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This is part 3 in a series of 5 posts. I strongly advise you to start from the first one. In particular, I’m Wiccan. Sandalwood is a fictional character. She does not represent my personal views.

Scratch

Scratch was fine.

Of course Scratch is a good boy, but why do I mention this here? We’ll learn the answer when I write up playthrough 1/14.

The Three Protectors

Sandalwood named the Three Protectors Oak, Ash, and Thorn. These names are from a song that’s popular among Wiccans; in turn the song is from a poem by Rudyard Kipling.

They were appropriately servile and obedient, just as Sandalwood likes it. She was ready to substitute them in if the other coven members proved fractious, but it wasn’t necessary.

A Horde of Admirers

All Witches can cast Animate Dead. This means that each Witch can be accompanied by a coterie of skeletons. Sandalwood preferred skeleton archers, because:

• Sandalwood wore the Circle of Bones which gives a undead and fiendish allies advantage against physical attacks.
• She had the ability Archer’s Eye, which is granted by the Witch mod. This causes all allies near her to have an advantage on their ranged attacks.

If she stood in the midst of her army of skeletal archers, all the coven’s servants would get these bonuses.

What’s more, since I was using the mod that allowed characters to go to level 20, a Level IX version of Animate Dead was available. This can animate up to 13 skeletons with a single spell.

The recipe, which Sandalwood dearly wants you to know, is:

• Obtain 13 corpses. Generally, corpses you find just lying around are not acceptable targets for Animate Dead, as it only works with corpses that are relatively fresh and unmutilated. You may have to create the corpses yourself.
• They don’t have to be corpses of your friends and loved ones, but (in Sandalwood’s words) they taste better if they are.



• In BG3, it can be tricky to get 13 corpses within the 10-meter range of Animate Dead. You may have to carry or move the corpses into a small space.
• Make sure the corpses don’t overlap, and that there’s no one standing on top of them. Animate Dead is picky; the undead needs enough space to stand up once it’s summoned.
• Cast Animate Dead on as many corpses as the spell allows.

  

• Have the Witch who summoned them lead them entirely out of the way, so the next Witch has room for their own summons.
• Any number of undead can be summoned from each corpse. That is, a given corpse can only generate one undead from a given Animate Dead spell, but a series of casters can use the same corpse repeatedly.

Animating Dead in this way is illegal, at least in Baldur’s Gate. If citizens see you, they may call the guard. In that case, remember the advice of Gheris Hhune:

Sabotage!

There was only one attempt at wickedness for which Sandalwood was thwarted.

And then…

Nope, no photos here. The game crashed.

I tried several times. Each time the game crashed at the same point: just as a divine being attempted retribution for the first time in the battle.

Almost certainly, the problem was with one of the mods I used in this playthrough. I would have to do a “binary search” through my mods to see which one was the culprit. However, once you enable a mod for a given playthrough, it’s generally not possible to turn it off; the code lingers in the game’s save file even if you disable the mod.

The result: Sandalwood was forced into making the goody-goody choice.

Thus is wickedness thwarted: Not because it’s stronger, but because some programmer didn’t debug their code.

Practical concerns

You may remember an earlier post in which I thought doing a “coven run” might be risky. I wondered if the Witch mod, which is unfinished and not well-supported, would allow for characters powerful enough to make it through the game.

When I wrote those concerns, I had not yet chosen to use the Fade’s Equipment Distribution mod. This, along with related mods, add a slew of new magical equipment to the game.

You can find those items by exploring the game world, but you can also find them all in a “tutorial chest” near the very beginning of the game.

When I saw the items in the tutorial chest, I ransacked it, taking any item that I thought might be useful in the future.

As a result, the characters had end-game-quality gear from the start. I didn’t have any problems with the strength of the characters, only with the role-playing decisions I had to make to be “wicked.”

I faced a related dilemma at the end of the game. Larian Studios released Patch 8 of the game on April 15, 2025. I’ll talk more about Patch 8 in subsequent posts, but I faced one potential issue: Many mods no longer worked in Patch 8.

The author of the Witch mod would almost certainly not be able to fix any problems with the mod, as they’re busy with other things.

I therefore rushed the game to completion, finishing playthrough 13 on April 14, 2025. I was just under the wire.

No great loss, as I’d mostly performed most of the wicked deeds I planned to do.

Still, what might Sandalwood have done if she’d had a bit more time?

Bits and pieces

The saga of BG3 playthrough 13

My original post on playthrough 13 became long, so I split it into sections. Here are links to all of them.

• Part 1: Coven
• Part 2: Betrayals
• Part 3: Spells
• Part 4: Vengeance
• Part 5: Evil