The Blood of Dawnwalker endings and how to get each one
It took me quite a while to work out all The Blood of Dawnwalker endings. Similar to The Witcher 3, there are a fair few different options, each with a number of variables that can change based on your choices. There are also some secret endings to discover.
Obviously, this guide will contain spoilers for just about everything, you’ve been warned. Here’s each ending, how they work, plus a short explainer about the epilogue and its different outcomes.
All Blood of Dawnwalker endings
There are seven possible endings to Blood of Dawnwalker.
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- Four involve assaulting Griefberg Castle, either with allies, or by yourself.
- One involves making a deal with Brencis.
- The final two endings are secret and accomplished before the others.
Also two additional notes:
- The post-credit cutscene plays in every ending.
- Lunka’s fate is the same in every ending.
All endings, except for one of the secret ones, involve an epilogue sequence which runs through decisions you made throughout the game—and there are some big differences, but I’ll explain all of those in the epilogue section at the end if you’re curious. Side note, make sure to have 800 Denarius on hand for any ending involving the epilogue, as the church will ask for a donation and you can give your sister Yanna a dowry.
Assaulting Griefberg Castle
(Image credit: Rebel Wolves)
Four of the game’s endings begin with assaulting Griefberg Castle, and in every version, your assault changes based on a few key variables:
- If Ambrus or Bakir are still alive you’ll have to fight them as bosses during the castle assault, with Ambrus in the entrance hall and Bakir in the dungeon. Bakir will also force you to fight some of the prisoners if he’s present.
- If you killed Xanthe, you won’t face her as a boss in the throneroom, but you’ll have to complete her trap sequence, which involves additional combat and puzzling.
- If your 30 day timer has run out, your family is dead, but you will have realised that by the cutscene that plays when you run out of time. After this point, you can keep playing the game without a timer, but the absence of your family impacts aspects of the epilogue.
Below, I’ll run through each variation of the castle assault.
A Lone Wolf’s Hunt
Coen takes the fight to Brencis by himself.
Unlock conditions
- Shadow Step over the wall of Griefberg Castle at nighttime.
- Or find Father Florin’s hideout in Svartrau cathedral, track him down, and complete A Hero’s End, which unlocks the ability to enter the castle in the day using a password at a sidedoor.
This ending sees Coen assault Griefberg Castle by himself at either day or night, depending on which of the above you approach. If you do fight Ambrus, Bakir, or Xanthe, you won’t be able to drink their Vrakhir blood and gain their abilities if it’s daytime, or invite them in, and will instead just kill them.
First off, you always have to fight the Unblinking Blasphemy boss, even if you completed the Who Pulls the Strings quest for the Manumits. You battle through the castle, free some prisoners by unlocking their cells, and eventually confront Brencis in the dungeon depths, just in time to save your family.
You can either fight Brencis here, or make a deal with him if you agree to bow and give up either Crake and the Manumits, or Lacra, though if it’s the former, you’ll have to go their hideout and mark it, as in the A Deal With the Devil ending (I’ll explain that one in its dedicated section below).
If not, you’ll fight and defeat Brencis, and choose whether to invite him in, or leave him in Anachora (vampire hell) to have his soul devoured. After this, the epilogue sequence in Laslea will begin.
This is genuinely one of my favorite endings—Vale Sangora becomes independent and there’s some degree of lawlessness, but the Manumits protect the valley from the worst enterprising ruffians. You can read a proclamation on a tree in Laslea explaining that Svatrau city council plans to petition Bohemia, Hungary, or Poland to join their realms in the spring.
Since there are no more Vrakhiri, the plague returns, the Uriashi return to their villages, but Christianity also returns, the cathedral is restored, and Father Florin becomes a saint. I’m sure you’re thinking “That’s a good ending??” but just wait until I explain the others.
Rise At Dawn, Fall Before Dusk
Coen helps Crake and the Manumits restore Catalin Dragosti to power.
Unlock conditions
- Join the Manumits via The Firebrand, Shadows in the Woods, and Where Loyalty Lies, and then follow the questline until you complete Who Pulls the Strings.
In this ending, Crake explains that Catalin Dragosti (the son of Vale Sangora’s former tyrant) is waiting outside the valley with an army, and you attack Eastridge Outpost to let him in.
Unsurprisingly, Catalin Dragosti is as bloodthirsty as his father and immediately executes some defenceless prisoners, though you can save at least two of them if you object. After Rise at Dawn, you attack Griefberg Castle in Fall Before Dusk, infiltrating through the tunnels below and battling some Kobolds.
The key variations here are that you won’t save any of the prisoners, since Brencis knew you were coming. Vlad will also get a load of Manumits killed by rushing the gate if you save him in the intro, and encourage his recklessness in the Old Friends, New Friends quest where you talk to him in the Manumit hideout.
Finally, you’ll reach the throne room, where Brencis will try to murder Catalin Dragosti.
- If you let Brencis try to kill Catalin, Crake will rush forward instead and die defending him.
- If you save Catalin, both he and Crake will live.
After this, you’ll continue to the banquet hall, with or without Crake, and will fight Brencis in a room with your family tied to chairs. Unlike the A Lone Wolf’s Hunt ending, you can’t make a deal with Brencis at this point, since you can’t stop Catalin and his army. You’ll fight and defeat Brencis, invite him in, or leave him in hell, and the epilogue in Laslea will play.
(Image credit: Rebel Wolves)
This is one of the worst endings in my opinion. Catalin Dragosti undertakes a campaign of retribution against anyone he sees as having helped the Vrakhiri, burning entire districts of Svartrau and filling the castle dungeons. As you see in a note on a tree in Laslea, he also imposes a large tax and encourages people to inform on each other. The epilogue also mentions his mercenary army loots and pillages towns whenever it feels like it.
Perhaps the most heartbreaking part of this ending is it reveals who Crake really is—a toady for Catalin. Under Dragosti’s orders, he undertakes a genocide of the Uriashi, seeing them as monsters just like the Vrakhiri. The plague also returns, as does Christianity, but there is a slight silver lining in that this is the only epilogue where you can talk to Crake in Laslea.
Midnight Reckoning
Coen helps Lacra end Brencis’ sinister scheme.
Unlock conditions
- Meet Lacra during the A Friend Like This quest, which you most likely get via the note on Ambrus’s body in The Gilded Gauntlet, and then follow her questline until you unlock Midnight Reckoning.
Alongside Lacra, you enter the Griefberg Castle dungeons via the ancient ruins below and destroy Brencis’s ritual, before ascending through the castle to face Brencis himself. The key variables here are that in smashing the ritual, Lacra unleashes hell on the castle. Corpses start coming back to life, huge chunks of the castle are ripped up into the air, and the prisoners lose their minds.
When you finally reach the throne room, your family will be overgrown in the red roots (but still alive). Brencis will appear to confront you and Lacra.
- If you betray Lacra and choose your family, she’ll fight Brencis, but he’ll win and drink her blood. The outcome here is the same as the A Deal With The Devil ending (explained below).
- If you fight Brencis with Lacra, you can still save your family. I haven’t played this variant to confirm, but there’s a cutscene midfight that implies Lacra dies if you didn’t complete her optional The Night of Horrors quest and eat the Mandrake with her.
As with the other endings, you’ll defeat Brencis in Anachora, and can decide whether to invite him in, or let him be consumed by hell. However, he’ll also reveal more in this ending about his plan—that he wanted to accept and harness the curse of Anachora that all vampires harbor instead of trying to resist it.
(Image credit: Rebel Wolves)
This ending isn’t a particularly good one—as with A Lone Wolf’s Hunt, Vale Sangora becomes independent for a time, the Manumits defend it, and both Christianity and the plague return. The negative here is basically everyone in the castle dies and it remains a cursed hellscape.
Lacra also doesn’t trust you enough to tell you that this was going to happen and could’ve killed your family, which is a sad realisation about her character and goals. Lacra will appear briefly in the epilogue, but she appears in almost every epilogue provided you complete her questline. Taking this route to the ending also doesn’t change her ending in the epilogue.
A Deal With The Devil
Coen makes a deal with Brencis for the freedom of Laslea.
Unlock conditions
- Reach max level infamy (by killing Ambrus, Bakir, and Xanthe).
In this ending, you meet Brencis at Shrike’s Crag, the haunted site of a mass atrocity committed by Skender Dragosti (the valley’s former tyrant). After meeting your father, who Brencis brings, he’ll offer you a deal: He’ll return your family and the villagers, and you can live in Laslea, exempt from the blood tax, if you find and mark the Manumit hideout.
You can also choose to kill Brencis here, though spilling any blood summons the dead, and you’ll have to fight him with a million ghosts trying to get in the way. The impact of this ending would be the same as A Lone Wolf’s Hunt above. Before you can agree, your father picks the absolute worst moment to trip over and hurt himself, summoning a legion of ghosts you have to fight through with Brencis to escape.
(Image credit: Rebel Wolves)
All you have to do to complete this ending is head to the Manumit hideout and mark the door. Brencis swoops in, murders the Manumits, drags Crake out into the street, drinks his blood, and then disappears with him—not a great outcome for Crake, obviously. However, the epilogue in Laslea will play out.
This ending is obviously not great. While it’s made clear that Brencis’s regime does eventually fall thanks to the Arbiters, bad stuff happens to Lacra and Father Florin, and Brencis continues to rule with an iron fist, slowly bleeding the valley for his scheme. The upsides are that the plague doesn’t return, the Uriashi stick around, and Laslea gets to practice Christianity as an exception.
Secret endings
Leaving Vale Sangora
Coen leaves the valley to its fate.
Unlock conditions
- Reach Corruption Level 11 and unlock the second level of Shadow Dweller in the vampirism tree.
This is probably my favorite ending for Blood of Dawnwalker. You can do it anytime after the prologue provided you reach Level 11 Corruption and unlock the second level of Shadow Dweller in the vampirism skill tree, increasing the max distance of Shadow Step. Head to the Cursed Chasm in northwest Briar Sloughs, following the road that looks like it leads out of Vale Sangora.
Use the max level Shadow Step to get across the gap and follow the road to the still open pass. You’ll be given the choice to leave the valley forever or stay. That’s it. There isn’t even an epilogue (besides the post-credit cutscene), so it really is a disavowal of everything in Vale Sangora, as Coen leaves with his newfound vampirism to make a new life.
Killing Brencis in the prologue
Coen thwarts Brencis’s scheme without leaving Laslea.
Unlock conditions:
- Defeat Brencis when you fight him at the end of the prologue and then defeat Brencis, Grotesque Ascendent.
As many of you likely guessed, saw, or experienced yourself, if you manage to beat Brencis’s first stage in the prologue, you can defeat him there and end the game. I’m going to be frank—it’s not worth it. Defeating both the Brencis fights in the prologue is incredibly hard, even on the lowest difficulty, and the ending isn’t that much different from A Lone Wolf’s Hunt.
The main difference is that the epilogue is, understandably, short as hell because you didn’t do anything in the game.
The Blood of Dawnwalker’s epilogue explained
(Image credit: Rebel Wolves)
The epilogue in Laslea has a few different variables depending on the ending you chose:
- Certain characters showing up in the town.
- The characters who appear in the scene with Lunka at the end are different.
- The notices on the tree in the town square can change, but invariably address who rules Vale Sangora, whether Christianity returned, and whether you killed the Murohn in Svartrau Cathedral’s Almshouse.
Below I’ll run through the epilogue section post-Laslea, which shows you a series of tableaus you can examine. These explain the outcomes of various quests and choices you made:
Your family
- Your mother will be absent if you didn’t make Anca’s medicine correctly and she was killed in the prologue.
- Your family will be dead and absent if you don’t save them in 30 days.
- Lunka will be corrupted by Brencis—her and Coen always leave the valley at the end after meeting Neberu.
Svartrau, The Plague, and the Uriashi
- The city will either be independent and somewhat lawless, still controlled by the Vrakhiri, or burned and sacked in retribution by Catalin Skender.
- The Uriashi will either retreat to the mountain or stay.
- The plague will return or remain absent based on whether Brencis remains in power.
Anca
- If you didn’t let Anca use The Font, she disappears from Laslea in search of a different cure.
- If you did, she stays in Laslea and is accepted by the villagers.
Crake and the Manumits
- Defend the newly independent Vale Sangora from ruffians if Coen defeated Brencis himself or with Lacra.
- Kill all of the Uriashi under Catalin Skender’s orders if Coen lets the army in.
- Are dead, because Brencis killed them after Coen made a deal with him.
Lacra
- Moves on and continues her travels and adventures.
- Is killed and sent to Anachora by Brencis and his court.
- If you complete Lacra’s questline, she’ll appear in the epilogue provided Brencis isn’t in power.
Father Florin
- Is canonized and made a saint. This might only happen if you complete his A Hero’s End quest.
- Is publicly burned alive if Brencis remains in power.
St. Tyna’s Convent
- Has its curse lifted but its zombie nuns wander off into the woods.
- Remains cursed and filled with undead.
A Study in Crimson
- You found the correct killer and the Svartrau murders ceased.
- You caught the wrong culprit and they continue.
- Vicho will also appear in the epilogue looking after Lunka if you befriended him.
Hive and Seek
- You killed the Kobold hive in Lacra’s quest. I haven’t seen the other outcome, but I assume it relates to sparing them.
Xanthe and Chariklea
- This tableau only shows up if you spared Xanthe during her The Cycle of Love quest (which you get by angering her). It basically explains how Xanthe keeps murdering women to keep Chariklea alive.
