D&D 5E Who is Boo?!

[Micah Sweet]

Play Baldur's Gate. It's that simple.

Oh, it that where they're from? Never played it.

 

[Scribe]

Oh, it that where they're from? Never played it.

You have missed out.

BG1, and 2 (skip the beamdog enhanced stuff in my opinion) are absolute classics.

Baldurs gate 2 is one of my "greatest of all time" level games.

 

[Andvari]

I think I’ve seen D&D reference miniature giant space hamsters in TSR publications from before Baldur’s Gate popularized them. They may be some of the weird Spelljammer things.

 

[Dioltach]

BG1, BG2, Planescape: Torment and, to a lesser extent, Icewind Dale 1 and 2 consumed a considerable portion of my life in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

You have missed out.

BG1, and 2 (skip the beamdog enhanced stuff in my opinion) are absolute classics.

Baldurs gate 2 is one of my "greatest of all time" level games.

Nah the Beamdog stuff is vastly improved over the originals. It just looks nicer and has good QoL features .

 

[Demetrios1453]

I think I’ve seen D&D reference miniature giant space hamsters in TSR publications from before Baldur’s Gate popularized them. They may be some of the weird Spelljammer things.

Miniature giant space hamsters were definitely in Spelljammer several years before BG came out.

 

[darjr]

Miniature giant space hamsters were definitely in Spelljammer several years before BG came out.

But not Boo.

 

[MarkB]

I have to admit that it does bug me a little bit that the actual  joke about Boo and his nature has kind of been lost over the decades of his memification. I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but wasn't the point that he was just a regular hamster and that "miniature giant space hamster" was obviously Minsc trying to justify why he thinks this ordinary rodent can speak to him? I haven't kept up with the FR canon re. Minsc and Boo, so I imagine it's since become the case that Boo is exactly what Minsc thinks he is - certainly it's the case now, according to this video - but that sort of seems to miss the point!

I'm not mad about it or anything, but it does mean Minsc is retroactively the only sane person in the Baldur's Gate games...

You're not wrong. It wasn't explicitly that Boo was just an ordinary hamster and Minsc was only imagining them talking to each other - but it was definitely that it could have gone either way. Maybe Boo was everything Minsc made him out to be, or maybe Minsc was just nuts.

 

[Scribe]

Nah the Beamdog stuff is vastly improved over the originals. It just looks nicer and has good QoL features .

I'm mostly talking about the new characters and writing.

 

[deganawida]

I have to admit that it does bug me a little bit that the actual  joke about Boo and his nature has kind of been lost over the decades of his memification. I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but wasn't the point that he was just a regular hamster and that "miniature giant space hamster" was obviously Minsc trying to justify why he thinks this ordinary rodent can speak to him? I haven't kept up with the FR canon re. Minsc and Boo, so I imagine it's since become the case that Boo is exactly what Minsc thinks he is - certainly it's the case now, according to this video - but that sort of seems to miss the point!

I'm not mad about it or anything, but it does mean Minsc is retroactively the only sane person in the Baldur's Gate games...

Oh, about 20 years ago, I read a post on the old old old BioWare/Black Isle Studios forums that said that Minsc, like most of the party members in BG1, came from a PnP campaign that one of the devs had. Minsc was a fighter-class character who used to carry around hamsters to use them to detect traps. Basically, loose the hamsters, set off traps safely. One day, he suffered a major blow to his head (can't remember if it was in combat or not), and he lost a lot of his mental stats as a result. He had one remaining hamster, named him Boo, and also started calling himself a ranger even though he was not.