r/BG3 • u/thealien73 • 1d ago
Cazador’s Plan Confusion Spoiler
Spoilers for the end of Astarion’s personal quest.
So Cazador needed 7000 souls for the ritual and he had 7 spawn hunting for him. Astarion was one of his first spawn and has been enslaved for 200 years.
7000/200 =35. They captured 35 people a year. I get that Cazador had to go slow so no one would notice people going missing… but 35 a year? That’s so few people, especially in a city the size of Baldur’s Gate. Not to mention the fact that Baldur’s Gate is a port-town, meaning there are people coming in and out allll the time. WOTC apparently gave the city a population of 125,000. That’s huge!!
Why did it take him so long?? Even if he only sent out one spawn a night, twice a week, and they had a 50/50 success rate, it should have been like 135 years and I’m pretty sure he sent them a lot more frequently than that
Of course, this is also the guy who had a plan “centuries in the making” that hinged on seven specific people and then sent those seven out into the world regularly. Oh and it DIDN’T actually hinge on those seven, he could have grabbed literally anyone including one of his sycophant servants to replace Astarion at any moment
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u/Meowzers3846 1d ago
Isn’t that the third vampiric lesson? Patience? He’s immortal. There’s no sense in rushing it when taking it slow and remaining under the radar is much much better.
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u/ferretatthecontrols 1d ago
Considering most of the other spawn didn't show up until years later (literally one of them is only 10 years a spawn) I think it's safe to assume Astarion was doing the heavy lifting, for a while. Additionally, considering Sebastian was one of the first, and Sebastian has been dead for 180ish years, it sound like Cazador didn't get started right away.
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u/musclemermaid 1d ago
Except Cazador explicitly states that each spawn had 1000 victims tied to them via the runic markings.
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u/BlueButterflies139 Druid 22h ago
That doesn't necessarily mean that they each collected 1000 people, just that their souls are tied in the contract.
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u/musclemermaid 22h ago
Damn, great point. I assumed because Sebastian’s runes match Astarion’s but you’re right.
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u/Gyges7171 1d ago
I assumed the ritual he was casting took years to prepare for, combined with the fact he was paranoid about other vampires finding out about it. He had all the time in the world to do it right.
That or cut content...
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u/TrashApprentice 1d ago
Probably to avoid suspicion. If people were going missing every other day at some point, someone would notice a pattern that most of the dissappeared were last seen with the same seven people and get traced back to the szarr palace from there. As an imortal, he has all the time in the world to do it slowly. It could also be that he found out about the ritual and started making plans for it much later than 200 years ago and was just making the spawn get him dinner before that.
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u/AllStitchedTogether 23h ago
I'm sure there are all kinds of reasons.
From Astarion's story, we know that that spawn were not out hunting for victims at all times. There was at least one time that Cazador locked him in a coffin for over a year at a time to starve as punishment. There was also all of the other torture and carving runes into his back, which would (most likely) all have to at least visibly heal before being sent back out so as to not raise suspicion. Cazador took his time, as a vampire lord would, since he has literally all the time in the world. No need to rush and mess up, might as well be slow, meticulous, enjoy the process. The fact that the spawn had no idea any of the victims could be alive also suggests that not all of the victims did survive. Many could have just been a delightful meal to satisfy a craving, or maybe he was picky about exactly which victims were worthy enough to meet his standards and keep alive. I highly doubt every single victim was a part of the ritual, Cazador is too sadistic for that to be the case.
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u/The_Shadow_Watches 1d ago
You have to plan ahead and save time between kidnappings or people will get suspicious. Even if you only targeted the poor and homeless, people would start to notice if 30 people disappeared each month.
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u/emmastory 21h ago
orchestrating 35 murders per year in a city of 125,000 is no joke. that’s a higher per capita murder rate than newark new jersey, and all the murders in newark aren’t committed by members of a single household
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u/Maleficent-Aerie2870 22h ago
The fact that this entire time Cazador could’ve just replaced Astarion and ascended and then would be unstoppable in terms of finding Astarion, tadpole or not, drove me nuts when I did the Astarion ascending route. Like wdym you can just carve the exact same runes on Cazador and it works just the same? I thought at the very least all the sacrifices had to be the spawn of the vampire ascending to make it a true sacrifice. Granted maybe Cazador didn’t know this and Astarion just tries it cause he’s desperate. I write off all the Cazador inconsistencies with him just being absolutely insane.
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u/Hyperspace_Towel Enrique and Poppers 15h ago
Cazador DID know this; if you poke around the mansion you’ll find the corpse of someone that was supposed to be Astarion’s replacement.
Since Cazador was a sadistic monster with an immortal’s patience, I think he just really wanted to use his favorite plaything in the ritual
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u/Maleficent-Aerie2870 1h ago
My interpretation of that journal entry is the chamberlain thought he would be Astarion’s replacement and in an attempt to avoid it, he took that potion out of desperation, not that Cazador intended for him to be one. I think he just knew Cazador was sacrificing spawn and he seems to be one of the only ones that wasn’t intended to be sacrificed.
I agree Cazador wouldn’t have been satisfied not getting Astarion back in his clutches, but I can imagine a situation where Cazador wants to keep Astarion around because his “screams sound sweetest” and he doesn’t like the idea of a devil getting the joy of torturing him.
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u/Scorpio_198 14h ago
Funny idea: what if Mephistopheles secretly specifically engineered the ritual to allow one of the Spawn and the Master to switch. Devils love to screw people over in unexpected ways and this wouldn't have been against their contract as Cazador could have ascended with the ritual. It's just that this other thing would work as well if Cazador was incompetent enough to let his Spawn beat him.
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u/arethainparis 13h ago
I don’t think a city of 125,000 is really as big as you think. I used to live in a port city slightly bigger than that and if 35 people went missing in a year — let alone EVERY year — people would definitely notice.
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u/Melody_of_Madness 20h ago
He feasted on folk a lot
He started with less so.maybe the first hundred years were 70 per year per person.
When you are already an immortal vampire 200 years is like a summer break.
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u/RagnarokCzD 13h ago
I mean ...
Imagine he would kidnap them all in one night, then preform the ritual, and by time you come to the city he would allready be ascended and basicaly impossible to kill.
Dont really make such compelling story for Astarion, does it? :D
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u/jessnthings 23h ago
Maybe he didn’t start out right away with a grand ascension scheme, maybe he just liked some of his dinner deliveries and wanted to keep them around, or maybe he was practicing making spawn, and then realized he had a bunch of potential vampires hanging around and needed a convenient way to get rid of them all.
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u/South_Front_4589 12h ago
35 a year is a pretty significant number. Especially when it only takes one wrong victim to lead to a more thorough investigation. The whole idea would be to make it slow and be careful who they pick.
They're also vampires. They feed on people. And I also expect they have a lot of uses for people in other ways. Not to mention a natural level of failure where victims die.
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u/stromboul 8h ago
Also we have no indication that Cazador (I think?) for how long Cazador knew how to actually finish the ritual. I get the sense that he didn't knew everything and he was piecing it together as the years went buy. The experimentation on the back of his spawn, maybe doing some partial rituals, not being sure how many he needed to capture, etc. And he didn't want his spawn to know he was doing it so they wouldn't rebel and kill him (exactly like he did to his master)
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u/mr_owl_mark 7h ago
MF I've had like a handful of dates over the past like 3 years. 35 seductions a year sounds excessive and exhausting.
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u/Deriveit789 1d ago
I assume Cazador was eating most of the people his spawn brought back and only a small % ended up as ritual victims.
The writing for Cazador is definitely weird though. It seems like there was a lot of cut content.