Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms, a free mobile game for iOS and Android, is receiving everyone’s favorite Hellfire Barbarian as a usable champion.
On Jan. 5, Larian Studios announced in a tweet that Karlach will be joining the four other BG3 characters that have already been added to Idle Champions. The game has been around since 2018, but the massive success of Baldur’s Gate 3 has been recently bolstering its popularity, and Larian Studios has cleverly exacerbated this effect by adding Shadowheart, Astarion, Lae’zel, Wyll, and now Karlach to the game.
Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms is a Strategy Placement game set in the Dungeons & Dragons universe created by Wizards of the Coast. While its simplicity and bite-sized adventures make it clear that it is designed to be played on a smart phone, you can also pick it up on Steam, Xbox, PlayStation, and even Switch. The game offers little in terms of matching the depth of storytelling present in BG3, but that really isn’t what it’s designed to do. It may not move you to tears, but it certainly will make a 45-minute commute fly by.
Because the same team is largely responsible for how Karlach is portrayed in Idle Champions, even a quick glance at the game’s website makes it clear that this is very much the Karlach we all know and love. In Idle Champions, she will serve as a sort of offensive support tank, protecting her friends by recklessly advancing and buffing up the damage of adjacent allies. The exact date that Karlach will be coming to the game has not been announced yet, but given the fact that she already has a complete breakdown of her stats and abilities available for viewing, it is likely that she will be joining the other Origin Companions in Idle Champions very soon indeed.
Including Karlach, five out of seven of BG3‘s Origin Characters are now present in Larian’s mobile game. There hasn’t been any announcement of whether we can expect to see Gale or the Dark Urge added, but following the logic of what has happened so far, I think it’s very reasonable to expect Gale to be ported over. I personally don’t think it’s tremendously likely that The Dark Urge will be added to Idle Champions given the fact that the character is only present in BG3 if selected by the player, and even then they are fully customizable. This makes it difficult for Durge to really have any sort of independent personality for people to bond with in the same way as the other Origin Characters, and as such there is likely little value in adding them to Idle Champions.
