The Wheels of Prophecy

A Gibberlings Three Mod
Author: DavidW
On the web: Home page and discussion forum

Version 8.5
Languages: English, French
Platforms: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux
GitHub: Gibberlings3/WheelsOfProphecy

The wheels of prophecy e'er turn
Gorion's ward has come.
Crossroads of past, present, and future
The one foretold, the one foreseen.

Wheels of Prophecy began as a fairly limited mod designed to give the player the chance to register his/her distrust of a particular major character in Throne of Bhaal (in case one or two people still don't know who this is!) It grew into a project to add a bit of non-linearity to the "lead-em-by-the-nose" 9th chapter of Throne of Bhaal, and to add a bit of unfinished-business content along the way.

If you hate Throne of Bhaal with a passion, this mod isn't for you. If you have a soft spot for it, but feel it's flawed, this mod just might give the last stage in the Bhaalspawn's journey a new lease of life.

For those who've played my other mods, a word of reassurance: Wheels of Prophecy is not a tactical mod. It does introduce one or two new combat encounters (depending on the route you take) but they're not particularly difficult by the standards of Throne of Bhaal.

Wheels of Prophecy is compatible with any of the four versions of Throne of Bhaal: Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition, the Enhanced Edition Trilogy mod, original Baldur's Gate II with the Throne of Bhaal expansion, or the Baldur's Gate Trilogy mod. For either of the last two, I highly recommend the BG2 Fixpack, available at G3 - I wrote Wheels of Prophecy with the Fixpack installed, so I don't know how well it will work without it.

I wrote Wheels of Prophecy with the Ascension mod in mind, and I recommend having Ascension installed (it's available at www.weidu.org); install it early in your install order, and certainly before Wheels of Prophecy. Ascension isn't required, though. If you don't install Ascension, a small part of it (the part involving an alliance with Balthazar) will be installed anyway (I didn't want to reinvent the wheel by writing my own ally-with-Balthazar dialogue). I'm extremely grateful to David Gaider, and to Cuv, for permission to reuse part of Ascension.

Wheels of Prophecy should be compatible with pretty much any other mod that's out there, although given that it mucks around quite a lot with the middle part of Throne of Bhaal, there's some prospect of it interfering with NPCs' dialogues. In particular, it's fully compatible with my tactical mod, Sword Coast Stratagems (SCS), provided that SCS is installed after Wheels of Prophecy.

If you should encounter any bugs, please report them to the authors at the The Wheels of Prophecy forum. In addition, The Wheels of Prophecy is available on GitHub, so fixes and changes can be submitted by the community.

Enhanced Editions Note
The Enhanced Editions are actively supported games. Please note that every patch update will wipe your current mod setup! If in the middle of a modded game you might want to delay the patch update (if possible) as even after reinstalling the mods, you might not be able to continue with your old savegames. Alternatively, copy the whole game's folder into a new one that can be modded and will stay untouched by game patches. For BG2:EE it is important that you install the mod to the language version you are playing the game in. Otherwise, the dialogues of the mod will not show but give error messages.

Windows
The Wheels of Prophecy for Windows is distributed as a self-extracting archive and includes a WeiDU installer. To install, simply double-click the archive and follow the instructions on screen.

Alternatively, the files can be extracted into your game directory using 7zip or WinRAR. When properly extracted, your game directory will contain setup-wheels.exe and the folder wheels. To install, double-click setup-wheels.exe and follow the instructions on screen.

You can run setup-wheels.exe in your game folder to reinstall, uninstall or otherwise change components.

Mac OS X
The Wheels of Prophecy for Mac OS X is distributed as a compressed tarball and includes a WeiDU installer.

First, extract the files from the tarball into your game directory. When properly extracted, your game directory will contain setup-wheels, setup-wheels.command, and the folder wheels. To install, double-click setup-wheels.command and follow the instructions on screen.

You can run setup-wheels.command in your game folder to reinstall, uninstall or otherwise change components.

Linux
The Wheels of Prophecy for Linux is distributed as a compressed tarball and does not include a WeiDU installer.

Extract the contents of the mod to the folder of the game you wish to modify.

Download the latest version of WeiDU for Linux from WeiDU.org and copy WeiDU and WeInstall to /usr/bin. Following that, open a terminal, cd to your game installation directory, run tolower and answer Y to both queries. You can avoid running the second option (linux.ini) if you've already ran it once in the same directory. To save time, the archive is already tolowered, so there's no need to run the first option (lowercasing file names) either if you've extracted only this mod since the last time you lowercased file names. If you're unsure, running tolower and choosing both options is the safe bet.

To install, run WeInstall wheels in your game folder. Then run wine BGMain.exe and start playing.

Note for Complete Uninstallation
In addition to the methods above for removing individual components, you can completely uninstall the mod using setup-wheels --uninstall at the command line to remove all components without wading through prompts. .

In summary, Wheels of Prophecy doesn't change the events of Throne of Bhaal (not much, anyway), but it does allow the player to interact with them in a much more flexible way.

In more detail: the main change made is that the player can attempt to enter Balthazar's monastery whenever s/he likes, instead of waiting until after Sendai and Abazigal are dead. It's entirely up to you what order you do it in. If you decide to wait until Abazigal and Sendai are dead before confronting Balthazar, you won't notice much change from the vanilla game; if you decide to encounter Balthazar earlier, things may play out rather differently from what you remember. (Getting into the monastery early in the game isn't completely trivial, but it can be done (ask the smugglers, or slaughter your way in if you're that way inclined).

The mod also features:

• Greatly expanded dialogue with Balthazar, Melissan, Sendai, Abazigal, and Elminster.
• Modifications to dialogue with Carras, Saemon, Faheed, Zahee, and the Solar.
• Minor unfinished-business content with the smugglers that didn't quite make it into Throne of Bhaal.
• Extra encounters part-way through dealing with the Five (depending which route you take) and just before confronting Melissan.
• An expanded conversation with the stone heads featuring voicing cut from the released version of Throne of Bhaal, but unearthed recently by K'aeloree of Spellhold Studios.
• And more!

To get the most out of the mod, you should start a new game, or at least start a new party at the start of Throne of Bhaal. Most of the new content doesn't show up until you arrive at Amkethran, though, so any save before then should be compatible. (You will, however, miss the chance to tell Melissan where to go.)

IF you're looking to see the most new content on a first playthrough, probably the best thing to do is to start with Balthazar's monastery. Good-aligned parties may then have to beat a hasty retreat; more bloodthirsty parties may have other ideas.

DavidW created this mod. Visit the Gibberlings Three forums for information on this and any other Gibberlings Three mods on which I may be working.

Many thanks are due to:

• Hannah Wallace, as always.
• CamDawg and the Gibberlings Three, for hosting this and all my mods.
• Westley Weimer, theBigg, and Wisp, for their indefatigable work on WEIDU.
• The creators of the Infinity Engine Structure Description Project.
• Jon Hauglid, for the Near Infinity Infinity Engine editor.
• David Gaider, Cuv, and all the other authors of Ascension - thanks especially to those two for permission to mirror part of Ascension in this mod.
• K'aeloree, for unearthing the lost Stone Heads dialogue.

The modding community for the Infinity Engine has been going strong for more than 15 years now, and is the culmination of thousands of unpaid modding hours by fellow fans of the game. Modders produce their best work and players get the best, well-supported mods when we all work together.

There are two big ways to upset this harmony. One is to claim someone else's work as your own. The second is to host and redistribute a mod without permission from the author(s).

Be kind to your fellow players and modders. Don't do either.

V1 First public release (July 2008)

V2 (December 2008)

• Systematic recoding to fix an embarrassingly large number of bugs with several of the possible paths
• Demons in the grove now behave better in the absence of SCSII
• If the barkeep tells you Balthazar is a Bhaalspawn, you can comment on this when you see Balthazar
• The people of Amkethran respond to changes in Balthazar's status and to the invasion of the village
• Readme restructured to be less spoiler-ish
• The mages and fighters who attack you if you go with Saemon now also help in the defence of the gate if you attack frontally
• The monastery can be frontally attacked even at the start of chapter 9
• Compatibility problem with SCSII's "Improved Abazigal's Lair" component fixed

V3 (November 2013)

• Modernisation of code to use my SFO function library (various bugs fixed en passant).
• Compatibility with BG2:EE
• Traification.
• Fixed a variety of logic holes and generally tightened up the scripting logic.
• Overhauled the way in which the townspeople, mercenaries and monks interact with the player, to make allowances for various points at which the party deal with Balthazar.
• Moved the attack on the village outside the monastery.
• New combat script for the friendly version of Balthazar.
• Install order with SCS is now enforced (WoP will refuse to install if SCS is installed.)

V4 (February 2016)

• Added French translation, courtesy of Mornagest (of the d'Oghmatiques)
• Included sox for improved OS X compatibility

V5 (May 2016)

• Added EET compatibility, courtesy of K4thos
• Fixed invalid abilities offset in dw#melri.itm that would prevent other mods from patching the file successfully

V6 (August 2016)

• Updated EET compatibility, courtesy of K4thos
• Added fixes to handle file changes in EE v2
• Improved robustness when encountering missing files, courtesy of CrevsDaak

V7 (September 2018)

• Fixed a bug that could prevent installations for French players
• Fixed a bug where a dialogue option with the Solar was failing to set a variable
• Fixed a pair of bugs dealing with the village attacked

V8 (April 2019)

• Ad-hoc fix to a dialog-mismatch for Balthazar in Enhanced Edition installs
• Under-the-hood changes: updated SFO function library and external-directory nomenclature; immutablised charset and audio handling

V8 incremental fixes:

• v8.1: fix a bug preventing install on non-Ascension installs
• v8.2: fix a nasty bug that was corrupting chapter-identifying variables and blocking late-stage play
• v8.3: allow for installation when Ascension 2.0 'Tougher Balthazar' isn't present
• v8.4: (maintenance release made by Angel) allow for installation with WeiDU 247, fixed a bug with exiting the pocket plane after Balthasar confrontation, some minor polishing
• v8.5 Added Simplified Chinese translation, courtesy of angel_c4