Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Story & Character Discussion The Emperor tadpoled us!

Actually it's crystal clear that it's his plan because if you don't follow his plan you die and become a dominated mindflayer. And if you do follow his plan the Absolute gets killed, everyone becomes free and ends up living a happily ever after.

So what kind of a stupid ass plan would it be for the Absolute to have her own agent deny her the only weapon that can resist her and then end up sabotaging her and getting herself killed through her own agent following her own plan? He even steps in to save you before she turns your brain into mush after doing it to Gortash, even says herself that she deliberately set the Emperor free so that he thinks he broke free on his own, which shocks him greatly.

I truly do not understand where this entirely illogical theory comes from when the story is quite coherent, logical and simple.

and you say that no emperor no us, i will say the God of the gods won't allow the chess game be stopped just because of a failed chessman, this you can see my last last post.

No, you don't die and become a mindflayer, you free Orpheus, you go whoop the Absolute's butt, and there is a big party. Have you forgotten this ending?

• Without the Emperor we'd transform into mindflayers during ACT 1 as soon as we either pass the Goblin Camp bridge, the bridge to the Mountain Pass or the hidden path prior to the Goblin Camp.
• And if you kill the Emperor at any point before the very end, you transform into a mindflayer.

So I don't really care about any divine intervention nor what Ao or any other God has to say when the entire party transforms into mindflayers and the Absolute starts her Grand Design ^^

Then he offers you the Astral tadpole which isn't being forced upon you, instead your illithid parts of your own body are craving for it due to its power. If you consume tadpoles, your tadpole is once again craving for power and you need to pass yet another Wisdom check. So this is in fact your fault for accepting to consume them in the first place knowing their effects, because you wanted to get strong. Why is it now an issue suddenly that you're being offered more power? Because of the yucky face?

So, I was never actually in the astral plane when that happened. I was in my home office playing Baldurs Gate3

Just like the Emperor the main character is also manipulating, exploiting and doing what they have to in order to survive, including killing people who don't deserve it. Orpheus' Honour Guard were just defending their own Prince from ghaik wretches and our main character murdered them for their own needs and then proceeded to exploit the Prince until he either becomes an alternative or doesn't. Regardless of whether we have a choice or not, that's what our main character did and that's why they're the same as the Emperor.

There's a line that Tav only says if you explore every island before you go to the skull. It goes something like: "wait, the figures in those images weren't demons at all they were just githyaki warriors"

Didn't come out in the cinematic but from that line and one the emperor gives just before joining the netherbrain it seems that script called for the honor guard to look like demons when the guardian showed them to us.

A coward, oh really? What else is he supposed to do when you betray him?

And yes, you do betray him... or do I need to remind everyone that even Orpheus is not deluded to such fact;

"You rejected the illithid when it no longer suited your needs. No doubt you freed me because it suits you now. I will neither forgive nor forget your abuse of my powers.

You had the opportunity to surrender yourself to my Honour Guard. They would have given you a noble end. Any worthy individual destined to become ghaik would've done so! My guard would have freed me, and I would have stopped the elder brain before it evolved into a Netherbrain."

It's funny how players only judge and condemn the Emperor, but refuse to judge their own character who is just like him. Tell me now... why did you not let his Honour Guard simply give you a noble end just like Ansur wanted to give the Emperor? Are you a coward? Willing to kill everyone to save your own skin? Willing to betray your very guardian, the person who saved you so many times? How many died so you can live?

Or are you simply a survivor, an opportunist JUST LIKE THE EMPEROR. Wanting to be free, wanting to live. Someone who is fighting to survive, someone who doesn't want to do these things, yet must do them in order to survive because there is no other choice.

The situation is bit more complicated than that. You are resting at your camp when you get attacked by Githyanki coming out of a portal that was (presumably) opened by the Emperor (since he is in control of the Prism). You never actually get to make an informed choice regarding Orpheus because the Emperor withholds all relevant information from you until it's absolutely necessary for his plan that you have it. It's the Emperor who presents you with an impossible choice here and thereby tricks you into being his complicit, signing the pact with the blood of Orpheus' honour guard. He presents you with a fait accompli.

Let us also not forget that for everything the Emperor has done to "help you" he was only a pawn for the Elder Brain's plan to break free. The Elder Brain freed the Emperor and guided him to the prism. Does that mean the Emperor owes it allegiance? Does it mean that he "betrays" the Elder Brain in the end? Of course not. That's not what allegiance is. Deciding that you no longer want to be manipulated by the Emperor and kill the innocent Orpheus for him once you have the means to resist his designs is not a betrayal - it's the first actual choice you get to make in that relationship and it's the only moral one.

Events of the Orpheus ending create a situation where the Emperor had to be lying, there is no other excuse for his JOINING the brain, which would otherwise be out of character for him. Larian chose to write that as an alternate timeline or something, but his behavior in that ending lays bare that he had to be lying the whole time (which is something that doesn't happen in the endings where you do not betray him).. In effect the story's universe changes at that juncture, and the facts of the matter fundamentally are not the same as the endings that occur if you stick with the Emperor.

Here's my take on all this with Early Access details fully taken into consideration;

All the evidence during Early Access supports this being the Emperor tadpoling the entire party after going rogue, because Daisy in EA would refer to the party as "her Chosen" and Shadowheart as "her beautiful weapon" as the prologue evidently displayed a clash between two different mindflayer factions aboard the Nautiloid (the Emperor making his move) because the mindflayer on the floor prior to getting tadpoled was already dead along with most of the Absolute cultists already mentally broken (which only a rogue mindflayer can do).

And considering how creepily manipulative Daisy was in EA depending on how the player treated her, the Emperor's personality behind the persona at the time was likely written to be 10 times worse because Larian clearly wanted him to truly embody what a mindflayer is. A heartlessly cold, calculating, manipulative psychic control-freak with far less moral ways to achieve his goal because he was quite literally willing to sacrifice the entirety of the Sword Coast using us as his Chosen, including us if we proved too stubborn. We were quite literally "his beautiful weapons", as Shadowheart still mentions even in full release.

Which is why Daisy was the way she was. She'd play nice as long as the party played nice, but if the party didn't play nice then she'd resort to direct threats and even force.

The essence of this personality still lingers even today in the Emperor although not as extreme nor direct, because if the player mistreats the Emperor in ACT 3 he will become very angry and show the party what he could've done to them by sharing memories of Duke Stelmane being dominated by him. Which fits his raw personality from Early Access because the tadpoles were a way for Daisy to initiate communication and slowly gain control over the player. The more the player used the tadpole, the stronger the psychic signal from it became which allowed Daisy to first only be able to communicate while the player was unconscious, and eventually even when they were fully awake. And if the player pissed her off, she would become furious and resort to direct threats (which we unfortunately never got to see, but we'd probably get dominated in certain parts of the story just like Stelmane was).

So I agree. This 100% was the Emperor in Early Access, however...

Because Larian noticed a vast majority of players kept entirely avoiding this aspect of the story since players couldn't for the life of them pick up on all the clues clearly hinting that Daisy ain't the tadpole nor the Absolute, this entire aspect of the game got rewritten and streamlined to make Daisy a benevolent Paladin Guardian instead who clearly stands against the Absolute, with the Emperor being much more emphatic and diplomatic in a friendly way as the focus of his narrative becomes the humanization of his character and whether his feelings are genuine or just an imitation.

He's doing what he must to survive because that's who he is, a survivor. A pragmatic whose most of his feelings towards our party are truly genuine because he could've done far worse to us, but naturally he's also simultaneously lying through omission by telling only what he considers important to tell to keep us focused on the job at hand. He has no use for petty human drama and trivialities, he's beyond such things because he sees the bigger picture when the fate of the whole existence is at stake, so who could blame him when he does truly end up saving the world and us multiple times.

Despite everything in Early Access clearly pointing towards the Emperor; in full release his appearance slightly changed to make him unique and the entire other half of the prologue that had all the evidence clearly pointing against him has been removed. Which is why the cinematic today is a sea of contradictions in relation to actual in-game lore due to the rewrites and unfortunately ends up being just a very fancy eye-candy intro cinematic and nothing more. One could say that he wiped our minds after tadpoling us, but alas the reality of the things is it is a very expensive cinematic created incredibly early during development so it no longer fits the actual in-game narrative because the party quite vividly remembers both the eye-insertion and the mindflayer who did it, yet does not whatsoever recognize the Emperor.

His Early Access version was a hardcore anti-hero who would have undertaken any action necessary no matter how immorally disgusting to achieve his goal and would have dominated us without any hesitation once we pissed him off. Which is an era of the game when the tadpoles and choices around Daisy truly were a severe consequence both in terms of gameplay and roleplay.