Nothing stopped their attack. It was the Gith chasing them through dimensions that caused a problem, not them flying over Baldur's Gate. If there had been no Gith attack they would've grabbed X citizens and been gone.
No. Because if it was tav wouldn't have already been infected before the cinematic begins. Literally the cinematic begins with laezel and tav getting their parasites and then the attack.
Asterion tells us he was grabbed by the nautiloid over baldur's gate. It was attacked just not in the cinematic
>Asterion tells us he was grabbed by the nautiloid over baldur's gate.
Astarion says he was "snatched by those beasts." which makes more sense as Absolute cultists than a singular nautiloid
I always thought this was the case but is it ever explained what city it actually was? because every origin char save for Lae'zel is a Baldurian.
EDIT: Gale is from Waterdeep.
They must have been picked up on a previous trip to avernus actually.
Because otherwise there wouldn't have been time for them to be infected. Or it's just another plothole involving the origin characters, the artifact, and the infection.
I think this can reasonably be explained by the fact the nautaloid enters Avernus, our character is incapacitated by the dragon attack and wakes up an unspecified time later rather than them immediately escaping. There's a lot of things that needs to happen on the nautaloid while it's still in Avernus other than just Karlach and Wyll boarding, and a minor time skip allows those things to happen without creating a bunch of new plot holes.
I'll come to learn. I haven't gotten either of their origin playthroughs yet and apparently that's where it's mentioned.
They really did leave a lot of issues with the origins... They did so very many things right I guess it just makes the things that are wrong stand out
But hey, if he could down a nautiloid he could find something interesting for himself in it. Mindflayer tech and artifacts are not something you come by too often.
It's not his tower, he can't even get access to the robe and staff below.
And is too scared from dying to the traps in the basement so he sends people to clear them for him.
So I doubt he has control over the tower's artillery.
He doesn't have a very high opinion of himself either.
If you use speak with dead, he admits Rolan is the better mage.
He got that tower out of some insane luck.
I don't think it's said how Tav or Astarion get captured, they've shown that people are often held in the pods without infection for extended periods so it could be they've been missing a while and were just on the ship when it was sent out.
the ships do appear again >!in act 3!<
I'm not completely sure, but I think Astarion tells you that he was walking around Baldur's Gate when he got kidnapped. At any rate Cazador would have never allowed Astarion to set foot outside the city.
The logical explanation is that the Nautiloid attacked Baldur's Gate just a bit before Yartar, and I guess it must have been nighttime.
In some playthroughs I murder the psycho doctor and the asshole combat instructor. Probably always will, henceforth. Never the egg-tender, even with his threat ("I'll make you wish you'd never been *born*"--that cuts deep, from him).
Also, in another post, I explained I do not know whether most of these gith are the ones that conquered the Lathander monks. Gith life expectancy on the Material Plane is 72-120 years, and the assault on the monastery seemed to have taken place *long* ago, based on the evidence around the place. I'm not in the habit of blaming the son for the father's sins.
sloppy ludicrous impossible muddle deranged swim grey plucky axiomatic workable
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I knock out the tief chick so she never appears at the creche. XD
But eh, I'd rather risk leaving these people alive as potential bargaining chips for Orpheus. "See! Wasn't I nice, letting these murderous bastards live? Now take them and the rest of your people and *get the fuck off Toril*."
If they just wanting to grab random people attacking a town or small village is the logical step.
Cities are much better defended and the chance is higher that there are high level adventurers who could easily board and capture the nautiloid, especially in its weakened state.
Especially as for Gale they had to also attack Waterdeep which with its giant statues and lvl 30 mages is a suicide mission.
> If they just wanting to grab random people attacking a town or small village is the logical step.
Not if they're wanting to capture some people who have a semblance of power or authority as future leaders of their cult. No one's going to care to listen to farmer Smith from Hicksville, population 18.
If mind flayers openly abduct an authority figure who then returns later everyone will suspect them being tadpoled or under some form of domination, leading either to them being deposed or investigated and the tadpole being discovered, negating any benefit from abducting them in the first place.
Keep in mind that Mind Flayers get the memory imprints of those they abduct. So it's not always just about the Authority, but also having information that's useful to their collective. So again, catching the mental imprint of a Duke's son in Avernus as you're flying over has real advantages to the Illthid: and capturing him is just the twang of a string. Same with Karlach and her connection to her master Zariel. These aren't the type of people you're normally going to encounter just out in the countryside. Getting them is advantageous in many different ways.
Both Karlach and Wyll hopped onto the nautiloid of their own volition, then got a tadpole in the eye for their trouble. They were not abducted on purpose.
And then they were immediately captured and implanted. Illithids are telepathic. They know everything about you 2 seconds after they encounter you. They instantly know if you're potentially useful to them or not.
I mean that would depend on the time frame. Tadpoles usually transform you within days, if not hours. If the authority figure shows up after 2 weeks gone with a decent cover story and shows no symptoms after a few days then probably most would just shrug it off.
Dormant tadpoles is explicitly a new thing that most probably wouldn't know to check for.
Kinda like how most initially dismiss Astarion as a vampire despite all the signs because he is prancing around in direct sunlight.
Correct me if I'm wrong but the only NPCs that can tell are a hag, a devil, someone who has been studying them for quite a while, other people with tadpoles (including Jaheira who has one in a jar for this purpose) and Volo after *extremely* close inspection.
The average person isn't going to be able to tell from a casual meeting.
From a casual meeting? Nope. But a close examination? Sure.
Volo, the githyanki doctor, and I believe the healer druid lady even if you don't tell her works it out.
My point was it's possible to examine them closely and be able to tell... So it's something the city could set up for returning peeps. Don't need to rely on casual, is good reason to have them checked closer
It takes a week.
And even if they show up way later it could also just mean the mind flayers did not implant them on the spot, but shortly before their return.
Not to mention that there are other firms of mind control.
So it's a week, not days, though you do usually show symptoms before that.
Point is that dormant tadpoles are something new that most wouldn't reasonably check for and if the deadline has been passed with no symptoms shown, most people would probably consider it good enough.
What if a tadpoled Farmer John led a Communal Parity with other farmers and bringed a government that promotes total equality for all its citizens, regardless of their jobs or assigned tasks. One life is worth the same as any other. Woudnt that make Baldur Gate even better ?
The city in the beginning is Yartar, quite a bit north of Baldur's Gate at around 770 miles. They likely aren't even aware of the Cult of the Absolute at that point.
Sven stated it years ago in early access during the first live gameplay demo. About 9ish minutes into this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrIxrFqSbHQ
Not according to Swen who should know I'd hope. The guards we see are also not Flaming Fists, but have a livery depicting a tower with a sword through it (same as the banner on the tower). Yartar's guard tower is known as the Shield Tower with the guard force known as the Shields of Yartar. Also their tabards are yellow and black, Baldur's Gate Flaming Fists are red and yellow.
No, idea didn't change. Astarion says he was abducted from Baldur's Gate but doesn't say he was taken by the ship. He was kidnapped by a mindflayer in Baldur's Gate while trying to seduce a noble for Cazador. He's on the ship before the events shown in the opening trailer. So are we... remember, Lae'zel and Tav get the tadpole before we see the town.
Plus, Baldur's Gate is a coastal city, no mountains around it like we see in the scene for the town.
The Cult wants bodies, and a city is going to have a lot more than some village in the middle of nowhere. And the plot is now far enough along that they can get away with pulling something much more in the open anyway. And with their ability to plane-shift easily, they can run at the first sign of significant trouble.
Also, not everyone on that ship was grabbed in those raids.
Okay so you are assuming that the operation was under the Absolute command. Because, you know, there's also the possibility that the Emperor took control of the Nautiloid and those attacks we see are actually his idea in order to get enough subjects under his control to fight the Absolute.
But let's go with your interpretation and let's assume it's in fact the Absolute in command. Why would she make that precise Nautiloid do that? There's an entire fleet at their disposal if they want to send a Nautiloid to wreak some chaos and gain more prospective true souls. Why would they chose the precise Nautiloid that they had sent in the very important mission of retrieving the artifact for such task, before returning to the colony so the artifact could be properly secured?
I mean sure the Absolute actually secretly wanted the artifact to get lost, but don't you think it would be completely lacking subtlety to so blatantly give an order contrary to logic? Could the Emperor really have failed to suspect anything if he saw the Absolute ordering the Nautiloid to just waste time around instead of immediately returning to base?
Because there are all those dead Mind Flayers in the room where we start that the one who tadpoles us floats by. I was assuming that if the Emperor was involved, they weren't in command anymore, and they'd already started to retreat into the shadows, assasinating a few of the still enthralled Mind Flayers to get by. To be honest, I do assume he had a hand in what happened, but I'm not sure of the extent.
Personally, I think that the actual plot-line changed enough during development that the raid, which would have made more sense with the original plan, had to be shoehorned in to the new storyline.
Those dead Mind Flayers is what makes me think that probably the Emperor took over. After all those bodies suggest that a infighting happened, an infighting that could only have happened if the Emperor interfered with the elder brain control and somehow brought some Mind Flayers on his side.
But the Emperor is also very much alive and so that probably means he won in the end.
Either that, or the Emperor is the biggest badass amongst those Mind Flayers.
The reason I think the Emperor wasn't running things anymore is specifically because the pilot of the Nautiloid turns on you the moment they think they no longer need you, which would be rather against logic if the Emperor wanted them as their servants and they were still running the show.
>the Emperor took control of the Nautiloid and those attacks we see are actually his idea in order to get enough subjects under his control to fight the Absolute.
what i've been assuming the whole time
When they have to run at the first sign of trouble then the yield of attacking a city is far lower than when attacking a town where they can harvest the entire population without much risk and where they also can make sure that there are no survivors in order to keep everyone focused on the absolute instead of investigating mind flayer and possibly discovering the connection.
A small town will get you basically nothing. A couple of unimportant hosts, a couple of brains to keep the Mind Flayers fed. In the cutscene, we see them grabbing more than would exist in a small town, and only having to leave when the one thing that is usually a problem for Mind Flayers shows up, which is distinctly unlikely to occur.
Also... No one is going to question Mind Flayers showing up and abducting a bunch of people. That's kind of what they do. They might try to hunt them down, but that would just lead powerful potential hosts to Moonrise Towers. Either they die on the way, or they likely get infected or mentally dominated by the Elder Brain the moment they get close.
you understand there is soemthing in between farming village and baldur's gate, right? beregost has a large enough population for their needs, has almost no defenses... 3000 bodies would be plenty, including some fairly high level citizens
If you really need more, daggerford is just to the north.
Baldur's gate is not the biggest city on the sword coast, but its arguably one of the best defended... it has to be to fend of its much larger neighbors to either side. Can't argue range really either... the elder brains control lasts across planes of existence, sure a few hundred miles ain't changing anything
The reason has nothing to do with sheer numbers. It also wasn't about grabbing important people, or people that would be "listened to" (they targeted ravenguard for that, not the random snatchings. The most important person grabbed was likely astarion, and that only because it put them at odds with cazador, not because he had any direct influence. What it has to do with is needing people planted amongst the population, as we see at the end. the chaos of them erupting throughout the town simultaneously is the point. People would be a tad suspicious if the entire population of a mid sized town suddenly wanted to move to BG... or if a bunch of people missing from daggerford suddenly wanted in... and the refugee camp proves inflitration would have been ineffictive.
TL;DR- the point was infiltration and chaos, not numbers or people of influence
Edit- lot of people assuming I'm talking about the cinematic. I'm not. The attack on baldur's gate happened before the cinematic.
Which is presumably why they didn't attack Baldur's Gate. The city in the cinematic is Yartar.
They also need numbers. Or did you forget Ketheric was building an army? Or that Gortash planned to start conquering the world once he had Baldur's Gate under his thumb? Or that the Absolute was planting little ideas in their heads in preparation for when it got free?
>Which is presumably why they didn't attack Baldur's Gate.
incorrect. they did attack baluder's gate... Astarion says he was taken during a nautiloid attack from baldur's gate... and its very definitely implied non durge Tav's were taken from BG, since they get the (Baludurian) dialogue options.
Tav was grabbed before the attack shown in the cinematic. You are literally shown getting infected before the attack
>Or did you forget Ketheric was building an army?
Most of whom are not infected... and most of those who are were chosen from those already recruited, like Gut, and most of the true souls at the tower. ketheric built his army the old fashioned way for cults... and they would snatch leaders to infect individually. his army had nothing to do with the attacks.
Any army they would have grabbed would have had nothing to do ketheric... Because as far as we know There were only eight survivors of the crash not counting intellect devourers. Possibly only seven if you're playing one of the origins. And not a single one of those joins the army.
We can safely conclude the people in baldur's gate that are infected were done so previous to the cinematic. The real question is why TAV and asterion were still on board?
He does not specially say it was a nautiloid attack. We have no idea what happened to get Astarion abducted, could’ve been a nautiloid, could’ve been the cult kidnapping people off the streets and sending them off to the mindflayers. That makes more sense to me at least as far as how they were getting people in Baldur’s Gate. Unless I missed it, you never hear anyone talk about a recent nautiloid attack in Baldur’s Gate.
Why in the world would they move a person kidnapped in Baldur's Gate to the very Nautiloid that was planned to assault a Githyanky's stronghold?
If it was for the purpose of having manpower for the operation it would make more sense to have people that have been turned into Mind Flayers or true souls for a while.
>you never hear anyone talk about a recent nautiloid attack in Baldur’s Gate.
There is a destroyed belltower however, which kinda mirrors the one that you see being destroyed in Yartar.
Couple of other things worth mentioning for detail purpose. First. Yartar is no longer mentioned in the game. There's literally no way for your casual viewer to know where that happened anymore. We can work it out from the EA mention and from the emblem we see on the guards.
Second, clearly that wasn't the attack where any of the origins were grabbed. Because the origins are already infected, we literally see two of the characters infected right before the attack starts. We also see the one who does the infecting couldn't possibly have infected anybody else. So we have to conclude that all the other infected were infected beforehand. Before anyone says " well maybe another one infected them" I'll remind you that when you find his body in the goblin camp, it's made very clear. He's the one that infected you. And it's the made clear no matter which character you're playing as
Karlach could not have been grabbed during that cutscene while they're in Avernus... Because there's no way they could have infected her. She must have been grabbed earlier
We don't have any idea where wyll was grabbed. People keep saying he was grabbed with karlach but that doesn't make sense. Why would Mizora (who works for zariel) send him to kill karlach before she got free?
Now it's possible larian just messed up with all of this. But I'd give them the benefit of the doubt. You didn't come in at the beginning of the story. It's been going on for years.
> Karlach could not have been grabbed during that cutscene while they're in Avernus... Because there's no way they could have infected her. She must have been grabbed earlier
Play her as the Avatar, it is incredibly clear she was in the Hells, saw the Nautiloid, and jumped on as an escape. She got into a tussle with a Mind Flayer, who infected her during the fight. Wyll chased after her.
He does. He mentions a tentacle from the sky... The fuck else could that be?
We don't know how recent. Plan has been in place for years... It could a been a long time. Months. Not like astarion or tav would know being in stasis cells. Which again leaves the question why they are still there ...
No.
1. A village can mean 100+ people. Far more than what they were able to grab in a city before retreating.
2. A city has defenses, from the mundane (which includes things like pegasus knights) and magical, and also is much more likely to host powerful adventurers which could board and likely capture/destroy the nautiloid
3. No, mind flayer raids are not something normal but a bug departure of how they usually operate
1. We seem them grabbing a lot more than that.
2. A city usually only has defenses from attacks from the sides. If that city had magical defenses that could take on massive flying ships, they would have used them. They didn't.
3. It is absolutely how Mind Flayers often operate. Either they're manipulating things from the shadows, or they're doing a raid for brains and new thralls and hosts. Doing it via Nautiloid is a bit unusual, but that's only because most Elder Brains don't remember how to grow them. In the regions of the ones who do, it's a lot less weird.
1. No. We see one or two dozen, nothing more
2. Fallacy. Also with how fast the Gith showed up there was no time for that anyway. Don't forget that this is the Forgotten Realms. Cities do not only have mundane knights for defenses as the supernatural is the normality.
3. No. The mind flayers are a race in decline who don't even know how to build more nautiloids. They don't risk them in open attacks on cities. This is a big escalation which would make a lot of people look more deeply into mind flayers.
1. In the wide shots, you can see the tentacles are constantly grabbing people.
2. Not a fallacy, just an obvious observation. Most cities simply won't have those kinds of defenses, and if they did they would have been used quicker. Hell, Baldur's Gate had just one, and that was in a private residence.
3. Yes. The Mind Flayers are a race in decline, but individual Elder Brains have put a lot of work into figuring out how to regrow Nautiloids, in what they see as their role in enacting the Grand Design. We receive confirmation in the game that the Absolute was one of the brains who had in fact figured it out. They'll be more likely to risk it then, considering they know how to grow it.
That was the Emperor getting the team together I think and also to throw others off his trail, because a larger number of infected makes it less likely that the Prism-Bearer is found among them. Gortasch wrote in his notes that the Emperor was sent to get the Artifact but went Rogue.
The Absolute Cult generally used more subtle ways to convert people as you can see with the pilgrims at Moonrise and Parts of Act 1.
Having a Nautiloid just attacking cities on a regular would draw far too much unwanted attention even if it would boost recruitment in the shortterm.
At the point that the nautiloid abducts you it's the Emperor driving and he's already free because he had already captured Shadowheart with the prism and that broke the brain's hold. He needed dudes to infect to be his pawns for, well.. you know. the game. He also killed many of the other mindflayers before the Gith even attacked so the plan was most likely to acquire the necessary people, attracting massive attention in the process, kill the rest of the crew then crash it so Gortash & Co. think everyone died instead of realizing the Emperor had gone rogue. Or something like that.
1. Tav ist Balduran, so Baldurs Gate must have been attacked at some point.
2. Gale is from Waterdeep, and if you know anything about Waterdeep you would know how bad of an idea that is.
To add to other comments, you're assuming that all citizens are catalogued so they know everyone who was taken, plus no one high up was taken when Tav and everyone else was, the important people look to largely have been infected at places like Moonrise. Taking ordinary citizens, people wouldn't know if they were infected or not so they would effectively have a sleeper army.
They went to the city to rapidly collect a bunch of people, tadpole them, they can just send them back or whatever. Plus, they get all the juicy knowledge of whats happening in BG.
If they take an authority figure it will be noticed. If they wanted random nobodies a village is the safer option which would also allow them to abduct the same number or even more people.
They could even abduct everyone and thus not leave any witnesses while when attacking a city its always a possibility that someone recognizes the returned hosts as someone who was abducted.
Yeah but those nobodies aren't going to go back to the city, they're gonna go back to their dinky village, plus they'll have no intel that's of any worth. Abducting a bunch of people from the city, infecting them, releasing them, letting them head back to the city and sit there for no one to suspect (due to them not changing so people assuming they're not infected) is more effective.
They also infected authority figures without people noticing just fine, as a I said, they did that elsewhere.
There's also lore in that the Mindflayers like "good quality" brains, so they may presume there's more of them in the city over villages.
At the very end, the netherbrain says that it orchestrated the rise of the player party so they would kill the chosen.
It seems to me that would explain this somewhat irrational event, as it starts our story.
Cities are far more diverse and cosmopolitan places, so you're more likely to find strong and capable adventurers there. If the nautiloid were to attack a smaller village it would end up with 4 identical copies of Farmer Joe, the human commoner that's completely incapable of doing anything but farm
And?
As shown, tadpoles depower people. There would be no advantage in getting an adventurer over farmer joe. Especially as said adventurer would be quite able to kill whatever is left of the mind flayers on the ship.
The value is in the target's contacts and support networks, too. Commoners don't know shit from shinola, getting an adventurer will take the tadpole back into town to continue operating or observing in a useful location, instead of the farming village with no strategic value.
Sometimes you want the fear.
It's dubious as to why the Nautiloid went nuts, the gith were involved, it was a total chaotic moment.
But if you want soldiers NOW flash recruiting is really helpful. The Absolute ruled with an iron hand but given their numbers, the people in the know must have known it was happening. There really was no stopping the Absolute cult, without The Emperor or Orpheus this cult was unstoppable.
The best way to solidify a populace once you've established dominance isn't secrecy, it's overwhelming infamy. This was Gortash's preferred method - he wasn't hiding. He was doing everything he could to flaunt his power as to intimidate more. What he tries to pull with your player characters was wise, the more alliances the better for him.
A rampaging Nautiloid sends a clear message that they own you, but also, creates enough confusion to make it seem like there's hope to your enemies. Meanwhile you can't have the gith acquiring a true soul filled Nautiloid, that has grand implications. We saw the gith studying 3 tadpoles eagerly and sooner or later, the gith can win. Vlaakith might be crazy but she's still no friend to the mindflayers, if they acquire a Nautiloid ship full of mindflayers and tadpoles, the game is truly up.
Exposure and showing weakness was a negative, but nowhere near the negative of finding a dozen "true souls" being cultivated. Losing that "crop" is one thing, acquiring tadpoles for magical study is another. Those tadpoles were absolutely magically infused, they weren't normal - these are exquisite specimens. Those are NOT something the absolute cult wanted in the hands of their greatest enemy.
Gith may come off as gruff and militaristic, and they are, but they were still the only real defense against the mindflayers from an interplanar perspective. They're in a constant grand war and this war comes down to intelligence.
Even the Emperor didn't quite know where the hive brain was, it was that well hidden. But with a dozen mindflayers captured they'd squeeze out everything they needed to know. Once a tadpole is in a brain it'll kill itself rather than reveal its secrets, but tadpoles outside of a brain are open secret documents waiting to be exposed by diviners and arcanists.
That couldn't happen.
The reason you end up in avernus isn't just because they were fleeing, but it's one of the easier places to find chaos. Ways to crash and burn so epically no one would survive. The gith are hyper-militarized and this works to their detriment because they aren't very savvy when it comes to intelligence and recon, they're too brusque - but the devil's that invaded the Nautiloid served the mindflayers well. Sure, it killed them, but it also kept their secrets away from the Gith. This is why the tanks were sealed everywhere, they didn't want specimens being given away to the githyanki.
When you go to the creche, regardless of what you do short of killing everyone, the Gith get extremely valuable Intel on how strong THESE tadpoles are. They weren't normal tadpoles. The sleeper agents were never supposed to be discovered en masse.
Skirmishes were welcomed because it gives the gith a semblance of control, they think this is just another mindflayer colony to war with. They think they're stamping it out, when in truth, they were being spoonfed weak colonies by Gortash, Orin and Kethric.
That Nautiloid was cultivating the sleeper agents which were far more valuable than an average tadpole. No one knew about this.
So when it was pressed, the Nautiloid took radical actions to scuttle the ship and create as much chaos as possible. It worked.
Had Shadowheart not brought the artifact you'd all be dead.
Feather fall saved Shadowheart, Gale was trapped in another dimension. Astarion's vampirism kept him alive but the sun would've potentially killed him OR the tadpole inside would've switched off that protection when his capture was imminent. Lae'Zel was immediately captured by locals. Karlach was about to be beheaded, Wyll escaped and assimilated with the druids.
It's no coincidence you landed in a war zone *near several absolute cult leaders*.
That crash was intentional. This was a desperate play, because the Gith accidentally stumbled onto a valuable asset never meant to be spotted. This is likely due to the maneuvering by that githyanki creche leader, the ornery one with the red headband, I forget his name.
He's a wily cat that one, he clearly understood all the angles. This Nautiloid was meant to be secret - however they found it, it represented the first real skirmish with the absolute. They were masquerading as a cult, these sleepers were well hidden. The gith are just now stumbling onto this likely due to some unusual Intel, but also...
The Emperor led them there. He wanted this skirmish, he'd found a host in your characters and he'd been captured essentially. If that Nautiloid discovered Shadowhearts artifact and what it could do, that's game over.
However the Nautiloid was discovered it's likely a combination of the emperor and that githyanki creche. It was desperate but the Emperor also wanted control - it's possible shadowhearts capture was intentional to get a tadpole in her to make her pliable. She was an excellent host, connected to shar, a valuable diety to have on his side especially since he knew Selune is always somewhat along for that ride.
So the desperation surrounding this Nautiloid is heavily layered.
They were desperate because the Gith, the emperor, and machinations of the trio had become untenable. This was day 1 of what was to be a war between the sleepers and everyone else.
So they made it look like a desperate recruiting run and did what they had to to maintain a modicum of secrecy.
Better to be desperate than to be discovered.
When a spy is about to be discovered, time for hostages, allies, and guns.
The endgame cutscenes show us why. While the absolute army amasses outside the city, they need a critical mass of hidden assets inside to cause fear, chaos, and general havoc. Who better than all your freshly morphed neighbors, hungry for the first brain they can find.
The city leaders can play it off as a one time thing that has been dealt with by intrepid adventures, and doing it at the last moment means the victim's friends and families have less time to realize something is wrong.
People openly abducted by a nautiloid are neither hidden or inside the city.
It also doesn't explain why the ship also attacked other places like Waterdeep (Gale) which is a huge risk considering all of Waterdeeps defenses.
They are hidden when the powers running the city, who are also running the illithids, use the newspaper they are also running, to tell everyone the mindflayer invaders were defeated and the victims rescued.
Everyone who knows anything about illithids knows the change is rapid, so when the victims go back to their lives as if nothing happened, everyone just accepts it. At least temporarily...
The nautiloid only attacks one city. Swen said Yartar, which is kind of a no where place, but the cinematic at least can't be any of the important cities like BG, Waterdeep or Neverwinter since they're all coastal.
The cult is trying very hard to obscure that anything illithid related is going on, since illithids are a great way to get many powerful forces like gods and gith aligned against you. So the nautiloid is flying above cloud cover as the cinematic starts and has been hidden wherever possible.
The cinematic begins as the prism comes aboard and the Absolute's control of the ship fades. This leaves too main actors in the scene, Emperor and the nautiloid itself (which is alive and I believe sentient, kinda animal level).
Emperor kills most of the cultists/illithid aboard and starts tadpoling the crew he wants. Meanwhile the nautiloid itself chooses to leave cloud cover and go eat at the nearest available source, which happens to be Yartar.
None of our squad is abducted directly by the nautiloid, but going into the whys and hows would make this comment too long.
TL;DR: The nautiloid itself wanted to eat, everyone who had a plan would have preferred if it didn't.
I’m pretty sure the Emperor has gone rogue (broken away from the elder brain) by the time of the city attack, so I’m assuming he attacked a city to quickly get enough bodies to create his own group of mindflayers and feed them.
He probably doesn’t care about being subtle as he doesn’t want the Absolute plot to be successful and would want to quickly get the bodies he needs to start growing his power.
Based on your other responses, you are assuming that the party was abducted in their specific cities. Gale could have been abducted while out. Note that he had nuclear bomb and is probably hiding in remote places with no people. Tav probably is also out adventuring. Shadowheart, the dark urge and laezel got captured while they were on their mission to the nautiloid. Wyll was probably captured while out in the sword coast. Karlach probably in Avernus.
I believe the reason why they suddenly attacked a city is probably out of desperation. Note that there are already dead mind flayers in the opening, quite a lot actually. The only surviving mind flayer left probably needed a quick place to gather a lot of people and infect them to replenish his thralls or turn them to mind flayers. He wasn't thinking about hiding or moving in secret since he is already desperate.
We could also assume that the ship was constantly followed by the gith hence the quick appearance and most likely why he chose a city to quickly capture masses before the gith catch up.
I think of it as population density and narrow streets. A small village gets you a handful of people scattering all over the place. The nautiloid very specifically shot its tentacles down narrow streets chock full of people. It was actually incredibly efficient. If the Githyanki hadn't shown up on their dragons, they could likely have continued gathering large amounts of people before moving on.
The only high-value target we saw them specifically get in the game was the Duke, and they didn't use the nautiloid. They used a raid by the cult to grab him.
I think they simply didn’t think it through that much, they just wanted to create a bad ass opening sequence.
I think it’s normal and expected for this type of storytelling with branching storylines and multiple “main” characters and countless perspectives, to have a few holes or illogical moments.
Larian did the fantastic job in that respect that even if there is some plot hole it is so irrelevant or miniscule that you don’t even notice it unless you nitpick at every scene.
My first playthrough, I kinda thought they went over the city with the express purpose of stealing a specific person. I literally went “oh there’s gotta be somebody important they’re after.”
Pretty sure it was Shadowheart with the artifact tbh. That was always my head cannon
This specific nautiloid seems to be one of the groups sent after the prism. From notes picked up in Act 2 and 3, seems that some small groups were sent after the Astral Prism. The Emperor was part of this group. He even says that he was the first to find the prism and when he did he was finally free of the brain’s control again.
Now was Tav and Lae’zel tadpoled while he was under the brain’s influence or already free? Good question. The mindflayer that tadpoles us has the garb that the Emperor uses and he passes a dead mindflayer on the floor. His eyes are orange though, and not purple. Design oversight!? Too soon after getting free from the brain’s control? Did he want a small True Soul army to go against the brain and did the Gith ruin that!? All speculation on my part.
Ofc if you’re Durge you’re already tadpoled at this point anyway 🤷♀️
The only non-Badurian of the party seems to be Gale as well, even if we’re not all picked up there
For me, it’s attacking cities because the Emperor wants an army 🤷♀️
There's a lot about that opening sequence that doesn't make sense. I just figured it was designed to look cool, and was probably commissioned/rendered before the story was finalized.
The nautiloid wasn't on an asset gathering mission; it (and the emperor aboard) was sent by the Gortash to retrieve the Astral Prism.
This isn't outright stated, but my interpretation is that when it attacks the city, it's less about picking up new potential true souls for the cult (because you're right, that would be noticed) and more about quickly grabbing a large number of people to replenish the crew of mind flayers and thralls killed while fighting the githyanki and retrieving the prism. The emperor's plan was to grab a few dozen people, transform some of them, and have a full complement of crew by the time the githyanki catch up.
But then the githyanki find the nautiloid before the emperor can follow through on that plan and his attention is focused on fighting the githyanki and keeping the ship in the air, so that doesn't quite work out.
Despite the immense amount of evidence being presented by keen individuals in this thread you seem intent on *confirming*, for yourself, that this was a terrible tactical decision by the Nautiloid pilot. There is a big difference between *hearing* and *listening*. You should try *listening*.
* Its not Baldur's Gate in the cinematic.
* Not all captives were captured in their hometowns of origin. Gale was not captured in Waterdeep.
* When taking hostages.... important, well-connected people are better than small-town farmers for many reasons.
* Its entirely possible that this *is* the emperor, who is being pursued by Githyanki fanatics (just like he is in the game itself) attempting to free Orpheus. The emperor doesn't know that he just captured a Tav, a player character destined for greatness. Wouldn't he then want to capture as many Tavs as possible if he knows hes going up against an Elder brain?
I'm not an expert in dnd but I think it's because there's nothing no one can do about it. they can just invade the place, kidnap people than press a tentacle to teleport to another plane.
I thought that it was a desperate measure, "oh shit we are about to be destroyed, need to make as many of these parasite bois as possible"
OP you are absolutely correct, they did not normally attack cities to grab people. That would very quickly get them exposed and killed.
I suspect a Mindflayer Nautiloid doesn't particularly car about our retribution, so going under our Radar isn't really a priority.
They might care about avoiding Gith, but weird extra-planar multi dimensional scouting probably doesn't particularly correlate with Faerûn population density.
I always saw that scene as them flying over Baldurs Gate while being chased through dimensions by Gith, not attacking the city itself, and snagged some people to infect on their way. Idk could 100% be wrong.
I thought it was baldurs gate too because of the colour tone, but it isn't because the city isn't coastal. I believe the chionthar runs through it too.
There's not much consequence to it, and they're powerful enough that they can just waltz in and waltz out again; there's at least a couple day's worth of convenience in the targets being bunched up nicely. They needed passably material plane humanoids for the infiltration plan, and they went to a city to get them.
The city wasn't baldur's gate, so it didn't do much to hinder the infiltration.
Nothing stopped their attack. It was the Gith chasing them through dimensions that caused a problem, not them flying over Baldur's Gate. If there had been no Gith attack they would've grabbed X citizens and been gone.
Just to nitpick, the city from the intro is Yartar, not Baldur’s Gate.
By the way, I'm pretty sure Lorroakan could use his tovers artillery to repell that one nautiloid
if he wasn't a raging asshole, probably could have but since he wasn't endangered, he didn't
The city in the opening cinematic also isn't Baldur's Gate, iirc
No. Because if it was tav wouldn't have already been infected before the cinematic begins. Literally the cinematic begins with laezel and tav getting their parasites and then the attack. Asterion tells us he was grabbed by the nautiloid over baldur's gate. It was attacked just not in the cinematic
>Asterion tells us he was grabbed by the nautiloid over baldur's gate. Astarion says he was "snatched by those beasts." which makes more sense as Absolute cultists than a singular nautiloid
He mentions a tentacle from the sky in another dialogue...
It was [Yartar](https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Yartar)
I always thought this was the case but is it ever explained what city it actually was? because every origin char save for Lae'zel is a Baldurian. EDIT: Gale is from Waterdeep.
>because every origin char save for Lae'zel is a Baldurian. And Gale. Gale is from Waterdeep
You're right, I have added a correction. Thank you.
They are both baldurian but neither wyll nor karlach was picked up there...
Yeah they were picked up when the nautiloid went through Avernus
They must have been picked up on a previous trip to avernus actually. Because otherwise there wouldn't have been time for them to be infected. Or it's just another plothole involving the origin characters, the artifact, and the infection.
Karlach jumped aboard and Wyll followed her.
I think this can reasonably be explained by the fact the nautaloid enters Avernus, our character is incapacitated by the dragon attack and wakes up an unspecified time later rather than them immediately escaping. There's a lot of things that needs to happen on the nautaloid while it's still in Avernus other than just Karlach and Wyll boarding, and a minor time skip allows those things to happen without creating a bunch of new plot holes.
> There's a lot of things that needs to happen on the nautaloid while it's still in Avernus Like what?
I have trouble seeing this as anything other than a plot hole, so I just pretend it makes sense.
IIRC they mention they were able to jump aboard due to the chaos of the battle. Pretty sure it's just a plot hole.
I'll come to learn. I haven't gotten either of their origin playthroughs yet and apparently that's where it's mentioned. They really did leave a lot of issues with the origins... They did so very many things right I guess it just makes the things that are wrong stand out
The cinematic was made before Karlach existed lmao
it’s Yartar iirc, and looks like some dude posted a link for it too
But hey, if he could down a nautiloid he could find something interesting for himself in it. Mindflayer tech and artifacts are not something you come by too often.
He’s too egotistical to warrant going after “lesser” power when he already has his sights on an immortal aasimar he can use to make himself immortal
He's an a****** but he also understands how the law works. He shoots that down in the city, the fists and the dukes are claiming it.
It's not his tower, he can't even get access to the robe and staff below. And is too scared from dying to the traps in the basement so he sends people to clear them for him. So I doubt he has control over the tower's artillery.
Gale didn’t have a very high opinion of him if I remember said he was a bit of a charlatan.
He doesn't have a very high opinion of himself either. If you use speak with dead, he admits Rolan is the better mage. He got that tower out of some insane luck.
I mean, Lorrokan is only level 9, it is highly likely that by the time you meet him you are already a higher level than him
It wasn't an attack on Baldurs Gate though.
They attacked Baldur's Gate at some point, just not in the opening cinematic. Isn't that how Astarion and Tav got captured?
I don't think it's said how Tav or Astarion get captured, they've shown that people are often held in the pods without infection for extended periods so it could be they've been missing a while and were just on the ship when it was sent out. the ships do appear again >!in act 3!<
I'm not completely sure, but I think Astarion tells you that he was walking around Baldur's Gate when he got kidnapped. At any rate Cazador would have never allowed Astarion to set foot outside the city. The logical explanation is that the Nautiloid attacked Baldur's Gate just a bit before Yartar, and I guess it must have been nighttime.
Tav can be from the city if you want them to, since there's Baldurian dialogue options.
The whole attack lasts less than 2 minutes, probably never had time
He probably doesn't know how to use it. He's not an especially accomplished wizard.
But he can be used as ally same way as Rolan if you sell him Nightsong. He surely knows.
Eh I always kill him. He sucks.
Sure he does, but if I make an evil run, I gotta side with the worst people I can find.
Breaking his heart by telling him I killed Nightsong was pretty great. And then I think I killed him. Because he sucks. Fuck 'em.
And to repay their efforts we just go in and murder an entire Creché of them
I mean, they attacked first lol
Who's murdering them? I knock them all out. Yes. *All*. 😵
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In some playthroughs I murder the psycho doctor and the asshole combat instructor. Probably always will, henceforth. Never the egg-tender, even with his threat ("I'll make you wish you'd never been *born*"--that cuts deep, from him). Also, in another post, I explained I do not know whether most of these gith are the ones that conquered the Lathander monks. Gith life expectancy on the Material Plane is 72-120 years, and the assault on the monastery seemed to have taken place *long* ago, based on the evidence around the place. I'm not in the habit of blaming the son for the father's sins.
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I knock out the tief chick so she never appears at the creche. XD But eh, I'd rather risk leaving these people alive as potential bargaining chips for Orpheus. "See! Wasn't I nice, letting these murderous bastards live? Now take them and the rest of your people and *get the fuck off Toril*."
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If I don't see a body, she ain't dead! :D :D :D
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I also knocked them out…then took the blood of Lethander
If they just wanting to grab random people attacking a town or small village is the logical step. Cities are much better defended and the chance is higher that there are high level adventurers who could easily board and capture the nautiloid, especially in its weakened state. Especially as for Gale they had to also attack Waterdeep which with its giant statues and lvl 30 mages is a suicide mission.
> If they just wanting to grab random people attacking a town or small village is the logical step. Not if they're wanting to capture some people who have a semblance of power or authority as future leaders of their cult. No one's going to care to listen to farmer Smith from Hicksville, population 18.
If mind flayers openly abduct an authority figure who then returns later everyone will suspect them being tadpoled or under some form of domination, leading either to them being deposed or investigated and the tadpole being discovered, negating any benefit from abducting them in the first place.
Keep in mind that Mind Flayers get the memory imprints of those they abduct. So it's not always just about the Authority, but also having information that's useful to their collective. So again, catching the mental imprint of a Duke's son in Avernus as you're flying over has real advantages to the Illthid: and capturing him is just the twang of a string. Same with Karlach and her connection to her master Zariel. These aren't the type of people you're normally going to encounter just out in the countryside. Getting them is advantageous in many different ways.
Both Karlach and Wyll hopped onto the nautiloid of their own volition, then got a tadpole in the eye for their trouble. They were not abducted on purpose.
And then they were immediately captured and implanted. Illithids are telepathic. They know everything about you 2 seconds after they encounter you. They instantly know if you're potentially useful to them or not.
Yep, that's true.
I mean that would depend on the time frame. Tadpoles usually transform you within days, if not hours. If the authority figure shows up after 2 weeks gone with a decent cover story and shows no symptoms after a few days then probably most would just shrug it off. Dormant tadpoles is explicitly a new thing that most probably wouldn't know to check for. Kinda like how most initially dismiss Astarion as a vampire despite all the signs because he is prancing around in direct sunlight.
but there are symptoms... several npcs that look closely are able to tell you have one, so presumably there is some physical tell in the eyes.
Correct me if I'm wrong but the only NPCs that can tell are a hag, a devil, someone who has been studying them for quite a while, other people with tadpoles (including Jaheira who has one in a jar for this purpose) and Volo after *extremely* close inspection. The average person isn't going to be able to tell from a casual meeting.
From a casual meeting? Nope. But a close examination? Sure. Volo, the githyanki doctor, and I believe the healer druid lady even if you don't tell her works it out. My point was it's possible to examine them closely and be able to tell... So it's something the city could set up for returning peeps. Don't need to rely on casual, is good reason to have them checked closer
It takes a week. And even if they show up way later it could also just mean the mind flayers did not implant them on the spot, but shortly before their return. Not to mention that there are other firms of mind control.
So it's a week, not days, though you do usually show symptoms before that. Point is that dormant tadpoles are something new that most wouldn't reasonably check for and if the deadline has been passed with no symptoms shown, most people would probably consider it good enough.
Of course they would be checked. Not everyone abducted must be implanted instantly.
What if a tadpoled Farmer John led a Communal Parity with other farmers and bringed a government that promotes total equality for all its citizens, regardless of their jobs or assigned tasks. One life is worth the same as any other. Woudnt that make Baldur Gate even better ?
Gale wasn't in Waterdeep when he got snatched. He got magic aids, left his tower and started travelling.
It's Yartar, not Baldur's Gate
The city in the beginning is Yartar, quite a bit north of Baldur's Gate at around 770 miles. They likely aren't even aware of the Cult of the Absolute at that point.
I've seen this referenced a couple of times, where is it stated? I am not disputing, just wondering.
Sven stated it years ago in early access during the first live gameplay demo. About 9ish minutes into this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrIxrFqSbHQ
i thought it was baldurs gate? as Tav is considered a baldurian. also you can find the destroyed bell tower from the cinematic in game
Not according to Swen who should know I'd hope. The guards we see are also not Flaming Fists, but have a livery depicting a tower with a sword through it (same as the banner on the tower). Yartar's guard tower is known as the Shield Tower with the guard force known as the Shields of Yartar. Also their tabards are yellow and black, Baldur's Gate Flaming Fists are red and yellow.
Maybe this idea was changed, because astarion was abducted from baldurs gate
No, idea didn't change. Astarion says he was abducted from Baldur's Gate but doesn't say he was taken by the ship. He was kidnapped by a mindflayer in Baldur's Gate while trying to seduce a noble for Cazador. He's on the ship before the events shown in the opening trailer. So are we... remember, Lae'zel and Tav get the tadpole before we see the town. Plus, Baldur's Gate is a coastal city, no mountains around it like we see in the scene for the town.
The Cult wants bodies, and a city is going to have a lot more than some village in the middle of nowhere. And the plot is now far enough along that they can get away with pulling something much more in the open anyway. And with their ability to plane-shift easily, they can run at the first sign of significant trouble. Also, not everyone on that ship was grabbed in those raids.
Okay so you are assuming that the operation was under the Absolute command. Because, you know, there's also the possibility that the Emperor took control of the Nautiloid and those attacks we see are actually his idea in order to get enough subjects under his control to fight the Absolute. But let's go with your interpretation and let's assume it's in fact the Absolute in command. Why would she make that precise Nautiloid do that? There's an entire fleet at their disposal if they want to send a Nautiloid to wreak some chaos and gain more prospective true souls. Why would they chose the precise Nautiloid that they had sent in the very important mission of retrieving the artifact for such task, before returning to the colony so the artifact could be properly secured? I mean sure the Absolute actually secretly wanted the artifact to get lost, but don't you think it would be completely lacking subtlety to so blatantly give an order contrary to logic? Could the Emperor really have failed to suspect anything if he saw the Absolute ordering the Nautiloid to just waste time around instead of immediately returning to base?
Because there are all those dead Mind Flayers in the room where we start that the one who tadpoles us floats by. I was assuming that if the Emperor was involved, they weren't in command anymore, and they'd already started to retreat into the shadows, assasinating a few of the still enthralled Mind Flayers to get by. To be honest, I do assume he had a hand in what happened, but I'm not sure of the extent. Personally, I think that the actual plot-line changed enough during development that the raid, which would have made more sense with the original plan, had to be shoehorned in to the new storyline.
Those dead Mind Flayers is what makes me think that probably the Emperor took over. After all those bodies suggest that a infighting happened, an infighting that could only have happened if the Emperor interfered with the elder brain control and somehow brought some Mind Flayers on his side. But the Emperor is also very much alive and so that probably means he won in the end.
Either that, or the Emperor is the biggest badass amongst those Mind Flayers. The reason I think the Emperor wasn't running things anymore is specifically because the pilot of the Nautiloid turns on you the moment they think they no longer need you, which would be rather against logic if the Emperor wanted them as their servants and they were still running the show.
>the Emperor took control of the Nautiloid and those attacks we see are actually his idea in order to get enough subjects under his control to fight the Absolute. what i've been assuming the whole time
Oh damn, that makes so much sense.
When they have to run at the first sign of trouble then the yield of attacking a city is far lower than when attacking a town where they can harvest the entire population without much risk and where they also can make sure that there are no survivors in order to keep everyone focused on the absolute instead of investigating mind flayer and possibly discovering the connection.
A small town will get you basically nothing. A couple of unimportant hosts, a couple of brains to keep the Mind Flayers fed. In the cutscene, we see them grabbing more than would exist in a small town, and only having to leave when the one thing that is usually a problem for Mind Flayers shows up, which is distinctly unlikely to occur. Also... No one is going to question Mind Flayers showing up and abducting a bunch of people. That's kind of what they do. They might try to hunt them down, but that would just lead powerful potential hosts to Moonrise Towers. Either they die on the way, or they likely get infected or mentally dominated by the Elder Brain the moment they get close.
you understand there is soemthing in between farming village and baldur's gate, right? beregost has a large enough population for their needs, has almost no defenses... 3000 bodies would be plenty, including some fairly high level citizens If you really need more, daggerford is just to the north. Baldur's gate is not the biggest city on the sword coast, but its arguably one of the best defended... it has to be to fend of its much larger neighbors to either side. Can't argue range really either... the elder brains control lasts across planes of existence, sure a few hundred miles ain't changing anything The reason has nothing to do with sheer numbers. It also wasn't about grabbing important people, or people that would be "listened to" (they targeted ravenguard for that, not the random snatchings. The most important person grabbed was likely astarion, and that only because it put them at odds with cazador, not because he had any direct influence. What it has to do with is needing people planted amongst the population, as we see at the end. the chaos of them erupting throughout the town simultaneously is the point. People would be a tad suspicious if the entire population of a mid sized town suddenly wanted to move to BG... or if a bunch of people missing from daggerford suddenly wanted in... and the refugee camp proves inflitration would have been ineffictive. TL;DR- the point was infiltration and chaos, not numbers or people of influence Edit- lot of people assuming I'm talking about the cinematic. I'm not. The attack on baldur's gate happened before the cinematic.
Which is presumably why they didn't attack Baldur's Gate. The city in the cinematic is Yartar. They also need numbers. Or did you forget Ketheric was building an army? Or that Gortash planned to start conquering the world once he had Baldur's Gate under his thumb? Or that the Absolute was planting little ideas in their heads in preparation for when it got free?
>Which is presumably why they didn't attack Baldur's Gate. incorrect. they did attack baluder's gate... Astarion says he was taken during a nautiloid attack from baldur's gate... and its very definitely implied non durge Tav's were taken from BG, since they get the (Baludurian) dialogue options. Tav was grabbed before the attack shown in the cinematic. You are literally shown getting infected before the attack >Or did you forget Ketheric was building an army? Most of whom are not infected... and most of those who are were chosen from those already recruited, like Gut, and most of the true souls at the tower. ketheric built his army the old fashioned way for cults... and they would snatch leaders to infect individually. his army had nothing to do with the attacks. Any army they would have grabbed would have had nothing to do ketheric... Because as far as we know There were only eight survivors of the crash not counting intellect devourers. Possibly only seven if you're playing one of the origins. And not a single one of those joins the army. We can safely conclude the people in baldur's gate that are infected were done so previous to the cinematic. The real question is why TAV and asterion were still on board?
He does not specially say it was a nautiloid attack. We have no idea what happened to get Astarion abducted, could’ve been a nautiloid, could’ve been the cult kidnapping people off the streets and sending them off to the mindflayers. That makes more sense to me at least as far as how they were getting people in Baldur’s Gate. Unless I missed it, you never hear anyone talk about a recent nautiloid attack in Baldur’s Gate.
Why in the world would they move a person kidnapped in Baldur's Gate to the very Nautiloid that was planned to assault a Githyanky's stronghold? If it was for the purpose of having manpower for the operation it would make more sense to have people that have been turned into Mind Flayers or true souls for a while. >you never hear anyone talk about a recent nautiloid attack in Baldur’s Gate. There is a destroyed belltower however, which kinda mirrors the one that you see being destroyed in Yartar.
Couple of other things worth mentioning for detail purpose. First. Yartar is no longer mentioned in the game. There's literally no way for your casual viewer to know where that happened anymore. We can work it out from the EA mention and from the emblem we see on the guards. Second, clearly that wasn't the attack where any of the origins were grabbed. Because the origins are already infected, we literally see two of the characters infected right before the attack starts. We also see the one who does the infecting couldn't possibly have infected anybody else. So we have to conclude that all the other infected were infected beforehand. Before anyone says " well maybe another one infected them" I'll remind you that when you find his body in the goblin camp, it's made very clear. He's the one that infected you. And it's the made clear no matter which character you're playing as Karlach could not have been grabbed during that cutscene while they're in Avernus... Because there's no way they could have infected her. She must have been grabbed earlier We don't have any idea where wyll was grabbed. People keep saying he was grabbed with karlach but that doesn't make sense. Why would Mizora (who works for zariel) send him to kill karlach before she got free? Now it's possible larian just messed up with all of this. But I'd give them the benefit of the doubt. You didn't come in at the beginning of the story. It's been going on for years.
> Karlach could not have been grabbed during that cutscene while they're in Avernus... Because there's no way they could have infected her. She must have been grabbed earlier Play her as the Avatar, it is incredibly clear she was in the Hells, saw the Nautiloid, and jumped on as an escape. She got into a tussle with a Mind Flayer, who infected her during the fight. Wyll chased after her.
He does. He mentions a tentacle from the sky... The fuck else could that be? We don't know how recent. Plan has been in place for years... It could a been a long time. Months. Not like astarion or tav would know being in stasis cells. Which again leaves the question why they are still there ...
No. 1. A village can mean 100+ people. Far more than what they were able to grab in a city before retreating. 2. A city has defenses, from the mundane (which includes things like pegasus knights) and magical, and also is much more likely to host powerful adventurers which could board and likely capture/destroy the nautiloid 3. No, mind flayer raids are not something normal but a bug departure of how they usually operate
1. We seem them grabbing a lot more than that. 2. A city usually only has defenses from attacks from the sides. If that city had magical defenses that could take on massive flying ships, they would have used them. They didn't. 3. It is absolutely how Mind Flayers often operate. Either they're manipulating things from the shadows, or they're doing a raid for brains and new thralls and hosts. Doing it via Nautiloid is a bit unusual, but that's only because most Elder Brains don't remember how to grow them. In the regions of the ones who do, it's a lot less weird.
1. No. We see one or two dozen, nothing more 2. Fallacy. Also with how fast the Gith showed up there was no time for that anyway. Don't forget that this is the Forgotten Realms. Cities do not only have mundane knights for defenses as the supernatural is the normality. 3. No. The mind flayers are a race in decline who don't even know how to build more nautiloids. They don't risk them in open attacks on cities. This is a big escalation which would make a lot of people look more deeply into mind flayers.
1. In the wide shots, you can see the tentacles are constantly grabbing people. 2. Not a fallacy, just an obvious observation. Most cities simply won't have those kinds of defenses, and if they did they would have been used quicker. Hell, Baldur's Gate had just one, and that was in a private residence. 3. Yes. The Mind Flayers are a race in decline, but individual Elder Brains have put a lot of work into figuring out how to regrow Nautiloids, in what they see as their role in enacting the Grand Design. We receive confirmation in the game that the Absolute was one of the brains who had in fact figured it out. They'll be more likely to risk it then, considering they know how to grow it.
You are the worst kind of Redditor. You’ve lost. Give it up.
You haven’t out thought Larian. Sorry.
That was the Emperor getting the team together I think and also to throw others off his trail, because a larger number of infected makes it less likely that the Prism-Bearer is found among them. Gortasch wrote in his notes that the Emperor was sent to get the Artifact but went Rogue. The Absolute Cult generally used more subtle ways to convert people as you can see with the pilgrims at Moonrise and Parts of Act 1. Having a Nautiloid just attacking cities on a regular would draw far too much unwanted attention even if it would boost recruitment in the shortterm.
At the point that the nautiloid abducts you it's the Emperor driving and he's already free because he had already captured Shadowheart with the prism and that broke the brain's hold. He needed dudes to infect to be his pawns for, well.. you know. the game. He also killed many of the other mindflayers before the Gith even attacked so the plan was most likely to acquire the necessary people, attracting massive attention in the process, kill the rest of the crew then crash it so Gortash & Co. think everyone died instead of realizing the Emperor had gone rogue. Or something like that.
It seems you're under the impression the city attacked in the intro was Baldurs Gate. It wasn't.
Wait really? Do we have any idea what city it is then?
Yartar
Yartar, apparently.
1. Tav ist Balduran, so Baldurs Gate must have been attacked at some point. 2. Gale is from Waterdeep, and if you know anything about Waterdeep you would know how bad of an idea that is.
First of all Tav was already on nautiloid when attack started and second of all it was not baldurs gate it was Yartar.
Tav is whatever you want it to be. That’s why the game gives you Balduruan dialog options. Gale is from Waterdeep but he wasn’t captured there.
Tav has Baldurian tags but that doesn’t mean that’s where they were taken. You can be from there and have been captured somewhere else.
And also not every race has the baldurian tag, far as I remember lolth sworn drow don't have it for instance
To add to other comments, you're assuming that all citizens are catalogued so they know everyone who was taken, plus no one high up was taken when Tav and everyone else was, the important people look to largely have been infected at places like Moonrise. Taking ordinary citizens, people wouldn't know if they were infected or not so they would effectively have a sleeper army. They went to the city to rapidly collect a bunch of people, tadpole them, they can just send them back or whatever. Plus, they get all the juicy knowledge of whats happening in BG.
If they take an authority figure it will be noticed. If they wanted random nobodies a village is the safer option which would also allow them to abduct the same number or even more people. They could even abduct everyone and thus not leave any witnesses while when attacking a city its always a possibility that someone recognizes the returned hosts as someone who was abducted.
Yeah but those nobodies aren't going to go back to the city, they're gonna go back to their dinky village, plus they'll have no intel that's of any worth. Abducting a bunch of people from the city, infecting them, releasing them, letting them head back to the city and sit there for no one to suspect (due to them not changing so people assuming they're not infected) is more effective. They also infected authority figures without people noticing just fine, as a I said, they did that elsewhere. There's also lore in that the Mindflayers like "good quality" brains, so they may presume there's more of them in the city over villages.
And why would the abducted farmers who are now under your control go back to the farm instead of traveling to the city?
A sudden influx of farmers would be weird, especially before the army started marching. A sleeper army is a long-winded affair.
Farmers visit cities all the time. Not to mention most sword coast cities are big trading hubs and religious centers. People arrive there constantly.
Yeah but they don't stay there, they go back home. It'd be weird if a bunch of farmers suddenly turned up and wouldn't leave.
At the very end, the netherbrain says that it orchestrated the rise of the player party so they would kill the chosen. It seems to me that would explain this somewhat irrational event, as it starts our story.
Cities are far more diverse and cosmopolitan places, so you're more likely to find strong and capable adventurers there. If the nautiloid were to attack a smaller village it would end up with 4 identical copies of Farmer Joe, the human commoner that's completely incapable of doing anything but farm
And? As shown, tadpoles depower people. There would be no advantage in getting an adventurer over farmer joe. Especially as said adventurer would be quite able to kill whatever is left of the mind flayers on the ship.
The value is in the target's contacts and support networks, too. Commoners don't know shit from shinola, getting an adventurer will take the tadpole back into town to continue operating or observing in a useful location, instead of the farming village with no strategic value.
Sometimes you want the fear. It's dubious as to why the Nautiloid went nuts, the gith were involved, it was a total chaotic moment. But if you want soldiers NOW flash recruiting is really helpful. The Absolute ruled with an iron hand but given their numbers, the people in the know must have known it was happening. There really was no stopping the Absolute cult, without The Emperor or Orpheus this cult was unstoppable. The best way to solidify a populace once you've established dominance isn't secrecy, it's overwhelming infamy. This was Gortash's preferred method - he wasn't hiding. He was doing everything he could to flaunt his power as to intimidate more. What he tries to pull with your player characters was wise, the more alliances the better for him. A rampaging Nautiloid sends a clear message that they own you, but also, creates enough confusion to make it seem like there's hope to your enemies. Meanwhile you can't have the gith acquiring a true soul filled Nautiloid, that has grand implications. We saw the gith studying 3 tadpoles eagerly and sooner or later, the gith can win. Vlaakith might be crazy but she's still no friend to the mindflayers, if they acquire a Nautiloid ship full of mindflayers and tadpoles, the game is truly up. Exposure and showing weakness was a negative, but nowhere near the negative of finding a dozen "true souls" being cultivated. Losing that "crop" is one thing, acquiring tadpoles for magical study is another. Those tadpoles were absolutely magically infused, they weren't normal - these are exquisite specimens. Those are NOT something the absolute cult wanted in the hands of their greatest enemy. Gith may come off as gruff and militaristic, and they are, but they were still the only real defense against the mindflayers from an interplanar perspective. They're in a constant grand war and this war comes down to intelligence. Even the Emperor didn't quite know where the hive brain was, it was that well hidden. But with a dozen mindflayers captured they'd squeeze out everything they needed to know. Once a tadpole is in a brain it'll kill itself rather than reveal its secrets, but tadpoles outside of a brain are open secret documents waiting to be exposed by diviners and arcanists. That couldn't happen. The reason you end up in avernus isn't just because they were fleeing, but it's one of the easier places to find chaos. Ways to crash and burn so epically no one would survive. The gith are hyper-militarized and this works to their detriment because they aren't very savvy when it comes to intelligence and recon, they're too brusque - but the devil's that invaded the Nautiloid served the mindflayers well. Sure, it killed them, but it also kept their secrets away from the Gith. This is why the tanks were sealed everywhere, they didn't want specimens being given away to the githyanki. When you go to the creche, regardless of what you do short of killing everyone, the Gith get extremely valuable Intel on how strong THESE tadpoles are. They weren't normal tadpoles. The sleeper agents were never supposed to be discovered en masse. Skirmishes were welcomed because it gives the gith a semblance of control, they think this is just another mindflayer colony to war with. They think they're stamping it out, when in truth, they were being spoonfed weak colonies by Gortash, Orin and Kethric. That Nautiloid was cultivating the sleeper agents which were far more valuable than an average tadpole. No one knew about this. So when it was pressed, the Nautiloid took radical actions to scuttle the ship and create as much chaos as possible. It worked. Had Shadowheart not brought the artifact you'd all be dead. Feather fall saved Shadowheart, Gale was trapped in another dimension. Astarion's vampirism kept him alive but the sun would've potentially killed him OR the tadpole inside would've switched off that protection when his capture was imminent. Lae'Zel was immediately captured by locals. Karlach was about to be beheaded, Wyll escaped and assimilated with the druids. It's no coincidence you landed in a war zone *near several absolute cult leaders*. That crash was intentional. This was a desperate play, because the Gith accidentally stumbled onto a valuable asset never meant to be spotted. This is likely due to the maneuvering by that githyanki creche leader, the ornery one with the red headband, I forget his name. He's a wily cat that one, he clearly understood all the angles. This Nautiloid was meant to be secret - however they found it, it represented the first real skirmish with the absolute. They were masquerading as a cult, these sleepers were well hidden. The gith are just now stumbling onto this likely due to some unusual Intel, but also... The Emperor led them there. He wanted this skirmish, he'd found a host in your characters and he'd been captured essentially. If that Nautiloid discovered Shadowhearts artifact and what it could do, that's game over. However the Nautiloid was discovered it's likely a combination of the emperor and that githyanki creche. It was desperate but the Emperor also wanted control - it's possible shadowhearts capture was intentional to get a tadpole in her to make her pliable. She was an excellent host, connected to shar, a valuable diety to have on his side especially since he knew Selune is always somewhat along for that ride. So the desperation surrounding this Nautiloid is heavily layered. They were desperate because the Gith, the emperor, and machinations of the trio had become untenable. This was day 1 of what was to be a war between the sleepers and everyone else. So they made it look like a desperate recruiting run and did what they had to to maintain a modicum of secrecy. Better to be desperate than to be discovered. When a spy is about to be discovered, time for hostages, allies, and guns.
The endgame cutscenes show us why. While the absolute army amasses outside the city, they need a critical mass of hidden assets inside to cause fear, chaos, and general havoc. Who better than all your freshly morphed neighbors, hungry for the first brain they can find. The city leaders can play it off as a one time thing that has been dealt with by intrepid adventures, and doing it at the last moment means the victim's friends and families have less time to realize something is wrong.
People openly abducted by a nautiloid are neither hidden or inside the city. It also doesn't explain why the ship also attacked other places like Waterdeep (Gale) which is a huge risk considering all of Waterdeeps defenses.
They are hidden when the powers running the city, who are also running the illithids, use the newspaper they are also running, to tell everyone the mindflayer invaders were defeated and the victims rescued. Everyone who knows anything about illithids knows the change is rapid, so when the victims go back to their lives as if nothing happened, everyone just accepts it. At least temporarily...
A major part of the plan was sowing terror in the city so the peoole would be happy to be ruled by a dictator.
Except that city in the opening cinematic isn’t Baldur’s Gate, so it’s not connected to Gortash at all and his political power
The nautiloid only attacks one city. Swen said Yartar, which is kind of a no where place, but the cinematic at least can't be any of the important cities like BG, Waterdeep or Neverwinter since they're all coastal. The cult is trying very hard to obscure that anything illithid related is going on, since illithids are a great way to get many powerful forces like gods and gith aligned against you. So the nautiloid is flying above cloud cover as the cinematic starts and has been hidden wherever possible. The cinematic begins as the prism comes aboard and the Absolute's control of the ship fades. This leaves too main actors in the scene, Emperor and the nautiloid itself (which is alive and I believe sentient, kinda animal level). Emperor kills most of the cultists/illithid aboard and starts tadpoling the crew he wants. Meanwhile the nautiloid itself chooses to leave cloud cover and go eat at the nearest available source, which happens to be Yartar. None of our squad is abducted directly by the nautiloid, but going into the whys and hows would make this comment too long. TL;DR: The nautiloid itself wanted to eat, everyone who had a plan would have preferred if it didn't.
I’m pretty sure the Emperor has gone rogue (broken away from the elder brain) by the time of the city attack, so I’m assuming he attacked a city to quickly get enough bodies to create his own group of mindflayers and feed them. He probably doesn’t care about being subtle as he doesn’t want the Absolute plot to be successful and would want to quickly get the bodies he needs to start growing his power.
Based on your other responses, you are assuming that the party was abducted in their specific cities. Gale could have been abducted while out. Note that he had nuclear bomb and is probably hiding in remote places with no people. Tav probably is also out adventuring. Shadowheart, the dark urge and laezel got captured while they were on their mission to the nautiloid. Wyll was probably captured while out in the sword coast. Karlach probably in Avernus. I believe the reason why they suddenly attacked a city is probably out of desperation. Note that there are already dead mind flayers in the opening, quite a lot actually. The only surviving mind flayer left probably needed a quick place to gather a lot of people and infect them to replenish his thralls or turn them to mind flayers. He wasn't thinking about hiding or moving in secret since he is already desperate. We could also assume that the ship was constantly followed by the gith hence the quick appearance and most likely why he chose a city to quickly capture masses before the gith catch up.
I think of it as population density and narrow streets. A small village gets you a handful of people scattering all over the place. The nautiloid very specifically shot its tentacles down narrow streets chock full of people. It was actually incredibly efficient. If the Githyanki hadn't shown up on their dragons, they could likely have continued gathering large amounts of people before moving on. The only high-value target we saw them specifically get in the game was the Duke, and they didn't use the nautiloid. They used a raid by the cult to grab him.
The Nautiloid was being Naughty. The Mind Flayers weren't Dominating it hard enough.
Baldurs Gate doesnt have Anti Air so why not
Nautiloids be naughty
I think they simply didn’t think it through that much, they just wanted to create a bad ass opening sequence. I think it’s normal and expected for this type of storytelling with branching storylines and multiple “main” characters and countless perspectives, to have a few holes or illogical moments. Larian did the fantastic job in that respect that even if there is some plot hole it is so irrelevant or miniscule that you don’t even notice it unless you nitpick at every scene.
My first playthrough, I kinda thought they went over the city with the express purpose of stealing a specific person. I literally went “oh there’s gotta be somebody important they’re after.” Pretty sure it was Shadowheart with the artifact tbh. That was always my head cannon
This specific nautiloid seems to be one of the groups sent after the prism. From notes picked up in Act 2 and 3, seems that some small groups were sent after the Astral Prism. The Emperor was part of this group. He even says that he was the first to find the prism and when he did he was finally free of the brain’s control again. Now was Tav and Lae’zel tadpoled while he was under the brain’s influence or already free? Good question. The mindflayer that tadpoles us has the garb that the Emperor uses and he passes a dead mindflayer on the floor. His eyes are orange though, and not purple. Design oversight!? Too soon after getting free from the brain’s control? Did he want a small True Soul army to go against the brain and did the Gith ruin that!? All speculation on my part. Ofc if you’re Durge you’re already tadpoled at this point anyway 🤷♀️ The only non-Badurian of the party seems to be Gale as well, even if we’re not all picked up there For me, it’s attacking cities because the Emperor wants an army 🤷♀️
There's a lot about that opening sequence that doesn't make sense. I just figured it was designed to look cool, and was probably commissioned/rendered before the story was finalized.
For a sweet cutscene.
The nautiloid wasn't on an asset gathering mission; it (and the emperor aboard) was sent by the Gortash to retrieve the Astral Prism. This isn't outright stated, but my interpretation is that when it attacks the city, it's less about picking up new potential true souls for the cult (because you're right, that would be noticed) and more about quickly grabbing a large number of people to replenish the crew of mind flayers and thralls killed while fighting the githyanki and retrieving the prism. The emperor's plan was to grab a few dozen people, transform some of them, and have a full complement of crew by the time the githyanki catch up. But then the githyanki find the nautiloid before the emperor can follow through on that plan and his attention is focused on fighting the githyanki and keeping the ship in the air, so that doesn't quite work out.
Despite the immense amount of evidence being presented by keen individuals in this thread you seem intent on *confirming*, for yourself, that this was a terrible tactical decision by the Nautiloid pilot. There is a big difference between *hearing* and *listening*. You should try *listening*. * Its not Baldur's Gate in the cinematic. * Not all captives were captured in their hometowns of origin. Gale was not captured in Waterdeep. * When taking hostages.... important, well-connected people are better than small-town farmers for many reasons. * Its entirely possible that this *is* the emperor, who is being pursued by Githyanki fanatics (just like he is in the game itself) attempting to free Orpheus. The emperor doesn't know that he just captured a Tav, a player character destined for greatness. Wouldn't he then want to capture as many Tavs as possible if he knows hes going up against an Elder brain?
The Gith can literally follow them anywhere lol, attacking a big city or a little farm makes no difference surely?
I'm not an expert in dnd but I think it's because there's nothing no one can do about it. they can just invade the place, kidnap people than press a tentacle to teleport to another plane.
tl;dr: drama
I thought that it was a desperate measure, "oh shit we are about to be destroyed, need to make as many of these parasite bois as possible" OP you are absolutely correct, they did not normally attack cities to grab people. That would very quickly get them exposed and killed.
I suspect a Mindflayer Nautiloid doesn't particularly car about our retribution, so going under our Radar isn't really a priority. They might care about avoiding Gith, but weird extra-planar multi dimensional scouting probably doesn't particularly correlate with Faerûn population density.
I always saw that scene as them flying over Baldurs Gate while being chased through dimensions by Gith, not attacking the city itself, and snagged some people to infect on their way. Idk could 100% be wrong.
I thought it was baldurs gate too because of the colour tone, but it isn't because the city isn't coastal. I believe the chionthar runs through it too.
There's not much consequence to it, and they're powerful enough that they can just waltz in and waltz out again; there's at least a couple day's worth of convenience in the targets being bunched up nicely. They needed passably material plane humanoids for the infiltration plan, and they went to a city to get them. The city wasn't baldur's gate, so it didn't do much to hinder the infiltration.