It's not every day you come across a game like Baldur's Gate 3, and it's even rarer to find a guy like Howard. The most remarkable thing about him? He's actually totally normal. You might find his face model on a few random NPCs, but you'd never peg them for the heroes. Howard is a short and stocky gold dwarf bard, still sporting an eyebrow piercing despite looking well into his 50s, and BG3 fans on Facebook are eating him up.
The strange phenomena happened very suddenly. "They adopted him so quickly that I got whiplash," says Howard's creator Lisa D'Ambrosio, and you can tell as much by simply looking at the clamoring on his 750-strong Facebook page. Have a quick scan of any online group or forum dedicated to the game, and you're bound to find many a pretty tiefling setting out on a perilous journey toward Astarion's belt buckle. But by creating the most extraordinarily ordinary man in Faerûn, D'Ambrosio has answered a question none of us knew we had in the first place: what if the fantasy hero wasn't some hot young thing, but a bewildered middle-aged ornithologist who wants nothing more than to put his feet up, have a snooze, and give you unwanted yet well-meaning life advice? Well, the moment she found out was "actually pure accident."
