Originally I bought Grim Dawn + Ashes of Malmouth, leveled up, got Forgotten Gods from Steam, it didn’t seem worth it so I returned it. Now I am back with Ashes of Malmouth and no character.
I think I have the character file in \Documents\My Games\Grim Dawn\save\main\_Character, but it is not visible in the game.
Why can’t I continue playing from what I already had?
i had this problem and to disable cloud saving in the options of grim dawns main menu.
if you do see the character files in that directory this would make sense.
I have tried with and without cloud saving, it doesn’t see the character in the game.
If you loaded your character into forgotten gods it’s a forgotten gods character now and can only be loaded with forgotten gods loaded. I have no idea if its possible to revert your characters, stash etc. back to ashes of malmouth once it’s been upgraded.
Sure could use a warning before hand.
How are the devs supposed to know you’ve refunded the expansion to give you a warning? 
How am I supposed to know that I wont be able to play my character? I tried to do the right thing and buy the game instead of using pirated one, and here we are. My mistake, I’ll learn from it.
Devs don’t have to overwrite the character completely. I only logged in, saw that I don’t have access to FG until complete the difficulty level, and logged out. How is this situation any reasonable.
Shouldn’t there be a backup of the char with two underscores ? Vanilla did something like that when you took a char into AoM.
Check if there is a second version of your char in the save dir. The regular ones are starting with one _ If you find others, backup the dir, delete the _ one and rename the other to _charname
It is fairly common for expansions to ‘break’ compatibility but regardless you should be able to head into Forgotten gods play as soon as you finish Krieg. (for refrence thats only a single quest not a full difficulty if thats what you ment).
Prob a bit late now but if you were still interested in playing FG content thats one way to get your charas back if they had already made it that far.
Yes, there is a character folder with two underscores and with one, I thought that it is the back up for the expansion and it will load the character according to DLC I have, it is not the case.
Try renaming the __ to _ and use that one, does that work ?
This is incorrect; Forgotten Gods can be accessed after you kill Warden Krieg at the end of Act 1 of the base game on any difficulty. Ashes of Malmouth can’t be accessed until you kill the final boss at the end of Act 4 of the base game in any difficulty.