Baldur’s Gate 3 players discover easter egg for classic DnD fans

Baldur’s Gate 3 is packed full of cool references, authentic callbacks, and to-the-letter accurate recreations of tabletop rules and regulations. It’s part of what makes the game so fun, for many. Baldur’s Gate 3 is about as close to the Dungeons and Dragons experience as you can get from a video game. A fact highlighted by one very interesting easter egg found recently.

This easter egg is nestled in Act 1 of the game and highlighted by Reddit user Sapowski_Casts_Quen. They discovered that Auntie Ethel, everyone’s favourite hag and charming lass, may actually owe their name to a specific bit of Dungeons and Dragons writing.

Volo’s Guide to Monsters is a monster manual created to aid game masters in creating interesting and challenging encounters for their players. In it, there’s a small but dead handy naming guide for hags – a way of adding a bit of character to, well, some scary antagonistic characters in your sessions! Game Masters are free to either choose from a selection of pre-selected names, or roll for a semi-randomised one.

And would you believe it, Auntie Ethel just so happens to be one of the possible outcomes of using said table. This is cool to the layman now, just learning of this little reference now after the fact, but it’s especially cool that a Dungeons and Dragons player who really knows their stuff could figure out that Auntie Ethel is a hag before the game tips its hand.

You do, of course, find out soon enough regardless – a quick trip to the swamp and Ethel will reveal themselves in all their green glory, but the possibility of a premature discovery does wonders for the game. It all adds to that water cooler effect – some guy out there with the required know-how could tell their friends how they clocked onto ethel immediately, while others would be taken by total surpirse. Therein lies the merit in going that extra mile when it comes to world building and accuracy to source material.

Did you know about this before playing Baldur’s Gate 3? If not, are there any other little references and interesting tidbits that you found while playing? Let us know below!