Welcome to my Baldur’s Gate 3 Honour Mode story. In this series, I’m going to tell the story of my character as I play through the game in, as you may have guessed, Honour mode. I’ve already done multiple Honour mode runs, two of which ended in success, and the others ending at varying places across all three acts, so I consider myself a veteran by now!
Each time, I’ve created a character, given them their own personality, and stuck with it through the game, using it to guide my build choices and accepting whatever events happen as a result of that character’s choices. I have a special place in my heart for the poor wizard, who I decided would be cursed with extreme overconfidence, who accidentally angered the ogres in Act 1 and got squashed to a pulp just outside the Grove. That was a short run, but still fun!
Previously, I’ve posted my stories to some friends on Discord, including details about the roleplaying choices, character/companion builds, and explaining how I’ve approached certain fights. But since I have a blog now, I thought I’d write it up for a wider audience. So hold on to your hats and get ready for what will hopefully be an exciting and successful run through Patch 8.
Meet the protagonist!
Our protagonist is Haciathra, a high elf born to wealthy parents in Neverwinter. She showed an aptitude for magic at a young age and so was sent off to study under the best tutors money can buy in a prestigious wizard academy. Haciathra loved learning how to use her magic and thoroughly enjoyed her studies, although she always felt like something was missing. In her free time, she liked to read about the exciting exploits of adventurers across the world, and secretly longed to go adventuring herself.
One day, she happened across a tale of an elven wizard whose chosen method of magic combined the art of swordsmanship with the arcane – the ancient tradition of bladesinging. This immediately appealed to Haciathra as a way to combine her studies with something practical that would allow her to venture out into the world. It was a convenient bonus that bladesinging was considered a noble art by her people.
And so Haciathra packed her bags and set out in search of a tutor, accompanied only by several chaperones and a couple of family servants, eventually finding herself a mentor in the city of Baldur’s Gate. There she threw herself wholeheartedly into studying this tradition, striving to perfect it so that she could be the perfect adventurer.
Unfortunately, her studies were cut short when, one morning, an odd airship with massive tentacles that seemed more biological than mechanical flew through Baldur’s Gate. In addition to causing a whole lot of destruction, the nautiloid, as Hacianthra would later learn it was called, abducted her, taking her away from her life of study and into the unknown.
And how are we building her?
In game, of course. I’m not actually building a high elf wizard in real life.
Race/Subrace
As mentioned in the previous section, Haciathra is a High Elf. This is mostly for roleplaying reasons since Bladesinger is, in lore, a High Elf tradition, so I’m leaning into that. The darkvision and extra cantrip based on intelligence is nice for the in-game build though.
Background
For her background, I’ve chosen Sage. From my experience, backgrounds don’t have a huge impact in Baldur’s Gate 3, and Sage fits well from a roleplaying perspective.
Class should be obvious by this point. Haciathra is a Wizard and I intend to take the Bladesinger subclass when she reaches level 2. I suspect this will not be quite as good or broken as, say, Hexblade Warlock, but Warlock is one of the classes I’ve already won an honour mode run on, so I’d prefer to try something different. Bladesinger Wizard seems like another fun way to do the whole spellsword concept.
Stats
Haciathra’s stats probably aren’t surprising to anyone who knows how BG3 works.
- Strength 8 – dump stat. Karlach or Lae’zel, whichever we end up with, will be more than capable of carrying our burdens
- Dexterity 16 – Bladesinger needs a high dexterity for AC, and it can double up as our weapon attack and damage stat if we use a finesse weapon
- Constitution 14 – if we’re going to be in melee, we’re likely to get hit a lot and so having a high con modifier will make us more likely to succeed at concentration saves. Plus it gives us extra hit points
- Intelligence 16 – Haciathra is, ultimately, a Wizard, so the effectiveness of her spells depends on intelligence. This also affects how many spells she can prepare
- Wisdom 12 – having a positive perception modifier is always useful, so I like to squeeze in a bit of wisdom if there are enough points
- Charisma 8 – dump stat. I am aware that there are quite a few places where a good persuasion or deception check can skip entire encounters, but we don’t have enough points to increase it enough to matter, and actually doing those encounters can be fun and interesting
Spells
Our initial cantrips are:
- Booming Blade (High Elf cantrip) – this is most likely going to be our main cantrip throughout the game
- Fire Bolt – every wizard should know how to throw fire
- Bone Chill – being able to prevent healing is useful in several situations
- Shocking Grasp – another melee cantrip that’s pretty good and gives us more damage type options
I considered Toll the Dead, but decided it didn’t fit thematically. I’ll probably give it to Shadowheart when I respec her.
Hacianthra’s initial spells are:
- Mage Armour – absolutely essential even as a wizard who’s not going into melee
- Grease – generally good for slowing down enemies and it can be detonated with Fire Bolt if it’s not actually proving very useful
- Magic Missile – guaranteed chip damage, potentially on multiple targets is great in a lot of places
- Shield – another essential for any wizard
- Sleep – great crowd control in the early game
- Thunderwave – throwing your enemies across the map is a nice option to have
So that’s Hacianthra, the High Elf Wizard, who is soon to be a Bladesinger. She should have decent spell attack and saves from her high intelligence, and her high dexterity with middling constitution should help to keep her alive in melee. The lack of charisma might cause problems later, but that’s a bridge we’ll burn when we get to it!
House rules
Alright, these aren’t iron clad rules, painstakingly etched into a steel tablet (bonus internet points if you get the reference), but they are some guidelines that I like to follow.
- Multiclasses are allowed, but must make sense from a roleplaying point of view – so no single level dip into Warlock for everyone with any modicum of charisma
- Respecs are allowed where it makes sense for the character – I don’t know what the design decision behind some of the companion stat choices was, so I intend to tweak the starting stats a bit. I also want to play with the new subclasses, so I need to respec Shadowheart to make her a Death Domain Cleric. I won’t be doing respecs just to take advantage of how certain game mechanics work though
- Exploiting merchants is not permitted – I don’t like using exploits to win the game, so I’m not going to do some of the really cheesy stuff that I know exists
And off we go!
With that, it’s time for Hacianthra to start her journey! Hopefully it’s a long one! And if not, I’ll just roll up a new character and start again (I have so many classes and subclasses I still want to try). If you’ve enjoyed reading this, let me know your thoughts in the comments, or follow me on Bluesky for further updates! I’m also building a video game based on the Pathfinder 2E system and blogging my progress, so take a look through those articles too!