#i didnt cover astarion bc i havent gotten enough of his backstory yet

[tathracyn]

If there's only a single lesson I take away from Baldur's Gate 3, from a Dungeon Master perspective, it's that you shouldn't be afraid to mix science fiction in with your fantasy. Like, even just looking at the initial descriptions of the core party members, you have:

A woman forcibly converted into a cyborg by a militant war-queen and forced to serve as a frontline soldier in the largest war of the setting, who needs constant maintenance on her cybernetics to stay alive.

A man who accidentally subsumed a fission reactor and now constantly has to feed it fuel or else it'll go into meltdown and take out the entire region.

A ranking soldier serving an interstellar empire, who was a POW of her people's sworn enemy and given an implant that will gradually override her physical and mental autonomy until she's assimilated into her enemy's ranks.

A well-meaning mercenary-for-hire who learned his skills under contract with a powerful overlord, who is now bound by that contract to serve her lest his abilities and even his very body be forfeited.

A covert operative of a shadowy intelligence organization who regularly has her memories wiped before being sent out on highly classified missions, for the (alleged) sake of operational security.

These are hard sci-fi character types, even though they use devils and magic instead of CEOs and circuitry, and it barely registers on my immersion.

If an officially produced DnD game set in one of the most conventionally fantasy settings of the franchise can include this level of science fantasy, fans' own campaigns can go absolutely wild with it!