Baldur’s Gate 3is an incredibly detailed game, with complex items and NPCs given far more backstory than many players ever learn. Some of these details, like Doni’s letter to his dad or Lenore’s messages to Yrre the Sparkstruck, provide additional characterization for tertiary figures in the story; others, like the accounts about the Descent, detail parts of Faerun’s lore not fully explored within the game itself. But one detail has evaded explanation since the game’s release:the symbol on the Soul Coins.
Soul Coins are the currency of devils, each containing a mortal soul, and work as consumables for Karlach that buff her combat abilities. They’re quite simple mechanically, but parts of their appearance raise questions about their origins. The specific lore provided in other Forgotten Realms source materials does not quite seem to match up with the game’s portrayal of the coins. But this change may have been intentional, and may actually make perfect sense with what we already know about the infernal currency.
Examining The Appearance Of BG3’s Soul Coins
Selling Your Soul To A Devil
First, let’s examine soul coins as they are described in the Forgotten Realms, outsideBG3. Each coin contains the soul of someone who has traded theirs to a devil, in exchange for power or aid. One side of the coin, fashioned entirely from infernal iron, displays a horrified visage of the mortal bound to it. The other, however, is said to be inscribed with infernal script.This script is sometimes said to act as the seal which binds the soul to the coin, and other times said to represent a specific devil.
Only one side of a Soul Coin is visible within the game’s art, and that side appears to depict an abstract symbol, one that almost looks like a flower. This is actuallythe Infernal symbol for “Z,” meaning we can assume that the side we see is the side with the Infernal script,and the unseen side portrays the coin’s occupant. It may only be one letter, but there’s clearly someone that this Z is intended to represent:Zariel, a powerful deviland archduke of Avernus.
Zariel’s Connection To The Coins
BG3’s Most Important Devil You Never Meet
Zariel is already a big figure inBG3, due to her connection to Karlach, Wyll, and Gortash’s stories. And it would make sense for an archduke to have been the one to originally own all these Soul Coins, asZariel is constantly looking for new mortals to add to her army andfight in the Blood War. But the thing is, the player can learn about at least one Soul Coin in the game that definitely wasn’t owned by Zariel.
While underlings of the archdukes, like Mizora and Florenta the Garroter, may actually be the ones directly dealing with mortals in most cases, it is likely that their ruler would be the one whose mark would appear on the given coin.
If the party enters Moonrise Towers and speaks to the vendor Lann Tarv with Karlach in the party, he will offer three Soul Coins if they listen to the stories of those within. One story reveals thatone of these Soul Coins was created as part of a deal with Tiamat, not Zariel,and yet it appears the same as all the rest. According to the lore behind the coins, it should bear an Infernal T, but it doesn’t.
The simplest explanation for this is thatthe developers only made one model for the Soul Coin and based it on Zariel,given her narrative importance. But there’s also an explanation that could make sense within the lore of the game and explain why so many coins are marked with a Z, even if they aren’t all results of Zariel’s direct dealings.`
Zariel’s Infernal Mechanics May Be To Blame
A Change In Hellish Production
The text concerning Soul Coins in theD&DmoduleDescent Into Avernussays that Soul Coins were minted by Mammon, archduke of Minaurous, in his factories. We actually see another kind of Infernal coin in the game, within Helsik’s shop, calledthe “Coin of Mammon,” which is similar to but distinct from the game’s Soul Coinsand seems to bear Mammon’s mark. Maybe the Infernal script on these coins is not indicative of the devil who owns them or made the deal that captured the soul; rather, it may be reflective of the level of the Hells where the coin itself was produced.
Each level of the Hells essentially functions as its own plane, where its archduke is ruler and in charge of the other devils inhabiting it. Zariel’s level, Avernus, is also the location of the front lines of the Blood War, an eternal battle between demons and devils.
Karlach’s infernal engine and Gortash’s hellish creations prove that, on Avernus, Zariel has been revving up her production of machines of war and focusing more in general on industrialization.It could be that Zariel has begun minting her own Soul Coins,and that all the ones we find in the game were created by her and her underlings on Avernus, thus bearing her mark. This could explain why they would function with Karlach’s engine, while Mammon’s coins do not.
If this is true, and Zariel is cutting in on Mammon’s production,this may indicate a power struggle is about to occur in the Hells. Several other devils are seen in conflict with one another throughout the game: Mammon evidently helped the Chosen of the Dead Three rob Mephistopheles' vaults, and if Raphael ends the game with the Crown of Karsus, he will attempt to overthrow the archdukes. This tiny detail inBaldur’s Gate 3might just be a small and inconsequential design oversight, or it could be foreshadowing something big about to happen on the Infernal plane.
