Baldur's Gate 3 is well over two years old and its developer is no longer making major content additions, but its players are still finding fresh and exciting ways to crack open its ruleset towards their own gamebreaking ends. This week, as spotted by GamesRadar, BG3 have found a way to recruit a fighting force of the most powerful beings in Larian's version of Faerun.
It's children. They're building armies of children.
The process is laid out in a YouTube short from BG3 aficionado and seeming evil mastermind Morgana Evelyn titled "Child Labour is Unbeatable." That name alone should tell you what kind of moral dimensions we're working with here. If the idea of conscripting a horde of combat orphans doesn't pass your ethical sniff test, you probably won't enjoy where the rest of this goes.
To pull this off, you'll need a level 7 Companion character with access to the Dominate Beast and Polymorph spells. With that character, you'll need to select your ideal child combatant—or because they all perform identically, any child combatant—and polymorph them. Once they're in sheep shape, hit them with Dominate Beast, and then travel to your camp.
Once there, Morgana recommends enabling turn-based mode, because the timing windows here can be particular. Dismiss the companion who did the spells on your chosen child from your party, and wait until you see the notification that their concentration has ended for the Polymorph and Dominate Beast spells. Once it has, re-recruit them before the spells expire, quickly leave camp, and immediately save the game.
Once you load that save, that companion will now permanently have a child follower. Why, you might be asking, is that a good thing? After all, children aren't renowned for their battlefield prowess.
That's where you and whoever distributes battlefield renown would be wrong, and—Morgana concludes—you likely have German media law to thank for it. As Germany's Unterhaltungssoftware Selbstkontrolle explains, German law requires products to be rated for appropriate ages, and holds providers of digital content responsible for ensuring that children aren't exposed to "material which is likely to harm the development of children or young people."
That harmful material, according to Germany's Youth Protection Act, includes depictions of "serious physical or mental suffering in a manner that violates human dignity" or are "likely to seriously endanger the development of children or adolescents." In this case, we're counting "children dying" as a violation of human dignity that, if it was portrayed in a game, could prevent it from being advertised or distributed, or force retailers to pay a fine for selling it.
Aside from its being frowned on by most ethical frameworks, Germany's laws and similar laws elsewhere are why killing children tends to be impossible in games—Baldur's Gate 3 included. Morgana probably shouts out Germany's laws specifically because of a brief controversy that bubbled up online after Steam started mandating ratings for its German store in 2024.
In BG3's case, the particular way in which Larian tried to make children unmurderable makes them terrifyingly potent in a fight if you can find a way to get them into combat under your command, like with the method above.
As you'd expect, your child conscripts are unkillable. But more than that, because they generally aren't intended to be in combat in the first place, they ignore BG3's combat initiative order. In other words, they have infinite attacks.
I might object to the methods, but I can't deny the potency.
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
