Animals are often the best parts ofDungeons & Dragons. Wild beasts add danger to a journey, and can set up unprovoked attacks that don’t need a lot of story justification. But they’re also fascinating creatures that can deepen an understanding of, and connection to, the world our characters explore. Unfortunately, thanks toBaldur’s Gate 3, I hate hollyphants now.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is generally pretty good at including animals in the mix. Most notably there’s the owlbear cub you can shelter in camp, but you’ll also meet displacer beasts,cows that aren’t quite what they seem, and helpful (if brutal) rothe. It’s not that the hollyphant is included in the game badly either. It is simply that I hate it.
At the start of Act Three, you’ll be able to enter a church where a murder has recently taken place. As with everything else in Baldur’s Gate 3, you’ll decide this is definitely your business. You can talk to the witnesses (and even the victim himself with magic) and try to uncover what happened. In doing this, you’ll work with Inspector Valeria, who is a hollyphant.
Hollyphants are small, winged elephants. They do have a 12 foot tall form where they are warriors and war mounts, but they’re most depicted in their two foot tall (short?) form, as Valeria is. They’re good natured, though often neutral on trivial matters because of their status as celestials, and generally helpful and kind. And then there’s Valeria.
When you first meet Inspector Valeria, she’s not too interested in investigating. She, like everyone else, has decided that you’re not dealing with a double murder, but a murder suicide. Case closed, nothing to see here, the criminal is dead. It’s fairly obvious that this isn’t true when you talk to a couple of people who knew the victims, but nonetheless Valeria thinks it’s all wrapped up.
As you investigate where Valeria apparently hadn’t bothered, you discover some leads and get to solve the case, which leads to a deeper conspiracy. It’s one of Baldur’s Gate 3’s strongest stories, and a testament to the confidence the game has - it’s off the beaten path and three layers deep. You’re not guided towards it, and are only rewarded with the adventure if you explore.
Because of that, I’ll avoid the major details of the quest here. But suffice to say that at every turn Valeria is useless, often arrogant, and always generally unpleasant to deal with. I loved these little elephants, and now I want to exact a dark vengeance upon them all.
Hollyphants have a base Intelligence of 16 (Valeria notwithstanding), so they’re not to be used as pets. A displacer beast, for comparison, is at 6 Intelligence. An almiraj is at 2. These are the sorts of creatures I include in my own D&D adventures as pets and animal companions, and at the very least Valeria has shown me that a hollyphant would be a character in its own right rather than a cute lil guy. The staff at TheGamer missed the chance to add a displacer beast cub to their party, and will only discover that upon reading this article.They do, at least, have a nuisance fire fiend for a friend.
Even if Hollyphants don’t suit the ‘animal’ or ‘pet’ mould that their appearance suggests, I could still have found a use for them. I have images ready to rock for every notable character in my campaigns, and the darling design of the hollyphant was a great fit for that. Considering humans have a base Intelligence of 14-15 (if you played D&D with the team here you’d know that number was a high estimate), hollyphants would be some of the smartest creatures in an adventure. There’s a lot you could do with a hollyphant, then. Unfortunately I hate them forever.
Next:Playing Baldur’s Gate 3 As A New Class Is A Whole New Game
