How to open the Necromancy of Thay in Baldur’s Gate 3 (BG3)

All right, so you’ve traversed the Blighted Village in Baldur’s Gate 3, broke into a secret cellar, and bypassed a security mirror. Now, you have a scary book – The Necromancy of Thay – and you want to read it. How do you get it open.

When you’ve got a fleshy book with a big indentation in its open mouth, my first thought would be to put my fist in it. Unfortunately, that’s not an option. You can destroy it and make your cowardly companions happy, but I’m guessing if you’re here, you want some delicious forbidden knowledge.

There’s a chance you already dropped into the Whispering Depths dungeon in the blighted village. If not, you can get there by interacting with the well in the center of town. Be warned; there are spiders down there. Big ones that spit poison, and they’re a real pain.

If you thought the first run of phase spiders was bad, I got some bad news for you. The item you’re looking for, the Dark Amethyst, is located behind more phase spiders, as well as their mother, the Phase Spider Matriarch. It’s a pretty rough fight. You might be able to sneak by them, maybe with a potion of invisibility, but I just fought through them. Listen, I’m just a hammer. I swing at every nail I see.

Whatever you decide to do, the Dark Amethyst is just sitting on the ground on the far end of the Whispering Depths. It’s a purple, glowing lump, so it’s hard to miss.

Opening the Necromancy of Thay

Once you have the Dark Amethyst, you can use it by selecting the Necromancy of Thay in your inventory and selecting Read. Whoever is holding it will then get the prompt to slot the Amethyst or, once again, just destroy the book.

If you’re cool and you choose to try and open the book, you’re going to get hit by three saving throws against your Wisdom. The first has a threshold of 10, the next 15, and the last one is a whopping 20. Note that you can close the book at any time if you can’t get through the saving throws.

If you manage to win the saving throws, your character will walk away with the “Speak with Dead” spell, as well as the “Forbidden Knowledge” trait, which gives you +1 to all your wisdom saving throws. Boy, wouldn’t that have been useful a moment ago? 

If you fail a single saving throw, however, you’ll be cursed with Whispers of Madness, and that gives you a disadvantage against all wisdom checks for 50 turns. Fail again, and you’ll get Baleful Knowledge, which is also a disadvantage against wisdom throws but will stick to you until you can manage a Remove Curse spell.

Later on, in Act 3, the Necromancy of Thay will come in handy again. You’ll be able to learn to dig further into its secrets for even more bonuses. And why not? All this fear of Necromancy is so overblown. If the dead didn’t want their bodies desecrated, then they shouldn’t have died.