Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Recruiting Minthara - A more flexible and eventful approach

Consider this entire post a spoiler I guess. It is mostly hypothetical, but it is about Act 1 and Act 2 events.



I started writing this as a reply to another thread, but it took a life of its own! Hopefully this is a different view on a very commonly raised issue, although I have read very few discussions in order to avoid spoiler.

First things first, I haven't tested this, but I am pretty sure that the route you take through Act 2 is not determined by how Act 1 played out. So you can still go to either Last Light Inn or Moonrise Towers first and follow their storylines from their perspective. I assume that you would be able to defend the Grove but then show up in/infiltrate Moonrise and do their quests. If you go to Last Light first and work with Halsin, that would be a better a better point to lock players out of recruiting Minthara, if there must be a lock-out at all (make Minthara unrescuable once the player has reached some early point of Halsin's quest).


Story-wise, it fits very well to be able to recruit Minthara after having defended the Grove from her.

Even if you successfully raid the Grove,
A forgiving player character could see a redeeming quality in those points, and less-than-forgiving origin characters can still leave the party over recruiting Minthara. Having an argument in the party right in Moonrise Towers, possibly in the throne room, sure makes for an exciting situation to resolve. Halsin might have a thing or two to say (or slay?) back at the camp.


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This part optional: Ok, I got a little super carried away with a potential confrontation with party members over Minthara. What if Halsin himself is in the party when you go to Moonrise? Now we are getting in completely new content territory and I am basically writing fanfic, but I decided to roll with it and keep writing. DE maybe ?

In the following scenarios, Halsin and Minthara remain mutually exclusive as party members, but there is more player agency, and some more exciting situations to find your party in. If this specific confrontation happens, the player is also locked into either the Moonrise or the Last Light ways of resolving Act 2, depending on whether Minthara or Halsin ends up alive.

So you have Halsin with you, you go to infiltrate Moonrise, and Halsin starts a fight then and there if you attempt to recruit Minthara (or even if you show any empathy or forgiveness towards her).

Possible outcomes for this:

- Fight happens in the dungeons:

- You are forced to kill Halsin, a few Moonrise guards, possibly certain other party members if they side with Halsin. Going back to the Throne Room, Ketheric finds this amusing in some way, he allows you to keep Minthara, and you proceed with the Moonrise storyline.
- You knock out Halsin and take him with you, so you can't take Minthara. Going back to the Throne Room would be a bad idea in this case. Find a way to escape, and be prepared for some good rolls at the camp if you want Halsin stay with the party.

The intent: So you screwed up somewhat. You should have seen this coming, really. Things could go bad, but the situation is still salvageable if you keep a cool head.

- Fight happens in the Throne Room:

- Halsin is hostile, the guards are temp hostile, but the more important NPCs are neutral and not taking part. Minthara is held in place and not allowed to take part. Ketheric lets you fight for a turn or two without interfering, but then he steps in and punches a hole through Minthara's chest. This is your cue that you screwed up, and also that you can't win this fight. One of the characters, or the player's Guardian, should very strongly indicate that fleeing is the only option. Halsin is not under player control, but he will attempt to escape (and players can sure still help him). If he makes it out alive you get a scene at the camp, with some difficult checks to have him stay.
- As before, but you manage to kill Halsin before Ketheric interferes. Since you were willing to kill your comrade for this, he allows you to keep Minthara and follow through with the Moonrise quests if you want to. Ketheric pretty much sees you as a pawn.

The intent: You screwed up a lot. You were inconsistent and inconsiderate in your motivations and your choices, and you got into a serious conflict with your own party. This puts you in a much harsher predicament, but you can still resolve things one way or the other if you can stay alive. It is quote possible to lose both Halsin and Minthara, in fact this is the more likely outcome. Face the consequences of your actions!

Yes! I had the same thing in mind! Initially, I thought of ways to recruit Minthara in a “good” route for storytelling purposes but it ended up making me question why it’s not in the game. I can confirm that you can defend the Grove and still infiltrate Moonrise as some sort of double agent.

Aside from the things you listed under the spoiler tag, I think Minthara fleeing from the Grove makes perfect sense because she specifically had this line before the raid: “I do not intend to lead a suicidal charge. The goblins are expendable, I am not.” This is a direct contradiction to her later actions and I'm surprised it's getting unnoticed.

Now, to preface this, some people have said that presenting "headcanons" as fan feedback is a little stupid. But this is a roleplaying game, I see there is no harm in doing so as long as it is narratively coherent. I’d also like to say, at this point in time, it seems like Larian is making changes that require little to no effort. I have my reasons to support this claim but simply put: the more elaborate your suggestions are, the less likely it will be considered and implemented. So, the question is: how can we expand Minthara's recruitment with minimal changes?

Currently there is a datamined dialogue from Patch 4 that hints at a new way to recruit Minthara with the non-lethal attack option. I expressed my dislike for this method over at the Larian Discord for several reasons, and most of her fans seem to agree.

While it is definitely an in-character reaction from Minthara, there is little sense behind the player's decision to knock her out. This method also requires little effort from a production standpoint. If this is all they're adding to her recruitment, I would even go on to say they're being lazy. It’s just several lines added into one part of the game, rather than animating a potential cutscene of her fleeing from a fight and considering the consequences that would follow such a decision.

As for the optional parts you've suggested, while they would be interesting to see (Ketheric punching a hole through Minthara?! Wow XD), I don't think it is in-character at all for Halsin to start a fight in Moonrise. He recognizes Minthara as a victim of the cult and if he did feel threatened by her, the dialogue would most definitely happen in camp and be discussed civilly. Larian has already planned for this ultimatum to be added into the game.

Diving into more hypotheticals:

If Minthara flees from the Grove, there should be several changes to her dialogue after you rescued her. For example, when she is put on trial before Ketheric, she will recognize you as someone who betrayed her in the Grove. She will be less likely to trust you, but would still be grateful if you saved her life. I think this route is miles better than the KO option Larian is planning, but it does take a reasonable amount of time and effort to implement so I'm not holding out much hope.

Meanwhile, KO-ing an important character like Minthara needs a strong reason outside of metagaming, which the datamined dialogue didn't really present.
If the option must remain, I would suggest they add a small scene of the mind control wavering on Minthara because of the Prism's power. This could happen at the spot where we first meet her but I'd prefer it if we get the option to talk to her alone without any goblins in the room. This small addition would give us a real incentive to sway her to our side and instantly recognize her as a brainwashed cult member.

Yeah. It's the simplest solution. Simple in every sense of the word, Minthara herself canonically thinks you are stupid for doing it based on the datamine. I hope it lowers her approval significantly if we recruit her this way.

I would be totally fine with dumping Halsin for Minthara, since I never really interact with Halsin much anyway. I’d love to have that option on a playthrough where you don’t slaughter the grove. But there’s one thing that confuses me about the datamined ultimatum that Halsin gives, and just the whole notion that Halsin might leave your party in general.

Act 2 spoilers

I had the same concern. But, in the datamine, you can actually see Halsin’s dialogue differs depending on whether or not you’ve lifted the Shadow Curse. This is my speculation so take it with a grain of salt, but I think in order to lift the Shadow Curse and get Minthara, you will have to help Halsin first before rescuing Minthara in Moonrise Towers.

I predict this will be an issue for most players if there is no warning beforehand. Hopefully Larian considers a few things before implementing it in a future patch. People have also heavily criticized the dialogue itself because they think it’s out-of-character for Halsin to issue an ultimatum and condemn Minthara to mind control.

Halsin might be more inclined to cut party leaders slack if Thaniel has already been sorted out and the curse is hanging by the thread of Ketheric's life.

Halsin might be more inclined to cut party leaders slack if Thaniel has already been sorted out and the curse is hanging by the thread of Ketheric's life.

Honestly? He should, but Larian doesn’t think so. They seem hell-bent on making Halsin and Minthara mutually exclusive for some unknown reason.

I can understand why designers might want to keep some things like that exclusive, which is why I made sure to preserve state of affairs in my suggestion. You can always recruit no matter what you did before meeting her, it seems, so there is that. Idk how much sense that makes lore-wise, and she does seem like a less fleshed-out companion. Then again, I don't have her in my party.

The datamined dialogue is interesting, if a little rough. It is good to keep in mind that datamines can be anything - content in development (that may or may not work out), placeholder content, or content that was already considered and cut from the game. But have read enough buzz in various comments about this (including Minthara's awesome voice actress going back for more lines) so I do believe that more content is coming. Which means I should not play until it arrives lol.

I agree that knocking Minthara - and only her - out to recruit her does not make sense, it is pure meta. She should retreat, although of course it should still be possible to kill her. For what it's worth, I try all the time to not be meta, but recruiting Minthara (and the cost of that) was the biggest meta decision I made. Playing durge made it a little easier. There is also an origin character that I never recruited, and another one that messed with the wrong Tav and got dealt with, so I am proud of following through with those decisions, despite obviously missing out on companions (the first one was not too obvious tbh). All that meant that, from the Grove onward, and until I got Minthara, I had Withers provide me with a fourth party member!

I am sure it is hard for the game designers to make the game they want while taking into account that most players will have available tons of meta information about everything. At the end of the day, it is up to us to read or not read guides, to reload or not reload a choice or a bad roll. But I still think that Minthara should be given at least a chance to escape the battle, and that player who fought against her should still have a chance to recruit her later. Both missable/optional. Minthara is nothing if not pragmatic, and the datamined dialogue plays into that nicely. Just don't do it by bonking her on the head .

It also seems too much like forcing a "Good"-or-"Evil" choice on the player character, who might not be one of the two extremes; This it not only a bit much, even for old-fashioned D&D, but it clashes directly with some big points of Act 2 that, very prominently, allow the player to switch between "Good" and "Evil" freely.

Even though BG3 is this immense masterpiece that it is (bugs and all), I am sure that Larian would have crammed double the stuff in it if they had all the time and resources in the world. They sure have added a lot to their previous games after release. Let's wait and see what else is in store for Minthara and the rest of the cast.

PS: It seems that the time I would have spent playing BG3 will be spent in the forums instead! My next post will probably be about my experience at the Last Light Inn and the way I handled things there - there is something I want to discuss.

I'm sure I will come to understand the mutual exclusivity if the ultimatum is actually done well. I love drama so a huge part of me loves the datamined exchange (there's so much tension!) but another part of me thinks this conflict feels a little forced. Halsin is being incredibly cold and stubborn about this when he has given the pass to other people before, like Kagha. It is subject to change, of course, but it’s also fine to criticize it when we know how responsive they could be to feedback.

Definitely. I’m also keeping in mind that we might not be able to get the whole picture from this little snippet. Who knows? Maybe they’re going to add more to go along with it. I sure hope so! I'll take any new Minthara content

Regardless, the KO option is mainly motivated by meta reasons and Larian is putting their precious time and effort into potentially adding this into the game, this is the biggest reason I’m being so harsh about it.

Also, imagine starting a relationship with someone who knocked you out to rescue you instead of talking you down (hell, the Prism is right there). Even by Faerun’s standards, that’s honestly so wild. I fully support them adding this KO option, if only to take a dig at questionable player decisions, but they better lower her approval significantly as a consequence. I also hope they do not stop here and consider adding other alternatives that make more sense.

Honestly, now that I'm thinking about it, adding the possibility of Minthara fleeing from the Grove wouldn't take too much of an effort. It's actually pretty simple as far as changes go. Humor me for a bit, this format reads like a fanfic but I assure you it’s based on logic:

You betray Minthara at the Grove and fight her. She gets to a low health and/or she notices the goblins are being outnumbered, she realizes she can't win. She's a 200 something-year-old drow warrior, the Absolute's influence shouldn't be able to erase her battle knowledge. So she decides to flee, but here's the catch: it doesn’t happen right away. You get the option to intercept her attempt or let her get away, or just have a turn limit (1-3 turns) to kill her before she flees. Either of these options would give players the freedom to decide her fate.

Cut to Moonrise, where she is being judged by Ketheric for her failure. Minthara would recognize you as a traitor, but hold on, she is being put on trial and Ketheric is looking to you to make judgement on her. It makes more sense for her to stay silent than to blow your cover as Ketheric would not even take her word at that point. The scene can commence as it usually does.

So, with that said, it seems more of a hassle to me to add the KO reaction. I’m sure the writers at Larian may have a different opinion though, and I totally respect that. I just think these turn of events make a lot more sense. Have fun in the forums btw! I mostly just appear when Minthara is mentioned LOL