Everything you need to know about getting the ending you want in The Blood of Dawnwalker, including the requirements for each one, and envisioning an ideal ending for future Dawnwalker games.
Use the Table of Contents, located in the left panel (top left button on the mobile menu) to navigate through this long guide more easily and quickly.
General Considerations
Before we get into specific endings, it’s important to cover the 30-day timer, engaging during the day vs night, choosing to turn against your allies in exchange for not fighting Brencis, dealing with the Boyars, and the continuation of the story in future games.
30-Day Timer
The 30-day timer you have to save your family actually has pretty limited impact on the overall story. You miss out on a conversation with your family at the very end, but that’s really about it.
If you don’t rescue them before a month has elapsed, the game just does a quick little realization cutscene, and you can continue on your merry way. The objective just gets changed from “Rescue your family” to “Avenge your family”, so you still have to attack Greifberg Castle either way to beat the game.
The game does end after you defeat when you deal with Brencis after passing the point of no return, so any quests you want to complete you just need to do before that happens.
Time does not progress for most endings after you’ve passed the point of no return, so you can wait until there’s only one hour (time increment) left on the very last night if you want.
Day vs Night
If you’ve invested heavily in either the Vampirism or Witchcraft trees such that you do not perform equally well in combat during the day and night, you need to consider when you plan to attack the castle.
Most endings must begin at a specific time, so make sure you shoot for an ending where you’re well-equipped to fight him at that time.
The Turncoat
If you attack Brencis before the month is up, he will offer to pardon you and release your family when you meet him face-to-face if you leave in peace.
There’s an achievement associated with accepting his pardon while accompanied by Lacra or Crake. Even if you don’t plan to do this for your “true” ending, if you care about the achievement, make a quicksave right before fighting him so you don’t have to repeat the whole Griefberg assault just to get both endings.
Boyars
Defeating the Boyars out in Vale Sangora gives you access to legendary Vrakhir loot and unlocks/upgrades their unique ability in the Vampirism tree. It also removes them as obstacles inside Griefberg Castle.
Still, if you can defeat Brencis, you can defeat the rest of them, especially if you’ve invested more heavily in Witchcraft and Swordsmastery and invade during the day. You do get XP, skill points, and the best vrakhir goodies for defeating them, so it can be worthwhile to depose them before the very end.
Trilogy Continuation
The developers of The Blood of Dawnwalker (Rebel Wolves) have already stated that they plan to continue following Coen’s story through the ages in subsequent entries in Dawnwalker trilogy, and the choices you make in each game will be taken into account for the next game.
Beating the Game Before It Starts
It is possible to defeat Brencis when you first fight him at the end of the prologue. He has the same two phases just like he does when you fight him at the end of the game.
The first phase is doable, but the second Grotesque Ascendant phase in Anachora is incredibly challenging, even on the easiest difficulty, as all his attacks will one-shot you there.
A Deal with the Devil (at Shrike’s Crag)
There’s a missable side quest called “A Deal with the Devil” associated angering with Brencis just as there are with each of the Boyars where he will invite you to parley with him at Shrike’s Crag.
It’s unclear what the exact conditions are to triggering it, but it likely involves at least some of the following:
- Defeating all 3 Boyars, likely without taking any of them in
- Reaching an invisible Infamy X rank by continuing to do activities that anger his court after reaching Infamy IX: Dreaded
- You may need to defeat the last Boyar after reaching Infamy IX
- Complete the Manumits questline up to the point of no return (Rise at Dawn)
- Eliminate Lacra at the Uriash Village
- Reaching this point with time to spare before your month is up
The parley costs 4 hours and you can choose to fight him there, but you will lose your entire family (save for Murohnified Lunka) if you do. Brencis seems to have a dead man’s switch of sorts.
Otherwise, he offers you the same deal to release your family as he does when you find him in Greifberg Castle. You can choose to mark the Manumits’s hideout as promised or inform Crake about Brencis’s offer.
The Folk Hero (Lone Wolf)
You can choose to storm the front gates of Greifberg Castle at night, using Shadow Step to climb over the castle walls. Since Shadow Step is a vrakhir power, you can only do a frontal assault at night.
Inside the castle, you’ll face off against any Boyars you didn’t defeat beforehand, else you’ll dispatch their much less formidable underlings in their stead.
This ending has no other requirements and is the one you can’t miss by avoiding specific quest lines or failing them.
If you get to Brencis before the month is up and you have met with the Manumits or Lacra, you can use either of them as a bargaining chip to get your family back without fighting him and trigger The Turncoat ending instead.
Backdoor to Griefberg
If you wish to go it alone during the day, you’ll need to breach Greifberg via the back door, either with the help of Father Florin’s flock or looting a key off a specific bandit camp.
The secret tunnel entrance you use with Catalin Skender does not seems to be accessible (or visible) until you’re teleported there during a cutscene.
Father Florin’s Flock
Father Florin is an ambitious man who plays both sides of the table. He will approach you the first time you enter Svartrau Cathedral (during the day) and invite you to visit some ruins beneath Carpenter’s Row in Altenmarkt.
The cathedral gets locked down during the day once you’ve reached Infamy IX, but you can still learn about his activities while looking for clues about the whereabouts of Saint Mihai’s sword in the cathedral’s treasury building.
If you choose not to kill him and complete his quest for the Ancient Hero’s Armour in the Arimaspian ruins, he will tell you about the back entrance and that one of his followers will open the door for you.
Racovitza’s Key
Even if you chose to kill Father Florin beneath Carpenter’s Row, you don’t lose access to the backdoor, but you’ll need to get a key from Racovitza at a specific bandit camp east of the Tantari Woods in Xanthe’s Fiefdom.
It’s unclear if it’s bugged, but you may lose this key once Brencis offers to parley with you at Shrike’s Crag.
The Patricide (with Lacra)
You unlock “The Patricide” ending by storming Greifberg castle with Lacra, disrupting Brencis’s ritual with dire consequences.
To unlock this ending, you’ll need to complete the full questline with Lacra, including the following:
- A Friend Like This
- Song of the Mountain
- Hive and Seek
- Our Rotten Roots
- The Night of Horrors (optional)
- Midnight Reckoning
The general path with Lacra enables you to embrace your vrakhir side and be evil, or you can help show your “sister” that there’s a better way.
If you want to act as Lacra’s moral compass, it’s essential (for the Uriash) that you don’t make Lacra wait too long in Rockfall. She will grow impatient and massacre the entire village if you take too long to meet her in the cave before she sets out.
That being said, you’ll have an easier time keeping the village alive if you help other Uriashi first. They don’t make it easy on you.
The Night of Horrors quest is time-consuming but will basically give you a free ultimate perk and save Lacra during your fight against Brencis (so long as you don’t betray her) and access to some other key vrakhir items.
Since Lacra is a vrakhir, you can only complete this ending at night, and while most of the best vrakhir equipment comes from her questline, you still have to invest some skill points in the Vampirism tree if you want to be effective.
The Knyazmaker (with Crake and Manumits)
You unlock “The Knyazmaker” ending by storming Greifberg Castle with Crake and the Manumits during the daytime.
To unlock this ending, you’ll need to complete the full questline with Crake and the Manumits, including the following:
- Under Watchful Eyes
- The Firebrand
- Shadows in the Woods
- Where Loyalty Lies
- What Hunts the Night
- What Moves the Dead
- Who Pulls the Strings
- Rise at Dawn
This is the only ending where time progresses after you pass the point of no return, though you have to start it during the day, and not enough time passes to where he’ll execute your family midway through the quest (7 hours progress in total).
You can choose to protect Catalin Skender in the throne room, but the Skenders prove to be just as much of a blight on the valley as Brencis ever was. Brencis will attack Crake there as well if you chose not to spare the soldiers back at Eastridge Outpost.
Many Manumits will die along the way and Vale Sangora won’t really be in a better position if you choose to aid their rebellion.
Together Forever (at Aurelius’s Tower)
There’s a nightmare trap waiting for you at the top of Aurelius’s Tower in The Silts of Xanthe’s Fiefdom. If you repeat the nightmare 4 times by fighting the gargoyle at the end instead of going down the well, you’ll experience the “Together Forever” ending.
It does get progressively more difficult with each cycle. Each time it gets later in the day, and you partially turn into your vrakhir form. You lose access to your healing consumables and both Witchcraft and Vampirism abilities, so only the Swordsmastery abilities work.
A Hero They Deserve (Depart Vale Sangora)
While Brencis has closed the 3 gates leading out of Vale Sangora, you can just use Shadow Step at night to scale the walls with ease and trigger the “A Hero They Deserve” ending, where you just leave everybody in the valley behind.
It’s not a serious ending, but I expect the devs will still support it for future Dawnwalker games. Lunka’s fate seems completely unavoidable. Given that the Arbiters eventually manage to clean things up, you’ll likely be reunited with her at some point early in the next game.
Abandoning your family isn’t the worst decision either. Lunka’s Murohnic fate is sealed, so Yanna and Mirto are the only major casualties, though far more will die if you choose to get involved in the future of Vale Sangora.
It’s painful to say, but Esme, your mother, is a great burden to her entire family and requires the kind of care that won’t start to become available for another half-millennium.
Based on what Volk tells you, Pieter, your father, deserves the noose for his crimes. I don’t know about you, but gruesomely murdering a bunch of people just to turn the money into funding a library and scriptorium is not okay in my book.
If Pieter spent the money to take care of his family instead, maybe he and his wife could afford to dedicate more time to taking care of their children instead of being unable to supervise Alin and Coen going ice skating in the spring.
If Alin lived, Esme wouldn’t have gotten lost in her own head, and Yanna and Mirto wouldn’t be weighed down by secondhand trauma. They’d be more free to be their own people, just like Coen.
This is all completely beside the fact that they’re all mortal, something that the other vrakhiri keep trying to hammer into you.
Implications and the “Ideal” Ending
Your perspective may differ, but I believe the ideal ending involves making a deal with Brencis to get your family back, receive a full pardon, and exempt the people of Laslea Glen from the blood tax.
You can’t know until you see an ending once, but the Augurs do eventually dispatch an Arbiter, Neberu, to depose Brencis.
The valley is spared from being ravaged by the Black Death and experiences a far greater quality of life under Brencis’s rule than they would under Catalin Skender or with a power vacuum. The 15th century just isn’t a great time to be alive anywhere.
Dispatching his Boyars is pretty hard to avoid, and Xanthe and Bakir definitely need to go. Ambrus is drunk with power, but he’s not a raving lunatic like the other two.
Lacra
Lacra isn’t much better than the Boyars, but at least you can keep her in check and prevent much of the carnage she would inflict.
It really doesn’t seem like disrupting the ritual ends up being worth the cost, but you never get a sufficiently detailed explanation on what Brencis was doing, so it’s hard to say for certain.
Lacra might be the only romanceable character who remains relevant in future titles, though given that there are so many opportunities for her to die, I can’t imagine she’ll be a major focus going forward, unless they continue to enable Coen to become as bloodthirsty as his brethren.
There is no good justification for sparing Xanthe, unless you already give into your hunger at will.
Anca
Anca’s questline has the smallest impact on the ending, though your actions at St. Tyna’s convent and Anca’s fate are addressed during the epilogue.
Letting Anca complete Leonica’s ritual is objectively better, as spooky as it might sound.
You can find and fight the undead nuns out in the surrounding wilderness, but they’re no more dangerous than the wolves, and they do seem to have some degree of awareness.
Anca’s second quest is worth doing. Given that you’ll be around for a very long time, it makes sense to drink from the Font of Power and forego the short-term gains you get for destroying the font (getting the Ancient Greaves) or letting a mortal drink from it instead.
It’s frustrating that you can’t drink from the font and then knock it over, so you get both the permanent buff and the fancy pants.
Completing the “Stronger than Achilles” quest with the Font of Power will result in Anca’s departure from Vale Sangora. Otherwise, she’ll remain and gain acceptance from the village. Either way seems like a happy enough ending for her.
Crake and the Manumits
Crake lands on his feet one way or another, unless you go out of your way to betray him. Most or all of the Manumits, on the other hand, are doomed if you involve them in the finale. It seems like the best thing you can do for them is to stay away.
Given how ruthless and cutthroat they can be, I’m not convinced that they’re really worth consideration in the first place. The Manumits and Skender really embody how monstrous humanity can be and that the vrakhiri are nothing more than a reflection of their inhumanity.
Vicho
Vicho can end up in the epilogue if he lives, and while the two never interact directly, he serves as a foil to Lacra. I expect the series will continue to explore the price of immortality in future games. Given that Coen doesn’t jump off a bridge, it seems wrong for him to support Vicho’s decision to step into the sunlight.
The Uriash
The Uriash will recede to the mountaintops regardless of your choices. I can’t see how they’d have a significant presence in future games. It doesn’t seem like they’re all that different from protectionist or isolationist humans, either, from a morality standpoint.
Just as there are some good eggs among them, many are willing to kill on site, even when it isn’t about protecting their village.
