Clean Hands + Ghost + Mostly Flesh and Steel + Granny Rags

An easy way at the end of the game, to avoid getting detected by Granny Rags, and avoid killing her accidentally, without glitching things out with Time Stop. This will clear some common confusion up.

How to do it:

At the end of the game, a lot of people that try to get these three achievements, have trouble with Granny Rags either detecting them, or getting killed seemingly for no reason. They suggest convoluted ways to glitch the game through Time Stop.

What they don't understand, is that you can both get spotted by Granny Rags without actually getting spotted, and that you CAN choke her out without killing her.

First I am going to explain some basic game mechanics:

Detection, according to the Ghost achievement, is when somebody gets three lightning icons over their heads that turn red and break. At TWO lightning bolts, you will hear a loud string sound that indicates that somebody has almost detected you, which is useful if you can't see them. For instance, friendly people can detect you just fine. Granny Rags counts as friendly until she starts actually fighting you.

There's a lot of talk about how you will kill Granny Rags if you do a non-lethal takedown. Yes, this is due to poor programming, but this ONLY happens when she turns into a swarm of rats. (This is probably because she counts as killed if she turns into a swarm of rats in mission 2 due to her "suitors" stabbing her.) If Granny Rags is mortal, and you can pick her up afterwards as an unconscious body, you didn't kill her.

It's easy to do this fight once to know these two things:

First, save your game before you do anything - preferably before you even see Granny Rags.

Now sneak up behind her and steal her sewer key. She will turn around and detect you and get angry, *but she will not actually detect you*.

You have her key now, so go and free Slackjaw by pulling the lever. (I don't know if leaving him to rot and die of starvation would count as killing him, but if you help him, he'll give you a big reward afterwards, as well as the Street Conspiracy achievement.) Slackjaw will begin to fight Granny Rags, but if you just wait around, he will die from the fight, so now you have to hurry a bit.

As Granny Rags has now entered fight mode, she can detect you after she's teleported in, but she doesn't have the best of eyesight, so if you just enter stealth mode and sneak along the outer ledge of the cavern, even if it means sneaking behind her, you shouldn't get the three lightning bolts breaking.

If you were to choke her out at this point, you would kill her. The game doesn't display that you have, and the fight continues, but her turning into a swarm of rats, counts as a kill. I guess she basically kills herself in order to avoid losing the fight. Instead pass her by.

When you reach her bedchambers, you could just leave, but that would end up with Slackjaw being killed by Granny Rags, so now you have to defeat Granny Rags. You do that by disposing of her cameo, taking care to avoid Granny Rags seeing you if she happens to teleport into the room during the battle. Note that if you dispose of it before you steal her key, she will teleport in behind you as a scripted event. It is possible that this doesn't count as an actual detection either, but I haven't tried that.

Now when Granny Rags is mortal, she had lost her ability to turn into a rat swarm, so you can sneak up behind her and choke her out. (Be careful to pick up her body as you do that, in case her own rats starts chewing on her before they disappear, thereby killing her.)

The rats will disappear as the battle ends, so go talk to Slackjaw for the reward and achievement.

As you reach the end of the level and the level stats, you will see if the battle worked out, or what went wrong.

[Boaboa]

Hey this actually worked, though it was clunky as hell and I didn't know if I managed until the end. Thanks.

[Syntax3rr]

Even later to the party. I've just gone through her and can confirm that you can skip stealing her key. If you just go to burn her cameo, she'll appear behind you into some scripted dialogue where she doesn't 'detect' you. After that, she'll teleport a bit to the side in a puff of black smoke. If you hit her with a sleep bolt in a couple of seconds, she'll only get to two bolts at most and no rats to deal with.

[Halcyon]

I'm a little late to the party but I just wanted to share my strat. Simply hard save before entering the room, then eliminate Granny Rags by whatever means you want to get the achievement, then load. On your second run through the room, just snatch her key, run/blink up to her room, go through the back door and close it. She will never see you and you run no risk of her dying. You'll lose Slackjaw's reward money but by that late in the game you probably don't need it anyway.

[Caveman]

In response as to why you would avoid the granny rags quests: a mixture of curiosity as to what would happen if you didn't do the quests, and the fact that i was doing a mostly flesh and steel run, so the rewards of runes were literally useless. Found it completely by accident.

[Highly Inappropriate]

BlizzardWizard
I don't get why you wouldn't try to do all the quests in your playthrough, but that's probably an option too. ...but you would miss out.

[Caveman]

I found another way to do it, the entire scene is skipped if you don't do the granny rags questline. You instead find the key on the almost dead gang member who tells you about it, and can go through the door without even encountering her there. Either that or my game glitched, but i got the achivements anyway.

[Bree]

The issue people encounter most often with Granny Rags is: if you neutralize her in ANY way before burning her cameo, you will fail Clean Hands. You MUST destroy her cameo first before doing anything to Granny Rags. Destroying the cameo has multiple steps: you must put it in the furnace, close the furnace door, AND activate the furnace (don't forget the last step!). Once the cameo is destroyed, a chokehold or sleepdart is all that is needed. Sleep dart is significantly easier due to Granny's teleporting, especially if you are also doing Mostly Flesh And Steel.

[Cthylla]

i followed this guide exactly, and confirmed this trick works. thank you for this guide!

some notes:
i suggest that don't free slackjaw just after you stole granny's key. burn the cameo and choke granny first, then pull that lever. granny can't see you at all if you follow this guide, so it's you or slackjaw whom granny actually fights doesn't really matter.
if you free slackjaw first, one of these may happen: 1) granny killed slackjaw even you act very fast; 2) granny turned into a swarm of rats in fight; 3) slackjaw killed granny just after you burn her cameo. even you managed to avoid these after some tries, this game has a glitch which probably prevents you from finishing slackjaw's side mission. you just got stuck when it told you to defeat granny after you already choked her.

[TerraDOOM]

nice, i think i made it anyways, somehow, but otherwise cool guide