BG3 world-building/lore series part 1 – the Arcane Tower

BG3 is a huge game, full of mind-blowing amounts of small details that are so easily missed. I have almost 1000 hours into this game, and I’m still finding new things, whether they be little bits of lore hidden in flavor texts, new dialogue options, or just putting the pieces together. I’m starting a series of small short posts, each one going into a bit of the world building that I’ve been delighted by.

One of the most interesting world-building side quests in the game involves the Arcane Tower in the Underdark. It is an area that is completely unrelated to the plot, and very easy to miss. You first hear about it through a couple of traders talking amongst themselves, when one suggests that they could ask someone named Lenore in the tower for help. The other explains “Lenore has always been the lonely sort. Nature was her only companion.” Very offhanded, throwaway kind of comment.

When you eventually find the Arcane Tower in your wandering, it is a difficult place to get to. There is a puzzle in the courtyard that will kill your party if you can’t figure out how to get around it. Once you get in, there is no one in the tower. Everything is automated, and the story is pieced together almost entirely through scattered notes. You find the first note in the courtyard, after surviving the trap, and it’s the key to the whole thing. The story unfolds in non-chronological order, so for purposes of telling the story, I’ll save this note until the end.

While you are exploring Lenore’s bedroom, you find a button very low to the ground (everyone comments on this, so it’s meant to be important) that ostensibly does nothing. However, if you had dug up a doggy’s grave earlier in the Underdark—because you’re a monster—and put on its collar, then when you hit the button, a steak appears. So the grave belonged to Myrna, Lenore’s dog that passed away.

Okay, so Lenore, being a “lonesome sort” basically only had one companion, her dog, who passed away. Myrna’s grave is on a cliff overlooking the lake that she loved to play around in, and in another letter, we know that Lenore walks out to the grave to place autumncrocus flowers on it. So who are these sad poems written about? It doesn’t seem about a dog.

A key piece is in the flavor text of the Blast Pendant, an amulet that can be equipped as gear to strengthen lightning charges. It reads “Though they only worked together for a short time, it is hard to overstate the influence Lenore the cleric of Mystra had on Yrre the Sparkstruck, who often likened harnessing lightning to manipulating the Weave.”

Aha, so Lenore had a friend named Yrre. It says they were only together for a short time, so what happened to him? Unfortunately, it doesn’t take long to put the pieces together. As you explore the tower, you find scraps of paper and handwritten poems throughout.

When you get to the basement, you find the Staff of Arcane Blessing, gathering dust in all its nooks and crannies. The flavor text on it reads “its previous owner cast it aside forgotten because there was nobody to bless.”

Damn, girl. What the hell happened?

Well, now we get back to that letter you find in the courtyard, the first clue you can find before you even get into the Arcane Tower.

“Dearest Yrre,

I don’t know if you’re coming back, if you’ll even read this message, but if you do come back, could you wait for me? I’ll only be gone for a few tendays, but the thought of coming back to this empty tower, with nothing but Bernard to fill these halls… I don’t know how much longer I can take this. I miss you. I miss you so much.

I can’t shake the thought of how different things might have been if only I’d been less stubborn. Working on your lightning inventions, my magic. Eating together. Laughing at your stupid puns. Waking up next to you. Despite everything, I still love you.

So please, if you read this, can you wait? I’ll be back. I won’t be long.

Forever yours,

Lenore.”

When you get to the roof, you meet the aforementioned Bernard, and find that he’s an automaton. He only has pre-programmed responses to certain trigger phrases, which turn out to be lines from the poems that you found.

One of those phrases elicits a hug from him. The game states that the hug is at an awkward area, as if he was hugging someone shorter than you. I guess Lenore was small of stature. He then reminds you that you are so loved, and that everyone will be so proud of you.

If you try to ask him any questions, he has no response. Bernard can only do what he has been programmed to do. Which makes it incredibly dark that one of those poem lines actually elicits Bernard and the other automatons to attack. There is no way to calm them down afterward. They fight to the death. Given how depressed Lenore was, and how she speaks of “I don’t know how much longer I can take this”, it’s pretty safe to assume that she designed a literal kill-switch, a sort of programmable suicide.

Every time I think this story is so sad, I find another layer that adds more.

When you look at the flavor text for the Spellsparkler, it reads “Yrre the Sparkstruck intended to give the Spellsparkler to Lenore, a cleric of Mystra and old lover. But when the gnome returned to the cleric’s tower, they found it empty – inhabited only by dust and abandoned experiments.”

That letter in the courtyard, the one that you find first, where Lenore asks Yrre to wait for her? It holds the key to everything.

At the bottom of the letter, there are a few sentences penned below in a different hand:

“I waited. I waited until Tarsahk. I’ll always wait for you, but you didn’t come.”

So Yrre did come back! Why wasn’t this a happy ending? What happened to Lenore? You find a journal entry that says she was invited to Baldur’s Gate to give a talk, and that she was nervous about it. You know that she intended to return, because she wrote that note to Yrre in the courtyard. You know that she never did, because of his response.

My best guess comes from a reference in another note, this one written by a distant friend in another city, who chides Lenore for missing Myrna so much that she tried to befriend a bulette, a wild and impulsive creature. At first, I didn’t know whether the bulette was violent by nature. Sure, it attacks us when we get too near any of its hunting grounds, but hey, that’s most of the Underdark! Then I had a playthrough where I came across a giant empty hole in the ground (and hadn’t yet fought/killed the bulette) and called down into it. For the first time, I heard a snarling vicious voice respond:

“You won’t last long here, noisy flesh-bag.” / “Quiet. Or your meat will fill my belly.”

Whoa, okay, rudeness alert. So the bulette is not this cute land shark. It’s vicious, mean, and violent. Not something that a person in her right mind would try to befriend. But we’ve already established that Lenore was not in her right mind. She was severely depressed, alone, and looking for ANY source of comfort, enough that it clouded her judgment.

Then I remembered that earlier piece of info, about how Lenore would place autumncrocus flowers on Myrna’s grave, because the doggy had loved to roll around in them. It makes sense that prior to her long trip to Baldur’s Gate, Lenore would have done her usual ritual of walking alone to the cliff and spend some time at the grave. The same grave where the bulette attacks us if we wander too close.

Suddenly, I have a very bad feeling who this pile of bones by the grave could have been.

When you put this all together, you get the story of a deeply lonely woman with very little support system, heartbroken from a breakup, losing her only friend, desperate to connect with anyone that she didn’t have to program, who probably died a gruesome death that no one else knew about. Heck, her friends in the myconid colony didn’t even know she died. Her lover came back with the staff as an apology, but it was too late. Neither of them managed to connect again with the other. He showed up, waited for her, but then maybe thought that she had flaked, and he left too. Both of them went their separate ways thinking the other person didn’t care. It’s just so fucking sad, and disturbingly realistic.

I’ve played this game a few times, learning all of these pieces, but not putting it all together until the fourth time through. I thought it was sad from the individual pieces, but altogether, I sat and cried for a while, feeling so bad for this lonely woman that I never even met, virtually or in reality. That’s how amazing the world-building in this game is, because all of this is pieced together from a completely throwaway quest that you don’t even need to do.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go give Hodor a hug, and maybe some autumncrocus flowers.