Larian Studios may already be focused on its next Divinity, but Baldur’s Gate 3 is still growing thanks to the community. A team of modders is now attempting something massive: adapting the full campaign of the original Baldur’s Gate inside the game, which could effectively turn BG3 into host to another enormous RPG.
Larian Studios is now dedicating most of its resources to the new Divinity, which means no more official post-launch content is planned for Baldur’s Gate 3. Even so, the fantasy RPG continues to expand without the Belgian studio’s direct involvement, largely because of the official mod editor. That tool allows players to integrate not only small tweaks, but even full campaigns into the game. One group of fans has now taken on a project that could become a huge deal for long-time RPG players, since the goal is to recreate the entire adventure of the first Baldur’s Gate.
The story began back in August 2025, when a modder known as 786r786 surprised players by recreating Candlekeep, the opening area of the original Baldur’s Gate, inside Larian’s RPG. As he explained in an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun, the idea originally started as a “simple test” of what the official mod editor could do. The response to that Candlekeep adaptation, however, was so positive that the whole thing snowballed into something much bigger and far more serious.
Deathbringer’s Reign is no longer thinking small
“I received many requests from fans of the original Baldur’s Gate games to turn the mod into a full campaign, along with offers from some incredibly talented modders who volunteered to help,” said 786r786. “Making a custom, standalone campaign is a bit easier than making an expansion for the base game, because you do not need to take into account the incredible number of scenarios present in BG3, and you have complete control over the player’s environment.”
Since then, 786r786 has stopped working alone. He formed the Deathbringer’s Reign team with other modders who volunteered to help build the Baldur’s Gate campaign, and a broader plan has already been laid out for adapting the entire Enhanced Edition in a coherent way. The original map is expected to be split into at least eight “different large zones,” and the chance of triggering random encounters when moving between areas will also be implemented. The city of Baldur’s Gate itself will require a different approach, because the team sees it as the biggest challenge of the whole project due to its sheer scale.
“The original game has over 100 interiors, while BG3’s Lower City features around 40 buildings. We have to decide how to capture that density of content while adjusting the design to suit BG3’s modern gameplay and presentation,” 786r786 explained. “To solve this, we plan to divide the city into three different levels. This makes the workload much more manageable and ensures that the final product will not suffer from performance issues, since only one section will be loaded at a time.”
And even that is not where the ambition ends. The team does not just want to adapt everything from Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition. It also plans to insert extra dialogue and encounters so the campaign better accommodates Baldur’s Gate 3‘s unique abilities, such as speaking with animals or conversing with the dead. In the longer term, the plan is even to record voice lines for every piece of dialogue included in the mod.
In other words, this is a monumental undertaking. If it succeeds, Baldur’s Gate 3 players will be able to experience the backstories of characters like Jaheira and Minsc while discovering the story BioWare originally crafted in 1998. According to HowLongToBeat, that would translate to just over 30 hours for players rushing through the main story and as much as 95 hours for those going for full completion, and that estimate does not even include any extra content Deathbringer’s Reign may add on top. The project still has a long road ahead of it, and the creators have not set any release window. Still, anyone curious can already try the campaign’s prologue through the Return to Candlekeep demo available on NexusMods.
Source: 3DJuegos
