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Mod author: AWizardDidIt

Version used for review: 1.2.

Illasera the Quick, introduced in the first three minutes of Throne of Bhaal and killed off by the player nearly as quickly, does not really have any defining traits beyond being the introduction to the Five, the group of Bhaalspawn that want to kill Gorion’s Ward and take the titular throne for themselves.

I would struggle to call Illasera much of a character at all — let alone an interesting one. She functionally serves to deliver a piece of exposition, though in doing so she inadvertently lessens the impact of her message. If she is one of five Bhaalspawn that stand as the most powerful of the bunch, then who’s to say that they won’t be pushovers like she was? You can argue that it flows well from a mechanical standpoint, but it doesn’t much change the fact that Illasera isn’t much more than a footnote of a footnote.

Black Hearts, a mod primarily for BG1, introduces Illasera as a rather prominent side character in the game. First, as an intriguing femme fatale bounty hunter who offers the player fun and rewarding battles to take on, then later as a key part of the fight against Sarevok. Knowing her fate, and the fate of all Bhaalspawn that don’t walk alongside the player, makes it rather tragic then that Black Hearts made me fall a little bit in love with her.

The characterisation of Illasera is the most notable positive in this mod, but it is by no means the only thing that it has going for it. Black Hearts vexed me from the very moment I read up on it. It openly reuses fights from the Enhanced Edition’s Black Pits, which I expected to disrupt my enjoyment of the mod, given that I’ve fought those battles dozens of times (in fact, it would not surprise me if I held the record for most Black Pits campaigns completed), but it didn’t. It introduces a (theoretically) major character from Throne of Bhaal, which I expected to distract me, but it didn’t. It adds an entire new dimension to the lattermost chunk of the game and somehow it ended up feeling natural and deliberate.

Let’s start with Illasera herself. You’ll find her in Feldpost’s Inn, where she will grant you bounty opportunities from Chapter 3 onwards. The woman is sardonic, condescending, and generally holds an air of superiority about her in every interaction, but in a rather crafty masterstroke, all of these qualities come off as endearing and admirable. She’s the kind of woman that you want to like you — effortlessly interesting and leaving you hanging on every word.

The mod equips her with a full backstory and it manages to intrigue in a way I wasn’t expecting. Knowing Illasera’s heritage makes every interaction with the player feel dangerous and full of opportunity and openly hearing about the history of another Bhaalspawn prior to the in-game reveal is a genuinely interesting prospect. It’s fortunate, then, that the way she conveys her backstory is so deft — it feels as though she’s weaponising it against you, testing your reaction to the brutality and pragmatism of her tales. And of course, her character being written the way it is, the urge to impress her is ever-present, and the mod seems well aware of this. It feeds into the game of dangerous, tension-fueled conversation in a way that genuinely had me entranced.

Quite the contrast to her character beforehand.

Black Hearts is effectively split into 3 acts — the bounties are given in Act 1, further story and plot action is set up in Act 2, and then it pays off in Act 3 with a resolution. These acts are spread out through the chapters of the game, and this structure allows for a believable relationship with Illasera, with many little moments to build it up in a natural way.

For example, at the end of Act 1 — once the last bounty has been turned in — the player gets the opportunity to learn more about Illasera and express themselves in a roleplay-heavy conversation over drinks. I found all of it to be sharply written and quite engaging.

The bounties that she gives you, as said before, are repurposed fights from Black Pits. Putting it as simply as that, however, is a disservice to the mod. It goes to a surprising amount of effort to recontextualise these fights, making them feel grounded in the world with backstories and motivations — it doesn’t go overboard with this, but the small details go a long way in making the experience feel more organic: the first group that you fight got involved in a bar fight that you can discuss with the owner; the bounty on the hobgoblins from the second Black Pits fight was actually posted by the Chill; the necromancer has taken to the second level of Nashkel Mines after you’ve cleared it to build up a skeletal army… and so on.

Some of these scenarios don’t end up involving combat at all, like the Ogre Mage that is looking for entry to Candlekeep in order to acquire a particular book. It’s an entertaining problem to solve, but it’s also the first appearance of my biggest issue with this mod. The dialogue with the Ogre Mage is winding, circular, and forces the player to cycle through the same dialogue options several times over to even exit the conversation, and even then, it does so in a way that makes no sense in context.

You see, Black Hearts puts its best foot forward. Illasera is excellent. Every other non-enemy NPC that it introduces, however, fares poorly. This brings us to Act 2 of the mod, which begins once the player enters Baldur’s Gate (and has completed the bounties thus far).

The time f0r bounties is over. Illasera is now hunting the Iron Throne and a potential new ally that Sarevok is acquiring, a Red Wizard and former Deathstalker of Bhaal named Cherise Siltuhr. I like this plotline. What I don’t like is that a rather significant portion of it hinges on a side character named Nerys, who is, to put it bluntly, rather insufferable.

I don’t really have anything against the ‘plucky gnome’ character archetype. I gave The Artisan’s Aura Glimmershine a rather positive review, after all. Nerys is a whole different beast, however, because she has very little reason to feature in this story as heavily as she does.

Her schtick, basically, is that she is a naive and largely incompetent Harper. She’s introduced as someone who has some information or somesuch that will help Illasera on her quest, which is all well and good, but she greatly overstays her welcome. Nerys comes equipped with her own portrait, a dialogue tree to parrot basic facts about herself at a moment’s notice, and somehow manages to continue showing up long after Illasera or the story has any need of her. A majority of my companions would butt in about “how cute” she is, and when she inevitably gets kidnapped (ugh), everyone gets in a huff about how we have to save her.

Even Illasera, who outwardly shuns Nerys, ends up showing her a little kindness and appreciation behind her usual venom. As the player, you’re given the opportunity to tell Nerys that she’s annoying and to berate her for even deigning to express an opinion or a modicum of curiosity, so it’s clear that she’s meant to be this way. It’s just that I so desperately wish that she wasn’t.

It feels as though Nerys was written by a completely different person to Illasera. One that had a less sophisticated understanding of character writing and who neglected to do an editing pass over their work — Nerys’s dialogue stretches on for long pieces of exposition that, in all honesty, didn’t really seem to matter that much. I understood the story just fine and her explanations served only to convolute things that I already had a grasp on.

I think with a serious look at how valuable she is to the story her role could be significantly improved. Pay some editorial attention to her dialogue, slim things down, and give the player the option to dismiss her when she’s not needed — and no, Nerys playing music for the background of a scene she is otherwise not involved in does not count as her being needed, and no, having her be more involved in that scene isn’t the solution. There’s no reason that the music can’t be non-diegetic.

Nerys feels like the author’s D&D character that they wanted to inject into the mod in some way, and it’s an unfortunate stumble in an otherwise very strong experience. Other than speaking to Nerys, most of what you’ll be doing for Act 2 of the mod involves investigating the operations of this Thayan Bhaal cultist. This takes the player, at this point, to a few new areas accessible from the farmland north of the city, and the sewers of Baldur’s Gate.

The areas are nicely crafted. It would have been a nice touch to have a small world map addition for the former area, since travelling to a mossy grove with evil vibes feels strange as a subarea from the zombie-infested farm, but it’s not a big deal. Visually, all the areas are enjoyable and nothing stands out as being too out of place.

It’s also worth noting that the reused battles from Black Pits are still showing up. Every major encounter in this mod is either taken directly or heavily inspired by a battle from it, and it makes me wonder if the entire storyline was conceived based off the available battles in the side-game. If it was, then it somehow managed to do an excellent job at incorporating everything naturally. It’s a strange amount of dedication that Black Hearts shows by using just about every single encounter available to it.

The sewer area, in my opinion, would benefit more from having interactable elements in the environment. There were a few things that I hovered my mouse over expecting to see a question mark, but to no avail. I had to simply take everything at face value, which felt a little strange given that at face value, these are assets from another game — a criminally underrated one, mind you.

In this underground base, it’s revealed that Illasera is performing a simultaneous attack on their base in the Astral Plane. This is then rather poorly explained by Illasera in the following sequence — the idea that “the Thayans are storing trolls, salamanders, and other monsters in the Astral Plane to gift to Sarevok” should be a simple concept, but Black Hearts feels like it goes out of its way to be simultaneously vague and overcomplicated at the same time.

After the questing in Act 2, however, we are treated to yet another lengthy conversation with Illasera, where she recounts a previous adventure and ruminates on a few moral concepts that I enjoyed playing through. It’s worth noting that if you have Imoen in your party, then she’ll butt in here and have quite a few interjections with Illasera, effectively joining the conversation. It seems clear with the player’s knowledge that Illasera knows Imoen is also a Bhaalspawn, but the writing is subtle enough to not make it obvious. Illasera actually takes an active ear to the things that Imoen says sometimes, or at the very least acknowledges her presence, which is more than she does for most. It’s a fun time, and it’s a great to have Gorion’s Ward and Imoen’s warm and safe past reflected against Illasera’s horrific and violent one in contrast, all the while managing to find familiar ground. At least, that’s how it was when I played it. I’m quite sure that you could take a more actively hostile approach to Illasera, though I doubt you’ll be sharing flirtatious drinks at that point.

With Act 2 wrapped up, Illasera’s story doesn’t pick back up again until Chapter 7 when you go to confront Slythe and Krystin. If you’ve been successful in the quest thus far, she’ll join in on the fight at the last minute and then recommend that you take the fight to Cherise at long last to whittle down the very last of Sarevok’s identified supporters. Agreeing to this will see you teleported to the Thayan base of operations on the Astral Plane, where the monsters that they were keeping have been set loose and wreaking havoc.

The objective is a pretty simple one — collect four wardstones to unlock the boss arena, but it’s pretty enjoyable and the area is fun to traverse. The battles are, of course, still taken from Black Pits and incorporated pretty seamlessly. There’s even a fight taken and COMPLETELY recontextualised, which I won’t spoil for you if you’ve not played through the mod, because it was a pretty fun moment for me. The final battle is a great note to end on for this quest.

Within the content added by the mod, there are quite a few new magical items. A majority of them are fairly basic, in a good way, and the most powerful ones are earned here in Chapter 7, quite literally right before the finale. There are no items to me that stand out as being egregiously overpowered or poorly designed. A majority of them will be sold or used for a short time and I think they’re fun enough to warrant their inclusion. It helps make the bounties feel worthwhile, since turning them in doesn’t grant experience beyond what is gained from killing them.

If you complete the questline of Black Hearts successfully, then you are rewarded with Illasera’s help during the final battle with Sarevok, without taking up a party slot — if she is injured too badly, then she will teleport out of the battle, but she’s a great help. My only gripe is that her movement speed is absolutely insane. Regardless of if it’s her original speed from Throne of Bhaal, it should probably be tweaked. If you fail the quest, then you have an additional tough battle to get through in the Undercity, which I found to be a more difficult fight than any other in the mod. It’s a good time either way.

At the time of writing there is supposed to be a Siege of Dragonspear epilogue to Illasera’s story in development. I’m hoping for a prison visit, at the very least, because building the relationship with Illasera only to then kill her at the next opportunity felt a little anticlimactic.

The BG2:EE patch for Black Hearts adds a few lines of extra dialogue to Illasera’s confrontation in ToB, and those lines do a good job at acknowledging the situation and the player’s potential former friendship with Gorion’s Ward. It ends up feeling appropriately tragic, but the lack of rumination that comes after the fact is what cements it as lacking for me. The player is expected to move on as they did originally, but the context of Illasera’s battle has changed now, so I don’t think that really works.

I think what could really sell this interaction for me, personally, is either a journal or note on her person if you confirmed in dialogue that you had a previously good relationship. It could hint a little at how she was feeling in the days, weeks, leading up to her death — perhaps that she felt that this was the only path for her when faced with the rest of the Five and Mellisan. Perhaps in the end she truly didn’t care, and she was merely hungry for power the entire time.

The fact that I want that, though, is a testament to the writing of this mod and its characterisation of Illasera. If she were any less engaging than she was, any less likeable, I wouldn’t care so much. But she is, and I was sad when I had to kill her, and a little disappointed when that sadness wasn’t acknowledged by the game. With some tweaks, I could see Black Hearts becoming a mainstay for me. It is, despite my personal gripes, worth your time. If you’ve not tried it, then I recommend giving it a try — it’s a seriously impressive mod.

Thanks for reading.