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Drow Paladin Minthara seems like a cool character, even if she placed dead last in PC Gamer’s Baldur’s gate 3 companion ranking. To recruit her, you have to betray most of act one’s questgivers and friendly NPCs to help a bunch of stinky goblins instead, and this route also sees you waving goodbye to companions Karlach, Wyll, Halsin, and possibly Gale.
There’s already mods for recruiting Minthara without being heinous, but a Taiwanese gamer with the handle pao870111 figured out a way to do so in vanilla Baldur’s Gate 3, subsequently shared in English to Reddit by ZookeepergameDeep360. Fair warning: it’s a jank juggling act of epic proportions, and very much not what Larian intended.
You start by attacking Minthara first in the Kill the Goblin Leaders quest for Halsin, which makes her only “Temporarily Hostile” in Baldur’s Gate 3’s game logic. Using nonlethal attacks to knock her unconscious isn’t really recognized by the story, but it does mean that Minthara will show up at her old spot in the goblin camp after your next long rest and remain there indefinitely (though you can’t talk to her). After finishing the Goblin Leaders quest in this way, it looks like you can progress through act one and into act two as normal, being sure to unlock the Moonrise Towers waypoint.
Here’s where it gets weird: you then return to Minthara at the goblin camp, use the Polymorph spell to turn her into a sheep, and then the Dominate Animal spell to temporarily add her to your party. Taking control of Sheepthara, you then have to teleport straight to the Moonrise Towers waypoint.
What follows seems to be the most arduous part of the whole ordeal: Minthara has to reach Ketheric Thorm’s throne room to trigger her normal trial scene from an evil playthrough, overriding the one with the goblins you get on a good playthrough. However, in her normal Drow form, Minthara will be hostile to Moonrise’s guards and temporarily aggro’d on you whenever exiting sheep mode—she has a high likelihood of running off into the Shadow Cursed lands to instantly die during this long walk to hell.
To ensure she reaches her date with destiny (and possibly you, if you pursue her romance subplot), you have to keep re-upping the Polymorph/Dominate Animal combo and carry her across the bridge and into the throne room by using a high-strength character to pick her up as an “improvised weapon,” walk as far as they can, and then set her down gently, being careful to disengage from her when she turns back into a Drow and ensuring that she’s not in immediate danger from Moonrise’s guards.
Recruit Minthara and save Tieflings both without Mod/CE from r/BaldursGate3
Once you convey Minthara to the throne room in sheep form, she’ll be judged and sentenced to death by Ketheric just like when she survives in a playthrough where you attack the Grove with her, only she’ll remain a sheep for the duration of the cutscene.
You can watch that particular miscarriage of justice timestamped here in this video guide from ZookeepergameDeep360, though the video itself is flagged as adults only on YouTube because they took all of Minthara’s stuff and she’s completely in the buff when in Drow form—kinda par for the course with this madcap quest, though. Once Sheepthara has been sentenced to death, her story proceeds as normal, and you can recruit her in the Moonrise Dungeons (she won’t be a sheep anymore).
Truly a high-flying trapeze act of RPG wonkiness, all to completely bork one of Baldur’s Gate 3’s main branching choices and save both Minthara and the Tiefling Refugees. There’ll no doubt be some bugs and jank to having Minthara alongside otherwise mutually-exclusive companions, and she’ll reference your alternate timeline slaughter of the Grove to boot, but who cares: you’ll have done the impossible.
This secret golden path really has it all: nonlethal playstyle shenanigans, goofy Larian talking animals, using a sheep as an “improvised weapon” to save her life, and thoroughly coloring outside the lines in an RPG all about creative experimentation.
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