Baldur’s Gate 3 is enormous in both scale and—against even Larian’s expectations—popularity. In fact, it’s so massive that it’s slipped the boundaries of your PC and begun gushing all over your table, in the form of a set of free BG3-themed goodies you can collect right now at D&D Beyond that will help you translate the game’s companions to a tabletop game.
D&D Beyond is the official companion site and app for the latest incarnation of the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop RPG, and lets you do things like quickly look up rules, create characters, and roll dice for skill checks. Most crucially for borderline-innumerate PC Gamer news writers, it also takes the maths out of players’ hands, ensuring you don’t forget to add or subtract this or that modifier when you make a skill check. It also means you can’t cheat, I guess, so maybe it’s actually a really bad idea.
The freebies it’s giving away are very minor but are—I reckon—still interesting. First up, you get a set of virtual BG3-themed dice, which is kind of neat but fairly ho-hum. The more interesting part is the filled-out character sheets for your fellow tadpole’d Baldur’s Gate 3 companions.
That means an easy way to bring Astarion, Lae’zel, Gale, Karlach, Shadowheart, and Wyll into your tabletop D&D games and a way to delve into their backstories (via the prewritten “Background” and traits section of the sheets) without having to do anything as gauche as actually speaking with them in-game. Did you know that “Behind that wide vocabulary, [Gale] hides a wounded heart, one more vulnerable than he cares to admit”? He’s just like me, for real!
Interestingly, the stat scores on the TTRPG versions of your companions seem to be derived from their early access versions. Lae’zel seems to have a higher intelligence and a lower constitution on her free character sheet than she does in my game, while Shadowheart’s charisma is a whole two points higher on her TTRPG version than it is in-game (meaning she loses her negative modifier on charisma rolls). What could this mean? Well, nothing. But I strongly encourage you to dream up a dramatic headcanon about it anyway.