But there's another wrinkle to this as well: While finding a way to 'cure' your characters by removing the tadpole is the most obvious solution to this problem, there's also something curious about the infection itself. No matter who you choose to play as, however, Baldur's Gate 3 opens on this central dilemma: You and your companion characters are infected by the Mind Flayers' tadpole, and supposedly you have only days before it transforms you into a Mind Flayer and you join in their work of infecting and controlling yet more people. That said, even if you roll your own character, Vincke explains later that there will be other ways in which the narrative is tailored to your choices about race, class, and background, in character creation, so it shouldn't feel like you're playing with a generic 'blank' character as opposed to the custom-created ones. Astarion has the affected sophistication of a true decadent, like one of Richard E. A disgraced nobleman who used his position as a local magistrate to serve a vampire clan by feeding them prisoners, he was eventually too corrupt even for them and was effectively sent to serve as the personal slave of a powerful vampire. In this case, we were shown Astarion, who seemed like a real asshole. The origin characters also comprise a good number of the game's companion characters, but when they are the main character there are special aspects of their arc that is under the player's direction. In keeping with the Divinity: Original Sin games, you have the option of creating your own character from scratch or choosing an 'origin story' character that comes with special narrative content around a detailed backstory. Which brings us to one of the game's first major decisions. After a chaotic pursuit featuring multiple warps to different parts of the world, the ship warps to safety and crash-lands. In pursuit of the warship, emerging from some kind of cosmic void that tears open the sky, is a trio of dragons who immediately begin tearing the Mind Flayer's ship to pieces. Then, in short order, we see the Mind Flayer leave his victims to await their transformation while he goes to the deck of his vast, living warship as it descends on the city of Baldur's Gate, the ship slaughtering dozens of citizens as its enormous tentacles reduce people to ash with a single touch.

The opening cinematic features a Mind Flayer systematically infecting imprisoned characters with a Mind Flayer 'tadpole' that (rather horrifyingly) burrows in through the eye of its victim and takes up residence in their bodies.

While two of the encounters we see demonstrated are against low-level bandits and an ill-fated group of goblin fighters, the campaign itself has its focus on greater, more existentially devastating threats that only rarely come out to play in a D&D campaign. But Baldur's Gate is also not wasting time doing a lot of table-setting.

Stronghold on the edge of chaos