i tried to make heads or tails of the city, and it was a disaster. my efforts are bellow the cut, with screenshots.

The Qunari serve as a mirror for Anders. They show us what a conflict with the Chantry looks like.

So, because I love you guys, I just disassembled the generic Spellcaster tactics tables for Origins, and turned them into visual guides to what spells an NPC would need to execute those tactics - which is to say, a lot of the tables name higher level spells, and those imply the spells before them, even if those lower level spells don't get used by the game.

So, the next time you're looking at the SVG Map of Thedas and wondering how long it takes to get between two points, start counting boxes and use this list to help yourself around that problem:

So, re-reading WoTv2 this evening, I think this passage from Brother Genitivi (my man) gets a lot more interesting post-Trespasser. The Mysterious West (World of Thedas, Vol. 2) If one journeys west across the Anderfels, one will reach the settlement of Laysh. Once a sprawling port town, Laysh largely fell to ruin after the Third Blight…but not, as one might suppose, due to darkspawn attacks. The entire purpose of Laysh was to receive ships from across the Volca Sea, odd-looking cargo vessels that would arrive with wares and spices of a like never before seen in Thedas. The trade was lucrative enough to justify Laysh's existence even in such harsh territory, at least until the traders stopped coming early in the Black Age.

An exploration of paper-like materials mentioned in canon.

NOTES: Distance Grids: 30km is the approximate distance a human can travel on foot in a day. 60km is the approximate distance a horse can travel in a day. Speed and daily distance may vary depending on terrain, weather, physical fitness, total length of journey, and other factors. * Based on the assumption that Bioware devs' statement that Ferelden is roughly the size of England is correct. ** Based on the fact that Thedas seems like it should be s l i g h t l y larger (and not much else tbh). If you'd like to see your own calculations included as a distance grid, please contact me via the information in "Contribute" at the top of the page

I don't know about you, but when I was first considering the overall state of Thedas, mostly for worldbuilding purposes, I was semi-consciously thinking of it as a fairly typical pseudo-medieval-Europe. And that's natural enough, because in Origins, Ferelden really did look like that. Thatching, half-timbering, nobles in fortified castles, a fairly monolithic church around which much of society was built.

This was requested at @dawriting. File has transcriptions for all judgment scenes: Chief Movran, Denam, Alexius, Mayor Gregory, Erimond, Ser Ruth, Servis, Florianne, Mistress Poulin, Samson and Blackwall, plus Ser Barris' promotion scene on the throne and Storvacker's judgment in Jaws of Hakkon. # I've transcribed exactly as the subtitles showed, so the inconsistent capitalization of certain words (Templar/templar, Blight/blight) is intentional to reflect the spelling found in-game, as-is. # Denam's, Samson's and Blackwall's judgments have circular conditional dialogue, it is a bit hard to follow on a linear format. These will be made into flowcharts to read more clearly, I just wanted to write it all down first. # If the colors/bolding/italics make the text harder to read rather than helping with the flow, please do let me know.

So, Loghain's decision to poison Arl Eamon always seemed a little flimsy to me - until I actually went diving into the politics of Ferelden, after the occupation.

Anonymous asked: if i remember correctly bethany admits that being in the circle made her see the necessity for mage revolution, least in a defend the mages ending, but its been awhile since i played a non-mage hawke.

I mean Alistair's line about Templars not needing lyrium to use their abilities is generally disregarded as retconned by meta-commentary in the comics, but we actually can't disregard that line anymore because one of the possible endings to Inquisition is that Cullen opens a clinic to help Templars shed the lyrium addiction, and many Templars follow his example and sober up, and yet somehow are still able to remain Templars (which only makes sense if they're still able to use their Templar abilities, otherwise they'd just be generic soldiers).

ok everybody has probably already caught this by now, but I wanted to write it down - You have to judge the mayor of Crestwood for pretty much the same thing that Solas is responsible for (albeit on a much smaller scale). I couldn't have written a closer parallel if I tried - the mayor, in a position of authority, made the decision to unilaterally kill many innocent people in order to stop something he believed to be more terrible from happening (eta: and both were, perhaps, attempts to specifically stem the spread of the Blight - thank you for catching that, @rederiswrites!). Then living with guilt for years, all those deaths on his hands, wondering if he made the right call, until finally the truth was revealed. Where it gets interesting is when Solas reacts to the Mayor's punishment. And his reactions are almost the complete opposite of all the other companions.

So, it's implied in WoT2 that an Amell Warden is taken by the templars between 9:05 and 9:10. To quote the wiki: In the years after Leandra's leaving [9:05], several unfortunate events occurred within the Amell family, chief among them was when Revka's firstborn child was discovered to be a mage. Revka was seen sobbing in the streets, after the the Templars took away her child. After Revka's child was taken away, things only got worse for her and the Amell family. In the year 9:10 Dragon, Revka's aunt Bethann passed away after a second bout with cholera, the next year her uncle Aristide died of the same disease. Magic manifests, generally, between the ages of 6 and 12, which are the outer limits we see in canon. Which would make them about Hawke's age, and probably older.

Huh. This is an early banter between Solas and the Herald that I've somehow never heard or heard of before. Maybe it's old news to everyone else, but I hadn't encountered it. [...] I think that "attacked for no greater reason than their superstition" and "well enough to be suspicious" are both really interesting phrasings. I mean, he isn't just saying that they didn't want to listen. He's saying they attacked him and he doesn't trust them. And now more than ever I really want to know what those interactions really were and what went down, because that's more than just sour grapes because he offered wisdom 'from on high' and they didn't appreciate it.

This is a collection of posts and conversations about healing and medicine, both magical and non-magical, in Thedas. A lot of it is necessarily headcanon, but reading through some or all of these may help people formulate their own ideas of how these work, for writing purposes.

(all taken from the Last Flight tie-in novel) (non-plot spoilers, obvs)

So, for the meredith post, are you forgetting that the previous viscount was extorting money from the Orlesian navy and lynched the knight-commander who preceded meredith? ------------------------------- Hi, Anonymous person! I dunno. Perhaps I am! Are you forgetting that history is written by the victors, and that the Chantry and Orlais have been collectively winning at Thedas for about 900 years now? Because I'm not!

Either I'm forgetting something or I can't wrap my head around it. You're so smart and lore savvy, I was wondering if perhaps you could help me out! When elves go in to uthenara, they are asleep, right? And when people sleep, they basically go in to the Fade for a while? So before the Veil was put up... where did elves in uthenara go if there was no 'Fade'? Is it like a FADIER Fade? @_@

Because this is relevant to a thing I might do, I decided to look up what we know about the game of Diamondback. According to the DA Wiki trivia on Oghren's page, there is this bit of information: The card game Diamondback mentioned in Oghren's conversation with Alistair is a reference to a game of the same name in Dave Sim's Cerebus the Aardvark. That link goes to Wikipedia, which wasn't super useful, but I'll leave it in for the sake of how I got to where I did. With the magic of Google, I found a page of links and information on the comic mentioned. (I don't know that it's relevant, but it's interesting to note the name Cerebus.) Anyway, so I found this page. Which links to two different sites that have Diamondback information.