#coming to terms with the fact that I am not enjoying Veilguard and think it's pretty terrible which I know is a controversial statement here

[jawsandbones]

[yellingaboutmasseffect]

Griffons are not Long Termed Fucked: Real Life Animal Conservation Success for your Fantasy World Building

So the Dragon Age AMA sure was a thing. I am not going touch on any of the rest of it besides the future of the griffons, especially as someone who just played Inquisition and Veilguard. The reason I want to touch on the griffons is because animals are an interest of mine and I greatly admire the work that has gone into conservation and breeding programs across the world. Hopefully, y'all enjoy me theorizing about griffons with what I know.

Before we get into it, I would like to thank @ellstersmash for screenshotting the AMA and posting it here. Below the cut is going to be a screenshot from their post. Beyond the cut is spoilers for Veilguard so beware if you are avoiding those.

Ok, let's get the first thing out of the way, is 13 individuals ideal? Of course not but that does not make the situation impossible. I am going to go at this from "what would be most ideal" in the scenario that the game presents.

Aren't Assan and the other griffons siblings?

I think it is important to remember that Davrin is the one who says this. None of the Wardens involved in finding or raising the griffons would know that information. In fact, the only person that would know that is Isseya, who hid the eggs.

The wardens and Davrin were concerned in raising and training these young griffons. At that age, it didn't seem like they were thinking of the breeding possibilities in the future and considered them "siblings" because they were found and hatched together.

There is some visual cues that could point to the griffons not being from the same clutch. When you go back to the Hossberg Wetlands after rescuing the griffons, they can be found hanging amongst the wardens and they are surprisingly colorful and each seem to be inspired by different birds when it comes to their colors. While it is completely possible that is just how griffons were, it could point to a situation where Isseya stole an egg from 13 different clutches. It would make sense that when the griffons were wiped out, Warden command would have noticed if entire clutches disappeared but what about just an egg from each clutch? While this is the best case scenario, I do feel it's entirely plausible and would mean each griffon of our 13 have different parents.

In short, they could very well be siblings but there is no reason they couldn't be eggs from 13 different mated pairs of griffons. Hopefully Bioware goes with the later.

EDIT: As @siderealtide very helpfully pointed out in their reblog, we do know they are all siblings from one clutch from the story, Last Flight, as Isseya did cut them out of 1 dying griffon.

Given.... everything it could get retconned or as Siderealtide also pointed out as well they could be more mammalian like cats and have multiple fathers if their mother was especially frisky ( that would be fantastic for the situation. Not ideal but not insurmountable). Or magic but I did not feel knowledgeable enough on what is possible with magic in Dragon Age to theorize on that for this post. Back to the original post.

2. But isn't 13 griffons still too few?

Now there are ideal situations, which this isn't, but that doesn't make it impossible. It would make the griffons susceptible to a falling prey to a disease or scenario that deceased griffons might have had the genetic diversity to combat but none of the surviving 13 have the genes to weather through. That is not guaranteed to happen (and this is a fictional scenario.)

There are also some remarkable examples of animals coming back with similar odds.

The California Condor, my beloved. By 1982, only 23 individuals remained so they were all taken into captivity by the California Condor Recovery Program for a captive breeding program. In such programs they can arrange for mating pairs for ideal genetic diversity and hand rear individuals to ensure as many of the young live to adulthood. Today, there are over 500 California Condors in the wild and in captivity combined.

The Black Footed Ferret's program started with 18 individuals and 1000 are now in the wild!

In short, not ideal but not impossible. Even if you make a certain choice in game.

3. Ok, so how would the griffon breeding program work?

So I do believe both the Dalish/Veiljumpers and the Wardens would be capable of doing such efforts depending on your choice in game. They don't have as many tools at their disposal for optimal pairings or detecting genetic makeup, but they could do pedigrees to track who mated with whom and when.

Ideally, there would be more female griffons than males since the female griffons can lay eggs (hopefully more than one at a time). You could then pair a female and male griffon together until they produce a clutch/or clutches successfully before rotating in another male partner to repeat the process. From there, you would keep track of their ancestry to produce ideal mating pairs going forward and keep it as genetically varied as possible. In this ideal scenario, griffons don't mate for life and if there is lore about that, refer to my earlier disclaimer about my dragon age knowledge.

4. What about that 50/500 thing?

That came from Google AI summary. I admit I have never heard that rule before but it's more complicated than saying these numbers are required across the board.

5. Why did you make this post?

Like I said, it's a special interest of mine. I love watching Nat Geo shows about accredited zoos and learning about their conservation efforts. Environmental doomerism serves no one. Yeah, there will be times where we can't save species but people have shown time and time again that it is possible even under very bleak circumstances. So yeah in part this was about hope for these fictional griffons but I also if you got a little hope about real life conservation efforts, that's nice too.

[hyperfixationstation128]

A Question For My Fellow Dragon Age Enjoyers

So it's pretty much no secret that I've been in love with the Dragon Age series for a very long time, having played the Origins when I was 9 years old. Of course, as an avid lover of all things medieval fantasy adjacent or related, I fawned over the games and their stories. I love the lore and history of the world and after having completed the games, I can only say that I'm satisfied with how things ended. I love how the game sets up the potential return of Rook (either as a PC or not, I'd love to see them again.

But that brings me to my question. Well, I suppose it's more of an announcement. Since 2012, I have been working on a fancomic for the games. With the completion of Veilguard finally on my roster, it's my firm belief that I'm ready to announce the fancomic I've been working on for the past 13 years: Through the Eluvian.

Through the Eluvian is definitely a self-indulgent piece of fan work, but it's one I've worked on for years and am very proud of. Depicting the adventures of a girl from our world who is gifted an ornate mirror with strange carvings in its frame after the passing of the elderly woman she was a volunteer caretaker for. Being an avid rabid fan of the games and having studied it's lore to the point of being able to translate some Elven, she accidentally activates the mirror and is pulled into the world of Thedas several months before the beginning of Origins.

Finding herself not only in need of guidance and protection, she wields her encyclopedic knowledge of the games to guide each of its main heroes! Directing them down the path with the greatest outcome. Now, this might make her seem like a Mary Sue, but I assure you, she's not. Girly goes through it and has to come to terms with the fact that sometimes, no matter how hard you try to stop things from happening, they will happen anyway.

Now, I don't want to give too much away about the story, so now I'll ask the aforementioned question: Would anyone be interested in reading a story like this? I think I'd still post it even if the answer is "no", but I want the opinions of my fellow fans and artists.

I'm gonna follow up this post with some pictures of the main character, Caleo Lazaar, once I'm off from work. In the meantime, let me know your thoughts! Any questions you might have are welcomed and appreciated!

See y'all on the flip side!

[pizzleyanked]

dragon age veilguard review embargo thoughts. no spoilers. in sum: i am so sad. i did see it coming but i must admit that a part of me was hoping that the reviews after the embargo would bring me a spark. it didn't & i'm so sorry to my da mutuals who are excited about the game. i wish that was me as well.

while i can't forget the way that ea selectively did not hand out review codes to those who were more critical of the game after the preview event, i do think that from a financial standpoint the game will be the w that the studio needs to persist. of course ea's actions piss me off, but that's not on bioware or on the game. it is ea, the publisher, who conducts this part of the marketing. i do urge everyone to wait for reviews to drop possibly late next week for purchasing decisions. it is a known fact that ea has had a heavy hand on the review scale.

quite frankly, it is a miracle that the game is coming out at all, and i wholeheartedly commend the workers at bioware and the writers who have since then been laid off without fair compensation for their hard work. if you asked me two years ago, i would tell you that the game wouldn't happen at all. i love the environmental visuals and the art direction, although there are specific design philosophies that i dislike (namely, the darkspawn and playable qunari looking like that AND different from the other, properly qun qunari we see. i see bioware failing yet again to be normal about the qun). i love the effort the team put into the granular difficulties (and i see that one can, indeed, customize enemy hp. nightmare difficulty should not have scaled enemy hp up because all i see is everyone complain that nightmare is hp sponge fest, but luckily one can create a reduced enemy hp nightmare mode), and customizable hud.

it is however not a dragon age game that i currently see myself enjoying. from every preview material there was something about the tone of the writing that didn't sit right with me. i never expected the game to be purely grim, because no bioware game ever was. and i always appreciated the levity in a shitty world. to me it was always more that the writing felt insecure to me, in a sense that it over-expositions, over-explains itself. it needs to explain itself in no ambiguous terms, and to me it felt hamfisted in the snippets shown by various reviewers. nuance and ambiguity have largely been erased. consequences are spelled out to you in no uncertain terms; the game affirms what will happen based on your choices in a way that quite frankly takes me out of the experience. and as someone who plays rpgs for the immersion and ambiguity in both storytelling and decision making, this is what tells me that the game is not a game for me. i don't want a game that will take my hand and show me what it wants me to see, the way it wants me to see it. i want a game to drop me in its universe and let me cup my way around as a newborn kitten.

there's two reviews i'd like to highlight. one is mortym's, with whom i have historically disagreed on the matter of dragon age, but wholeheartedly respect. he is not a story and themes and romance guy, but i appreciate his holistic approach to game systems, and in that regard the game really impressed him to the point he considers it to be his goty. the other is skill up, who i mostly watch for his weekly roundup, but whose reviews i tend to enjoy for the way he explains his positioning, whether i agree or disagree. surprisingly, shill up did not show up. he spends a lot of time going over the art direction, which i did like, unlike him. but his criticism on the writing was the only one other than the guardian's review that mirrored my own perspective.

it's not the game i would like to play, but it is shaping to be the one that bioware needs right now.