Neverwinter Nights 2 / Mask of the Betrayer

Tropes 0-F | Tropes G-L | Tropes M-R | Tropes S-Z | Mask of the Betrayer | Storm of Zehir | Mysteries of Westgate

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Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer provides examples of the following tropes:

• And I Must Scream: The Wall of the Faithless, though the souls there do eventually cease to exist - it's just that the process is lengthy and extremely painful. Turns out to be the final resting place of former Token Evil Teammate, Bishop.
• Animal Theme Naming: Kaelyn the Dove and her half-celestial siblings call themselves the Menagerie. The other members you meet are Efrem the Stag and Susah the Crow.
  • With high influence, Kaelyn may induct you into the Menagerie, after which you can add a similar moniker to your name. If you ask her what she thinks would be a good fit she suggests "the Wolf" after the telthor wolf you ate during your escape from Okku's barrow.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: More egregious here since the limit is only one below the member of followers you can accumulate in the game, and one below the limit for the latter half of the core game.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Gann's not quite happy with Anya's dream construct of him for a number of reasons.
  Gann: That Gann there, he is a fantasy you have conjured up, and he is becoming a wedge between you and the waking world, Anya. He also has terrible fashion sense, and the nose is all wrong.
• Artificial Human: Safiya.
• Badass Adorable: Kaelyn the Dove, full stop.
• Bag of Spilling: At least you keep character levels and equipped armor.
• Battle Amongst the Flames: The fight against the man-shaped fire elemental thingy in the Ashenwood, which is the source of the flames.
• Bears Are Bad News: Especially when said bear happens to be a bear god. With an army. Which includes ghost bears.
• Best Served Cold: In the evil ending, the spirit-eater uses their new, godlike powers to avenge themselves on the Githyanki who repeatedly targeted them throughout the original campaign, wiping out their cities and sparing only the children, who are handed in chains to become slaves again to their mortal enemies the mind flayers.
• Bittersweet Ending: The two non-mask endings. On the one end, you can choose to permanently bond the curse to your soul and stay in Kelemvor's domain forever, taking a romanced companion with you: you can never return home, but the curse is now no longer a problem. This ends poorly for Kaelyn, whose crusade never recovers and leaves her a hermit in the Plane of Shadow, but well for Okku, who is happy to see the curse resolved. On the other, you can choose to forcibly remove the curse from yourself, leaving you free of it and allowing you to return home and live your life however you please, but ensuring that the curse will continue to plague the land. This ends happily for Kaelyn, who is emboldened by your defiance of divine will and begins her crusade anew, but poorly for Okku, who is ashamed at his failure and ultimately wastes away.
• Blessed with Suck/Cursed with Awesome: The Spirit-Eater Curse, depending how you play it. While it's entirely up to you to decide whether it's either a horrible dog-raping curse or the most awesome ability ever, it's absolutely certain there's an NPC somewhere who will disagree with you and get violent about it.
  • Arguably, your situation is not great. Yes, you just beat an incredibly powerful avatar of the dark side of magic, but your close friends and followers may well be dead, and they're certainly incapable of helping you. The shard that has been inside your body for all your life has been removed — but not very well; you didn't get crushed to death at the end of NWN 2 — but you're thousands of miles from home, trapped in a country full of beings who despise you. Oh yeah, and you're afflicted with a curse that has always killed all previous victims, turns you into an insane ravening husk along the way, and means that your soul is already in Wall of the Faithless, to remain there even once you die of the curse.
• Body Motifs: Faces and masks (it is in the title). The spirit-eater curse is referred to sometimes as an entity in and of itself that happens to be "wearing" you as a mask, just as it's "worn" the faces of its many previous victims. A name for an important character in the backstory is The Faceless Man, and you can end the curse by restoring him to being Akachi - using a mask. Gann's beautiful face is something of a plot point, and his initial attitude masks deeper issues. Safiya's face is identical to that of her mother for a good reason. Kelemvor, new god of the dead, wears a very memorable mask. The woman who runs the Veil Theatre has a studio dedicated to creating masks for the plays, and even the theatre's name refers to a sort of mask. The city of Mulsantir has its own mask in its Shadow counterpart, where people often retreat to hide themselves. The witches who rule Rashemen are all masked. And a drinking game for every time somebody refers to masks, faces, or masks on faces, or faces beneath masks as a metaphor for anything is inadvisable unless one seeks liver failure.
• Body Surf: The spirit-eater.
• Bonding over Missing Parents: Telling Gannayev about your own Parental Abandonment hooks you a decent amount of influence points and gets him willing to talk slightly more about his past.
• Boring, but Practical/Difficult, but Awesome: The Spirit-Eater Curse again, depending on how you run with it.
  • To expand, if you play the Good Route, and suppress the thing, and only use it against the undead, then your craving will be far lower, and you will lose spirit points much, much more slowly, which is incredibly helpful during several very lengthy parts of the game with little to feed on. This can make for an easier time, but you can potentially deny yourself several powerful items and abilities.
  • Embracing the curse, and thus using it far more often results in a higher Craving, meaning you must feed more often,^note to compare, if you suppress the craving, you will only lose 1 point per in game hour, if you feed constantly and have maximum craving, you will lose 6 points per in game hour; if you run out of spirit points, you die which makes the aforesaid lengthy parts much more difficult. Furthermore, to get the most out of each usage of an ability, you must time it so that you kill the enemy when they are below a certain threshold (below 25% health to restore the flat amount plus whatever life the enemy had left), otherwise it will restore a flat amount of Spirit Points, which if you've been embracing it, will probably be peanuts to what you need to stay alive. On the flip side, you can get and make some pretty damn powerful items and some cool powers.
• Boxed Crook: Gann's initial reason for joining you.
• Bragging Rights Reward: Akachi's Scythe and to a lesser extent the Spiritual Evisceration feat It'd be nice if you actually had something to use it on; instead you get them after beating the final boss. While Spiritual Evisceration does get some use on a potential short fight following its obtainment and can be used on a New Game Plus provided you export your character, Akachi's Scythe is only usable in the same short fight.
• The Casanova: Gann. He banged so damn many girls that they locked him in prison.
• Central Theme: Love, and how the different loves a person has can conflict. (Love of a god is faith and expressed as worship, for instance; love of duty or clan is expressed in an oath. Love of an ideal is righteousness. There's love of family, friends, and romantic love. All of these loves hold obligations and demand loyalty.) Okku feels that he's trapped in an oath that he can't fulfil, and he'll never reconcile his duties to honor the man who trapped the curse and protect his clan. Kaelyn could not maintain her faith once she learned of the Wall of the Faithless, and her rebellion - though entirely righteous in her mind - set her against her family, her god and her original purpose forever. Gann has no faith and refuses any duty, even when it seems he should be morally obligated in some way, unaware of his parents' true love of each other and of him. Safiya lacks faith too, but feels bound by duty to protect the Captain which is revealed to be an extension of the deepest love, the purpose for which she was made. Also, ultimately, Akachi chose to betray his god rather than condemn his lover — something his god reacted to very badly because Akachi was the most beloved of his followers. You can resolve their conflicts in a number of ways. Or twist them. Except Kaelyn. Her rebellion will go on as long as she believes she's in the right. All you can change is how long it persists.
• Cessation of Existence: The fate of anything consumed by the Spirit Eater. This is also the fate of those condemned to the Wall of the Faithless, but it takes time, and being slowly dissolved while paralysed isn't a whole bundle of fun.
• Converting for Love: In one of the endings, either Gannayev or Safiya (both n/atheists) will swear themselves to Kelemvor so that they can stay with you in the City of Judgement.
• The Corruption: The Spirit Eater curse.
• Cute Monster Guy: Gannayev the Hagspawn. Lampshaded when he jokingly denies that he's a Hagspawn simply on the basis that he's way too pretty to be one. Gann looks so beautiful because his mother and father were genuinely in love when they conceived him.
• Cutting Off the Branches: The expansion assumes a character that wasn't imported from the original campaign did not join the King of Shadows at the end.
• Daddy Had a Good Reason for Abandoning You: Namely, Gann's mother was forced to leave her infant in the wilderness by her hag sisters, presumably on pain of death for them both.
• The Dandy: Gann is entirely aware that he's probably the only attractive Hagspawn out there — a fact which he feels he must constantly broadcast to all the world.
• Darker and Edgier: Mask of the Betrayer has a significantly darker and personal storyline than the vanilla game, and features themes rarely seen in video games, such as justice, original sin and faith.
• Dark World: The Plane of Shadow is a dark reflection of the Prime Material Plane. There are no colours; the entire plane is monochrome. The terrain varies slightly in each plane, and the Plane of Shadows is populated by hostile undead called Shadows.
• Dark Is Not Evil: The good ending for Kaelyn the Dove implies that Kaelyn becomes a fallen angel. Even so, a good majority, especially the souls on the Wall of the Faithless, still consider her a hero.
• Defeat Means Friendship: Okku, if you don't devour him.
• Deliberately Monochrome: The Plane of Shadows. Spells - and in one case, blood - offer the only color.
• Developer's Foresight: There are several changes to dialog over the course of the game if your character is a priest of Kelemvor.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?:
  • Did You Just Eat Myrkul? It won't last unless you take certain other steps, however.
  • An NPC Berserker will offer to arm wrestle you, and is tough enough to beat a player transformed into an Iron Golem when he is at full power. To win, you need strength boosts on top of the transformation.
• Dirty Mind-Reading: According to Gann, the prison warden of Mulsantir has more than a few dirty dreams to spare.
  Gann: ...and old mother, do not think your mind has not laid down paths for me to stroll. Such thoughts in a woman your age – it would put even a farmer's fiery-loined daughter to shame.
• Dissonant Serenity: Kaelyn always talks in a soft, motherly tone, which can be a bit disturbing when she's supposed to be angry, such as whenever she talks about the Wall or if you side with Araman in the endgame.
• Dreaming the Truth: With dreams being a major theme of the series, it's only natural that several of the dreams you travel through through let you in on the backstory. Gann is helpful in this regard.
• Dreaming of Times Gone By: Safiya confesses to having very twisted dreams of being trapped in the Wall of the Faithless - which she was back when she was part of the Founder.
• Driven to Madness: Gulk'aush as a result of being forced to eat her lover alive, piece by piece.
• Dysfunction Junction: Surprisingly averted... well, unless you have One of Many and regularly go out of your way to gain Influence with it, given the darker tone of this instalment. There's a bit of banter back and forth, and Gann certainly likes teasing Kaelyn from time to time, but the party feels much more cohesive and calm compared to the original gang - less a squabbling rabble and more a set of self-contained individuals.
• Early-Bird Boss: Okku, because you lack a real tank in your party unless it's you.
• Eldritch Abomination: Should you go for the evil ending, this is effectively what you become; a wandering eternal incarnation of emptiness devouring all in your path, a thing which has declared war on the planes by its very existence, capable of consuming even gods. One of Many is ecstatic; everyone else is horrified.
• Eleventh Hour Super Power: The Spiritual Evisceration spell, which lets you instantly devour the soul of a target. But you only get it if you choose to devour Akachi, and you only get to use it in the very last battle against your companions when they attack you.
• The Epic: If you believe Neverwinter Nights 2 was not this, Mask of the Betrayer is definitely qualified. The story spans over two countries and four planes of existence, making the Player Character meet and battle Gods of old, walk in dreams, committing extraordinary deeds with equally incredible companions, uncovering a mystery that affected millions since centuries, culminating in a crusade taking place in the land of the dead for the sake of their soul.
• Eternal Love: Gann cheerfully points out in the ending where both of you remain in the City of Judgement that "eternal servitude" isn't such a bad deal once you think about it - after all, who else can brag about literally being together forever?
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": The Founder.
• Evil Tastes Good: Given your curse is described as a "hunger", and given how often you can threaten other characters with it, several evil dialogue options take on this tone. And then there's One-of-Many.
• Fallen Angel: Kaelyn the Dove can be considered one, being barred from entering Celestia. She becomes a real one in the ending as well.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Rashemen is based partly on Slavic myths, particularly ancient Russia.
• Fatal Flaw: Kaelyn's obsession with destroying the Wall of the Faithless. There's one ending where it destroys her siblings and her spirit with them.
• Flat-Earth Atheist: Gann, even after meeting a god in person. This only becomes more interesting when you realize that he's a divine spellcaster — a type of magic which, by definition, requires belief in a higher power. The answer is he puts his faith in spirits.
• Flaying Alive: The fate of Gannayev's father.
• Game-Breaking Bug: The initial version broke the "go to the swamp to retrieve the silver shard" quest early in the original campaign by causing a Plot Lock to fail to open.
• Ghostly Animals: The expansion takes place mainly in Rashemen, where telthors, the powerful spirits of exemplary animals, often stick around after the animal dies due to their bonds to the land. These can be eaten by the PC's Spirit-Eater curse: the Knight-Captain eats a direwolf telthor while escaping the previous Spirit-Eater's tomb, provoking the bear telthor Okku to lead an army of spirits after them. If defeated and spared, Okku becomes a party member.
• Guide Dang It!: The Golden Ending requires items you can only get by doing optional sidequests in optional areas with Gann in your party.
• God's Hands Are Tied: Kelemvor would love to end the Spirit-Eater curse for you, but the entire pantheon would come down on him if he were to toss aside another god's judgement against his own follower. However, he is willing to abuse some loopholes to let you end it. The Wall of the Faithless, on the other hand, is there to stay for the same reason he can't end the curse himself, only more so.
  Kelemvor: Even the gods are bound by laws, Kaelyn.
• Golden Ending: Reassembling the Mask of the Betrayer lets you return the last fragments of Akachi's mind to him, enough to finally let his soul rest. This ends the Spirit Eater curse and lets you go off on your merry way, something all your companions (except One of Many) approve of. See Guide Dang It! above though.
• Good Is Not Nice: Kaelyn is genuinely heroic, but she tends to get... angry when the topic of the Wall comes up.
• Good Versus Good: The crusade involves celestials fighting paladins to the death. Or even paladin versus paladin, if the player is one.
• Genius Loci: In the Ashenwood, there are two. One is a spiritual entity with higher reasoning, personifying the wood, that defends both itself and all within it. The other, actually called a "Genius Loci", is a feral, enraged, collective instinct that arose when the other spirit was attacked viciously and left too weak to protect the wood.

• Half-Human Hybrid: Kaelyn, Gann.
• Hero Antagonist: Araman and Okku.
• Hero Insurance: Averted in one of the taverns in Mulsantir, where the owner will force you to pay a fine if you start a fight and/or vandalise any of the furniture.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • If you're male and had romanced Elanee, Ammon Jerro reveals that she took a piece of the King of Shadows' Collapsing Lair that would have struck you.
  • Casavir is said to have died at the end of the original game while holding up the collapsing ceiling of the Shadow King's lair to buy time for the rest of the group to escape. The truth of his demise is in question, as someone very similar to him show up in Storm of Zehir.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: A male Player Character with a very high influence with Gann can begin sharing his thoughts and memories with him. They become extremely close and in some endings they go Walking the Earth as true companions.
• Hiding Behind Your Bangs: Gannayev, possibly symbolic of his deep-seated and carefully hidden fear of showing people who he really is.
• I'm a Humanitarian: The uthraki, shape-shifting apes who feed on human flesh and think of spirit-eating as a gift. You'll meet a family of them, the Hill Tribe, who will either teach you to devour the souls of humanoid characters (rather than just wraiths, ghosts, undead or elementals) or attack you, depending on whether you spared Okku, and evil PCs help them catch victims by leading certain NPCs to their den. During the Slumbering Coven quest, you can offer one of your companions or a mute slave child to some other uthraki if sufficiently evil.
• Immortal Breaker: The Spirit Eater curse. In one ending, your character goes on a rampage through the planes killing many gods and immortal beings before being finally stopped themselves.
• Insult Backfire: Insulting Gann often increases your influence with him - though it has to be a witty one. He enjoys a good verbal spar.
• Intellectual Animal: Okku is the spirit of a bear, and often offers advice both from his perspective as one and from his perspective as a protector of the land.
• Interspecies Romance: Guaranteed if you romance Gann. Near-guaranteed if you romance Safiya (if one assumes that Player Characters are divided equally among the playable races).
• Journey to the Center of the Mind: The last battle in the game takes place within your own soul, the atmosphere of which is different depending on your alignment. There, you and Akachi have one last throw down to determine who gets control.
• Killer Rabbit: There's a spirit badger outside the Ice Troll Lodge in Mulsantir that hates you, but can't harm you, partly because of binding spells but also because it's only about as large as your foot. Should you massacre everyone in the Lodge, your last opponent will be the badger - now the size of Okku, with stats pumped through the roof, and entirely capable of ripping huge chunks out of your health. It is very likely to avenge its fallen masters if you don't cheat.
• Last Villain Stand: Provided you proceed with the invasion of the Fugue Plane instead of defending against said invasion, Araman decides to oppose you, serving as the last villain of that segment.
• Legendary Weapon: The game has the longsword Sivlem, a weapon that has been attached to many glorious deeds. Its Flavor Text has a weird Invoked Double Subversion when the mage enchanting it intended to give it an intelligence that would drive its wielder to yet greater acts of heroism, but applied said intelligence to a more mundane blade by mistake.
• Level-Up at Intimacy 5: Once a character's influence hits "Devoted", you can't gain anymore bonuses relating to it unless they fall in love with you.
• Light and Mirrors Puzzle
• Love Makes You Evil: Indeed it can, and indeed it has. It's one of the main themes of the game, central to the reason the PC is in this mess at all, and Myrkul actually says it in so many words, with all the gleeful and malicious irony he can muster. Only love could be so cruel. However, the trope is also inverted and played with if the player goes snooping through enough of the incidental story.
• Luke, I Am Your Father: The Founder to Safiya, and Gulk'aush to Gann.

• MacGuffin Title: The Mask of the Betrayer actually makes an appearance in the final battle if you manage to collect all the mask fragments. It's even useful in protecting you from Akachi's soul-draining abilities.
• The Magocracy: Rashemen is ruled by masked witches - and witches only. No men. The older they are, the greater their authority, which some younger members resent. Minus the gender restriction, Thaymount Academy (and Red Wizard society in general) works this way too, but with rather more backstabbing.
• Many Spirits Inside of One: One of Many.
• Merger of Souls: The Academy of Shapers and Binders has a wizard who can fuse souls, and bound his own soul into a clay golem to do it more safely. A sidequest on the same level requires you to trade a soul to two pit fiends. Unfortunately, since they're unwilling to hand over what you request, they won't agree on what sort of soul they should have; in fact each gives mutually exclusive requirements. The solution ends up being to have the aforementioned wizard fuse two completely opposite souls together. They get really annoyed with you for finding that loophole, but they have to honor the agreement.
• Mr. Fanservice: Gann, full stop. He's one In-Universe, too; see The Casanova entry above.
• The Multiverse: You visit several planes, and more are mentioned.
• Mundane Utility: According to Gannayev, the best use for travelling through dreams is getting laid.
• Mythology Gag: One can find a miscellaneous item in the game called "Astral Rodent Charm" that is described as a small wooden carving of a rodent with the words "For M" written into the bottom that gives you increased strength bonus at the cost of intelligence.
• Narrator All Along: Kelemvor, God of the Dead, is revealed to be the one narrating your story. Since you don't meet him until you're minutes away from the game's end, you're unlikely to recognise his voice until then.
• Nature Spirit: Quite a few, but Okku most notably. The existence of these spirits, "telthor" and the local worship of them is arguably Rashemen's hat.
• No Blood Ties: Hags always abandon their male children, as they have no use for them.
• No Canon for the Wicked: Slight implied aversion in Storm of Zehir, where One of Many turns up in a random encounter. You'd think that would only occur if the Spirit Eater freed it from the Furnace using Okku's pelt; however, if you try to exorcise it with Eternal Rest, it thanks the Spirit Eater for purging it of weakness, suggesting it may have been able to free itself.
• Not in This for Your Revolution: The expansion pack is praised for giving a motive that is believable for all characters — saving yourself from a curse that is slowly killing you — over the "save the world" that the original game forced the players into. So even if the player character has no reason to stop what has been plaguing the lands for decades, they still have a reason to finish the main quest.
  • You can choose to take it a step or three further. You can turn against the Crusade most of the party wants you to join, kill the Founder out of vengeance for roping you into this mess, abandon or kill your party and - while the heroic option is to stay on the Fugue Plane for eternity to contain the spirit eater deep within the recesses of your soul (or with a little extra work, end it forever) - you can also throw the curse out of your soul and send it on its merry way to a new host. You then return to your friends and the Keep from the original campaign as if none of it had ever happened.
• Ominous Fog: Lampshaded.
• Optional Party Member: One of Many is an odd example, as you can get either him or Okku, depending on whether you consume Okku. Similarly, Araman can be obtained if if you side against the Third Crusade in place of Kaelyn (who will attack you if you meet the conditions for him).
• Pardon My Klingon: Subverted by Kaelyn the Dove:

  Kaelyn: You... you are a... Oh, I don't know any curses. How embarrassing.

• Parental Abandonment: The player carried over from NWN 2, and Gann.
  • Disappeared Dad: Safiya's father is never brought up because she literally never had one.
• Paying for the Action Scene: A tavern where the owner will fine you if you start a bar fight and/or vandalise any of the furniture.
• Plot Hole: The existence of the Wall of the Faithless is contentious at best, because Kelemvor very specifically destroyed it at the moment of his ascension in the novel Prince of Lies, and still hadn't brought it back in Crucible: The Trial of Cyric the Mad set decades later, despite being forced to run the afterlife as a more neutral place by the other gods. The Wall seemingly does not exist in 5e and Ed Greenwood has stated his distaste for it, so the events of this game can probably be considered non-canon as far as anything to do with the Wall goes.
• Point of No Return: The Betrayer's Gate. It is made extremely obvious.
• The Power of Friendship: The player and his/her respective followers can get some really powerful feats and buffs when they have a high positive influence.
• Power Perversion Potential: Potential which Gann gleefully abuses.
• Proud Beauty:
  Gann: I noticed that... your eyes are like mirrors, which makes them doubly pleasing to me.
• Proud Warrior Race Guy: Okku has many elements, most noticeable when he encounters carrion-eating spirits at the coven.
• The Punishment: Akachi. Poor, poor Akachi.
• Rage Against the Heavens: You can actually take either side.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: Consisting of you (already a Walking Disaster Area linked to the Silver Sword of Gith who then gets cursed to become a soul-eating abomination), a somewhat Machiavellian wizard from an organisation of similar but much nastier wizards, a Hagspawn casanova who uses his dreamwalking powers to give the local ladies very pleasant dreams, an exiled half-angel rebelling against the gods themselves, and either another soul-eating abomination created from the fused souls of dozens of cremated individuals or a giant talking rainbow spirit bear god.
• Rainbow Pimp Gear: Lampshaded with the item Rainbow Armor, which according to the item description, was made by a color-blind mage.
• Reincarnation Romance: Male Player Characters can enter into one with Safiya.Women could as well before Executive Meddling.
• Russian Guy Suffers Most: Given that Akachi was Rashemi, which is basically the local equivalent to the Kievan Rus, and was basically existentially tortured on a cosmic level until his very soul and psyche were all but completely destroyed to render him basically a manifestation of instinctual hunger, one could argue he qualifies.
• Self-Deprecation: There really is a lot of self-deprecating humor.
• Sequence Breaking: Getting Gann's influence high enough before the end of Act I will tip you off about the spirit eater curse before you're supposed to know about it.
• Soul Jar: Several - especially at the Academy of Shapers and Binders, which contains a library specifically for soul housings.
• So Beautiful, It's a Curse: Gann is apparently so damn pretty that they had to throw him in jail to keep him from banging every girl in Rashemen.
  • The amazing part is, they actually pull the trope off without making it seem utterly ridiculous; he's a pretty hagspawn, so none of the local humans trust him worth a damn and the only reason they don't kill him is out of fear that he'd overpower them and take their daughters anyway, and he's a pretty hagspawn, so all of the hags find him legitimately abhorrent and not actually "beautiful" at all. Even his mother takes a while to come around, and by the time she did, it didn't do either of them much good.
• Sociopathic Hero: One of Many, a terrifying soul-eating spiritual construct that craves power and revels in suffering. If it approves of something you've done, you can be assured that whatever you just did was an act of malicious selfishness, vicious cruelty or both.
• Speaking Simlish: One Of Many is a dark twist. It speaks with a "call of the dead" that any mortal creature can understand.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: Akachi and the Founder. A devoted disciple of Myrkul and a Faithless...and that was only the start of their problems.
• Status Quo Is God: For all the epic changes the campaign allows you to make, you can still play in such a way as to have essentially nothing change when you end it. You can reject or kill all your companions, put down the Crusade, eject the spirit eater to resume its course, and, if your character is an import from the original campaign, return to Crossroad Keep and reunite with your old friends.
• Stupid Sexy Flanders: A male PC with a high enough Charisma stat can catch Gann in one of these moments when they first meet, likely an artifact from when Gann was going to be bisexual.
• Taken from a Dream: Dreamwalking forms a significant part of the plot, and the PC is able to bring back items from various dreamworlds multiple times, including the fragments of the eponymous mask which are required to get the Golden Ending.
• Test of Pain: In order to become a member of the Ice Troll Berserkers, one of the initiation rituals the Player Character will have to overcome involves them demonstrating their tolerance of harsh conditions by standing in a tub of icy cold water for an extended period of time, without any of their gear or any magical protection. Once they've joined, they can attempt it a 2nd time in water chilled with ice magic, and enduring will net them a magical ring of cold resistance.
• Thin Dimensional Barrier: It takes place partially in the Plane of Shadow, which is reachable by portals that appear at night in areas of the world where the planar boundaries are weak.
• Token Evil Teammate: One Of Many, an insane Hive Mind that Kaelyn openly states "should not be".
• Tragic Monster: The Spirit Eater is the soul of a priest of Myrkul named Akachi. A redeemed priest, who fell in unselfish love with one of the Faithless, and for his sacrilege against the God of Evil, he had his very humanity and sentience destroyed to make him the mindless body-hopping Eldritch Abomination inside you.
• Truly Single Parent: The Founder. She split off pieces of her soul into new bodies - Lienna, Nefris and Safiya. Each held an aspect of her personality and none of them had anything like a "dad".
• The Ugly Guy's Hot Daughter: Gender-flipped with Gann and his mother Gulk'aush. She's a stereotypically ugly hag, he's quite handsome. And a Justified Trope: His mother and father were truly in love.
• Uneven Hybrid: MotB adds genasi, humans with a touch of elemental blood, as playable races.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: Obsidian hasn't lost its touch. Playing to abuse the power of the curse is only the start. Feel free to trick innocent people into being trapped and devoured by uthraki (flesh-eating shape-shifters), such a family of merchants with two children, a mute pre-adolescent boy, a pair of eager young warriors and a mentally ill farmer's daughter. Then there's creating another evil soul-eating abomination to hang out with by having hundreds of dead, deranged spirits inhabit the shell of a spirit you devoured. Use it to kill and devour the spirits of people whose abilities or memories will be useful to you. Psychologically abuse and torment everyone you meet for laughs! Betray your companions and and devour their souls to create a nifty stat-boosting amulet! Skin a person alive! Take your revenge on the one who gave you to the curse by consuming their spirit, which is in context even more horrible than it sounds! Meaning you devour the soul of the woman Akachi loved so much even the abomination he's become recoils at the notion! You actually need to consume the god's essence beforehand to overcome him, and even then he cries out in pure agony and tries to stop you. You just made the personified hunger feel misery beyond imaginable, which even the aforementioned god thought was impossible. Also, it is one of two only points in the game when Safiya, who otherwise stays loyal through every possible evil act, finally tries to kill you. How do you go down from there? There you go. Defend against the Crusade, kill Kaelyn's siblings, get her grandfather-solar to come and try to stop you, kill him, and leave Kaelyn mortally wounded but alive for demons to collect, weeping in utter anguish. Then put the cherry on the sundae of evil and manipulate the curse to turn yourself into an abomination against all that lives that devours whole nations and even gods who cross your path.
• Villains Never Lie: Myrkul. The player character can even lampshade it to Kaelyn. Later subverted when Kelemvor reveals that though he wasn't lying to her, he was lying to you and to the Founder.
• Warrior Heaven: If you choose to bind Akachi to your soul, Kelemvor is more than willing to reward your sacrifice by at least making the afterlife comfortable and exciting for you, and you spend all of eternity kicking ass and taking names in the Fugue Plane with either Gannayev or Safiya as the other half of your eternal Battle Couple.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Kaelyn is on the verge of being one.
• What the Hell, Hero?: In both of the standard endings, at least one member of your party will be unhappy with your choice. Binding your soul to Akachi's will anger Kaelyn, as it means you've sworn yourself to protect the very thing she seeks to destroy, and the One of Many mocks you for choosing an eternity in the City of Judgement. If you free yourself from the curse but not end it, however, Safiya will be angry that you've let Akachi continue to suffer, and Okku will be mad that you've ditched your chance to end the curse for good for your own survival. And then there's the Bad End, where everyone (save the One of Many) will be against you for committing such a purely selfish, evil act and becoming a god-forsaken abomination.
• Wizard Needs Food Badly: With souls!
• You Are Worth Hell: If you choose to stay on the Fugue Plane in order to bind the spirit eater, your love interest will go as far as pledging their soul to the God of the Dead so that you won't have to be all alone.
• You Killed My Father: Once Gann finds out the truth behind his Parental Abandonment, he's more than happy to help "end the dream" of the hags responsible.
• You Kill It, You Bought It: The Spirit-eater pretty reliably body surfs to the closest living, intelligent creature when its current victim dies, unless it's somehow bound to a place with no victims. A number of Spirit Eaters in the past explicitly set out to destroy a ravening monster, only to become the monster themselves when they slew it.

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