Some mysteries in Baldur's Gate 3 are best left uninvestigated. I'm not talking about the infamous tryst between a bugbear and an ogre you might've happened upon in Act 1, but the hidden Spectator encountered sometime after. These one-eyed horrors are a less-powerful spin on Dungeons & Dragons' Beholders: tentacled, toothsome, hard-hitting alien menaces, usually awaiting you in the depths of the House of Hope shortly before the most marvelous boss fight in RPG history. But imagine my surprise when I learned that you can actually find one in the game's earlier hours, and that it can be either the biggest boon or an instant game-over?
I tried to keep an eye out for one such nasty secret during my most recent playthrough – something my friends and colleagues cryptically described as a "terrifying surprise" to stumble upon – without any clue what to actually look for. The chain of events speaks to the glorious mayhem of a world governed by D&D, and as Larian moves on to pastures new (or potentially familiar) in its upcoming RPG Divinity, I hope it doesn't forget these lessons in mischief.
Do it for the plot
"Find the missing shipment." I roll my eyes as the quest pops up in my logbook, one of a great many I usually skim over in the majority of my Baldur's Gate 3 playthroughs. I'm a self-confessed Act 1 steamroller, having perfected the neatest, most straightforward course of action across some 700 hours-and-counting of playtime, perpetually eager to get stuck into the delicious gloom of the Shadow-Cursed Lands and the promise of high-tier gear.
But this time, I question my thoughtless predilection for efficiency. I'm trying to find the secret Act 1 Spectator, right? What if instead of ignoring Mayrina, zooming past Waukeen's Rest, and sniping Minthara down a chasm at the goblin camp, I take stock of my surroundings for a change? What if I actually – shudder – investigate those annoying gnolls nearby the fake Paladins of Tyr?
I feel noble – magnanimous, even, – to be sacrificing my time in the name of novelty. I decide to veer off my tried-and-true path and plod into the midst of a firefight between gnolls, hyenas, and gnoll hunters; pledging my aid to the latter.
A lengthy battle and two or three dead NPCs later, I can finally examine the contents of this cliffside hideout for this missing shipment. I was supposed to keep those two gentlemen alive, I think, but my loot goblin brain can't help but celebrate as I look upon their gnoll-ravaged corpses. It's time to gleefully pick through their pockets and find some nice trinkets to flog at Emerald Grove, or feed to Gale if a magical item's stats displease me.
That's how I happen upon a mysterious iron flask with a glowing insignia on the bottle, alerting me to the presence of something inside. I drop a sneaky save before popping the lid open – accidentally freeing the Act 1 monster I'd been warned so extensively about.
A real turn-based Strahd-egy
You don't know anything until you risk getting killed by your own curiosity.
It's a hilariously "oh shit" moment, trumped only by a real-life instance where something eerily similar happened during a game of D&D.
Faced with a radiant damage-resistant Vampire Lord, my tried-and-true BG3 cleric strat of simply casting Daylight was obsolete. I had no more spell slots, and as a Level 5 Light Cleric, I had yet to unlock my high-level Divine Intervention class action that would ordinarily come in clutch to grant me a full long rest in the midst of battle. My radiant cantrips were useless against this vampiric brute – who knew the vampire lord of Barovia was curiously invulnerable to an undead-melting staple? All I had was a single, curious item my DM had assigned me at the start of our adventure: a "crystal knob from a door". Yes, that's the actual item description (check out trinket number 69).
In a moment of panic, I lobbed it straight at Strahd von Zarovich, hoping to distract the vampire from ripping my fellow adventurer's throat out. Imagine my surprise when, instead of simply snapping my neck, he vanished from sight. It turns out this "crystal knob" had been a dimension door all along – an enchanted link to Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion – and I had managed to avoid certain death by banishing Strahd temporarily into a magical house in some pocket dimension.
It's a FAFO moment that blessedly paid off, allowing me to pull off a Hail Mary feat by the skin of my teeth, and I wish there'd been more like it in Larian's RPG (honorable mentions to the djinn in Ramazith Tower and the sunbeam laser in the Gith crèche).
The iron flask is a monster grenade, essentially, capable of being lobbed into an enemy's path or strategically dropped upon them from outside a combat zone to cause maximum chaos without actually being present for it – but you don't know anything until you risk getting killed by your own curiosity. I know that Divinity marks a pivot for Larian, moving away from the rules and regulations of Dungeons & Dragons as it revisits its own RPG series – I played Divinity Original Sin 2 for the first time recently, and the differences between it and BG3's systems were not lost on me. But here's hoping the developer doesn't abandon the giddy chaos of D&D completely in an effort to re-establish what makes Divinity distinct from BG3.
I need more trial-and-error consequences in my sprawling fantasy RPGs, and between a Spectator in a jar and a vampire in a doorknob, I'd love to see Larian push the envelope to new, even wilder heights.
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