If you’ve just set foot into Baldur’s Gate 3‘s third act, you might be excited to finally reach this fancy ‘Baldur’s Gate’ place you’ve been hearing so much about. Unfortunately, you’ll need to jump a few hurdles before you can set foot in the city. First, you need to get past a bridge checkpoint with a psychically invasive Steel Watcher—then, you need to break into Wyrm’s Rock Fortress.
Luckily, being a Larian game, there are several nifty ways to get past these final hurdles and enter into Act 3 proper. You’ll still want to explore the area outside the city, though—there’s plenty of side questing and socialising to keep you occupied, with some questlines making your entry far less painful. Read on to find out which ones.
How to get past the bridge checkpoint in Wyrm’s Crossing
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First things first—dealing with the Steel Watcher inspection at the bridge. If you saved Wulbren and the Ironhand Gnomes back at Moonrise Towers, you won’t even need to lift a finger—submit yourself to inspection, give yourself over for arrest, and enjoy the fireworks as Nimble hurls a blindness bomb at the watcher. Run past the checkpoint while everyone’s rubbing the dust out their eyes, and you’ll make it onto the bridge unscathed. Alternatively, if you didn’t save the gnomes, you can just hand yourself over—this’ll lead to a tough prison break from Wyrm’s Rock Fortress, though, so it is to be avoided.
You can also jump, teleport, or fly up onto a platform, found to the right of the bridge. You only need to get one of your party members up there, as there’s a handy waypoint which can teleport the rest of your group inside once it’s unlocked. If you have a caster (or a potion) to hand, Invisibility just… works. Lord Gortash’s fearsome army of Steel Watchers can be beaten by a 2nd level spell, I guess. It’s worth noting that once you’ve arrived in Wyrm’s Crossing, you can pass through the checkpoint at-will, without being stopped.
However you handle the checkpoint, you’ll unlock a bit more of the map—only to hit another roadblock. The drawbridge is up, and access to Wyrm’s Rock Fortress is closed, meaning you’ll need to find another way to gatecrash Lord Gortash’s coronation.
How to get into Wyrm’s Rock Fortress
There are a handful of ways to lower the drawbridge. If you have a silver tongue with expertise in some social skills—and maybe a little bardic inspiration to hand—you might be able to talk your way inside. However, the options aren’t great—two are difficulty 30, with a slightly less mean difficulty 25 option tucked in there. The easiest of the three is the option regarding donations to the Flaming Fist, though they’re all pretty hard for any adventurer without bard-tier wit. Fortunately, there are some other ways to get a pass instead.
- Open Hand Temple Murders: First off, progressing the Open Hand Temple Murders questline will net you a Lower City Pass. Head back over the bridge to the temple—which is next to the circus—and speak with Sister Yannis to get started. She’s hard to miss, given she’s stood right next to a flying elephant that’s also a detective.
- Investigate the Suspicious Toys: You can also pursue Arfur’s quest to get a Lower City pass, which starts at Arfur’s House in Rivington. There are multiple ways to do this, but the most peaceful is to convince him to leave the refugees in his house alone, and then search his basement for the suspicious toys. After heading to the Requisitioned Barn to discover that the toys are bombs, you can find Arfur in Sharess’ Caress and convince him to give up his contact, as well as his pass to Gortash’s coronation.
- Sharess’ Caress: Your third option, and definitely the sneakiest, is to lockpick the Nymph’s Grotto on the top floor of the Sharess’ Caress brothel. Naoise Nallinto is entertaining Fist Jara, but you can steal a pass to the coronation from the side of the bathtub. Be careful not to disturb them, as this triggers a cutscene where Jara turns into a Mind Flayer, though if you defeat the creature, you’ll get to sort-of romance the dryad as a little reward.
If you’d rather take a more illegal route, though, you can use a Feather Fall spell to jump through a broken fence to the right of the drawbridge. Shimmy around the right side of the fortress until you come to a crack in the wall, entering the Wyrm’s Rock Prison with all of your gear intact.
Once inside you’ll need to lockpick—or break—your way out of the cell. The guards will act as if you’ve been arrested already. You can pass a difficulty 15 deception check, or go crossbows blazing and murder your way out. You’ll then need to lockpick your way out of the entrance door, or get the key by pickpocketing Fist Ivarus—you can also grab it off his corpse, if you went all scorched-earth.
On that same platform with the broken fence, however, you can also just Dimension Door to pass the drawbridge entirely. It’s a touch fiddly, but I was able to get my Gale to the other side intact—and once I’d been formally invited to Lord Gortash’s coronation, the bridge was lowered for the rest of my party to follow. However you get inside, attending Gortash’s coronation will set you on the path to the rest of Act 3, and the wide, sprawling streets of Baldur’s Gate.