Baldur’s Gate 3 has choices—oodles of ’em. Choices that Larian’s accounted for, for the most part. In my recent playthrough, instead of taking a certain character to a certain body for a story quest, I picked up the corpse and dumped it back in camp like a cat bringing their owner a dead bird. The dialogue still worked (though I had to have them in my party) besides one or two out-of-context lines.
However, one player has found an edge-case scenario that the game doesn’t account for at all, and it’s honestly pretty reasonable when you break it down. Spoilers for Act 1 and Gale’s storyline to follow, as well as a minor Act 3 spoiler.
As outlined by ThePawn08 on the game’s subreddit, reverse-pickpocketing a dead wizard onto the devil incarnate isn’t on the list of things Larian thought to program. For context: Gale of Waterdeep (ponderer of orbs and all-around dweeb) has a sphere of Netherese magic in his chest that’ll act like a nuke if he dies.
The range of it isn’t infinite, though, as he insists he’ll find a cosy, remote spot to go all nuclear should he become unable to control it. There’s also later confirmation that this is the case, but I’d have to dole out another spoiler warning for that. If Gale dies and you don’t resurrect him, he explodes and you get a game over after two Long Rests.
As it turns out, there are actually a couple of ways to put Gale’s body in different planes of existence—or hundreds of miles away. One such theory was tested by ThePawn08 when they were visited by Raphael:
“I had Raphael in my camp because he didn’t get to talk to me near the Blighted Village, and since I was travelling to a different region he appeared in my camp to talk to me … I reverse-pickpocketed Gale’s corpse into Raphael’s inventory before I talked to him and he disappeared.”
In theory, this should mean that Raphael brings Gale’s whole dead corpse (without noticing he’s carrying it) back to the Nine Hells and the House of Hope. Gale explodes, wiping out the schemer with him. Only when ThePawn08 took a long rest, they were rewarded for their ingenuity with a “lengthy black screen”, followed by a game over.
(Image credit: Larian)
Raphael could have noticed the body when he got home, and dumped it back on the material plane—but I figure that the absence of any cutscene at all implies the game’s just throwing its hands up and doing the best with the code it has.
Especially since a unique cutscene would be hilarious: A pissed-off devil just bamfing in, dumping Gale five metres from where your party’s sleeping, then bamfing out without another word. It’s not like Larian’s averse to making bespoke scenes for rare situations—heck, Minthara’s a fully-developed companion character, and a lot of players miss her on their first run.
Another player tried to test this with a unique Act 3 interaction that can send Gale’s body to another continent—as Misaka9982 writes: “I sent Gale to Chult via the Djinni express and let him die there. Still a game over.” They’re referring to Akabi’s Wheel of Wonders, a minigame at the Circus of the Last Days. Call the genie out on cheating and he sends you to Chult, a remote jungle that’s hundreds of miles away.
This is such a unique edge-case scenario that I can’t really blame Larian for not covering it. Vaporising Raphael would also blow up several late-game story arcs that’re vital—and in terms of things that are hard to predict, ‘sneaking an entire dead body into the pocket of a devil’ is certainly one of them.
