The Ruins of Baldur's Gate [ EDIT ]

In 1479 DR, Baldur's Gate stood as a towering bastion of power in the land of Faerûn. From its questionable founding of peasants timidly encroaching claim on a wall inexplicably built by a successful adventure before mysteriously vanishing, presumably on a quest for a financial adviser, The Gate has seen through much on it's way to become the sprawling metropolis that even had come to overshadow Waterdeep, and with much fewer troubles than its waning neighbors. Amn had withdrawn from it's aggressions, Insurgencies had been squashed, and relations with the angry paladins of Elturgard. Baldur's Gate's population boomed, admittedly much from refugees, and settlements popped up for miles outside the walls.

Then, at the the cusp of passing into 1480, the night sky lit up in the wake of a screaming comet that fell from the heavens straight down upon the highest ward of the city, throwing a roaring wave a ruin through the grand metropolis, toppling proud walls outward and sending uncountable souls to their gods. The news shook the Sword Coast, and it took agonizing months for it to be understood that Baldur's Gate, its lords and it's people and it's power, had fallen.

In that time however, seekers, scholars, historians, rivals, guilds, and other sorts of opportunists and respondents had begun to move to investigate the devastation. The earliest of the piqued, discovered that throughout the carnage, among debris and fragmented survivors and doomsayers, strange minerals that confounded the sages. Rumors spread quickly that people were discovering pieces of the comet that fell the city, fragments of mysterious stone or metal from another realm rich with mysterious power. Perhaps a fanciful exaggeration in respect to such a terrible cataclysm, but the rumors were enough to draw a sort of rush to what was left of the city on the mouth of the River Chionthar. A number of influential people moved to hire mercenaries and treasure hunters to scour the ruins in search of these fragments, their want of them, and their intentions, as unique and varying as one might expect from such a massive place now perhaps irrevocably rid of any semblance of law and order. What /is/ common with them, is that they are paying well for the exchange of any of these "fragments" found, and this is where you come in, adventurer!

Actual Game Breakdown! (aha, formatting error! Additional information found here: http://gamersplane.com/forums/thread/4452/?p=181048#p181048 )