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The Advisors of the Inquisition: Lord Poncyfart (all ruffled), Knifey Shivdark (all hidden) and Captain Swordface (all marchy)

au where when you met sera and ask her if she offers nobles/spies/soldiers she just steals the job and clothes of one of your advisors. maybe of all of them. she is all your advisors now. imagine

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Nughumper and Branka are definitely in the leed here for very different reasons but I love them both equally. Maybe I should give him two. Man who can never be normal about his wife and will always find a way to be vulgar gets two dogs he doesn't want who help him find alcohol

So if Oghren ended up with a mabari the question is...what stupid name would he call the dog?

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This is a self indulgent poll but it's my self indulgent poll. If you're interested in any of this then uhhhhh yeah it's coming and by coming I mean I want to write the entire first draft before I publish it so I'm estimating like December 2025. However, I will be dropping updates and taking questions etc. etc. prior to that and I AM super excited so expect to hear stuff from me.

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So if Oghren ended up with a mabari the question is...what stupid name would he call the dog?

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I think it indicates a fundamental lack of comprehension skills (and empathy) to characterize Kaidan Alenko, whose backstory is "I was kidnapped by the military and taken to an isolated space station so they could experiment on me without pesky oversight from the Space UN and survived profound physical and emotional abuse at the hands of the adult in whose care I was placed." as whiny or fucking boring, lmao. He's constantly downplaying the trauma he went through at BAaT, even going so far as to stop himself mid-stream to redirect and remind Shepard that he didn't have it that bad.  It takes three whole conversations for him to tell the entire story because the minute he starts getting into the details of what happened to him there he shuts himself down and apologizes for bothering Shepard and wasting their time!!

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Tracery: A Symphony in Bronze by Timothy Cleary

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random assortment of shitpost

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Day 4 - Childhood Memories

Dialogue is from when you talk to Illario in Minrathous after Lucanis dies before the last battle. I'm terribly sorry.

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Oof Fenris didn't sign up for all this saving mages affair....... but was brought along anyway

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forgot i can post art on tumblr

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I think one thing genuinely missing from Veilguard was court intrigue. This is of course true from the perspective of the events in game but it is also, crucially, true from the glimpses we see into Solas/The Dread Wolfs past prior to the veil coming down.

One of the most intriguing little moments in DAI is when Solas begins waxing poetic about how he missed court intrigue, politics, how these places linger with sex. If you call him on that and ask hey WHEN did you experience that, he immediately gives you disapproval. This is the closest the inquisitor can get prior to trespasser to catching him in an outright lie and KNOWING it.

Further, the dalish tales that we have heard about Solas say that he could walk in multiple worlds, and pass himself off as whatever the moment called for; that's one of his trickster aspects.

Yet in absolutely all of the visions we see in the past the rebellion is literally just fighting or breaking into a location to fight in there. The closest we get to that not being the case is breaking into ghilianhans lab but even then it's just fight fight fight the whole way through. When Solas and Elganan are speaking to one another, they frame it as them being family or siblings having an argument rather than as the sort of political rivals that I had imagined from DAI.

Part of me wonders if this was yet another sacrifice of Joplin (the original plan for DA4) which was a sneaky heist game. Joplin sounded like it would take a lead on some of its major missions from missions in the past like Wicked Eyes Wicked Hearts in DAI and Mark of the Assassin in DA2. DAtV simplified a lot of those concepts down, making the game polished in terms of technical gameplay but lacking in critical roleplay decisions which I think are more key to a game focused around politics and court intrigue. The decision to make Solas a lone actor rather than the leader of the dreadwolfs agents also slashed the chance at this; making the game the first in the series where none of the companions have ulterior motives in joining your group/none of them are lying to you.

But ultimately I do think it's sad we never truly got to see Solas act the dreadwolf in regard to court politics. It sounded like he really did miss it and it sounded like a side of him that we had only glimpsed briefly in DAI; I was excited to see it in all it's glory.

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i will die your daughter.

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my fav part of origins is the fact that it's a love letter to "the end does not justify the means". the entire game, in almost every quest, this is the constant question that's thrown at us. everyone in the story tells us that they did what they did because it would achieve the best outcome. from uldred's uprising in the circle tower, to zathrian's cursing of the werewolves, to bhelen's coup. loghain himself uses this as justification for the retreat at ostagar - that it was the morally correct decision to abandon the field, because it guaranteed some of the army would survive and could regroup for a new assault on the darkspawn in ostagar. and it's so specific that loghain, as the primary antagonist, loghain is the one arguing that the ends justifies the means because he is either your parallel, or your mirror.

to be more specific, my favourite thing about origins is that you, as the player character, are faced with the exact same choice. you will always resolve the circle tower uprising. you will always resolve the issue between the dalish and the werewolves. you will always settle the secession crisis in orzammar. you will always fight the archdemon and win over it. but how? what are your means? will you murder a child to spare redcliffe? will you slaughter cornered circle mages trapped in a tower with no escape? will you kill innocent werewolves who had nothing to do with a tragedy that happened hundreds of years ago? will you support a king that has his own family's blood on his hands because he wants change or a king that's more committed to culture & tradition over justice?

does it matter? to you? to anyone? why does it matter, if you're going to get to the same place in the story at the end?

and the story tells you. again and again. it matters. it matters because the ends do not justify the means. to roughly quote ursula k le guin, it matters because there is no end - you start the awakening dlc as your own warden if you survived, or as an orlesian warden if not. so, all you have left is the means.

it's very clumsy in a lot of places, and there's obvious issues if you look at each case in closer detail (e.g. the ideas around social justice re: dalish elves & mages), but overall, this is the kind of story that makes origins so special to me tbh. it really holds up a mirror to this kind of cold, utilitarian morality that's so often rewarded in "dark" fantasy genres. like idk it's very good to me.