Mod Content Warning: mentions of sexual assault, slavery, and suicide.

[ Download Link ]

Version used for review: 5.6.

Fade, though that is not her original name, is a fey’ri, a planetouched race of elves similar to tieflings. The fey’ri come from Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition and up and are the result of a few elite sun elf families trying to strengthen their bloodlines by sleeping with demons. Unfortunately, fey’ri usually turned out evil.

Our fey’ri companion here, however, is Chaotic Neutral. She was not always so, and harbors much regret and trauma from her past. She hasn’t truly come to terms with the things she did or what happened to her, and it shows.

Despite this, Fade is usually a plucky, playful companion who enjoys playing games, and will generally appreciate it if you play along. The majority of her banters involve joking around or discussing the past.

When she does open up — and it’ll take a while — she’ll speak much on both of your heritages. Fade admires you. You both have tainted blood, but you had a normal childhood, while she was doomed to a violent upbringing. You’re not a slave to your nature, but she feels hers calling to her at all times. She puts you on something of a pedestal, which doesn’t make for the healthiest relationship if you take a fancy to her.

As her backstory is slowly unveiled to you, you’ll see that there are some really… questionable things discussed. I won’t go into too much detail but the writer tends to linger on sexual servitude for a bit too long at some points for my taste. There are some very heavy topics at play here and they’re not always handled with grace.

One of the places this mod shines is how it allows the player to respond to Fade in conversation. You’ll be given a wealth of well written, in-depth options allowing you to characterise your feelings and past in interesting ways. The dialogue that prompts these moments, however, is often lacking.

In my opinion, the worst part of this mod as a whole is the fact that it uses descriptive parentheticals to a near excessive degree. Many mods have these, but they the original game uses such a style very sparingly, with less than five characters in BG1 using them. The only example I can think of in BG2 comes from Viconia’s romance path, in which she utters a single *chuckle*. I will maintain my position that if your dialogue is written well, then you can express actions through words, rather than outright telling the player what that character is doing.

Your first meeting with Fade doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence. “(… her eyes are as red as her hair, and to your surprise, you see she has a tail…)” feels like something straight out of a D&D fanfiction — which, to be fair, is somewhat accurate, except instead of being a standalone work, this is intended to be injected into the source material.

Fade has some strong beliefs and she won’t be afraid to interject in conversations if she has an opinion on something. She interjects at about the same rate as Jaheira, which I can appreciate. On the other hand, I often don’t appreciate what she has to say.

Speaking of vanilla companions, Fade is supposed to banter with all companions. However, I could only get romance conflicts and a total of four conversations with Imoen and Neera. The characterisation of the vanilla NPCs has been done very well done.

Across the entirety of SoA and ToB, I counted two spelling errors, one in each portion of the game. Overall, there’s some really, really good stuff here. There’s also some really, really bad stuff. The negatives overshadow the positives a lot of the time, and at the end of the day I can’t help but feel that Fade’s writing just doesn’t fit in as well as it could do.

Fade will romance men of any race and alignment. Her romance leans into the aspects of her character that I’m really not a fan of. The ‘exotic sex appeal of the playful hot demon elf’ aspect. That’s not all the romance has to offer, though.

Fade comes off as quite emotionally immature. This is basically her first relationship, and she falls head over heels in love with you. She actually tells you she loves you shortly after she’s managed to exposit her entire backstory to you, which felt really quite awkward.

At one point she asks you if you’ve ever been in love before, which gives you a few neat options where you can define your sexuality one way or the other. Whatever you pick, Fade won’t be bothered by it, she’ll just be upset at the thought of you with someone else. It’s played off as a cute moment, too, which I felt slightly uncomfortable with.

The level of possessiveness and pedestalizing she displays is somewhat concerning. “I’ve never felt this way before,” “You’re so much more than I deserve,” and “I don’t like the thought of someone else having you,” are not things that I want to hear in a relationship. The worst part is that you can never call her out on it. You can try once, but she just says you’re being modest, and that you’re amazing.

I’m not saying this is necessarily bad writing, I’m just saying that this reminds me heavily of my own unhealthy relationships.

She also has a lot of hot and cold moments, similar to Viconia. Unlike Viconia, however, this is demonstrated by Fade having terrible nightmares before she suddenly gets up and attacks you while screaming. Subtle writing at its finest.

Another oversight is in the romance conflict dialogues. In Neera’s and Jaheira’s, there’s no option to say “You have every right to be upset, I’ve literally been leading on everyone, but I’m devoted to you.” It’s just “Can’t I just wait longer until I make a decision? Pretty please?”

It really just reminds me of this.

Surprisingly, in Throne of Bhaal things actually take a turn for the better. In general, the quality of the writing has improved, but Fade as a character has not. As I understand it, the project was put on hold part way through the ToB section, and then it was picked up and finished a few years later by a few other people.

I won’t go too deep into spoilers for the romance but I will say that it takes a few pointers from Aerie in ToB. Personally, I’m not a massive fan.

Fade technically has three quests. None of them are good, but they’re not terrible.

The first of the three will see an extra task added to the list of things Aran Linvail wants you to do before he sends you to Spellhold. It’s a cute quest, involving a funny character. I’d honestly really like it if it was optional. As it stands, you cannot progress the main story with Fade in your party if you don’t do it. It’s not that much of a big deal, but it does mean an extra trip back to the docks after you’ve completed it. A minor example of bad game design, plain and simple.

The next is a kidnap quest. Fade is taken from your party and all of her items are dropped. It repurposes the underdeveloped ‘guarded compound’ in the Temple district and has you rescue her from the top floor. Doing this without a thief can be a nightmare because there are a bunch of traps around, so I’d recommend picking up Jan or Nalia JUST to get your main thief back. It’s clear that this area wasn’t designed for this, and it sucks.

The third quest is near the end of Shadows of Amn where Fade is tracked down by members of her family. The evil demon family. So she kills them and repeatedly stabs their bodies post-mortem. This quest isn’t actually added to your quest log and you barely get any information on it, so you’re expected to just walk around until you find her family.

It turns out that they’re at the entrance to the Temple of Amaunator. Why? They want the rift device. Why? I have no idea. This quest feels unfinished and it’s never brought up again, despite the fact that it sees Fade literally killing her entire family.

There is also a friendship path for characters not romancing Fade, and although I didn’t do it, I can only assume that it’s better than the romance. Oh and also there’s some content in here that very nearly counts as explicitly sexual. The writers really went overtime on the smut thesaurus for this one.

When you install the mod for the Enhanced Edition, you’ll have the option to make Fade a shadowdancer rather than a regular thief, but non-EE games are stuck with thief unless you have Shadowkeeper to make her something else. I rather enjoy her as a fighter/thief, personally.

Her stat spread is a bit confused. Clearly it’s just for roleplay reasons, but gameplay-wise for a thief we’re only going to care about the first three stats. Her strength isn’t good, but that’s easily fixed with a belt of some sort. If you don’t feel like making Crom Faeyr then you’ll have more than enough strength-boosting items to spare.

Her dexterity is great, bested only by Hexxat without her cloak. But Hexxat is a baseclass thief, so Fade outshines her in every way except trapping as a Shadowdancer.

Fade’s constitution is terrible. As you can see, at level 16 she has 72 hitpoints, so she’s one critical hit away from being dead until she gets high-level abilities and can wear helmets. However, the best way to avoid certain death is to just make sure that she’s going in and out of stealth constantly. It’s a lot of micromanagement but she’s an absolute beast with a strength belt and a maximum backstab multiplier. Of course she also has shadow step to get out of immediate danger if need be — if a mage is casting horrid wilting, you can shadow step and get the hell out of there before it goes off.

At 16 intelligence she’ll be able to survive three hits from an Illithid, but other than that it’s completely irrelevant, as are her Wisdom and Charisma.

Fade gets one unique weapon and one item. The weapon can be upgraded with a gem found in her third quest. It’s the best short sword in the game, for sure (though that’s not saying much). It can be bought from the Adventurer’s Mart from Ribald’s special stock.

Fade’s default portrait, in my opinion, blends in quite well with the BG2 style NPCs and doesn’t look terrible alongside the EE style either. It’s a little simplistic compared to the art of Mike Sass, but I may be asking for too much otherwise. Make sure you go into Shadow/EEKeeper to change her small portrait to the large variation to get rid of the fuzziness she has by default.

Fade uses a soundset from Neverwinter Nights, which I don’t mind — no voice is better than a bad voice. The soundset she uses is pretty good, however it’s a little too loud compared to the other NPCs. It’s noticeable enough to get on your nerves if you play in long sessions.

The mod comes with one music track, which plays during some conversations and all romance banter. It’s a pleasant melody also taken from Neverwinter Nights, and it only adds to the experience unless you’re going to be overly distracted by it.

So, does Fade pass the proverbial vibe check?

Sometimes, yes. Her portrait, voice, and interjections are good, and those are the pieces of content you’re going to be exposed to most frequently. Her banters with the PC offer many fantastic roleplaying opportunities but handles serious topics with a strong degree of callousness.

My main problem with Fade as a mod is the use of descriptive parentheticals. Emotion that could be displayed through dialogue is instead relegated to descriptive text and it weakens the mod and the game as a whole. The near constant use of “(sigh)” really got on my nerves, too. If it was kept to individual dialogue boxes, I wouldn’t mind so much. But I believe that the first thing an NPC mod should achieve is to blend in with the original cast, and Fade – ironically enough – sticks out a bit too much for my liking.

If you’re in the market for a thief and don’t mind a little divergence from traditional dialogue formatting, or if you just want to try something different, then this mod could be for you. Ultimately I think Fade doesn’t fit in with the world of Baldur’s Gate very well, though not for a lack of trying.

I enjoyed my time with the mod viewing it from a critical lens, as I did with the first time I played it, but overall I feel like it just doesn’t fit into the world well enough to recommend to everyone.

Thanks for reading.

---