Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Pixie?

Yeah, there are big cultural differences between America, where they think pixies are like Disney Peter Pan Tinkerbell, and here in Europe, where we know they will make the cow give sour milk if we don't leave a saucer out for them.

If you watch the movie... Tinkerbell is a pretty accurate pixie. She tried to trick Peter into Killing Wendy out of jealousy and was in general capricious and moody. She was NOT nice. Not generally.

I know pixies from forgotten realms lore - you know, the type of pixie we're talking about? Specifically not your mid-euorpean earth pixie?

This is kind of the complaint that I'm highlighting:

In Our World, in a particular cultures, pixies have a certain cultural history and lore. That's great.

It's Also Not The Forgotten Realms. It's entirely irrelevant what your cultural representation of a creature is like when that is not the creature we're talking about at all.

Larian have seem to have gone "We know what pixies are; our cultural history tells us what pixies are!" and haven't bothered to check whether their concept of pixies as they know it from their own real-world cultural mythos lines up at all with the completely independent fictional creature that exists in the forgotten realms and has its own lore; hot tip - it doesn't! They did the same with vampires! Wooden stakes through the heart do not kill vampires or vampire spawn! Sorry, not this mythos, not this lore.

To put it simply:


No. They Don't be like that. Quite specifically, these fey do not, and are not, like that. It's part of their intrinsic nature (not even inherent nature - actual intrinsic nature) that they are not malicious creatures; they literally do not have the capacity for it. (Unlike mortal creatures who have the capacity to direct their alignment and morality, intrinsically good creatures - as pixies are - don't.)

If they wanted a corrupted pixie, capable of malice, then the successful check should have revealed that, instead of just saying that pixies can be malicious (they can't).
If they wanted a creature that is small, mischievous, with the capacity and potential for great malice as well, then they could have made the tiny creature a quickling.

My complaint is not that the pixie was grumpy - though the crudeness was unnecessary and I don't feel the crude humour added anything of value to the scene, while detracting from it actively - my main complaint is that the check that the character made was successful and provided abjectly false information in order to sow doubt falsely.

Sorry, I should have made more clear that I was only talking about the lore check part - not about this particular pixie's personality.



I think so, too - of course this pixie can be rude, she's an individual with her own personality.

The parts of this scene that bothered me were the lore check description, because it's quite different to the 5E description, and the unfinished looking model.

Huh. I was not aware of this. I assumed pixies, while typically having very spesific behaviour and alignment (though I hear WotC hates alignment now and wants to do away with it or something?) still could behave outside of that. Learned something today then, thank you

I think it's like Niara said that D&D uses a lot of creatures from mythology and folklore around the world, but makes their very own version of it. They share the same name, but sometimes they are entirely different beings.

And also even in real world folklore, a lot of versions of these beings exists. Sometimes a stake to the heart is enough to kill a vampire, sometimes you need to decapitate it, or incinerate the body (Of course in real life people did this to corpses of people they suspected to have become vampires, or to prevent them from leaving their graves. And also a lot of other weird stuff we would call desecration today.)

So when we talk about something like a pixie or a vampire, we all already have different versions in mind.
Unless otherwise stated, I would expect that BG3 uses the D&D 5E Forgotten Realms versions, so that we are all on the same page.
And we don't have to worry we'll loose a rogue when we let Astarion carry our garlic 😄

If there is one thing im sure about ...
Its whos milk some "real" pixie turned sour ...

Something is eating you Niara? :-/

I loved her name. So sophisticated and posh!
Seriously - with a name like that she must be a member of the deprived underclass of Pixie society, this being further evidenced by her speech patterns and behaviour. Thank goodness she did not send a juicy fart our ways was as manner of greeting, innit?

I have been thinking about this for a while.

Personally, I like that WotC seems to be stepping back a bit from alignment and that they were adding a "typically" to the alignment in the statblocks in the latest publications.
I think having a certain alignment would make sense for beings that are the embodiment of these alignments, like devils and demons, for example.

But I like it when everyone else has more leeway, I think it's also more interesting. Personally, I wouldn't put pixies in the same category (being the embodiment of an alignment, that is) as devils, for example. But I am not a pixie expert, that's just my impression.

So, with that in mind, maybe Larian has already taken into account changes that are made to the creature statblocks. I think it would then make sense to say that a pixie then can play harmless pranks, or malicious ones.

I must admit that I misremembered the exact phrasing of the lore check. I should have watched it again, but I was certain that the narrator had said mischievous and malicious.

I just rewatched the scene and the exact phrasing was "These fey creatures are infamous for their trickery - sometimes playful, sometimes malicious."

I know that mischievous can have different meanings, but if I understand it correctly, it has a more negative connotation than "playful". "Sometimes playful, sometimes malicious" sounds much more neutral, and I think I am ok with that.
So what we get from this lore check is basically that they like trickery.

(Yes, I sometimes manage to contradict myself or have a change of heart several times a day 😄)

I'm fine, Rag - just pointing out something that really should not have needed to be reiterated:

There are many different lores and mythos of creatures called pixies, and they are often strikingly different. When you are acting as the custodian of a body of lore that does not belong to you, you have a duty to represent it as it describes itself - that is, not to erase it and replace it with the lore of some other completely different creature from a different source.

We are not talking about the pictsies of the Discworld, who are foul-mouthed brawlers prone to stealing cows wholesale when the mood strikes them.
We are not talking about the pixies of the Artemis Fowl series of novels who stand close to a metre tall and are generally better at modern tech science than you.
We are not talking about James Barry's pixies who can only feel one emotion at a time and are powered by clapping and the laughter of children.
We are not talking about Cornish pixies, who disguise themselves in rags and attempt to lure young children away.
We are not talking about modern British pixies, nor Swedish pixies, nor Romanian pixies, nor even the older Celtic pixies.

We also are not talking about Disney pixies who mostly concern themselves with fashion and are made to appeal as marketable to young girls, nor Dreamworks pixies, nor Pixar pixies, all of whom are as varied as the individual movies in which a variant may show up.

We are talking about pixies of the Forgotten Realms, who are their own species of creature, in their own world space and setting, with their own lore and descriptions...


It is intrinsic to their nature to be friendly and curious; it is intrinsic to their nature to find violence and malice abhorrent; the tricks they play are, by stated definition, harmless. So, to have a lore check tell you that this creature might be malicious is abjectly contra to the very essence of what it is. If a pixie is not like this - say they have been corrupted and twisted in some way, which is entirely possible given the circumstance - then that is what a successful check should reveal.

The Larian crew live in a country and culture where pixies exist and, as Rag points out, within that mythos, they're often arseholes. The Larian crew have been either lazy, or simply lacking in care and respect enough to do anything more than assume that their local understanding of their own pixies must surely be correct and universal, or else that it doesn't matter enough to bother about showing basic respect to other bodies of mythos or lore.


For the duration of the game that they are making, Larian are the custodians of the realms lore that it involves; they have a duty to do properly by that - that means not making random assumptions about the creatures contained in it, or treating such creatures as generic cultural representations of themselves, and disregarding the actual relevant lore as it applies to these specific creatures in this specific world space. It's a degree of basic professionalism that Larian have often made it seem as though they are incapable of, time and time again.

They should have stuck to their own personal IPs - They are not mature enough, or respectful of others enough, to be trusted with someone else's.

She could be related to Shadow-feys... especially since area where we encounter her is highly influenced by Shadowfell.

There are no Pixies native to the Forgotten Realms. Pixies come from the Feywild. And the Feywild connects to all D&D settings. As per Ed Greenwood's kitchen chats will Elminster & Co, that includes our world. Ergo the pixies you meet in the Forgotten Realms are the same pixies you meet in our world. So they will most definitely curdle your milk if you don't appease the little blighters.

Question!
What does it matter? If DM say this Pixie is a bitch, then its a bitch ... first rule of any tabletop game.

+1
Roma locuta, causa finita

Same, I don't have a problem with this specific pixie not being that nice, despite the fact, that pixies in DnD are not malicious . She was jailed up in that lantern for a while and I don't think, that drider, who seems to be a right ahole, would have treated her nice, so she has all the right in the world to be cranky.
I didn't like her look though, she looked ... unfinished to me.

Heretics! Villains in the dark!!

I love the voice acting in that part.

I want to start calling people heretics and accuse them of being villain in the dark now.

Duck-billed platypus! Lily-livered bandicoots! Anthropophagus! Anacoluthons!

Also Heretics!

Sorry, just needed to do my Avatar justice

Carry on.

And you did.
Although you forgot to add
Iconoclasts!


Now I want Dolly Dolly Dolly as a Companion ...