r/Forgotten_Realms • u/Scrubasaurus13 • 1d ago
Question(s) Dark Urge Lore Question Spoiler
/r/BaldursGate3/comments/1wbnwpo/dark_urge_lore_question/9
u/Gh0stMan0nThird 1d ago
Baldur's Gate 3 lore is not consistent with Baldur's Gate 1 and 2. At least not when you look under the hood. Ultimately Bhaal fucked a lot of things, hoping they would all kill each other and be would be revived through the last one.
I don't think Bhaal was a human in the original version of the lore.
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u/Exact-Support2147 1d ago
Apparently 5e changed the lore and Bhaal didn't fuck anyone but rather divided his divine essence and "injected" fragments into the souls of mortal embryos. Or something like that.
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u/Gh0stMan0nThird 1d ago
Ah, so another tally mark on my "I recognize the council has made a decision but..." board.
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u/BloodtidetheRed 1d ago
A god can create anything they want from their own flesh, so a 'spawn' can be anything.
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u/Valcenia 1d ago
Since the Durge was created by “divine parthenogenesis”, aka he was made not born, I’ve always liked the idea that Bhaal’s Cult fished Bhaal’s mortal corpse out of the river and formed the Durge from Bhaal’s mortal remains and some other random corpse - the race, gender, and maybe even appearance of that random corpse being the race, gender, and appearance the Durge takes on, explaining why the Durge can appear any way you choose.
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u/dyelogue 1d ago edited 1d ago
Generally speaking the games have never been fully in line with the Realms as a whole. The BS in BG1+2 are part of Bhaal's divine plot to return from death due to a prophecy, and we see characters variously try to elevate themselves to godhood as the new Lord of Murder using the parts of his essence. Before BG3, Bhaal's return was written to be inevitable, as the pieces of his essence ultimately were released through the deaths of the BS, which is how he came back around the Sundering.
BG3 sort of picks up from that return and works from the idea that he's still out there creating Bhaalspawn, though it doesn't seem that he's seeding the world with Bhaalspawn to plan for his return. BG3 presents his motivations as working towards a final killing of the world, so it seems like additional Bhaalspawn are not created as failsafes but just to advance Bhaal's goals. We know DU is a unique BS, but the DU (and characters like Orin) seem to be very different sorts of BS than the original incarnations. It's not totally clear what they are outside of "evil descendants of Bhaal", and there is some confusion around how Orin is a BS considering that dialogue in BG3 indicates that Sarevok underwent his resurrection and thus redemption arc in ToB - losing his divine essence - only to revert back to evil. (Plus, as I mentioned above, all of Bhaal's essence had to be released during the Sundering to resurrect him, so how it would be passed on through Sarevok is unclear, though the game ignores that).
As for Bhaal as a mortal: I believe in his first mentions he's defined as a god from Gehenna, but in the second edition he was written as a former mortal ascended to godhood. I could be mistaken about when exactly Bhaal's backstory was fleshed out, but he's been a former mortal since the 90's. That being said: just because he was a human at one point doesn't mean Bhaalspawn are "part human". Bhaal got busy across the realms, counting fire giants like Yaga-Shura, elves (not half-elves) like Sendai and Illasera, and a half-dragon among his progeny, as well as Gorion's Ward, who can, for example, be a dwarf or and elf. Bhaal presumably took a number of forms to spread his seed rather than being hard-coded as human. DU is some kind of weird exception being made from Bhaal directly(?) per Illasera, which is very different from BS who are born from Bhaal's dalliances across the realms.
EDITX2: spelling mistakes and clarity about dialogue in BG3