Morrowind is one of the most-modded roleplaying games of all time, and a lot of those mods focus on big sweeping changes like overhauling UI and adding new locations, or rebuilding the whole dang thing, or delightful-yet-absurd technical upgrades like adding footprints.
Others, meanwhile, make smaller tweaks. That's the case with the Feminist Nerevarine mod from AliceL93. The title is a little overblown—it doesn't rewrite Morrowind as a feminist parable—but by changing a few quest options, it highlights the number of times Morrowind didn't give us the option to take a woman's side in a dispute, or even just be polite.
"In some Morrowind quests where there was a conflict between a man and a woman, you didn't have the opportunity to side with the woman," writes AliceL93. "In other quests, a woman required something from you, and if you wanted to refuse it, the game forced you to do so in a rude manner. And there were also quests where a man overstepped the boundaries of a woman, and you didn't have the opportunity to refuse helping him."
For example, one quest has you steal a naughty adult book from a lady so that a a man named Aengoth can use it as blackmail leverage against her family. The mod adds the option to keep the book, refusing to hand it over, under the argument that you won't let him blackmail the woman with her private life.
"The characters in these quests don't necessarily have to agree with you, if you take these choices," AliceL93 writes. "For example, if you refuse to hand over the book, Aengoth will scold you that you won't be popular in the Thieves' Guild with that attitude, and even hints at hiring someone to steal the book from you. I thought that it's important to keep these characters true to Bethesda's vision of them. So with this mod, you can roleplay a 'feminist' and you are provided with new choices, but the world of the game doesn't necessarily have to agree with you."
Which is nice, as, for example, I think a lot of people would want to tell off that one creep who wants you to use a love potion on someone without their consent. That guy's kind of a bad person.
Here's the full list of changes:
- The Beauty and the Bandit: You can refuse helping Maurrie without telling her outright that you think that she is an idiot for falling in love with the bandit who robbed her. Instead, you can warn her to return to her senses, after all, the man is a dangerous outlaw who already harmed her once.
- Bloodmoon: A Woman Scorned: You can refuse helping Kjolver without judging her. Instead, you can try to convince her that even though she loves her husband, he clearly doesn't love her back, that's why he is cheating on her and that she should forget about him because she deserves someone better.
- Thieves' Guild: Naughty Gandosa: You still need to steal the book, but upon learning about its contents you can refuse to hand it over to Aengoth with the argument that it wouldn't be right to blackmail a woman with her private life.
- Widowmaker: You can kill the naked Nord barbarian and receive a reward from the witch for doing so. Strangely, this option was not present in vanilla, while it was present in the other "witch vs. naked Nord barbarian" quest, and there you could choose whom you side with.
- For the Love of a Bosmer: You can call out Gadayn for his plan to use a love potion on the woman who doesn't love him back. In vanilla, you could only agree to deliver the potion to her or to recommend Gadayn to pursue another woman instead. So if you think that a person who would resort to such methods doesn't deserve either, you can refuse his errand, and even call him out for it.
- Kidnapped by Cultists: A bonus feature. You can scold Sason for being unable to protect his wife. Obviously, those were some dangerous cultists, and all of that, but I thought that such a feature wouldn't warrant its own mod, so I squeezed it into this one, even if it doesn't really fit thematically 100% with the rest of the new choices.
This sort of thing is actually a running theme with AliceL93's mods, which span the political spectrum: They've also uploaded Anarchist, Communist, Libertarian, Imperialist, and Nationalist roleplaying mods. The latter two prevent the main quest from "bullying" the player away from being "a loyal servant of the Empire" or a "Dunmer nationalist."
