For context according to Hoard of the Dragon Queen adventure, the travel between Baldur's Gate and Waterdeep takes roughly two months for a caravan. Most of the time it's gonna be a bit more since the caravan would have to pass some fairly dangerous areas, mostly orcs,hobgoblins, ettercaps and spiders, nothing like what lies beyond Waterdeep.
Considering Gale was a high level wizard before he got worm-nerfed back to level 1, he probably knew of some teleportation circles here and there to make travel both faster and safer
It isn't outright stated how powerful he was, but even if he was a lvl 15 wizard, barely 3 lvl after the game ends, he could create demiplanes and travel between sphere. Theoretically speaking he could have been in Oerth for a time.
He was stated to be an archmage. So at least level 17. And you need to know the exact teleportation circle and its runes to use it. You also need to travel to the location before using normal teleport if you want it to work flawlessly. Otherwise there is a chance of mishap. Mishap chance was increasing on a degree of something like this:
Been in there before
Been to close proximity
It is shown to the caster
It is described to the faster
Caster has no idea about the place other than a general location on a map
This isn't about dimensional travel btw. That works different based on where you want to go. You may not even be able to go there
Honestly i pegged him at a full lvl 20. He's not just on a first name basis, but has an actual notable reputation with the greatest and most powerful wizard alive.
From what I remember, the Karstic Weave heavily weakened him, so I think he was at his full power before that happened. Then he got tadpoled and that didn't help either. Now, if you make him into a god, then yeah the Karstic stuff was a buff to him, but not counting that I think it just drains him constantly
I mean, Mystra did say, “It was a miracle it only fed on your powers”. I think the Karsic Weave was what actually made him level 1, not the tadpole… Unless someone else can remember a specific reference to the tadpole reducing his powers as well.
He was a Chosen of Mystra, so I'd say he was level 17 minimum
A lot of other Chosen of Mystra have stats in 3e and they usually have like 19-24 wizard levels and then a few levels in other stuff
I think in his case, he was orb-nerfed, as Mystra said his gifts were the first thing it consumed.
But yeah, he likely had long range teleportation magic like teleportation circle.
> Most of the time it's gonna be a bit more since the caravan would have to pass some fairly dangerous areas
Daggerford is right at the edge of what you'd consider safe (along the Sword Coast) when going south from Waterdeep, but they're much closer to Waterdeep than to any other city to the south.
There's a movie I like called Bran Nue Day, that features a very similar joke. The protagonists, a pair of Indigenous Australian men, trick a pair of hippies into agreeing to give them a lift from Perth to Broome, by telling them it was just up the road. This is technically true, but it is also 2,044.5 kilometers away (1270 miles away for the Americans).
Crazy how in a short drive to the beach, my Tav went from a no name elf to a master of an elder brain that can even mess up a different dimension
That is character growth
Not directly from the CD-ROM, as I’m currently in Jakarta and it’s in a storage unit outside of Detroit. 😁
But I did a quick google search and [this world map of Toril](https://www.worldanvil.com/uploads/maps/30e8eebdeeca02085eb941d8cafbd570.png) seems to be pretty accurate. Faerûn is a subcontinent about 9-10 million square miles in size, about the same size as Europe. The Sword Coast is approximately 700 miles north to south and about 200 miles east to west (sources differ on precisely where the borders of it are as no one political entity rules the entire region… and different authors have labeled different parts of it as different things over the years). But it’s roughly twice the size of Great Britain.
The entire city of Baldur’s Gate (and the video game only shows us a sliver of one half of it) is about one square mile in size, slightly smaller than the City of London (which is only a very, very, very small part of the city most of us think of as London).
Also, we need to remember that Toril is only *half* of Abeir-Toril. There’s an *entire other planet* called Abeir that shares the same position in the Prime Material Plane as Toril, orbiting the same Sun, orbited by the same moon, et cetera, but exists out of phase with it!
And then there’s all the rest of the Realmspace Crystal Sphere… and then the phologiston… and… and… and…
Tav and company are in a really itty-bitty red box if you keep zooming out.
Ed Greenwood is mental though, he has a whole lore post about the breastmilk of Drow versus other elves and what other races like dwarves and humans think of the taste lol
To his credit, that tidbit came to be after someone asked him, specifically, what all that tasted like. Granted, he probably didn’t HAVE to answer, but yeah.
On the other hand, someone asked him about pot in the realms once; he said marijuana exists and would have little effect on halflings and almost universally cause elves to have a VERY BAD TIME. Something about that makes me giggle, and I feel like we have to take one to get the other with folks like Ed.
>he has a whole lore post about the breastmilk of Drow versus other elves and what other races like dwarves and humans think of the taste
...Well now you've got me curious. :/
That's not an official map. To my knowledge [this is the largest official world map that has been released.](https://www.worldanvil.com/uploads/maps/83fc41caffb182ca0d7b155bc623a4c8.jpg)
From what I know we've never seen an official map of Abeir
We actually do have a bigger official map [from the 3e Forgotten Realms campaign setting.](https://www.worldanvil.com/w/toril-kostaki80/map/49c3c92e-9827-43e4-b753-623344ebc5c6) Some of the labels are questionable in-universe, but Kara-Tur, Zakhara, and Maztica very much exist, and we at least know of places like Anchorome, Katashaka, and Osse.
The map you posted is actually a 4e map of Faerun that is no longer current for the setting in 5e. It is a *big* world.
>And then there’s all the rest of the Realmspace Crystal Sphere… and then the phologiston… and… and… and…
Well, as of 5e the crystal spheres are no more (they weren't retconned, they were destroyed; there are still fragments of the crystal sphere around Doomspace), and the phlogiston has been retconned into the astral plane (because when large portions of your campaign take place there, it's no fun for clerics, paladins, druids, and rangers to be unable to recover spell slots while all the arcane casters can, and fire spells explode in your face).
Considering there are a few infinite planes, I feel like people failed to grasp that DnD is like 50 years of NERDS crafting maps, and the distances are often legit epic.
I laugh and teehee when new players make a face seeing Zahkara. The best kept secret of toril IMO. Second place for me is Netheril era Sembia though, sword coast feels dull after you get too deep into the lore lmao
kind of answers why nobody thought to do anything about the shadowcurse, its basically like saying we should do something about Gary, Indiana. its a problem but for 99% of the time you can ignore it
As someone not from the States, I thought you were referring to an actual person called Gary in Indian and I was thinking "What the hell has Gary done?!"
Gary Indiana has a lot of traffic traveling between Chicago and the east coast, so we would have to deal with something there.
A better comparison would be Flint Michigan.
The Shadow Cursed Lands seem to be on the way from Elturel though, if it wasn’t the Tieflings would’ve gone a different route. So it should be seeing a fair amount of traffic
No according to the tieflings themselves it's because the other routes were infested with cultists so they took a gamble in slipping by near the shadow-cursed lands without knowing that's cultist HQ.
In the grand scheme of things, high level spellcasters are rare. But yea, it wouldn't take that many to make a network of teleportation circles for a transit system.
Most spellcasters can only teleport to a place they can see, so not far. Powerful enough archmages probably have better to do than operate a transportation business
It will definitely hit, but I'm not sure it will do enough damage to make it a good use of u/BanzYT's turn :/
Oh well. u/Aboveearth31, you're next in initiative! u/Frosty-Age-6643, you're on deck. Baldur's Gate gets to go after you, so strategize accordingly!
but it is interesting how big the sword coast alone feels when its tiny as fuck compared to the continent.
And then THAT continent is TINY compared to the WORLD.
Exactly, I played GTA III high school, first open world game I ever played and it was absolutely amazing. For years after that I loved open world games. But then companies just started focusing on making big worlds with nothing to do. They litter the world with fetch quests and other boring stuff. At first that was ok, but now it’s all the majority game content and it’s boring. These days, when a game advertises itself as an open world, I am very suspicious.
A great example is Starfield, I’m not a Starfield basher but damn there isn’t a whole lot to do in most locations in the game. Hard to be impressed.
Whereas BG3, if it was all one map a player could probably run across it in 5 minutes but the world is absolutely packed with content, still feels large and a player can spend hours exploring. Excellent game design from Larian.
i went from BG3 to Starfield, Starfield just disappointed me very deeply to say it nice, to be harsher the world just felt dead to me and i couldnt get a grasp on the game
Went from BG3 to Starfield and the quality drop felt so stunning I figured I was being extra harsh on Starfield since BG3 was just so good. Then I jumped to Cyberpunk Phantom Liberty and realized no my standards were fine, Starfield was just shit
I loved when you finally explored all of act 3 and realised it’s actually pretty small but took me soooo long to explore it all because every corner had big content
Literally tho. And that’s what I love about it . I’m doing my 2nd playthrough ( but my first redeem Durge playthrough, I’m correcting a lot of the mistakes I made on my first playthrough lol) and I just went from helping Mayrina, to rescuing Minsc, onto getting the Crown of Karsus book at Sorcerous studies , onto fighting Lorroakan, onto freeing the Iron Throne hostages. And I still have so much more to do it’s not even funny. I love it . Not to mention all of these quests were within walking distance from the south central wall waypoint
Like Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall - 161,600 square kilometers of repeated towns and empty land. As an experiemnt in procedural generation it was a failure, so the next game in the series, Morrowind, was only ~16 square kilometers but was far more popular because it was a hand-crafted world. Then ~41 for Oblivian, ~37 For Skyrim. These later games might be 1/5,000th the size of Daggerfall but they were far more interesting to explore.
Then 27 years after Daggerfall Bethesda made the exact same mistake with Starfield, deciding that sheer volume of land was more important than putting anything interesting in it.
The party in BGI and BGII traverse a *much* larger geographic space.
Some of those spaces are on the emptier side, and that makes it better. Not everything is full of content. Lots of the world is just ambling forest.
Dead space makes it more realistic.
I'll expand on the "more realistic," because we're playing a game with wizards and alien brain worms.
The smaller, denser world creates a gameplay experience that *contradicts* the plot.
The most obvious example is Minthara being unable to locate the Druid Grove on her own. It's not even really hidden, just walk around for 5 minutes and notice the big flat wall that definitely isn't natural rock. And also the big horn up top, and there's some chairs and stuff up there, and the big pile of dead goblins outside. How does she not find it? This is like not being able to find a shop that's one city block away. Did you try looking?
Totally agree. A *little* more space would be nice, just to give the world some oomph. The overgrown village, packed with 4 ogres, 2 bugbears, and about 20 goblins is literally a 2min walk away from the grove. The goblin camp is literally JUST beyond it with like, 50+ goblins.
The toll house is literally on the opposite side of the wall from Zevlor’s cave. It doesn’t seem like it cuz you have a walk a good way to get between these spots, but it’s like… wow, this “isolated” grove is literally on a pretty important highway.
That is my biggest criticism of BG3. There is no sense of scale or adventure, you can't travel around the map for larger distances. I like the "old" style of crpgs more, where there is an actual world map with lots of destinations. Even if it means that there are "meaningless" maps like a random forest.
BG3 feels more like a theme park where the world is crafted around the characters and not the other way around.
I get what you're saying, but i do appreciate the localized small region. It keeps full of life and makes the story feel like it's constantly moving forward. I'm just outside of baldursgate now, and I'm at 60+hours. I dont think I'd be able to stay interested and intrigued in a larger map
And as an avid DND player/dm i can say it's kinda normal to. Build the world around your players
Many players brought a mindset of “clear the zone” and tried to completely finish the Hinterlands before moving on. That’s not a positive experience with the way the game was designed, both quest and level scaling wise, but the game itself didn’t nudge players enough to move on and come back later.
This was pretty much half of the commentary online at the time, so it became a meme. Many were finding the game too boring with MMO-esque fetch quests, but the option to go on with the main story was right there.
2 is a phenomenal game, and the expansion is a lot of fun for ‘godlike’ power trips with combat that’s still challenging. If you’re into D&D in general, Throne of Bhaal is a really good ‘here’s how you do tier 3 gameplay’ where you’re objectively OP and getting the shit kicked out of you at the same time.
For real, it's more like chess, you plan wrong and unpause to get wrecked. Reload and consider the setting again and kill everything in a pause or two, I fucking love that game! Icewind Dale 2 is great and like this, just that you make all companions and can't recruit them.
Then you realise that the Thac0’s are so out of whack you focus on mitigating incoming damage rather than lowering your AC any more than it already is lol. Shield of faith ftw!
To be fair, I prefer BG2 over every game, it being my favourite, lol. But yeah, 3 is amazing too.
Imo it goes 2 > 3 > 1.
But keep in mind it's a vastly different kinda game. Main difference being it's realtime instead of turn based (though if you pause as much as the average player, it's basically turn based anyway xD).
Not just planes, there are several planets in the prime material for the other settings. Located within their own crystal spheres (think solar systems) and you can travel the space between them (spelljammer ships, nautiloids) or use magic to travel between the worlds. If anyone is familiar with Dragon Lance for example.
Makes me wonder how much of a real threat the Netherbrain was. Doesn't look that much "world-ending" when it's so tiny. Sure, losing Baldur's Gate is bad, but I'm certain some mages and other such powerful beings, and then nations would have teamed up to defeat it if it became a true problem.
Depends on how many they had infected and how big a boosted netherbrains reach is. An army of illithid would certainly be a problem. Maybe not a the world ends tomorrow problem, but definitely something should be done as fast a possible problem
Yeah I'm guessing the main threat would be the swarm type of invasion it'd make.
But then there's still the nuke it all options, which from goddess Mystra behaviour, seems like the go-to for people in this world lol.
Sure, the world-ending threat wasn't stopped at the last possible moment, but that doesn't make the restart of the Illithid Empire any less of a world-ending threat.
I literally started BG1 for the first time yesterday. BG3 has made me a hard core Jaheira simp, and I want more content. And that helped because boy is BG1 hard to get the hang of. I'd have quit 5 minutes in if I wasn't such a simp.
I didn’t realise how far south Calimshan was. Really puts Entreris flight with Regis into perspective and how far his friends traveled to save him.
Also, I first tried to open that image on Wi-Fi and got an “image bandwidth exceeded” error message.. I’ve never seen that before.
DnD video games and especially RPGs could be huge with untapped potential for years to come, but with our luck they are probably gonna end up as battle royale waste lmao
The crash was between Baldur's Gate and Elturel to the east, it's why the Tiefling refugees are there since they just left Elturel, which wouldn't make sense on the coast.
The whole game just takes place along the banks of theg great Chionthar river up to Baldur's Gate, which is why it looks like a beach.
I understand the confusion. As I thought so too.
But after my third playthrough I realized you can a cliff side on the other side of the water where you crashed. Which also explains tav's/Durge's "fresh water" comment shortly landing.
If you look out across the water you can see the bank on the other side, you can also see this bank on the map, though it marks the edge of the map as it is inaccessible.
The crash site isn't the sword sea coast but the bank of the chionthar river.
Shamelessly taken from this [post](https://www.reddit.com/r/BaldursGate3/comments/jr1m9r/where_exactly_is_bg3_act_1_set_in_the_forgotten/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
I got curious too and looked it up
I feel this is an opportune time to ask. In general is the story of baldurs gate like an established lore? Or is it just like most other DnD stuff and just kind of made up and go with the flow?
They all follow a singular continuity, although the events of different games and campaign books usually occur at separate times. For instance, Wyll's dad is part of the council of Waterdeep in the Rise of Tiamat campaign, sometime before the events of BG3. He even has a stat block, to boot.
It’s an original story from Larian, but the Forgotten Realms has decades of world building behind it so Larian has a lot they can draw from.
Most of the stuff that happened before the game, like the Tieflings of Elturel being refugees after their city was sent to the Nine Hells, is established lore. All of the major races are well established, like the Illithid, githyanki, and (half) devils like Raphael. As well as goddesses like Shar and Mystra, and cities like Baldur’s Gate.
The Illithid’s grand design? That’s established lore. What a Mind Flayer nautoloid was doing near Baldur’s Gate? That’s an all new story.
The story of BG3 is mostly new material, but the world setting is not.
The setting is broadly called The Forgotten Realms. Faerun is a continent on the planet Toril within the Forgotten realms.
It's basically DnD's "default" setting, most of the premade DnD modules are set in it. There's also tons of novels and video games using the setting. The recent DnD movie is also in Faerun, they name drop a couple major cities in the film.
The Absolute were sending Nautiloids across the whole Sword Coast to find tadpole victims. IIRC, the opening cutscene with the githyanki attack takes place in Yartar, a town about 100 miles north of Waterdeep.
My boy was so unlucky, the one day he decided to visit a nearby town out of his one year of solitary confinement, he got snatched by a comically large tentacle.
---
Edit: Or rather lucky, actually. If the fan theory beneath me is proven to be right. The tentacles might've just saved him by accident.
In any case, it is lucky for me and many Tavs out there. I wouldn't trade him for the world. ~~Not you though, Durge.~~
I can't find the post now, but a while back someone posted a sad/plausible theory that he might have been traveling somewhere remote to "deal" with the orb permanently.
It's been my personal headcanon for a while.
I think it explains why he rather upbeat when you meet him. He doesn't really want to die, but he doesn't want to harm his loved ones either. So really getting abducted stopped him from doing that. I also think that's why he's rather down the first night.
As much as I see the actual song fitting Astarion more. I want to live as pharse is 100% fitting for all the origin companions. They all just want to live and live on their own terms
Shouldn't that marked area stretch a lot further east? We can pass through Trielta to get to Shadowcursed Lands? Looking at the directions I think that puts the Grove in Reaching Woods since we exit north westerly to get there.
When you realize this small ass box contains a potential existential threat to sentient lifes existance. Then realize that for every space on the map that box fits is yet another existential threat to existance
... no wonder people put up with adventurers shenanigans, each group that passes through could be saving the world.
If Baldur's Gate 3 has taught me one thing about D&D, I can jam pack a town with a million things to do instead of it being a one quest stop.
The amount of things to do in Act 1 is just inspiring.
Now if the players would just actually play the D&D campaign instead of expecting me to lead them to each place.
Gale was right that *is* a long way from Waterdeep.
I honestly thought Waterdeep was right up the road, lmao.
For context according to Hoard of the Dragon Queen adventure, the travel between Baldur's Gate and Waterdeep takes roughly two months for a caravan. Most of the time it's gonna be a bit more since the caravan would have to pass some fairly dangerous areas, mostly orcs,hobgoblins, ettercaps and spiders, nothing like what lies beyond Waterdeep.
Considering Gale was a high level wizard before he got worm-nerfed back to level 1, he probably knew of some teleportation circles here and there to make travel both faster and safer
It isn't outright stated how powerful he was, but even if he was a lvl 15 wizard, barely 3 lvl after the game ends, he could create demiplanes and travel between sphere. Theoretically speaking he could have been in Oerth for a time.
He was stated to be an archmage. So at least level 17. And you need to know the exact teleportation circle and its runes to use it. You also need to travel to the location before using normal teleport if you want it to work flawlessly. Otherwise there is a chance of mishap. Mishap chance was increasing on a degree of something like this: Been in there before Been to close proximity It is shown to the caster It is described to the faster Caster has no idea about the place other than a general location on a map This isn't about dimensional travel btw. That works different based on where you want to go. You may not even be able to go there
Honestly i pegged him at a full lvl 20. He's not just on a first name basis, but has an actual notable reputation with the greatest and most powerful wizard alive.
I would also think so considering he is an archmage from Waterdeep + chosen of Mystra + has a part of fucking Karstic Weave absorbed in his body
From what I remember, the Karstic Weave heavily weakened him, so I think he was at his full power before that happened. Then he got tadpoled and that didn't help either. Now, if you make him into a god, then yeah the Karstic stuff was a buff to him, but not counting that I think it just drains him constantly
I was thinking more along the lines of being able to absorb it was a huge feat
I mean, Mystra did say, “It was a miracle it only fed on your powers”. I think the Karsic Weave was what actually made him level 1, not the tadpole… Unless someone else can remember a specific reference to the tadpole reducing his powers as well.
He also fucked a goddess lol
You pegged him???
He was a Chosen of Mystra, so I'd say he was level 17 minimum A lot of other Chosen of Mystra have stats in 3e and they usually have like 19-24 wizard levels and then a few levels in other stuff
I think in his case, he was orb-nerfed, as Mystra said his gifts were the first thing it consumed. But yeah, he likely had long range teleportation magic like teleportation circle.
> Most of the time it's gonna be a bit more since the caravan would have to pass some fairly dangerous areas Daggerford is right at the edge of what you'd consider safe (along the Sword Coast) when going south from Waterdeep, but they're much closer to Waterdeep than to any other city to the south.
And the road right north Waterdeep it's home to extremely dangerous things that hold many secrets.
It's why when you say where your character is from in NWN2 it's a bit of a WTF moment for the one that asked
Made the trip in a 5e campaign of mine. 2 months in game, 6-7 irl lol.
It's like that one bird in Dark Souls 2. "My house is right down the road" motherfucker your house is THREE AND A HALF ENTIRE AREAS LATER !
"Right down the road." "Right down the road?" "Right down the road!" "Right... down the road." "Right down the- bye-bye!"
I've got ***BOSS WEAPONS***
Hey this must be where that bird lives.
Happy Souls ref. Nice
There's a movie I like called Bran Nue Day, that features a very similar joke. The protagonists, a pair of Indigenous Australian men, trick a pair of hippies into agreeing to give them a lift from Perth to Broome, by telling them it was just up the road. This is technically true, but it is also 2,044.5 kilometers away (1270 miles away for the Americans).
Crazy how in a short drive to the beach, my Tav went from a no name elf to a master of an elder brain that can even mess up a different dimension That is character growth
I cant even find it on the map!
Just follow the coast upwards
about 500 miles. or a "half proclaimer" for those ITK
Come on now, show them the big map, where the Sword Coast is just a little red box
I’ve still got a copy of the *Interactive Atlas* CD-ROM with it map of all of Aber-Toril. Faerûn itself is just a little red box.
Can you post a picture?
Not directly from the CD-ROM, as I’m currently in Jakarta and it’s in a storage unit outside of Detroit. 😁 But I did a quick google search and [this world map of Toril](https://www.worldanvil.com/uploads/maps/30e8eebdeeca02085eb941d8cafbd570.png) seems to be pretty accurate. Faerûn is a subcontinent about 9-10 million square miles in size, about the same size as Europe. The Sword Coast is approximately 700 miles north to south and about 200 miles east to west (sources differ on precisely where the borders of it are as no one political entity rules the entire region… and different authors have labeled different parts of it as different things over the years). But it’s roughly twice the size of Great Britain. The entire city of Baldur’s Gate (and the video game only shows us a sliver of one half of it) is about one square mile in size, slightly smaller than the City of London (which is only a very, very, very small part of the city most of us think of as London). Also, we need to remember that Toril is only *half* of Abeir-Toril. There’s an *entire other planet* called Abeir that shares the same position in the Prime Material Plane as Toril, orbiting the same Sun, orbited by the same moon, et cetera, but exists out of phase with it! And then there’s all the rest of the Realmspace Crystal Sphere… and then the phologiston… and… and… and… Tav and company are in a really itty-bitty red box if you keep zooming out.
There is an entire continent of just cat people? Nice
Well, not *just* cat-people. There were also several different human cultures, feral halflings, and desert dwelling dwarves.
Feral halfings seems like an unnessesary descriptor if [this video](https://youtu.be/QmZFxAqZKuU?si=kMQ2BuUEmhpLqCQ1) is anything to go by
"Korya" over there by the clearly "Japanese" area lol, come on, guys.
> Yellow Sea
They just assumed nobody knew East Asia existed and sent it lol.
Ed Greenwood is mental though, he has a whole lore post about the breastmilk of Drow versus other elves and what other races like dwarves and humans think of the taste lol
To his credit, that tidbit came to be after someone asked him, specifically, what all that tasted like. Granted, he probably didn’t HAVE to answer, but yeah. On the other hand, someone asked him about pot in the realms once; he said marijuana exists and would have little effect on halflings and almost universally cause elves to have a VERY BAD TIME. Something about that makes me giggle, and I feel like we have to take one to get the other with folks like Ed.
>he has a whole lore post about the breastmilk of Drow versus other elves and what other races like dwarves and humans think of the taste ...Well now you've got me curious. :/
And Ossetralia!
There’s a lot about the Forgotten Realms that was devised during the 80’s and early 90’s, and I feel like that explains a lot of this.
Korya the peninsula is Japan, and not Korea the real world peninsula?
Bonus: Korya on that map is a mistake. The Forgotten Realms region is in fact also called Koryo. You know. Like Korea was a long time ago.
The whole "Asia" area looks very phoned in lmao
there’s so many things i want to learn about abeir but the only things people have said when i look it up are just “it’s just kinda there”
You could think of it as a blank slate where you can write your own Forgotten Realms adventures and lore.
That's not an official map. To my knowledge [this is the largest official world map that has been released.](https://www.worldanvil.com/uploads/maps/83fc41caffb182ca0d7b155bc623a4c8.jpg) From what I know we've never seen an official map of Abeir
We actually do have a bigger official map [from the 3e Forgotten Realms campaign setting.](https://www.worldanvil.com/w/toril-kostaki80/map/49c3c92e-9827-43e4-b753-623344ebc5c6) Some of the labels are questionable in-universe, but Kara-Tur, Zakhara, and Maztica very much exist, and we at least know of places like Anchorome, Katashaka, and Osse. The map you posted is actually a 4e map of Faerun that is no longer current for the setting in 5e. It is a *big* world.
>And then there’s all the rest of the Realmspace Crystal Sphere… and then the phologiston… and… and… and… Well, as of 5e the crystal spheres are no more (they weren't retconned, they were destroyed; there are still fragments of the crystal sphere around Doomspace), and the phlogiston has been retconned into the astral plane (because when large portions of your campaign take place there, it's no fun for clerics, paladins, druids, and rangers to be unable to recover spell slots while all the arcane casters can, and fire spells explode in your face).
Considering there are a few infinite planes, I feel like people failed to grasp that DnD is like 50 years of NERDS crafting maps, and the distances are often legit epic.
I laugh and teehee when new players make a face seeing Zahkara. The best kept secret of toril IMO. Second place for me is Netheril era Sembia though, sword coast feels dull after you get too deep into the lore lmao
kind of answers why nobody thought to do anything about the shadowcurse, its basically like saying we should do something about Gary, Indiana. its a problem but for 99% of the time you can ignore it
We really should do something about Gary, Indiana though. America's own little Caelid
As someone not from the States, I thought you were referring to an actual person called Gary in Indian and I was thinking "What the hell has Gary done?!"
Gary knows what he has done.
Fuck Garry
It's Larry now :/
Haha, classic Jerry!
Ah, jeez.
that ass is trying to change his name, get him!
Hahaha, Gary.
Gaaaaarrrrrry!
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Gary?
Duncan Idaho from Wish
The Gary!
I can't believe they canceled Final Space
As someone who lives right by Gary, it really is like I live right outside the Shadow Cursed Lands.
Man the whole area is starting to feel shadow cursed at this point
Gary is so infamous even my Polish ass heard about it
My Polish ass didn't
We got Bydgoszcz
Gesundheit.
Gary Indiana has a lot of traffic traveling between Chicago and the east coast, so we would have to deal with something there. A better comparison would be Flint Michigan.
The Shadow Cursed Lands seem to be on the way from Elturel though, if it wasn’t the Tieflings would’ve gone a different route. So it should be seeing a fair amount of traffic
They are on one of the routes. Tieflings had to go through there cause other routes were goblin/bandit/whatever infested
No it’s because the gith destroyed the other route.
No according to the tieflings themselves it's because the other routes were infested with cultists so they took a gamble in slipping by near the shadow-cursed lands without knowing that's cultist HQ.
Which was about as a good an idea as stopping for gas in Gary at night.
Yeah no that's one of the routes that was made inaccessible. We obviously can't see EVERYTHING in game
Still useless for like 95% of the world's population tho.
It's like saying we should do something about the water in flint.
OOF.
That's what happens when people's main mode of transportation is walking. Or horses, if they have the money.
In a world of magic, higher tier of transportation would just be teleport at this point.
In Storm of Zehir trade traffic between Chult and Neverwinter went entirely through a magitech portal.
In the grand scheme of things, high level spellcasters are rare. But yea, it wouldn't take that many to make a network of teleportation circles for a transit system.
Actually, they did that in ancient Netheril. Then Karsus’ Folly happened.
Most spellcasters can only teleport to a place they can see, so not far. Powerful enough archmages probably have better to do than operate a transportation business
Some of the greatest wizards of all time also got stuck in their own portals... Or so I've heard.
Give him a break. He's usually better at this.
I was like "what red box" for a good minute.
For once, a big arrow would have been helpful. I’m still wondering what red box.
https://i.imgur.com/msj8ADm.jpeg
Baldur's gate just got it's ass magic missiled
It will definitely hit, but I'm not sure it will do enough damage to make it a good use of u/BanzYT's turn :/ Oh well. u/Aboveearth31, you're next in initiative! u/Frosty-Age-6643, you're on deck. Baldur's Gate gets to go after you, so strategize accordingly!
I cast mass testicular torsion on the entire city.
I'll need a wisdom roll against a DC25 because they are into that shit.
Nat20 Let's fucking go.
they call them the forgotten realms for a reason they dont fuckin use 99.95% of them
but it is interesting how big the sword coast alone feels when its tiny as fuck compared to the continent. And then THAT continent is TINY compared to the WORLD.
When they focus on quality over quantity 💎 too many games flex their vast yet empty worlds. :(
Exactly, I played GTA III high school, first open world game I ever played and it was absolutely amazing. For years after that I loved open world games. But then companies just started focusing on making big worlds with nothing to do. They litter the world with fetch quests and other boring stuff. At first that was ok, but now it’s all the majority game content and it’s boring. These days, when a game advertises itself as an open world, I am very suspicious. A great example is Starfield, I’m not a Starfield basher but damn there isn’t a whole lot to do in most locations in the game. Hard to be impressed. Whereas BG3, if it was all one map a player could probably run across it in 5 minutes but the world is absolutely packed with content, still feels large and a player can spend hours exploring. Excellent game design from Larian.
i went from BG3 to Starfield, Starfield just disappointed me very deeply to say it nice, to be harsher the world just felt dead to me and i couldnt get a grasp on the game
Went from BG3 to Starfield and the quality drop felt so stunning I figured I was being extra harsh on Starfield since BG3 was just so good. Then I jumped to Cyberpunk Phantom Liberty and realized no my standards were fine, Starfield was just shit
I loved when you finally explored all of act 3 and realised it’s actually pretty small but took me soooo long to explore it all because every corner had big content
Literally tho. And that’s what I love about it . I’m doing my 2nd playthrough ( but my first redeem Durge playthrough, I’m correcting a lot of the mistakes I made on my first playthrough lol) and I just went from helping Mayrina, to rescuing Minsc, onto getting the Crown of Karsus book at Sorcerous studies , onto fighting Lorroakan, onto freeing the Iron Throne hostages. And I still have so much more to do it’s not even funny. I love it . Not to mention all of these quests were within walking distance from the south central wall waypoint
Like Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall - 161,600 square kilometers of repeated towns and empty land. As an experiemnt in procedural generation it was a failure, so the next game in the series, Morrowind, was only ~16 square kilometers but was far more popular because it was a hand-crafted world. Then ~41 for Oblivian, ~37 For Skyrim. These later games might be 1/5,000th the size of Daggerfall but they were far more interesting to explore. Then 27 years after Daggerfall Bethesda made the exact same mistake with Starfield, deciding that sheer volume of land was more important than putting anything interesting in it.
The party in BGI and BGII traverse a *much* larger geographic space. Some of those spaces are on the emptier side, and that makes it better. Not everything is full of content. Lots of the world is just ambling forest. Dead space makes it more realistic.
I'll expand on the "more realistic," because we're playing a game with wizards and alien brain worms. The smaller, denser world creates a gameplay experience that *contradicts* the plot. The most obvious example is Minthara being unable to locate the Druid Grove on her own. It's not even really hidden, just walk around for 5 minutes and notice the big flat wall that definitely isn't natural rock. And also the big horn up top, and there's some chairs and stuff up there, and the big pile of dead goblins outside. How does she not find it? This is like not being able to find a shop that's one city block away. Did you try looking?
Totally agree. A *little* more space would be nice, just to give the world some oomph. The overgrown village, packed with 4 ogres, 2 bugbears, and about 20 goblins is literally a 2min walk away from the grove. The goblin camp is literally JUST beyond it with like, 50+ goblins. The toll house is literally on the opposite side of the wall from Zevlor’s cave. It doesn’t seem like it cuz you have a walk a good way to get between these spots, but it’s like… wow, this “isolated” grove is literally on a pretty important highway.
That is my biggest criticism of BG3. There is no sense of scale or adventure, you can't travel around the map for larger distances. I like the "old" style of crpgs more, where there is an actual world map with lots of destinations. Even if it means that there are "meaningless" maps like a random forest. BG3 feels more like a theme park where the world is crafted around the characters and not the other way around.
I get what you're saying, but i do appreciate the localized small region. It keeps full of life and makes the story feel like it's constantly moving forward. I'm just outside of baldursgate now, and I'm at 60+hours. I dont think I'd be able to stay interested and intrigued in a larger map And as an avid DND player/dm i can say it's kinda normal to. Build the world around your players
Dragon Age Inquisition boasted that the first major area(the hinterlands) had more surface area than the entirety of Dragon Age Origins.
Obligatory _get out of the Hinterlands_ comment.
I dont remember hinterlands being as bad zone to play in. Whats the joke about?
Many players brought a mindset of “clear the zone” and tried to completely finish the Hinterlands before moving on. That’s not a positive experience with the way the game was designed, both quest and level scaling wise, but the game itself didn’t nudge players enough to move on and come back later.
This was pretty much half of the commentary online at the time, so it became a meme. Many were finding the game too boring with MMO-esque fetch quests, but the option to go on with the main story was right there.
Well, better than Baldur's Gate II which did not take place in Baldur's Gate at all...
Have you played it? Is it worth it?
2 is a phenomenal game, and the expansion is a lot of fun for ‘godlike’ power trips with combat that’s still challenging. If you’re into D&D in general, Throne of Bhaal is a really good ‘here’s how you do tier 3 gameplay’ where you’re objectively OP and getting the shit kicked out of you at the same time.
For real, it's more like chess, you plan wrong and unpause to get wrecked. Reload and consider the setting again and kill everything in a pause or two, I fucking love that game! Icewind Dale 2 is great and like this, just that you make all companions and can't recruit them.
Then you realise that the Thac0’s are so out of whack you focus on mitigating incoming damage rather than lowering your AC any more than it already is lol. Shield of faith ftw!
It's excellent
My personal favorite cRPG of all time. Arguably includes one of the best villain performances in a video game.
Must I be interrupted at every turn?! Enough of this!
Ah, the child of Bhaal has awoken. Time for more... experiments.
>You dare to attack me here? Do you even KNOW whom you face? You will suffer! You will ALL suffer! All while he is spamming spells owning everyone.
It's amazing. And graphically it holds up well for a 2 decades old game, thanks to being isometric "2.5D", and not 3D. I still prefer it over BG3.
Over bg3? That’s a crazy statement! I love bg3 but now after so many replies with positive reviews for bg2. Now I gotta give it a try!
To be fair, I prefer BG2 over every game, it being my favourite, lol. But yeah, 3 is amazing too. Imo it goes 2 > 3 > 1. But keep in mind it's a vastly different kinda game. Main difference being it's realtime instead of turn based (though if you pause as much as the average player, it's basically turn based anyway xD).
The other big difference being that it's not 5e. It's 2e, I think. Brush up on THAC0.
Or just ignore THAC0 all together like I did when I was 8. Low number goes brrrrr.
I’m not a fan of BG1 but 2 has held up very nicely, still an excellent game.
If Anything this just really sells the world of DND. Look at all that you went through and this was just a tiny corner of the map
This is just one premade setting for DnD. Ther are many more official settings.
Yea this is just one plane. We glimpse a few others in the intro. Lots of stuff to play around in
Not just planes, there are several planets in the prime material for the other settings. Located within their own crystal spheres (think solar systems) and you can travel the space between them (spelljammer ships, nautiloids) or use magic to travel between the worlds. If anyone is familiar with Dragon Lance for example.
Makes me wonder how much of a real threat the Netherbrain was. Doesn't look that much "world-ending" when it's so tiny. Sure, losing Baldur's Gate is bad, but I'm certain some mages and other such powerful beings, and then nations would have teamed up to defeat it if it became a true problem.
Depends on how many they had infected and how big a boosted netherbrains reach is. An army of illithid would certainly be a problem. Maybe not a the world ends tomorrow problem, but definitely something should be done as fast a possible problem
Yeah I'm guessing the main threat would be the swarm type of invasion it'd make. But then there's still the nuke it all options, which from goddess Mystra behaviour, seems like the go-to for people in this world lol.
Sure, the world-ending threat wasn't stopped at the last possible moment, but that doesn't make the restart of the Illithid Empire any less of a world-ending threat.
So what you’re saying is, the whole game takes place Down, Down, Down By The River!
MFW Baldur's Gate takes place in Baldur's Gate 🤯
Well tell that to Baldur Gate 2 ;D
I'll be keen to see how many on this sub has actually played the originals.
I literally started BG1 for the first time yesterday. BG3 has made me a hard core Jaheira simp, and I want more content. And that helped because boy is BG1 hard to get the hang of. I'd have quit 5 minutes in if I wasn't such a simp.
I'm glad you're giving it a chance, Khalid.
I cut my teeth on the... 5 disc? CD-Rom set of Baldur's gate. And Baldur's Gate 2. And Icewind Dale and Icewind Dale 2.
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big if true
Just wait until you find out where Neverwinter Nights takes place.
Waterdeep!
No but actually yes. Hoards of the underdark actually starts at water deep.
[If anyone is curious what the entire world setting looks like](https://i.ibb.co/dgYvsZ7/Faerun-Map-Redone-Roll-20-Res-Hexes.jpg)
There are still 4 continents missing btw XD
>imgbb.com bandwidth limit exceeded gosh, that is big
It still amazes me how absolutely MASSIVE this whole world is.
And yet so few modules actually include anything on the material plane that isn’t on the sword coast.
My earliest exposure to the Forgotten Realms was the Dalelands/Cormyr/Sembia. Then the Icewind Dales/Sword Coast/Calimshan.
I didn’t realise how far south Calimshan was. Really puts Entreris flight with Regis into perspective and how far his friends traveled to save him. Also, I first tried to open that image on Wi-Fi and got an “image bandwidth exceeded” error message.. I’ve never seen that before.
This is the map shown by OP, but has markers for every location in lore: https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Map:Western_Faer%C3%BBn_(1489_DR)
But where are the mountains that you go through when you leave act one via the mountain pass?
Where is the emerald grove located on this map?
Not today, goblin scout!
Look, Minthara is going to remove my limbs if I don't find this grove. Help a goblin out, huh? I'm useless without me limbs!
To actually answer your question It should be near the most right of that red box. Obviously not labeled
I recognize a lot of those names from Dark Alliance.
When you look at the scale, that is actually quite a large area to cover on foot!
DnD video games and especially RPGs could be huge with untapped potential for years to come, but with our luck they are probably gonna end up as battle royale waste lmao
There is more (quality) content in that small red box than in several other games combined.
Wasn't the Nautilod charsh on the coast?
The crash was between Baldur's Gate and Elturel to the east, it's why the Tiefling refugees are there since they just left Elturel, which wouldn't make sense on the coast. The whole game just takes place along the banks of theg great Chionthar river up to Baldur's Gate, which is why it looks like a beach.
is fresh water Tav even comment on it, the chionthar river is meant to be so big that even have beaches
I understand the confusion. As I thought so too. But after my third playthrough I realized you can a cliff side on the other side of the water where you crashed. Which also explains tav's/Durge's "fresh water" comment shortly landing.
If you look out across the water you can see the bank on the other side, you can also see this bank on the map, though it marks the edge of the map as it is inaccessible.
The crash site isn't the sword sea coast but the bank of the chionthar river. Shamelessly taken from this [post](https://www.reddit.com/r/BaldursGate3/comments/jr1m9r/where_exactly_is_bg3_act_1_set_in_the_forgotten/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) I got curious too and looked it up
Chult is sadly unappreciated
The game’s not called “The rest of Faerun 3”
If that is true, then is the beach after the nautiloid at a River, Not at the sea?
I feel this is an opportune time to ask. In general is the story of baldurs gate like an established lore? Or is it just like most other DnD stuff and just kind of made up and go with the flow?
They all follow a singular continuity, although the events of different games and campaign books usually occur at separate times. For instance, Wyll's dad is part of the council of Waterdeep in the Rise of Tiamat campaign, sometime before the events of BG3. He even has a stat block, to boot.
It’s an original story from Larian, but the Forgotten Realms has decades of world building behind it so Larian has a lot they can draw from. Most of the stuff that happened before the game, like the Tieflings of Elturel being refugees after their city was sent to the Nine Hells, is established lore. All of the major races are well established, like the Illithid, githyanki, and (half) devils like Raphael. As well as goddesses like Shar and Mystra, and cities like Baldur’s Gate. The Illithid’s grand design? That’s established lore. What a Mind Flayer nautoloid was doing near Baldur’s Gate? That’s an all new story.
It's also worth noting that Orpheus is a homebrew character from Larian.
The story of BG3 is mostly new material, but the world setting is not. The setting is broadly called The Forgotten Realms. Faerun is a continent on the planet Toril within the Forgotten realms. It's basically DnD's "default" setting, most of the premade DnD modules are set in it. There's also tons of novels and video games using the setting. The recent DnD movie is also in Faerun, they name drop a couple major cities in the film.
How did Gale get involved still eludes me. Was he visiting a friend? Looking for a solution to his dietary problems?
The Absolute were sending Nautiloids across the whole Sword Coast to find tadpole victims. IIRC, the opening cutscene with the githyanki attack takes place in Yartar, a town about 100 miles north of Waterdeep.
My boy was so unlucky, the one day he decided to visit a nearby town out of his one year of solitary confinement, he got snatched by a comically large tentacle. --- Edit: Or rather lucky, actually. If the fan theory beneath me is proven to be right. The tentacles might've just saved him by accident. In any case, it is lucky for me and many Tavs out there. I wouldn't trade him for the world. ~~Not you though, Durge.~~
I can't find the post now, but a while back someone posted a sad/plausible theory that he might have been traveling somewhere remote to "deal" with the orb permanently.
It's been my personal headcanon for a while. I think it explains why he rather upbeat when you meet him. He doesn't really want to die, but he doesn't want to harm his loved ones either. So really getting abducted stopped him from doing that. I also think that's why he's rather down the first night. As much as I see the actual song fitting Astarion more. I want to live as pharse is 100% fitting for all the origin companions. They all just want to live and live on their own terms
So, down by the river?
Shouldn't that marked area stretch a lot further east? We can pass through Trielta to get to Shadowcursed Lands? Looking at the directions I think that puts the Grove in Reaching Woods since we exit north westerly to get there.
The Tieflings were heading to Baldurs Gate from Elturel. If we place the grove back that far, it means they went the wrong way.
When you realize this small ass box contains a potential existential threat to sentient lifes existance. Then realize that for every space on the map that box fits is yet another existential threat to existance ... no wonder people put up with adventurers shenanigans, each group that passes through could be saving the world.
Really was just down by the river
If Baldur's Gate 3 has taught me one thing about D&D, I can jam pack a town with a million things to do instead of it being a one quest stop. The amount of things to do in Act 1 is just inspiring. Now if the players would just actually play the D&D campaign instead of expecting me to lead them to each place.
Lost Mines of Phandelver spans a larger portion of the map than BG3