Baldur’s Gate 3’s biggest mod team now has hundreds of devs working on its huge custom campaign in an impressively professional production

While Larian is set to leave Baldur’s Gate 3 behind after the release of Patch 8, the modding community is far from done with the game. Alongside the typical mods, custom campaigns are in the works adding brand-new questlines and locations to the RPG.

Out of every mod for the game, the upcoming Path to Menzoberranzan mod is by far the most ambitious. Set in Baldur’s Gate 2’s City of Coin, the mod aims to be a huge campaign with six-to-eight new companions that takes players back to reimagined locations, such as the just-revealed Irenicus’ Dungeon.

Last time we sat down with the team, to Path to Menzoberranzan crew was already sizable. project lead Gregory ‘Lotrich’ Barak and creative director Thomas Loughlin mustered up a large team. However, in the last two months the size of the workforce on the Baldur’s Gate 3 mod has skyrocketed.

While the team is still looking for people in key areas—such as a VFX artist—the group is already huge. Morgan Camp, the mod’s art director, leads of team of 50 volunteers on her own. With a background in film lighting, Camp is bringing years of industry talent to the team just on the visuals side alone.

While there are often horror stories about fan-made expansions that never come out, the Path to Menzoberranzan team is an efficient machine powered by their love of Baldur’s Gate 3.

“My team of artists is about 50-strong,” Camp told us. “ And even though they’re volunteers, it is as efficient as a production environment, any production environment that I’ve ever been in. I was working in film before this, and it’s just really astounded me how similar this is to the film productions that I worked on.”

On the writing side, the Baldur’s Gate 3 mod has five total writing teams, all of which have 10-15 people working together. Steered by creative director Thomas Loughlin, the writing teams all have their own focus: main quest, factions, side quests, etc.

“When we first spoke, I think I had a really great team of about 15 people,” Loughlin said. “But with the sheer amount of interest and numbers, I’ve got five writing teams, all of which have 10 to 15 people in. So I’ve got about 55 writers that are underneath me.”

This has helped the team to make sure that everything continues to stay in line with every aspect of The Forgotten Realms’ lore as well as the mod’s own storylines. While Loughlin believed he already had a great understanding of the universe, the huge expansion of fans has introduced lore experts who have an almost cosmic level of knowledge about the D&D universe to keep things on track.

With the huge amount of interest from fans of Baldur’s Gate 3 following Lotrich’s initial reveal of the mod’s early version of Athkala as well as subreddit posts, articles and videos from content creators, the team grew so much that the crew had to move away from services such as GitHub as the cost of development was exponentially growing.

“[On GitHub] we’ve got to pay per seat for a person, that would just rapidly, like, become very expensive for us,” explained technical director Chris Heisler. “As we’ve gotten a lot more people interested than we expected, right? We ended up posting our own project management tool. So instead of paying, we’re hosting it on a server. We run it ourselves. So likewise, just to collaborate on the code base, we have a tool. We are hosting our own Git service.”

Alongside writers, artists and programmers, the upcoming Baldur’s Gate 3 mod also features voice acting of companions and NPCs just like the main game. Following a public call for actors to join, the team was met with a flood of newcomers with over 700 fans putting their names forward for a part following an article by PC Guide.

“It exploded,” Loughlin exclaimed. “We had a lot of really interesting voice actors anyway and then the article just gave us about 700 more. It seems crazy, you know, there’s people chomping at the bits. We’re still in talks with a voice director to kind of start that process of bringing them all in.”

While the Path to Menzoberranzan team is a force to be reckoned with, the team is still looking for more hands. Fans are still encouraged to join the team via their Discord server either to help work on the mod or to simply keep up with new updates.