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Mod author: Sillara and Nethrin

Version used for review: 16.0.

The appeal of drow in Dungeons & Dragons is twofold — yes, they are cool, sexy, and edgy, but they also offer an interesting avenue in which to explore topics like gender roles, racism, cultural differences, and sexuality. Yasraena opts to disregard that and just sticks with cool, sexy, and edgy, with an extra dash of tired tropes that somehow manage to undo even those simple truths. Unfortunately, Yasraena may be the most boring drow ever written.

I would say that Yasraena, in absence of any interesting characteristics, is at least inoffensive in her pallidness, but I would be lying. Perhaps it’s simply because we live in a day and age where good Infinity Engine mods are not hard to find, but Yasraena is aggressively bad, and not even in an enjoyable way, as in the case of other mods often spoken of in the same breath.

So where do we start? The very end of the beginning is where we find Yasraena, at the precipice of exiting Irenicus’s Dungeon. Naturally, I have questions for her, but Yasraena isn’t about to answer them.

Yasraena is a chaotic good drow who left the Underdark fairly recently. You will learn very little about her through talking with her and those who know her, and the most information I could find about her backstory comes from forum posts that are twenty years old.

Supposedly, Yasraena heard that Irenicus knew something about her master, Divalir, and so she came to his dungeon. A mere few sentences later, though, she states that Irenicus captured her. This is the beginning of a trend with Yasraena’s character — her writing is perpetually in conflict with itself, and the mod never seems to be able to make its mind up about who Yasraena is. Did she come to Irenicus’s dungeon voluntarily? Isn’t it… secret? If she was then captured, what’s the story there?

Regardless, Yasraena may then join your party, and you have a new side quest — to follow the thread of Irenicus knowing something about where Yasraena’s master is. This barely counts as a side quest in my books, because it requires literally zero engagement outside of following the main story. Only when you get to the Underdark does the quest resume, and at that point it drops any connection to Irenicus. So why even include her in Irenicus’s dungeon in the first place?

This quest centers around finding Divalir. Who is Divalir? Well, Divalir is a surface elf that, for some reason that I was unable to parse from forums nor the mod itself, was disguised as a drow. He served as a master at the Melee-Magthere — the school for male melee warriors in Menzoberranzan — where he met Yasraena, who was there disguised as a man due to completely irrelevant circumstances.

Divalir served as Yasraena’s teacher, and they fell in love with one another, and for her own safety he eventually arranged to have her smuggled to the surface.

According the mod itself, Yasraena was 15 at the time she met Divalir. Drow typically live up to about 750 years, and Divalir is implied to be an incredibly experienced and respected warrior from Suldanesselar. I don’t know if this is just an interpretation of Yasraena’s age into a human equivalent, but I’m guessing he’s too old for her either way. Is this the right time to mention that this is from the same authors as Saerelith, another 15 year old girl who is completely romanceable by the player?

Yasraena has so many inconsistencies in her writing it is hard for me to even articulate it. She simultaneously doesn’t understand that Jaheira could love her husband and have that Khalid could have loved her back, but also plans on marrying Divalir. She was deliberately not raised as a woman due to her house’s status, but still believes herself to be superior to men and that they are meant to serve her. Why even give her this backstory if she’s not going to have a different perspective to any other drow?

Everything about Yasraena comes back to Divalir, and frankly, I could not give a damn about him. Yasraena carries on some of the worst tropes from Saerileth, though in smaller portions and with slightly more bearable writing. Divalir saved her life, and so of course, Yasraena must owe him everything to the point that without him, she doesn’t see a point to living.

She is so sensitive about Divalir, in fact, that should you say to his face that Yasraena is your lover, then she will attack you knowing that she will die, simply because Divalir thinks that she’s betrayed her.

Though, of course, Yasraena is not romanceable. She does have some minor flirts available via player-initiated dialogue, romance conflicts for all potential romances, the option to tell her that you’re “not interested”, the option to kiss her in a way that implies that she did not expect nor want such a thing, and a whole slew of dialogue with Divalir about how much you love her.

Would it be such a crime to just remove any semblance of romance from Yasraena’s talks with the player? Of course not, because Yasraena must be seen as an object of desire, because she is a woman and she is a drow, and she has to compete with Viconia.

The mod wants Yasraena to be a naive little girl and a mature, powerful drow like Viconia at the same time, but these aspects of herself are constantly warring with one another, resulting in a character that isn’t really a character at all, but just a bundle of poorly disguised tropes conglomerated together.

Chasing after Irenicus as Yasraena wants to do, of course, takes you to Ust Natha. This happens to be where Divalir is located, but his presence there has nothing to do with Irenicus. You’re given a short quest to free him, and then the connection is never brought up again. Yasraena has barely anything to say to Irenicus.

The conversation with Divalir also had me cracking up.

Almost instantaneously we have established that the player is supposed to be jealous of Divalir because he holds the unwavering affections of Yasraena. It’s almost the inverse scenario of Saerileth, who had a man vying for her attention while she was focused solely on the player. Now the player is to take the part of the envious man wanting after what they cannot have.

But here, with Divalir, claiming that you are Yasraena’s lover and sticking with this deception even as Yasraena herself protests it, we get possibly the strangest sequence of dialogue yet.

If you claim that you have laid with Yasraena many times to Divalir, then he will question Yasraena about it. Rather than even live in a world where Divalir doubts her, she deliberately throws her life away by attacking you in order to restore his faith in her. What this man thinks of her matters more to her than her own life. It truly is just vexing.

Once you free Divalir, he heads back to Suldanesselar, and that’s it! That’s the most involvement you’ll have in Yasraena’s story. You’ll encounter Divalir in Suldanesselar for a brief few lines, and I do like that there are variations on this — if you choose not to take Yasraena with you to the Underdark then you’ll find out that she freed him at the cost of her own life, and this can result in Divalir attacking you if you deliberately abandoned her. It’s not much, but it’s almost interesting.

Probably the most egregious thing about this mod comes in Throne of Bhaal, but only if you have Viconia in your party. Yasraena and Viconia do not get along — one is good, the other is evil, after all. Though it’s never implied that Viconia truly hates her, at least not any more than she does anyone else in the party. She naturally has plenty of barbs to throw her way, but in Throne of Bhaal, she deliberately gets Yasraena killed for little reason.

In Chapter 8, Yasraena’s old Matron Mother arrives in tow with a group of soldiers and a yochol, here to kill Yasraena. If Viconia is in the party, she encourages them to do so, to which you cannot interject. Yasraena is instantly disintegrated and you’ll never see her again. Without Viconia, you get the option to fight them and keep your companion.

The mod’s documentation does warn that having Viconia and Yasraena in the same party will have disastrous consequences, but I was expecting a confrontation between the two, not a complete and utter failure of game design.

It could be implied that the reason Viconia does this is because she’s fearful of Lolth, which tracks fairly well with her character, but it could very easily have been fixed by giving her an appropriate reaction and giving the player a chance to interject accordingly. Perhaps it could have been a good moment of character building for both Viconia and Yasraena.

But no. You are punished for deigning to have another drow in the party, when they don’t seem to be all that at odds with one another. It sucks.

The mod also makes liberal use of parenthetical descriptions in dialogue, and their quality is no better. There are some lines that, much like Yasraena herself, make little actual sense and leave me more amused about the scene occuring than illuminated.

A fun activity I like to do sometimes is to physically re-enact the actions described in some of these dialogues. Unfortunately I’m yet to find a way to make my eyes glow red, but I feel fairly ridiculous either way.

Both Yasraena and Divalir are voiced to a substantial degree, though the skill of the actors and the quality of their microphones is questionable. Yasraena’s voice didn’t make me hate her any more than I already did, though, despite the flat delivery. I’ll take what I can get, honestly.

Her portrait is also a distracting blend of artworks. The hood is clearly from Viconia’s portrait, which is made ever more obvious by the fact that Siege of Dragonspear’s Viconia portrait uses this same colour scheme. At first glance it doesn’t seem too bad, but the way that the hood is reversed in comparison to the direction her head is facing eventually began to drive me insane. With a little more editing I think it would look just fine, but the fact that the portrait for a drow companion rips off one of the most iconic parts of the only other drow companion’s portrait is… an odd choice, to say the least.

As a pure fighter with exceptional ability scores, Yasraena is a little boring. She comes with two short swords that spontaneously become upgraded to an absurd degree in Throne of Bhaal, but the descriptions of these weapons are so unclear in regards to what they do that I opted to not waste time figuring it out.

There’s a reason why there aren’t that many drow NPCs from the modding community. Viconia is such an excellent character that any drow companion is inevitably going to be compared to her, and there aren’t many that could stand up to that scrutiny. Yasraena certainly doesn’t do well. She simply feels like a generic and disrespectful downgrade, but the mod could still be worth playing if you don’t mind such a thing. Yasraena certainly has a few interesting things to say about the Underdark, albeit only if prompted. Surprisingly, she actually has exceptionally little to say in her homeland beyond her desire to rescue Divalir.

That being said, I’ve spent enough time lambasting this 20-plus year old piece of fanmade content. Let the words contained above be but a word of warning to aspiring drow writers, and for god’s sake, don’t make your character’s life entirely hinge on their love interest.

Thanks for reading.