Video Game / Divinity: Original Sin II

Divinity: Original Sin II is the sequel to Divinity: Original Sin by Larian Studios^note although, in terms of the timeline, it actually follows after Divine Divinity and Beyond Divinity, given how the original Original Sin was set over a thousand years before all three. Thanks to the success of the original, Larian had enough funds to produce it on their own, but took to Kickstarter once more to attract additional funding, build up a player community early, and to sign Chris Avellone on as a stretch goal. The game was originally projected for release in December 2016, but having smashed through every single Kickstarter stretch goal with over $2M in pledges, delays were inevitable. It released on September 14, 2017, almost exactly one year after the first act of the game was released to Early Access by the developers. A Definitive Edition was released a year later on August 31, 2018, which fixed numerous bugs and addressed criticisms of the original release, alongside a release for Xbox One and Playstation 4 (with a Nintendo Switch version releasing a year after that). Like the enhanced version of the first Original Sin title, the Definitive Edition was given to owners of the original release for free.

A few decades have gone by since Divine Divinity, and Lucian the Divine has passed away after winning the Great War against the Black Ring. His death has weakened the Seven Gods, however, who watch idly as monsters from the Void now threaten to overrun Rivellon. These "Voidwoken" are drawn to manifestations of the Source, so Bishop Alexandar, Lucian's son and the new leader of his Divine Order, has decreed that all Sourcerers be corralled on a remote island of Fort Joy. You play as one of the Fort Joy captives and have to band up with the others to escape from the island before the Divine Magisters subject you all to a Fate Worse than Death. From there on, you uncover the mysteries of the Voidwoken, divinity, and the Source, in order to stop the Void from swallowing the whole world.

The Central Theme of the game is how your origins affect who you are and what chances you get in life, which is expressed in your main Player Character's origin story having massive impact on how others in the world treat you. You can play as either a fully-customized Featureless Protagonist with a generic background, or one of six pregenerated characters with intricate backstories and personal quests interwoven with the main storyline. Up to three of these can be recruited into the Player Party early in Fort Joy and each is just as capable of handling dialogue and story events as the "main" PC. This is further expanded in the innovative multiplayer mode, which allows all three to be controlled by other players, who are then free to aid or to interfere with you as they please. The much praised Turn-Based Combat system of D:OS also makes its return with a lot of added depth.

The game received several post launch DLC packs for free. These "gift bags" consist of polished versions of popular fan-made mods (allowing console players to utilize them) ranging from increasing the default movement speed, adding new customization options, new gameplay mechanics, and more. The first story DLC, titled The Four Relics of Rivellon, was released in 2020, adding new encounters to the existing maps with new bosses and the titular four new sets of armor, each with their own gimmicks. Like the gift bags, Four Relics is free for all owners of the game.

A tactics-based follow-up game, Divinity: Fallen Heroes, was eventually cancelled after being delayed "indefinitely". In 2020, a prequel graphic novel titled Divinity: Godwoken was announced, delving into the backstories of the 6 protagonists in greater detail.

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Hear ye, hear ye! Divinity: Original Sin 2 provides examples of the following tropes!

Tropes A — D

• Absurdly Short Level: The game is technically divided into seven chapters, but in reality all the content is divided up into four separate acts. Chapter 1 is a short tutorial set aboard the Merryweather. Chapter 3 is set on the Lady Vengeance and has only one mandatory fight. Chapter 7 is devoted entirely to the Final Boss.
• Actually Pretty Funny:
  • One of the NPCs, a dwarf minstrel, sings a Pro-Royalist song about Beast falling out with his cousin the queen and being kicked out of her court. Beast himself thinks the song has some clever lyrics and his overall review is "too funny to get mad about."
  • Sometimes if you play with the Jester tag or as Lohse (who has the Jester tag) you can make non sequitur comments from time to time. On occasion, an NPC might actually laugh at what you had to say.
• The Alcatraz: Fort Joy is established as one, having had zero escapes, in part due to being on an island far from anything else, making most escape attempts doomed to failure. Your job through Act One is to find a way to escape this penal colony.
• All There in the Manual: All there in the artbook and lorebook that come with the "Divine Ascension" DLC, which provide in-universe, though indirect, information about various characters, as well as out-of-universe design decisions and planning for the world and said characters.
• Alien Blood:
  • The evil Voidwoken have cursed blood that appears dark and swimming with leeches when spilled. It also inflicts a Revive Kills Zombie effect on contact.
  • Several Polymorph skills temporarily transmute the user's blood into electrified water, poison, ice, or fire, creating Geo Effects when it's spilled.
• And I Must Scream:
  • Braccus Rex rather enjoyed inflicting these on those who challenged him. For example, you can find three brothers in a completely dry well, suffering from extreme thirst, having been there since the time of Braccus' rule, as well as a man, called the Historian, who's been trapped on a pedestal, permanently on fire, and a woman who was turned into a pig and also permanently on fire. Fortunately you can end their suffering, then speak to them if you know what to do.
  • A victim of The Doctor has his hands, eyes, and tongue removed and lives in agony for an unknown length of time. An Elf character can inhabit these memories by eating flesh of his remains.
• And Your Reward Is Parenthood: If the Red Prince completes his personal quest with his prophesied mate, they hatch his first child in Act IV — the first of a new line of Great Red Dragons, which can join him as a Bond Creature.
• Animal Motif: The Dwarven Kingdom is obsessed with Wolves. Almost every Dwarven weapon or piece of armor has a wolf's head on it. The banner of the kingdom is adorned with a wolf. Even the furniture is covered in wolf faces. Their carts are pulled by massive wolves, and the carts themselves are of course also adorned with stylized wolves. The unnamed Goddess who was Duna's consort is depicted riding a wolf, which might explain it.
• Antagonistic Offspring: Dallis is actually Fane's daughter.
• Anti-Debuff: A key element of combat:
  • Most harmful status effects are resisted by either Physical Armor or Magic Armor, so a character is safe from them while they have Armor Points of that type. In addition, some protective Skills and items dispel or grant ongoing protection against specific conditions.
  • Item Crafting provides one Mundane Solution: combining footwear with nails makes the wearer immune to the knockdown effect of ice surfaces.
  • Inverted with two Talents that negate the anti-debuff ability of armor: characters with "Glass Cannon" gain extra action points per turn but aren't protected from statuses by armor, while those with "Torturer" can inflict damaging statuses on armored enemies.
  • Sebille's unique Source power dispels a long list of negative status effects.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Combining crossbows and bows into a catch-all "Ranged".
  • If you make a ranged attack you will see a path of where your projectile is traveling as well as a visual range. Very useful in tight corridors, and when firing arrows or projectile abilities.
  • If you learned a skill, you don't have to "re-learn" it, you actually remember it but can only use a set number at a time based upon your Memory stat.
  • You'll gain access to the Magic Mirror at the end of Act I, which lets you respec at will from then on.
  • Original Sin 2 is far more forgiving with the movement than the previous game. You get less action points than before, but it costs far less to move, and there are a load more mobility-enhancing abilities than before.
  • The game typically autosaves when you're entering an area where there will shortly be a really difficult fight and/or big decision. If you don't like how things went down, you can reload the save and possibly go somewhere else first.
  • You can usually use items in other characters' inventories, even in combat. So, don't worry about splitting up potions, scrolls, and all the like. You can have all of them in one character's bags and the other characters will still have access.
  • Moving your mouse over the XP progress bar will show you how much % of XP you currently have before leveling up.
  • Draining Source from a ghost will permanently erase them. If enemies do this on player characters, however, this isn't the case and the victim's ghost will reappear, ready to be revived as normal.
• Anti-Grinding: You can only get so much XP in the game, as enemies almost never respawn, with a few exceptions where you don't get any extra XP when you kill them more than once. Trompdoy's illusions, in the second fight with him, do provide (rapidly diminishing) XP gains when you kill them and they're respawned, however.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: Even if you persuade a character to join you, they won't join you if you have four already in the group.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Some skills from the Hunting mastery (Marksman's Fang) and Scoundrel mastery (Sawtooth) allow you to bypass physical armor altogether. Some skills deal piercing damage, but also have an additional effect if used when the target has no remaining armor.
  • The Torturer Talent lets you inflict a short list of debuffs even if the target still has the appropriate armor. Critically, it doesn't include statuses like Stunned, Frozen, or Knocked Down, which make the character lose their turn.
• Armor-Piercing Question: Dallis asks Fane if he even looked for signs of his wife and child's fate, to an answer of stunned silence. This becomes one of his goals in the ending credits.
• Artificial Brilliance: The AI has improved much since the previous game. If for example, you walk through a fiery field, your party members will break formation and follow you to avoid the damage — except for any party members who are winged, as flight prevents damage from fire surfaces. However, it goes both ways - tanks are considered to be worthless in this game because taunts don't become available until later, and enemies will ignore them and go for the obvious mage, making them reduced to just dealing Scratch Damage with a one-handed weapon.
• Artificial Stupidity: That said, it's still possible to break the AI for a few encounters. Some enemies either won't attack going out of range, or will get stuck trying to move past other enemies in the way.
  • Outside of battle, party members will avoid damaging hazards at all costs, even when they have enough armour to simply walk through the hazard with no damage whatsoever. This can result in them seeing a puddle of poison and then simply standing there if there is no path around it.
  • Inversely, party members make no attempts to avoid hazards that don't directly deal damage, like oil and ice, which leads to them taking routes that would only be fastest if said hazards weren't there. They will also happily wade through cursed oil, which has a chance to explode in their presence — but they will at least beeline the nearest unburned region once it invariably does.
  • Party members can also get stuck on or behind ladders, which can only be traversed by one person at a time. And sometimes they can get stuck on a few objects and lag behind.
  • Most creatures outside of the game's main playable races are incapable of using ladders. This doesn't, however, prevent them from standing uselessly right in front of a ladder and preventing their own allies from climbing it. If you have one of the temporary NPC follower animals with you, sometimes you'll end up with your entire party lagging way behind because there's a chicken standing in front of the ladder.
• Attack Speed Buff: The rare Power-Up Food Green Tea briefly reduces the Action Point cost of all skills by 2, to a minimum of 1. This effectively doubles or triples the drinker's attack rate per turn, though non-basic attacks are still subject to their own Cooldowns.
• Auntie Pennybags: Lady Kemm, once you get to Arx. The wife of the most prosperous man in the big city, but also perfectly content to be hostess to the lower classes for tea and a chat. Her husband, on the other hand...
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Source skills. While those that only use one Source point have their strategic uses, any that require two or three are a lot harder to justify since you'll likely only get to use them once per fight, they often cost a lot of action points as well, they take up more than one memory slot, and they need a great deal of setup to work correctly. That said, this stops being the case in the final battle, where your characters effectively have infinite Source and can use these abilities with absolute impunity.
    • The handful of skills that require 3 Source points and 4 action points (meaning they completely deplete the character's Source and take a full turn to use) are usually this, unless cast outside of battle to start the battle, which obviates the turn cost. This is less problematic for those with Lone Wolf or Glass Cannon, but even then, they're not easy.
    • The Polymorph "Skin" skills, which grant the user immunity to certain elements and cause them to bleed that element, but also take more damage from opposite elements (fire versus water, and poison/earth versus air). Their main draw of immunity is ousted by potions of elemental resistance (which provide up to 90% resistance — doubled with Five Star Diner — and no elemental weakness), and while it seems obvious to pair it with Elemental Affinity to have it constantly proc without blood washing away any surfaces, the spell uses up a useful Source point, and bleeding elements can harm nearby teammates.
  • The two "instantly kill an enemy" spell effects:
    • Deep Freeze only does it to enemies targeted in a cone that are frozen and at less than 10% health, but at that point it would be way easier to just finish said enemy off with a normal attack, given how weak they are and how Deep Freeze uses up an eyewatering 4 action points. It might have a niche purpose for freezing enemies on the spot without having to chill or wet them first, but that's about the only thing it could be properly applied for.
    • Mortal Blow's instant kill condition is a bit easier to satisfy: targets need to be at less than 20% health and it won't need any status effects to be applied beforehand. But again, chances are that an enemy with less than 20% health can be easily finished off by the Rogue in range to use the skill; and that's without going into its three Source point cost, which could be spent on other actions instead of a hyper-costly finishing blow. Like Deep Freeze, it at least has a secondary effect, dealing double damage if the user is sneaking or invisible.
• Back from the Dead: A number of NPCs are undead, in addition to the Godwoken Fane and an option to make an undead custom character.
  • More spoilerifically, Isbeil, Linder Kemm, Dallis, Braccus Rex, and Lucian the Divine are all ambulatory, all but the last as undead and the stand out having faked his death.
  • Those who are Sworn to the God-King cannot truly die. Windego explains the horrific aspects of this in the ending cards. Additionally, every Sworn character you've killed comes back during the final boss fight.
  • When attempting the trial to reach the Well of Ascension, your party will have to compete against each Origin Character you didn't recruit and were thus killed during the boss fight at the end of Act I. They're now Undead and not particularly pleased that you let them die.
• Back Stab: A game mechanic, though exclusive to those wielding at least one dagger (read: rogues). It automatically grants a critical hit if it connects, and includes a helpful cone behind the enemy to determine where the backstab range is (plus there's an ability that automatically puts you in backstab position and all dagger based abilities can backstab).
• Bad Powers, Good People:
  • Source basically utterly obliterates the souls of their targets and can be used to perform some... very nightmarish things. Yet there are a few sourcerers who use it for good.
  • Almira is a succubus who basically traps her targets (usually men) in neverending lust to feed off of them and give their souls to the God King. However, by the time the player meets her, Almira's current target has made her actually feel true love - so now she wants nothing more than to be free of the God King and live a happy life.
• The Battle Didn't Count: Bishop Alexandar is only left comatose from being killed as the Disc-One Final Boss, no matter what you do to his corpse, and similarly gets an Unexplained Recovery if you attempt a Sickbed Slaying. The general public thinks him dead in Act II, so you might be forced to admit to colleagues that you didn't actually finish the job.
• Beef Gate: The game world is technically open, but the hard level scaling of every major area de facto divides the game into more or less just a cryptic version of the usual linear progression, unless you want your party to get annihilated on the first turn by the first enemy because they're a couple levels above you. The Definitive Edition made this more blatant as it significantly reduced XP from a lot of early encounters and basically required you complete all the quests in one area in order to have a chance against the enemies of the next area. The wiki has maps showing what level the enemies are generally at per area. Several mods were created solely to change this, most notably the Reduced Numbers Bloat mod, which simply reduces the rate at which health and damage upscale to be more in line with DND levels.
• Begin with a Finisher: The insane, undead witch Alice Alisceon can't be Persuaded and begins combat with a devastating firestorm that can wipe out a closely grouped party in one hit. It's an immensely difficult fight compared to the rest of her quest, but at least the ability has a long Cooldown.
• Big Bad: At first, it appears to be Bishop Alexandar, but then it's later revealed (not so subtly) to be Magister Dallis. In the end she's just The Dragon to someone even more powerful.
• Big Bad Ensemble: Hoo boy. The story of the game could best be described as a war between multiple Big Bads, with your hapless team of adventurers caught in the middle and left with no choice but to kill them all.
  • Lucian, Divine and leader of the Divine Order, is behind the purging of Sourcerers, the weakening of the Seven, and the unleashing of the Voidwoken upon Rivellon, causing the untold death of millions.
  • The Seven created the Voidwoken in the first place, have been exploiting mortals for millennia in order to feast on their Source, and directly inspired Lucian's own crusade, with his main goal being to stop them.
  • The God King rules and controls the malignant Voidwoken invading the world.
  • Braccus Rex is manipulating everyone above him on this list to become a god in and of himself.
  • Adramahlihk is lurking on the side, masquearading as The Doctor and occasionally possessing Lohse, waiting to seize divinity for himself, which he just might, becoming the new Big Bad if you let him.
• The Big Bad Shuffle: At the beginning of the game, you're led to believe that the main antagonist is going to be the current leader of the Divine Order, Alexandar. Once you take him out at the end of Act I, his dragon, Dallis, takes the reins. Then you find out that she's ultimately working for Lucian. Then you find out that BOTH of them are unknowingly being manipulated by Braccus Rex, who is in turn allied with the God King.
• Big Beautiful Woman: The unnamed Goddess who was Duna's consort is depicted in statue form as a heavy-set, pregnant female dwarf. Dwarf characters (of both genders) describe her as "a beaute".
• Big Fancy House: Ryker, Lord Kemm and the Doctor all have big residences with all the luxury and comfort money can buy.
• Big "NO!": A common reaction from victims of your Source vampirism.
• Bittersweet Ending: The canon ending per pre-release material for Fallen Heroes is an example of Merging the Branches for two of the game's own bittersweet endings. It's mostly sweet. Millions of people are dead from the events of the past years, but the Voidwoken are permanently defeated and the Veil sealed. Source is mostly gone from the world, but some people can still harness it. All six of the party members survived and apparently completed their personal quests while departing on good terms with each other (given their contentedness in the trailer and willingness to work together again), which is impossible in the game itself. The bitterest taste of the canon outcome is that, given that it mostly follows the Seal the Veil ending, Lucian is allowed to get away with all of his atrocities and remain a Villain with Good Publicity.
• Blamed for Being Railroaded: The player characters get blamed for the Arbitrary Headcount Limit in Act III when the playable characters who weren't chosen as companions after Act I return as malevolent undead, murderously angry that you left them behind.
• Book Ends:
  • Act 1 begins and ends on a boat full of Sourcerers.
  • The game's prologue and the playable part of the epilogue take place on a ship, as well.
• Booze-Based Buff: Drunk characters gain a bonus to Dodging and Lucky Charm, which improves their odds of finding valuable loot in containers.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Backlash. If you're a rogue-y type character, get ready to use it a lot - it has a very short cooldown, teleports you behind the target (if possible) and gives backstab bonus.
  • On that note, movement skills, such as Phoenix Dive from Warfare, Cloak and Dagger from Scoundrel, Tactical Retreat from Huntsman, and Nether Swap from Aerothurge, saves a lot of AP from movement and are the only way to access certain locations such as Paradise Downs and the volcanic ruins east of Zorl-Stissa's temple.
  • The humble bedroll. Using it lets you heal all of your health on all party members, as long as there are no enemies nearby, making after-action healing much quicker. Best of all, you can get one within a minute of starting a game.
  • Knockdown and Chicken Claw. Most forms of crowd control are easily countered, and the AI will easily remove any forms of crowd control (Or they will just stand there if they are confused, or taunted), but Chicken Claw does not have any counters and the AI seems to never use Markman's First Aid or Summoner's Soul Mate (which are the only counters to knockdown), making them the most reliable forms of crowd control in the game. In fact, there's little to no Contractual Boss Immunity so you can even chain crowd-control bosses once you get rid of all their armour. You also learn abilities that can inflict knockdown from level one, whereas most others either come far later or have to use Source.
  • Charm effects. They're generally very carefully controlled and limited in number, but since they not only remove an enemy temporarily but turn them against their old allies (who will often kindly kill them for you), they're incredibly powerful when used properly — especially the incredibly powerful Mind Maggot Grenades, which are area of effect on top of being long enough duration to last most of the battle. Their one weakness is that they're blocked by magic armor, and an enemy without armor is vulnerable to so many crowd control effects they're essentially just punching bags, but even then it's often worth putting off killing an enemy for a few turns so they can serve as a meatshield instead.
  • The "Peace of Mind" spell only costs a single AP to cast, lasts for an impressive three turns, provides significant initiative and attack buffs, and protects against a variety of otherwise potentially devastating status conditions such as Mad and Charmed.
  • The "Terrain Transmutation" spell can be exceptionally useful for controlling the battlefield, between sending away bad surfaces and bringing in good ones, especially for its relatively frequent every-second-turn cooldown and cheap singular AP cost. Being able to partially negate the constant burning floor effect can be a godsend in the infamous Blackpits fight.
  • Healers will likely want to build around Restoration and Armour of Frost, and cast both as frequently as possible. Other forms of healing and armor repair are based on gimmicks, like Cryogenic Stasis making the recipient unable to act or take damage while they heal or Healing Tears only activating on nearby allies. Restoration and Armour of Frost are basic, entry-level spells that just do their one thing really well: Restoration can put out a lot of healing with its over-time effect, Armour of Frost clears out a lot of bothersome debuffs, and both have a cheap AP cost. Fortify, for Geomancers, has a similar level of utility.
  • The humble Rain spell is a nice staple of Hydrosophist builds: no damage, just applies the Wet debuff and creates water surfaces in its range. Wet enemies become prime targets for electrocution and freezing, the spell creates a lot of water with which an Elemental Affinity Hydrosophist can now use their costlier freezing spells at a lower cost, it can be used to counter the effects of an enemy Pyrokinetic, and freezing the large rainpuddle is the only way you can really get use out of the Cryotherapy spell. It's also a very efficient way to discover invisible enemies, as Wet ignores armor and Rain applies it on a wide range.
  • Dome of Protection, the innate Source skill shared by all custom characters. The Origin characters get unique effects specifically related to their character like warping time to take a second turn, stealing armor with a demonic stare, or summoning a wolf companion. In contrast, the generic Dome simply places a Circle of Protection that increases all resistances and restores physical and magical armor each turn for allies within it. The thing is, all crowd control in the game relies on depleting the Target's armor first, so not only do allies take reduced damage, they also become far harder to apply debilitating statuses to. This can save players' hide in the long run during a fight, especially thanks to the spell's long duration and being re-castable the turn after it fades.
  • Similarly, Sebille's innate Source skill, Break the Shackles. It instantly cancels all debuffs on her, including exotic ones like Plagued and Shackles of Pain, and can be used to cure Mute even though it would normally prevent her from casting this to start with. Certainly less flashy than the other Origin characters, but it will turn a fight around when used.
• Boss-Altering Consequence:
  • The Demon Lord Adramahlihk is a punishing Optional Boss, but if Lohse is in the party, Malady offers a sidequest to breach his Pocket Dimension and destroy his vast reserve of Soul Power. This reduces his Hit Points and elemental resistances, disables his daemon summons, and prevents him from destroying Lohse's soul.
  • The last quest of the arena chain, "Proving Ground", has you fight a boss battle against the Great Guardian and its flunkies. You can fight him normally, but you can also realign the Eternal Reflectors conveniently located around the arena and power them up with a Phase Capacitor which will stun the Great Guardian and keep its Magic Armor at 0... or you can just pickpocket the Phase Capacitors off it and its flunkies, killing it instantly.
• Boss-Arena Idiocy: The Sallow Man is a Demon of Human Origin (well, technically Elven). It's not required to fight him, but if you do, he has thousands of hot points, unique debuffs, and a rare second stage to his fight...assuming you don't just teleport him into the pit of lava that borders one side of his base.
• Boss in Mook Clothing: Mummie Dearest at the Abandoned Livewood Mill, she's level 15 while the rest of the Lone Wolves are at level 14, a single swipe from her axe can instantly kill and worst of all, she moves very quickly and kill all in the same turn.
• Boss-Only Level: The Final Boss is found after both a Boss Corridor and the same clearly-labeled Point of No Return that marks the transition to each new Act. In multiplayer, this requires each player to confirm the transition.
• Botanical Abomination: The summonable Hungry Flower.
• Boy Meets Ghoul:
  • Any romance involving an undead character, whether it is your character or Fane as an NPC.
  • You can even have sex with Fane much earlier than any of the other characters, which he uses as an excuse to do research on this mysterious concept of "sex".
• Brainless Beauty: Played for Laughs by the Cheese Merchant's preferences: "I like my men the way I like my cheese...THICK!" Unless she meant a different kind of "thick". Or yet another.
• Brick Joke:
  • On the ship to Fort Joy, if you talk to Red Prince, he will ask you how good you are at cooking and grooming. After answering him, he will tell you that he is going to let you be his slave. One of your dialogue options is to tell him you have half a mind to punch him in the face for his impudence. If he is alive and on good terms with you at the end of the game, he will once again offer you the opportunity to be his slave during your last conversation with him. One of your options is to punch him in the face.
  • In Fort Joy, there's a particular, seemingly-normal crab claiming to be a Sourcerer that a character with Pet Pal can talk to. On the Nameless Isle a couple of Acts later, there's another crab, and this one will claim to be a Source Hunter tracking down that exact crab from Act 1. Taunt him or implicate yourself as said Sourcerer-Crab's ally, and this crab will transform into a giant crab and attack you. On the other hand, if you decided to kill the first crab, the Source Hunter crab will give you a reward.
• Brutal Bonus Level: Reapers Coast contains two- Paradise Downs and Bloodmoon Island. While both contain some quests, some useful information and other fun stuff, they are hard to reach, harder to figure out how to get to, and packed to the brim with the hardest encounters in the area aside from the Abomination in the Cloisterwood.
• Buy or Get Lost:
  • Of the pair of demon merchants at the Nameless Isle, one greets you with a flat "Trade, or leave." The other is a bit too friendly.
  • Trader Fionola warns characters not to waste her time on a busy holiday and tells them to "skedaddle" as soon as they finish trading.
• Call-Back:
  • Braccus Rex is Back from the Dead - those familiar with the previous game could even recognise his voice.
  • Another one, doubling as a Brick Joke from the first Original Sin: the original had an (in)famous cheese vendor well known for spouting the same decree over and over again. This is nodded to throughout Original Sin 2 but never directly invoked until you reach Arx. There, an elven cheese vendor will also sell you a selection of rare rings and amulets if you approach her with the Outlaw tag. When pressed about how she comes across this merchandise, she hints that the mice in the city bring her the wares she sells because,
    • "After all, nobody has as many friends as the elf with many cheeses."
• Candlelit Ritual: Lord Arhu is found in a glowing pentagram with green-burning candles at its points, trapped by a Containment Field and an Agony Beam. They're generated by three spirits and disappear, candles included, when the spirits are destroyed.
• Canon Identifier: Players can control one of six available origin characters with preestablished backgrounds or create a custom avatar. Regardless of choice you take on the role of a Sourcerer, one able to wield magical Source, and eventually Godwoken, a Sourcerer chosen by a god to become the next Divine and the majority of characters refer to the members of your party by one of these titles or your chosen race.
• Cap: Combat and civil skills can only have so many points invested in each area (10 for combat skills, and five for civil skills), but this doesn't count against bonuses you can get from equipment and such, meaning you can have invested five points in thievery but have a score of seven because you have a piece of equipment that gives you two extra points in thievery, for example. Some obstacles flat-out require more points than the cap provides, such as convincing Alexandar to step down quietly with at least 6 persuasion.
• Cast From HP:
  • Flesh Sacrifice the Elf racial. Though in actuality it's more of a Maximum HP Reduction.
  • Becomes a Subverted Trope with the Leech trait - the pool of blood created by this ability provides an instant burst of healing.
  • The Necromancer skill Last Rites will resurrect a dead Godwoken at the cost of dealing massive damage to the caster. Can easily be fatal if you have a particularly Squishy Wizard.
• Chainmail Bikini: Elves of both genders dress this way. Notably, all races have their armor in their own racial style, so equipping Chainmail Armor that looks like a full surcoat on a human will inexplicably become a literal Chainmail Bikini if an elf puts it on.
• Chekhov's Gun: During the second act of the game, players might stumble upon a scroll called "Voidwoken Fish Exchange", with the cryptic description of "Notify the Doctor that his fish is available". In the final act of the game, when the player finally has an opportunity to meet the Doctor, clever use of this scroll with a barrel and a teleporter pyramid can provide a method of access into his house.
• Chekhov's Gunman: In an early conversation, Fane will offhandedly mention having had a wife and daughter, which doesn't come across as important until Dallis reveals that she is Fane's daughter, struggling to undo the damage he caused aeons ago.
• Children's Covert Coterie: A gang of thief children live in a lair in Arx's Absurdly Spacious Sewer. Having managed at least one dangerous, high-profile heist, they keep their existence a secret; you can learn of them by fast-talking their fence or questioning the ghost of their latest fall guy.
• The Chosen Many:
  • Played with. The Player Character is Godwoken, a person chosen by a god as the potential next Divine. The thing is, they're a Godwoken, one of many, only one of which can become the next Divine. This puts the player into conflict with Bishop Alexandar, and also potentially with the other members of the party. The knowledge that only one of the group can become Divine and the others must either acquiesce or resist slowly builds over the course of the game until it is ultimately settled late in Act 3.
  • Which is not to mention that the Nameless Isle is littered with Godwoken who failed to become Divine, some of them living and many more of them dead.
• Chunky Salsa Rule: Averted. Your character can explode, be raised from the dead, and explode again, but your party members can still revive them no problem. Hilariously, this is also Averted in-universe: Alexandar always survives your first fight and is merely comatose on the Lady Vengeance, no matter how he died. Yes, even after being Frozen and then shattered.
• Color-Coded Item Tiers: Item tiers are coded like this, depending on how many magical properties they have. It's worth noting that only the amount of affixes varies - how powerful the affix is depends on the item's level:
  • White: Non-magical.
  • Green: Uncommon. One random magical affix.
  • Blue: Rare. Two random magical affixes.
  • Purple: Epic. Three random magical affixes.
  • Pink: Legendary. Four random magical affixes.
  • Yellow: Divine. Five random magical affixes.
  • Gold: Unique. A fixed number of magical properties. They can actually have less affixes than the other grades of items, but they are usually more powerful or offer abilities not found elsewhere.
• Common Place Rare: The game has tons of useless everyday items whose sole purpose is to be sold for dough. And yet, there's only ONE teapot in the entire game that you can find in the very last chapter. You can't even take it or steal it, you have to return to its location every time you need to make some tea.
• Cultural Chop Suey: Each of the races has some similarities to a blend of various world cultures, detailed further under Fantasy Counterpart Culture. The Eternals are an in-universe example of this. The seven gods were all Eternals, and based each race in their own image. Fane claims that The Eternals were "a race from a time when the term 'race' was unnecessary".
• Cutscene Power to the Max:
  • During chapter 4, you can take out a loan with Sanguina Tell, a demon that requires you to give her some of your blood. You are told you must pay back whatever loan you take (which can be anywhere from a small amount to enough to buy everything in Arx) or else there will be consequences...and those consequences are she will eventually show up to collect and if you are unable to pay her back, she will instantly kill you. However, after you take out the loan, you can simply sneak into the basement of her house through the back and kill her, and even though she has your blood, she is unable to use it to instantly kill you there, leading to a relatively easy fight. And after that, there is zero consequence for taking out the largest loan possible, you are set for the rest of the game.
  • When the player character finds Isbeil in Chapter 4, she knocks out the entire party mid-dialogue with a huge Area of Effect spell that ignores their protective equipment and immunities. When they escape and fight her, she only has ordinary combat skills.
  • On the Nameless Isle, Ifan can stab Bishop Alexandar to death in one surprise attack during dialogue, no matter his current build. His victim is otherwise a Boss Battle who's extremely difficult to one-shot in normal combat.
• Combat Pragmatist: Melee rogues have no concept of a fair fight. Throwing sand in the enemy's eyes, rupturing their tendons making them lose heath when they walk, stabbing ''through'' their armor, and numerous other dirty tricks are all fair game as far as they're concerned.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Debuffs that make the characters change allegiances (temporarily) seem to work way differently for players versus enemies. It seems to be that whenever a player is taunted or charmed, they will Shoot the Medic First, buff enemies, and chew through their entire backpack of one-shot items. When enemies are taunted or charmed, they'll just stand there. Note also that the Provoke skill when used by a player has to have that enemy's Physical Armor breached first, whereas the Computer can automatically provoke your guys even fully buffed. The different effects upon PCs vs. NPCs just add insult to injury. (This seems to have been fixed in a later patch.)
  • The AI in general has been described as playing a tabletop game against someone who is metagaming, with AI behaviours that seem blatantly out of place within the game's context. Part of this is due to the fact that the AI examines you with loremaster before their turn, meaning they know all your resistances and whether or not you're undead, and there's no visual or even in-game indication they are doing this, so they come off as psychic.
  • Towards the end, you'll lose count of the number of times the NPCs get a free opening salvo fireball or similar effect that pretty much destroys the Magic Armor of half of your team, and the next enemy or so in the initiative will start doing Crowd Control effects like Madness, Charm, or Terrified.
  • Many fights start out with the NPCs surrounding the party in spread out, tactical positions. Meanwhile, the default set up for the party is to be stuck in the middle of the enemies and a juicy target for area of effect spells, possibly standing right next to acid, fire, or poison as well.
  Article: Every encounter is stacked against you and you have to use your wits, the environment, and clever combinations to succeed...(the game) is meant to be rigged against the player — you have to find areas where you can rig it back against the game.
  • Player characters typically have 4 Action Points to spend each turn, and can never have more than 6 banked (there is some minmaxing to be done with skills and talents that will let a player character have more than 6, but they're clunky and situational). Using Loremaster shows that many enemies—even non-bosses—have as many as nine Action Points available every single turn.
• Contractual Boss Immunity: Generally averted. Some bosses are immune to crowd control effects, but most bosses actually aren't.
  • A standout: hilariously, almost every boss in the game, no matter how powerful, huge, or outright divine, can be turned into a chicken for a few rounds once their physical armor is depleted. The only exceptions are bosses that are so big they have multiple separate 'parts', because it wouldn't make sense to turn just one tentacle into a chicken, and your own god while they're hiding within your soul in Act 2.
  • By the time you can get access to barrels of Deathfog, most of the bosses you face 'just happen' to be undead in lore, meaning they can't be trivially killed... but this is purely an in-universe problem, not a meta excuse. Literally Lucian the Divine himself, on the other hand, is still alive when you fight him, and thus can get OHKO'd along with his living helpers with a barrel of the stuff to the face.
  • Inverted by Mordus in Act 2. His minions are all mind-controlled, making them immune to sleep and thus unable to be CCed by the common Scoundrel skill Chloroform. Mordus himself lacks this immunity, meaning the boss is the only character in the fight who isn't immune.
  • Really the only boss that plays this at all straight is Adramahlihk — not because he's actually immune, but because if you haven't nerfed him through Lohse's personal sidequest, he just has an incredible amount of magic armor — and if Lohse is in your party, he'll mind-control her permanently, removing her from the party, in far too little time for most players to work it down. However, even he is vulnerable to the freezing effect of cursed ice, which for whatever reason goes right through magic armor.
• Contrasting Sequel Main Character: In Original Sin, you played as Source Hunters. In the sequel, you play as the Sourcerers on the run from the hunters.
• Convection, Schmonvection: Downplayed slightly, in that you get the "warm" status effect if you go near lava, but, aside from that, you can get as close as you want to lava, and as long as you don't touch it (which is instant death), be perfectly okay.
• Cooldown Manipulation: The "Skin Graft" Polymorph skill is only usable once per battle but clears all of the user's active cooldowns.
• Co-Op Multiplayer/Drop-In-Drop-Out Multiplayer: Like in the first game, co-op is a big thing here, except now you can play with three other people, rather than just one. Note that local split screen multiplayer is still limited to two, mostly due to screen real estate.
• Corrupted Contingency: A Magitek supercomputer within a Pocket Dimension detected interference with the crystal that anchors it in the physical world, decided that the most plausible explanation was a sabotage attempt, and killed all its operators with its security failsafes. The interference was from a playful dog.
• Critical Existence Failure: Barring status effects, as long as you have at least one health point, you will fight just as effectively as if you had full health, but when you have zero, you instantly die.
• Critical Hit Class:
  • You can make a critical hit focused version of any playstyle, but Dagger-wielding Rogues, Archers, and Two-Handed weapon Warriors are most suited to it.
  • As mentioned below, Humans get more out of their crits than the other races.
  • The Savage Sortilege talent allows magic-based attacks to benefit from critical hit multipliers.
• Cutting Off the Branches: One of the potential final bosses of the game is the Divine Lucian himself. If you've played Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga, you can see how this would become problematic as this game takes place before that one. However, one ending comes from doing what Lucian asks you to do, so that ending is presumably the canon one.
• Cutscene Drop: The cutscene before the Final Boss battle gathers the entire party into a close group in front of the boss. They have no opportunity to take their positions again before the fight begins, exposing them to multiple Herd Hitting Attacks and disadvantaging Long Range Fighters and Squishy Wizards.
• Dangerous Forbidden Technique: The Source. While the original game initially treated it as pure Black Magic, it eventually revealed that the Source was not always corruptive and evil and can, in fact, be used for good. Abusing it, however, is very easy and quickly leads to a lot of suffering. The primary means of obtaining source points is to defile corpses in the goriest way possible: sucking out one's soul and ripping their remains to shreds.
• Darker and Edgier: In terms of overall tone, D:OS2 is to the original Original Sin what The Sith Lords was to the first Knights of the Old Republic. Where in D:OS you played a pair of heroic individuals with a secret heroic legacy out on a quest to stop an obvious evil through courage and mettle, in the sequel you play a bunch of deeply flawed individuals who just happen to be less flawed than everyone else in the world. And while the ending of D:OS is unambiguously triumphant, every single ending of the sequel is morally ambiguous in some way. Heck, the game can be considered this for the Divinity series as a whole. In the past, the lines between good and evil were clearly defined, making it easy to be an all-out hero. In Original Sin 2, there are so many conflicting agendas between the nations, factions, gods, and even your own allies that being an unambiguous good guy is nearly impossible to pull off, and the situation is so dire that you're often left with no choice but to do some pretty rotten things just to move forward. Oh, and one of the Big bads? Lucian - the player character from the first Divine Divinity game.
• The Dark Side: You can quickly upgrade your Source Skills and recharge Source Points by slaughtering everyone in sight and consuming their life essence... but it has some very unpleasant consequences in a long run.
• Dead All Along: The Reveal has the Godwoken realize that the real Magister Dallis was killed by Fane's daughter before the game began, assuming her identity using the same kind of mask he uses. Judging by Alexandar's comments on his upbringing, it looks to have happened more than a decade ago.
• Deader than Dead: Depending on how far the player cares to take it, Sebille's revenge against the Master can take the form of killing him, exploding his corpse, eating his heart, and then devouring his soul for good measure. More generally, many characters leave a spirit behind after you kill them. You can then consume the spirit for Source, consigning them to oblivion. In the case of Black Ring cultists, this will prevent the God King from resurrecting them, though some of them are quick enough to disappear when you try.
• Deadly Gas: Deathfog. Instant death for the living; anyone who's undead, like Fane, can pass through it fine.
• Deal with the Devil: Becoming Sworn to the God King is very much this. On the bright side you gain power and potential immortality since the God King can revive his followers. On the downside, you have to follow every command your new master gives you and you can never disobey him. If you force the Sworn Mordus to reveal what he knows about the God King, his master makes him disintegrate before your very eyes. At least three characters who have become Sworn now regret it and seek a magical scythe called the Swornbreaker which has the power to undo magical binding oaths.
• Death as Game Mechanic: Godwoken like the Player Party are canonically less bound by mortality, hence why they can use Resurrection Scrolls. A PC can also gain Talents that make them explode when killed and Auto-Revive afterwards.
• Death of the Old Gods: Sort of. You see, the old gods all gave up half their magic to the Divine (who they call the usurper) a long while back, and since the death of the Divine, they're slowly losing the rest of it to the void, thus slowly dying. It's a bit closer to "terminal illness of the old gods." As it turns out, the Divine has been leeching the source from the Gods for his Rage Against the Heavens plan.
• Decapitated Army:
  • Downplayed in gameplay terms proper, as some leaders have a "Leadership" score that boosts the stats of their teammates. Killing them removes this buff, making those minions slightly easier to handle. Some forces die or disappear when the leader is killed, but these are cases of Keystone Army.
  • Early on, you must battle an annoying spirit named Trompdoy, who at one point splits himself up into multiple targets. If you know to focus on one, the rest of them die alongside him.
  • If you focus exclusively on Braccus Rex in the final fight, all of his flunkies die with him.
• Decoy Antagonist: Windego, the old lady who destroys the boat you are on with source magic at the beginning, seems set to be a major antagonist, even the fact that she is the narrator of the prologue and part of the ending. However, she ultimately factors very little into the plot - in fact, only Fane gives her any kind of different interactions on Fort Joy and her act 4 presence, wherein she takes a sizable Info Dump on the player is very very easily missed.
• De-power: As part of her arrest by the Magisters, Meistr Siva was purged. Being a Source Master, this didn't turn her into a Silent Monk, but it stripped her of her Source powers. Meaning she can't train the Godwoken, so they much search Reaper's Coast for someone else to teach them.
• Dem Bones: Undead are walking, talking skeletons. You have the option of playing as one of any race. Given how jumpy everyone is towards the walking dead, playable skeletons will need enough gear to cover themselves up lest they attract the anger of everyone they come across.
• Desperation Attack: Using the necromantic Death Wish skill gives you a damage boost depending on how much percentage of life you lost. The less vitality you have, the more powerful the damage will become.
• Developer's Foresight: This game is very very well liked for having all sorts of foresight in terms of the dev team, allowing all sorts of variations within how (roughly half) of the quests are completed.
  • In fact, there is even an actual ending for taking Lohse with you without having completed her personal quest and killed Adrahmalihk.
    • Said quest apparently doesn't check for whether or not you learned his true name and used Malady's sidequest to weaken Adrahmalihk in-story, it only checks for whether or not you defeated the boss. As mentioned under Lord British Postulate, you can just kill them and it still considers the quest completed.
  • Multiple quests in which you are told to kill someone or find something can be instantly completed by presenting the item right there since you found it before.
  • There are numerous ways to exit Fort Joy, master Source, enter the Nameless Isle temple, and trick out Lucian's Path of Blood, all of which accomodate for possibilities that may render some methods impossible.
• Disaster Dominoes: Dialogue immediately before the final boss explains why the Voidwoken have broken through into Rivellon after thousands of years of trying. Lucian's use of Deathfog on the Elves weakened Tir-Cendilius by killing so many of his worshippers. This weakness created the hole that the God-King needed to break through, and he expanded it from there. His invasion of Rivellon kicked off the Sourceror pogrom, conflict with Justinia, and all the sorrows the Godwoken experience over the course of the game.
• Demanding Their Head:
  • The Godwoken can accept a quest to collect Bishop Alexandar's head for the Sallow Man — an Undead Abomination and lieutenant to the Greater-Scope Villain. It serves a purpose beyond killing an enemy; the Sallow Man eats the head to absorb Alexandar's knowledge.
  • The bounty on the Psycho for Hire Mummie Dearest is collected by hunting her down and delivering her head to Paladin Hardwin. He'd personally set the price after she took an axe to his best friend's neck.
    Narrator: He recoils in disgust. But then, recognizing her face... he grins.
• Disc-One Final Dungeon: The Nameless Isle in Act III. It's built up as the finale, as it's where you and your companions go to fulfill their destiny and become the Divine. Things don't go according to plan, and the fact that there's a lot of buildup, foreshadowing, and unfinished quests surrounding the city of Arx should tell you there's going to be a lot more to go.
• Disc-One Nuke:
  • Teleport - partially for the damage, but mostly for the sheer utility. Teleport can be obtained very early via a glove (or even a skillbook). Players will most likely find themselves using it into the late game either to bring squishy casters or rangers over, or to send annoying enemies away.
  • The Chicken Claw + Rupture Tendons combo. Not only is it hilarious incorporating Chicken Claw as crowd control, Rupture Tendons then inflicts tons of damage since they are forced to flee (and trigger movement-based damage). This combo is cheap and even in Act 2 continues to pull weight, inflicting hundreds of damage.
  • If you have a rogue, killing a certain boss inside the Fort Joy Prison will cause him to drop his daggers that can inflict mute or bleeding. In the same area, there is a particularly strong bow hidden behind some (skippable, with a certain item or Pet Pal) dogs.
  • For ranged characters, bringing Ifan along will net you a very powerful crossbow from his personal quest immediately after escaping Fort Joy. Particularly notable is the fact that it deals piercing damage, which ignores armor.
  • Beast can actually get his Source Collar removed first (you just have to have him talk to a few dwarves who know him), and with it he can use his ability "Blinding Gale". The skill itself is very much Overshadowed by Awesome (Especially if Beast is Ranged or a caster) and Source Points are worth their weight in gold at this point in the game. But for Fort Joy and early parts of Reaper's Coast? It's actually not bad at all.
  • With the Four Relics DLC/Definitive Edition, once in Act II, if one knows what to do it's possible to very quickly find and complete the Vulture Armor quest. Getting armor at level 9 or 10 that's intended for level 14 makes a ranged character extremely powerful, mobile, and even durable for the early parts of Reaper's Coast and it's still useable all the way 'til the next Act.
• Dissonant Serenity:
  • During The Reveal in the academy, most of the past events revolving around Lucian's actions see him with a gentle, comforting presence even as he personally slays any competitors for divinity.
  • At the climax Lucian's tone remains deathly calm, even as he discusses the death of his son, the Rage Against the Heavens plan and even when Vredman breaks free of his chains.
• Distant Sequel: Divinity: Original Sin II is set 1200 years after Divinity: Original Sin, and although it is not a direct sequel to it (it actually more closely follows Divine Divinity), the two games form the two end points of the same story arc concerning the Dangerous Forbidden Technique Source as the origin of the divine power: D:OS explains how it got corrupted, while the sequel allows you remove it from the world entirely in some of the endings.
• Divine Intervention: Your god saves you from drowning after the ship you're on is attacked by a kraken at the beginning of the game, allowing you to wash onshore at Fort Joy.
• Doomsday Device: You can find one under Arx, and activate it yourself, if you want to wipe out the whole city via the release of a huge cloud of deathfog.
• Double-Edged Buff:
  • The Scoundrel skill Adrenaline gives the user two bonus Action Points on their current turn but subtracts two from their next turn.
  • The Warfare skill Enrage gives the target guaranteed Critical Hits but prevents them from using magic for that turn.
  • Elemental status effects tend to give percent-based resistances and vulnerabilities to elemental damage. For example, being set on fire grants some resistance to water damage.
• Dragon Ascendant: The Big Bad of Act I is Bishop Alexandar, but his second in command becomes the overarching villain of the story.
• The Dragons Come Back: The Red Prince and Sadha are prophesied to hatch a new generation of the great red dragons from which the Lizards are descended. His enemies are bent on preventing this in the belief that the other races would unite against them. If his personal quest is completed, his first dragon child hatches and serves him as a Bond Creature.
• Dual Wielding: More than doable, though the weapon in your off hand gets a 50% damage penalty. It's mostly done with rogues and their daggers, though you can find a couple of mages dual wielding wands.
  • Sebille loves using her daggers. She's seen wielding one in her character introduction video, two on loading screens, and when recruited, has two daggers as well.
• Dump Stat:
  • Constitution is worthless to invest points into. Status effects that stun are only inhibited by physical and magical armor, not vitality, meaning if your armor is broken its already likely that you're being stunlocked. All Constitution does is increase your vitality, making you tankier but not improving your armor values. This means an effective tank is likely better as someone with high armor values and a shield instead of high Constitution. As well, putting points into your attack stats makes it more likely you'll break enemy armor and stunlock them before they can reach you.
  • Memory can be this for fighter-type characters - Memory increases the number of active skills you can have at a time. While skill slots are useful, fighters might not need as many since they can just Attack! Attack! Attack!. One talent, Mnemonic, essentially allows you to get away with ignoring it for a while.
  • Finesse for non-rogue builds. Unlike strength, which increases carrying capacity, and intelligence, which increases spell damage (which any class can use via scrolls) on top of increasing their respective weapons' damage, finesse has no effect beyond increasing its weapons' damage, making it useless for anyone who doesn't use said weapons.
  • More generically, Strength, Finesse, and Intelligence all cover a subset of both weapons and armor (melee heavy weapons/plate, bows and daggers/chain, staves and wands/enchanted robes, respectively) and passively increase attacks made by those weapons (including abilities that incorporate them). This means that most characters will want to go deep on one of these three stats and ignore the other two. The only real exception is a 1-4 point in another stat in order to get more of a particularly type of armor, since plate armor leans toward physical, chain is balanced, and robes lean toward magic.
  • When it comes to civil stats, Bartering and Telekinesis aren't nearly as useful as the rest (as money is plentiful in this game for the former and teleportation skills and simple strength make the latter redundant). Though Telekinesis does let you lift items that not even your warrior can lift, as it (for obvious reasons) completely ignores strength checks.
  • Wits for dagger-wielding Rogues. The primary benefit of Wits is increased crit chance, but Rogues are able to regularly deliver Back Stab attacks, which provide guaranteed criticals regardless of crit chance. The secondary effect of Wits is to increase your initiative, but a stealthy character can move around outside of combat, use Cloak and Dagger to position themselves wherever they want, and get in a backstab flurry before the enemies can do anything about it, which is just as good if not better than going first in the initiative order.
• Dysfunction Junction: Pretty much everyone you can invite to your party (barring custom characters) has some sort of dark past that still affects them to this day, ranging from Ifan, who unwittingly unleashed death fog on an unsuspecting elven settlement while trying to save them; to Sebille, who was made a slave and forced to kill her own kind; to Lohse, who has a powerful demon inhabiting her body. Each character's quest is about resolving their issues or punishing those whose fault it was that these things happened.

Tropes E — H

• Early Game Hell: Still in effect. You begin the game without equipment, without physical or magical armor your characters can get afflicted by delibitating ailments, new skills are expensive and a new player doesn't know which ones they should use depending on the situation (new players may even seal their own fate by setting up poison and fire areas that they can't handle), some early game encounters are brutal, and overall you die extremely easily. Once you acquire decent equipment, skills and level up a little, the game gets progressively easier, though you can expect it to throw you a curveball at a moment's notice.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: For the most part, there is a good solution for many of the dilemmas in the game, but oftentimes is harder than choosing the more evil, easier path. Then again, you typically earn more XP for taking the harder route. One example would be fighting The Doctor WITHOUT sacrificing the souls of millions.
• Earthquakes Cause Fissures: The Geomancy spell "Earthquake" is an Area of Effect that inflicts heavy elemental damage and knockdown, creates oil surfaces, and causes cracks in the ground to radiate outwards from the caster, though the latter effect is short-lived and purely cosmetic.
• Easy Level Trick: It's possible to instantly kill the Sallow Man by teleporting him into the lava surrounding his boss arena.
• Electricity Knocks You Out: Many Shock and Awe powers and electrical Geo Effects can inflict the status effect "Stunned", which costs the target their next turn.
• Elemental Speed:
  • The Favourable Wind aerotheurge skill grants nearby allies a boost to movement speed, described as the wind literally being at their back.
  • The Haste pyrokinetic skill grants the target both a boost to movement speed and an extra Action Point per combat turn.
• Elemental Weapon: Magic Wands and Staffs deal damage of a specific element^note (Air, Earth, Fire, Poison, or Water) by default, while some other weapons deal elemental damage on top of their usual Physical damage. Some have a chance of inflicting elemental-themed status effects like Burning. Weapons can also gain elemental damage from socketed runes, by Item Crafting them with damage sources, and/or temporarily from spells.
• 11th-Hour Superpower: Before the Final Boss, your characters get a prayer that removes the Source Cost for your skills that had before been Too Awesome to Use.
• Elves Versus Dwarves: Averted. Elves and Dwarves don't have very many significant interactions in the backstory one way or another. Practically Inverted considering they share a mutual hatred of racist humans. Strangely, there are some elven NPCs that seem bigotted against dwarves, but they're few and far between, plus they sing the same tune as the aforementioned racist humans, so it's less an example of this trope than it is an example of a few prejudiced assholes.
• Enemy Mine: At one point, you can call a truce with Bishop Alexandar. This is entirely optional though - you can also side with the Black Ring and kill Alexandar, or side with neither.
• Escort Mission: Played with.
  • The quest On the Ropes is a fairly straight example, except that you merely need to make Gwydion survive a single fight, rather than guide him somewhere. The fact that it's a bit of a Marathon Level complicates matters.
  • You'll do this again during the fight with Roost Anlin, where Saheila cowers in the back of the office (and Roost's minions will frustratingly ignore the four Godwoken assaulting them in order to attack the defenseless elf).
  • After said fight, Saheila will become a Guest-Star Party Member as you engineer her escape from the lumber mill as Roost's remaining followers try to stop just that. Aside from the wrinkle of directly controlling the character you're escorting, the trope is played to the hilt with, again, hardened mercenaries willing to run through clouds of fire and a thicket of attacks of opportunity just to paste the helpless blind girl cowering in the back.
  • This is done again with the Magister Ranger Dolorus in Act 3. The only wrinkle is that the reward for keeping him alive is more or less negligible.
• Eternal English: Characters trapped for three millennia speak the exact same language as your characters despite almost certainly not having had any contact with anyone in the intervening time. Justified later in the game when you learn that the seven gods that created the races are Eternals
• Ethnic God: Except for Amadia, who is the patron of all wizards, and Xantezza who is the god of Imps but is worshipped as a goddess of mirth and laughter, the seven gods play this straight. This is Subverted on the Nameless Isle when you meet a Lizard who worships Tir-Cendelius, the god of Elves. He claims that he was the Godwoken of Zorl-Stissa, god of Lizards, but felt abandoned by her after failing to become the Divine.
  • Beast, Sebille, and The Red Prince's stories could each be described as a Decon-Recon Switch of this concept. Each of their motives to ascend is to bring their respective race glory because they are on the decline. Over the course of the story, it becomes increasingly obvious that because there can only be one Divine, each of the seven gods is expecting to come to power by stepping over the other races, leaving only one Ethnic God alive while the others suffer without divine patronage. This is reconstructed, however, if the player (as one of those three characters) rejects this racist, supremacist view and becomes a god that not only saves their own race, but is good to the others. If any of those three characters is one of your companions, then their story is about realizing that the player would make a better divine while also trusting that they have good intentions for the future of their own people. In any case, you can also Defy this trope by destroying the position of Divine by giving Sourcery to everyone in the world.
• Ethnic Menial Labour: Dwarves in human lands do a lot of the menial jobs. One especially racist Magister even refers to Dwarves as pack mules, good for nothing but cheap labor.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": The Red Prince's only given name so far is... The Red Prince. And it's not a lizard thing, as you can meet lizard folk with proper given names like Saam and Stingtail. Especially notable in The Red Prince's personal quest regarding The Red Princess, who when encountered in-game, is named Sadha.
• Everyone Is Bi: Played straight with the romanceable party members, all of whom are available regardless of gender. The only aversion in the entire game, in fact, is Papa Thrash, who can only be seduced by a female dwarf.
• Evil Sorceror: Or Evil Sourcerer, as it were. The premise of Act 2 is that the Godwoken must become a master of the Source. However, the Magister crackdown means that the Meistr who was supposed to instruct them on how to do so is now De Powered, so they must look elsewhere for training. Given that Sourcery is currently illegal, all the good Sourcerors have already turned themselves in, meaning the Godwoken must find and bargain with the Sourcerors in the area who were too unscrupulous to turn themselves in and too powerful to be taken by force. A few of them are fairly decent people, some are more ruthless than they initially appear, yet more are Obviously Evil, and one is a literal demon.
• Extradimensional Emergency Exit:
  • At the end of Act I, Malady helps the player character escape a Divine Order assault by teleporting her ship and its passengers into the Hall of Echoes, though she needs to be protected while she prepares the spell.
  • Malady repeats the feat after Act III, teleporting the ship midair into a Collapsing Lair to grab the player character and then immediately back into the Hall. There, she goes straight to bed to recover from the feat.
• Extradimensional Power Source: In prehistory, the Eternals detected a vast reserve of Source magic outside the physical world and tapped it to become the Seven Gods. Unfortunately, that reserve was a barrier against the Void, and weakening it caused all Sourcery to be tainted.
• The Extremist Was Right:
  • Despite all the atrocities he committed, and even though you have every reason to hate him, going through with Lucian's plan leads to the best overall ending for Rivellon. The Void is sealed, the Voidwoken threat is ended, and the the world enters an age of peace and prosperity. Meanwhile, the other endings paint a much less ideal picture for Rivellon's future.
  • The Prince of Shadows explains that he enslaved Sebille and forced her to kill her own kind because Elvenkind represented a threat to all other races of Rivellon, and their need for expansion would certainly doom everyone else. Considering that the Elves are currently hovering on the brink of extinction, this seems far-fetched. But if Saheila survives into Act IV and Sebille does as she instructed in Act III by killing Mother Tree, she reveals that this is exactly what she had planned.
• Face–Heel Turn: Each of the Godwoken that the player left to die on the Lady Vengeance by not recruiting them returns at the end of Act III to challenge the player for the right to become the next Divine, except now they're undead.
• Failure Is the Only Option: You can never save more than 4 of the 6 Godwoken from dying on the Lady Vengeance at the end of of Act 1 because of the game's Arbitrary Head Count Limit. The ones you don't save return as undead to challenge you for Divinity at the end of Act 3 and truly hate you for it.
• Fantastic Nuke:
  • Deathfog is a Deadly Gas that kills any and all living things unfortunate enough to enter it. In small amounts, it can wipe out a battlefield; in large amounts, it can slaughter an entire city (or even a whole region), and keep the area from ever being settled again. Its very existence is shown to be a game changer in the political landscape, with many nations scrambling to counteract it in some way. Of note is how Justinia attempts to launch a preemptive attack on Arx out of sheer paranoia that the Divine Order will unleash deathfog on her kingdom just like it had on the elves.'
  • Higba the Sourcerer is an alchemy expert and you can pickpocket a bottle of Homemade Explosives from him. However the insane concoction is made, using it will blow up the user as well as everything else in a huge area for massive damage. It scales with level and Intelligence, so a spellcaster can use it to One-Hit Kill almost any enemy in range, including bosses. Best to keep distance from party members and/or pop Fire Resistance, or else you will absolutely vaporize allies as well.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • Quite a few (but by no means all) humans have a lot of dislike for, and fear of, elves, due to the fact that they eat their dead, making them worry that the elves will eat them too. Interestingly, though, dwarves don't have any particular grudge against elves or vice versa.
  • Racism against lizards is also particularly pronounced from humans, partly due to the Ancient Empire being known slavers and their infamously stuck up attitudes. In particular, you can count the number of Magister lizards that make it to the end of the game on one hand.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: The humans have a general Medieval European Fantasy aesthetic while the other races have Cultural Chop Suey going on:
  • The Lizards are primarily a blend of "Arabian Nights" Days and Imperial China. They live in the desert, use scimitars, have genies (in lamps, even!), their Drudinae is often used in hookah-like Drudinae pipes, and their fancier clothes involve light robes and turbans in vibrant color schemes. They're also an isolated and advanced empire with aloof and haughty nobles that look down on foreigners and live in a Forbidden City.
  • The Elves are a bit more all over the place. They have hints of Gaelic culture in their druidic lifestyle, and their status as refugees from lands conquered by a larger imperial power gives them some Native American parallels (The casting effect for Flesh Sacrifice, the Elven racial ability, resembles a Dreamcatcher pattern). Elven-style axes are Aztec style obsidian-studded clubs.
  • The Dwarves have Celtic knot patterns decorating their architecture and often wear Nordic looking braids. Their backstory involves a warrior-king confederating many tribes under his banner through conquest and diplomacy, not unlike Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan. The primary influence on their aesthetics, though, is Ancient Grome. Their Plate Armor sets are gilded and skirted while their cloth armors are basically decorated togas. They tend to have Latin sounding names like "Marcus Miles" or "Justinia". Their more recent backstory, involving their Empire fracturing due to conquests by younger cultures that they view as barbaric, adds to this. They have some hints of post-Roman Renaissance Italy and Iberia, with their ornate and fancy weapons (their Axes often have rapier-like baskets around the hilts), a powerful merchant class, and a tradition of seafaring (and sea shanties of course). Less obviously, their presence in human cities as oppressed, barely tolerated, second-class citizens who often make a living as craftsmen make them out to be similar to the medieval Jews.
• Fantasy Gun Control: In full effect. Probably most noticeable in that the Lady Vengeance looks straight out of the Age of Sail, except she has ballistas instead of cannons.
• Fate Worse than Death: When the Divine Order's Magisters catch a Sourcerer, they strip them of their powers, which has a side effect of essentially wiping out their personality and individuality. Some of them are even converted into Human Weapons for the Divine Order.
• Fighter, Mage, Thief: The character creation and upgrade system is extremely flexible, allowing for mixing and matching as the player desires, but there are direct analogues to all three regardless. For example, there are weapon skills targeted towards one or more classes, as well as several areas that very much equate to one or another (e.g. Warfare for fighters, Marksman and Scoundrel for Rogues, and various forms of magic for mages).
  • More directly, the stats of Strength, Intelligence, and Finesse all correspond directly to the respective roles. As mentioned under Dump Stat, each stat shares both a weapon and an armor type, and they're the same weapons and armor usually assigned to each of those classes.
    • Strength is for Fighters, enabling swords, axes, and hammers good for dishing out physical damage and heavy plate armor good for soaking it.
    • Finesse is for Rogues, scaling daggers, bows, and crossbows, all weapons that excel while fighting unfairly (daggers get automatic critical hits when attacking from behind and ranged attacks deal more damage from high ground, where an enemy will also have trouble fighting back). It also unlocks chain armor, which offers balanced protection from physical and magic damage—perfect if you're not sure what you'll be fighting, but you know it will only hit you once before you burst it down.
    • Intelligence increases the damage of staves, wands, and most spells. It also unlocks the ability to wear enchanted robes, which pack tons of magic armor but provide all the protection one would expect from thick cloth against a broadsword.
• Final Boss Preview:
  • The Kraken, you can tell, will be fought much later. It's fortunately a Skippable Boss though.
  • Magister Dallis and the cloaked figure at the beginning of act two. She's actually standing next to the True Final Boss.
• First-Person Peripheral Narrator: The animated prologue, epilogue, and sections between Acts are all narrated by the minor villain Wendigo.
• Flunky Boss: Just about every boss you face is one of these, having three or more flunkies around to keep you on your toes. The few non-flunky bosses show why this is: a similarly leveled, well equipped, and well built party can keep the sole boss off balance and unable to attack, while wearing him down.
• Fog of Doom: Death fog, which instantly kills anyone who enters it. It's apparently also mass manufactured, storable in crates and barrels, and a large shipment has gone missing...
• Forced Transformation:
  • Chicken Claw turns its target into a chicken, who then cannot attack, or use skills. It also makes them so much easier to kill, as chickens, naturally, aren't very tough.
  • There is a rare status effect that turns you into a cow. On the Reaper's Coast, you can find two people who have been transformed this way. They will give you a quest to get them back to normal with a witch's brew. Better yet, even though they're both female bovines, when you transform them back, one of them is revealed to be a man.
  • Braccus Rex turned a princess he was engaged to and her entire court into Fire Slugs for annoying him. He also turned Sourcerers who questioned his rule such as Feder into pigs that were permanently set on fire.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Note that most of the people on board the Lady Vengeance are killed by Meteor Storm, and by someone who sounds very similar to Braccus Rex. In Act 4, it's revealed that Dallis brought Braccus Rex back from the dead.
  • If Fane is in your party and you talk to Windego, someone takes over her voice... the same voice of those voidwoken.
  • Fane and a custom undead Avatar both illustrate that Godwoken can aspire to Divinity even if they're undead. Which each Godwoken you left to die on the Lady Vengeance will do.
  • The staff areas at the Blackpits contain poisoned food alongside normal rations, hinting that someone in Dallis' expedition is undead. Like Dallis herself.
• Freaky Funeral Forms: Each of the four races have different means of being due to the dead. The humans have traditional burials. The dwarves have their corpses fed to animals. The elves turn themselves into trees after being sampled by their own kin. The lizards prefer cremation. One quest involves finding a lizard's corpse being treated as a human's and transferring the remains to a lizard crematorium.
• Full Health Bonus: Characters who learn the "Hothead" talent gain bonuses to attack accuracy and Critical Hit chance while at maximum HP, which incentivizes ambushes, high Initiative scores, and plenty of Armor Points to retain the benefit.
• Game-Breaking Bug:
  • It's not easy to pull of if you're not trying for it (or aren't a big fan of overkill) but in the final boss fight, if you damage Vredeman for far more health than he has left (say with a backstabbing rogue doing ridiculous damage), it's possible that he will give his dialogue for revealing himself to actually be Braccus Rex, but not actually spawn for part two of the fight, rendering it unwinnable, even if you do eliminate the other combatants who carried over, as Braccus must be defeated.
  • The game has quite a bit of bugs here and there - sometimes entire quests will end up bugged.
  • There are some enemis in Bloodmoon Island in Act II that can cast Madness Squall, which will instantly crash the game when it lands. Focusing on the enemies that can use them and either kill them quickly or keep them incapable of acting can let you kill them without the game crashing, but it can be a huge issue if you do not save frequently.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • One of Fane's biggest quirks is that due to being locked inside a tomb for thousands of years, he knows next to nothing of the world he now finds himself in, or even basic concepts of what it means to be mortal. And yet, he has the scholar tag which allows him to chime in with knowledge about history and world lore. He was a great scholar before he was imprisoned, but it is odd that he can be a big source of historical knowledge of the present while also knowing nothing about it.
  • An unusual quirk of the "Loremaster" stat has this happen. If your character is undead or Fane, in-universe when you are wearing a face of a living character, you look like one and this should fool virtually everyone into thinking you're undead. In-practice, the second you enter combat, enemies will somehow know the character is undead and will toss weaponised healing spells at them despite having no real reason in-universe to think to do that.
  • You can trade with NPCs at any time in their conversation. This includes before a fight with them. The trading interface means that they're fully willing to do so, no matter how absurd it is for a demon or what-have-you giving you some gold for whatever pots and pans you stole from their house before you fight them.
  • The leveling of items is cited as one of the few issues with the game. This is made apparent during the Artefacts of the Tyrant quest line, having you traipsing around Fort Joy for the hidden armor of the Source King, Bracchus Rex. Each piece has a curse on it that can only be removed by wearing the whole set. After completing this complicated quest chain and suspending the curse, the feared armor of the Source King—still whispered of in fear, 1000 years after his death—will be noticeably worse than bog-standard gear by level 9.
  • Multiple characters have sworn an oath to the God King, and they are tied to him through that oath, even if they later come to regret it, but there is a way to free them from that oath. Sadha, the Red Princess, is one of those people, and if you have a Swornbreaker, you can give it to her and she'll be free of the God King forever. However, if you don't happen to have one and Red Prince is a party member...nothing ever comes of it. She stays in the Dream Realm for the rest of the game where the voidwoken can't reach her, but even if you take Divinity for yourself instead of giving it to everyone or destroying it, both options which permanently end the God King's crusade on the living world, in the epilogue, she marries the Red Prince and goes on to birth many dragons which are used in the war against the voidwoken, and her bond to the God King never comes up again.
  • The Undead are believed to be unholy abominations and are attacked on sight, requiring an undead PC to hide their skeletal body. However, all potential companions and most NPCs important to the main story are fine with it, even if the PC reveals themself as undead in their first conversation ever.
  • Sebille is armed with an absurdly sharp needle that's frequently mentioned in dialogue and can deal One Hit Kills in cutscenes, but is absent from her inventory and from regular gameplay.
  • In the story, Source Magic Is a Monster Magnet that can cause Voidwoken to appear with "just a drop". In gameplay, you can use all the Source you like; Voidwoken attacks, even those nominally attracted by Source, are scripted events or cutscenes.
  • Although Source magic is highly illegal and reviled, and one Sidequest treats a Source spell scroll as incriminating contraband, every major vendor has Source skill books for sale by Act II onwards.
• Gang Up on the Human: Averted by the Final Boss - if you allowed any Magisters to survive, or even Lucian or Dallis, they will go after Braccus Rex too. This can be used to your advantage since they will eat hits and weaken the Final Boss for you.
• Gay Option: You can romance any of your living companions, regardless of your own gender, such as romancing Lohse with Sebille, or Beast with Ifan.
• Geo Effects: The cornerstone of the combat system is, again, creating and combining different terrain effects.
• The Ghost: Braccus Rex. Those who played the previous game killed him (or not), but since the first act is set on a Penal Colony that used to be one of Braccus Rex's strongholds, expect to hear him a lot. Subverted in that Braccus Rex was present the whole time, although you don't find out he was under the guise of Vredeman until Act 4.
• Ghost Memory:
  • Elves can share the memories of the dead by consuming their flesh, which is a major part of their funeral rites. In game, an elf Player Character can consume body parts to learn something about their former owners and, occasionally, to gain a free Skill.
  • After the player characters gain the ability to see spirits, they can attune to some ghosts' Soul Power to read their memories.
• Giant Enemy Crab: On the Nameless Isle, you can provoke a tiny crab into a fight. He then enlarge himself into a gigantic one.
• Glass Cannon: There is a talent by this name, and boy does it live up to it. What it does is it allows you to start every turn with maximum AP (six, when everyone typically starts with four), but your physical and magic armor do not protect against environmental (like electrified water, fire, or poison clouds) or crowd control (like knockdown, blinded, or charm) effects. Everyone can use the extra AP, not just the damage-y types, but the frequency of environmental damage and the fact that pretty much every enemy can use some crowd control skills makes it a careful tradeoff, and near-useless for any character that doesn't keep their distance.
• Glass Weapon: The legendary glass sword Anathema holds the spirit of a demon and is powerfully magical, but is brittle and can't be repaired like other weapons, so it shatters after it deals a single blow.
• Godhood Seeker: The Player Character and their companions seek out divinity at their own patron gods' urging, both to defeat the Voidwoken and to fulfill their own visions for the future of the world. Trouble is, There Can Be Only One new Divine.
• God-Emperor: The Divine is also the Emperor of Rivellon, ruling all the races (though, appropriate for an emperor, there are still kings under them).
• God Is Dead: The Divine is dead, which sends the world into chaos. There is to be a new god to replace the Divine, selected from the godwoken, six or seven people (depending on whether you choose a custom character or not) with destinies that either involve becoming gods or dying.
• Gods Need Prayer Badly: At the end of the game, just before the final battle Lucian tells you that, over someone's life they gather source within their body, and when they die, their source goes to whatever god they prayed to in life, ensuring their survival. This is implied even before that in the Blackpits, during the meeting with the Eternal Aetera, a member of Fane's species sealed away for her beef with the gods.
• Go Fetch: One possible encounter with a pack of Source Hounds in Fort Joy can be resolved peacefully if you give them a shiny toy ball to play with.
• Golden Ending: The least ambiguous ending slides—and as it turns out, the canon ending per Fallen Heroes—comes from sealing the veil. The Voidwoken are totally defeated and it's explicitly said that peace and prosperity spreads throughout the land among all the races, without a bittersweet touch to it like the Divinity ending (the Voidwoken are not permanently defeated and low-scale war continues) or the Release the Source ending (the peaceful golden age is followed by super-powered wars among the new Sourcerers). The Voidwoken are gone forever, the elves get massive reparations from Lucian and become powerful and populous again, the dwarves enter a new golden age, the lizards democratize and abandon the old houses, and the human settlements you visited become new capitals of trade, tourism, and industry. Even your Heroic Sacrifice is subverted when it turns out that Malady can rescue you and your companions from having your souls taken. Additionally, all of the party members are pretty satisfied with this ending with the exception of Ifan, and even his displeasure is easily handled by making him the player character.
• Good Powers, Bad People: Lucian—he's one of the game's main antagonists.
• Gray-and-Grey Morality: The Divine Order and the Godwoken both do some terrible things over the course of the game, but all of it is done in the name of saving Rivellon from the encroachment of the Void.
• Great Off Screen War: Lucian's Great War against the resurgent Black Ring^note who have apparently recovered from the deaths of their leaders and the Demon of Lies at Lucian's hands in DD still has a massive impact on the setting, despite having occurred years before the game. The last battle of the war in particular, fought in the ancestral forest of the elves, had far-reaching consequences, as it saw Lucian release the Deathfog to ensure no Black Ring members escaped — before all elven civilians could be evacuated. The result was, predictably, a massive genocide that had primed an entire race for extinction, leaving them understandably embittered. This event ties directly into two companions' personal quests: Ifan was Lucian's lieutenant ordered to deliver the Deathfog bomb, while Sebille is the Prime Scion of the elven race and, thus, the unwitting and unwilling last hope for their salvation.
  • Digging into the endgame lore and backstory reveals that this war effectively set the entire events of the plot in motion. The deathfog was deliberate overkill not, as claimed, to destroy the Black Ring but rather to decimate the elven population to weaken Tir-Cendelius enough to make the other gods vulnerable. This had the effect of weakening the Veil between the Void and the Hall of Echoes enough for the Voidwoken to invade and attack both the gods and their worshipers, which in turn made Sorcerers a danger to the rest of the population and triggering the subsequent pogrom. Lucian did all of this in the hope of destroying the gods entirely, having realized that the sentient races of Rivellorn where little more than livestock to them.
• Griefer: The game actually accounts for this type of multiplayer and weaves player characters' conflicts into the plot.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: Using Teleport on a character to drop them on top of another deals damage to both. It deals very little damage, so even on low-level enemies it's almost never used with that purpose.
• Groin Attack: Sebille is especially fond of these, especially around the first act.
  • First is the shakedown when you enter the Fort Joy Ghetto, where one option, with Sebille and the right dialogue options at least, is to cup the thug's cheek, grab his throat, then knee him hard in the groin. This can also be followed up by breaking his leg if you feel like adding salt to the wound. The best part is all the witnesses to said event gain a massive approval bonus with your party members when you do this.
  • The second is a threat against the inmate running the ghetto's kitchen, where to get the name of the Lone Wolves assassin who can give her the name of the Lone Wolf who can help her learn her master's whereabouts, Sebille can threaten to jam her needle into his private parts. It doesn't work, because he's surrounded by his thugs, but it counts.
  • A third case presents itself if you play as Sebille and kill Stingtail with The Red Prince in your party. After you kill Stingtail, The Red Prince will grab you by the throat, and one option to get him to let you go is a swift kick between the knees, which will cause him to drop you and stop being as angry.
• Guest-Star Party Member: Saheila can temporarily join your party in Act 2. The Magister Dolorus and Bishop Alexandar can both be convinced to do the same in Act 3. In each case, the game treats the Guest Star similarly to a summoned ally.
• Guide Dang It!: Fortunately the main game does not actually have this, but there are some sidequests that actually have this:
  • Kemm's Vault specifically, Arhu's prison can be accessed only once. The problem is, it's entirely possible to enter and complete those events before you know that it's actually the subject of two, up to three quests. A patch fortunately fixed it, however it's still fully possible to reach Kemm's vault without knowing that there is a key item within it - the Swornbreaker. You have to know where it is specifically unless you Pixel Hunt.
  • To get the optimal ending for The Red Prince's Quest, you have to pick up a Swornbreaker, from one of two places that are inaccessible after completing. On your first playthrough, by the time you learn that you can even do this there's a good chance you might have missed it.
  • The Swornbreakers. While Ryker gives a hint as to what it is, there is only one NPC (who is the subject of another quest) who will mention what it is specifically... but the problem with that is, you have to go to the very most northeastern-point of the Reaper's Coast, which is an easily missable location. Confounding it is the only way to access it is to use an ability to cross a gap. A good number of players completed the game without even knowing that she was there!
  • The Black Root. While you are told by the Meistr that it grows somewhere in the Cloisterwood, she does not tell you where it grows specifically, just "It's in the Cloisterwood".
  • If you killed three bosses in act 3-4, they will appear in the Final Boss fight. There is no way for you to know this aside from that they are associated with the Black Ring.
  • The Act II quest "A Trial for All Seasons," requires you to create four specific surfaces in a small area. The first two are fairly straightforward: an ice surface caused by several common Hydrosophist skills (and given that Hydrosophist has the lion's share of the game's healing abilities, you probably have one at your disposal) and a blood surface (caused by, among other things, an Elf's innate skill). The third is a bit trickier, requiring stacking three common surfaces (fire, then water, then Shocked). The fourth requires creating a Fire Cloud, which can be created only by using several specific spells^note Laser Ray automatically creates such a cloud, but otherwise you need to create a Fire surface and then cast Vaporize on it...which the quest does not make obvious.
  • If you want to free the people possessed by the demons of Bloodmoon Island, be prepared to do some very careful cheesing with Summoning skills or else kill your own party members.
  • In a quest in Paradise Downs, you meet a healer who is treating a somewhat deranged woman in his basement, and you can offer to help cure her. Successfully doing this requires actively controlling a character with the Scholar Tag (not just using them to talk to her), making the correct dialogue choices for how you want to proceed with the treatment, and having a sufficiently high Finesse and Intelligence to perform the surgery (which probably involves using some potions ahead of time). The game doesn't tell you any of these requirements, and not doing everything perfectly results in the patient dying during the surgery and the healer becoming angry with you. Though to be fair, offering to help with a delicate surgery without anything resembling the skills required is less than clever...
  • The solution to saving the Historian in the Gargoyle's Maze. An earlier sidequest is resolved through using Bless to break a similar "burning for all eternity" curse, but that doesn't work here. The actual solution, which is only barely hinted at, is to douse the Historian in blood and then cast Bless on him after the flames wear off but before they can return.
• Guilty Until Someone Else Is Guilty: In a murder mystery Sidequest, the Magisters don't believe any evidence of their prime suspect's innocence until you identify the real killer. Subverted when they still don't call off the hunt, insisting that the original suspect must be guilty of something, which requires you to smuggle the man out of town to keep him alive.
• Harmless Freezing: Hitting an enemy with two Hydrosphist skills in a quick succession will cause them to be frozen solid, skipping their turn to thaw out. There is no ill-effect beyond losing a turn.
• Hat of Authority: The ornate, feathered Noble Hat convinces viewers that the wearer is a Blue Blood, unlocking "Noble" Dialogue Tree options. This is the only way for a non-Noble player character to speak with Lady Paulina Kemm.
• Have You Tried Not Being a Monster?: At a few points, the game makes parallels between the suppression of Sourcerers and real-life prejudices. For example, one Magister refers to Sourcery as "the magic that dare not speak its name".
• Healing Spring: If the player character shows compassion at the Sanctuary of Amadia, the goddess blesses the pool beneath her statue in a rare act of Divine Intervention. Creatures gain Regenerating Health while in the pool, and one NPC in a Sidequest can enter to be cured of a Forced Transformation.
• Heal It with Blood:
  • Characters with the "Leech" Talent gain Regenerating Health while standing on blood surfaces.
  • The Necromancy spell "Blood Sucker" causes the target to absorb a blood surface beneath them and restores Hit Points proportional to the size of the surface.
  • Blood surfaces can be blessed with Source to grant Regenerating Health to creatures standing on them.
• Heal It with Water: The Hydrosophist ability governs water and ice magic and includes a number of skills to restore Hit Points or remove status ailments, such as Restoration, Healing Tears, and Cleanse Wounds. Some even work through water surfaces or steam clouds.
• Hijacked by Ganon: After Dallis was built up as the Big Bad, it turns out, the Big Bad is actually Braccus Rex again.
• Hitbox Dissonance:
  • Just like the first game, be very careful about talking to NPCs in areas with lots of items around because of how easy it is for the game to register you clicking on an item and not the person you're trying to talk to.
  • While improved, it's still highly possible to accidentally click on the floor around your target when you commanded them to attack. Fortunately if you move close enough it won't cost any AP, but it does lead to some attacks of opportunity.
    • Related to the above, it is also very easy to click on an ability or scroll and think you've used it and then click on the target point only to find out that the click did not take and your character gleefully charges over to the enemy instead of shooting them or casting a spell at them.
• Hollywood Exorcism: Jahan attempts to exorcise the demon influencing Lohse, which involves plenty of speaking in tongues, exhorting it to come out, and invoking its name, along with an implied Battle in the Center of the Mind. He fails, so Lohse has to find and kill the demon herself.
• Housepet Pig: One wealthy merchant in Arx keeps an extremely pampered pet pig in his manor house. The pig also happens to be his sole heir rather than his daughter, as you learn if you join in an Inheritance Murder.
• Hover Bot: The Eternals' Magitek constructs are built like floating legless humanoids, allowing them to hover over harmful surfaces. Some of them also have Rocket Jump engines built into the bottom of their torsos and/or Floating Limbs for their Arm Cannons.
• Hufflepuff House: Outside of a rare few appearances of their ghosts, orcs and imps play no role in the story. Their gods in turn are also very minor players, even though they're supposed to be on relatively equal standing with the rest of the Seven.
• Humans Are Average: Played Straight in-universe, but Double Subverted in gameplay. Humans are described as being more diverse and adaptable compared to the other races. Gameplay-wise, though, they're a Critical Hit Class, as their passive ability gives them a bonus to critical hit chance and the crit multiplier. However, this bonus actually benefits any playstyle: rogues get free crits with backstabs, so they benefit from the extra crit multiplier. Warriors can learn Enrage to get guaranteed critical hits. Mages can learn Savage Sortilege to give their spells crit chance. Archers can get easily get high crit chance, so the more the better. Healers don't benefit from crits...unless you come up against Undead, in which case the damage from your healing spells can crit if you have Savage Sortilege.
• Humans Are Diplomats:
  • Zigzagged in gameplay; humans get a bonus to their Bartering Skill, but Lizards get a bonus to Persuasion—meaning humans are better merchants, but Lizards are the better diplomats.
  • In-universe, this is Inverted; Humans are on the receiving end of more Fantastic Racism than anyone else. Elves hate them for obliterating their homeland, Dwarves resent becoming a marginalized minority in human lands, and the Lizard Empire is openly at war with the Divine Order, which seems to run Human culture in Rivellon.

Tropes I — L

• I Ate WHAT?!: You can feed humanoid meat to Buddy the dog. He gets a few bites in, realizes what it is, and attacks on the spot.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: From easiest to hardest:
  • Story Mode
  • Explorer Mode
  • Classic Mode
  • Tactician Mode
    • Regular
    • Honour
• "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight: If you approach Saheila in Fort Joy with Lohse in your party, she will try to talk with the blind elf, then, if you allow her to, the demon will take over her body and try to kill Saheila. If you choose to side with the elves, you just have to do enough damage to Lohse to get her back in her right mind.
• I'm a Humanitarian: Elves (and others who take the right perk) can eat body parts to see their deceased owners' memories. As you might expect, however, several people in-universe take issue with this, to the point of being concerned that an elf PC will eat them.
  • That meat stew in Driftwood is made of dead magisters.
• Immortal Procreation Clause: A very real problem for the elves, who lost most of their people along with their homeland in the deathfog incident. Since they are very slow to reproduce, by virtue of being very Long-Lived, they're in danger of dying out if they don't start producing a lot more children.
• Improbable Power Discrepancy: Exaggerated. The hard level scaling by region and the fact that a couple differences in level makes it nearly impossible for the weaker fighter to win means that even street vendors from Act 4 could effortlessly curb-stomp the Big Bad as they were in Act 1. All of the origin characters also start at level 1 making them quite literally the weakest people in the world, even though all of them are supposed to be experienced and powerful adventurers before the game starts. Extreme Gameplay and Story Segregation abound, of course, such as various Lone Wolves in Act 3 being starstruck by Ifan and complimenting his legendary skills when any one of them could potentially wipe him out in a turn at that point.
• Improvised Lockpick:
  • Undead characters are able to pick locks using their fingers as "skeleton keys".
  • Through the magic of Item Crafting, player characters can make lockpicks out of spare nails, needles, or even an old key and a bar of soap.
• Improvised Weapon: Any tool can used as a weapon: brooms, fishing rods, shears, frying pans, etc. They do pathetic damage however and are rated below starter weapons.
• Incapable of Disobeying: The Ancient Empire of the Lizard Folk mark their slaves with magical scars that let them be controlled through songs. Normally these only force the slave to obey the singer, as seen with the Living Ship the Lady Vengeance, but they can also be amplified to effectively cause Death of Personality.
• Interface Spoiler: Examining certain NPCs can prematurely tell you that they're undead (and by extension, up to something nefarious) before they officially unveil themselves.
• Interrogating the Dead: The Godwoken are some of the few who can perceive and speak with spirits. Some willingly share information, while others need to be compelled to share their memories in a battle of wills.
• Interservice Rivalry: The branches of the Divine Order are not on great terms with one another, to put it mildly. The Paladins view the Magisters as upstarts whose actions bring shame to the late Lucian's name and are actively investigating what is happening on Fort Joy. The Magisters, for their part, view the Paladins as weaklings who are unwilling and unable to do what is necessary to fight the Voidwoken. Then there are the Seekers, who seek to guide the Godwoken into potentially succeeding Lucian and are hunted by the Magisters for their refusal to acknowledge Alexandar as the only legitimate Godwoken.
• Interspecies Romance: You can romance any of your party members regardless of your race. Yes, even the lizard and undead characters. In-universe there is more of a taboo, at least amongst the magisters. One female magister in Driftwood muses about having a roll in the hay with a lizard, only for her friend to remind her that doing so would result in a one way trip to Fort Joy.
• Intoxication Mechanic: Consuming alcohol has a chance to inflict the "Drunk" Status Effect, which penalizes several stats, but does make the character luckier. Characters who keep drinking while drunk will get knocked out.
• Invisibility with Drawbacks:
  • In this game, invisibility (such as that caused by the Chameleon Cloak spell) is broken when the invisible character is targeted (whether from an attack or Geo Effect), attacks, or performs certain other actions.
  • There are alternate methods to detect invisible characters that don't involve breaking said invisibility, such as listening to their footsteps as they move, or Interface Spoilers such as attempting to teleport an ally (you can't Teleport a character right where another is located, so untargetable open spots are signal of an invisible character being there), or the game's cursor making jittery movements if it's about to move to a spot where someone invisible is located.
• Invisible to Normals: The spirits of the dead can only be seen and heard by trained Sourcerers. To informed NPCs, speaking of seeing ghosts is a dead giveaway of your Godwoken status.
• I See Dead People: Justified — spirits are made of Source power, so learning to perceive and manipulate them is a core part of Sourcerer training.
• Jackass Genie: There is a lizard djinn in a lamp you can find on a beach in Reaper's Coast. If you pass the persuasion check to make it grant you a wish, it offers four choices: power, knowledge, wealth, and to never see your enemies again. His interpretation of these options leaves more than a little something to be desired. For example, wish for wealth and you'll get a necklace worth 1700 gold, but which has the stolen tag (and 1700 isn't that much at this point, never mind that no shopkeeper will buy it from you for that price), and, if you wish to never see your enemies again, you'll be struck permanently blind. At least his lamp is worth a pretty penny, once he's out of it. There are four options for trying to persuade him to grant you a wish. Passing two of them will result in the described scenario, but the other two result in him giving you actually useful rewards for the same reward choices, like a non-stolen version of the same necklace, or a powerful spell scroll.
• Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique: How Sebille ends up interrogating Stingtail. If your main character is Sebille, you can grab him by the throat, stab him, twist the needle you're stabbing him with, etc. just to get him to tell you who your master is.
• Jar of the Bizarre: Two variants that show up in Mad Doctor lairs: Grotesque Jars contain preserved body parts but have no value, while Jars of Mind Maggots can be crafted into powerful mind-control grenades.
• Jerkass Gods: The seven "gods" in this game were actually members of a race called the Eternals. The seven lords pulled a gambit to exile the rest of the members of their race into the void, and then created the mortal races in their own images. These mortals would then live their lives, naturally building up Source magic in their souls. When the mortal would die and appear in their worshipped god's domain, said god would chow down on their own follower to consume their Source. In a matter of karma, the gods gave half of their power into a human avatar called The Divine to help fight the Void, and the Divine managed to not only backstab the gods, but committed a series of atrocities that actually strengthened the Void and made things worse.
• Karma Houdini: Judging by the events of future (chronologically) Divinity games, Lucian commits all kinds of atrocities and orders them, yet appears to canonically get away with it.
• Karma Meter: Invisible, but present. The game keeps track of the actions you take throughout. If you do enough heroic or villainous deeds, then you'll be awarded with the Hero or Villain tag respectively. These tags are not mutually exclusive; it's possible to get both.
• Kill the Host Body: "Possessed" characters like Mordus' thralls and the Advocate's demon hosts usually can't be freed, only killed. Their spirits often thank the player for killing them, as they'd been trapped helpless in their own minds while their bodies ran rampant.
• Kleptomaniac Hero Found Underwear: When looking through things like closets and trunks in people's home, whether scrupulously or not, one of the things you can find is pairs of panties that haven't been washed in quite some time.
• Kraken and Leviathan: A Kraken destroys the ship your on at the beginning of the game, and is part of the final boss fight at the end.
• Lame Pun Reaction: Characters with the Jester tag (and Lohse) can on occasion drop some absolutely awful puns, and nearby characters will react accordingly. As an example, calling Ser Lora's story about the world-ending Great Acorn "a little nutty" will cause both the squirrel knight and his skeletal cat mount to give you silent Death Glares...
• Level Editor: The game ships with the updated version of the Divinity Engine, which Larian use to develop it.
• Level-Locked Loot:
  • Most equippable items, especially later in the game, can only be used by a character with a minimum score in a given ability, like Intelligence for Magic Wands or Strength for heavy armour. If a Status Effect drops that score below the minimum, the equipment will fall off mid-battle.
  • Zig-zagged regarding Character Level. Characters can wield items of a higher level than them — this heavily penalizes attack accuracy, but many builds focus on Always Accurate Attacks, so they get the equipment's powers and stat benefits with no drawback.
• Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: Inverted, interestingly enough. While mages are great damage dealers in the beginning, warriors, rogues, and archers, who are a bit slow to get off the ground, eventually just outdo them by a wide margin in damage and (in some ways) debuffing by endgame. Mages do have their place as utility casters, applying statuses and changing terrain, but for damage it's all about the physical attackers.
• Living Ship: The Livewood ship, The Lady Vengeance, that you hijack at the end of act one. She even talks to you, once you find the controlling song, and admits that due to her own slave scar, etched into her wood, she literally can never be free.
• Lizard Folk: One of the playable races. They think highly of themselves and look down on other races.
• Loads and Loads of Loading: Played with. Starting the game will take some time depending on your computer's specs. Next, loading your saved game will treat you with another, longer loading screen. However, loading a saved game afterwards will be done at much faster pace until you quit and restart the game. There's no loading time when moving from one area to another.
• Long-Range Fighter: The Huntsman ability increases the damage bonus for attacking from high ground and unlocks a variety of skills that enhance long-range attacks, including an Armor-Piercing Attack, a Rain of Arrows, and a shot that gains bonus damage proportional to the distance to the target.
• Loophole Abuse: During "Shadow Over Driftwood", you are obviously intended to have the party members find keys and open doors to reunite with one another. Ain't No Rule saying you can just trade the pyramids back-and-forth and teleport to them and then wander around.
  • You must make a second Escort Mission with Saheila through a mill of dangerous enemies. The game actually assigns her to you as a minion - so you can simply teleport to a waypoint and she'll follow. This same trick also works to bypass some difficult stealth if you want to help Higba escape from Driftwood without having to fight the magisters.
• Lord British Postulate:
  • Dallis at the end of Act one. You're obviously not supposed to be able to kill her, but if you manage to do so, she'll turn into a dragon and fly away.
  • It is also dealt with quite brilliantly with the Doctor. Unless you have Lohse in your party and do her and Malady's sidequest to weaken him, the Doctor is easily the most powerful boss in the entire game. If you do have Lohse in your party when you fight him, he additionally automatically wins the fight if you don't kill him in three rounds or so by possessing her. With this, the game (and Malady) outright tell you that killing the Doctor without weakening him first is impossible — but this is still a video game, and the Doctor has stats, so of course there are ways to do just that with proper Min-Maxing and Save Scumming. And yet, what Malady tells you is still true: there is no narrative reason for the Doctor to lose if you don't weaken him, and the primary way to achieve this is by abusing gameplay mechanics with complete disregard to the story. In other words, if you are playing for the narrative, you'll have to do the weakening sidequest, but if you're in it for the Turn-Based Combat, you have an awesome Optional Boss to test your mettle against.

Tropes M — P

• Magic Staff: They're Intelligence-based two-handed weapons that sling elemental projectiles and can grant secondary powers or bonuses. Unlike wands, they grant a melee basic attack but have a one-turn cooldown for their ranged attack.
• Magic Wand: They're Intelligence-based one-handed weapons that sling elemental projectiles and can grant secondary powers or bonuses. Unlike staves, they can be Dual Wielded and grant a ranged basic attack.
• Marathon Boss: The Final Boss is very, VERY long.
• Marathon Level: The Reaper's Coast is, hands down, the longest section of the game. (Even longer than the Cyseal area or Lucilla Forest in the previous Original Sin game) Especially if you decide to go for 100% Completion on it. Players who think they got everything may often find that they are still missing something, and that's not counting all the quests that can be made Unwinnable, either by mistake or by design.
• Master of None: The game allows you to dabble in whichever skillsets that you prefer. However, the fights tend to be geared towards specialized characters who do their one thing really, really well. Although the game doesn't have literal Level Scaling, there is definitely a finite amount of XP available and it basically requires the player to complete every Sidequest possible just to keep up with the expected level required by the end of the game. Diversifying a character too much will result in them being unable to match the foes sent against them.
• Mauve Shirt: Everyone who is a Player Character but wasn't part of the main party after Dallis attacks the Lady Vengeance shall be dead by the time Dallis' rampage ends.
• Meaningful Name: Chastity and Abstinence, the knives used by the Magister Kniles the Flesner. Once you're able to visit his mother a while later in Reaper's Coast, you learn these were virtues she held in high regard when it came to raising children. This and her implicit abuse are hinted to be at least partly why Kniles - a sadomasochistic torturer with a sexual fixation on things like the scales of lizards ^note  A fight with him can be avoided by simply handing over the severed leg of one of his lizard fellow magisters - which he proceeds to fawn over to the point of ignoring you - turned out the way he did.
• Mechanically Unusual Class: Polymorph is unlike the other combat abilities in that specializing in it won't provide a direct benefit outside of letting you use skills that require a certain level of Polymorph. It's terrible as a primary skill because of this, but every build can take a dip into it and reap strong rewards. Warrior characters will love skills like Bull Rush and the different Elemental Skin skills, while rogues can utilize Chameleon Cloak and Chicken Claw with deadly efficiency. Damage casters can get in on the fun with skills like Flay Skin to shred magic armor and Skin Graft to fully reset their cooldowns, and support types will enjoy the utility provided by Terrain Transmutation and Spread Your Wings. The only archetype that can't use Polymorph efficiently are long-ranged characters that specialize in Huntsman and Ranged, but those deal more than enough damage and are mostly self-sufficient regardless.
• Medieval Stasis: Despite taking place 1200 years after the original, technology hasn't advanced much at all. However, with this particular game, it is justified - as the official timeline places this game just before Beyond Divinity.
• Mêlée à Trois: The battle with Alexandar near the end of Act I becomes this when a third party (A voidwoken drillworm) joins in. Though Alexandar's Magisters will prioritize attacking it, they will not hesitate to take potshots at you as well, especially if you stay within their range.
  • This actually happens multiple occasions, but only when Voidwoken appear alongside Magisters. They do not simply Gang Up on the Human.
  • Even the Final Boss is one - unless you side with Lucian, it becomes a three-way battle between the Magisters and Lucian, you, and Braccus Rex/The Black Ring. Sure enough, even Lucian and Dallis will go after Braccus Rex if he's alive.
• Mind-Control Music: How Sebille's master controlled her. He would use a song to control her thoughts. In her character introduction video, she says she's planning to make him sing a very different kind of song.
  • If Sebille is a companion to a player who does all her side quests, she will teach the player a countersong to bring her back in case the Master tries to use it against her. This is very important if one plans to let her kill her former master: unless the player knows her song, she'll be mind-controlled and permanently removed from the player's party.
  • The Lady Vengeance is enthralled the same way, including a matching scar. In order to keep the Living Ship under control, Dallis used an obscure hymn written in the old Lizard tongue to control it, then locked the hymnal in her quarters.
  • This also happens to be Lohse's Source ability, though of the Insanity variety rather than direct control.
• Mind over Matter: Telekinesis is a civil skill you can invest in, allowing you to move objects a certain distance, regardless of their weight.
• Minmaxer's Delight: Most classes have one or two talents that they can take for powerful gains. For example:
  • Parry Master and The Pawn for dual wielding rogues. The former adds a 10% dodge bonus if you're dual wielding, which is huge as without the bonus you're liable to end up at around 25% dodge chance by endgame if you focus on finesse and wits, but 35% with it. The latter, in return for having at least one point in Scoundrel to take it, gives you one free AP of movement at the beginning of each turn, so if you can move 8.5 meters on one AP, normally, this will let you move 8.5 meters on zero AP, which, considering how mobile melee rogues need to be for full (backstabby) effectiveness, is a huge boon.
  • For archers, Duck Duck Goose, and Arrow Recovery. The first is an easy pick, as it allows you to avoid attacks of opportunity, and if someone gets close enough that they're allowed to hit you with an attack of opportunity, then it's time to relocate, and doing so with a reduced risk of damage is always beneficial. The latter gives you a one in three chance to get your special arrows back, which doesn't sound like much, but considering how effective they are when used at the right time (and how difficult it can be to stock up at times), can be a huge boon.
  • Warriors can't go wrong with Executioner, Opportunist, or Picture of Health. The first gives you two AP for the first foe you kill during your turn, which allows you to move onto another target or two during the same turn and do more damage. Opportunist allows attacks of opportunity if enemies try to get away from you, which, if they're weak, may just be enough to end them (and give you two AP for your next turn). Picture of Health, meanwhile, can supplement or let you ignore your constitution stat, depending on your build, because it adds 3% to your maximum HP for every level of Warfare you take, meaning you can add 30% to your health by endgame, where your health is typically in the low thousands anyway.
  • Mages get some fun ones too, like Far Out Man, which increases the range of non-touch spells by two meters, and Torturer, which increases the duration of the effects of all your spells and surfaces by one turn (though not direct damage from them), which means you can stun someone for two turns instead of the normal one, say, or poison them for an extra turn. And with the Definitive Edition, Torturer becomes even more useful, as it allows your magic to affect enemies even through their magic armor. So you can poison/burn/shock/what have you even before removing all of an enemy's magic armor.
  • Pretty much every character in the entire game can benefit from Adrenaline, a Scoundrel skill that only needs one point of the skill to access. In exchange, you get the ability to occasionally get two more AP a turn in exchange for two less AP next turn, but there are so many strategies and ways to get bonus AP that you can nullify this downside easily. Adrenaline is useful for moving around the map, performing abilities, or finishing off a dying opponent, which means basically everyone should take it. Similarly, the Polymorph tree contains a number of useful support skills that pretty much any archetype can benefit from, making it to that dipping into the skill tree is extremely helpful.
• Mirror Boss: The final boss of Act III is one of these, where your party will fight exact copies of themselves controlled by their Inner Gods, furious with them for letting Dallis beat them.
• Mobile Shrubbery: Characters entering stealth mode will adopt a variety of disguises based on their current terrain, such as bushes in a natural environment or barrels in a settlement.
• Monstrous Mandibles: The Lamenting Abomination looks like a grotesque Shapeshifter Mashup with multiple sets of mismatched jaws flapping around its mouth. Its existence is unbearably painful and it attacks in hopes of winning relief from the God-King.
• Monster/Slayer Romance: Mihaly, a Magister devoted to fighting demons and the Black Ring, and Almira, a succubus sworn to the Black Ring, were A Match Madein Stockholm while Almira was in Magister custody. They deserted their respective factions and ran away to be together.
• Mood Whiplash: If one makes Lohse sing at the end of her personal quest, it follows an epic battle against a building full of possessed people, a giant demon, and (depending on your previous actions) a number of normal-sized demons.
• Mouth-to-Mouth Force-Feeding: Radeka the Witch forcibly tries to kiss the player character so she can spit insects down their throat, thereby weakening them.
• Multiple-Choice Past: At character creation, you pick one of the available origin stories for your main PC, which has massive impact on how they will approach quests, dialogues, and general problem solving throughout the game. Even for custom characters, the tags you choose at character creation give you extra dialogue choices indicating a certain kind of past.
• Multiple Endings: The game has five endings:
  • "Supreme Sacrifice": You side with Lucian and let Dallis purge all of Rivellon (including you!) of the Source, so it can be used to mend the Veil, permanently sealing away the Void, the Voidwoken, and the God King. If Malady is still alive, though, she can reverse your transformation into Silent Monks, allowing you to roam the world as regular humans once again. You can also kick Lucian's ass and then freely sacrifice your Source to the Veil.
  • "Risen": One of you becomes the new Divine and leads the world into the new golden age, like Lucian before you, but the threat of the Void still remains.
  • "Return of the King": You refuse to take up Divinity or just side with the God King, allowing him to return and to enslave all peoples of Rivellon.
  • "One For All": You redistribute the Source equally among everyone in Rivellon, which initially leads to a new golden age, and the God King is driven back, seemingly forever, but in the long run, the newly-empowered peoples descend into another global war.
  • "Angel and Demon": After making a deal with the Doctor, one of you ascends to Divinity together with him. The Void is driven back by the Doctor's demons, but soon an even worse war breaks out between both Divines.
  • Fane has an extra ending option: Return the Eternals from the void, freeing them from their eternal torment, but dooming Rivellon to ruin and enslavement.
• Murder, Inc.: The Lone Wolves, a loosely bound group of assassins for hire, usually working alone (hence the name). Ifan is a member of this group, and is on a mission to kill Bishop Alexandar.
• Murder Into Malevolence: The Godwoken who aren't chosen as party members are abruptly murdered at the end of Act I, then reappear at the end of Act III as malevolent skeletal undead and try to kill the player characters. In between, their spirits swear a covenant with the God-King for a chance to resolve their Unfinished Business, but lose their original selves in the bargain.
• Mythology Gag: One quest has you enter a philosophical duel to the death with an undead philosopher. Normally, beating him requires either having the right origin tags or reading some specific books. However, an undead character can win the duel just by repeatedly pointing out the inherent impossibility of skeletons being being able to walk, talk, and think without any muscles, internal organs, vocal cords, or brains, recalling a similar conversation two skeletons had in Divine Divinity. And just like that game, it causes the hapless philosopher to explode in a Puff of Logic.
• Nay-Theist: A number of the companions, namely Lohse and Fane, have a pretty dismal view of the Seven. By the end of the third act, all of them are absolutely contemptuous of the gods.
• Necromancer:
  • Players and NPCs can invest in the Necromancer skill line, which grants passive healing when they inflict damage. Its spells specialize in Non-Elemental damage, Blood Magic, making minions and armour out of corpses, and inflicting status ailments.
  • Tarquin insists that he's an inventor and a scholar, not a necromancer, though the cat skeleton he animated tells a different story. The endgame narration reveals that he achieved the greatest feat of necromancy in history: resurrecting Braccus Rex while Tarquin was a Kidnapped Scientist.
• Neglected Sidequest Consequence:
  • If you ignore your companions' Loyalty Missions and don't find some other way to raise their Relationship Values, they'll decide to make their own bid for Divinity rather than support yours, even if that means fighting you to the death.
  • Subverted with Tarquin's quest for a Dismantled MacGuffin in Act II. If you ignore it and then talk to him about it in Act IV, he acts as though you've missed your only chance to gain a weapon that could defeat the Big Bad; however, it's useful but not necessary in the Final Battle.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • Lucian and Dallis' plan is actually quite heroic. Up until they let an argument with the Godwoken distract them from Braccus Rex slipping his shackles and starting the final boss fight.
  • In Act 2, Paladin Thom Hardwin gives you a Side Quest to investigate the Magisters' secret operation at the Blackpits. Reasonable and heroic enough, given that you've hardly seen anything good about the Magisters at this point, and your investigation doesn't turn up anything to change that. Come Act 4, however, it turns out that the Paladins' commander, Lord Kemm, is in service to the God-King and working to bring about his return, while the Magisters, for all their wanton cruelty, would very much like to prevent that. With your evidence that the Magisters were working with the Black Ring, Kemm had the excuse he needed to crack down on the Magisters, plunging the city of Arx into civil war when they're already under siege from Voidwoken. Downplayed in that the events in the aforementioned spoiler still happens even without your help.
• Nightmare Fetishist: Most people are rightly horrified and disgusted by Braccus Rex's legacy. The witch Radeka is one exception. If asked, she will gush about Braccus Rex's methods of torturing and killing people and admires the way he increased his own power by draining Source from others.
• No "Arc" in "Archery": Zig zagged. With regular shots, your arrows do follow an arc, but with special shots (but not special arrows), like Marksman's Fang, the arrow goes in a perfectly straight line. Some Projectile Spells also follow an arc. As an Anti Frustration Feature, the game displays the path before the shot is fired.
• Non-Elemental: Most weapons (other than wands and staffs) and offensive Necromancer spells deal physical damage. Unlike the elemental damage types, resistances and vulnerabilities to physical damage are extremely rare.
• Non-Heteronormative Society: Gender Is No Object in the government or military, same-sex marriages are an everyday part of the world, the Romance Sidequest options aren't at all restricted by the player character's gender, and sexual orientation isn't mentioned beyond one person asking if the PC has a preference for an Optional Sexual Encounter.
• Non-Indicative Name: Fort Joy, which being a brutal Penal Colony, is anything but.
• Non-Player Companion: Played with. Technically, there is the custom "main" Player Character and their three companions, but unlike in most RPGs, all four can initiate and participate in conversations and make story decisions, like the Source Hunters in D:OS.
• Non-Standard Skill Learning: Most skills (i.e.: spells, special attacks, etc.) are learned by consuming Skill Books, except:
  • The Godwoken player character's Patron God directly imparts skills related to their special powers of Sourcery in their shared Mental World.
  • The Summon Cat Familiar, Summon Condor, and Deafening Shriek skills can only be learned at specific points in the game by bringing the cat to safety, persuading the condor to join you, and consuming a unique flower, respectively.
  • By completing his personal quest, the Red Prince gains the unique ability to summon a dragonling, his firstborn child.
• No Ontological Inertia: Zig-zagged:
  • Braccus Rex's curses are still active on Fort Joy.
  • Conjured beings will vanish if you kill their summoner.
• No-Sell: Many monster types have a signature immunity and/or resistance. For example, Voidwoken are immune to the Decaying status effect, while Undead are immune to Bleeding. It's also not unusual for enemies to be immune to a single damage type and/or resistant to several. Resistances over 100% are possible, and cause that type of damage to heal the target instead, though this usually comes with vulnerability to the opposite type of damage.
• Not Quite Dead: Alexandar survives your assassination attempt at the end of Act One.
  • As mentioned under Back from the Dead, enemies Sworn to the God-King are reborn endlessly. This plays out during the final boss fight, where Isbeil, Linder Kemm, the Sallow Man, and an endless number of Black Ring Mooks are regurgitated by the Kraken.
  • The Godwoken kill Windego during Act I, only for her to come back undead in Act III, and again in Act IV.
• Obviously Evil: A number of the Source Masters in Act 2.
  • Ryker lives alone in a mansion at the edge of a graveyard, is surrounded by what appear to be homemade Silent Monks, and multiple ghosts repeat stories of his frequent graverobbing.
  • Mordus is an undead dwarf who's handy with mind control magic and can be found in an abandoned cave crawling with Voidwoken.
  • The Advocate is a literal demon who resides in an island where Gore grows out of the ground.
  • Pretty much every member of the Black Ring qualifies, as well.
  • There are two depictions of the God-King in game. In the shrine beneath Arx, he is portrayed as an Eldritch Abomination. In the ending, he is portrayed as an enormous skeleton. Neither broadcasts him being in the right of the game's otherwise somewhat grey and gray conflict.
• Oh, My Gods!: Characters regularly invoke the Divine, the Seven, and the Void when something big happens or shit hits the fan (like Malady's "For The love of the void" at the end of Act One), though there is one unusual invocation in-game, completely played for laughs.
  What in the name of Lucian's prized pig is that?
• One Stat to Rule Them All: While one should not ignore other stats, everyone should consider Wits, since it affects your initiative. Being able to act before most enemies makes a huge difference.
• Only the Chosen May Wield: The Blackroot ritual is essential for Godwoken to commune with their gods and awaken their Source powers. If any non-Godwoken attempts it, the drug kills them instead.
• "Open!" Says Me: If you don't have a key to a particular door or lack the lock-picking skill to open it, it is just as viable to just knock the door down.
• Optional Boss: Lots. For example, there are five Master Sourcerers in Act 2, but the Godwoken strictly needs to deal with two of them; there's also an Animalistic Abomination in Cloisterwood, some demons buried beneath Bloodmoon Island, and a particularly nasty witch on a crucifix looking to KILL YOUR SHINING LIGHTS up the coast. In Act 3, the Godwoken can team up with the Magisters or the Black Ring...or kill both, or deal with various other obstacles if they choose to pray at each altar. Act 4 has the Toymaker and The Doctor.
• The Order: The Divine Magisters appear to be a religious order hell-bent on eradicating all Sourcerers (who aren't them).
• Our Dwarves Are Different: The Dwarves of Rivellon are deeply divided between the upper and lower classes. Most of the dwarves you meet in-game fall into the category of homeless criminals and impoverished peasants or fabulously wealthy merchants and powerful nobles. Dwarven men tend to have beards, and the women tend to have elaborate hairstyles. Unusually compared to most depictions of Dwarves, the Dwarven nation is ruled by a Queen.
• Our Elves Are Different: Elves are tall, lithe, elegant, beautiful, intelligent, long lived cannibals whose homeland was recently completely destroyed. Contrary to popular in-universe belief, though, most only eat those who are willing to be eaten after death, outside of special circumstances (eg starvation).
• Our Ghosts Are Different: They're the souls of the dead, formed of the Source power they accumulated throughout their lives: Invisible to Normals and mostly unable to affect the physical world. Some are the same as they were in life, while others are trapped reliving one short memory; they might be held back from the afterlife by choice, Unfinished Business, or simple madness. Player characters can sample their memories or consume them for power.
• Out-of-Turn Interaction: Creatures with the Talent "Opportunist" automatically make an out-of-turn attack when an enemy in melee range moves away from them. It works once per turn of combat.
• Overdrawn at the Blood Bank: Whacking each other around with physical weapons, bleeding effects, intentionally cutting yourself for some benefit, and eating body parts as small as a disembodied hand splashes around a patently ridiculous amount of blood, yet no matter how much blood they lose the characters seem unaffected until their HP hits zero.
  • This is a byproduct of Gameplay and Story Segregation. The combat system revolves around creating Geo Effects, of which blood is one. Several skills interact with pools of blood, so the game creates them, even in circumstances where a dribble would be more appropriate.
  • Interestingly, summoning an Incarnate on a blood surface will grant it "Blood Infusion," allowing physical damage, self-healing on damaging enemy hit points (but not armor), and a powerful ranged spell. An Elf using Flesh Sacrifice will also have exactly the number of Action Points required to summon and fully buff an Incarnate, as well as a big splash of blood to summon it on.
• Overhead Interaction Indicator: Player Characters and their companions get floating exclamation marks when they want to discuss a significant plot point that just occurred. However, other NPCs and scripted dialogue aren't similarly marked.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: Most NPCs will immediately attack any character they realize is undead. Fortunately, all it takes is a shirt, pants, and a hat to fool everyone around. Sure, you still have a grinning skull for a face... but you're wearing a hat! At least until you enter combat and enemies start throwing weaponized healing spells at you.
• Parabolic Power Curve: Inverted. While the number of attribute and Skill Points you gain per level is linear, your Hit Points and base weapon damage grow almost exponentially, so being even just one level above the enemies always represents a massive advantage.
• Parental Neglect: Lucian and Fane are practically in a contest over who's worse.
  • Lucian faked his own death, built his son up as a successor, only to willingly sacrifice him in the name of his plan.
  • It never even occurs to Fane to look for his wife and child. He mentions them so inconsequentially that the player might even miss that they exist. When he finally finds his daughter he addresses her as, "Child," meaning he either never named her or forgot what her name was. It's up to the reader which is worse.
• Penal Colony: Fort Joy is a remote island off the coast of Rivellon that was once used by Braccus Rex as a testing ground for his newest dark magics. In the game, the Divine Magisters use it to corral all Sourcerers they can catch to better control them and to attempt to "cure" them of the source using some of those old Braccus Rex magics they discovered on the island.
• Percent-Based Values:
  • Elemental resistance reduces the damage a creature takes from that element by a given percent, which stacks additively from multiple sources. If a creature's resistance is greater than 100%, they're healed by that damage type instead.
  • The "Forced Exchange" skill swaps the target's current Hit Points percentage with the caster's. In addition to its offensive uses, it's one of the few safe ways to heal an ally with the Decaying Status Effect or another vulnerability to Healing Hands.
  • Resurrection scrolls and the "Comeback Kid" talent both revive a dead Player Character with 20% of their maximum hit points. The "Morning Person" talent boosts this to 100%.
• Permanently Missable Content: Anything you don't complete in the previous area will be lost, since you cannot backtrack, unlike in the previous game which had much fewer instances.
• Pilfering Proprietor: The quest "Love has a Price" in the Driftwood tavern involves the player paying for the most expensive "exotic" room in the tavern, which also happens to come with an Optional Sexual Encounter with a Lizardkin courtesan of exceptional skill. But after the fade to black Sexy Discretion Shot, a group of thugs will burst into the room and attempt to mug you, and it's made very clear the innkeeper was in on the scheme which was designed to catch you without your gear. The player can both pay, talk their way out or go on a Full-Frontal Assault. If you confront the innkeeper afterward, he'll give you a sob story about doing it to support his daughter, but further investigation will prove he doesn't even have children.
• Pimped-Out Dress: Lizard Folk generally wear the most opulent gowns, headdresses, and jewellery they can; one NPC recounts how Hannag appeared out of nowhere at his rural home in "incredible" golden robes, while PC gear tends toward ornamented Bling of War. In lore, the Lizards place great importance on taking care of their bodies, so clothing is a way to show them off.
• Pixel Hunt: Fortunately, you can hold the alt key to highlight loot, but even then, finding the Blackroot for Meistr Siva is a pain.
• Point of No Return: Unlike the previous Original Sin game, once you complete an area (Fort Joy, Reaper's Coast, Nameless Isle, the Arx), you cannot return. The game does give you a warning once you hit each point that there's no turning back.
• Pop Quiz: Cranley Huwbert will spring one on you if you have the Scholar tag and visit his home in Arx. His questions probe knowledge that's hidden damn deep within the readable lore books you've likely encountered in scores by then, but one of them^note "The third house of the Lizard Folk is the House of Dreamers" is only mildly challenging, far less so if you're playing as the Red Prince or have been following his quest.
• Potion-Brewing Mechanic: Many Magic Potions can be created with Item Crafting. Most require an empty vial and one ingredient, but poison and Healing Potions can also be combined or upgraded to more powerful forms. You can even brew recipes you haven't learned in-character.
• Prisoner's Dilemma: The whole game puts you under one. You and all your party members have been chosen by their affiliated gods to become the new Divine, but the catch is there can only be one Divine. To this end, the gods urge their respective champions to eventually betray their comrades, and your comrades in turn find more and more reasons to want to ascend. This ensures that an air of distrust hangs over the whole party's head even as they become Fire-Forged Friends.
• Professional Killer: Quite a few of them, with two origins (Sebille and Ifan) having been assassins in their past, and the latter being on the island in part to kill Bishop Alexander.
• Projectile Spell: Zig-zagged. Wands and staves fire projectiles of elemental energy, while spells like Fireball and Electric Discharge are also classed as projectiles. In both cases, they need a clear path to their target (either arcing or straight-line) and are subject to effects that deflect projectiles. Other spells require the target to be visible to the caster, but take effect regardless of what's between the two.
• Protection Mission: When you escape Fort Joy at the end of Act I, Dallis's forces intercept your ship, forcing you to keep Malady alive while she casts a spell for an Extradimensional Emergency Exit. You can win the fight outright and force Dallis to retreat, but you only get a Combat Compliment before the scene proceeds as usual.
• Psychic-Assisted Suicide: The treacherous Evil Sorcerer Mordus mind-controlled a large group of his erstwhile boss's minions and established himself in a remote cave, where the minions are ordered to guard Voidwoken eggs and then feed themselves to the hatchlings. If you kill the minions, some of their spirits are grateful to have been spared that fate.
• Psychic Glimpse of Death: The Godwoken can share the memories of the dead, which gives them a few first-hand experiences of being killed. One burn victim's final memories are so powerful they can set the Godwoken on fire.
• Purely Aesthetic Gender: Gender Is No Object in Rivellon, and the playable characters' genders don't affect their stats, gameplay, or romantic options. There is one sex-specific story element: if the Red Prince is in the party, he can impregnate Sadha and meet his child later.
• Puzzle Boss: The penultimate battle in Lucian's tomb is against a small squad of automaton toys in a place appropriately named the "Death Room". The toys don't have a ton of health but they will respawn after being killed and also spend most of their time running around the room activating traps which can be as annoying as teleporting you across the room or as deadly as spawning deathfog. The only way to win is to either defeat all the toys permanently by using Source Vampirism after removing their magic armor or by unlocking the door out of the room by pulling oddly named switches so that they spell POWER. This is only made a thousand times worse if you have reached this point without receiving hints from the Toymaker (or Arhu) on how to get past this part.

Tropes Q — T

• Quieting the Unquiet Dead: As Godwoken, the Player Party are among the few who can see and communicate with spirits. Many of them have minor Sidequests to resolve their Unfinished Business and let them pass on — or the Godwoken can devour them for power.
• Rage Against the Heavens: Lucian is intent on destroying the Seven Gods.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: The party members are basically outcasts from all over Rivellon who band together for better chances of survival. In multiplayer, it is quite possible to drive this trope to its logical conclusion and play out all the in-fighting that should realistically come out of such a clash of personalities.
• Random Drop Booster: The Lucky Charm Skill Score increases the chances of finding valuable (randomly generated) loot in chests and other containers.
• "Reason You Suck" Speech: Dallis will give one to Fane if he makes it to the final boss fight. And, oh boy, does he deserve it.
• Redshirt Army: The Paladin Bridestone is guarded by several armed paladins. It get stormed by undead at some point and most sentries are killed before the end of the first turn, leaving only three paladins you must save. And the undead didn't even trigger the traps deployed outside!
• Reduced-Downtime Features:
  • Inventories can be auto-sorted by various criteria; Downloadable Content adds a set of bags that automatically pack specific categories of items. With the "Magic Pockets" feature, characters in a party automatically access each other's inventories for things like keys and tools.
  • Armor Points refresh outside of combat. Portable bedrolls can be used when enemies aren't nearby to refresh the party's hit points; Downloadable Content also lets bedrolls resurrect dead PCs and refresh their Source points.
  • Player characters can fast-travel to any Waypoint they've already visited within the same Act. They can also find a set of reusable, portable "teleport pyramids" that can be activated to transport the user and any attached characters to any of the other pyramids.
• Reforged into a Minion:
  • The Magisters create Silent Monks by Purging sourcerers' souls, leaving them Empty Shells with no sense of self. The even more unlucky ones are upgraded with torturous mechanical grafts.
  • The Doctor's "nurses" are the bodies of demon hunters he'd previously defeated, now utterly enslaved to his will. If killed, their spirits are very grateful no longer to be trapped helpless in their own bodies.
• Remember the New Guy?: Bishop Alexandar. He was never alluded to or even so much as mentioned in any other Divinity games, despite that he is the son of the Divine. (And you would think this would be an important thing to mention.) This is somewhat justified in that he doesn't live to the end of the game, thus justifying why the later chronological games wouldn't mention him.
• Resource Reimbursement: The talent "Executioner" grants the character two bonus Action Points once per round when they kill an enemy. This partly or fully refunds the action cost of the attack, though Cooldowns are unaffected.
• Resurrect the Wreck: The epilogue takes place back on the Lady Vengeance, which is destroyed at the beginning of Act IV. It's Hand Waved as Malady restoring her with magic as a personal favour.
• Revenge is Sweet: If Sebille completes her personal quest to kill the man who magically enslaved her and turned her into an assassin, she says "It feels... magnificent." Her revenge is compounded by the knowledge that he can never control her again.
• Revive Kills Zombie:
  • Healing spells do physical damage to undead, draining their physical armor (if they have any) or reducing their health (if they don't). Considering how common undead are in the first act, you can take advantage of this fact a lot. You do have to keep this in mind, though, if you have an undead party member, like Fane. Healing spells will damage them as well.
  • The Decaying status applies a similar effect, where all kind of healing (including poisoning the Undead) will damage the affected character instead. They cannot be healed by any means until the Decaying status is removed.
• Right Through His Pants:
  • In the interlude between acts 2 and 3, you can have sex with another character in your party. At the end of the sex scene, you zoom out to find both characters are still wearing all their clothes.
  • Averted in the Optional Sexual Encounter with the Lizardkin courtesan in Driftwood: if you choose to peruse her or his... services, your character will be stripped butt-naked while the screen fades to black and back again, with all of their gear and inventory put neatly into a bag container on the floor next to the bed. Which is kind of a problem, as a group of thugs will try to mug you the very next moment.
• Rogue Protagonist: Lucian, the player character of Divine Divinity, is one of the bad guys here.
• Sacred Flames: Sacred Fire is any fire that has been blessed with Source, and has the property of healing living beings instead of harming them (and doing damage to The Undead). Its opposite is Necrofire, which deals extra damage and cannot be put out with water and water-based magic.
• Sad Battle Music: A somber version of the games main theme ("Sins and Gods") plays during the first phase of the final battle. Additionally, all sound effects and voice lines are muffled, and the game speed slows down to create dramatic effect.
• Save Scumming: Very common, especially if you are going to play a backstabber or sneaking type character.
  • You can save your game anytime during a battle.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: Bloodmoon Island has three of them, one of whom is directly responsible for the island's general malaise. Two can be opened and undone, the last can only be started on a long path that will lead to eventual healing.
• Second Hour Superpower: The playable characters start the game in Power Nullifier collars, on their way to a penal colony for Sourcerers. One of the intermediate goals of Act I is to have the Player Party's collars removed so they can use their Source powers.
• The Secret of Long Pork Pies: The cook in the bar in Driftwood has been killing magisters and cooking them into her meaty stew, hence why Lodvik will not sell stew to an elf character as they'll be able to see the memories of a dead magister upon eating it. Not that it's hard to work around.
• Seductive Spider: Dorotya is a succubus-like were-spider who's eager to lead the Player Character away for a Magic Kiss that boosts one of their stats. Unusually for the trope, her spider form isn't anthropomorphic at all, but a PC can still eagerly ask to go another round.
• Sentry Gun: Summon Magic can conjure "elemental totems" out of various surfaces. Totems have their own place in the Action Initiative and automatically fire long-range attacks; though they're fragile and immobile, they have a minimal Cooldown to create and can be Status Buffed.
• Sequence Breaking: The devs promise that even if you play competitive multiplayer (as in, actively hindering other players' quests), you will not be able to "break" the main story.
  • That said, it's still possible to gain a quest item or even a quest objective before you are even told what it is. This enables the player to present the quest item right over to the person when they ask you to find it, but it has also sometimes caused quests to be bugged.
• Set Bonus: There are two sets that provide bonuses as of Definitive Edition:
  • The Tyrant set in Act I. Each piece carries a curse, but the curses vanish when the entire set is worn.
  • The Faithful set in Act III. Each piece provides useful bonuses, and worn together they grant the wearer a permanent Blessing buff.
• Shady Lady of the Night: In the quest "Love Has a Price", you have a sexual encounter with a prostitute named Zharah/Zharat. Unless you are a lizard or Ifan, the night after dwarven thugs will attempt to rob you, and the prostitute will say it has been a set-up. If you are an undead, the prostitute will fight with you, but otherwise she/he will turn against you.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: In act 2, there is a quest to save a hen's eggs that were stolen by voidwoken. By the time you get there, only one is left which you take back to the hen who is at happy that at least one survived. If you come back later, all the chickens in the coop have been slaughtered, and only the just hatched chicken is alive and decides to follow you, calling you its mom. But it turns out that it was corrupted by the voidwoken and was the one who killed its mother and the other chickens and will attack you if it survives long enough. If you speak to the ghost of its mother, she will suggest taking him to his father, who she thinks can help him. However, once you do that, the rooster will simply suggest you kill the corrupted chick and put him out of his misery. The chick dies no matter what you do.
  • In act 1, you can build up a rapport with Butter in Fort Joy, and promise to meet up in Arx once you've both escaped. Two and a half acts later, when you finally reach Arx, Butter is nowhere to be found in the city. You can eventually stumble upon her on a small peninsula out by the shore... dead, killed by a Voidwoken.
  • Arguably, the entire game counts. One controversial aspect of the endings was that the ending that had the best overall effect upon the world would be the one where The Bad Guy Wins and you should have just stayed out of his way the entire time. It doesn't help that choosing to follow his logic while still fighting him for all of his atrocities gives you an ending where you submit to his will after all. They apparently omitted an ending (as implied) where you defeat him but choose the same path. Instead, after defeating him you just mysteriously put him back in charge and sacrifice yourself to becoming a vegetable.
• Shaped Like Itself: We never find out what the Eternals looked like. There are only three of them in the whole game, and none of them have any skin.
• Shapeshifter Weapon: The Polymorph skill line unlocks several transformations that deal damage and/or status ailments, including single-use Combat Tentacles, bull horns for a Dash Attack, web-slinging spider legs, and Medusa's petrifying snake-hair.
• Shoot the Dog: True to the game's Black-and-Grey Morality, expect to do a lot of shady things for the greater good. Most notably, Act II requires you to seek local Sourcerers who can teach you how to channel more Source. The problem is that most of them are morally ambiguous at best, and their methods of training you involve doing some nasty things like killing all animals in the forest, obliterating multiple souls of the dead, or even making a pact with demons.
• Shoulders of Doom: For some reason, many of the rogue and warrior armors (especially on elven women in the former case) have really massive, overelaborate shoulder pads on them.
• Shout-Out:
  • One of the items you can find is the holy hand grenade. No word on if you have to count exactly to three to use it, however.
  • The female lizard prostitute at The Black Bull tavern is a reference to the Lusty Argonian Maid, and even refers to herself as "just an innocent, sexy lizard maid" at one point.
  • In a remote corner of the Arx sewer system, you can find a bonfire with a sword in the flames.
  • If the player characters go along with the Shadow Prince's plan to kill the Mother Tree, he'll trigger the Phlebotinum Bomb and remark, "I love the smell of deathfog in the morning."
• Schrödinger's Player Character: Averted. The Origin characters, if not selected as player characters, form recruitable party members.
• Shipwreck Start: The prologue takes place aboard a prison ship, transporting several Sourcerors (including the Player Character) to the prison colony Fort Joy. The ship is attacked by a kraken and ripped apart, and chapter one begins with the player character washing up on a beach not far from the colony.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: Can be done a number of times throughout the game, though by far the best example in-game would be right after Braccus Rex reveals himself, there is a dialogue option that goes "Tell him to SHUT HIS GODSDAMNED MOUTH!" (Caps theirs). It doesn't change anything except some dialogue if you succeed the persuasion check in question, but it's still good fun to yell it at him.
• Sick Captive Scam: A ghost in the Driftwood jail cells admits that he tried to make himself sick to get released to the infirmary, but misjudged how much poison to take.
• Signature Move:
  • Each of the six Origin characters has a unique Source skill that can't be obtained by anyone else. Custom characters zigzag this trope by having a Source skill that can't be obtained anywhere else, but they all share.
  • Voidwoken blood and many abilities used by Voidwoken cause the Decaying status, which makes healing damage the character and is only wielded by select Necromancers otherwise. They also love to spew out the Curse skill with abandon.
• Simple, yet Awesome:
  • Teleport deserves a special mention for being incredibly amazing as a utility. It can send dangerous melee enemies away, bring archers and casters close (and deal some modest physical damage, making it easier to knockdown/cripple them to keep them close), interact with nearby objects to use as impromptu projectiles, and snag hidden treasure items that would be unreachable without it. And if you don't feel like fighting certain enemies, you can teleport them into One-Hit Kill lava to instantly dispatch them.
  • Planar Gateway is a Source skill that costs no AP and 2 source points; using it allows the player to place two ends of a teleporter within its range. Up to four characters can teleport, with no AP needed to activate either end. Mobilizing an entire party can be challenging, but when used right, Planar Gateway allows characters to cover a very large distance or instantly get access to valuable high ground while still having enough AP to attack twice in one turn.
  • Five-Star Diner when combined with Dinner. Five-Star Diner doubles the effect of food; Dinner heals 20% hp, gives a bonus of 1 Strength, only needs 1 AP to consume, and can be crafted out of basically any random Inexplicably Preserved Dungeon Meat you find on your travels. A character that has both can heal almost half of their total HP in a single turn for a measly one AP, using an item that's cheaper and easier to obtain than any potion you'll ever find.
• Sinking Ship Scenario: Shortly after the beginning of the game, the ship you're on is attacked by a kraken, forcing you to try to abandon ship. Regardless of whether you go back to save the other survivors at the end of this sequence, you don't quite make it to the lifeboat. Divine Intervention ends up saving you from a watery grave.
• The Six Stats: The game uses Strength for large melee weapon damage and carrying capacity; Finesse for light weapon and bow damage; Constitution for Hit Points; Intelligence for spell damage; and Wits for perceptiveness, Initiative, and Critical Hit chance. It uses Memory for the sixth; Charisma is deprecated to the optional civil abilities Persuasion and Bartering.
• Skippable Boss:
  • Some enemies have a "boss" flag, but can be skipped either by talking them out of it, or giving them an item that will allow them to let you pass.
  • Act 3 builds up to a confrontation between the Divine Order and the Black Ring, with the Godwoken forced to either side with one against the other or destroy both in order to access the Academy. But liberal use of teleportation abilities will lead the Godwoken to the Academy's back door, prompting both sides to despawn.
• Slave Brand: Sebille starts with one on her cheek, allowing her master, who is nowhere to be found, to control her. Her number one priority is to have it removed.
• Soul Jar: You can find several In Fort Joy and the surrounding island. Except for a few fake ones in one specific quest, each contains a soul, and you can either smash the soul jar to free said soul, absorb the soul inside, or just carry it around. Freeing or absorbing the soul kills the person who's soul was in it, though at least two directly ask you to free their souls, having been in And I Must Scream scenarios for the past few millennia, courtesy of Braccus Rex.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: Lohse, the game's resident Spoony Bard, does indeed sing. What happens is that you can make her do this in the middle of a room filled with pools of blood and dead bodies.
• Spell Crafting: In addition to the Item Crafting from the first game, the sequel allows you to combine effects of several default spells into dangerous new combos.
• Split Screen:
  • Like the Original Sin Enhanced Edition, the game allows several players to play at the same PC and automatically enters the split-screen mode when they steer their characters too far apart from each other (only when playing with controllers).
  • This how local multiplayer works on consoles, as well. Note that local multiplayer is limited to two people, not the four that online multiplayer allows for, mostly due to screen size.
• Squick: In-Universe, even the sleazy pimp gets grossed out if you tell him that undead make the best lovers.
• Standard Fantasy Races: The humans are the usual pseudo-medieval civilization, the elves are reclusive forest-dwellers with a few unique attributes added such as their use of Blood Magic and Cannibalism Superpower, the lizards rule an ancient empire constantly at odds with the other polities, and the dwarves are, unusually, gifted seamen and magicians. There are other races in the setting, most notably imps, orcs, and demons, but they're mostly in the background.
• Starfish Aliens: The Voidwoken are not of this world, and mostly resemble giant invertebrates like maggots, worms, locusts, wasps, slugs, spiders, and squid. Their ancestors appeared to resemble tall blue-skinned humans, but the Void has thoroughly transformed them.
• Static Role, Exchangeable Character: There are six possible origin stories, but you can only pick one of them for your main PC and three for your companions (assuming you don't just make a custom PC).
• Stationary Enemy: Justified with the Shriekers, Human Weapons who are crucified to the spot.
• Status Effect-Powered Ability:
  • A talent adds elemental damage to your arrows if you are currently standing on a surface of corresponding element. In other words, if you are on fire, your arrows gain added fire damage.
  • Some status ailments upgrade to a more severe version if the target already has specific status effects from attacks or Geo Effects. "Warm" is a harmless effect that stacks with itself to become "Burning"; "Wet" combines with "Chilled" or "Shocked" to freeze the target solid or stun them; and so on.
  • Spontaneous Combustion deals moderate fire damage, but if the target has the Burning or Necrofire effect, it also turns all the Damage Over Time for the rest of the effect's duration into a single hit.
• Status Infliction Attack: A core element of combat is that most attacks inflict both Hit Point damage and status effects, either directly or via Geo Effects, which can stack into more serious forms or be resisted via Anti-Debuffs. Elemental Powers usually inflict themed statuses (like Shocked or Suffocating for Aerotheurge spells), but many weapon skills also carry effects like knockdown or Bleed.
• Stealthy Teleportation: Unlike most of the game's teleportation spells, which range from flashy to outright harmful, the "Cloak and Dagger" Scoundrel skill teleports without disrupting stealth mode or invisibility.
• Strange Secret Entrance: The Sallow Man's Volcano Lair is hidden behind a Hard Light illusion of a cave wall. To enter, the player character needs either to have a unique artifact of True Sight to dispel it or to offer a MacGuffin the Sallow Man wants so he'll admit them.
• Stripperiffic: The female and male elves both wear armor that reveals a lot of skin. While not as extreme as the elves, female lizard armor trends in this direction about as often as it doesn't.
• Summon Magic: The Summoning skill line primarily creates and buffs short-lived Elemental Embodiments, mostly "Incarnates" that the player directly controls and Sentry Gun-like "Totems". Other creatures are available through combining other skill lines, like the Necromancer's Bone Widows, and through Non-Standard Skill Learning, like a condor you can persuade to obey your summons.
• Super-Fun Happy Thing of Doom: The Magisters ship Sourcerers to a dilapidated prison island where they live in squalor with no semblance of law or order. Eventually they take certain prisoners and drain them of Source, essentially turning into soulless husks. This facility is called "Fort Joy".
• Support Party Member: Every skill has some spells that provide support roles (ex. Pyromancer's Haste and Peace of Mind skills), but Hydrosophist characters specialise in being this, with many of their spells being dedicated to healing or removing status ailments.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • Steal things then attempt to sell them back to the shopkeeper? They'll immediately bust you. Kill them in self-defense when they attack you from being caught trying to pickpocket them and leave their dead bodies around? Guards will appear and start interrogating you. Manage to get away with stealing things? More guards will appear in the area and make it harder to rob people blind.
  • Every time you fight the Kraken (assuming you can even call it a fight), it's in an environment where it has a major advantage, and the Kraken makes good use of it.
    • Your first encounter is during the prologue, when you're on the open sea. The Kraken simply grabs the ship you're on, and snaps it in half like a dry twig, and only divine intervention saves you from a watery grave.
    • Later on, you (optionally) meet the Kraken again in Arx harbor. Since you're on terra firma this time, it can't repeat the above scenario. But once you've done enough damage for the Kraken to feel like it's actually in danger from these pesky humanoids, it'll retreat to open water, knowing you can't stop or pursue it.
    • The same thing happens again in the final battle: once you've done enough damage to the Kraken or killed its summoner, it'll simply withdraw from the battle.
• Swap Teleportation:
  • The spell Nether Swap exchanges two nearby characters, who may be allies, enemies, or the spellcaster. This can be extremely valuable in a combat system that emphasizes crowd control, Geo Effects, and tactical movement.
  • The Cat Familiar has a unique skill that it can use to swap places with its summoner.
• Symbolic Baptism: The Godwoken who enters the Wellspring ascends to Divinity. This turns out to be because the Wellspring is a massive pool of liquid Source, and the Godwoken absorbs it all.
• Symbolic Serene Submersion: The game opens with a playable prologue on a Prison Ship, which ends with the Kraken crushing said ship, throwing the Player Character into the water. Just before they drown, however, a mysterious voice speaks to them and warps them to the shore. This is a symbolic rebirth for the character, as it is later revealed that the voice belongs to their respective patron god, who, by saving them from drowning, sets them on the path to become the next Divine, i.e. avatar of the gods.
• Symmetric Effect: The skill "Equalize" averages out the health and armor percentages of everyone in the Area of Effect. Because it works by percentage, characters with a higher Hit Point or Armor Point maximum are more heavily affected in absolute terms.
• Take Your Time: Generally played straight, but some quests are timed and will end in failure if you didn't address them earlier, such as preventing the murder of Gareth's parents.
• Taken for Granite: This game has the Petrifying Touch and Petrifying Visage abilities that, as the name implies, petrifies the target (if they don't have any Magic Armor). Petrified targets cannot move for a turn (two turns for Petrifying Visage), cannot dodge attacks and have an increased vulnerability to Earth damage. On the other hand, they are immune to almost all other status effects (and the target gets healed from them if they already have any of those statuses) and have an increased resistance to Fire and Air damage.
• Tea Is Classy: The wealthy, well-connected Lady Kemm has unique teas that serve as Power-Up Food. She hosts tea parties for the less-fortunate citizens of the city and goes through a large amount of the stuff in the course of a single conversation.v
• Teleportation: You find the red-and-blue pair of teleporter pyramids from the previous games in Dallis' quarters on Lady Vengeance and two more (a green and a yellow one) in dungeons on the Reaper Coast. You can also instantly travel to any waypoint you have discovered, but only within the current act.
• Test of Pain: One ghost only grants his Sidequest to someone who can experience his final memories in silence— he refused to make a sound as his murderer burned him to death.
• Theme Naming: A rather subtle, meta example during character customization. Instead of a standard color palette for hair and skin, the game offers such exotic hues as almandine, black grape, still water, and harvestman. Cycling through these reveals that the color scheme for a particular race is generally based on a theme related to that race. The aristocratic Lizards have colors named after gemstones and scenery. Dwarven colors reflect a love of food and drink. Humans, adaptable and ubiquitous, have hair colors representative of their many different trades.
• Threatening Shark: Zigzagged. In Reaper's Coast, you can find a shark flopping around on the beach. Killing it will reveal it ate a child, but if you talk to it with the Pet Pal talent, you'll find out it beached itself on purpose, knowing that would kill it, because it couldn't bear to be in the ocean where the Voidwoken lurked.
• Thriving Ghost Town: The Arx — one of Rivellon's great cities and the capital of the Divine Order — has a grand total of seven homes, four public buildings, and a few market stalls in the city proper, plus a harbour and guardhouse outside.
• Time Skip: 1,200 years have passed since the events of Divinity: Original Sin. Although the first Original Sin is technically the outlier here; Original Sin II takes place firmly in between the events of the first few games.^*With the exception of Dragon Commander which is set several thousand years before the first Original Sin.
• Time to Unlock More True Potential: The goal of Act II is to develop your Godwoken abilities so you're capable of claiming Divinity. Various mentors teach you to handle more Source (for a price), while your own patron deity teaches you to perceive and manipulate souls.
• Time-Travel Tense Trouble: While not literal time travellers, elven culture has a different view of time from everyone else, and communally share the memories of the dead. This means traditional elves will often speak exclusively in the present tense, although some learn past and future tenses to communicate with outsiders easier. Non-traditional elves also don't have this speech pattern.
• Tin Man: The Eternals are described as coldly rational in contrast to the emotionally-driven mortal races, but are often shown being influenced by their emotions. In particular, Aetera refuses to ally with Fane out of rage at him being the Eternals' Unwitting Instigator of Doom, and Dallis' thoroughly unrequited sense of companionship with Braccus Rex gives him a chance to disable his Restraining Bolt so he can later turn on her.
• Too Awesome to Use:
  • Pretty much all Source skills that cost the full 3 Source points, especially those that also cost 4 action points (meaning that, for most characters, this single skill uses up a full turn and all of their Source points).
  • There is a point in the middle of Act 1 where the player will have had the opportunity to break at least one Source collar but doesn't have access to a Source fountain, meaning chances to regain Source are limited to a few random pools found throughout the wilderness.
  • The first few fights in Act 2 are conducted without a way to replenish Source. Once the player rescues Meistr Siva, the fountain in her basement will provide more Source in exchange for a minor detour.
  • This trope is averted for the many nice one-shot scrolls, potions, arrows, etc. in your inventory. Players used to other Role-Playing Games who let these things accumulate in their inventory are making the game notably harder for themselves. Since there are no random encounters and few cakewalk trash fights, using a one-shot item to make fights much easier, even if they aren't with a boss, will make the game less stressful.
• Translation by Volume: Lord Withermore speaks loudly and slowly to a Lizard player character until reminded that the Common Tongue has been spoken in the Lizard Empire for centuries. In his defense, he's spent those centuries entombed underground as an undead, yet still apologizes for the misstep.
• Translator Microbes: Several inscriptions in the Eternal language translate themselves directly into the mind of the reader.
• Troll Bridge: There are a couple of these in Reaper's Coast. One Troll, Marg, charges a pittance while the other troll, Grog, charges an exorbitant price for crossing. Each Troll is upset by the practices of the competition and asks you to remove his business rival. Helping the seemingly friendlier Marg backfires since he moves on to his former rival's bridge and charges an even higher price for crossing since he's got a monopoly on the bridge toll business now. Helping Grog doesn't reduce his prices, but he does agree to teach a free skill to your character.
• Turn-Based Combat: Like the first game, the sequel features tactical turn-based combat with initiative, action points, and free movement.

Tropes U — Z

• Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay: In many RPGs, when pickpocketing, you can either only steal one specific item or the game will pause to let you select whatever you wish to steal at your leisure. Not here. NPCs, both your mark and those around it, are constantly moving about in real time, meaning you have to be extremely quick and precise to not get discovered. One of the easiest ways to circumvent this problem? Use another of your characters to talk to the mark. They'll be distracted and have their back turned safely away as the pickpocket makes their move. This is precisely why most successful real-life pickpockets operate in groups.
• Unexplained Recovery: You can incinerate Alexandar's body as much as you want in the fight at the end of Act I, he'll be back (unconscious) but no worse for the wear in the Lady Vengeance in Act II, where you can kill him again (although the Quest Log states you left him comatose), and then see him once again in Act III healthy and with several extra levels. His death is final at this point, though.
• Unfinished Business: A number of ghosts, when spoken to, will give you a quest that, when completed, will let them move on. Others move on after you finish their unfinished business for them, like the children's ghosts in Roost's room after you kill him.
• The Unfought: The God King, whose minions you fight throughout the entire game, is never confronted unless you choose to seal off all Source, and even then, all it does is prevent him from being able to influence the world.
• The Unreveal: The cloaked figure is Braccus Rex, which can be revealed to you ahead of time by Taraquin or by a note in the Magisters' Barracks. Hilariously, the player can invoke this by saying "This explains nothing."
• Useless Useful Spell:
  • Most debuffs, especially taunts, charm, and madden. They are far more deadly when they go off on you than on the enemies. For one, in order to charm an enemy or taunt them, you gotta remove their magic and physical armour (Respectively) for it to go off. After that, it's guaranteed... but the smart AI will remove it almost instantly, sometimes even before their turn is next. If the computer doesn't, the mind-controlled/addled enemies will proceed to do the bare minimum to actually act as if they were charmed/taunted/confused, whereas your characters will go all out on you if not eat half their inventory in one round.
  • Piercing damage ignores physical and magic armor, always dealing damage directly to vitality. Awesome in theory, except that almost every skill in the game is a Status Infliction Attack if it hits a target without the appropriate armor type. This means that, unless it actually kills the target, reducing their armor to make them vulnerable to a status effect from an ally would usually have been more effective. And since Piercing damage is relatively rare, it's unlikely you'll have enough sources of it to kill the target without removing their armor anyway.
  • Area of effect spells are largely this. Most fights consist of 3-5 enemies who are not standing that near each other, there's a good chance of hitting your allies as well, and it's usually better to focus on killing one enemy as opposed to wounding several.
  • Elemental Arrows (the skill, not the items) is this, once plenty of actual elemental arrows are accumulated.
  • Elemental Infusions on the Summoner's Incarnate are often this. Summoning an Incarnate over a Geo Effect will affect its resistances as well as granting it a skill and setting all the Incarnate's damage to that type. The thing is, Power Infusion gives the Incarnate a powerful knockdown effect that always checks for physical armor, even if your Incarnate can't deal physical damage. It's usually better to have an uninfused Incarnate with a knockdown than an Incarnate infused with the damage type the enemy is weakest to. The outliers here is Blood, which will keep the Incarnate on physical damage while also granting it Mosquito Swarm and the Necromancy passive (self-healing as a percentage of damage dealt directly to enemy hit points).
• Vanilla Unit: A primary use of Summon Magic is to conjure Elemental Embodiments out of nearby Geo Effects. Absent any suitable surface or Elemental Infusion buff spell, it creates a Wood Incarnate or Totem that lacks any special attacks, elemental powers, or resistances.
• Variable Mix: Some event-driven music tracks (particularly battle music) have five different variations, with the latter four including the individual instruments you can select for your party members on the character creation/editing screen. Usually, the non-instrument version of the track plays first, then segues between the other four instrument versions depending on the party member you are currently controlling, or which party member scored the latest kill.
• Very Definitely Final Dungeon: The game makes it abundantly clear that entering Lucian's crypt is the game's final Point of No Return.
• Video Game Caring Potential:
  • Thanks to you, Birdie the Source Hound Death Seeker can be persuaded into getting its life back on track.
  • You can find a few victims of Braccus Rex's curses, such as the fire slugs, the flaming skeleton, Gratania, and the pigs cursed to burn. The player can indeed free them from their torment and suffering, and you are rewarded for doing so.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential:
  • In Act 2 you learn to literally suck the Source from living and dead alike. While doing it to living people will only cause them to lose Source (if they have any), using it on ghosts will cause their soul to be utterly annihilated. While at first this hardly seems worse than the actions of many of your enemies in the game, it becomes more and more apparent as you progress that it is in fact one of the worst fates one can suffer. Even spirits that have been tortured for an eternity, begging for it to end, change their minds and cry out in terror when you use it upon them. Most will beg and plead while others will simply stare at you with all the hatred they can muster, but there is no one in the game who will thank you for it, save for the Knight of Duna, who is bonded to the God King and wants a Mercy Kill. Interestingly, this can be tried on every single spirit you encounter. Apart from only one or two unimportant apparitions that will disappear when you try, none will be able to resist or fight it. With most important characters becoming spirits after they die, there's a lot of room for cruelty here. You can be the maniac who laughs as immortal generals, arch-demons and some of the other most powerful beings in the region find out what fearing for one's non-existence actually feels like. Even Alexander can be destroyed this way. The kicker? Allies that died fighting with you are just as vulnerable to it, taking senseless betrayal up to eleven.
  • And sure enough, you can attack random people to make their lives a living hell, like throwing furniture and objects at them or just outright killing them.
  • As part of Sebille's personal quest in Act 3, you finally track down her former master with her planning on killing him, however he has a special song that he will use to bend her to his will forever. Sebille trusts you with a counter melody, counting on you to save her from enslavement when the time comes so she can take her revenge. You can choose to simply not to, which will ensure that Sebille is mind controlled back into enslavement, her quest of revenge ending in failure as she permanently leaves your party. Bonus points if you're playing as the Red Prince where you have the option to give Sebille to the Shadow Prince as a gift.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment:
  • Throw chairs at people or getting caught stealing from them red-handed and their attitude towards you will lower.
  • Opting to sacrifice every animal in a forest in Reaper's Coast to gain better mastery over Source will cause your hero to permanently lose the ability to speak to any animals afterward if you possessed the ability to do so already.^note  You can spend another very precious talent point to get the Pet Pal talent back, but it's a significant loss either way.
  • Inverted with Magister Jonathan. You actually get rewarded for killing him before crossing the Paladin Bridge, knocked out and all, as you can prevent Gareth's parents from getting murdered.
• Villain of Another Story:
  • Certain characters in the world will take on this role if you don't recruit the companion to whom they're a personal enemy of. They're still present and you can still deal with them if you so choose, but you won't have a personal stake against them and they're only tangentially related to the main quest at most. These characters include the Shadow Prince, who plays a big role in both Sebille and the Red Prince's story, Queen Justinia, who is Beast's nemesis, and the demon possessing Lohse.
  • You hear a lot about Damian, learn that he may still be at large, and you have to deal extensively with his organization, the Black Ring, but he otherwise plays no role in the plot. He's a threat that's dealt with in Beyond Divinity and Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga.
• Violence is the Only Option: On Reaper's Coast, Magister Jonathan will send two Silent Monks to kill Gareth's parents in their home at Paradise Down, potentially sending him on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge, unless you kill Jonathan before that happens. This is possible by finding a house to the north of Driftwood, where Gareth had subdued Jonathan and could not decide what to do next, before entering Stonegarden. Convincing Gareth to spare Jonathan will result in a Redemption Rejection later on as Jonathan will still send the Silent Monks to kill Gareth's parents, but Gareth is unwilling to kill him or take him prisoner on board the Lady Vengeance, so you must strike the killing blow. Doing so will result in a What the Hell, Hero? from Gareth, but you can counter with an Armor-Piercing Response that will pacify him.
• Visible Invisibility: Invisible characters appear to allied players as a faintly glowing monochromatic outline with minimal shading.
• Volcano Lair: The Sallow Man — a malevolent Humanoid Abomination — and his undead minions operate out of a cave network in the volcanic Nameless Isle, complete with plenty of Lava Pits. This makes for an Easy Level Trick, since his Boss Battle can be cut short by teleporting him into the lava.
• Walk, Don't Swim: Fane is unconcerned to be on a sinking ship because, as an undead, he can simply walk the rest of the way, and later says he's mainly aboard the Lady Vengeance because sailing is so much faster. In gameplay, deep water is as impassible to him as to anyone else.
• Weaponized Animal: The Magisters have trained hounds to shoot crossbows attached on their backs. How those dogs reload their crossbows is up for debate.
• Weaponized Teleportation: The low-level Teleportation skill and associated scroll allows the caster to teleport almost anyone and anything within range (typically within line of sight) to an applicable destination. Although you cannot teleport things directly on top of each other, the full hitbox of any objects already at the destination is usually not factored in, and the act of teleporting the target will usually result in it taking Falling Damage that scales based on the caster's level and Intelligence attribute. The trope is also invoked with the achievement for killing an enemy using teleportation. Hence, this mundane utility spell can be turned into a potent weapon in three ways:
  • Teleport a target that has very little HP (e.g. a weakened enemy) to another location. The falling damage they take will kill them.
  • Teleport an object right beside a creature. The object will deal impact damage to the creature by falling within their hitbox. Said object does not necessarily need to be large; even a stack of nails will suffice.
  • Teleport a creature right beside another creature. As the teleported creature gets back up to their feet, they will cause Collision Damage to themselves and the creature they were teleported to.
• Welcome to Corneria: The game has a serious problem with repeated dialogue in the overworld. It's most noticeable in towns when you go shopping, because when you take your time, the dialogue will wear on you fast.
  • In particular, hope you enjoy listening to the two ladies chatting in the Arx Marketplace, because you'll be hearing that particular conversation a lot! The wandering dwarf chatting up the Stall vendors in driftwood is just as bad.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: The Magisters - at least those that aren't Ax-Crazy - are holding Sourcerers captive and "curing" them because they genuinely believe it's the only way to stop the Void creatures from attacking.
• Wham Episode: The Academy and the Arena of the One at the end of Act III. Here, you learn many unpleasant truths: the Voidwoken are the Eternals, the Gods are merely using their worshippers to feast on their Source, and Divinity is snatched away from you at the deciding moment by Dallis when she takes the Wellspring for herself. The now Source-starved gods turn on you in fury and desperation for more Source, and you end up killing them. Depending on what choices you made, you may have even lost the favor of some of your companions. Oh, and the vaguely goofy "Arena's of the One" that have shown up in both previous two arcs are part of a millenia-old tradition that reach back to Fane's day. The One they're referring to is the One who will drink from the Well.
• Wham Shot: During a late game side quest Lohse will go on a journey with Malady to weaken the demon that is trying to possess her. You do so by snuffing out candles that represent the poor souls he's stolen over the years. At first you only find them in patches of one or two candles, but near the end you round the top of a hill and then look upon a sea of millions of candles.
• What the Hell, Hero?: There are certain decisions that your Companions will absolutely not stand for. Not only will they call you out on it, particularly spiteful player actions can cause your party members to leave the party. Permanently. And often violently.
  • If you choose to disregard Sebille's wishes on The Nameless Isle and proceed into the Academy, she will leave for good to try and enact her revenge on her own.
  • Ifan makes it unmistakably clear that he will not tolerate the use of Deathfog for any reason. Crossing the Moral Event Horizon in Arx will enrage him to the point that he immediately turns and attacks you.
  • Beast will not appreciate the player's choice to kill Lohar in Driftwood. Like Ifan, he will also attack you if you release Deathfog in Arx.
    Beast: What are you playin' at? All I've done, all you've done, and you just show yourself t'be the tyrant I thought Justinia was!
  • The Red Prince will be quite understandably upset if, at the grand finale of his personal quest, you choose death for his and Sadha's children.
  • Nearly every party member (and even the spirits of the unchosen party members) will despise you if you let the God King win (with only Fane approving on any level). Same with if you let Lohse's demon gain divinity (with Beast seeming neutral to it and Lohse fully possessed. If you are good friends, Red Prince is disgusted in you but still hopes that you may realize you've made a terrible mistake, in which case he promises he will take up arms with you again. Ifan will also despise you if you let Lucian win and destroy Sourcery, as he is sure Lucian will take advantage of this to manipulate the world.
• What the Hell, Player?: If you opt to let the God King take over and enslave all of Rivellon, the ending will really hammer it home that you screwed up and did something very bad.
  Narrator: Are you proud of all you achieved? Or are you ashamed of your sins?
• Why Am I Ticking?: There is a spell that turns its target into a walking, talking bomb, most notably used by the cloaked figure in the battle after you steal the Lady Vengeance. You don't die when you explode, just release a bunch of fire in the area around you. Cue sudden Action Bomb running into a group of foes.
• Won the War, Lost the Peace: In the ending where you give the power of the Source to everyone, the Voidwoken are defeated once and for all with the now empowered people of Rivellon. However, without a common foe or a single Divine to unite them, and the balance of power thrown out of whack, the nations swiftly turn on each other and the world descends into global warfare.
• World of Jerkass: Everyone is a jerkass in Divinity: Original Sin II. The Magisters are jerks. The Black Ring are jerks. The dwarf queen is a jerk. The dwarf rebels are jerks. The Void is definitely a jerk. The gods are jerks. The Divine is a jerk. The elf Mother Tree is a jerk. The Sourcerers are jerks. Even most of the playable characters are jerks to one extent or another. While there may be individuals that have good intentions, every single organization you encounter is responsible for atrocities. The one exception to this is the Paladins (not for lack of the game trying, mind you). Despite the game's bright design and playful narration, the setting is actually really, really bleak.
• You Have Failed Me: The final boss of Act III is a fight against each of your parties' Inner Gods, furious that you let Dallis beat you. It takes the form of a fight with exact copies of your party.
• Your Normal Is Our Taboo: Eating parts of the dead is an elven tradition meant to honor them and share their memories, as they can see the memories of those they eat (a uniquely elven trait). To everyone else, though, eating the dead is one serious taboo, hence a lot of the fantastic racism against elves. This is Truth in Television: several real-life cultures practice or practiced funerary cannibalism, and suffered prejudice from other cultures that hold it as a taboo.
• You All Meet in a Cell: The game kicks off with a group of Sourcerers (including your player character) put on a boat and shipped to prison. The first half of the starting chapter of the game is escaping the fortress you are kept captive in.

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