Baldur’s Gate 3: My Disastrous Journey Through Honor Mode (Act 1)

In the two years since it came out, Baldur’s Gate 3 has become my absolute favorite video game. Even after six hundred hours of play, I can’t get enough of it! I’ve played it solo, with my brother, on my PC, on my PS5, and online with my friends. With mods, without party members, at level one, with cheat codes, I’ve experimented so much with this game I’ve practically got a degree!

Yet of all my many playthroughs, one stands head and shoulders above the others. Don’t get me wrong, I love playing with family and friends. But multiplayer did not solidify this RPG as my favorite game. It was my journey through Honor Mode.

Honor Mode is BG3’s ultimate challenge. Enemies are smarter, stronger, and ruthless. Bosses have Legendary Actions that completely change how they play. The ability to load a save is removed; every decision and mistake is carved in stone. Worst of all: if you die even once, you need to restart the entire game. Your only reward for beating it: a golden dice skin.

But gold is my favorite color, so that was more than enough for me!

I’ve tried a few Honor Mode runs in the past. Even got pretty far in a few of them. But something always went wrong and those adventures came to bloody, tragic ends. It was demoralizing, frustrating, and incredibly stressful. Yet even after losing sixty-plus hours of progress across three failed campaigns, I was still determined to win. I wanted those golden dice, dammit!

Until, finally, I managed it. After seventy hours of play, I emerged victorious. Which was a miracle, because this run was a disaster!

For this run, I chose to play a Tiefling Bard named Elya. A kind soul who loves animals, Elya always has a song on her lips and a blade in her hands. For an extra challenge (because my masochism knows no bounds) I chose to play as the Dark Urge. Our friendly heroine is cursed with an unquenchable bloodlust. Lacking any memories of her origins, Elya must cure herself before her Urge pens a tragedy in blood.

With my character created, ‘Down By the River‘ thoroughly enjoyed, and my nerves steeled: it was time to put a worm in my eye.

Act 1

Elya’s adventure got off to a rocky start. Within the Nautiloid, she failed to free Us and could not steal the Everburn Blade. Minor failings, but they set a grim tone for things to come. With Lae’zel and Shadowheart at her side, our Bard managed to safely escape Illithid clutches to land upon the Sword Coast.

Things went fairly smoothly for a while. Elya managed to recruit Gale without sawing off his hand, picked up Astarion without anyone getting stabbed, and freed Lae’zel without killing any innocent tieflings. Heading to the crypt, the party made quick work of the scavengers, annihilated some skeletons, and woke Withers from his tomb.

Once they reached the Druid’s Grove, things got a bit… messy. When Elya agreed to help him find Karlach, Wyll joined the party happily. At least, until a series of bad choices left some tieflings dead and got me in trouble with the law. Still, we managed to reach level three without any major catastrophes.

This is where I got access to my secret weapon: camp clerics. With Withers’ help, you can get up to three hirelings. By converting them to the Cleric class, you can use them to apply day-long buffs to your active party members. As you level up, you’ll get more of these buffs, and they’ll become increasingly more powerful. These include:

• Aid: increases maximum HP by 5 for each level
• Warding Bond: splits damage between caster and target, adds +1 to all skill checks, saving throws, and attacks
• Protection From Poison: lowers all poison damage by 50%
• Longstrider: increases movement speed
• Death Ward: resist death one time
• Freedom of Movement: difficult terrain no longer affects you
• Heroes’ Feast: increase maximum HP and creates food

Applying these buffs every day can certainly be tedious. However, without them, I wouldn’t have made it past act one. There are just too many enemies, and they hit way too hard. These are the tools I needed to even the playing field. And even these often weren’t enough; there are more close calls in this run than I could count.

Within the Grove, Elya met a kindred spirit in Alfira, another tiefling bard. Together, they composed a ballad in honor of Alfira’s late teacher. For her help, Alfira gave Elya a lute. So began a beautiful friendship. Much to the Urge’s disgust.

A horde of goblins stood between Elya and Baldur’s Gate, so the party left the Grove to deal with them. For a while, things went as well as I could hope for. Goblins were killed, owlbears subdued (non-lethally because I love that cub more than life itself) and Astarion’s vampiric hungers satiated without any stakes in hearts. Taking a detour northwards, the party recruited Karlach and, with many explosive barrels, slaughtered the false Paladins of Tyr. An act which earned Wyll some snazzy new horns.

Unfortunately, this is where I made some stupid mistakes. As I went to save Councilor Florick from the fire, I made a pit stop back at camp to collect Wyll. This was apparently a mistake, because when I got back, the fire was gone and the Councilor was dead.

Believe it or not, that wasn’t the dumbest mistake I made this playthrough.

My bad luck wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. The party managed to recruit Lug and his band, but the horn elected to glitch out. No ogres came to my aid against the goblins, and no circlet of intellect was collected. We managed to collect the Necromancy of Thay book beneath the potion shop, but Astarion failed to draw out its power and I subsequently forgot about it.

As the party made camp, we were approached by Alfira, who wanted to join the adventure. Imagining all the duets they could perform, Elya recruited her happily. Only to wake in the middle of the night standing over her corpse, blood soaking her hands. In a panic, Elya hid her involvement and went back to bed. When the party found the body, she managed to avoid suspicion. Wracked with guilt and shame, she swore to conquer her Urge before she could kill again.

The next night, Elya had a surprise visitor: a horrible little demon butler. While he clearly recognized her as his ‘Lady’, our heroine had no memory of him. For her murdering Alfira, he gifted her a magic cloak, then disappeared. It seems the path of evil has a few benefits after all.

The bumpy road evened out when I turned southwards to the swamp. Here, I found key evidence that Kagha was involved in a plot with Shadow Druids to corrupt the Grove. Returning, Elya brought the scheme to light and persuaded Kagha to return to Sylvanus’s embrace. With her returned to good, the Shadow Druids were toppled without any issues.

Then it was time for the first major boss of the campaign: Aunty Ethil. On a normal run, she’s not that hard; just use Magic Missle to destroy her clones and the rest is easy. But in Honor Mode, she uses your magic against you to create even more duplicates. Luckily, with Astarion, Karlach, and Lae’zel at her side, Elya brought the hag down, saving Mayrina and collecting a stat-boosting hair.

With Ethil eliminated and Kagha redeemed, Elya and the party journeyed to the Goblin Camp. Elya and the party rescued Halsin, Volo, and the owlbear cub without a hitch. With some careful planning, they wiped out the goblins outside, killed Ragzlin and Gut, and knocked out Minthara. With the threat eliminated, I cleared out the camp for valuables and returned to the Grove victorious.

It was here that my run nearly came to a catastrophic end. See, I got a little greedy. I wanted to steal the druid’s idol for Mol in exchange for a Ring of Protection. Unfortunately, my heist fell apart immediately when I forgot to cast Fog Cloud. Now all the druids that praised me as a hero turned to kill me as a thief. When it became clear I could not win, I made a quick retreat, barely escaping with my life. Luckily, they were only temporarily hostile, so we made up at the party that night.

During the festivities, Elya spent some quality one-on-one time with Shadowheart. Sharing a bottle of wine, they exchanged stories of their past. To comfort her companion, Elya made up tales that did not involve bloody murder. As the dawn drew closer, the pair shared their first kiss, then went back to the others.

Then they killed some Phase Spiders. Not a lot happened. There were spiders. Then there were not. Moving on.

With the first map cleared, the party turned their gaze to Moonrise Towers, home base of the Absolute. But which road did they take? Did they delve into the Underdark or risk the mountain pass? After some careful deliberation (and a lot of time spent reading the wiki) I decided to start with the Underdark.

Elya’s journey through the caves went without a hitch. Bulettes, Hook Horrors, and Spectators were slain, Myconids were avenged, and a wizard’s tower explored with no poetic robots murdered. The duegar made for easy prey, and the kuotoa were easily convinced that Elya was their god.

Things continued to go my way throughout the Grymforge. Using her silver tongue, Elya managed to incite a duegar civil war. In the chaos, she killed Nere will little issue. She even managed to talk the duegar into releasing the deep gnomes without further bloodshed. All according to plan.

Delving deeper into the caves, the party came to the Grymforge. Here, I could craft some powerful weapons and armor to assist me in the journey ahead. There was just one problem: Grym, guardian of the forge. This dude hits like a tank and can only be hurt when standing in lava. You can crush him using the forge for big damage, but even this has its risks.

Which is why I didn’t bother. See, tough as this fight is, it’s really easy to cheese it. All you need are some bows and spells and you can do the full fight safely from above. Boss fight is much easier when the boss can’t ever attack you.

Was this fun? No. But I was playing to win, dammit! And win I did!

With the Underdark cleared, the party back-tracked to take the mountain pass. Elya narrowly talked around Voss to prevent a fight with the Githyanki. Here, we learned a troubling fact: Vlaakith’s armies seek the Artefact. The same Artefact keeping us safe from the Absolute.

After killing some undead and tricking a supposed scholar into taking an owlbear egg instead of a githyanki one, the party made their way to the Creche. Here, Elya acquired a buff that completely changed the game. Normally, I allowed Lae’zel to destroy the Zaithysk. But I had recently learned that, if you succeed a few saving throws, you unlock a crucial upgrade to your Illithid powers: all of them become bonus actions rather than full actions. And with a few extremely lucky rolls, Elya acquired that exact buff. It’s no exaggeration to say this single buff more than tripled Elya’s combat efficiency.

Which was good, because the githyanki did not go easy on me. Normally, the creche fights are perfectly managable. But on Honor Mode, the boss has a super fun mechanic where he summons a metric fuckton of psychic swords. Very strong and deadly swords with their own place in initiative. Needless to say this fight was fucking psychotic and I barely managed to escape alive.

Elya’s reward: the Blood of Lathander, one of the best early game weapons you can get. Lae’zel was rewarded with exile and a death sentence. But at least Voss was friendly when he snuck into camp that night, so there’s that.

Having cleared both the Underdark and the mountains, it was finally time to head into act two. Up ’till now, the run has been messy but overall successful. Alas, Elya’s fortunes were about to take a dramatic plunge.

To Be Continued…

I had originally planned on this being one single article. Unfortunately, as I so often do: I got carried away. At the rate things were going, this article was going to become a fully fledged novella. Considering that I’m already – *checks calendar* – two months late (sorry about that), I decided to break this silly little project into a trilogy.

Don’t worry, you won’t need to wait long for parts two and three. My draft for act two is already complete; all it needs is some editing and it’ll be ready to go. Act three is nearly done too. You can expect each of those in the following weeks. When they’re all done, I’ll release the original uncut all-in-one version as an extra treat.

I hope you enjoyed the adventure so far. Stick around, because the best is yet to come. Until next time: stay safe. And try not to kill any tiefling bards.