Baldur’s Gate 3 Alchemy Books Are Actually Quite Dark

If you think you’ve seen all the content that Baldur’s Gate 3 has to offer, firstly, you’d be wrong – new lines of dialogue and instances are uncovered almost everyday. And, secondly, even the books within the game tell their own interesting stories. While a lot of them simply feature flavour text, some editions tell long-winded stories.

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For instance, the alchemy books in the games not only teach you about various recipes, but the writers have created them in a way that they have been extracted and published from the journals of master alchemist Haskinn Xhesilaphin. They tell of their venture into alchemy to help people, but things eventually take a morbid turn.

Baldur’s Gate 3’s Alchemy Books Feature The Tragic Tale Of Haskinn Xhesilaphin

As pointed out by Sia on Reddit, the alchemy books start with Xhesilaphin’s origins – a dragonborn who was descaled as a teenager. They dabbled in alchemy in order to bring back their hide. However, once that was rendered impossible, they continued to experiment and bring alchemy to the masses in the hope to improve their lives.

However, people being people, instead of using Xhesilaphin’s work for good, people wanted to exploit their knowledge for poisons that would serve their own purpose. You can see the dragonborn’s writing becoming more deranged with every entry. The initial entries are hopeful, and even a bit naive – “Please use this recipe responsibly, and do not cause any harm to other thinking creatures.”

Turning to the last few pages, we see that Xhesilaphin has almost lost their mind. Becoming paranoid and losing their mind, the entries become harder to understand as they are ramblings, filled with grammatical errors – “going to tak my medicin now hot chocolat it tastes just lik hot chocolate.”

Eventually, they are so far gone that the in-universe editors of the alchemy books had to include a preamble about how Xhesilaphin’s notes had to be edited just to make it readable. “In this edited edition punctuation has been inserted out of respect for the master of Alchemy,” reads the preamble. “To the reader, we the editors wish to communicate that he was not at all in his right mind, and ask for your clemency on his behalf.”

To add to the tragedy, the edition tells of how Xhesilaphin, clearly no longer in control of his mind, poisoned their friend Nikros because they feared he had the same plan – “the world is a red blister swelling up behind my eyes and my flesh is afire feels like bugs are biting me itchy itchy. Nikros… Oh sweet Nikros what have I done…”

Released

August 3, 2023

ESRB

M for Mature: Blood and Gore, Partial Nudity, Sexual Content, Strong Language, Violence