WARNING: Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies to Moments pages. All spoilers will be unmarked!
- The Chanters standing outside the inner fortress of Candlekeep, spouting out the prophecies of Alaundo, one of which sets the tone of both games. It may seem like meaningless gibberish at the time, but later on, after learning more of your foes, their plans, and yourself....Chanter: The Lord of Murder shall perish, but in his doom, he shall spawn a score of mortal progeny. Chaos will be sown in their footsteps. So sayeth the wise Alaundo...
- Chapter 1 of the first game. You were just attacked by a large man in menacing armor who was demanding Gorion give you over to him, same armored man cut down Gorion, a powerful archmage, with all the effort of a dealing with a goblin, and you're left on your own, realizing you can't go back home, and only your tag-along best friend is at your side in a wide-open, hostile world, with only the advice to seek out Khalid and Jaheira as your only lead.Narrator: The dawn is especially cruel this morning. You awake with the realization that you have not been living some horrible dream. Ambushed, you saw Gorion cut down before your eyes, and even his powerful magic could not stop the onslaught. It was his wish that you flee, but that does not remove the feeling of helplessness that now overwhelms you. "Hand over your ward," the armored fiend had said. He was after you and you alone, but why? If only Gorion had given some clue, but now you are alone and lost. Candlekeep is near, but you will find no quarter there. The readers pay for their serenity with rather draconian entry rules, and without Gorion's influence, their doors will remain closed.
- The dream sequences, in which Irenicus gives you increasingly dark and morbid Breaking Lectures. It becomes even worse when you find out the Irenicus that talks to you in your dreams isn't Irenicus at all. Its Bhaal himself, trying to goad you to The Dark Side.
- Anyone familiar with the dream sequences of the first game will likely find the second ones lukewarm at best. The dreams you have in those are much more symbolic, but backed by the narration of Kevin Michael Richardson and an excellent background theme and can be quite freaky to the unprepared, especially if you haven't already been spoiled as to their nature.
- Speaking of the dreams from the first game, a single phrase that remains chilling if you're following the good route and are still in the dark as to their significance: "You WILL learn...."
- If you visit the Temple District at night, you'll run into a Shadow Thief. He won't attack, but he will start babbling a deranged "song" when you speak to him. It sounds like the typical ravings of a madman at first...then the song describes how an innocent man was forced to watch his friends and family be butchered because he refused to get involved in the current guild war. The song suddenly becomes much more chilling when you realise who the song is describing."You can't hide! War will find! YOU CAN'T HIDE! WAR WILL FIND! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAA!!!"
- The first game has encounter after encounter with increasingly difficult bounty hunters, from the ridiculously easy Carbos and Shank who are no match for you by yourself, to later ones who can stand toe to toe with your entire party and give them a run for their money if you're not careful. Many of them carry a bounty notice, which observant players will notice are in increasing amounts of gold on their head with each one. While definitely not the creepiest thing on this list, remember that you're a sheltered kid, barely any more than 20yrs old, lacking any sort of field experience, and you're being hunted wherever you go, starting in your own home you've never left. The intro to Chapter 4 sums the feeling up quite well...Narrator: One thing is for certain: someone has taken a very personal interest in your death...
- The "Albert & His Dog" sidequest. A cute little boy comes up to you and asks you to find his dog, Rufie, who's missing? Aww, poor thing. Found the dog and Rufie turns out to be a wolf creature and not a regular dog? Um, okay, starting to get a sense of something being...a bit off here, but whatever....Return with Rufie and Albert transforms into an ogre mage (original)/nabassu or pit-fiend (EE) and thanks you for helping him before teleporting Rufie back to Hell? WTF!?
- It's actually in your best interest experience point-wise to kill Rufie and report back to Albert, who winds up pissed and tells you he'll never trust you again, and your journal makes mention of having made a VERY powerful enemy of the demon. While nothing comes of it, you can't help but wonder... who or what exactly did you just piss off!?
- Your second visit to Candlekeep in the first game when everyone's been replaced by dopplegangers."DIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIE MEAT!"
- Even better, even better, when you get to the end of the catacombs, Gorion shows up and tries to convince you that none of the dopplegangers were real, and instead you just murdered all of your old childhood friends in a bout of insanity. Of course, he turns out to be a doppleganger, too, but it can really mess with your head for a brief moment.
- The whole ordeal is especially creepier if the player misses doing the Seven Suns investigation for Scar and doesn't trigger certain encounters, missing out on the presence of doppelgangers being a threat, which is easy to do if said player finds themselves more drawn to the now accessible library-castle in the center of the map. All the player knows is that their friends are terrified of some nameless thing, and the whole affair becomes an example of Nothing Is Scarier until their first encounter with the False Phlydia in the catacombs.
- For a mixture of horror and Tear Jerker, find Captain Brage and right click on him to hear a mixture of insane laughter and broken sobbing.
- Take a closer look at that bandit camp. Apparently they decided to decorate their camp with rotting corpses.
- There's nothing in the game that says this, but you might still wonder if one of the flayed bodies ringing the top of Tazok's tent could be Kivan's wife...especially if he's in your party.
- The cries in the Fear Test in hell in Shadows of Amn.
- The Underdark. An enormous sub-terranean world filled to the brim with beings so dangerous and evil that it can compete with the lower planes.
- For extra scary points, try bringing Aerie there. Aerie, like all the Avariel, is claustrophobic. Upon realizing where she is and that there's a very good chance that she'll never see the sky again, she suffers a Heroic BSoD.
- The illithid cave. You're captured the instant you enter the cavern and are forced to fight in a arena. You escape and have to fight your way out with every room containing some of the worst creatures in the entire game. And the only way to escape the complex is to slay the Elder Brain. Have fun!
- On top of being one of the most dangerous monsters in the game, Beholders are very scary looking. They're huge, flesh coloured heads with several eye stalks, massive mouths with razor sharp teeth and a huge central eye with a constant Death Glare to boot.
- The wraiths in Throne of Bhaal. These...things exist solely to torment anyone they encounter by reading their minds, taking on the forms of their deceased loved ones, and then reciting all their deepest doubts, fears and failures to them, all the while "reminding" them how said loved one's death was their fault. It's borderline Mind Rape, and is enough to drive Jaheira to near-tears.
- The wraith is particularly brutal with Aerie. It will make her think that her mother has been killed while searching for her and she will believe it for the rest of the game. Talk about trauma.
- Irenicus's lab may become tedious in later playthroughs, but it's chillingly terrifying the first time you go through it. You've just recently escaped after weeks of torture and are now wandering around, no weapons, no armor, no spells, no companions except the equally weakened Imoen, Jaheira and Minsc. You have no idea where the rest of your friends are or what befell them. You have no clue what's going on, where the resident Mad Wizard is or when he'll be back. It's eerily quiet. And every door you open reveals horrors worse than the last. Brrr....
- Yoshimo's description of the Geas, and what happens to those who try to break it.
- In Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal, Anomen asks Keldorn about one of the battles the older knight was in, clearly expecting a story about his legendary heroism. Keldorn instead tells him, dispassionately and in full detail, about how he and his unit were subjected to horrific atrocities.
- To sum up: First, Keldorn's unit was betrayed to the enemy and decimated in battle. Second, the enemy captured them and stripped everyone naked, living or dead. They then tied each living knight to one of their dead fellow soldiers, and left them all on the battlefield. As they they were Forced to Watch their friends' bodies rot, some of them died of exposure or went insane. Keldorn escaped, saved everyone he could, and then sneaked into the enemy camp and killed everyone who had done this to them. It's a testament to his Heroic Willpower that he's still fighting after all of that.
- In comparison to the games, the books' depiction of the spider-infested Cloakwood ruins were pretty damned horrifying.
- All of Durlag's Tower. It's creepy enough on its own, with its trap-filled halls and powerful monsters. But bit by bit, the tower shows you what Durlag went through, why he built hate into the very stones of that place. All Durlag ever wanted was a home, a family, but it went so very, very wrong.
- Throughout the tower, you will find both old bones and bodies of previous adventures, presumably killed by monsters or traps. How many traps did this place originally have before adventures started either disarming them or dying from them?
- All in all, if Chapter 6 failed to scare you with how doppelgangers could steal the faces of your friends, Durlag's Tower and its backstory brings to the forefront how utterly TERRIFYING doppelgangers are. Sure, they may not be especially difficult in a fight (with exception of the spellcasting Greater Doppelgangers), but in a world where these creatures exist, how can you know from one minute to another that the person you're looking at is your friend or family member, or just a monster wearing their face? And as the game shows, when there's one...there's typically a bunch of them nearby as well, so who else can you believe in? Is it any WONDER why Durlag went batshit insane?
- The teaser to Baldur's Gate III gives us a view of Baldur's Gate under siege, with dead Flaming Fist soldiers littering the streets. One survivor stumbles exhausted through an alley, preparing for a desperate last stand. Then suddenly he vomits blood, his teeth fall out, and a horrible transformation starts, culminating in four tentacles bursting out of his mouth. Seconds later, a newly born illithid rises into the air. And then a flash of lightning illuminates the clouds, and the sky is full of mind flayers. Then another flash reveals what can only be described as something big. Possibly Ilsensine himself.
(The logo◊ seems to suggest it).- Even worse, this transformation we see is something that normally takes a week to complete, yet the poor soldier is turned in under a minute. Just what is going on?
- One track on the original soundtrack - "Fighting for Survival" - really fits its title and manages to make any fight terrifying.
