#bg4

First off there's-

The Stuff That Doesn't Need To Come Up In The Narrative Right Away But Let's Establish The Underlying Assumptions Shall We?:

The white dragon born dark urge managing to overcome Bhaal and defeat the elderbrain, in the end, but with a somewhat uneven series of good and bad choices at their back.

Minthara is probably dead, though I’d love it if she was still around and you absolutely can get away with that, narratively, thanks to the patches.

On the other side, Halsin, Dame Aylin and Isobel are probably alive.

Astarion and Gale are both alive and may or may not be the god/godlike versions of themselves.

Karlach and Wyll are alive and still in Avernus together (unless the DLC drops and we have Blade of Avernus/Fixing Karlach's engine adventures between the games) not explicitly as a couple though, I'd leave that ambiguous.

Lae’zel and Shadowheart are in love (this is both the most specific my post-headcanon gets, and entirely non-negotiable) but spend a lot of time apart because of respective responsibilities. Lae’zel can be a diplomat or a freedom fighter, but Shadowheart is a Selunite living with her parents on a farm and overcoming her fear of wolves by also raising some wolves alongside her adopted Githyanki son.

What Larian did with legacy characters from the earlier game was smart, in that they didn’t overuse them or reveal too many details about what they’d been doing in the interim, so like, we’ll keep it basic, leave a lot up to the imagination, but the writing around their appearances and roles in the story would match the above info.

Starting with origin characters, I think there’s potential to include familiar faces.

First Familiar Face - Githyanki egg all grown up. He shouldn’t be called Ptaris, because this is kind of assuming that the path where he ends up with that name doesn’t happen. For now, I’m just going to call him Egg, as I can sort of imagine Lae’zel using it as a slightly mocking but ultimately affectionate nickname, and miss “I picked my own name” maybe sort of leaving it up to him.

Egg - as I would write him, would have spent some time on the astral plane, like one of his moms and so his age is kind of a ??? because time is different there, and Egg would have also spent some time living with one of his moms on the farm. There’s sort of an obvious characterization available here. Where does he belong? Who are his people, really? You could write him confused and conflicted, or you could take the route I like and say that he was raised by the two most perfect people to help him understand that. He has his half-elf mother’s compounding knowledge of temperance between seemingly conflicted forces, and disparate elements, and his githyanki mother made sure he grew up confident and sure of himself and proud of his incredibly unique heritage. Also, these two states of mind aren’t totally mutually exclusive, cognitive dissonance is a major part of life, and an appropriate coming of age theme. I already love Egg. In keeping with the idea of temperance, I’d put him firmly in the true neutral category.

Second Familiar Face - Mol. Like. Just give me more Mol. What a great character, I’m so stoked imagining her grown up. I would write her as our team warlock, even if Raphael has been eaten by Mephistopheles. She can still do eldritch blast and the works ever since her pact with him. She’s pretty concerned that the implications of this are that Meph is her true fount now, and she wonders if he knows, or if there’s some small bit of his power he’s not aware is being lent out to her, and what he’ll do if he ever learns of her existence. She keeps these worries close to the chest though, instead projecting nonchalance that comes off as careless and callous during the earlier parts of the story, before she opens up. Probably neutral evil.

Third Familiar Face - Arabella. I’d make her so, so weird. Her magic is druidic, so she’s probably our druid, but you could easily get away with sorcerer or a secret third thing and I wouldn’t be mad. As a fully grown woman she speaks with the annoying esoteric air of a dryad and personifies inanimate objects, and is constantly carrying on conversations with animals when left to her own devices. She and Mol do not get along anymore, though they still care a lot about each other and there should be some cuteness about their history and childhood as buddies and little lost refugees together. Chaotic good.

I think you could get away with including all three in the main party, even early game, but I wouldn’t do more than that. New original characters are potentially more important and I would have the plot and the bones of the game be more closely tied to these totally new faces rather than relying on sequel energy. Even if all three games exist in the same universe and share themes, elements, and some characters, they don’t really feel like direct sequels and I think that’s a good thing. The only reason I think you can get away with using these three kids from the third game like this is because as adults, they’ll be completely different people, to the point that the story would have to reintroduce them anyway. The fact that they have any connections to the events of the past games doesn’t even really need to be explored beyond the kind of high-level backstory stuff that affected everyone in the world:

Arabella: “Remember when Baldur’s Gate almost got destroyed by an Elder Brain?”

Mol: “Yeah, that was wild.”

Egg: “No, I was there, but I hadn’t hatched yet.”

Mol: “HOW OLD ARE YOU?”

Egg: “Ugh, it’s complicated.”

I would probably continue with the often fun but at times vaguely serious “kill all the gods and masters” themes from previous games, and use this as a way to get everyone into hell for a portion of the game to go toe-to-toe with some archdevils, and also as an excuse to get Karlach and Wyll in the game (it's hard for me to get too much into this idea tbh, because I'm still hopeful that they'll be lvl13-20 dlc that involves Avernus, in which case, all of this is resolved and idk where to go from here with those two as I'm sure it would be affected a lot by how all that theoretical dlc content turns out, and I'm like so invested in going to Avernus with Wyll and Karlach).

And, Legacy character time!

Lae’zel I think could be our Jaheira analog, meaning she’s a previous origin character who I think could join the main team and be a party member for a chunk of the game without breaking anything. I would keep it until later though, but make it about as simple as recruiting Jaheira, in that it feels almost compulsory if you just follow a common path and progress the game.

Shadowheart would work nicely as our Minsc analog, in that she could be introduced as a very late game party character, essentially starting off as a lvl 12 cleric of light, as Selune intended, and I would make her recruitment more complicated and involve a side-quest. A rough idea for that side-quest would be trying to successfully get a message to Selunite allies, asking for aid. If you manage to meet the requirements and your messenger isn’t killed—and I think it would be fun if there was some randomness to it, like maybe a background constitution check that just mysteriously triggers when you cross into a certain area, and if it passes, it means your messenger (wherever they are) safely made it, and if it fails, they didn’t. So, I would let Shadowheart have a big damn hero moment and ride into a battle (on the back of one her wolves, why not) and join in the fight as an unexpected ally. From a play testing point of view, it would be especially fun to set up a certain fight so that waves of enemies arrive, and there’s a point where most people get overwhelmed and that’s when she shows up. But, for extra complication, if you don’t have Lae’zel or Egg with you at the time, she shows up for the one battle, saves your ass, then fights you if you’re responsible for either of their deaths, and if they are in your party, then you have to pass the roll, and play the whole thing for family drama.

Gale and Astarion, if you wanted to go with their bad endings, then Gale becoming and god and Astarion ascending would be the canon and there’s a lot to work with. Or, if you wanted to go with the good ending, then Gale is professor Dekarios and Astarion would either be an adventurer or leading the spawn in the Underdark. Professor Dekarios could easily just be a helpful mentor-type. His participation in shenanigans can be limited to a side quest or two, an Elminster/Volo like series of cameos etc. He’s a good adventurer when he has to be, but it’s not really where his heart is and we always knew that. He’s a wizard in his tower/in the classroom, but sure, he’ll lend a helping hand as he still remembers how valuable a service that can be. As a silly goose, I’m tempted to write a Volo/Elminster/Gale scene that involves all three of them very wine drunk and arguing about something absolutely no one else could hope to understand.

God Gale I can’t resist making him one of the baddies. It’s sad, but it feels appropriate. If he’s now the god of ambition then he failed to learn a pretty fundamental lesson during the course of BG3, and Tav/Durge who didn’t help him out with that failed and should feel bad. Offense absolutely intended. The logical conclusion is that Gale has become exactly the sort of god that once threatened and made his life miserable, especially since his antagonism towards Mystra with this ending seems to just be couched in pure unexamined hurt, and pettiness rather than a real understand that even as one of the “good gods” she wronged him, and she was wrong from the beginning and that there might just be something inherently bad about having and wielding this kind of power, at all.

He doesn’t get that, but it’s a bit due to wilful ignorance, I think, so I’d continue that and I wouldn’t make Gale knowingly the big bad. it just doesn't fit his character. You have a mortal avatar/chosen, some very ambitious enemy who Gale is helping, without a clear understanding of exactly what kind of schemes he’s backing. He’s too removed to really understand that he fucked up, and by the time he figures it out, it’s too late. Necessarily, his presence like this would be minimal, maybe we don’t even know for sure that he’s involved in any capacity until quite late, and even then, I’d make getting an actual appearance from the guy, pretty hard fought.

Astarion would be our other antagonist, and I think you can get away with going in any of the three different routes with him (Ascended, Spawn Adventurer, Spawn Dad) and make him an antagonist regardless. It would more be a matter of setting, do you want a quest in a big gothic castle or at a fancy party? A totally new location where he can turn up unexpectedly? The underdark? Setting might be the deciding factor, but his behavior and his role in the story could more or less follow the same pattern because the degrees of difference in his personality as ascendant/spawn are workable. That’s the thing about being a neutral evil aligned character—it’s maybe the broadest category as far as D&D character rep goes. He can get away with doing basically anything and still remain in that alignment because it takes an extreme act of unhinged evil to shift his alignment towards chaos, and anything good he does can still be dismissed as a cheap “pet the dog” moment by everyone who is unwilling to admit that he might have some capacity for redemption in him.

I would not make him a big bad antagonist though, because why would he ever bother, what’s actually in it for him? And I would want to create a route where he can join your side, but I wouldn’t have him join the camp/party in a permanent sense, at most you could do a Dame Aylin thing and keep him around and available for additional dialogue, a later quest or two.

In any case, even at his most antagonistic, Astarion isn’t truly ambitious. In BG3 he’ll ascend if he gets the chance, he'll try and run the city as long as the network is all in place already and it's not too much work, but he was never going to go out of his way to set all that up and he’ll settle. You could easily tie his story together with God Gale, if you wanted. “Ambition gets you stabbed to death by your spawn—of course none of this shit was my idea! I didn’t have a choice!” He was always quite good at delivering overdramatic ( but more often than people want to admit, totally valid) justifications for his behaviour, so I’d use that again, to utilize him to his maximum anti-hero/anti-villain potential.

He’d make a great red herring villain in the story, like let everything—including his old allies—think that he’s some mastermind (and let bg3 fans freak out a little that they've characterized him wrong), or that he’s more involved and more willing than he actually is. Then story beats slowly reveal that he’s a smaller level antagonist, pressed into the service of the bigger bad by circumstances/fear/whatever. It brings back bad memories. He’s pissed about it actually, doesn’t want to be doing any of this, has maybe been planning his own escape/betrayal for a while now. The player can ignore all that and just kill him here, or they can help him and see where things go if you give him a chance to ally with you against your common enemy. Fans can then continue their very stupid argument about whether he’s a hero or a villain, and we know that arguing is what truly makes them happy, so everyone wins.

A possible later quest could tie with Mol, if Astarion is the vampire ascendant, because in that scenario they are both in a weird ambiguous state where Mephistopheles is maybe their master or maybe not? D&D lore arguments continue?