You can simply walk into the Shadowlands with a new Baldur’s Gate 3 mod that brings The Lord of the Rings to Faerun. Well, maybe not so simply. Setting it up takes a bit of work, but once you have the right mods installed, you can bring Gandalf, Legolas, Frodo, and the Hobbit bunch along for almost the entire journey (thanks, GamesRadar).
NexusMods user Nexus1118 brought the creation to life with a bit of help from the Party Limit Begone mod, which lets you have up to eight characters in multiplayer and 16 in single-player mode. That and Appearance Edit, so they could change Gale, are the only other extra mod you’ll need to get this one working. Nexus1118 says they kept it simple to minimize the chances of BG3 crashing or encountering other issues while your oversized party treks across the world.
Getting this to work was apparently quite the challenge.
“I had to boot 8 copies of the game window in potato mode while logged out of Steam to get the first 8, then swapped to single player and recruited Gale and changed his appearance to be close to Gandalf,” they said. “Current save has Shadowheart, Lae’zel, and Astarion in camp. The classes and appearances are as close as I could get to the movie with BG3‘s limited vanilla character creator.”
The modded save file starts outside the Emerald Grove after recruiting Galedalf as your companion and is bound to Tactician difficulty, as “everything is easy with 9 characters.”
Nexus1118 even gave each character a Middle Earth-themed Guardian. Aragorn gets Arwen, Gandalf has a High Elf, and Galadriel watches over Gimli.
Considering you can develop a BG3 romance with the Guardian, it’s probably best not to think too closely about the rest – Frodo and his uncle Bilbo, Boromir and his father Denethor, and so on. We’ll just assume they take the platonic route and leave that alone forever.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF
