I’m of several different minds about this whole sequence. I’ve praised the Witcher games in the past for being “realistic” (in the literary sense of the word, not the literal sense), and this video<\/a> covers the core of that argument if you want to know it in more detail. The Bloody Baron story meets many of my own informal criteria for realism: a believable messiness, an emphasis on the personal, events that are relatively small in scale in comparison to their surroundings, and characters who at least occasionally confound our dramatic expectations. And, broadly speaking, I like literary realism.<\/p>\n So I was surprised to find myself uneasy with this quest. It’s my personal – though relatively casual – belief that every good story has a moral. In some cases the moral is up-front and obvious, like with an Aesop’s fable, and in some cases the moral is complex and squirrelly enough that it defies conventional methods of explanation and can only be glimpsed through fiction. Put another way, even in literary realism, which tends to resist pat value judgments, stories are trying to say something about the world. And my personal reading of what the Bloody Baron sequence is trying to say is that the behavior of the titular character is at least partially excusable, and that perhaps the Baron shouldn’t be considered a villain at all.<\/p>\n Let’s look at that behavior. Our first direct contact with the Baron’s existence is at the inn we’re sent to to locate the Emperor’s spy. The village surrounding the inn is being terrorized by the Baron’s men, to the point where parents are disguising their daughters as boys in hopes of sparing them from being raped. Geralt has an encounter with them in the inn itself, and you can either fight them or talk them down.In a bit of reactivity I didn’t know the game had until recently, fighting them gets you banned from the Baron’s fort at Crow’s Perch, and you have to sneak in through a cave that leads to the bottom of the fort’s well.<\/span><\/p>\n Now I don’t necessarily mean to say that a commander bears full culpability far all the actions of his men in a situation like this, but surely he bears some. It’s not as though the Baron thinks the soldiers under his command are angels. In his first conversation with Geralt he says that they’re “good at pulling up the floorboards to find a peasant’s last sack of grain,”Or something like that, those may not be his exact words.<\/span> so he’s apparently aware that at the very least his men are taking food from desperate people by force.<\/p>\n If I had to guess the intentions of the writers, I would guess that they deliberately built up a fearsome and brutal reputation in the mind of the player, only to subvert it once Geralt meets its owner. Phillip Strenger, aka the “Bloody Baron,” is in fact an affable and friendly person, even endearing, in a sort of sweaty, booze-soaked way. He knows that we’re looking for Ciri, and we learn that Ciri was a guest at Crow’s Perch for a time, and was treated with genuine hospitality.<\/p>\n He tells the story of how exactly she came to be there, leading to another one of the game’s vignettes where she becomes the player character. Ciri finds herself in a forest (for reasons unknown to the player at this point) where she rescues a child from wolves before using Witcher techniques to dispatch a werewolf, at which point a man she rescued brings her to the Baron.<\/p>\n Strenger, however, is not willing to share the entire story until Geralt helps him with a problem: his wife and daughter have been kidnapped. By this point the player has probably already seen the “have you seen this person” posters for them around various villages in the region, including the town at the base of Crow’s Perch. Geralt uses his Witcher senses to investigate the rooms they disappeared from, and finds a clue in the shape of a protective medallion, leading him to investigate the local Pellar.<\/p>\n (I like it when I learn things from games. A “pellar” is the name of a certain brand of fortune teller and practitioner of folk magic, broadly in the pagan tradition. If you’re not afraid of the wikipedia rabbit hole, here’s the article on “Cunning Folk in Britain.”<\/a>\u00a0I assume there must have been a comparable tradition in Poland. At some point during this series I’m going to comment\/speculate on the game’s translation and how strong – in my opinion, at least – it is.)<\/p>\n From the Pellar’s information the player can gradually, over many steps in the questline, reconstruct what happened. First, you learn what you probably already suspected by this point: the Baron’s wife (Anna) and daughter (Tamara), weren’t “kidnapped” at all, but fled from the physically abusive Strenger. Before they fled, Anna learned she was pregnant. Not wanting to have another of the Baron’s children, she went to the local hideous, unsettling coven of witches, the Crones of Crookback Bog (we’ll cover them in more detail in future entries).<\/p>\n The Crones offered Anna a deal: they’ll induce a miscarriage in return for her service. I thought this plot point was a bit forced – was “pledge service to supernatural beings” really the best abortion option available to her? The western tradition records abortofacient herbs and other techniques going all the way back to ancient Greece. Anna is a noblewoman, and not without resources, in a setting with both alchemy and magic. But whatever, I guess I’ll go with it.<\/p>\n Then Anna went to the Pellar to get a medallion to protect her from the Crones. During the struggle with the drunken Strenger on the night of their escape, she lost the medallion, and a Fiend (a beast controlled by the Crones) abducted her and carried her into the bog to fulfill the terms of her agreement. At some point, her mind snaps (the game is a little vague on this), and Geralt meets her at the orphanage there, where he knows her only as “Gran,” caretaker of the orphans.<\/p>\n (Oh yeah, and at one point during all of this you have to retrieve the Pellar’s goat, which has wandered off to eat strawberries.)<\/p>\n You might have noticed that this story is a little convoluted. It doesn’t help that, much like the Dandelion\/Ciri backstory in Novigrad, the player only learns bits of it at a time, and out of order to boot. In fact, you never even get to hear Anna’s side of the story, since by the time you meet her she’s taken on her “Gran” persona.<\/p>\n After Anna and Tamara fled, the Baron buried the miscarried fetus without naming it, causing it to turn into a super creepy monster called a “botchling.” At this point Geralt has the option of killing it, but the better option is to perform a ritual where Strenger gives it a name and accepts it as his own, perhaps earning a scrap of redemption along the way.<\/p>\n So Anna, the victim of abuseAnd possibly the perpetrator, if you believe the Baron, which I’m not entirely sure I do.<\/span>, gets a fragmented, confusing story relayed through hearsay. The Baron, by contrast, gets a dramatic story, a distinct and unique personality, and several scenes where he gets to demonstrate regret for his actions.<\/p>\n To the game’s credit, said story, personality, and scenes are well executed. The English voice actorA man by the name of James Clyde<\/a>, just another of the UK’s bottomless reserve of talented actors you’ve never heard of.<\/span> does an excellent job, his dialogue is well written, and the cutscenes are well directed (to the extent that word applies to a game). But I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bother me that the developers went out of their way to humanize the Bloody Baron, who by merits is an abuser and a brutal warlord, a monster of a person, but only gives us the barest glimpse of his primary victim.<\/p>\n
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