4. The Emperor

“Can we fuck a Mind Flayer” is the kind of thing fans joke about in the years before a game like Baldur’s Gate 3, and it turns out that yes, you can. Romancing the Emperor is a loaded (sorry), perhaps absurd path to go down, and the actual culmination of your relationship acknowledges the alien nature of your partner more than others. You have a whole History dice roll about whether or not you know where a Mind Flayer’s mouth is, and if you pass it, you remember that you once saw diagrams of this species that tell you they’re underneath the tentacles protruding from its face. Then, floating in the astral plane, you stroke and kiss his tentacles until The Emperor wraps them around you and gets down to business.

It’s clear Baldur’s Gate 3 gets how wild this is, because it chooses to double down on it by showing that your teammates, through your telepathic connection, saw the whole thing. It took Dragon Age: Inquisition’s “getting walked in on” scene with Iron Bull and cranked it up to 11. You can also choose to ask the Emperor to change back into the Guardian form it used for most of the game—the one you designed in the character creator—but the game fades to black before it shows any such relations.

Larian is brave enough to let my character fondle the tentacles of an alien species but won’t let him fuck the Tiefling daddy of my own creation? Lame.