Larian Studios has said goodbye to Baldur’s Gate 3. They’ve been clear about this: At a GDC panel in 2024, founder Swen Vincke said, “We’re not going to make new expansions, which everybody is expecting us to do. We’re not going to make Baldur’s Gate 4, which everybody is expecting us to do. We’re going to move on, we’re going to move away from D&D, and we’re going to start making a new thing.”
There’s a world in which that was the end of new Baldur’s Gate 3 content, full stop. That’s not the world we live in. Since late July of this year alone, at least four substantial custom campaigns have been released for the game. There’s a fifth fan-made campaign already in development. Three years after Baldur’s Gate 3’s release, and with the developer’s assurance that no new official expansions are forthcoming, the question now isn’t whether we’re going to get more content. It’s why we’re getting so much — and if any of that content is actually good.
Better dev tools can answer one of those questions. Larian’s official mod support was never built to allow full custom-campaign creation. Modders have figured out ways to build around that restriction, partially by using unlocked toolkits like Moonglasses. Larian’s own editor ships with several key features disabled, like the ability to build brand-new levels, write new dialogue, or design new combat encounters…e.g., the foundational building blocks of a real campaign. Moonglasses and similar third-party mods remove those restrictions and allow modders to access developer mode within the game, granting them the ability to build new stories from scratch.
There’s also timing: One of these expansions, A Dream of Silence: ReVamped, was built specifically as an entry for the BG3 July Modathon 2026, an organized community event. That does indicate, for at least some of these mods, it’s not a coincidence that we’re seeing so many projects releasing at the exact same time. (For those interested, this does appear to be an annual event, so there’s a decent chance we’ll get a drop of expansions next year, too.)
But are these expansions any good? Depends on what you’re looking for. Each of the recent modded campaigns delivers something specific.
- A Dream of Silence: ReVamped drops you and Astarion into a shifting nightmare version of Cazador’s mansion, adapting an existing piece of interactive fiction into a six-hour, four-ending story about your choices to save him or let the nightmare win.
- The Sunless Citadel skips branching narrative choices almost entirely for a linear dungeon crawl, for those who don’t want to wade through dialogue and would rather get right to combat and exploration.
- Act Two Expansion widens, as the name indicates, Baldur’s Gate 3’s second section into an entirely new region, the Chionthar Wilds, with over 70 new items and 30 new fights.
- Dinner With Strahd goes the opposite direction from Sunless Citadel, granting players a new story and full voice acting for one self-contained encounter with an iconic Dungeons & Dragons villain.
- And — upcoming — we have Path to Menzoberranzan, which promises a full three-act campaign with its own companions and a new protagonist, set one century after the events of Baldur’s Gate 2.
Determining if each is good is in the eye of the player. Looking for voice acting? Play Dinner With Strahd. Seeking more lore and exploration? Act Two Expansion may be the way to go.
Again, these are not highly polished, official DLC experiences. Some of them do feel oddly disconnected from the rest of the base game — nothing you live through in the Act Two Expansion, for example, will influence your run’s Act 3. None of these expansions are available on console, at least at this time; each requires a PC install through Nexus Mods, since bigger campaign mods like these don’t currently meet the requirements for Larian’s official console-friendly in-game mod menu. And at least a couple of these mods are in flux or running alphas or betas pending further modder updates. The Sunless Citadel, for instance, doesn’t have a camp system yet (those are harder to build than you might think!). Further, if you’re interested in running more than one of these at a time, you may need to tread with care. A Dream of Silence: ReVamped’s own documentation warns that running it alongside Dinner With Strahd can cause a glitch that unexpectedly swaps out some of Cazador’s visuals.
Six hours from one campaign, seven or eight from another, a whole new region to explore in Act 2, and (my eye’s on you, Path to Menzoberranzan) entirely new characters and a full-game campaign in the works — the incredibly active and creative modding scene surrounding Baldur’s Gate 3 is keeping the tens of thousands of people constantly replaying this game busy. This is all real, playable content, available now, ready for your next run. Clear your schedule: For a game that’s not getting official DLC or expansions anymore, Baldur’s Gate 3 has a surprisingly vast library of ways to make replays feel brand-new, every single time.
