Baldur's Gate 3 has a smorgasbord of mods to choose from—adding quality-of-life features like introducing voice lines you otherwise wouldn't hear, letting your companions chip in during conversations, or making Withers hot. I don't like thinking about that one.

Good news! There are more horrors to repress. This latest terror from the twisted imaginations of the game's fanbase comes scrabbling out of the deep like your most tenacious sleep paralysis demon—quite literally, I regret to say. Run On All Fours booked it onto Nexus Mods last week, and I have not been able to get the mental image out of my head since.

“Today I woke up and chose violence,” writes the mod's author, FluffySpider, on the mod's description page—well, they actually used strikethrough on the “choose violence” part, but I felt it only right to leave it in untouched—”[and] swapped the running animations for humans. Why? I have no idea lol.”

Despite the auteur's insistence that this is “a joke mod, so treat it like one”, I can't quite reckon with that. Jokes are usually pleasant things. They are designed to make us laugh, japes and jests delivered on a humble stage of a pub that smells like stale beer, or in a noble's courtroom—accompanied by the clicking of a jester's bell-jangled heels. This mod, as you can see below, carries no such charm:

The most concerning implications come from FluffySpider's slapdash application, which is rather selective. In the mod, only “non-beefy” humans (as in, the less muscular body type) are impacted. This implies that, at some point, human evolution in the Forgotten Realms diverged—divvying up all of humanity into swole gigachads and, uh, dog people.

As FluffySpider reveals, however, there are some hybrid cases: “Some other races seems to use a few human animations, so they can briefly stand on all fours after running.” Upsetting.

Fortunately, the modder has at least contributed to the common good in other ways—there's this mod that makes your facial expressions slightly more stoic, one that swaps out Volo's donor eye for the cooler version you get from the hag, and one that makes your character be really into Astarion grabbing your neck—oh. I think I know why he's the only one standing in all of those screenshots now. At least it's not Thomas the Tank Engine again.