Character Types and Follower Questions

After a long hiatus, I'm about to try and give Arcanum another go. Before I do though, I wanna ask some questions. Now that I can pretty much mod the game however I want (tech ops can make ANYTHING), I want to play out different characters paths, though I don't want to play the evil path. And I wanna play dwarf woman and a half-ogre female. I'm wondering what paths are open to me? I do know about the Raven romance, I'd like to play it. Here are the characters (not sure who to play first

Charlotte: a half-orichish sapper from off-continent, came to Arcanum to study in Tarant. Officer and lady, total gunslinger.

Dominic: half elf, balance of magic and technology.

Greta: Woman Dwarf.

Vasshel: Techno-Elf. Want to pursue Raven with this one.

Clarissa: Half-Ogre female. Melee fighter, and possibly dumb.

Wondering if there's a type I'm missing.

Problems:
How do I change up portraits? I want Dominic to use the Elf sprites and to do that I need to create him as elf and then edit his race, but I want to use a half-elf portrait. I can make do with the dwarf and Half-ogre sprites, but I need to be able to give them female portraits at creation. Been trying to edit portrait availability to no avail.

And about followers, is there a way to recruit followers without the alignment check? And especially, what's the way to get Zen and Raven to get along. Every time I recruit Zen, Raven complains and won't rejoin the group with her in it. What's the work around.

Thanks for your time

 

To get followers without the alignment check you need either Master Persuade or 20 CH (I forgot which one), one of those allows you to have any followers without them leaving (though they will complain if you're of the wrong alignment or if you take certain other followers).

 

This should explain everything.

Master training in persuasion.

Master training in persuasion to deal with the opposite alignments + 20 points in charisma to deal with Raven's prejudice against a dark elf.

 

Didn't playing strange non-standard race/genders make the game crash at certain points?

 

Playing a normally unplayable race (orc, ogre or dark elf) results in a lot of error messages in dialogues when the game tries to give race specific lines and responses, seeing how there were no lines prepared for such races.

Not sure if there will any problems with playing a normally unplayable sex of a playable race, but I'm guessing it should go fine and a quick test seems to confirm this.

 

Hey, thank you! Although the userport.mes file in the portriat section doesn't seem to exisit. I know it has to be somewhere, but I scanned my whole computer for it, and it seems to be nowhere. I had been doing things with the portrait's gameport.mes file, but that didn't do anything.

Oh and while I'm here, is there a description list for special items? I know the description.mes does most of the common items...but where's the item numbers for special items like the Trapmaker's Specticles, the Teleportation Staff, the Bane of Kree's Torian Fell's Ancestrial Sword and things like that?

 

"You may have to create this file. Simply make a new text file and change the extension from txt to mes."

Never looked for one myself but this thread would be a start if I would.

 

These items are unique, as in they're part of their respective maps. You can't get more than a single copy of any one of them.

 

Unique I understand, being part of a specfic map I don't understand, nor do I understand why my game crashes everytime I make one of them with the tech skills. And that aside, is there a template of userport? I have no idea what to put in it.

 

To give you the hang of it, here is an exemplary portrait folder. Two human male portraits, one half ogre male portrait and an appropriately filled userport.mes file within.

 

Um...is there a way to create your own items with effects. If you can't make another Staff of Telportation, why not make a new staff with the same ability and put it in the game via altered schematics? Can it be done?