Dragon Age Meta Nexus

His full pen name is, actually, "Philliam, a Bard!". The exclamation point is part of the pen name, and he gets pissy if you drop it. He's like the Buzzfeed of Thedas, editing up important articles and scholarly works for mass consumption by taking out all the boring parts and leaving mostly just the sex and violence. [...]

We don't really know much about who this man was. Wynne doesn't say much about him. The only narrative we really have in the game about Wynne's pregnancy is her very brief account:

So… I am sure I'm not the first to notice this, but I find it a little interesting that Imshael decides to spare the children of Clan Virnehn. It's very similar to the story we hear about the Slow Arrow. Like, almost identical. Fen'Harel is summoned to kill a great beast and protect the village. He does so, but only after he allows the beast to kill everyone in the village except the children, thereby fulfilling his promise. Imshael is summoned to make a keystone, which he does, but then tricks and kills the majority of the clan, except the children. In both cases, Fen'Harel and Imshael fulfill their bargain, but twist the deal.

I get very frustrated with the people who hear the Starkhaven accent (Scottish in the games) and assume this must mean that Starkhaven = Scotland, that everyone is wearing kilts, and that bagpipes sound in the streets. I have a few different reasons for this, but the main one is this: It Doesn't Make Sense

Anonymous asked: Are we sure the Alamarri were being called across the sea to Tevinter? Or beyond Tevinter across the Volca Sea? The Saga of Tyrdda Bright-Axe only mentions the Waking Sea. "Cross the Waking, eat the gilded city's fill." That doesn't rule out crossing the Volca Sea too - there's nothing that states how far north they were meant to go, and Tevinter doesn't actually exist at this point, the specific destination is left vague - but I don't have any thoughts on what lies across the Volca Sea. I'm more interested in the idea that this is the same call the Tevinter magisters heard, but over a thousand years earlier.

Transcript below the cut. Thanks to @penbrydd for help with some of the dates between Tevinter and Chantry Calendars. :) @daydreamingofdragons for mentioning the Codex that led to this monstrosity O.o :)

If anyone's interested here is a searchable copy of the(almost?) full script of Dragon age Inquisition that someone's pulled directly from the game files and uploaded. It should be useful for anyone looking to find snippets of dialogue for meta and such, esp. if you play on console, or aren't tech savvy enough to go through the game files for it. Edit: This isn't actually the full script, it's missing the dialogue from the cutscenes, but it covers every other conversation/banter/ambient piece of dialogue in the game so it's still p useful.

about Titans and the Blight and the Evanuris, etc. (answer to a question I got before) from what I've discovered, my best guess is that the Titans (more specifically, the Blight unleashed by killing the Titans) were the last straw for Solas, in addition to Mythal's murder. It was a war against the dwarves/Titans that caused the Evanuris to be worshiped as gods, then "an aeon seems to pass" and, apparently, about the same time when Fen'Harel was rebelling against the gods about the slaves, something ominous starts to emerge from deep within the earth, where the Titans were killed…

I've taken all dialog listed here and added a few more. (Thanks to justjasper for the link!) I will be going through and recording all of them, crossing them out as I go and linking to them as they are posted. If you see anything missing or if there's a line of dialog you just want to see recorded let me know and I'll add it to the list! I'll be using this tag if you want to go through and see everything that has been posted so far.

You know how I was rambling about how DA2's Qunari plotline is all about Chantry control the other day? Playing through Act 3 now, I'm just now noticing what happened to the old Qunari compound.

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.