Overview
Lady Aribeth de Tymarande is one of the critical NPC characters encountered by the player in the official singleplayer campaign of Neverwinter Nights. She is also a potential love interest for male characters. She is voiced by Wendee Lee.
Once personal bodyguard to Nasher Alagondar (the ruler of Neverwinter), Aribeth is a Paladin of Tyr, the blind god of Justice. Devoted to her duty, she is assigned to head up operations to counter the Wailing Death, a disease ravaging the city at the beginning of the game. After an enemy raid on the Neverwinter Academy kills every student but the player, Aribeth takes him (or her) under her wing, giving him various quests to root out the cause of the plague and the forces behind it.
Aribeth is also the lover of Fenthick Moss, an elf and cleric helping to find a cure.
Personal History
Born a half-elf in Thundertree, a village within the Neverwinter Wood, her home was destroyed in an orc raid, leaving Aribeth the sole survivor. Seeking vengeance, she hunted down the orcs responsible, until, caught in a sudden blizzard, she lost consciousness. Rescued by a mysterious figure that she believes was an avatar of the god Tyr, she trained to become a paladin and was assigned to Nasher's bodyguard.
In-game Activities (Spoilers)
Aribeth mostly functions as a quest-giver during the campaign, though she becomes an antagonist midway through the storyline. Following the end of the plague and the revelation that Fenthick as an accomplice in the Luskan plot to overthrow Neverwinter, Fenthick is executed as a traitor. Enraged over his death, she falls and becomes a Blackguard (the evil-alignment version of a paladin), agreeing to lead the Luskan forces against Neverwinter.
The player is given a chance to redeem Aribeth rather than kill her in single combat, restoring her to good. If the player listened to whole Aribeth's tale in chapter 2 and kept her ring, she will not only agree to restore to good, but find out about her developing feelings to a protagonist. While he fights Malag (the Queen of the Old Ones), Aribeth will be kept in prison for further judgment, their future after the game end is uncertain.
Hordes of the Underdark
Aribeth is encountered again during the Hordes of the Underdark expansion campaign, this time by the player, who plays the protagonist of the previous Shadows of Undrentide campaign. Disregarding the love story from the original campaign, Aribeth now is an undead specter sentenced to the nine level of Hell, Cania. She was apparently executed as a traitor following her defeat at the end of Neverwinter Nights original campaign. The player may then recruit her as a compaion, either as her good-aligned paladin class or her evil-aligned Blackguard class.
She is also a potential love interest, and if in a romance with the player at the end of the game, the epilogue narrates her as being by the player's side as he dies (presumably of old age). After all, she's a ghost. The lovers souls are united in afterlife.
Player can discover her True name from The Knower of Names and use it for different evil purposes (knowledge of one's True name allows unquestioning control of that person). Her True name is Va'ardalia the Twinsouled.
In-game Bug
There is a bug in all the versions of game, including latest 1.69 HotU (critical rebuild), sometimes making Aribeth romance impossible. Detail description and fixes are available on http://social.bioware.com/forum/Neverwinter-Nights-1/NwN-1-Hordes-of-the-Underdark-Official-Campaign-Spoilers-Warning/Aribeth-romance-spoilers-8377193-1.html or If you want to, you can open SoU chapter 3 in the NWN toolset, bring up the script hx_ari_romce_ad1, and on line 15 of that script, change the 2 to 1.
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