1. Introduction
[1.1] Released in 2002, the role-playing game Neverwinter Nights invites players to "voyage through the complex and dangerous fantasy world of The Forgotten Realms" (https://www.bioware.com/games/#previous-games). Developed by BioWare and using the familiarity of the Dungeons & Dragons setting, the game also boasts two official expansions and a host of official modules. While part of Neverwinter Nights' longevity depends on the multiple ways the main narrative can be attempted—multiple classes, hordes of main-game mods—it also comes equipped with the Aurora Toolset, which, as BioWare puts it, allows modders to "build your own world" entirely independent of the primary and official campaigns. Put broadly, modders design and create files that alter, add to, or replace parts of an original game. Like other aspects of fandom and fan works, modding comprises a network of modders and players, often through the forums or servers used for distribution of mods (Consalvo 2017). Hector Postigo argues that mods provide value for players since they contribute to and amplify the game's "content pool" (2007, 302). Similarly, Henry Jenkins frames the work of modders as encouraging audience participation (2006). Julian Kücklich refers to modding practice as "playbor" and draws more of a focus upon the intersection of the that pleasure creators and players derive with the amount of work they put in (2005). BioWare's handing-over of the creative process to the fan community—"build your own world"—is notable and also aligns neatly with the way Henry Jenkins (2004, 123–4) discusses the fundamental importance of the "storyworld" of a game, the "immersive environment" here that is presented as part of fan response. Mods also, to draw on Victoria Cooper's useful approach, allow for and encourage "audience response" while also opening up a space of "reflexive communication within player communities" (2021, 162). Mods might include items, weapons, outfits, appearances, additional sections or sequences of action or dialogue, or entirely new worlds or stories separate from the official game.
[1.2] Many Neverwinter Nights game mods are available through a long-running archive site, the Neverwinter Vault (https://neverwintervault.org). First used as a receptacle for news about the game, fan discussions, and community modding, the Vault—through a few wobbly resurrections—still exists as a site for modders to upload, play, comment on, and vote for their favored Neverwinter Nights mods. Arguably, mods can be considered a cornerstone of wider gaming fandom while at the same time occupying a rather undefinable arena somewhere between fan fic and fan work more generally.
[1.3] Fan fic itself remains thorny to define neatly. Following an online survey of people who considered themselves fans, the website Fansplaining (https://www.fansplaining.com/articles/towards-a-definition-of-fanfiction) presented findings that suggested that most people who engaged in fan communities and fan work located fan fiction as—broadly construed—"derivative of another work," as well as "written by and for fans." Judith Fathallah's definition of fan fiction is also extremely useful here: fan-created material that is "typically freely shared, makes no money and, though it has an analogue history, exists primarily on the internet" (2017, 9). These definitions are suitable due to the underlined significance of fan work as something that is not necessarily a written work but could encompass media texts more broadly.
[1.4] The focus here, the Neverwinter Nights mod A Dance with Rogues, also enters into a more transmedial and adaptational space. Essentially, the mod takes the nuts and bolts of BioWare's version of the Forgotten Realms and reworks them into the mod author's original creation, the realm of Betancuria. Layering the narrative strata all the more intertextually, the mod clearly also takes a great deal of inspiration—to the point of homage—from George R. R. Martin's fantasy novel series A Song of Ice and Fire.
2. A Dance with Rogues
[2.1] The mod A Dance with Rogues was first made available in two parts on the Neverwinter Vault in 2006. Significant edits were undertaken for updated uploads in 2010 and 2014, respectively, and the mod was most recently updated in 2020 and 2023. As per the Vault, the mod sits in the Hall of Fame and has an average user voting response of 9.4 out of 10. It also won the Vault's Module of the Year award in 2006 (https://neverwintervault.org/project/nwn1/module/dance-rogues-part-one).
[2.2] The mod's creator, Valine, describes the mod as a single-player story, heavy on story and role-playing, rogues the preferred player class, and epic in scope. In total, the mod includes around 250,000 lines of description and dialogue. While the mod and its updates are overwhelmingly Valine's sole work, they also credit users Frankie and Scott Craig with "helping improve dialogue" for Version 1.11, Jhmmsa for the use of "special scripts," and Tamelander for a "cover picture."
[2.3] Introducing their world, Valine states, "This is the story of a young woman whose world is shattered into pieces on a single, dark night. Formerly Princess of a mighty Kingdom, she barely survives when the enemies of her Lord Father kill her family, her loved ones, her friends. Suddenly alone in a cruel world, hiding from those people who only wish to see her dead, she finds help where she'd least expect it. Sheltered by a group of thugs and thieves, her life now takes a very different line. But her enemies remain the same."
[2.4] At the outset, the mod appears to be quite restrictive—the player can only assume the character of this princess and must play as a rogue (or at least as a character who has sunk the majority of their points into rogue skills and traits). Within this immediate restriction, however, the mod embraces a wealth of options around who this princess may become and how she may solve or respond to the quests she undertakes. This in turn allows for a depth of role-playing since the mod leans into a play style that embraces—or even prefers—wading through conversation and tackling challenges with interpersonal or emotional responses as much or even more than combat-based responses. Valine points this out explicitly on the mod's upload pages, informing players that "most XP is granted for progressing in the story line" and "there's little (really little!) XP for killing things!"
[2.5] Stylistically, the mod incorporates a heavy amount of text. Interestingly, however, the style and format of the text mirrors the main game's own official expansion packs more than the game itself. Essentially, a character's dialogue can at times be framed by descriptive text that adds the more detailed trappings of emotion, suggestion, or tone. This is something that Neverwinter Nights itself draws upon, though only within the confines of the expansion packs Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark. For example, when the player character's Tiefling companion Valen is beset by the curse of his blood, descriptive dialogue lets the player know that Valen's eyes are flickering from blue to red, that he is physically struggling, or that he appears tired.
[2.6] While the player character in A Dance with Rogues can walk around, unlock doors, and pick fights in environmental sections that open up as they explore, clicking on other characters allows the player to engage in densely written encounters. This extends to wider narrative events, such as the sacking of the princess's city at the start of the mod:
[2.7] I put them on. The clothes fit badly enough, but at least they're clean and smell of soap. [Vico] grabs my wrists again and drags me out of the storage room. We're passing through several corridors, sometimes going up, sometimes down. I have no idea where we are. […] Finally, after pushing me up a steep ladder, we enter a dark, ruined house. A number of bodies are lying motionless on the floor, giving off a thick, rotting stench. I bite my lip, fighting hard not to puke. He grabs me again and propels me out onto the street. Chilly night air greets me. It's dark, a cold wind blows, and it smells of rain. […] There are hushed voices shouting angrily some distance away, but I do not understand what they are about. The sky above the castle glows as if some giant fire burns within.
[2.8] This in-depth approach reflects the walkthrough retelling style of fan fic—wherein a writer might write through their experience with a game or mod, using their playthrough as a base for their fic. Similarly, the way the mod's focus upon the player having to play as a rogue to progress is conveyed in a manner that recalls fic writers choosing a version of the player character to funnel a story through. All Forgotten Realms computer games allow the player to choose from an exhaustive list of classes, subclasses, and prestige classes. It is not, however, uncommon to find fan fic stories that hinge on a particular version. For instance, a cursory exploration of the Archive of Our Own (AO3) for the broad Neverwinter Nights title label evidences LadyMaisry's A Scar Upon the Earth (https://archiveofourown.org/works/56598397/chapters/143855821), "the tale of a bard with a difficult past," while WarriorDrgnMage's Found (https://archiveofourown.org/works/128359) offers a more specific "Lawful Good Cleric of Tyr."
[2.9] Encounters throughout the mod with various characters run the gamut from simple quest-giving moments to verbal confrontations to the mod's infamously detailed moments of sex and sexual experience, which include both direct dialogue and description. These include coercive scenes, scenes of manipulation on the player character's part (framed within the mod as "learning to use one's wiles"), threats of sexual violence, and repeatable and consensual scenes with the player character's chosen love interest(s). Of these, all but one is avoidable through dialogue choice. Valine's notes point out clearly that the mod is adults-only: "Contains graphical and verbal nudity, explicit content and forms of violence." Alongside this, there are several hints and tips alluding to preferred play style to set players up with enough detail to begin building their character usefully. There is also—both interestingly and troublingly—a brief note suggesting that "if you are offended by the opening cutscene, you shouldn't play this!!" The scene referred to here is an act of rape suffered by the player character—while escaping the castle, the Lost Princess is cornered and assaulted by Vico, who later becomes a plot-important non-player character (NPC) and possible long-term companion, as well as a possible romance interest. Unlike all other sexual scenes in the game, this one is obscured—the room is plunged into darkness, and there is very little description. It is also the sole unavoidable sexual scene. While the outcome of the scene becomes viciously clear almost immediately—barely minutes into the mod itself—the lack of explicitly distinct warning, tag, or trigger label is a striking choice. Forms of violence and explicit content do, after all, only infer the possibility of rape, and the "offense" warning feels rather convoluted. The threat of rape remains throughout the mod, emerging both obliquely and directly in dialogue or encounter—Betancuria and the realms beyond are a world where women's bodily autonomy is under constant surveillance and in peril of violation.
3. Reading (parts of) the world of A Dance with Rogues as Forgotten Realms fan fiction
[3.1] Fan fic, despite its proliferation across the digital sphere of fandom, is still in some ways a deceptively spiky concept to pin down. This is exponentially true when considering fan works that go beyond the more typical definition of a story or narrative written and presented in a familiar manner (here, we might consider a true-to-canon retelling fic, or a more traditional alternate universe or what-if scenario, or even a good old-fashioned porn-without-plot one-shot). A story-based mod might be best framed within the wider sphere of digital fandom—creative output that is not entirely fan fiction, but is underlined strongly by a form of it, while also drawing on expectations of the Forgotten Realms setting and presented to the crucible of player community response on the Vault. In essence, such mods emerge from what Henry Jenkins terms "knowledge communities," a nexus of creative fan production that shares and responds to fan works of multiple types (2002, 2).
[3.2] Valine's realm of Betancuria is, technically, an addition to the Forgotten Realms setting—there is, for instance, a long section in which the player must work their way through the Underdark, with the possibility of recruiting a Drow companion, Rizzen, who can accompany the player back onto the surface. The Underdark and the brutal social strata of the Drow remains unchanged in the mod. Rizzen is a typically beleaguered male Drow weapon master, trying to salvage some semblance of social survival within House Do'Vrinn while painfully aware of the power his older sisters have within their ferociously matriarchal society (https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Drow). In his dialogue and interactions with other characters, he feels typically Drow-like, with speech patterns reflecting some of the Drow in Hordes of the Underdark: "I won't sell you, nor will I give you to others for their pleasure. But you are mine. I bought you at the slave market. I saved you from the sadistic ways of my sister. […] Now I even betray my House. [Still] you are but a surfacer, a human, whereas I hail from Maeralssin's strongest house, my Mother the First Matron." Rizzen's speech patterns and behaviors are distinct and also mirror those replicated in Forgotten Realms fan fiction when writers present Drow characters. He—or rather, Valine's writing of him—feels Drow to a player who understands the Forgotten Realms, something that Monica Flegel and Jenny Roth would frame as "convey[ing] the sense of the fictional world," a mode integral to their understanding of fan fiction (2014, 1097).
4. Transplanting Westeros: Adaptational borrowings as a form of A Song of Ice and Fire fan fiction
[4.1] While Betancuria often behaves like the Forgotten Realms, with its roster of wizards, druids, and a menagerie of bizarre creatures such as slaads, giant spiders, and ettercaps, it nonetheless bears the unmistakable overlay of George R. R. Martin's Westeros, with all the attendant brutality of encounter and experience a familiar player might assume. The title alone is a sly wink—a barely hidden nod to the novel A Dance with Dragons. Likewise, the mod's default name for the player character is Lyanna Stormborn, a double-dipping of character names from Martin's series in reference to Lyanna Stark and Daenerys "Stormborn" Targaryen, respectively. Furthermore, the player character's introduction to an assassin/thief guild under the tutelage of Master Nathan mirrors Arya Stark's grimy adventures, right down to having to disguise oneself.
[4.2] Extrapolating further, the suggested name invites players to consider Lyanna and Daenerys and their tribulations—the former distinctly tragic, the latter becoming stronger while absorbing every challenge a grimly unforgiving world doles out. Both are women at the mercy of male-dominated and male-controlled social hierarchies, painfully aware of their lack of social power and the threat of sexual violence, something that Valine's Lost Princess must contend with throughout the mod. This web of references, of intertextual conversation and player response, aligns well with Mafalda Stasi's delineation of the term palimpsest, a "layering of genres," concerned also with reinterpretation (2006, 119). As Milena Popova (2017) elaborates, Stasi's palimpsest is first applied to slash fan fic. Popova does, however, argue that it is usefully expanded across fan writing more generally since its "compression of meaning" (48) and the ease of which readers (or players stepping into Valine's Betancuria) can adapt to these references works widely. In transplanting the ideologies, approach, and—for the knowledgeable player—assumptions of Westeros onto the Forgotten Realms, Valine opens up a space into which to overlay that threat and expectation of violence to the point where it seems endemic to the Forgotten Realms. As Stephanie Genz notes, the women of Westeros are "subjected to relentless abuse and violence" while some, such as Daenerys, "[embrace] sexual empowerment as a means of survival and control" (2016, 244, 249). Both these options are available to the player character—the latter evident when, for instance, the player has the option to seduce their way out of trouble in quests such as "Mayor's Mansion" or "Dance with Death." These references are similarly reflected in Vico, who is clearly coded as a stray from Westeros. His appearance (all black armor, a sword named Kinslayer), his manner of speaking (Valine appears to borrow from Sandor Clegane's fondness for foul language and diminutives in the way Vico refers to the Lost Princess as "little bird," much as the Hound does to Sansa Stark), and his behavior all call this to mind. Furthermore, in a manner not all that dissimilar to A Song of Ice and Fire fan fic featuring the Hound, the mod gives over a great deal of dialogue space in examining why Vico is the violent, threatening way he is and whether this can be forgiven or forgivable.
[4.3] For Valine's Lost Princess, as for her namesakes in Westeros, "bloodline is everything" (Larrington 2016, 15). Her loss of title and reduction to commoner is brutal, and she spends the stretch of the mod clawing her way out. The legitimacy of her actual place in the social hierarchy becomes first a dangerous secret and eventually a weapon. Like Daenerys, she carries the weight of her family history, along with the fateful knowledge that her father's castle—"never once taken, not in three hundred years"—has been breached. The Forgotten Realms, while not necessarily lighthearted, still infers a less cynical setting, one designed for a more traditional hero's journey. It also foregrounds its more exaggerated fantasy aspects—there are several planes of existence, the gods are both very real and very interventionist, and death is, at points, a revolving door greased by a canny player's coffers. On the surface, this should bump awkwardly against the relentlessly threatening environs of Westeros. This world is, after all, one that "distance[s] itself" from fantasy's less realistic trappings, which Anne Kustritz reads as part of the narrative's "refusal of 'improbable' 'happy ending' closure," something that the Lost Princess certainly does not and cannot achieve (2016, 4).
[4.4] Complicating any reading of the mod as fan fic, however, is the fact that nowhere does the mod or its notes directly acknowledge any inspiration from A Song of Ice and Fire. Judith Fathallah notes that George R. R. Martin rather infamously "state[d] publicly his dislike of fanfiction with his characters" even prior to HBO's adaptation of the novels (2015, 75). Interestingly, in more traditional fan fic spaces such as AO3 or LiveJournal, Ice and Fire stories are often framed by paratexts that grapple with Martin's statement, often "assur[ing] their readers they know how to manage [the characters and the world], asking us to 'have faith'" (Fathallah 2015, 81). The mod's introductory notes indicate that the setting is "medieval," which perhaps distances it at first glance from its perceived Forgotten Realms framing while at the same time bringing it more into line with its Westerosi borrowings.
5. Beyond the Vault: Some final thoughts, and A Dance with Rogues in/and the wider romance mod and writing community
[5.1] A Dance with Rogues sits oddly beside other romance modules, entirely, perhaps, as Valine intended. Part of this is due to its scope—it unfurls a complicated, well-written, and thorough adventure that requires several hours to complete. While other stand-alone Neverwinter Nights modules focus on romance, relationship-building, or outright erotic content—Lovelamb's DemonHeart, for instance, or FallenRayne's Gladiatrix series—most are exploration-/adventuring-focused (https://forum.neverwintervault.org/t/gladiatrix-bic/5708/1).
[5.2] Direct fan fiction of A Dance with Rogues exists and almost entirely focuses on the relationship between the Lost Princess and Vico. Most recently, AO3 shows a new story posted on December 14, 2024 by BreLakor. Titled The Tangled Webs We Weave (https://archiveofourown.org/works/61329928/chapters/156757714), the story comes equipped with the requisite warnings (including the rape/non-con archive warning), and the author's blurb states that "Vico's protection comes at a price—one that [the princess] Iris willingly pays if it spares her life." Posted much earlier in 2008 on Fanfiction.net, Aeryn Phoenix's story Broken (https://www.fanfiction.net/s/4573167/1/Broken) also charts the Princess and Vico's turbulent relationship, transposing their connection into one of mutual violence and passion. Here, author's notes stand in place of tags. While Aeryn Phoenix does point out that the multipart story includes "dark material" and "adult themes," there is also the interesting admission in regard to their first-person writing of the princess, that they have "never had the urge to write about someone so clearly disturbed before."
[5.3] Currently, A Dance with Rogues is still being played, and the community rating forums on the Vault are likewise still in use. Most recently, in late November, user Slaad rated the module thusly: "Great module :) I like very much the idea of playing 'ex-princess rogue,' and the feeling of being too weak for direct confrontation (a common feeling in first part AdwR [sic]). Some of quests allows [sic] a few solutions. I think a lot of good work done here :)." The story remains fraught—despite updates and alterations and tweaks to side quests and so forth, the opening of the mod remains unchanged, as does Vico's romance. As a mod, Valine's work is complex, well-designed, and thorough. Within that framework, however, it operates very much like fan fiction with its insistence on the lush and sometimes borderline florid descriptions couching its dialogue. Drawing on transmedial sources here is key as Valine's story plummets into the Forgotten Realms by way of King's Landing.