SPOILER WARNING for all sorts of stuff throughout the game
Welcome to the next post of the BG3 world/lore series!
In my last post, I talked about how Shar is utter garbage and caused a big chunk of Act 2. I left off by saying that she was responsible for half of the crap that happened in the world. The goddess of deception, darkness, loss, trickery, manipulation, and taking advantage is only responsible for HALF of the bad things we’ve come across?
Who could match her for the other half?
Meet this smug git.
Raphael is a devil that you meet very early on in the game. In fact, he is so ingrained in the plot that the game makes sure there are at least half a dozen different ways you could run into him, just in case you take the roads less traveled.
I’m not actually sure what he is. When we first meet him, Karlach calls him a cambion, which is a half-devil/half-mortal. We know from his daddy issues that his father is Mephistopheles, the archdevil of the 9th layer of hell, and All-Around Bad Guy. But we know nothing of his mother, so I’m not sure if he’s a cambion, or a full-fledged devil. He’s also extremely powerful, more than the typical cambions that we meet in the game. Is that from his patrilineal genes, or is that him? If you choose to fight him, he can shift into his Final Form, and it doesn’t look much like a cambion, so for purposes of this post, we’re going to keep calling him a devil.
We first meet him in Act 1 where he does his dramatic introduction and says that you’ll come to ask him for help eventually. He implies that he knows exactly what is going on with you, and only he can help you.
There’s a lot of fuss from your companions about whether or not you should take him up on his offer, but for the most part, Raphael is only there for setup in Act 1.
You do see references to him at scattered points. If you choose to defeat the Harpies, you can loot a letter from their nest (next to the Ring of Colour Spray), written from a warlock to an ex-lover. The warlock explains that they had to ‘take the deal’ to pay off their loans and keep the ex-lover safe, and then mentions that the person they made the deal with ‘likes to pop into camp’ to see how they is doing. They don’t come out and say it, but this smells of cherries and sulfur to me. Keep this in mind.
When we get to Act 2, it is littered with clues that a massive battle occurred here, with very few survivors. We find notice of the Selunites/Harpers/Druids surrendering to Ketheric Thorm, and his chilling two-word response.
So Thorm very much had the upper hand, (guided by Shar) at this point in this life. But we know that he was later defeated, and his army scattered and destroyed. We see scores of dead justiciars all over the shadow cursed lands, much to Shadowheart’s very persistent chagrin. So what could have happened to turn this massive army around when it had already all but decimated everything?
As with many of these things, we go to the archaeology! When we first get to the Grymforge, we meet a researcher staring at a massive hallway and temple, trying to fit the pieces of the past together. While the Grymforge is in Act 1, we know that it had a path leading directly to the Sharran temple, and thus had to do with Thorm’s forces. It is also where we first hear his name, from an elder rothe that had been alive all those years ago, and it is where we first come across the slain dark justiciars. So it has to be historical evidence of what happened all those years ago.
Stonemason Kith then asks for your help in noticing new details. With a series of lucky/skillful rolls, these are the pieces that you can gather:
- “The statue’s meandering curves and golden edges stand out against the weathered masonry behind it. Two styles, two eras. The statue was carved from newer stone, and erected by latecomers to this ancient fortress.”
- “Boulders and stone bricks of various sizes clutter the corridor, many split cleanly in two. Yet some walls remain fully intact. No quake brought these rocks down. They were smashed through in an instant. Something big charged through here. Something very big.”
- “Several glassy stones stand out in the debris. Their borders are coated with tiny yellow crystals The hottest of flames smoothed the stone and left sulfuric crystals behind. The fires of the Hells have touched Grymforge.”
We get corresponding evidence from asking that Elder Rothe what he remembers, and he says, “I saw tusks and flesh, smelled fire and eggs. It came with the masked men, crashing and smashing.”
What the Hell?
In exploring Gymforge, you stumble upon a side room where you fight a merregon, one of the masked soldiers of the Hells. Your character even notes that merregons are never far from their leaders, so what was this one doing stuck here?
We also find this note on one of the corpses:
Putting this all together, Grymforge is connected to an old Sharran temple, built a long time ago, then revived by a later group, likely Ketheric’s Sharran forces. He knew of this path from Gymforge, as the boss fight you have in this area involves his troops that he sent to clear the path. This also explains why Halsin tells you that the Underdark path is the faster and easier way to the Shadow-Cursed lands — he is operating on century-old information, because that’s when he was last there, same as Ketheric.
However, while those Sharran forces were here during the war, over a century ago, something from the Hells burst in and slaughtered everyone, with enough power to turn the war that was all but won earlier.
But why would something infernal have come to our world for this? What use do the Hells have for siding against the Sharrans?
When we eventually get to the Temple of Shar, on the other side of that broken pathway from Grymforge, located underneath the Shadow-Cursed lands, Raphael pops up again. He warns us about a creature inside the temple that is so powerful, we should kill it on sight, and not even let it speak. Raphael does not give more information than that, as he loves his dramatic tension.
When we finally meet the creature, lured into his trap, we see him for what he is: an orthon.
Now suddenly the large Hellbeast that smashed through Grymforge and wrecked everything up makes a lot more sense.
Okay, so we know that Yurgir destroyed the Sharran forces and paved the way for Ketheric’s defeat, leading him to pray to Shar in his dying moments, and unleashing the Shadow Curse that plagued the lands of Act 2 for more than a century.
But why? What does Yurgir care? As he said above, he just wants to kill things.
We don’t get an answer until all the way at the end of Act 3, where we meet a damned soul in the Hells.
This poor bastard was Morfred, the architect of Moonrise Towers, and one of Ketheric Thorm’s initial followers before his fall from grace. We came across his journal when exploring the ruined town of Reithwin, and it read “I met a man who was no man. Touched by a devil. Or maybe worse. But he offered me something I couldn’t refuse — help. The time is now. Ketheric’s justiciars, their stronghold in the temple below – they will be wiped out. All of them. I didn’t ask how. I just want them gone.”
When asked how he came to be in the Hells, specifically in Raphael’s home, he gives the us the final piece of the puzzle.
Oh honey.
Although I guess according to the letter of the law, Raphael DID destroy Ketheric Thorm’s forces by sending Yurgir to go smash everyone, and devils are all about the letter of the law. I’ll even give him the benefit of the doubt that he didn’t know that Thorm’s defeat would lead to Shar’s curse sweeping over the land.
However, Raphael’s fuckery goes deeper than that. When you first meet Yurgir, he seems to match my antagonistic feelings toward Raphael, as this is one of the first things he says when he meets/smells you:
Why does he hate Raphael so much? And if Yurgir was hired to destroy the army, and he did that a hundred years ago, why is he still here? Just go home to the Hells, bro. It’s cold up here.
Gee, who have we met so far that just loves contracts?
Yurgir reveals that to complete the contract, he needed to kill all the Dark Justiciars. He has slain every single one that he could find over the past hundred years, but he is still here. After wandering the Temple, you have several interactions with some pretty pissy rats, who consider you “unworthy” to be here. Through a convoluted series of events, you can find a ritual circle that explains that all the rats are many parts of one, and pieces them back together.
Meet Lyrthrindor, the last of the Shadow Justiciars, the “one become many.” When he saw all of his compatriots being murdered by the infernal beast, he made a deal to try to survive. Guess who answered him, splitting him into hundreds of rats so that Yurgir couldn’t find the last survivor?
So Raphael made a deal for Yurgir to kill all the Dark Justiciars, and then made a deal with the last Dark Justiciar to hide him from Yurgir.
Dude. In legal terms, this would be called “acting in bad faith.” But I guess that sums up Raphael in a nutshell. There are a lot of other things that can be said about him (and I do), but for purposes of this post, we are talking about how he has affected the events of the game.
What is Raphael’s motivation? It’s easy enough to say “well, he’s a devil, he just likes to create chaos.” And I’m sure that’s part of it. But that would be a bit of a copout from this well-written game, as well as not giving credit where credit is due.
As the game continues, Raphael’s part in this plot becomes bigger and bigger, tied together with multiple things. Kithrak Voss, whom we meet way back in Act 1, an incredibly proud and noble warrior, is seen practically begging Raphael to help him. Raphael tells him that there is only thing that he wants. Then he turns to us and pitches the main deal: we get the Orphic hammer that Voss wants, and Raphael gets the Crown of Karsus.
The Crown of Karsus is the macguffin that makes the entirety of the BG3 plotline possible. It’s far too big to go into in this post, but suffice to say that it is an incredibly powerful magical artifact, and Raphael wants the precious. It would grant him such a power boost that he could unite ALL of the hells as the Supreme Ruler of Hell.
This is not a bluff, by the way. If you choose a series of events that actually gives him the Crown, there is a post-credits scene where he villain-monologues about how the rulers of Hell have all come to him to discuss terms, including his own father.
Raphael mentions that he had wanted the Crown back in the days of yore when Karsus created it, but it slipped through his fingers when his father Mephistopheles spirited it away into his cold frigid vaults instead. Raphael raged, “but only for a decade”, and then started putting his plan in motion for the next thousand years. He can’t just break into Mephistopheles’ vault and steal it, because Daddy would smite the shit out of him.
But true to devil nature, he can try to sneak his way around it, use pawns, set plans in motion, etc.
Mephistopheles, to his credit, is aware of it. We never meet him in the game, but we meet a rather skimpily clad incubus named Haarlep in Raphael’s bedroom, who looks exactly like Raphael. The in-game encounter with him is… stimulating in a few different ways, but if you choose to kill him and cast speak with dead on him, he reveals that he was sent here by Mephistopheles, specifically to distract his son from his plans. So this means that Big Daddy is aware of Raphael’s machinations and plans, and knows that, true to any narcissist, the only thing that can distract him is himself.
Even his freaking incubus’s name is just an anagram of his own.
As we get further into the game, we realize that the Crown of Karsus is what the Chosen of the Dead Three are using to control the Brain and bend it to their will. One of those Chosen is Gortash, follower of the God of Tyranny. Gortash will likely have his own blog post later, but essentially he’s the main mastermind behind the whole plot.
Or is he?
Exploration of the Lower City stumbles us into a small unassuming shoe shop called “Flymm’s Cobblers.” Inside, the shopkeeps, an equally unassuming older couple named Sally and Dravo Flymm introduce themselves as the doting parents of the Archduke Gortash, formerly known as Enver Flymm. They’re so proud of their son, such a handsome and good boy, look, they even have his portrait hanging up on the wall!
It’s all a little too Stepford Wives-ish, so of course, it can’t be true. Casting “Detect Thoughts” on Gortash’s mother reveals that both parents are being mind-controlled to smile and praise about their son and pretend they are perfect parents. Sally hasn’t spoken to anyone in her real voice and words since before “some sort of worm” was rammed into her brain. She’s just a meat puppet now going through a script, while being fully conscious and screaming inside of her own brain. When asked how this happened, she reveals that Gortash came to the door, and when they let him in, he shoved the tadpoles into his own parents’ eye sockets.
When asked further, she is so desperate to have a conversation with anyone that she reveals everything: when Enver was a young boy, she and Dravo had “terrible world-ending debts” trying to keep the store afloat. So they sold the only thing they had of value: their son. They traded him to a “warlock,” and didn’t regret it at all.
Look. I’m not a mother. But I kind of feel like that’s just kids in general?
Was Gortash actually a needy nasty child? Depending on where you stand on the whole nature vs nurture thing, there are some kids that have all the privilege in the world and still turn out rotten.
Or was he just a child, with parents who obviously hated him, with food insecurity and a lack of safe space?
At the point that the game takes place, I don’t think it matters anymore. While trauma helps us to understand a character, and adds depth and empathy, it doesn’t change the fact that Gortash is a horrible human being by the time he grew up.
Why the deviation into Gortash during this dive into Raphael? Well, the “warlock” that the Flymm’s sold him to wasn’t a regular warlock at all.
When we make our way down to the House of Hope and explore that palace, we find a room that Raphael calls the “Chamber of Egress,” because he’s a fucking ponce. There we find seven large portals that Raphael uses to transport himself to the cities of Athkatla, Neverwinter, Waterdeep, Baldur’s Gate, Mephista, Luskan, and Menzoberranzan — all incredibly populous areas that would make it easy for him to find new victims. We also come across an incredibly cranky gnome named Nubaldin, who grumps that he used to be in charge of the prison, but was demoted to the Chamber of Egress because some little shit named Gortash escaped under his watch.
So Gortash was the ‘pageboy’ for Raphael, learning at Raphael’s elbow and being beaten by Nubaldin for I guess being a little shit.
We know that it is pretty much impossible to escape from the House of Hope. There are many, many damned souls trapped there, and the only way that we end up eventually escaping is to go through Raphael himself. How did Gortash do so? Maybe it was with the insider knowledge of having been there for an unknown amount of years, sure.
Or maybe, it was part of Raphael’s plan all along.
Take an ambitious clever young boy, give him exposure to a world of infernal knowledge, magical items, development of contacts and backdoor dealings, and let him “escape” with a chip on his shoulder, and a desire to become so powerful that he can never be used as a pawn again. Gortash then goes on to climb the ranks of the criminal underworld and even starts advising the upper class, eventually following in his parents’ shitty footsteps and trading his bodyguard Karlach to the archdevil Zariel of Avernus.
In return, he gets access to Zariel’s infernal iron, which he then uses in combination with enslaving the Gondians and their families to build him his Steel Watchers. He uses those patrolling monstrosities to jump from the criminal underworld into impressing the bougie patriars of Baldur’s Gate, making himself seem invaluable and starting his play to become Archduke of the city. Through his deal with the other Chosen of the Dead Three, he enlists the help of a diabolist to break into Mephistopheles’ vault, and steal the Crown of Karsus — the very item that Raphael has wanted for millennia and could not steal for himself.
It is made clear in the game that Gortash is the one that came up with the idea of using the crown to enslave the Brain, and the only way he could have learned about that was through his time with Raphael. Gortash also would have come across the knowledge of the Crown being in the vault, who could break into it, and formed connections with Zariek’s ilk through his time with Raphael. It is possible that all of this is a coincidence. Heck, it’s possible that Gortash DID learn about it just by reading in Raphael’s library, but escaped on his own power and came up with the plan on his own as well, fooling Raphael yet again.
However, given how much we see Raphael manipulating things throughout the game, and talking about how he raged for a decade but then started coming up with multiple plans, and how he talks to your character about how the Dead Three brought the Crown back into play, I think it’s fairly safe to say that coincidence was not the guiding hand here.
Credit where credit is due, that’s some 4D chess right there.
Raphael is someone who has so many fingers in so many pies that this is likely just one of the many plans he had simultaneously going. He put so much effort into this that I would almost feel bad about thwarting his plans, except then I remember what a horrible creature he is.
In fact, if you’re someone who delights in karmic justice (and schaudenfreude), check out the Orb of Infernal Visioning after you defeat him in his home.
