The Power of Mystery in Crafting RPG NPCs - Astarion
September 27, 2024
“What colour were your eyes before?”
“I—I don’t know. I can’t remember. My face is just some dark shape in my past. Another thing I’ve lost.”
This line - from the sanguine lips of Baldur’s Gate III’s fanged fop in chief, Astarion - really stuck with me. Which is saying something because, if you’ve played Larian’s masterpiece RPG, you’ll know there were many thousands of others that could’ve easily lodged themselves in my brain, illithid tadpole-style, instead.
And I think it’s because this line - what Astarion’s really saying - represents a narrative sleight of hand that’s bold, brave, and pretty damn potent when pulled off.
On its face, it’s a hook. It’s an invitation to find out something seemingly small but, in actuality, fundamental about this person you’ll spend tens and tens of hours travelling with, talking to, and sleeping beside. It’s a little dangling key on a string that teases a way into truly knowing who this guy is because it’ll throw a crucial piece of his past into relief. If you can nab that key, you can unlock the door. Who knows what else may lie beyond it?
This kind of telegraphing - the laying of a kind of story breadcrumb trail - isn’t all that notable in itself. But what is striking is that that key remains out of our grasp. It’s an open loop that Larian never closes: we never get to find out what colour Astarion’s eyes were. His writer Stephen Rooney and actor Neil Newbon have since confirmed as much, too: they’re very clear that this is in the realm of ‘headcanon’.
So, what Astarion is really saying, to the player as much as the player-character, is ‘there are limits to what you can learn about me’.
The result of this approach, which prompts the player to seek an answer to a question that the game never resolves, is that it kicks their imagination into gear. The player then gets to become a storyteller, too. It’s a powerful way to craft NPCs - those characters who aren’t us, and whose layers we’ll always yearn to unfurl until we're down to their very skeleton because they’re to some degree unknowable, outside of us. And it's brilliant.
We come to understand that, although Astarion could natter the hind legs off a horse, there's little he can, or will, say about his past. Most of his life before he was turned is off-limits. He gestures at recollections that he was a magistrate once; he knows he seriously pissed off some Gur who, in attacking him, provded the catalyst for his agreeing to be turned undead; you can learn his birth year was 1229 DR. And that’s about it.
We never learn where Astarion’s from, who his family were, or what brought him joy before that fateful day. You’ll only know his surname if you google what those Thorass symbols on his gravestone mean - if you happen to make choices that allow you to even see it, that is (it’s Ancunín, by the by). And, as per that striking line above, he can’t even remember what colour his eyes were.
He uses the word “lost” to describe the obliteration of that memory, alongside much else of his past - his former being. Speaking in terms of loss not only points to a deeply emotional sense of severance from something he once had, but implies that the chance of these things’ recovery is slim at best. Possible? Maybe. Two centuries after the fact, in a vast world in which he probably doesn’t even know where to start? Unlikely.
The major effect of this is pivotal: it shifts the emphasis of learning about this character onto the player’s experience and - crucially - their imagination. These threads of Astarion’s pre-vampiric being are just gone. He can’t know them, and you can’t know them. So, it’s over to us, the players, to imagine them ourselves.
It’s in such contrast to our instinct. Because if I had to use one word to describe my approach towards getting to know my BG3 companions, it would be ‘voracious’. I know I’m not alone in constantly panning their dialogue menus for nuggets of gold rather, shall we say, enthusiastically to see if they have something - anything - new to chew the fat about. With characters as expertly written as these, it’s only natural we want to plumb their depths - to know everything there is to know about them, as decided by the sources of their creation.
But it takes a sure and wise hand to know when to dangle a giant, juicy carrot and then tell us ‘nope, sorry, you can’t actually have that’. And even more so to know that this approach can strengthen these characters, and our connection to them.
It's wonderful to have seen forum posts and threads fill over time with variations of players' own Astarions - their passionately-held interpretations of who he was before, and why that matters to him (and them) now. The 'headcanoning' of how and why he pissed off those Gur, and how this might justify his later actions. What his true eye colour means for the kind of D&D elf he is, and what that background might mean for his place in, and understanding of, the world. All of this imagining on the part of the player, prompted by Larian's nudges, only enhances the decisions those players then make that affect him as the game goes on. It invests them more deeply in his story and informs how they respond to his desperate desire for freedom, and the morally fraught directions in which this desire takes him.
I can’t help but think of the merciless parade of film and TV prequels we’ve seen in recent years trying to backfill every inch of whitespace behind beloved characters and stories, which I think often serves only to flatten our experience of the whole. After all, what could better fill these ‘dark times’ than the limitless bounds of our own imaginations?
Not least because ‘storytelling’ is a little bit of a misnomer when we’re talking about games like this, isn't it? Especially RPGs. Because we’re not just telling the player a story if we’re doing our jobs well as game writers: we’re inviting them to tell us a story with us.
Who could be better placed to decide who this NPC in a roleplaying game really is in some of the most foundational ways than our fellow story ‘writers' - our players? The very people we want to feel this passionate about the people and places we conjure up for them to then fill with their own stories? Through lines such as this one of Astarion's, Larian is subtly but powerfully reminding us that our Baldur’s Gate III story is our Baldur’s Gate III story. It’s an approach that’s harmonious with the game’s genre expectations and narrative design, offering yet another dimension through which we can roleplay.
I deeply admire the fact that, as far as I’m aware, no one at Larian has shared what colour Astarion’s eyes were before they turned menacingly, irreversibly red. Whatever they’d declare as canon at this point would risk snipping the delicate threads of the rich tapestries players have woven about their Astarion. And those threads are precious. They connect us to these people in ways that make sense to us.
While this line in particular is just a small signifier of the backstory Larian has chosen not to publicly tell, it’s a potent one, because it’s an invitation to players to tell a big part of this core character’s story themselves. It's more than ok by me that that key stays high up on the shelf, where I'll never be able to reach it.