Let's Play Baldur's Gate - Part 4: "New friends are better than old ones"

After the usual routine: buy some overpriced healing potions (seriously, the damn things cost more than a ressurection), sell all the trophy baubles (whoever animated those skeletons sure had a taste for bling), nap on the cold hard stone of the mage tower because Thalantyr is an asshole; we finally set out for Nashkel.
We encounter no resistance on the road, but get to chat with some goofball noble looking guy from Neverwiner.

He spouts a bunch of pointless trivia which surely has no relation whatsoever to my adventure and won't come into play later on.

I'd like to comment on the subtlety of this but I did not detect the hint in his name until now

With that out of the way we finally arrive to the town of Nashkel, marking the start of Chapter Three and getting another narration dump.

The guy who does the voiceover for these could make a career in lullaby recording

We get the usual greeting and a vaguely threatening warning "not to cause any trouble" (we're adventurers, what the hell else can you possibly expect?!) from the heavily armed town guard, which seems more intent on marching back and forth through its single street than investigating the trouble in the mines. Another bounty hunter, in a helmet so preposterous I don't dare to show the screenshot with it, approaches us when we try to check into the inn, so we put on a show for the local drunks. They seem unimpressed though, even when the assassin manages to get a spell out as she dies, and gets entangling vines all over the inn.

Probably happens all the time

We spend about a minute getting out of the spell radius and then uncomfortably watching the rest of the visitors and the innkeeper repeatedly fail the saving throw and get the hentai treatment. The proprietor still agrees to give the party a room, on account of us never mentioning this night ever again.

I get a bizzare dream during our stay. From what I could gather before I fell asleep from the narrating guy's voice, Gorion comes to me in his incorporeal jedi form and tells me to get my act together and go do the main plot. I wake up (drooling on my keyboard) and, with a newfound sense of purpose, lead the party to see the town's sheriff or mayor or whoever is responsible for giving out quests.

The mayor recognizes Jaheira in my group and agrees to give us the rundown on the mine problems. Nobody knows what is going on in the mines, but the workers go missing and, in addition to that, the few ore shipments they somehow managed to gather are tainted with something that makes the iron go weak and break. He can't send the guard to sort it out, because his men are out protecting the caravans (and those who aren't are on the ever important "strutting about and threatening coming visitors" duty).

"You're doing a great job"

I accept the quest but, before we head to the mines, I go sidequest hunting again. We talk with a fellow named Minsk, he is ranger from the distant land of Belarus Rashemen and he offers to join us if we rescue a woman named Dynaheir from a gnoll fortress to the west. Taking out an entire fortress sounds pretty hardcore and I have a bad history with the west, but I am so sick of Montarion's utter uselessness I take Minsk up on his offer, just so I can get rid of the annoying Evil halfling (you can't kick people out of your party unless you are hiring someone else and there isn't enough room). He takes Xzar with him, so I have to go looking for a new mage and, what do ya know, find one a few meters away.

A man in a bright red robe named Edwin offers us a job: kill a witch named Dynaheir. Ooh, I feel a doublecross coming on! He divulges no information on the reason he wants Dyna dead but promises a great reward, and I decide that it's better to take the job myself than let Edwin find someone who is going to cause me trouble during her rescue. Minsk, disappointingly, offers no comment; Edwin joins the party to make sure we get the job done and I get a free mage for my trouble (and the ability to make sure Edwin goes into the inevitable doublecross scuffle with depleted spells, low health and no armor). He is a Red Wizard of Thay (read: an asshole) and his alignment is Lawful Evil, but that's okay since I plan on betraying him once he fulfills his purpose (how Lawful Neutral of me).

I finally get bored of running around the backwater town so we prepare to descend into the mines and face the unknown horrors lurking within.