Save Vanra is a quest in Baldur’s Gate 3, where you are tasked to find a missing daughter from a mother worried. To do so, you need to investigate the Old Garlow’s Place, and the Blushing Mermaid Pub located in the southern central area of the Lower City. These two locations will grant all the locations you need to figure out how to save Vanra in BG3.
Here’s a guide on how to Save Vanra in Baldur’s Gate 3, featuring the two options and other related facts about the quest.
How to Save Vanra in BG3¶
The areas marked in pink are the central locations you can visit for the Save Vanra side quest in BG3.
There are two methods you can use to save Vanra in BG3:
- Craft the Hag’s Bane potion
- Fight the Hag under the Blushing Mermaid Pub
First of all, we highly recommend visiting Old Garlow’s Place. The Garlow’s Place is a key area, as that is where you can find Mayrina, and Connor if you decided to go that route with the Act 1 Hag storyline. You can also find a Cleric here too helping lead the group. While there, you can get a mini-quest as well and do that. Once you’re done, you can get handed the keys to the safe on the wall and get a book which teaches you the recipe, Hag’s Bane.
This potion is one of the methods that you can use to save Vanra. Once you craft it, you can throw it onto the Hag, and she will automatically puke the child up, allowing you to rescue Vanra. You can do this while she is still disguised as the Captain too, if you are so inclined.
Go to Old Barlow’s and do the mini-quest to access the safe, which rewards you with the Hag’s Bane Potion, one of the ways to save Varna in BG3.
Meanwhile, the second option for saving Vanra is to actually go to the Mermaid first, and then speak to the drunk captain. If you do that, you can learn that the mother, Lora, was once a pirate, and the captain offers you to go and kill her for 3000 coins. If you refuse it, she will reveal herself as Auntie Ethel, yes the very same Hag you either killed or let go in exchange for one of her feathers. From there, the Hag retreats into the Pub’s cellar, behind a mysterious wall. If you follow it in, you can find a few of the patrons and the actual Captain Grisly wearing those mind control masks, as you saw with those in the Hag’s Lair in Act 1. You can either kill them or spare them and go straight into the back room and fight the Hag again.
Once you’re inside the Lair, you can get your martial characters to hit the boss, and select the Non-Lethal Option in the passives menu of your UI. Toggle that on, and get the final hit on the Hag. When she’s down, you can cut out Vanra, and save Vanra that way.
If you reveal the Hag, then go into the cellar, and walk through the fake wall, marked by its rickety broken wall near the vines.
Be warned, though, if you kill or knock out the Hag before taking out all of the mushrooms, the Hag will respawn. Make sure to kill those mushrooms when you actually want to deal with the Hag to end the boss fight. If you also kill the Hag without extracting Vanra, then she will die in the process, and you will fail the quest.
Now that you know the two methods to Save Vanra, you can return to Lora in her house and let her know you’ve done the trick. From there, she will award you with the 
Duellist’s Prerogative, a legendary rapier, fit for something like a College of Sword Bard Build, or a non-dual-wield Rogue Build. This pretty much concludes the Save Vanra Quest in Baldur’s Gate 3. Note the page still continues, largely thanks to some role-play and bug-related issues with this quest at launch. So, if you want to know about those issues, please read them below.
Captain Grisly Bug in BG3¶
If you speak to the Captain Grizzly in the Mermaid, and you get the voice lines that she is the Hag, yet she doesn’t transform. You will need to reload your game before you spoke to her. From there, check her health bar, and if it is on 0, then heal her using a healing spell or throw a potion at her. Once she actually has HP, you can speak to her again, and get the actual Hag change cutscene. Once that’s done, you will get into a fight with all the Rednaps disguised as pub patrons.
We’d like to thank this Reddit thread for bringing us to this attention, as we got this bug, and it was certainly annoying to deal with and lose progress over.
Saving Captain Grisly in BG3¶
It’s also worth noting that it is possible to save Captain Grizzly. If you do the second method and chase the Hag into the cellar of the Mermaid, then you can find her and some of her crew masked up. If you can deal with the Hag, and try to knock out the adds in the fight, which make the fight harder, then you can potentially free them. However, it seems a little buggy, and even if you knock out the captain and her crew, you may still get voice lines from the bar staff that say she died. So, there’s not much point in really trying to save Captain Grisly, but the challenge is there if you want it to be.
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