Baldur’s Gate 3 – Playthrough 3’ – Tav and Trophies

CW: Partial nudity, on the same level as my previous post. The first pictorial is spoiler free. However, there’ll be a warning afterwards for content past that.

The warnings

• Now we’re entering SPOILER ALERT territory. I’m going discuss more plot elements about the Dark Urge that Tav mentioned.

  I don’t regard Tav’s mention of the existence and motives of the Dark Urge as a spoiler. As she says, the Dark Urge tells you all this during the character introductions, when you go through creating an avatar in Baldur’s Gate 3.

• In particular, this essay is going to discuss fulfilling some “hidden” trophies in BG3. They are hidden because even knowing the trophies’ names spoil some of the plot.

  If you don’t want to know what the trophies are so you can discover them for yourself, it’s best to move on to the next blog post.

  Or consider scrolling rapidly to the next bunch of fanfic photos (though read the warning just before them).

• There is more fanfic, and images that contain partial nudity.
• There’s also more about Druid Angela.

You have been warned!

Nomenclature

What does “playthrough 3′” mean?

I’ve gone over my peculiar nomenclature before, and I have a reference page to keep track. However, it doesn’t hurt to go over it again:

• When I say something like “playthrough 3”, I’m talking about my own third playthrough of Baldur’s Gate 3

  

• Playthroughs 1/14 and 2/14.5 were ones in which Real Angela was the host. They were (respectively) the first and second playthroughs for her, and the fourteenth and a partial subsequent playthrough for me.
• Playthrough 8’/2.5 was a “fork” off a game save I managed to preserve from playthrough 8. It was a partial playthrough for Real Angela.

  

• Playthrough 15 is, following the above pattern, my fifteenth playthrough of BG3. For reasons I’ll explain in a future post, it’s taking me a while to complete.

  

  No, you haven’t missed something. I haven’t explained who this is yet in any of my posts. (Actually, I have, but you’d have to have read them carefully, and I’m not so vain that I think anyone would find that worthwhile.)

• Playthrough 1/16 is Actual Sabrina’s first BG3 playthrough, and my sixteenth as I guide and accompany her.

So we come to playthrough 3′, the one in which the opening fanfic story is set. It’s a fork of my original playthrough 3. Why would I want to want to resurrect a game from this old save?

Trophies

Trophies are one way to demonstrate one’s prowess in a video game. They don’t mean anything (any more than any video game does), but it can be pleasant to earn them.

I started using mods in playthrough 11. The playthroughs were fun, but you can’t earn game trophies in a playthrough that uses mods.

When I went back to playthrough 8’/2.5, I realized I could gain a couple of trophies easily.

A bit later I had the thought: What trophies remained for me in BG3?

As you can see, out of 54 possible trophies, I was only missing six:

• Pride of Baldur’s Gate requires collecting every other trophy in the game. If I gained all the others, that one would take care of itself.

  There’s a subtlety here: “Every” almost certainly includes one which is not listed in these screenshots: Foehammer, for completing the game in Honor mode. I plan to do that eventually. I’ll use tried-and-tested uber-builds; Arctic Druid Angela will have to sit this one out.

  

• Kill Two Birds With One Gnome has you throwing one enemy at another. That’s easy to do, provided you have a strong character.
• Fancy Footwork is awarded by killing Gortash without activating any of his traps. He’s got many of them in his rooms. They typically activate at the start of combat with him.
• Critical Hit is awarded for completing the game in Tactician mode. Although my playthrough 15 is in Tactician difficulty, it also uses mods and therefore won’t count.

  I will have to wait until my playthrough 17 to go through the game in Tactician mode from start to finish, without using any mods.

• There were two hidden trophies that I looked up. (One last SPOILER ALERT!)
  • Leave No One Behind requires you to save every possible Tielfling refugee in a single playthrough. This is not difficult, but unless you know the trophy is there it’s hard to do accidentally; the Tieflings are fragile and it’s easy to shrug off a loss of a single one.

    Again, for me this must wait until playthrough 17. I don’t have a game save that would permit me to do this. It might be trickier in Tactician; I’ll see!

  • Sins of the Father – “Claim your Throne of Blood: take control of the Netherbrain for Bhaal and break the world.”

I had only two old game saves that both did not use mods and would permit me to earn any of those above trophies: playthrough 3 and playthrough 8 (or 8’/2.5).

Fancy Footwork

Gortash had been defeated in my playthrough 3 save, but had not yet been defeated in my oldest playthrough 8 save.

I’m nowhere good enough to defeat Gortash the way the trophy was “supposed” to be earned by the game’s developers.

However, another strategy has emerged in the BG3 community: “kidnap” Gortash, using a trick associated with Improvised Melee Weapon; take him to the Wyrm’s Rock waypoint; shove him off a cliff.

Kill Two Birds With One Gnome

This was more convenient for me to do in playthrough 3′.

Sins of the Father

This is the achievement that required me to return to an old playthrough 3 save and continue from there.

My third playthrough was a Dark Urge run, but I chose the path of redemption for the character of Tav.

Consider the text of the achievement: “… take control … for Bhaal”.

I always save my games just at the point in which the character can choose to destroy the Ultimate Evil, or to take control of it. I had done so for Tav. This gives me a chance to see possible Evil Endings associated with that character. (I plan to write about Evil Endings in my playthrough 17 essay, after I’ve finally seen Shadowheart’s individual Evil Ending.)

Because I had Tav resist the Urge whenever possible, if I choose the Evil path at the very end, I can get this:

It’s dramatic and suitably Evil, but Tav isn’t claiming the throne in Bhaal’s name, but in her own.

Playthrough 3′

Fortunately, I had saves of playthrough 3 other than that end one. The timing of my earliest save was at the point at which Tav could decide whether to reject or accept the Dark Urge. As I said above, I chose to reject it.

I had never restored that save to see the consequences of accepting the Dark Urge. The reason is that there are story differences between rejecting the Dark Urge during the course of the game until the moment of this decision, or embracing the Dark Urge throughout the game.

Well… I suppose.

The point is, I’d planned to wait to see the full Dark Urge story in its own playthrough. But since playthrough 15 uses mods (I’m running out of patience with mods), to get the Sins of the Father trophy I’d either have to start a new playthrough from the beginning, or send Tav on the Bhaal-claiming path from the save I had.

I chose the latter.

Did I get the trophy?

So I’m at 51/54 trophies. As I noted above, it will be a while before I get those last three. At minimum, it will require a Tactician run with no mods. It might also require an Honor mode run. They’re on my to-do list.

However, it turns out that there was more to playthrough 3′ than just the trophy.

Two years of learning

Based on some secondary clues (trophy award dates), I believe I created my earliest surviving playthrough 3 save in March, 2024.

I loaded the save. I had Tav choose to succumb to the Dark Urge. I dealt with some of the immediate consequences of that decision.

Then I had a chance to look at how I spec’ed the characters. I was stunned at how poorly thought-out they were. Roughly two years of gameplay had changed my approach to the game.

I could have left things as they were. Playthrough 3 had been in Explorer difficulty. There was no reason for me to change that. I could have finished the game with the characters as they were. After all, I’d done it before.

Except I couldn’t. Months of developing BG3 skills left me unable to leave things alone.

I was multi-classing back then, but I did so by switching to Balanced difficulty, adding the new class, then going back to Explorer. I continued that practice, not because I couldn’t otherwise handle Balanced mode, but of how poorly-geared the characters were. It looked like I’d skipped whole areas of the game like the Mountain Pass, compared to the complete exploration that I’d become accustomed to.

I also was surprised when I got to the Camp and discovered that there were no Protectors. I shouldn’t have been; I hadn’t started using Protectors until playthrough 6. Again, I couldn’t help but hire them for their buffs.

Photo mode

There is no doubt in my mind that when Larian introduced photo mode in Apr-2025, there were players who immediately used it to create porn. As a sysadmin, I know that bandwidth improvements in communications technology have been driven by pornography since folks started trading Venus of Willendorf statues 30,000 years ago. We have assurance from Avenue Q that the Internet is for porn; who am I to deny a Broadway musical?

Since I’ve filled my recent posts with models I’ve posed for fanfic pictorials, you may be surprised to learn that I have zero interest in creating porn within, about, or connected to Baldur’s Gate 3.

However, as a typical arrested adolescent who spends too much time on video games when he should be writing a biography, I do like to look at the BG3 female figures from time to time.

Again, believe it or not, I’m not turned on by this. I simply think they’re pretty.

From the time I created Dark Urge Tav a couple of years ago, I gave her the “self-assigned” identity of a succubus. From a role-playing and storytelling perspective, this justified her mentally projecting her own ideas of body autonomy, and putting the party members and the hirelings in their underwear. In other words, I had an excuse for this:

Bear in mind that playthrough 3 took place before I knew how to take screenshots in the game and transfer them to my computer, and before BG3 photo mode made it possible for me to pose characters.

Is this porn? Actually, I don’t care. No human, directly or indirectly, is being abused.

It might contribute to the objectification of women. However, I feel that I know the difference between a digital fantasy character that I’m posing like a Barbie doll, and a human being with their own feelings, body, and identity.

I stick to tasteful images (insert your own definition of “tasteful” here) because it makes things simpler. If the sight of some bare butts on digital models is enough to excite you into unseemly lubricity, then so be it. Just don’t tell me about it.

For my part, if I want to look at pictures of digital naked women (or men) with their sexual characteristics exposed, I see plenty of that as I carefully pose the models so that said characteristics are not visible in the pictures.

With all that said…

I used the opportunity of loading the old playthrough 3 game save to create images that are either fun, disappointing, or disturbing; take your pick.

SUPER SPOILEROUS MAXIMUS WARNING

In the following fanfic, I’m going to discuss plot elements that players may not discover until they’ve made multiple BG3 playthroughs, reading the in-game books and unraveling other clues. I also reference extended Forgotten Realms lore, since it connects to the clues discussed in books found in BG3 and BG1+2.

On the other hand, if you’re a Forgotten Realms fan, these may not be a spoiler for you. They may also be a disappointment, since I make up a lot of stuff and don’t let established lore get in the way.

I also refer to my own recent Druid Angela fanfic. If you haven’t been following along, it may be confusing.

Proceed at your own risk. The nudity may not be worth it.

Failure