Earlier this week I won a particularly nasty battle against some magisters. And while I congratulated myself, I was also a bit dismayed because one of my companions, Fane, had died. He is prone to do that. I guess then fact that he is already undead makes him particularly susceptible to dying. Up until now I simply resurrected fallen comrades. But I had run out of resurrection scrolls and sellers were charging an outrageous amount for it. Far more then I could afford. At that point I had multiple choices:

• I could leave Fane behind and recruit another companion,
• I could try to gather more gold,
• I could scour the map to find a new scroll,
• I could try to find a recipe for a scroll,
• I could reload and do the whole battle anew,
• or I could try to get a scroll from a character that I had not yet recruited.

I had already killed Sebille, because she attacked me. That only left Beast. I tried to buy the scroll from him, but couldn’t. I didn’t try to steal the scroll from him, because I didn’t think of it at the time. That would probably not have worked anyway, because I lacked any scoundrel skills. So I made the choice of killing him. And I feel bad about it. Especially because afterwards I thought about the option of recruiting him, taking his scroll and abandoning him again. That would have also been mean, but not as evil as killing him for it.

Now I’m a couple of hours further into the game and I have more than enough funds to buy resurrection scrolls. I also found more of them and I found a recipe to make them myself. That only served to make me feel worse about myself for killing a character that had done nothing wrong. The game offers multiple ways in which to play a good or a bad character and I generally try to be a good guy, although the game does it’s best to let you land in situations that leave only bad choices. That one act made me realize that I have an evil streak in me. That is something that these games try very hard to make you realize. And while they don’t always succeed in incorporating that in the choices that they let you make, the simple fact that they provide an environment in which you can do whatever you want (up until a certain degree) prove to be just as successful in getting this point across.