#fauxvelyan

[deusexlachina]

Wannabe Warden Part 6: Experience the illusion of free choice

In which I reveal why this run is so difficult.

I investigate a weird templar hazing ritual, ostensibly demanded by Knight-Commander Meredith, but without any paper trail and with a series of disappearances. Turns out it's demons and blood magic, because most weird things in Kirkwall turn out to be demons and blood magic at one level or another. Cullen from the Ferelden Circle knows this, but he always thinks mages are using demons and blood magic, so unsurprisingly his investigation hasn't made much headway.

In this case, Cullen happens to be right and the templar he's interrogating turns into a monster because of blood magic. This hideous mockery of his former self is extremely dangerous. Fortunately, dealing with blood magic and demons is the templars' job, so I defer to the experts and let Cullen get beaten senseless by the guy he was just interrogating and several other demons while we civilians watch from a nice safe distance. This must have been very cathartic for Anders.

(If you have trouble seeing Cullen, he's that little blue circle backed into a wall by a small army of demons).

Cullen points me to the Blooming Rose, where a sex worker, Viveka, gives me proof that the missing templars all visited one of her colleagues, Idunna, the Exotic Wonder of the East. Writing down "racial fetishization" to the templars' extremely long list of faults, alongside "routinely succumbing to demons and blood magic despite it being their entire job to prevent that," I thank her for the tip, whereupon she reminds me it's anonymous. I then pay a visit to Idunna and try to interrogate her. Idunna rubs the bed beside her and suggests we "have some fun," which causes Merrill to suggest we be nice to her before quickly apologizing for her context-inappropriate acute queer enthusiasm. I get a choice of three ways to interrogate her, corresponding to the three dispositions - diplomatic, glib or aggressive.

Idunna dodges the question, and then you get another chance to force the issue - again, with three options to express different dispositions. In a wonderfully creepy scene, all three of the options actually lead to you telling Idunna who exposed her as the music suddenly changes. I'm using a mod here that shows the actual spoken dialogue instead of the often-misleading paraphrases - cleverly, it deliberately uses the paraphrase text here, to preserve the sense of control being suddenly and unexpectedly taken away from you.

Idunna vows revenge on Viveka and then tells you to kill yourself. This is not a malding expression of spite but the insidious compulsion of a powerful maleficar, and the only thing that makes this less chilling is the fact that I'm staring right at those titties.

Fortunately my sister is there to save me. Any mage can save you, but Bethany takes priority - if she's in your party, you'll always call for your sister, even if this seems like more Merrill's expertise. A touching display of sisterly love. On a more cynical note, this is exactly why I brought Bethany - Anders has higher priority than Merrill, and I need Merrill so I can reassure her I don't kill blood mages and she'll feel more supported, and I need to bring him along so he can see my choices and disapprove of them so he will be a better person. This makes sense in the chaotic, labyrinthine mind of Aveline Hawke, and nobody else.

My freedom was taken away from me by dark magic. This is an ill portent of the lack of freedom I suffer for the rest of my time in Kirkwall. To give the (very relatively!) short version of how much there is to do and how little my choices matter at all:

To finance my trip to the Deep Roads (where I can become a Grey Warden), I investigate issues in a mine, where I save a miner from dragons and agree to co-owning the mine if it means I can get better conditions for the workers. This leads to exactly the same outcomes as if I co-owned it out of greed or refused to co-own it at all. When the boss asks me to get the miners back to work, I avoid this quest like the plague, because all involvement with the mine leads to all the miners dying horribly and I can only hope this will spare them.

Entirely unrelated to my Deep Roads Expedition - but absolutely mandatory to go down there for some reason - I need to deal with the Qunari, since Act 2 only makes sense if we know each other. So I kill some random Tal-Vashoth because a dwarf thinks it will impress the Qunari Arishok so he'll give him gunpowder, and he'll split the profits with me. After my mine adventure, I have no need for profits, and even if I did, the dwarf's plan doesn't work because the Arishok never agreed to it. But I have to do this.

Sister Petrice, the Priestess of Meanness, asks me to help smuggle out a Qunari prisoner away from his people's oppression. It turns out he's a mage, and the penalty for a Qunari mage running away is death. Empathizing with an oppressed mage, much like my sister, I help him escape, damn the consequences, which leads to me fighting the Qunari. I could have handed him over, in which case the Qunari would sentence me to death for travelling with a mage, which would lead to me fighting the Qunari.

I ask Sister Petrice What The Fuck, and she explains she was trying to incite a war between the Chantry and Qunari. I confess to the Arishok that I killed his men and warn him of Petrice's conspiracy. Later, the Qunari and Chantry will both proceed with their respective plans, and involve me to the same extent, whether I did this or not.

When slavers threaten to kill an apostate boy, Feynriel, I tell them I want to stop them more than I want to save the boy. This impresses Fenris and gives me a brief tongue-lashing from Feynriel, and then leads to exactly the same long-term outcomes as handling the hostage situation any other way.

When I come back, I tell a mage sympathizer in the templars, Ser Thrask, about his daughter, who resisted being kidnapped by the slavers but turned into a monster and - say it with me - had to be euthanized. I tell him his secret his safe, which impresses Merrill and Other Aveline. Later, Thrask goes to me for help, noting my cooperation with him, but he would've gone to me for help even if I'd blackmailed him instead.

Thrask sends me to resolve a tense situation with apostates before his rival, Ser Karras, arrives and kills them all. Despite this seeming like a contrived good-cop-bad-cop routine, I have to work with Thrask - again, mandatory to the Deep Roads Expedition. Somehow.

When I kill the apostates' boss (a blood mage who uses demons) I have the choice to either have them arrested or help them escape, which in turn gives me the choice to fight Karras or trick him into Going Somewhere Else, which in turn can be done either with Varric or with a glib Hawke. All of these eventually lead to the apostates being caught so they can appear later.

And here is the problem I faced when planning a gimmick run for Dragon Age 2: How do you do a gimmick run when all runs are mostly the same? I was inspired by #fauxvelyan, a run of Inquisition in which the Inquisitor, Trevelyan, is secretly the same person as Warden Cousland (in disguise of course). So I decided to use context instead of content to make things fresh - the dialogue is the same, but in a very real sense, it's very much not, because, for example, my name is Aveline.

I hope you enjoyed/skipped/hated that brief glimpse into my dark imagination. Regardless of your reaction, I'll post part 7 tomorrow.

[officecyborg]

Herald of Ferelden: Confronting the Truth

With the battle at Adamant looming, tempers around Skyhold are wearing thin. Blackwall and I have words about his increasingly obvious lack of familiarity with the Grey Warden lore, and how he keeps asking me to run around the Hinterlands finding Warden scrolls and documents to hastily read in my presence. I cast aspersions onto his dubious Grey Warden identity as harshly as I can without revealing my true identity as a Grey Warden:

This is the sad, weak defence of a man who secretly wants to get caught. And speaking of men getting caught:

When I go to the tavern, I discover Cassandra and Varric feuding. We now know that Varric was actively hiding Hawke's location until now, and Cassandra, who was interrogating him about this through all 50 hours of DA2, is pissed. It falls to me to intervene. Or not intervene.

"First, Leliana and I searched for the Hero of Ferelden, but she had vanished," Cassandra says, before blaming Varric's deception for the fact that Justinia died at the Conclave.

I reckon this is a bit harsh, when Leliana knows exactly where I am and was doing the exact same thing. I tell her that this wasn't Varric's fault. Varric adds on, ominously, that if Hawke had been at the Conclave, he probably would have died too.

Alone, Cassandra gives me a peek under her Heavy Armour, revealing that this is really about her failures. She feels a fool for not having prevented this. "We're all fools, Cassandra," I say, continuing to fool her.

But Cassandra's concerns about Varric's reticence might be a moot point. Hawke is tripping death flags left and right.

🚨🚨SUTHERLAND WATCH🚨🚨

I let my girlfriend dress them up in little fancyboy scarves.

[officecyborg]

Herald of Ferelden: My Tenth Demon Army in As Many Years

I have reached a conclusion: the only way to protect myself from Corypheus's ability to control Grey Wardens is strength in numbers. And by strength in numbers, I mean muddying the waters by having all of my other companions also dress up as Grey Wardens.

Ha! That will fool him.

(My companions' individuality was of the utmost consideration when designing their armour. Blackwall's shining silver is offset by "Darkened" blue-black fabric accents, speaking to his duality. Varric's armour is made of Nugskin and Paragon's Lustre but tinted to match his colour palette, a reference to his complex family history. And Dorian is wearing Silk Brocade because he is a show-off.)

Hawke, Stroud, and our party arrive just in time to discover Magister Erimond directing the Grey Wardens in a heinous blood magic ritual. The 1/3 of the Wardens who are mages are killing the 2/3 of Grey Wardens who are not mages with their regulation-issue secret stabbin' knife, in order to summon a horde of demons. This is a bad plan. Not least of all because it's wasteful. Merrill could produce that much blood with a finger poke.

I cut to the chase and address the Wardens bluntly, telling them that this plan really is quite stupid and will accomplish the exact opposite of what they're trying to do:

The Wardens are not receptive, thanks to Erimond's mental control and off-centre eye-shines, and despite my cunning diversion, Erimond is able to identify me anyway by the glowing green hand that I have when people mention it in cutscenes. He turns his sinister magical influence onto me, overwhelming me with carpal tunnel:

But Erimond has underestimated Cousland, or perhaps the power of wrist braces and gentle stretching. I perform the "Rift Close" animation, and the decisiveness of this gesture breaks Erimond's control, somehow.

Knowing he is temporarily bested, Erimond sics his demons on us, and we are thrown into combat as he runs away. (I'm not quite sure where he is running away to, as the ritual platform doesn't have any stairs or a back door, and we're surrounded by desert wilderness. Maybe he's using one of those teleportation stones that Final Fantasy Tactics villains are always popping off at critical health.)

Erimond may have escaped us, but we know where he's headed: Adamant Fortress, home of the Wardens. We deduced this from the subtle clue that it's one of two inhabited buildings in the Western Approach.

[officecyborg]

There's this pretty neat dungeon called the Still Ruins, which might be the only other use of time magic in all of DAI. Thanks to an ill-advised Tevinter lab experiment, a constructed Fade rift sent demons pouring into the lab and brought down the building. But one of the mages stopped time mid-disaster, so that you walk in years later on this preserved crisis with rubble falling from the ceiling above your head. You have to figure out how to un-freeze time, which of course means that everything blows up very quickly and you have to fight your way back out through the now un-frozen demons. Cool concept. Like the one good scene in X-Men: Apocalypse.

That said, when I walked in, I didn't even question why they weren't moving. I just assumed it was another bug. Normal day in the Western Approach.

[officecyborg]

In the "Look for Cole" scene where he bungles reassuring a healer, there are several possible outcomes, all fairly similar. If you allow Cole to use his spirit powers to save scum the interaction, he'll try again, this time reassuring the woman that she could "work until [she] fell down" and still not be able to save everyone. Or, you can intervene and suggest he "just talk to her," in which case he'll start off awkwardly before finding his feet and landing on the same approach.

Or, as seen here, you can just steal his line and do it yourself.

[officecyborg]

Herald of Ferelden: Everyday Heroes

Taking a break from Here Lies the Abyss for a very special update, focusing on a very special character. That's right, it's finally time to spotlight the riveting sidequest NPC that everyone knows and loves.

This is Donal Sutherland, a character who, despite appearing to be just another one of Dragon Age's patented Canada Jokes, is actually the quest-giver for arguably the most involved series of war table missions in the game. You find Sutherland bussing tables in a part of the tavern inconveniently located behind the wall of Sera's room. As long as you don't encourage him to keep bussing tables, he will gradually build a competent patrol crew featuring other beloved irrelevant side-characters.

Although sidequests like this are usually the sort that Cousland would respond to with "Tell me your problems or I'll kick your head in," I've never followed the Sutherland questline to completion (what with it taking 9+ real-life hours and being extremely easy to halt prematurely), and decided to humour the guy for once.

As you can see, after sending him on a couple of pointless bandit patrols, the Sutherland crew has now metastasized to include Discount Solas and A Rogue, By Process of Elimination.

We'll be checking in on Sutherland and Company from time to time, because you literally have to check in with him to continue with each step of the questline. I'm sure the payoff for doing all this will be rich. Emotionally. Monetarily.

[officecyborg]

I've never picked this dialogue before because it's a little aggro, but lol.

[officecyborg]

While exploring Crestwood, we found an area with nothing but a cart of several opened crates of what appear to be lemons. This is a small fishing village, they're hardly going to sea. What do they need all these lemons for? Why were they abandoned (judging by the state of the fire) under an hour ago?

I ask Blackwall to contemplate the lemons with me.

We find more lemons, this time sitting on a bench by the fire.

Cole and I contemplate the lemons. Dorian, an iconoclast yet afraid of confronting the truly inexplicable, turns his back on the lemons.

Cole offers a theory, which I assume to be related to the lemons.

Fascinating.

Dorian confronts his fears, finally daring to contemplate the lemons.

[officecyborg]

As tumblr continues to censor my videos I'll just have to use more gifs to show off this slick Artificer spike trap tactic which I am growing fond of (when I manage to pull it off).

[officecyborg]

The people of Crestwood live a harsh life, having to subsist as they do off of scavenged goods from passing lords and ladies, such as infinite Enhanced Amulets of Willpower.

[officecyborg]

Herald of Ferelden: Grey Wardens Under Grey Skies

The Cousland Crew make our way to Crestwood for a meeting with Hawke's mysterious, unnamed Warden contact. On arrival, we immediately run into a group of Grey Wardens looking for a "rogue" Warden. It seems they're not looking for a Rogue Warden, though, so I put this from my mind.

Crestwood is one of the best main quests in DAI, perhaps because it's operating firmly in the series's wheelhouse: We travel somewhere to meet an important NPC, when we arrive, the area is menaced by [undead/darkspawn/demons/bandits], and we have to solve the local mystery on our way. It doesn't get bogged down in unmoored open-world exploration.

Unfortunately though, the map is still open-world, so I manage to bypass the town of Crestwood entirely. The result is that I end up at the bandit stronghold first, Cole announces that it's occupied, and, I guess in some kind of post-Western-Approach fugue state, I instinctively take over the fortress for no reason.

(Between my Artificer pyrotechnics and Dorian's Walking Bomb Necromancer build, our battle style can best be described as Stealthy Kabooms.)

Circling back around to Crestwood, the correct way this time, I learn that the town had-been-being menaced by bandits, making my fortress takeover retroactively a good deed.

I don't complete the quest, though, because that causes a hopeful ray of sun to dawn over the landscape, and I prefer Crestwood when it's raining. Onward to the smuggler's cave, where I meet Hawke's Warden contact... uh... this guy:

Man, I was sure it was going to be Howe's stupid son.

I hesitantly ask if this is Riordan, the only Orlesian Warden I know. Hawke introduces him as "Stroud." I don't know any Warden named Stroud. Hawke says that he's an acquaintance of Anders, and was like, pretty important during Dragon Age 2. You had to be there.

Stroud is a little suspicious of me. I think I manage to throw him off my scent, though:

Stroud informs us that Corypheus is the one responsible for all Grey Wardens hearing their Calling simultaneously. Some of them are being mind-controlled, but most are in fact just spurred by fear. So not on! They're making me look bad!

So is fellow "Warden" Blackwall, who, in what is either a cause for concern or a real brain fart moment, seems to suggest he doesn't know what the Calling is:

I can't focus on my suspicions right now, though. While Corypheus hasn't been able to control me so far, even the possibility is enough to leave me unsettled. I begin to brainstorm contingency plans.

[officecyborg]

Herald of Ferelden: Warden Contact List

I encounter my new Arcanist, who leads with, "Oh, you're her!" I rack my brains trying to place this "Dagna," and she reminds me that I helped her on a sidequest during the Fifth Blight. While Dagna seems to approve of my efforts, I'm less than thrilled to have a third person in on my secret identity. I go off to meet with someone who has no connection to my days as a Grey Warden: Anders's boyfriend.

Thought that guy died when I failed to upgrade Vigil's Keep, but glad he came out, I guess.

Hawke (who has somehow managed to hear "only good things" about me), explains that Corypheus has the power to mind-control Grey Wardens. "That's not good for the Wardens," I muse unhappily.

Luckily, Hawke has a contact in the Wardens. No, it isn't Anders.

"Velanna?" I offer.

"No, it's not Velanna either," says Hawke.

"...Oghren?"

"You could just wait for me tell you who my Warden contact is," Hawke suggests.

He proceeds to not tell me who his Warden contact is. Instead, I'm to meet both of them in an old smuggler's cave in Crestwood, which isn't suspicious at all.

...Sigrun? No wait, I've got it: Riordan--

[officecyborg]

Artificer may actually be the most fun I have ever had playing DAI, not least of all because I've realized that setting traps won't take you out of stealth, meaning that you can actually just walk up to an enemy and "set a trap" immediately under their feet like Wile E. Coyote.

[officecyborg]

From the tone of this letter, you might think my contractual het hubby is miffed with me. But I actually didn't inform him I was doing all this when I left Ferelden to investigate the Calling. I'm sure he'll laugh about the misunderstanding later, when I tell him. Eventually.

Hey wait, actually, I never thought about this before, but why doesn't Alistair ever bring up the Calling if he's king? Hm. That seems like a plot hole. Or it would be, if Queen Cousland weren't on the case.

[officecyborg]

I've respecced as an Artificer archer just in time for an archery competition adjudicated by my girlfriend of ten years:

Varric is banned from participating. In the interest of fairness.

Perhaps Varric feels a little self-conscious about this, because he decides to openly mock my instructor Three-Eyes while he's standing right there:

[officecyborg]

Imported Mattias Hawke for laughs (and also because the Hawke I actually made for the Cousland Kingdom worldstate, "Lady Hawke," just kinda looks like me again, and that would be weird).