#here lies the abyss ( quests )

[maleficore]

I'm not going to lie the whole Grey Warden plot with Alistair in Inquisition bothers me so much because I don't think it makes any sense for Clarel to get away with branding him a traitor in my worldstate. It's never outright stated, but since he's said to be the senior-most Warden after coming back from the fade and with the Orlesian Warden-Commander dead outranks every Grey Warden in the fortress my assumption has always been that he's not just "a Hero of the Fifth Blight", but has a high position in the Fereldan branch of the order to go with it. Hero of Ferelden still signs their letter as Warden-Commander and with a romanced Alistair the whole thing gives off a really strong second-in-command vibes so like?? Clarel playing dictator with all southern Grey Wardens and immediately going after the only high ranking Warden capable of opposing her when he disagrees with her plan of action is absolutely insane. I know that times of crisis and all, but damn.

There are really few things in Dragon Age that make me go "Yeah, no. We gotta rewrite that", but this is definitely one of them. I'm not saying I'd get rid of the whole thing, but at least make Clarel's situation less... oh poor Warden-Commander was being manipulated. She was, but in my humble opinion if she didn't get all tyrannical and allowed any kind of discussion things would not get that far. Her fuck up goes beyond just poor judgement and inability to think critically under pressure.

[daybreakrising]

NEW MUSE ADDITIONS

i've already mentioned this before but given i've now caught up, it's time for the official announcement of THREE NEW MUSES from hsr-

G.ALLAGHER

multiple people assigned this muse to me on looks alone before we even knew anything about him, so i had a space ready for him a long time ago. hyv really out here giving me all the dogboys, huh-

DR. RATIO

aka, charlie is a terrible influence and convinced me i'll write a good ratio so........... i gave in to the temptation. and, let's be real, he's also my kind of character-

L.UOCHA

this guy is on the PRIVATE LIST and not the main roster - meaning you'll have to ask for him as i won't offer him out initially (once we've discussed / built dynamics, i'll throw him at you whenever it feels right, however). he'll also be rather selective until i do some research / find his voice. but i just.... this guy fascinates me.

[kirkwallguy]

i appreciate the complexity and amount of choices wicked eyes has as someone who complains that dai quests rarely have multiple outcomes but. it really does suck huh.

[dragonknightofsummerset]

Cleared the war table of missions (minus the resources/gold ones that are repeatable) before doing "wicked eyes and wicked hearts" & crying cause of all the new war table missions that appeared

[hellomehlo]

into the fade 2: electric boogaloo

[oopsallmabari]

in other news i'm 5ish chapters away from having my longfic rewrite overtake my last completed chapter (and like. 2 away from the last chapter i posted lmfao). very excited to start doing new stuff :3

[enderevynne]

wait okay serious question: do you play Here Lies the Abyss before Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts? 

Have I been doing it wrong all this time?

[vilnan]

we’re finally doing my favourite quest out of all the quests i’ve ever done in video games.

[theoldgaylion]

Stuck in my Inquisition replay because my anxious ass can't dive into Wicked Eyes Wicked Hearts 🫠

[chedelat]

only doing cullens personal quest so i can be sure carver gets off lyrium too

[mako-designated-driver]

Codex Entry #34: Fears of the Dreamers

"The Pilgrim"

I came to the Temple of Sacred Ashes with the faithful, ready to help at the Conclave. I prayed to the Maker for peace, but the mountains shook and fell and buried me. Alone in the darkness, my legs crushed, I cried in fear of a world with no Maker, fading in and out of dreams of monsters inside the black.

Light my final hours. Let me go to the Maker without the terrors of darkness confounding me.

───────

"The Freeholder"

I watched the Blight take my land. I had nowhere to go. I tended the fields as I had, even as my flock died and my family sickened. My body wracked by pains and chills, I saw too late the poison that had crept into the land. In my fever dreams, the sickness covered this whole world, and I wept in fear for the family I killed with my foolish pride.

Show me that this world survives. Show me that the poison does not take everything.

───────

"The Grey Warden"

I joined the Wardens to serve in glory. No blade could touch me, nor any claw pierce my armor. Still, I was fated by Joining to die. Alone in the Deep Roads, the Calling in my mind, I sat by the last campfire I would see, allowing myself one last night of terror, and cursed the fate that brought me here.

Let it be my choice to have served and died. Let it be nobility rather than the dread hand of fate. Destroy my destiny and let this be my decision.

───────

"The Scholar"

When the darkspawn were new, when the magisters had just brought them to our world with their sin, I was among the first to call myself a Grey Warden and swear to end the Blight that threatened our world. We had seen the Archdemon die from mortal blows, only to rise again from the body of one of its servants. It could not die. I searched in vain for some way to kill the beast and save my world. I slept in fear, with no solution, knowing only that the Blight the magisters had brought would destroy everything because I could not save it.

Show me what must be done to slay the Archdemon. Show me what I need to save my world.

───────

"The Child"

Haven is burned. Mama cries when I'm not looking. It's cold in the mountains, and my feet hurt, but Mama says to hush, that others have it worse. She says a monster named Corypheus came to Haven, and it was only the Maker's blessing that let us escape. I don't feel blessed. The monsters come every night when I sleep, and I don't want to wake Mama crying again.

I miss Ser Snort. Ser Snort always kept the monsters away in my dreams.

[thedragonagelesbian]

@hexblooddruid replied to your post “there's a verve to faithful mage trevelyan that i...”:

Gonna be obsessed with their interactions for the whole game

���oh yiseeril is SO taken with viv from the jump; she sees her as what she could have been had she not been made tranquil & what she could still become by correctly leveraging her power as herald of andraste. loves the ambition the aesthetics the Panache.

at the same time, yiseeril is uniquely well positioned to understand the tragedy of vivienne's life too-- to have to rapidly remake oneself under extreme pressure (the herald of andraste; the iron lady), to have to be Perfect to be anything at all, and the parts of oneself that are sacrificed in that metamorphosis (yiseeril's normalcy & personhood; vivienne's intimacy & vulnerability)

it's not a similarity they acknowledge for much of the game because vivienne (understandably!) holds herself at such distance, and by the time vivienne asks yiseeril for help with bastien, i think it'll be clear (ie, that yiseeril's relationship with sera will have progressed enough) that their lives are ultimately on different trajectories-- the ascendant divine-to-be and the former divinity who will choose mundanity instead. but their friendship is still very deep & important to both of them, and vivienne trusts it--trusts yiseeril--enough to show her more of her heart than she reveals to most anyone else

[windupaidoneus]

hey! welcome to my long post where i complain about dragon age inquisition again 👍 literally don't even worry about it

the lack of even a bit of customisation regarding the inquisitor's origins truly is a downfall of inquisition's & generally the inquisitor kinda feels flat as a character. there are voice options but only two of them & i often find that dialogue options just don't fit what i want really, nor do they help toward making the inquisitor a character of their own. the war table operations related to the inquisitor's background could've easily been made actual quests with the sheer amount of pretty pointless quests that make the game longer & longer with very little reward for it (thinking of the sheer amount of quests just in the hinterlands. in my first playthrough i was stuck there for months because i just Did not want to get through that. it was my first dragon age game & it was very intimidating), but they're just... war table operations. & you kinda get nothing out of that. it's a real shame

the bits of custom dialogue they give to elven, qunari, dwarven & mage inquisitors are bare minimum when compared to the previous games. i enjoy that there are mage-specific choices for sit in judgement but they do kind of invariably suck (though if you're playing a shithole of a person then sure you can probably afford to make alexius tranquil). one of the few good things about these is that iirc you can get on cullen's case about him supporting you, a mage, but the inquisitor also has no real knowledge of what cullen has done & how bad it actually was so it's... yknow. kinda empty. also the way the class/race-specific dialogue is done in inquisition feels... very uh, "nonbinary character who is characterised by saying 'whoa did you just assume my pronouns???' ", which is probably not their intent (at least not fully & not everytime it happens) but it sure feels like it & god is it grating & frankly insulting at times. i'm used to fantasy microaggressions in dragon age games but in inquisition... grr.

& of course it's all coupled with quests like here lies the abyss which. just make the game not worth finishing. yes i've finished it five times but this isn't about these saves. it was a huge slap in the face to be faced with the alistair or hawke choice as a direct consequence of me doing whatever i could to help alistair keep living the happiest possible life he could have. it felt like a punishment for doing that & i know dragon age direction really likes to just make you regret doing good but this specific quest is the reason all my unfinished playthroughs are unfinished.

the flatness of the inquisitor makes it even more infuriating in that you, the player, have stakes in this but the inquisitor doesn't & cannot because they're just not allowed to have ties to either of them at all? or to have anything other than underwhelming dialogue options really lmao. you can't communicate much of anything during that quest through a character to who hawke & alistair are, yeah some important people probably, but they're still just... not people they really know. (wow haha wouldn't it be nice to have had more quests with them & also to have them as temporary companions... or something... haha..;..) at least having stroud as an easy out if you made alistair king or exiled him or whatever else spared me some anguish in my first playthrough (though i didn't know alistair at the time either so it probably wouldn't have meant anything to me).

also! as someone with ocs who have more specific backgrounds than what has been given to me by the games (like shamir, a formerly tranquil dreamer with a spirit friend - more akin to wynne than anders pre-tranquility but hope merged with him upon reaching for his mind. so basically. someone who could easily get alistair out of the fade. you know, his husband. someone who's also been friends with anders. you know. my hawke's boyfriend.) it does endlessly frustrate me that they're not willing to explore more daring options for what is & isn't possible to do. they literally have so many options to make things less miserable & they just refuse. & it's not even for the sake of narrative satisfaction! very few things in inquisition are narratively satisfying at all! so what's the point? what is the point of it all? if everything ends in misery anyway why did you make me do all this. it isn't cathartic or saddening it's upsetting & downright frustrating. i get nothing out of here lies the abyss

i don't know how to end this post. i'm just very peeved by . all this

[girlb0yfriend]

dragon age update!! finished origins for the second time ever :3

[danielnelsen]

ive somewhat joked about quests being 'the worst quest in the game' about a few things, but the actual worst quest in the game is 'notes on the wastes'. my goal this run is to not consult the wiki (except to make sure im getting the achievements for trials) so like........idk?? i guess bottles of thedas is worse, but it's a collection quest. quests that come under a location heading shouldnt be like this. especially in the hissing wastes, the bane of my existence

[asterroses]

am i just going insane or is there like . Nothing abt who wrote wicked eyes and wicked hearts