Nacarbac

Corvids are smart and have some kind of active shared education, so they're always quite skittish around humans. I suspect (with no evidence or research) that they sense the cultural enmity humans have, and possibly remember the long history of "pest control" (which still happens on farms). They'll eventually learn that you're a cool human.

One way I feed them is to show them the food, then place it somewhere visible like on a post or stump, and back away to let them choose to take it. Throwing motions startle them pretty easily, even when they're very gentle.

Various spoilers.

Yeah, it's pretty silly. His backstory was probably near or at Epic level

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if he genuinely thought he could fuck around with Karsus' Folly - that's one of the few things that would have your peer superwizards (who mostly dislike each other) joining forces to put a stop to.

I think pretty much all the character's backgrounds were a poor choice on their part. You don't need a shred of backstory upfront if the writing is up to snuff, and having theirs be so high-level kinda makes everything happening pretty low stakes - the intro cinematic with the spelljammer vs dragonriders is basically a level 20 action sequence, and then you're slogging through mud and goblins hearing about how cool everyone else used to be, having just seen how cool the stuff you don't get to do is.

Plus Elminster could genuinely solve all of it in about three hours, so he shouldn't have even been there to say:

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"So I hear you're an unstable antimagical nuclear weapon now Gale?".

Then teleport away without doing anything about it.

But eh, the story and stakes are all over the place.

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It isn't even actually mind flayers! It's just mid-level clerics of the three gods who job harder than Skeletor, with a plan so intensely stupid - fucking around with Illithid - that it can only function via the power of a saturday morning cartoon villain's mcguffin.

It's... like the Battle Angel Alita movie. It likes the source material too much, so it crams in too many elements from much later and weakens itself in the process. Or perhaps the poison of escalation.

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It isn't just hints of the mind flayer space empire, it's a netherese superweapon, no wait, it's also the Dead Three! The city you'll reach in thirty hours will be destroyed - and the entire world hangs in the balance! Only your level 12 characters can save the universe!

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It certainly doesn't sound out of character for Interplay - from the various accounts of the GURPS Fallout affair I've read the most persuasive (from the rare time an SJGames person commented on it) was roughly that Interplay took a lot of interest in getting SJGames to help them adapt GURPS, got quite far with it, then started asking more about how rpg mechanics should work, and then abruptly cut off all contact before the whole "Interplay gives SJGames money" part of the deal would happen.

The more well known claim is that it was SJGame's squeamishness over violence, which rings hollow given they made GURPS, and comes off as Interplay saying that they were busy being totally kewl and SJGames were squares who shot themselves in the [roll hit location]. I am, however, biased towards SJGames, given that they're actually hexagons (and GURPS is cool).

Come to think of it, it might also be about covering their ass in case SJGames had made more of a legal fuss, blurring the exact details of the GURPS->SPECIAL development process and any relevant correspondence.

It's such an old drama though...