Power Word Ruin in Baldur’s Gate 3: How to Cast the Cut 9th Level Spell

Baldur’s Gate 3 keeps a small pile of god-tier magic locked away from players. One of those spells, Power Word Ruin, was built for the epilogue in which Gale ascends to godhood, and it was finished to a shippable standard — tuned numbers, voice lines, and localisation included. A PC mod now hands that spell to your party in normal play.

Quick answer: Power Word Ruin cannot be cast in an unmodded playthrough. On PC, install the mod that adds it and you get a Power Word Ruin scroll any character can read; to learn the spell permanently, you also need a mod that raises the level cap to 20.

How to get Power Word Ruin on PC

Download and install the Power Word Ruin mod by JThug from its Nexus Mods page. Load it through your usual mod manager and launch the game as normal.

Check your inventory for the Power Word Ruin scroll the mod grants. Any character can use it, exactly like every other scroll in the game, so a Fighter or a Rogue can fire it off just as easily as a Wizard.

A glowing sword ability highlighted on the action bar during combat in Baldur's Gate 3 — Scrolls and abilities are cast straight from the action bar at the bottom of the screen. Image: Larian Studios

If you want the spell on your character sheet rather than as a one-shot scroll, add a mod that pushes the level cap to 20. Without it, no character in the game is high enough level to hold a 9th level spell.

Power Word Ruin damage and casting details

The spell fires three separate beams of magic. Add the beams together and the tooltip works out to 30d6 + 120 force damage, which lands somewhere between 150 and 300 on a single cast — enough to delete almost anything the campaign puts in front of you.

Property	Detail
Spell level	9th
Damage	30d6 + 120 force (150–300 total)
Effect	Three beams of magic
Internal ID	Projectile_EPI_Disintegrate_GaleGod
Access without mods	God-Gale epilogue only
Platform	PC

Astarion under the Polymorphed status, transformed into a winged creature during the Fugitive Nightwalker fight — A Fugitive Nightwalker encounter with the Polymorphed status active on a party member. Image: Larian Studios

Why the spell may not show up or be learnable

There are only two things that usually go wrong here, and both are level-related rather than mod-related.

You are trying to learn the spell in a vanilla-capped save. The base game tops out at 6th level spells, so every character is underlevelled for a 9th level slot.
You are on console. The mod has not been ported, so the spell is not obtainable there.

You know the setup worked when the scroll is sitting in your inventory and can be dragged to the hotbar like any other scroll, or, with a level 20 mod running, when Power Word Ruin appears in your character’s prepared spell list.

Where Power Word Ruin comes from in the base game

The spell already ships inside Baldur’s Gate 3 under the identifier Projectile_EPI_Disintegrate_GaleGod. It was written for the ending in which Gale ascends and becomes a god, which is why it exists in a fully voiced and localised state despite never being handed to a player character in ordinary combat. Because the asset is complete, the mod’s job is essentially plumbing — it puts an existing spell into a list the player can reach.

Gale standing before Mystra in a cutscene tied to the godhood storyline — Power Word Ruin was written for the storyline in which Gale ascends to godhood. Image: Larian Studios

Note: powerful NPC-only magic like this is normally kept out of the player’s hands entirely, so nothing about the spell is balanced around a standard party.

Console availability

The mod is PC-only for now. PC mods generally take a while to clear console approval, so a port is possible but not confirmed, and there is no announced date for one.

Power Word Kill: the closest unmodded option

If you want something in this family without touching mods, the only real route is a Dark Urge run in which you embrace Bhaal. That grants a single cast of Power Word Kill, which instantly kills most targets — but only if the target is sitting at 100HP or below. Anything with a bigger health pool shrugs it off, which is precisely the gap Power Word Ruin fills.

A Baldur's Gate 3 encounter mid-combat with spell effects on screen

Dropping a 300-damage nuke into a level-appropriate encounter is not a subtle change, and it is worth keeping to a separate save if you care about the campaign’s normal difficulty curve. Used as a novelty, though, it is one of the cleanest ways to see finished work that the game otherwise reserves for a single ending.