And I've now finished Siege of Dragonspear and run straight on to BG2, which since SoD is a bridging campaign and it all happens in the same game engine really doesn't feel like there was any gap in the story.
Thoughts on SoD: I really liked it, there are definitely some janky quest design bugs which I'm surprised weren't fixed and things like that, but the characters are really nice, I enjoyed M'Khiin the goblin shaman a lot as a companion. The ending of the main quest feels good, too, it makes for a narratively satisfying conclusion without anything feeling unearned. The post-ending which creates the BG2 segue is... a bit contrived, I guess, and compared to the start of BG2 the things the Hooded Man manages to do at SoD make him seem way more omnipotent than he broadly seems to turn out.
I did have to use a walkthrough for more bits of it than I'd have liked because things weren't always obvious and the game does have a tendency to penalise failure rather heavily if only by making you re-fight certain battles again and again until you get right or lucky. Generally D&D isn't a system that's well built around evenly matched adventuring parties taking chunks out of one another: it's a system built around preparation and working out how to use the tools at your disposal, so a group that has all the tools you have often just comes down to who rolls better right at the start of a fight and manages to e.g. shut the enemy casters down first. I did sort of enjoy it sometimes when I did really hit on a "right answer" to a battle, that said. One of the longest fights was a 1v1 you have to do during the siege itself which given I was a support caster basically meant slapping all the protection potions I owned onto myself then sitting there waiting until the enemy burned through her entire spell list - and then casting my own buffs and starting to do damage, after about five to ten mins of real-world time (I think that duel in-game probably took the characters most of an afternoon!)
So now I'm on BG2. I did NOT EXPECT the
two major BG1 characters killed off offscreen before you start the first dungeon
and was quite sad about them.
Other than that, I'm enjoying it so far though I miss all the nice kit I'd got stored up in the previous game. I just did the Chapter One dungeon so far, and the Circus Tent quest that's very near to where you start. I get that the Chapter One dungeon needs to be kind of easy, but it does feel like SoD really over-egged the power of the Hooded Man at the moment. Like, he's meant to be this "threatening the devils themselves for power and evil" level guy, and then his home security is five squads of goblins, a few golems, and a couple of squads of duergar? Even considering the assassins have tripped or disabled a bunch of stuff, it's a really lame setup. Like, he clearly has a case of the Xykons in that he expects his own power to do all the work, but even Xykon goes and builds an extraplanar fortress when he really wants something protected. And doesn't let himself get arrested, for that matter.
That said, I thought it was otherwise a good starting run, I like having more djinn around, I really enjoyed the circus tent quest though I'm sure I missed some content, and generally I'm looking forward to exploring Amn more, I think this is going to be pretty fun.