pave my way with corpses build my castle with bone

You ever watch your business partner test out his orphan bombs and realize you're in love?

Like 85% of tumblr users hate and loathe embarrassment based comedy with every fiber of their beings, but never in my life have I ever seen an author reassure their audience that the embarrassing scenes are skippable.

Lots of people dislike tragedy but never in my life have I ever seen an author reassure the audience that the death and grieving scenes are skippable.

Stop trying to pass off self-censorship as “accommodation.” Stop trying to pass off pandering as “inclusivity.”

Now, shall we go or do you have any other chaos you need to unleash here? | Baldur's Gate 3 (2023)

Bonus Astarion disapproves:

Bhaal is the god of assassins, bounty hunters, and mercenaries more than he is the god of unhinged compulsive serial killers. Or, he was pre-5e at least. Animalistic, hedonistic killing was a different guy, Malar (that's the guy whose name BG3!Jaheira uses as a curse word). Bhaal and his worshippers do also have a hateful, temperamental, sadistic side. But in the main, Bhaal's thing is (1) killing as a sport and art form, (2) killing for profit.

A normal person who's not a priest prays to Bhaal or takes him as their patron if those things are relevant to their daily life. If you're an assassin or bounty hunter, Bhaal has influence over how well the thing you do to earn your daily bread goes, so it's just sensible to maintain a positive relationship with him. And in these cases, obviously they're acquiring wealth from murder.

If you're a priest of Bhaal—a clergymember of the church of Bhaal, a deathbringer—your primary job is to serve him, but that encompasses a number of activities: the act of murder itself; suppressing priests & worshippers of the gods he doesn't like; and maintaining and expanding his worship. Anything that enables any of these three also counts, of course.

Bhaalist priests aren't necessarily, or even usually, attached to a temple. A deathbringer could be hanging out on their own somewhere, or the local representation of the church of Bhaal might just consist of a number of individual deathbringers that meet in each other's houses on the sly.

Deathbringers have secret identities!

Bhaal encourages his priests to pursue wealth and power for themselves as well as the church. Having a fancy house and fancy clothes and fancy food is for the priest, but wealth and power can be used to further any of the three activities I mentioned earlier, particularly the latter two. (But unlike e.g. Baneites, seeking out power isn't a duty in itself. A deathbringer can be hanging out in the slums if they like and be doing entirely right by Bhaal, so long as they kill people, proselytise, and fuck with stuff Chauntea or Lathander care about.)

It's noted to be a Thing that deathbringers go into law enforcement or politics; they also frequently work as killers-for-hire or trainers thereof. Sometimes the Bhaalist temple itself is functionally an assassin's guild, sometimes the priest is a freelancer or they're part of a secular organisation.

Deathbringers are obligated to kill solely as a sacred ceremony in Bhaal's honour at least once per tenday. In these cases, the priest will grab all the wealth of the victim that they can get their hands on, whether monetary or otherwise. Half of any coin acquired this way is tithed to the temple/senior deathbringer, but they get to keep the other half as well as anything that isn't gems or straight currency (like magical items, land, buildings, etc.). Targets are chosen based on what will benefit or at least not cause trouble for the church of Bhaal.

If a deathbringer kills for any other reason than pure worship and service, it doesn't count as a holy slaying. So the "robbing people blind" part is presumably moderated by the constraints of their employer (e.g. "make it look like my political rival killed themself" doesn't mix well with their house being ransacked). Regardless, it's still the case that ½ of all currency and gemstones gained from killing, whether it's loot or payment for services rendered, must be tithed to the temple/senior deathbringer.

So yes! Both as head of the Baldur's Gate temple and personally, Durge would be absolutely loaded.

Sources

Faiths & Avatars, a 2e sourcebook

Ed Greenwood Presents Elminster's Forgotten Realms, a 4e sourcebook

My redemption Durge has very little sense of self, a very tenuous grasp on his own personhood. He remembers very little and every bit he learns makes him not particularly keen to be that self again. I’m not saying it’s healthy, but he kind of latches on to Astarion as a point of identity. Not quite like those Insta wife accounts where a woman makes her partner her whole personality, except… well… Astarion is what his world revolves around. Having Shadowheart and Gale helps at first, but most of the rest of the other crew aren’t around much, and eventually, all of them — even Halsin, Minthara, etc — will die. But he will always have Astarion, the equally immortal vampire spawn.

But if Jergal is the one keeping Durge alive, he’s going to have to go do Jergal things from time to time. And hopefully doing that would help him find some sense of purpose beyond Astarion… but I don’t think he ever will fully. And eventually Jergal is going to find he’ll have better luck appealing to the vampire boyfriend than his actual chosen, because my Durge is such a love struck mushbrain that if Astarion wants something other than what Jergal wants, his dumb ass will choose Astarion 10 out of 10 times, even if it literally kills him.

The first batch of bhaalspawn were demigods (in the usual/5e sense): fathered on mortal mothers by Bhaal. Gods don't give DNA to their offspring—which is the reason it's Canonically Not Incest for a bhaalspawn to get it on with another—but they pass on "divine essence" magical soul stuff.

The bhaalspawn lore is kinda fucked up and confused by the fact that it was invented for the video games and then ported to tabletop. But in terms of pure lore, we know that the "canon" protag of BG1 & 2 was a human and lived to age 135 (and maybe longer, but violence happened). At that point he looked middle-aged but, y’know, he should’ve been dead.

There are rules for playing a bhaalspawn in 3.5e.[1] But in order to reconcile this with the events of the video games, where it's important that the protag of BG1 & 2 is the only one left, they invent the idea of "minor" bhaalspawn and that this is what you're playing.

Anyway, agelessness is a power you can pick up, but it's not default. These rules also state that all bhaalspawn have the creature type outsider. That means that they can't die on the Material Plane—like the devils we see in BG3, they would just respawn on their native plane (presumably Bhaal's divine realm, the Throne of Blood). First batch bhaalspawn were kinda instantly devoured by Bhaal to fuel his resurrection, though, because that was the whole point of their existence.

That's about it for lore specific to bhaalspawn. But we can extrapolate!

D&D, because it's a game, has this thing called divine rank. It's like character level but for gods and determines what abilities they have. In 3e, the lowest of these (rank 0) is called quasi-deity. "Creatures that have a mortal and a deity as parents" are given as an example.[2]

Rank 0 deities get a bunch of powers, and have creature type outsiders, but relevant to us is that, "All deities (even those of rank O) are naturally immortal-and cannot die from natural causes. Deities do not age, and they do not need to eat, sleep, or breathe. The only way for a deity to die is through special circumstances, usually by being slain in magical or physical combat."[3]

With all that said—Durge isn't a first batch bhaalspawn: they do not have a mortal parent.

BG3 is confusing and contradictory on the details of What Is Durge, but it's exceedingly firm on the point that Durge sprung only from Bhaal. "Each part of the body Bhaal sculpted is precious"; "I come from a place beyond mortality; I do not have a birthday"; Sceleritas says, "Bhaal gave out all his seed in the time of Sarevok. You are something far more special." (Paraphrasing these from memory, probably not 100% accurate.)

My interpretation is that, to some degree, Durge is some sort of construct wrought of Bhaal’s divine essence and/or actual literal flesh. And I can match that to a kind of creature in 5e: a titan.

5e's quasi-deity divine rank (entirely different from the 3e term) has three subtypes. In order of least to most powerful: demigods, offspring of deity + mortal; titans; and vestiges, extremely de-powered gods with too few worshippers.

"[Titans] might be birthed from the union of two deities, manufactured on a divine forge, born from blood spilled by a god, or otherwise brought about through divine will or substance."[4]

Here are some examples of creatures categorised as titans: astral dreadnoughts, atropals, empyreans[5], krakens, and the tarrasque. All of these are varying degrees of immortal. None of them age, some of them can be killed by violence, and none of them need sleep, food, or water to sustain themselves.

So in conclusion: Durge absolutely doesn't age.

(I think there’s even a good case to be made for Durge just popping right back up if they die, like Aylin. Or respawning in Bhaal's divine realm, the Throne of Blood in Gehenna, which we have no canon info on if it's been restored or not, but Gehenna is back and so is Bhaal so probably?)

Footnotes

Dragon Magazine #288 - The Bhaalspawn on archive.org

Faiths and Pantheons on archive.org

Faiths and Pantheons, p. 7

5e DMG, p. 11

All of this makes me wonder even more what exactly changes about Durge’s nature after rejecting Bhaal. If I recall correctly Bhaal says something like he is taking back what belongs to him, so Durge dies because Durge is a piece of Bhaal, brought about by Bhaal’s will. If Bhaal takes it back, no more Durge! Sort of like that classic parental threat: I brought you into this world and I can take you out of it!

But Withers is able to revive Durge. I got the implication that Durge is not exactly what he was before, that most of what Jergal brought back was drawn from who they chose to become over the course of BG3. So… is Durge still actually a bhaalspawn then? Are they still something like a titan, a quasi-divine being who’s just really pissed off daddy, but there’s nothing Bhaal can do because Jergal said so? It seems that redeemed Durge no longer has the urge/compulsions and can’t be controlled by Bhaal any longer (is that a normal thing, for gods to control titans like that or is it just a Durge thing?), but the epilogue implies they might still struggle and their kids if they have any would potentially still be bhaalspawn. I’m sure this falls into the “Larian definitely wasn’t trying to make this lore accurate” category but now I’m so curious!!

If they are still an immortal quasi-divine being of some description, that would make it super awkward if they did get killed and then respawned in Bhaal’s realm…