The Blood War [Baldur's Gate 3 / Dungeons and Dragons]

Today we talk about the Blood War; something that comes up time and time again in Baldur's Gate 3, but something that there isn't a whole lot of information about in-game otherwise. In this episode, we go through the who/what/when/where/why of the Blood War, in an attempt to find any and all information about the event since Karlach won't spill the beans about her time in the Nine Hells.

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Transcript

Hey there, welcome to the Lore’d to Death podcast. My name is Brett and today, I need to vent my latest obsession. I might be a little late to the party, but since when does that stop me from writing about something? This week, I wanted to talk about something that is brought up time and time again in Baldur’s Gate 3 that people might not know a ton about– the Blood War.

If you haven’t played Baldur’s Gate 3, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that you’re almost entirely spoiler-free in this episode so if you haven’t played the game, you’re safe to listen without ruining the plot. The only thing that I’m going to mention from the game that might fall into spoiler territory (depending on what you consider a spoiler or not) is talking about our favourite Tiefling companion, Karlach, and a bit of her backstory. The bad news is that if you haven’t played Baldur’s Gate 3, you’re missing out on some prime shenanigans.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is a ton of fun, and Larian Studios knocked it out of the park (again) making a great Dungeons and Dragons game. I could sit here and echo the praise that the rest of the internet has given it, having won the 2023 game of the year, but I wanted to take a second to offer a different take that I’m honestly surprised that barely anyone is talking about. Like I mentioned, this game is a lot of fun. A big part of that is because the mechanics are so in-depth it feels like you’re playing a DnD campaign. With deep and complex mechanics do come a very noticeable downside, which is a LOT of bugs. And most of them aren’t fun little glitches that you can just laugh at and carry on with your playthrough, but game-breaking bugs that have yet to be addressed as of writing this episode. Twice now I have had to backtrack through almost an hour and a half of gameplay because killing an enemy in the wrong spot has rendered an entire questline unable to be finished because if a large body falls on top of something you need, there is currently no way to move it aside from fast travelling and hoping that reloading the area causes the body to move off of where you need to access.

I don’t want to talk too much smack about the game, because the story, writing, and care that has gone into much of the game is refreshing and it heralds back to a time where studios made games that they were passionate about without worrying about shareholder stakes. But I do feel the need to address the double-standard that the gaming community en masse seems to have.  The bias being if a triple-A studio were the one developing Baldur’s Gate 3, it would have been torn to shreds by the community for being an unfinished game. Look at Starfield, for example. Bethesda received a lot of flak for launching a game that was missing several quality of life features and a buggy mess of a game, yet I’ve heard nothing on that side for Larian Studios when my experience with Bladur’s Gate 3 has been significantly worse and more frustrating with bugs than my experience with Starfield was. I’m not suggesting that we launch an inquisition on all game studios, but that we give them all a bit of a break. As technology grows and games become increasingly more complex, there are bound to be bugs and glitches. But that should be met with constructive criticism with the staff in mind who spent years trying to get these games off the ground under the pressure that we know exists in the gaming industry. My point is, the same issues exist in game development regardless of the size of the company and that is very evident in Baldur’s Gate 3. I would love to see some of these bugs remedied, but the fact that they haven’t been officially recognized by the company is disconcerting and makes me feel like I have to have my finger on the quicksave button at all times because who knows what force of God is going to hamstring my campaign next.

Anyways, what I wanted to talk about is something that’s mentioned in the game multiple times, but is never really given much of an explanation past the surface level and that is the Blood War. We know that one of the companions, Karlach Cliffgate, was forced to serve in the Blood War by the Archdevil and ruler of Avernus, Zariel. Zariel was able to forcibly take Karlach from her home in Baldur’s Gate after Karlach’s boss, Enver Gortash, made a deal with Zariel in exchange for Karlach’s life and Karlach fought on the front lines against demons. But there really isn’t much more context within the game. The only other snippets that we really get aside from some vague inference to the war from other devils are from some of the books in the game. There’s one called “The Blood War'' that you can find in the Moonrise towers which I think sums it up pretty well. It says:

“If ever there was a conflict in the Planes of existence, a conflict that swelled up as if filled with pus, bursting, only to scarrify and atrophy and never heal, only swell up and squirt itself out again, a neverending pus carnival of pain and misery, the Blood War would be that conflict.

It raged (and rages still truth be told) between the demons of the Abyss and the fiends of the Nine Hells. Cunning yugoloths may play one side against the other, but the conflict would swell and burst and swell again without much coaxing. It is in both sides' nature to fight.“

So from this we can glean that the whole shebang is a war between the demons and what they call “fiends of the Nine Hells”, which in this case means devils. The third party that they mentioned, the Yugoloths, played both sides as what we can boil down to a mercenary group. In reality, Yugoloths are neutral-evil fiends of malevolent intent who have no dogs in the Blood War race other than personal gain, so they pull the strings on both sides where they can turn a profit or twist an advance to suit their own agendas.

The other thing that we learned from this passage is that it seems like this war had no defined beginning and has yet to end by the time of Baldur’s Gate 3. As far as I can tell, it’s been raging on for all of history and the flames of war are to be stoked for eternity. Leave it to a devil to never let go of a grudge.

Most of the information that we’re going to get about the Blood War come one paragraph at a time from different player handbooks and a handful of other books. So the following info is almost entirely separated from the Baldur’s Gate games, but since all of these materials have Wizards of the Coasts stamp on them, it makes them all fair game and they should (theoretically) line up. That being said, there really isn’t a ton of information about the war and because of the nature of the history being given mostly in separate paragraphs, there’s a lot that we just don’t know. So let’s try to piece it together, shall we?

The Blood War started in the Age Before Ages, which is a very Tolkien-esque naming convention. This was before the Prime Material Plane, which is a fancy term for what really means the universe, had fully developed. So this conflict is unfathomably massive, spanning entire planes of reality and hosting a nigh infinite number of deaths and battlefields. The main site of the conflict is Avernus which we mentioned before along with the devil Zariel, who wasn’t always its ruler. There’s actually a couple of books in Baldur’s Gate 3 that talk about Zariel and what her job was before she was the Archdevil of Avernus, one of which is pretty hilarious. This one is called, “Mastodonian Memoirs, Vol. 1, Investigator Valeria”:

Bloody planetars. I tell them every time they deploy her: if you send someone to observe the Blood War, there's a danger they could be recruited. Every time they say it's a 'minor heresy.' Why? Zariel wouldn't be the first to fall - Lathander's light doesn't reach that far down the planes.
 [...]

Lulu's no help either. She's a model hollyphant (a perfect example, my superiors are quick to remind me), and she's fallen for Zariel's act - hook and all. No, it's not an act. Zariel believes what she's saying, she's just wrong. Foolish. And Lulu's a fool to believe it too.
 [...]

Not to say 'I told you so,' but my connections tell me Zariel's broken code to intervene in the Blood War. If ONLY someone had warned them! Apparently she killed a horde of Yeenoghu's gnolls running rampant down here in Toril. Her heart's in the right place - it's a shame her sword isn't. She's too reckless to be let near the Blood War, and I reckon this is just the beginning. But alas - I've picked up a rather handy new phrase since setting up in Baldur's Gate: 'That's none of my business.'

And there’s one last book in the game that gives us a synopsis of Zariel’s involvement in “Lessons for Sensible Living XII: Zariel’s Fall” which reads:

In short, Zariel was a celestial being tasked with monitoring the ebb and flow of the Blood War (of which more in Volume XXI: Matters of Little Importance to Sensible Folk). Observing was not righteous enough for Zariel though and she took it upon herself to become directly involved. Like the oaf who sees two fellows fighting over a spilled tankard of ale and, rather than applauding their efforts, cracks their skulls together and causes a tavern-wide brawl. 

So this tells us that during the Blood War– can I say during the Blood War? Because if it’s gone on forever, then technically everything happened during the Blood War. I digress. During the Blood War, Zariel was sent as an observer. She was to monitor the war and report back to someone else, but instead got sucked in and kind of accidentally came to be in charge of Avernus and has since been dedicating her entire being to winning the unending Blood War. We could go into how Zariel got there from her descent from living as an angel and becoming a devil, but that is another episode on its own and quite frankly, we’ve talked enough about Zariel already.

So how did we get on this tangent again? Ah, right- Avernus. Avernus was the main battleground of the Blood War, but it was far from the only one. It spanned across the multiverse and skirmishes emerged pretty well anywhere that Devils could get access to. Devils are able to travel across planes through the Blood Rift which is an endless river of blood that winds its way through planes. I wish that there was any more information about the Blood Rift, because it sounds metal as Hell (literally), but the only other thing I could find was that supposedly the Yugoloths are native to it. It’s basically a highway through hell that connected various places that ended up as battlefields as a result of the connection.

Now here’s the tricky question: how did it all start? The answer is that there’s no answer. There’s only speculation which is I think the most frustrating part about writing this.

If you asked the Yugoloths, they would tell you that the Blood War was the result of their own personal experiment with the nature of evil, one that they created and could end on their own terms once they were satisfied. While I honestly don’t find that too hard to believe, I think that something else must have happened and the Yugoloths were the ones who have been perpetuating that strife this entire time.

Another theory is that it was a remnant of the Great War of Law against Chaos waged by the Wind Dukes of Aaqa against the forces of the Queen of Chaos. This was a war that’s aim was to stop the Queen of Chaos from taking over the multiverse which ended with her defeat and retreat into the fourteenth layer of the Abyss, also known as the Steaming Fen, where she would plot a way to restart the war. It’s not a far stretch to think that the Blood War was just a continuation of this, but we have no way of knowing for sure.

Yet another theory is that it was involved with the origin-myth of Asmodeous who was an angel who travelled into the heart of the abyss and plucked a single shard from the “seed of evil”. It was said that Asmodeous foresaw his own victory in the conflict and perpetuated it so that he would have an eventual triumph over chaos and subsequently unite all of the planes of law under his rule.

But again, you can’t really trust a devil to tell you a story about anything and since they are the ones who know about the war the best, most of the history is going to be forever shrouded in mystery and misconceptions.

However it started, there are plenty of reasons that it has gone on for as long as it has. The devils believe that they are the ones holding demon-kind back from destroying all of existence, and so they keep fighting. They think they’re doing a favour to the rest of the multiverse by keeping the conflict largely contained to the abyss. While that might be true in some capacity, I think the main reason they continue the fight is so they have a near infinite source of souls to harvest to give to their superiors in exchange for various boons. Souls taken in this way can be made into soul coins, which are used to power war machines of the Nine Hells. Who knows, maybe they’re just trying to build a big enough army to do something more drastic?

On the other hand, most believe that demons fight in the Blood War because they are mindless beings of destruction. However, it seems like there might be a bit more thought put into it by the Demon Lords. The Demons Lords themselves have little direct involvement in the war, so it provides an adequate distraction for them to carry out their devious schemes and other machinations to demonstrate their superiority over the rest of the multiverse.

Past devil and demons, there was also some celestial influence as we know from talking about Zariel who was only ever there because of angelic intervention. Being in the abyss, the celestials didn’t really give a hoot what they were doing down there but once it came up to the upper planes, they got involved almost immediately. Striking down the fiends who invaded their personal bubble indiscriminately, killing those on both sides of the war, until the tide turned against them. Once the devils and demons realised the forces that they were reckoning with, they started to collude against the celestials.

Knowing that as formidable as they were, the celestials had a good chance of being overrun and would eventually face defeat. This forced them to come into an agreement that they would be left alone in exchange for their abstinence from the war. But they couldn’t just walk away and they had to scheme to have their involvement be a bit more discreet. On occasion, the celestials would plant a weapon or a powerful artefact amongst the devils and demons to turn the tide in one side’s favour, but they never did so to the point where one side could conceivably win. This means that even the impartial parties did not want this war to end, for it benefited them as well.

Whatever the reason or motivation, I think that in the end it gives those who don’t age something to do to stave off boredom. Like most things in this episode, it happened so long ago that I’m not sure anyone would know the initial reasons or motivations for starting an endless war.

Despite being technically endless, however, there were a few points where the fighting came to a pause to deal with other issues. At one point, the Illithid (or Mind Flayer) empire was threatening to take over all planes and enslave every race to serve their own. During the time where there was a temporary ceasefire in the Blood War, the Illithids had already taken over the Astral and Ethereal planes and had started to properly threaten the outer planes, including the ones that they had been warring in for a millenia. They stopped the war in an effort to keep the Illithids out of the hells, and then went right back to fighting each other.

There was also a point where the fighting stopped because of the Archdevil Asmodeus after he regained his divinity by absorbing the divine power of Azuth and professedly ended the war by pushing the Abyss to the bottom of the Elemental Chaos in what I just learned was called the World Axis cosmology. This is basically the structure that explained how the planes were connected or… not. It’s all very philosophical and confusing and I don’t want to talk about it any more. Basically, he moved where the Abyss sat in that diagram and forced it to the bottom. Don’t ask me how, it’s all very wibbly-wobbly-timey-whimey.

With the Abyss moved, Asmodeus claimed that the war was over and won by the devils because he was the one who yeeted the Abyss. Why would the position of the Abyss in the Elemental Chaos stop the war? I don’t know, and neither did anyone else. There was a bit of confusion with the fact that someone declared the war over, which caused some scattering and infighting amongst the demons while the devils mustered up their defences just in case the demons were able to get their affairs in order and resume the war. 

Despite Asmodeus declaring that the war was over, no one really listened to his nonsense because, surprise, the abyss was still the abyss and the hells were still the hells which means that they were still valid warring grounds. After a century of confusion as to why they would give up their precious war, it started again once the demons got their act together and formed their armies. 

Shortly after the fighting resumed, things ramped up considerably. There arose a proxy war in Toril after the God-King Gilgeam contacted the Demon Lord Graz’zt and asked them to aid Unther in their war against the Genasi forces of Shyr. This was successful and Unther was returned to Toril as part of the Second Sundering, and Gilgeam immediately moved against Tymanther to reclaim the former lands of Unther from the Dragonborn.

The forces of Gilgeam laid siege to Djerad Thymar while Asmodeus and Azuth conducted a ritual at the city in an attempt to make both gods separate once again. Azmodeus’ daughter and devil, Glasya, sent the Malbolgean forces to help the Thymari against the demons, helping Azmodeus and Azuth accomplish their goal in an effort to keep their place in the hells.

In the next few years around this conflict, the Archdevil Zariel began plucking cities from the world of Toril and used their citizens as fodder against the demonic hordes. This caused both sides to come to understand that they could recruit mortals directly from the Prime Material Plane. Each side acted on this to seduce and coerce individuals from various worlds that would serve as pawns in their endless war. This gave way to new breeds of devils and demons who were crossbred with mortals and is where the first Tieflings were born, along with Cambions and Alu-Fiends.

The same year, massive hordes of demons appeared on Avernus and marked the only time that the demons actually appeared as a threat there. If they were able to win there, they could have shifted the balance of the Blood War in their favour and conceivably ended it. Alas, that was not the case and the war has continued in perpetuity since.

I wish that I had anything else on the subject, but that’s basically the Blood War’s history. Like I said before, the history of the Blood War is brought up in paragraphs and one-off short stories here and there, so it’s not entirely fleshed out. That being said, I wanted to talk about some of the main combatants in the war on both sides as well as the infernal war machines, because those are both two very important parts of the Blood War.

Most of the big powers in the Nine Hells and the Abyss did not take an active role in the Blood War. Much like your typical Lord in a castle, their wars were waged by those who had a lower rank than they had and their role in the war was mostly political as a figurehead. The only exception to that rule is the Lord of Avernus because of Avernus’ role in the war, so Zariel was one of the only political figures that was an active general on the frontline.

Behind Zariel were the Dark Eight, formerly the Dark Nine but they went through a rebranding after their founding member died and they couldn’t find a good replacement on LinkedIn. This council was a democratic coven of pit fiend generals who resided in Nessus, the ninth layer of the hells, who plotted and strategized the movements of hell’s armies. Leave it to the devils to have a proper form of government behind their war machines. If one of the eight proposed a movement, the other seven would take a vote and if it was voted against then that was that. There was, as far as I can tell, no espionage or internal canoodling to further one of the eight’s agenda, and they all worked together to make sure that they had the most effective military that they could muster.

There was also Bael, the archdevil duke of the Nine Hells who served the Lord of the Third, Mammon. He was one of Hell’s greatest tacticians, nicknamed the Bronze General after the hue of his skin. Standing at around 8 feet tall, he was a gold-skinned humanoid with the appearance of a minotaur despite not being one. He had little interest in anything that wasn’t related to war or war accessories, and was one of the best in the game. However, he would likely never meet his ambition of rising higher in rank because of his inability for political prowess. Those above him, like Mammon, would continuously constrain his attempts to rise in rank to keep him below them.

Then there was the demon side which was the complete opposite of the devils. The demon princes Graz’zt, Orcus, and Demogorgon were constantly at war with each other in the abyss, and had little concern for the nine hells because they were too busy with themselves.

Also involved on the demon side was the demon lord Baltazo, called the Sleeping Sovereign, was their own diplomat and strategist. However, he has since retired from the war after being unable to use it to further his own agendas. There was also Eltab, a demon lord who was known as the Lord of the Hidden Layer. A humanoid with a canine-like appearance, he was a decorated fighter in the blood war.

Last but certainly not least are the infernal war machines. These were made of infernal iron, which was given its name by virtue of only being found in the hells. Infernal iron assumedly has properties that allow it to withstand extreme heat without deforming which is why it’s used in making infernal war machines, but that’s my own assumption and isn’t based on any fact. These war machines were powered by an inner furnace that processed damned souls as fuel to convert into mechanical energy. You could power your infernal war machine by inserting soul coins into a receptacle in the helm of the machine which would immediately be syphoned into the machine’s furnace, processed into power, and destroyed over the course of several days depending on the machine’s output. This made the infernal war machines the most deadly arcade machines in the realms.

Some of the notable war machines included the Devils Ride, which was a small single-rider operated machine built atop two wheels, like some kind of infernal motorcycle. These would be used on scouting missions due to their compact size, high speeds, and exceptional manoeuvrability.

Next in line would be the Tormentor, which was a four-wheeled vehicle that was used as a troop transport, mostly, and sometimes to carry cargo from one place to another.

The Earth Ripper was a huge war machine that could be used to transport large numbers of devils or to ruin someone’s day with its massive wrecking ball on a chain.

The Demon Grinder was… well, you might have guessed it. It was a large vehicle with some form of blades or other grinding mechanism on the front and probably sides and back that would have been used to mow down as many demons as humanly (or devilishly) possible.

There was also the scavenger, which was a means to an end to scavenge broken or otherwise incapacitated war machines with its giant claw from battlefields so they could be brought somewhere where they would be repaired or repurposed.

So, the infernal war machines were basically a bunch of Mad Max style vehicles that were used to cause as much mayhem, destruction, and confusion as possible. Because of their nature, they weren’t necessarily engineered to perfection, but were more often just cobbled together pieces of other war machines slapped together with some Flex Tape and damned souls. This was sort of by design, though, because the more simple the machines were, the easier they could be fixed or repurposed into something else on the fly. Most machines were able to be made operable within a matter of hours which made them perfect for an ever-changing, everlasting battlefield.

There is one machine that I left for the end, because it’s related to Karlach and we have to save the best for last. If you don’t think that Karlach is the best girl, then we have no business together.

Karlach had a very specific war machine implanted in her chest to replace her heart. This was an experimental engine given to her by Zariel, and as far as I know Karlach is the only one to have one. What its exact purpose is is largely unknown, but here’s what I believe:

By replacing one’s heart with an engine, you could theoretically keep that person alive forever. In a war that has no seeming end in sight, it’s pretty important to have a pseudo-immortal general on your side. It would also ensure that said person is under your control indefinitely, because at the snap of your fingers you could have the heart sabotaged or just “forget” to feed it which means that person’s life is forever in your hands. The other reason I believe is evident in-game, but never really fully explained. You can feed the heart soul coins to give it a sort of power up, increasing the energy output from the individual making them more deadly. 

The infernal heart had one major drawback for the user, which just so happened to work in the favour of the devil controlling it. This part is spoilers for Karlach’s questline, so if you haven’t gotten through act 2 of Baldur’s Gate 3, then I would recommend skipping forward a minute to avoid it. Because it’s an infernal machine, it doesn’t operate properly when out of the hells. Who knows what it is that causes this, but when Karlach escaped the hells and ended up on the Prime Material Plane, her heart started failing her. It would get unbearably hot and work in overdrive, causing her intense perpetual pain and discomfort, as well as making her physically hot to the touch to the point where she couldn’t get close enough to someone to even give them a hug because it would likely end up causing serious burns to the receiver. If that isn’t just the saddest thing you’ve heard all year, then I don’t know what is.

But with that, we’re done talking about the Blood War and everything along with it. If we ever get a substantial update to this topic, I will gladly revisit it. Until then, what do you think?

Do you think that we will ever get a full history of the Blood War, or do you think that it’s too large of a topic to ever be fleshed out properly? Personally, I would love a proper book series going through the various battles and machinations. Or maybe a comic series. That would be amazing.

You can find us online @loredtodeath on your favourite social media or podcast websites. If you have any questions or suggestions for topics, please send me a message wherever you can find me, or at loredtodeath@gmail.com. I would love to hear from you!

And remember, you don’t have to set any goals for the new year. Just try to be the best person you can be for yourself and for the people around you. Not everyone is goal oriented, and some people just want to live the best life they can, and that’s perfectly fine. So if anyone asks you what your goals for 2024 are, just tell them “to listen to the Lore’d to Death podcast every other week so I can be in their top 1% of fans on next year’s Spotify wrapped” and you’ll do just fine. I’ll lore you to death in the next one. C’ya.