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Mask of the Betrayer Is The Best Dungeons & Dragons Game You've Never Played

The following contains full spoilers for Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer.

Scene I: The town of Mulsantir, a warm bastion of safety in the cold, unforgiving Rashemen winter. The SPIRIT-EATER, a young human, sits on a stone wall. Beside her, stands an angel, KAELYN THE DOVE, rendered as if from a monochrome film, her entire body shades of black and white. KAELYN: Have I told you of the First Crusade, the war of Akachi against the Wall of the Faithless? He was a faithful adherent of Myrkul - Lord of the Dead those many centuries ago, before the rise of Kelemvor. SPIRIT-EATER: He was a follower of Myrkul? KAELYN: Yes, one of Myrkul’s chosen ones, in fact. He dispensed justice in Myrkul’s name and hunted the enemies of his god across the planes. But when one he loved fell victim to Myrkul’s laws, he appealed to his god...and was rebuked. SPIRIT-EATER: Laws? What laws? KAELYN: The one who loved Akachi - she did not worship the gods, any god, let alone the god of her beloved, Myrkul. There is a punishment for ones who carry such beliefs. No matter how virtuous their lives, those who do not believe in the gods will suffer upon the Wall of the Faithless - until their souls are no more. SPIRIT-EATER: That seems unjust. KAELYN: Yes. Yes, it is.

—-------------------

Neverwinter Nights 2 was the Baldur’s Gate 3 of its day, a meticulously faithful interpretation of Dungeons and Dragons’ contemporary ruleset that took players - and their friends, if they so wished - on a hundred-hour romp around one of the Sword Coast's preeminent cities. Like its younger sibling, it blends a fairly self-serious plot with a lot irreverent and tongue-in-cheek character writing that aims to emulate the feeling of riffing on an adventure module with your friends. They even both have a tiefling girl and an angry gith lady!

The difference, of course, is that one was an unprecedented blockbuster the likes of which the genre has scarcely seen, and the other is Neverwinter Nights 2.

It was, quite simply, the wrong game at the wrong time. BG3 delivers, for good or ill, the definitive D&D experience of its day - a day after Critical Role's actual play explosion, after Stranger Things brought the game back to a mainstream consciousness, after a Chris Pine-fronted feature film, and after the pandemic getting everyone inside and bugging their nerdiest collective friend to run a campaign for them. By contrast, Neverwinter Nights 2 is the definitive D&D experience of 2006 - the D&D of 3.5 and the Jeremy Irons movie, slow, staid, wildly overcomplicated, and almost unbelievably dorky. As similar as the games' overriding philosophies may be, none of NWN2's cast of virginal doofuses have a hope in hell of inspiring an ounce of the passion BG3's cast has done in its fans.

Why BG3 succeeded where NWN2 failed is obvious. What is less obvious, perhaps, is some of the things that BG3 lost in the time between 2006 and 2023. Or maybe it's not that it lost anything, so much as it gained 500 more staff members, and a budget in excess of any CRPG before or since. It bears the fruits of that - lavish graphics, award-winning voice acting and a development schedule of the best part of a decade, but also the scars of it. Wizards of the Coast's meticulous brand management has seemingly ended the creative relationship between them and developers Larian on less-than-ideal terms, with Wizards looking elsewhere for their next megahit, and leaving the game - despite patching the game for 2 whole years - in a similarly rough spot that the Divinity: Original Sin games were prior to their Enhanced Edition re-releases, with a lopsided and underdeveloped final act that players often struggle to get through. There was simply too much money involved for it to ever go any other way.

Neverwinter Nights 2, however, also got to address criticisms towards it through continual development of its multiplayer modes, but more siginifcantly through a scaled-down follow-up by a small team in a short timeframe, with a level of creative freedom from brand oversight unthinkable for the modern Wizards of the Coast. But back in 2007, something like this could still be made. Mask of the Betrayer was still possible.

Mask of the Betrayer is everything that Neverwinter Nights 2 isn't, zigging where it zagged, and, as a result, singing where it sagged. In seeking its goal of being "the definitive D&D experience", NWN2 made the common mistake of presuming that Dungeons & Dragons was a self-justifying, almost platonically good work, and therefore revelled in its cliches in the assumption that the motions of D&D were inherently worthwhile, and would remain so for 100 hours worth of gameplay. Mask of the Betrayer has no such illusions - it is ambitious, inventive, thematically rich, and does it all in around 20 hours.

There's a degree of irony in it, that the aggressively traditional Neverwinter Nights 2 represented a break from the Black Isle/Obsidian house style, a conscious attempt to Do A Normal One, For Once, and that the more inventive Mask of the Betrayer is more recognisably in thematic conversation with their prior work. But then, these things are rarely neat.

At the beginning of the expansion, the player has been spirited far away from the Sword Coast - and the Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies ending of the base Neverwinter Nights 2 content - and into the land of Rashemen, a fantastical steppe culture inspired by Russia and Eastern Europe (and being about as caricaturish as any of D&D's best efforts to represent other cultures). There, your character soon finds themselves afflicted with the Spirit-Eater curse, condmened to gorge themselves on the dreams and souls of the land of Rashemen until their hunger turns inwards...unless you can find a cure.

It's not the only curse, though - it's unfortunate that one of the major selling points of Mask of the Betrayer, that it takes your NWN2 character through the epic levels of 3.5E D&D with all new spells and feats, is also something that renders it profoundly inaccessible to new players. Getting up to speed on the narrative context is surmountable, especially given that MotB has very little relation to NWN2's plot. The greater hurdle is mechanical: this game simply expects you to know how to build and play an effective 3.5E character through some pretty challening encounters, with only your initial wizard companion as support, and that's just a bigger and bigger ask the further we drift from 2007.

Look, I don't think D&D is a particularly good tabletop game but it makes for an even worse video game, exposing all the flaws and frustrations that a DM at the table will paper over and bridge with their own interpretations and creativity. It's no coincidence that my favourite D&D game is one that simplifies the rules to the point of near-irrelvancy - Planescape: Torment, for what it's worth. 3rd Edition in particular has a level of complexity that is at once deeply expressive but clashes terribly with the inflexible digital DM of a video game, making it very easy for you to spend a huge amount of time building a character that seems cool, only to discover that they are practically useless, and that the critical errors you made that rendered your character unsalvageable occurred hours beforehand, without you even realizing it.

D&D is, to me, something of a straitjacket, that constrains otherwise remarkable games and narratives within a framework that renders them slower, more lumbering, pounderous and inaccessible than they would otherwise be. I'd love to be able recommend this game to people, but faced with the choice of either telling people to go through the slog that is the original campaign, or to do some extensive reading on 3.5 builds and rules, I find myself struggling to do so.

It is also buggy. Even now, crucial quests can break, rendering them uncompletable. On my most recent playthrough, I had to use a console command to skip over a quest objective that wouldn’t fire correctly, and if I hadn’t, the true ending of the game would have been denied to me. But that almost seems like small potatoes to the way the game constantly feels like it is barely holding itself together. Cutscenes occur without any acknowledgement of the relative statuses of the participants, which may mean that a crucial camera angle is obscured by your Enlarge Person’d companion standing in the way. Sometimes the camera will aim at nowhere at all, the actual speaking character having wandered off, or another character will wander in front of the character and block it, as below.

It makes you appreciate the basic competency on display in Bioware consistently getting staid shot/reverse-shot scenes to work - NWN2 feels like a play without a director, where everyone knows their lines but doesn’t know where to stand or what to wear.

And I love it. I really do.

There is a kind of...honesty to this technical fumbling of the game that I think rings profoundly true, both to the experience of running a tabletop role-playing game the kind of which Mask of the Betrayer is based on, and to the human effort behind the production of art. At a point in time where it feels like the entire medium has narrowed into remakes of past classics to paper over their perceived deficiencies, there is something so special about how utterly shambolic Mask of the Betrayer can be. I've read people make similar arguments as to the infamous bugginess of Bethesda games, but I've never quite connected with those on this level, because Mask of the Betrayer's ambitions feel deeply sympathetic, in comparison with Bethesda's proc-gen Chat GPT-driven vision of the future. Mask of the Betrayer feels like art made by people, people who made the prior bloated, unambitious mess, now maturing, stretching their creative muscles to reach ambitions that remain outside of their grasp, and being all the more admirable for their straining effort.

There’s a moment partway through the game, when walking through dreams, where you encounter a character reflecting on a time when the fairly non-descript grey Electron Engine room he stands in now was filled with an enormous army beyond human imagination.

—-------------------

Scene II: In the Death God’s Vault, before a black and gnarled gate that stretches to the ceiling. The Red Wizard Araman stands before the black gate. Enter the Spirit-Eater and Gannayev. GANNAYEV: That black portal before us...it is not something native to our world, or even the realm of dreams. ARAMAN: It began here. I stood at the Betrayer’s side - at my brother’s side. They were gathered around us...celestials, dragons, mortals both alive and dead. ARAMAN: Did the room expand to hold such a host? Or is my memory too small?

—-------------------

When someone in the theatre wears the mask of a dragon, none of us think that the actor has literally transformed into a dragon. The transformation is metaphorical, symbolic. But to be a good audience to a good play is to be captured by the willing illusion that they portray a dragon, we understand what they signify, what they symbolise, what they struggle to become even if truly turning into a dragon for the role is impossible. The scenery upon the stage is not meant to look exactly as a forest would look, but is a suggestion directed towards the audience to allow their imagination to grow to fill the empty space left by the props. I find it deeply rewarding to treat games like this the same, to meet them halfway when the actors on the stage do their best to convince me that I’m storming the gates of heaven itself with what little they have.

It's no coincidence that the player's home base in this adventure is a theatre: Mask of the Betrayer's vision of the role-playing game is rooted far more in the stage than the silver screen, and I think it might have had the right idea all along. In the moments where the game's ideas, like the Betrayer’s Host and that small room, are too big to fit within its narrow walls, and rather than chide it for its ambition, I cannot help but find the beauty in it, I cannot help but move to reach it halfway, even in the moments where the efforts are futile. A modern big-budget game could surely convey an army such as this in 4K fidelity, but would it be better off for it? When I look at contemporary games with their enforced AI upscaling in the graphics options, of their overwhelmingly huge budgets, and the massive layoffs that inevitably follow in their wake, the answer to that feels clear. There is something wonderful in a game battling against its circumstances to create something ambitious with what it has, even if it might fail to convey such a thing. A fight is still worth fighting, even if victory is far from certain.

Maybe that’s the only time it really means anything at all.

—-------------------

Scene III: A stone maze, beneath the sea. An old woman lies dead. GANNAYEV kneels beside her, silent. Behind him, near the wall, KAELYN THE DOVE and THE SPIRIT-EATER sit. KAELYN: Doomguides are priests of Kelemvor. They comfort the dying, and struggle to bring peace to creatures that have been denied death by necromancy or other means. We are intended to bring peace to the dying and to the dead. We teach it is not something to be feared, but simply a natural ending to life. SPIRIT-EATER: What happened? KAELYN: It is...difficult to express, but I will try. Once, I was one of the priesthood of Kelemvor, God of the Dead. I walked the planes alleviating the suffering of others. But… She pauses, and breathes. Something she has scarcely ever done. KAELYN: To face those same spirits, to soothe them and comfort them, only to know that they are bound for a place that torments them…it is not something I understand. SPIRIT-EATER: What do you mean? KAELYN: In Kelemvor’s faith, they teach that death is not something to be feared, that it is part of the natural cycle. But that is not true! If one does not worship the gods, then there is much to fear - and no prospects of peace in the afterlife. SPIRIT-EATER: I don’t understand. KAELYN: To comfort a dying child...knowing it is destined to scream eternally in an ever-living wall...a midwife of the Planes who has never heard of such a thing as gods, an entire plane of seawives who farm the sea and seed the oceans to bring about life...to know that they are bound to become stones in the wall of a faithless citadel, crushed together by dogma and ritual that has never once been reflected upon. That never once has been examined for what it is. SPIRIT-EATER: You’re speaking of the Wall of the Faithless.

—-------------------

If MotB’s digital actors sometimes fail to find their mark, they never fail when it comes to delivering their lines. Mask of the Betrayer's cast may be small for an RPG like this, their arcs brisker, but they remain wonderfully well-rendered, with what dialogue they have being rich with character and resonance with the narrative. It's fascinating watching the Red Wizard Safiya's curiosity and enthusiasm for education interact with her imperialistic attitudes in the space of a few lines of dialogue, and moving seeing the shame that drives the haughty bear god Okku's actions, even when he only rarely chimes in with something to say on a quest.

The density of the game's structure benefits from this. MotB's script and design are densely woven into each other such that each is talking to the other at all times. The most obvious of these is in the Spirit-Eater mechanics, where the experiences of the varying Spirit-Eaters before you are represented in the possibility space offered by the ever-decreasing Hunger meter and the prizes it dangles in front of you for indulging in it, but every part of the game is doing this. The puzzles of Safiya's Thaymount academy segment might be fiddly enough that you won't notice, but that entire part of the game is doing so much work to explain much of the mysteries of the game's plot, Safiya's character and how she came to be how she is, and other characters besides.

The writing of the game, as a whole, feels like the perfect maturation of the early Obsidian style, before it would descend into unintentional self-parody. MotB's dialogue leans far more towards the baroque than the naturalistic, but not only does it fit remarkably well in this fantastical setting with larger-than-life characters, but it is treated with a whole-hearted earnestness that Obsidian rarely indulged in, something enlived by the game's theatrical flourishes in presentation and theme. It largely lacks the self-aware fourth-wall leaning self-criticism that infused Planescape: Torment and Knights of the Old Republic 2, perhaps recognizing the limits of that approach coming at the point when the latter had characters directly explain the sinister implications of it's game mechanics to you. That cynicism isn't gone, but it is diffused throughout the whole of the narrative, the structural and metatextual themes coming through when one takes a step back and looks at the whole, rather than in lectures that can fall flat.

For a studio that had made its reputation on games that were as ambitious as they were messy, there is a coherence and confidence in Mask of the Betrayer that is exceptional to this day. I don't know if I'd say with confidence that it is the best script ever written for a CRPG like this, but it is certainly one of the tightest and densest, and if those are things you value, then you might very well feel that it is among the very best the genre has to offer.

Particular praise must be given to the cast. MotB’s voice acting is extremely good, with subdued, nuanced performances that infuse a script with a lot to get through in a comparative short amount of time with a huge degree of subtle characterization. Gannayev-of-Dreams, a beautiful hagspawn who walks the dreams of beautiful ladies throughout the land (apparently he would have walked through the dreams of beautiful men too, but that was one of the few instances where Wizards of the Coast put their foot down on this game, hilariously) and flirts relentlessly, could so easily be an utter bore of a character, but his performance walks the delicate balance act of making clear his affect is indeed a fragile affect whilst also suffusing it with genuine charm. However, the highlight for me is undoubtedly Kaelyn the Dove, a fallen angel who joins you when your quest overlaps with her life’s mission, and her delivery is full of these deeply characterful shifts in her measured, gentle demeanor, little points that demonstrate both her insecurities and the bottomless strength of her faith. There’s still ham aplenty to be found, with big performances from big, high-concept characters such as a coven of witches suspended together in a collective dream or the corpse of a dead god drifting through an astral plane, spitting venom through his decaying skeletal teeth. But it is Kaelyn that carries the heart of the game in her hands, along with her own.

—-------------------

Scene IV: A library in a stone temple, underground. Books are scattered, left open on pages that have become strung through with cobwebs. Bat-winged homuncili flitter around the SPIRIT-EATER, SAFIYA, GANNAYEV-OF-DREAMS, and KAELYN THE DOVE. An old woman in red robes walks towards them, her steps heavy with the hesitation of one who has found something they have been looking for, for as long as they can remember. DANTE: Hessa...Jassim...shoo! Give me a moment...to gaze upon... She reaches towards the SPIRIT-EATER, and gently strokes her cheek, her hand trembling with an ache bubbling to the surface of her body. DANTE: My Akachi...how our faces have changed. I've seen hags that are comelier than the prune that I've become. And you...you wear the skin of a lady. What a pair we are, my love. Her hand falls away. DANTE: I must be hideous to you...to him. If Akachi was not...the thing that he is...he would turn away from me with loathing. SPIRIT-EATER: What do such things matter, in the face of love? We are more than these trappings of flesh that we wear. GANNAYEV: That is a sentiment I have rarely heard echoed, but I agree with wholeheartedly. How much of such dreams and hopes are left unsaid between others? And how many could be saved - or healed - by such knowledge? If I am ever to love, I will speak of it. This is my promise, the first vow I have ever made. DANTE: Hmph. We have both worn faces aplenty, my beloved and I...but I am not Araman, to play myself false. My Akachi is gone. Little remains of him but a mindless hunger, seething beneath your flesh. DANTE: And the fault is mine.

—-------------------

Fitting for such a briskly-paced adventure, it isn't long before the full scope of the player's predicament becomes clear. What began as a personal ailment forcing to you prey upon the people of the steppe soon becomes a curse woven by a dead god to ensure his eternal continuance, that can only be broken by storming the gates of heaven itself, as has been done in the Betrayer's Crusade and the Second Crusade before you. Mask of the Betrayer and tear your soul from the Wall of the Faithless: hell for those who do not worship a god in the Forgotten Realms.

On paper, this sounds like a nightmarish “atheists are the true oppressed minority” treatise waiting to happen, in practice, it is much more about christian evangelism, in the violence justified by the moral primacy to believe. It's an element of the game I can only defend with the admittance that my experiences as Northern Irish person undoubtedly color my relationship with any story about religious violence. I am sympathetic to its beliefs, but I do think the game absolutely makes it work, by investing so much, and so earnestly, in faith.

Mask of the Betrayer is a thematically dense game, but faith is what it comes back to, time and time again. Faith in the ones we love, faith in promises, in the promise of love and devotion, the act of belief against certainty, against reason, and being moved by that belief to act, no matter how impossible it might be. Gann's arc is about him finding things that he can invest himself in and believe in, even as he rejects the gods on a philosophical level. Okku is driven by his faith that you are the one who will finally end the curse, and in so doing, free him from a debt he owes that has nearly destroyed his people. Safiya is swept along in the tide of her past self's all-consuming devotion to her lost love.

More than anything else though, Kaelyn is what keeps this game from becoming the reddit atheist nightmare that it so easily could have been, given when it was made. The most passionate, righteous member of the party is also the one most driven by faith, most given strength by it. Even as she condemns the injustices of her previous god Kelemvor and his Wall, there is a longing in her voice when she speaks of her time as one of his doomguides, the clear love she has for that work. She binds the flesh of the game together with knots so tight I could not imagine them broken. And when she speaks with a conviction that never wavers even as her confidence in herself does that this inustice in the world must not be...I cannot help but find myself believing it. I cannot help but find her voice echoing in my own. Despite being added to the game late into development, it feels impossible to imagine the game without her. She is not just my favourite character in this game, she is one of my favourite characters in any RPG. And she accomplishes it all in a fraction of the time afforded to many others.

Mask of the Betrayer's incredible leanness is both one of its greatest strengths, but it was also something I was surprised to find myself struggling with on my most recent playthrough. This is a CRPG that takes you on a journey of epic scale and personal scope, full of creative and unique ideas in a compelling setting, with a cast of well-rounded characters that each have their own arcs, all in around 20 hours. That, in and of itself, is remarkable, a vision of a world where RPGs don’t have to be tedious 100-hour exercises of squeezing blood from a stone, and to accomplish that without ever feeling slight or underwritten is an incredible achievement. Equally, however, everything carved away is something lost, and I find that in the process of making such a tight and cohesive game, Mask of the Betrayer lacks a certain something that I find deeply arresting in its spiritual forebears.

In Knights of the Old Republic 2, one of the main characters clearly dies, but the scene depicting this was never finished. Without it, he is simply there one moment, and gone the next: a character even remarks on his absence. This lack of a dramatic death scene creates a tangible, physical wound in the fabric of the game - of the story - that is never healed. It is profoundly sad and moving in a way that I was completely unprepared for when I reached the point of the game where this doesn’t happen. Someone that I cared about is gone, and I wasn’t even there to see them go: all I can feel is the echo left in their wake. It is a moment of transcendent beauty that was completely unintentional and all the more beautiful for that.

There’s nothing like this in Mask of the Betrayer. There’s cut content, to be sure, and if you’ve ever tinkered with the NWN2 Level Editor, you’ll be able to see the seams and flags that keep the wheels of this journey turning, a marionette show where the strings never quite manage to fade away. But there are no gaps, precious little left unsaid in the narrative. Every question is answered in ways that always lead back to the main quest, every loose end eventually winds its way back into the central mystery and narrative, every character arc linked to your own, walking in the wake of your own footsteps.

Planescape: Torment feels like trailing ellipses, full of tragedies and sorrows in the countless lives of the Nameless One, and Knights of the Old Republic 2 feels like a sentence cut short, the fullness of what might have been said vanishing in a puff of smoke as intoxicating as the words themselves. Mask of the Betrayer is as conclusive as a full-stop: everything is said that can be, every conclusion is reached. By any reasonable standard this is something to be celebrated, but I find that as I get older, I find that I am drawn to the absences, empty spaces that my heart can expand to fill. And there just isn’t much of that in Mask. Its absolute conclusions and resolutions feel like a wall around it that contain its meaning. There's so much to admire in there, it fills in its own gaps beautifully, shades all the edges, but in doing so, says “this far, and no farther”.

Which is, perhaps, appropriate.

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Scene V: The skeletal corpse of the dead YALDABAOTH, drifting through the Astral Plane. Enter SPIRIT-EATER, SAFIYA, GANNAYEV-OF-DREAMS, OKKU THE BEAR GOD, and KAELYN THE DOVE, walking across YALDABOATH’s ageless bones to whisper in his ear. YALDABAOTH: Ahh… what is this…? Are you a dream? A fantasy? A recollection, spawned of my own dead mind? Yes, you are that, but you are more, too. I know you, spirit-eater. You are an irony that walks...two fates bound together, both severed and incomplete. And you have brought others...castoffs...discarded souls, such as this priestess. She is of the higher planes...tinged with Kelemvor’s blind philosophy, salted with the wretched tears of Illmater’s pity. Are you here because Ilmater has now done as Kelemvor did? KAELYN: Illmater forsakes no one, Myrkul. Even ones who commit such atrocities as building the Wall of the Faithless and making vessels to feed its strength. YALDABAOTH: Illmater may take pity on you, little bird, but Kelemvor severed you like a gangrenous hand. He smelled the death of faith upon you - with all his “pragmatism,” he can be crueler than I...but he will not rule the dead better for it, I think. KAELYN: He rules the dead now, Myrkul. One could even say he rules dead gods as they drift in this empty place. YALDABOATH: Perhaps. It is an amusing notion. But your life embodies an irony of Kelemvor as well. SPIRIT-EATER: And what irony do you speak of? KAELYN: He does not know what he speaks of. YALDABAOTH: Do I not? You sought to console the dying, soothe their pain and doubt. Then the true pain came when you discovered where you were guiding them. Ahh, “doomguides”...an...apt name. What matters in healing their pain if the true agony is to come? That is what awaits them on my Wall. KAELYN: It is only a structure. It will not survive time and faith. It will not survive me. The Wall will be destroyed. YALDABAOTH: You would have an easier time dismantling Mount Celestia stone by stone. Ritual and circumstance are not easily undone, little bird, and they are rarely accomplished by peace. Will you lead the living to slaughter and die for those already lost? What a sacrifice for you to demand of those who blindly follow you.

—-------------------

Mask of the Betrayer ends with the player leading the Third Crusade on the Wall of the Faithless. If you’re willing to meet the game halfway and fill in the rest of what its stagecraft is trying to evoke, it’s an incredible finale, rushed as it is. You win victory after victory in the fight for the city alongside a dragon so large she can barely fit on the screen, exposing just how low-poly her model is, a host of fallen angels, and a Lich-Lord, adorably rendered as a giant comedy skull with jewels for eyes. You finally reach the part of the Wall that contains your lost soul, before finally, the voice that has been narrating your entire journey appears before you, in the flesh, and clad in a mask blind and cold to all before Him.

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Scene VI: A stone road beside a wall of screaming souls, their bodies meshing and crunching together at twisted angles to form its jagged mortar. Before it, stands the SPIRIT-EATER, SAFIYA, GANNAYEV-OF-DREAMS, KAELYN THE DOVE, OKKU THE BEAR GOD, and URIZEN, GOD OF THE DEAD. URIZEN: Kaelyn the Dove, leader of the Second Crusade, and formerly one of my doomguides, returned. You are not welcome here, and your grandfather cannot intervene to save you a second time. Your presence is a reminder that I should not have been merciful. Kaelyn: Has anything you have done in your reign been merciful, my Lord? I think that is the question you should ask. URIZEN: Pride is not a shield from me, Kaelyn. Do not test my will in this. And you, spirit-eater. You have brought strife to my gates… ignored every warning… allied yourself to a cause whose consequences were plain before your eyes. Do you understand what you risk? Bring down the Wall, and mortals will see that they cannot be held to account for their faith. One day, mortals will put faith aside. And the gods will bring vengeance upon them all. SPIRIT-EATER: You could have stopped me long before this, but you didn’t. URIZEN: You have seen Myrkul, and heard his twisted words. Can you not guess my reason for yourself? SPIRIT-EATER: You didn’t stop me because you know Myrkul’s curse was unjust. But if you simply undid it yourself, it would scream to all the planes that a god’s judgment had been overturned… URIZEN: And from that, I am forbidden. But if a mortal undid the curse, it would mean there had always been a way to end Akachi’s suffering. Kaelyn: You play games, and the currency is the suffering of the innocent? If you have pride, at least answer for your actions! URIZEN: Even the gods are bound by laws, Kaelyn. As the heir of Akachi, you had the chance to set things right. To show the planes that some justice - however cruel it may seem - is necessary to prevent the greater evil. SPIRIT-EATER: You call it justice - I call it cowardice. You are afraid to challenge the cruelty of the wall. URIZEN: Call it what you will. No god may challenge the judgments of the dead. And your curse is no different. SPIRIT-EATER: I will tear every soul from this Wall, Kelemvor. Not just my own. URIZEN: No, you will not. I allowed you to come this far because your curse was unfairly earned. But I could cast you from this plane with a mere thought. You will wrest no souls from the Wall, except your own. Until you find a way to battle a god in his own realm, the Wall of the Faithless will stand. You are not that strong, not yet.

—-------------------

Role-playing games, with all their talk of choice and consequence are fantasies of agency, the fantasy of being able to do something, and have it be acknowledged as something that occurred, something that changed the world. Many of these games are judged by the scope of possibility they offer, their ability to make choices that reflect themselves, with absences being criticized harshly. It is, of course, an illusion: there is no agency and no freedom, everything is the consequence of something written or designed by those who made the game. But when we struggle to find agency in our own lives, it’s a nice illusion. I enjoy it a great deal, myself.

And yet, there’s something starkly beautiful in how Mask of the Betrayer denies a player their agency at this crucial moment. The entire game has been building towards this final confrontation at the Wall of the Faithless, its evil has been made utterly plain throughout the entire journey, and when we finally reach there, we are told by God that all we have accomplished has been because He allowed it, and that he will not allow us to take more than a single brick from this wall. It’s a stunning anticlimax, sucking all the air out of the room in a manner that is deeply sad. I’m always struck by the sheepish cowardice of God, his hiding behind protestations of gods being bound by rules against the flames of Kaelyn’s righteous anger. I know there are many who reach this point of the game and find it the game’s biggest flaw, that the game should have let you tear down the Wall of the Faithless. But what would that have been, than a power fantasy? A fun one, maybe, but I think I prefer it this way, so much more. There’s an honesty to it that is stark, but real in a way that this genre often shies away from. We can push against our straitjackets, but eventually, they will push back. This far, and no farther. Some things are just too big, and sometimes evil is allowed to persist. Sometimes all you can save is yourself.

Mask of the Betrayer just isn’t a game about leading a revolution, not a game about overthrowing evil and saving everything. It’s a game about being unable to do that, no matter how hard you try. About being trapped within systems, tabletop and otherwise, about memories and thoughts too large to contain in the small walls around us. It is about what it means to live within a world filled with injustices and cruelties that are beyond our individual capabilities to destroy, even if we know in their hearts that they are mortal, that they can be undone, and what is required to keep the faith that that is so, even when the air around the fire inside us grows cold and harsh. And I think it is a better game than it would have been, had the Wall been allowed to fall.

The Third Crusade on the Wall ends and everyone goes home, their part in things over. All but Kaelyn. Once more, she is what makes this game. She is the only character who never really gets a happy ending, no matter what you do. Here too, the game denies you the agency to “save” her. She remains fighting the Wall, leading attack after attack on it, achieving little victories here and there, but never bringing it down. Over time, her wings grow black with age, but she never gives up the fight, never gives up her faith. She continues the fight without you, struggling for what she knows to be right, no matter how much she loses, no matter how impossible it might be.

When I was first introduced to Mask of the Betrayer, people told me about it in terms that placed it at the end of a thematic trail that began with Planescape: Torment and wound through the stars in Knights of the Old Republic 2. For a time I resisted that comparison, but I’ve come to accept it, in spite of, and because of those differences. It feels like a maturation of the anger and bitterness of those games, solidifying itself into a kind of mature acceptance - in the difficulty of confronting the limits of agency, but the worth in pushing against them, regardless. Mask of the Betrayer might not have changed the world of RPGs, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth remembering as the remarkable, wonderful game it still is. Myrkul may have been brought back for 5th Edition and Baldur’s Gate 3, but destroying him and his curse here still matters, still has power. And even if Kaelyn’s crusades never win, her fight going on still lights a fire in my chest. After all, a fight is still worth fighting, even if victory is far from certain. Maybe that’s the only time it really means anything at all.

During lockdown, some friends of mine asked me to run a game of Dungeons and Dragons with them. By this point, I knew what I thought of 5th Edition, and Dungeons and Dragons broadly - a straitjacket around players and the tabletop scene entire, burying creativity under a mountain of bitty rules. But it was the game my friends wanted to play, the game they were excited for, and I was excited to play with them. So, we played, and we tried to tell the best story that we could within a framework that I found stifling and distasteful. So too we all have done within Walls that press in against us. Sometimes we don’t get the luxury of choice. Sometimes we just have to do what we can, when we can.

Mask of the Betrayer came into this world already a relic, an expansion to a game that, in the eyes of many, had already failed, constrained by a system that didn’t quite work, with ideas far beyond its station, with the apparent future embodied in the same year's Mass Effect, bearing down upon it. And in its struggle to do something, say something within these circumstances, it came to life. Mask of the Betrayer feels like a dream, something achingly trapped in its moment but ahead of its time, a memory from another time that never came to pass, a dream of a better world, crying out to be born. Maybe that world will be born, some day. Maybe someday, the walls will come down, and maybe they won’t. But it gives me faith. To paraphrase the Dove herself, Mask of the Betrayer may seem a symbol, but symbols, like Akachi and the First Crusade, Kaelyn and the Second, and the Spirit-Eater and the Third - such symbols lend strength to others.

It has given me strength.

—------------------- Scene VII: A log cabin, in the Rashemen woodlands. The SPIRIT-EATER and KAELYN THE DOVE sit in front of a crackling fire. KAELYN: My grandfather sought to dissuade me from my efforts with the tale of the first crusade. I do not think he understood the tale he was telling. Before then, I did not even know that there had been previous attempts to bring down the Wall. To realize that others had felt as I did gave me a new strength - new conviction. One mortal sought to cast down the wall and failed, even with an army at his back. His name was Akachi, sometimes known as the Betrayer. She smiles. KAELYN: I’m sorry. You of all people know that part. SPIRIT-EATER: It’s ok. I’m just confused why your grandfather told you about it. KAELYN: In all things, Grandfather saw process and order and ritual, and that is what he tried to teach me when he told me of the first crusade. But those are abstracts that orbit a purpose. If the purpose is flawed… what meaning do process and ritual have? SPIRIT-EATER: What did you say, then? KAELYN: Only one question remained in my mind, so I spoke it. “Why must the universe be so?” Grandfather answered, resolved, with “what is there to be done.” To him, it was a statement. To me, it was a question. It is that question that is the torch that leads my way in shadow. KAELYN: I know what must be done.

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