Rune

The thing about Rune is that he was my first Dark Urge playthough and I am hopelessly obsessed with him. He is my BG3 experience. I have not yet surpassed the joy and brainrot I got from playing him.

Description

An unsettling little man. Pale, almost corpselike skin combined with pale white eyes and an intense demeanour do little to put anyone at ease in his presence.

I gave him red streaks in his hair 'cause they looked cool, but I do like to imagine it's Bhaal's Pretty Princess choices staining his hair with blood ❤

The scar on his face is from some fight or other - the one around his neck is from when Orin attacked him and got him brain-wormed.

He went full-illithid powers through the game, and ended up with illithid veins over the left half of his body. With the destruction of the Elder Brain and the subsequent loss of those powers, he was left with those same veins, only slightly faded.

About

In terms of personality, Rune is extremely dog-coded. He's not good with words - partly from the traumatic head injury and brainworm, partly just Who He Is - and though his charisma is high, it's mostly intimidation. He can and will communicate in grunts and growls if he can get away with it.

Rune is, technically, a warlock. He's multiclassed with fighter and rogue-assassin, and his fighting style is largely based around ripping people apart as fast and brutally as possible. Eldritch blast in blood red followed by a snarling man shoving a knife in your gut is the last thing many have seen.

During the early game when he - and I - knew exactly zero about what the fuck a Dark Urge was, I played him very erratic and blunt because he was terrified and had no idea what was going on, only that he had these intense Urges to be violent about it. Over the course of the story I played him initially as giving in to his Urges, only moving into resist!Durge after the point at which he found out he was a Bhaalspawn.

Post-game he's sort of civilised; he's no longer Bhaalspawn, but he's still got a lot of head trauma and lingering emotional trauma.

Backstory

He was the head of the Bhaalist cult in Baldur's Gate as-per canon, and whilst he was a bit more 'together' then, he's always been something like 'Bhaal's attack dog'. He clashed with Orin as-per canon in that death for death's sake was his driving force; committing violence to do violence, as aggressively as possibly, whilst she had her Art of Murder.

When he got involved with Gortash (and oh boy, am I insane about Durgetash as a Concept let me tell you), that attack-dog nature simply shifted who held the leash. Gortash liked having a savage dog to sic on his enemies; Rune has always needed someone to hold his leash because deep down he's always been afraid of how far his violence can go, particularly when he was first gifted the Slayer form.

Other than that, I don't have any particularly special backstory elements that stray very far from canon.

Relationships

For most of his early life, Rune didn't have emotionally-involved relationships. His connection with Orin was largely antagonistic or dismissive - she wasn't killing, she wasn't Bhaal, and she played with her food, in Rune's opinion, far too much. He never hated her until she bashed his head in; she was just There. Which of course meant he underestimated her, thus allowing said head-bashing to take place.

Gortash

And then he met Enver Gortash. What started as a snarly sort of work relationship, under some duress, turned into a form of mutual obsession and desire. As mentioned, Rune likes/needs someone to restrain him, and Gortash, control-freak Banite that he is, liked having a pet monster to restrain.

Gortash never flinched from the horror that was Rune, Chosen of Bhaal, nor from the Slayer, when it made its appearance. They grew a lot closer than either intended or ever would admit out loud, and when Rune 'died', Gortash was pissy and miserable.

When they re-met, Rune had a lot of confused feelings about it. Anger, resentment, a sudden wash of Knowing and Connection that only made him more confused. The confusion compelled him to seek Gortash out whilst the party were working with him in Baldur's Gate, but the encounter didn't really help his emotions any. Honestly, by that point he resented having emotions about the man at all.

But that didn't stop him from helping Gortash in order to achieve his own ends, and they faced the Absolute together. Whereupon Gortash died, horribly, and Rune was violent with grief. Mechanics-wise, you can't resurrect NPCs, but at that point in the run, I had no rez scrolls left, so narratively, Rune couldn't bring him back. And when he tried to speak with his corpse, he just got the Bane answerphone special, which only made him feel worse. So he took Gortash's gauntlet off his corpse and wore it until the Absolute was defeated - and for a time after that, too, though by the time of the epilogue reunion party, he'd set it aside.

He still has it, though.

Astarion

God, these fucking two. Astarion accidentally killed him drinking too much one single night, Rune punched him about it, then kept going back for more because being drained made the Urges shut up. There was sex to begin with, but that fell pretty quickly by the wayside in favour of the blood-drinking.

Then the fact that Astarion refused to be afraid of the Slayer form, when he got it...that just made Rune more attached. And had the side-effect of him not restraining said form whenever Astarion went down in combat. Guard dog man has made his appearance.

Post-game, they're still very much a couple. Astarion is still a vampire spawn, and Rune, though sans-worm-powers-and-Urges, is still a man of few words and much violence. They live together in a small house in the Lower City, bite each other and wrestle a bunch, and sometimes Astarion gets kidnapped and Rune does a violence about it.

Playlist

You can see the whole playlist, along with a handful of annotations here.