(PRE RELEASE) A Grand Baldur's Gate 3 Theory: The Dark Future of the Mind Flayers (Datamined)

there will be some data mine spoilers later in the video the dead three are a trio of quasi-divine beings that at one point used to be powerful deities before dying during the time of troubles their return to godhood came about differently for each one but bane bal and merkel ultimately came back however during the second sundering when the gods were ordered to withdraw their influence by the great ao the three decided to stay behind in order to continue exerting their influence over mortals it was this that brought them down to quasi deities able to walk among the people as if they were one and the same in most of my theories i've for the most part stuck with the idea that the dead three will be the main villains in bowler's gate 3 and there is good reason for that given that larry and have said it in their own press release and sven has said that the illithids will not be the main villains in an interview with metro in fact mike merles who works for wizards of the coast and who used to work very closely with larrion in 2019 when baldur's gate 3 was first announced has said the following in that same interview we see boulder's gate as a city with a story the history so you have bowlers gate 1 bowler's gate 2 and there was a tabletop product called murdering boulder's gate we see that all as part of one story and so descent into avernus is the next chapter and then the chapter after that will be boulder's gate 3. baldur's gate 1 2 and murder and borders gate all have a strong focus on baal and his return which he achieves in murdering boulder's gate descent into a vernis focuses on eltarel being dragged into the first layer of hell avernus however the front cover of the adventure has the symbol of baal on it and there are many references to dead three cultists in the adventure particularly at the start now if the magic the gathering cards are anything to go off then it looks like the under city beneath bowler's gate will be where we finally confront the dead three with this card here having the final point being the throne of the dead three so the dead three now find themselves in that sort of position where they are in the mortal world and they're enacting their master plan yes adam lee one of the lead designers on descent into avernus does literally tell us on that video that the events in bowler's gate 3 are part of the dead 3's master plan but let's get into the details of what this might mean first of all we need to go to the cinematic trailer specifically right at the start of it at this moment here in an interview with venturebeat adam smith one of the senior writers working on baldur's gate 3 had the following to say one thing that you obviously know knowing d d very well when you get to see the intro video again you probably even noticed this but the very first shot do you remember what it is it's a mural inside the nautiloid you'll see that it has a lot of background on what this particular nautiloid is but also the history of the illiterate empire is told by the murals in the nautiloid you can find out a lot about it just through the visuals there it's very deliberate that it's the first shot you see in the entire game a history of the illithids then when you finish character creation and the red dragons attack you see it shattered that's very important maybe adam smith is secretly a gcse english literature teacher and it's at this point that the shell starts to take on symbolic meaning in fact this sentiment of the illiterates being almost something to feel sorry for is shared by sven vinke himself in his interview with metro well actually its geeky name is an illithid but you don't have to know anything about it to appreciate what it is right it's got tentacles it's got psionic powers and it also has a tragic story it used to have an empire that spanned the astral plane and it lost everything and now it's hiding in the underdark and being hunted by this race called the githyanki who actually make it their life's initiation right to go kill one of these mind players take the head and bring it to their queen from these two statements i get the feeling that the mind players in baldur's gate 3 are something to take advantage of it's a race looking to fight back and take revenge perhaps even to rebuild its lost empire something which according to volo's guide to monsters is part of the grand design embedded in all elder brains but as always it might not be quite as simple as that and this might be a vulnerability that the dead three can use against the mind players in that same interview with metro mike merles and sven winker have the following to say yeah understanding the motivations makes a big difference they might be alien monstrosities but you can understand them as characters why do they inflict these awful things on humans well to them humans are just these barely sentient apes they don't think of them as anything else and then to realize that they're slaves themselves and that's the sort of thing that's buried in the law that they're actually a puppet of something else now here they are likely referring to the illiterates being slaves to an elder brain they're effectively a hive mind whilst under its yoke and we have already seen a melon speak about how he effectively set himself free from his elder brain but when mike described the earthids as puppets it got me thinking in a puppet show the audience can see the puppets dancing around on a little stage they know the puppets are being controlled by someone who cannot be seen they know that there is a puppet master albeit they might have never seen him if the puppet master was one day replaced would anyone know perhaps the movements of the puppets change ever so slightly the voices they once had seemed slightly off compared to before a few astute audience members might realize that something is different but ultimately the puppet strings are still being pulled and the show goes on it might be that we are in the dead threes facade their spectacular show they have gone behind the curtain and replaced or convinced the puppet master to move his puppets to their tune and whilst on the surface everything seems roughly in order things have changed and the show is quite different to what it was before thralls on board the north lloyd now wear the symbol of the dead three the tadpoles are tainted with netherese shadow magic and the cult of the absolute which has some tadpoled leaders unaware of their affliction seems to be made up of cells of three leaders we have mintara drawraxlin and priestess gut and then beyond them the three chosen there is symbolism everywhere hints at an influence coming from somewhere else and to top it all off they're not even aware they even have this tadpole in their head in the first place there's no thrallish loyalty to mind flares specifically when omelum asks whether his species is evolving blerg then questions the rate at which it is happening [Music] i have never seen anything [Music] as my species evolving [Music] perhaps but at such an accelerated rate which is a good point evolution doesn't happen that fast now what i'm curious about is the awareness the mind players themselves have of the dead three's influence there is no guarantee that old law is relevant in fifth edition but in the lords of madness from 2005 it is written that mind players often don't entirely understand why the elder brain instructs them to do certain things again bringing us back to the idea of there being a hidden puppet master the dead mind flayer in the goblin camp describes the absolute as a circle of mind players and also talks of a void in the sky with naught lloyds pouring through it but does not reference bane baal or merkel wherever this circle of mind players are it could be that they truly believe that they are just doing classic mind flayer work following an elder brain and furthering their grand design the only sort of illiterate awareness we might be seeing of this is in the dreams that we have where it seems like two beings are fighting for control of our mind the true tadpole versus the shadow magic corrupting it and keeping it in stasis beast it wants her gone there are three data mined lines that i would like to share with you and these kind of prove the fact that the dead three are behind basically everything we were told through a vision that the only way to remove our parasite was to find and destroy the dark magic the clerics of the dead three are using to enchant the tadpoles know that there are many who serve the absolute even in death waiting for the day when the grand design will come into play oh i've heard it all it's tieflings their fiend spawn after all it's haberdashes they're putting evil personality altering enchantments on fedoras it's a dark alliance of dead gods perverting the illithids grand design to their own unholy ends you read it in a tabloid somewhere and just like the way it sounded i suppose the burning question in all of this is why why are the dead three doing all this why are they using the mind flares bane the de facto head of the dead three is usually a man with a plan wait what's happening [Music] oh yeah this is bane now anyway so he's a man with a plan and so there has to be reasoning behind this apparent madness well to find the possible answer to that we have to go back to 1989 and take a look at an adventure called tantras which was set during the time of troubles an era when gods were banished to torrel in mortal forms after bane and merkel attempted to steal the tablets of fate from the over god eo in this adventure bane wishes to absorb the souls of all the assassins of faerun he would do this through the priests of merkel casting a mass death spell whereby his own followers would then start a ceremony called the stealing of the souls once these souls had been stolen they would then be transformed into something called the black brother and bane is quoted as saying the following the brother is made of black glass crafted by devils under my command it bears a special and very old spell the greatest of my working the most perilous a god can ever undertake it can swallow souls they will give it life and energy and power the souls must all be loyal to me or at least my thinking for they must align under my command you must get those souls for me now and bane says the souls must all be loyal to me or at least my thinking well that got me thinking true souls they are loyal to the absolute which is likely the dead three if they all got mascera morphed here and become mind flayers then will their souls loyal to a deity that potentially doesn't exist be trapped somehow by the shadow magic will the dead three be able to use these souls to further their own godly ambitions leaving the world in a state of carnage and in the slimy grasp of the mind flares it is known it was sort of established in a second edition product called the illithiad that mind flares when they consume humanoid brains they get sensations from that it's part of the joy of eating the brain for them is they experience fragmentary memories of the creature that they're eating and in some cases those memories can stick with the mind flare for a long time i think this bit of law could be used and extrapolated by larian the tadpoles may very well be functioning as a sort of siphon leading straight to the dead three bringing along the soul and whatever else they need to facilitate their plan tantrus offers inspiration on how and also why bane needs souls to augment himself what if that's all the true souls are people that are loyal and to the dead three's thinking i think we can put aside the idea of a huge construct like the black brother but the aspect of the adventure that talks about the soul is something that i could see as having inspired the writers of boulder's gate 3. now i had some other stuff in my notes about time travelling netherese obelisks but as i sit here writing the script for this at 2am i thought [ __ ] that and i've decided to wrap the video up here if you've made it this far thank you very much for watching and i'll see you next time bye [Music] you

Channel: Harbs Narbs

Views: 11,635

Keywords: baldur's gate 3, dnd, forgotten realms, dungeons and dragons, bg3, larian, larian studios, mind flayers, illithids, bhaal, myrkul, bane, harbs narbs, harbsnarbs, nautiloids

Id: nVcqWVEOxXQ

Length: 13min 59sec (839 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 05 2022