Dragon Age Meta Nexus

Just some of my highlighting from the Dragon Age RPG book re: Circle structure that I thought I'd share, since I can't be the only one who sometimes struggles understanding how Circle politics work.

How do surnames work in Thedas, anyway?

Kind of a random question, but do you know if ships in the Dragon Age universe have canons? I know Qunari ships have something, but I mean ships like the ones the Raiders of the Waking Sea use. Trying to figure out how naval combat works in DA. The qunari are the only culture who have the knowledge of gaatlok aka black powder aka gunpowder, and as such, their dreadnaughts have canons.

In DA:O's city elf origin, you have the option to speak with two young elves who tell you they do not know of any elven heroes. Considering the Chantry's active erasure of elven history, this is not surprising. But there are great elven heroes and notable figures, past and present.

In the world of Thedas, an Exalted March is a religious crusade led by the Chantry. A Divine declares an Exalted March in the name of the Maker, and because the Chantry has authority above national politics, as well as control over the Circles of Magi, they have instant armies of thousands, promised to have a special seat beside the Maker for their participation. In 2:10 Glory, Divine Renata I declared the first Exalted March since Andraste's day against the elves of the Dales. Why? It's a tad more complicated than a simple summary, but much less so than some claim it to be.

If someone joined the templar order and showed aptitude for it, could they be asked to join the Seekers? Or is that selection made while the person is still a brother or a sister? [...] So it would seem that yes, it can happen, although not as often as getting recruited straight from the get-go, like Cassandra.

As tumblr's resident Dalish expert, would you happen to know anything about Dalish courtship or marriage traditions? I know DA:O has a city elf marriage but they don't know/follow a lot of elven traditions.

Just like our world, there is the human race, and then within the human race are different racial/ethnic backgrounds, coming from different parts of the world. This is a Cole's Notes-type post about the humans of Thedas.

Offhand Dragon Age Fact #8: Orlesian masks are designed to show who's noble family you are a part of/work for. In The Masked Empire, Briala gives the example of if a lord's house mask was a lion carved from ivory and inlaid with onyx and gold, his servants' masks would be lions as well, painted black and lined with brass.

how does magic word in da? does it only come from a mage's hands? so if a mage was an amputee without their hands they wouldn't be able to perform any magic at all? No, a mage amputee could absolutely still perform magic!

Upon asking for preferences between me working on a post about chevaliers or the Right of Annulment, the selling point for me was that someone said they don't really know a lot about the chevaliers. And I can get that, because while there actually is a fair amount of information about them, it's all spread out in bits across media. Some of it paints a very romantic picture of knights in shinning armour, ready to rescue princesses from dragons. But it wouldn't be part of upper class Orlesian culture if there wasn't shit underneath all that armour polish now, would it?

(So over a year ago I was trying to dig as deeply in to the Dragon Age lore as I could having beaten the first two games after their release. In the process I searched high and low for a timeline that put every bit of media in to chronological order as that was how I wanted to tackle it and to help see the big picture. I found one that was out of date and inaccurate so I ended up making one of my own and updated it as I checked out everything first hand. So after using it for my own reference for quite some time I decided to put it on here. This is what I've managed to come up with so far. Any suggestions or questions are welcome. I'll update this as new information comes forward. This includes all related media that I could find, and goes off of the most recent official information that I can gather in game and out.)

These are all taken from the toolset (mostly under "cuss" in the soundsets, but also from various bits of dialogue), organized for your convenience.

All information is taken from in-game item descriptions, codex entries, war table missions, and extended lore material (such as the RPG book.)

I thought I had a thing, so I replayed Golems of Amgarrak (which should tell you how much I thought I had a thing, because I fricking hate Amgarrak), and I am no closer to either proving or disproving the thing than I was before I dragged poor Alim's ass through the Deep Roads but I'm going to try to verbalise this anyway

Or, Falling Into The Sky: Why The Dwarves Aren't So Wrong After All "You can't go outside! You'll fall into the sky!" Orzammar dwarves cry, in defiance of countless surface dwarves, Grey Wardens, and other surfacers repeatedly telling them that they won't. And, indeed, in defiance of the fact that they themselves aren't all glued to Orzammar's ceiling.

It occurred to me that I haven't actually seen any in-depth commentary on the Forgotten Ones since Trespasser came out... which is kind of a shame, because I think we can make some fairly educated guesses about them, their natures and their motivations now.

So the answer is sort of both. The canvas presumably packs away into the aravel when the clan's on the move, then opens out again when they stop. There's a schematic here. [...] There is no way in hell that Dalish clans are as small as we usually see: the one in Origins is maybe 30 or 40 people, and the one in DA2 is even less than that. I'd guess the actual average clan size, if Bioware had infinite memory and resources to dedicate to making it realistic, would be around 100-200? Enough for breeding, at least.

The Awakening-to-DA2 timeline doesn't make a huge amount of sense, no. Awakening does take less than a year (it's only about six months, apparently) but the maths still doesn't work out. And it's all the fault of Seneschal Varel.

She knows very little about human society because she was not raised in it. The first human she ever met was Duncan. The second human she ever met was probably Hawke.