#optional-quests

[vigilskeep]

hey harker! very much enjoying the lucanis/illario/general crow posting, and im gonna encourage more: now that you’ve had some time to sit with the game i was really curious to hear more about your opinion on lucanis becoming first talon. i can’t help but feel like it’s completely glossed over that lucanis is definitely going to get chewed up by this job in most save states. i have mixed feelings about it personally - but setting those aside because i’m asking about yours.

i TRULY cannot express this enough: that villa is a tomb and if we do not get him out of there we are burying him in it

lucanis does not want this job. he has straight up canonically always avoided thinking about this by assuming he would die before it becomes something he has to deal with. he reacts with paralysed disbelief to being given it and seems to have barely registered it for the rest of the game. and even if he did want it, lucanis is not capable of this job. none of his skillsets are managing people, or making ruthless calls, or watching out for himself. the only driving force behind him being pushed into this is caterina, who will not be around to do the admin and protect him from external threats forever. and she only wants him to do it in the first place because she had a good heir—his mother—and has needed to project that dead daughter onto lucanis for his whole life, to believe she hasn’t already gambled and irrevocably lost her family’s future decades ago. but lucanis’ incapacity to ever say no to her, which is what lets him stay that eternal teacher’s pet, is one of the most obvious shining examples why he would be so bad for the job!

it would be an uphill battle for anyone to recover control of an assassin house that until last week was being run by your cousin who tried to kill you. it would be an uphill battle for anyone to lead the crows in the aftermath of the antaam occupation. it would be an uphill battle for anyone to cope with the fact that relying on viago and teia—which lucanis with his resources and skills has no choice but to do here, even if he didn’t simply like them and make choices based on liking people because he is not a strategist—presents them as an alliance that any other ambitious talon must cut down to get anywhere. three out of eight of the talons is such a ludicrously dangerous number. it does not take an overwhelmingly brilliant mind to notice that there’s more of us than there are of them

the best man for the job would still be fighting for their life, and lucanis is far from the best man. caterina was! and she still lost five children and six grandchildren holding it! that’s so many! have you guys ever seen that one post about people who kept getting a new outdoor cat every time the last one got eaten by cougars and it was pointed out they were basically just feeding cats to the cougars. that’s what caterina dellamorte was doing having kids

the points in lucanis’ favour off the top of my head are the weight of the dellamorte name and reputation, that his victory over illario was decisive and public, and simply the fear factor that he is a god slayer and, lest we forget, a fucking abomination. is that enough to keep him alive? for how long? under what level of constant anxiety and moral degradation for his very soft over-caffeinated heart? all for the questionable gain of several large and empty villas and the privilege of dragging out the slow and lingering death of a family that, you guessed it, you love it, it’s the thedas favourite: has no! next! generation! heirs! at all!!!

(unless illario has a bunch of kids somewhere. i think that would be objectively pretty funny, a sentence i managed to type most of before feeling ill. oh god we need to get them out.)

i apologise that my tone here is somewhat hysterical but i have been living in the mind of my rook, a character very aware of the realities of crow politics who loves lucanis very much. it does not surprise me that lucanis was once again incapable of even conceptualising saying no to his grandmother and accepted the title, or that the idea of abandoning her legacy and his family would seem insurmountable to him when he has been raised to believe it’s all he’s for and he is the last one shouldering the weight. but i am saying this with total and absolute confidence: this is another prison and he is going to die in there if nobody gets him out.

[yuzuuu4]

protective bf era

[anerol152]

Season of Ikea be like:

[relaxtimestwo]

⊹ . ݁˖ Stelle x Firefly (part 2) . ݁₊ ⊹

Firefly is introducing Penacony's various attractions to Stelle! ✩

I hope we get more dreampeek calls in future updates. Especially for past characters that don't have much lore like Qingque and Luka. It's nice getting little scraps of characterisation!

Also, I love how the consumables look in Penacony! They're so fun and colourful! I just had to draw the two of them interacting with the items.

[terramythos]

that post says it but I think it's extremely important to reiterate that the very first thing g'raha does is deceive and manipulate you and that was back in a fucking realm reborn. yeah it's jokes and it seems pointless at the time but holy fucking shit does that behavior stay relevant from the moment he re-enters the story to present day. like lmao

[neckromantics]

petition for larian studios to make a dialogue option where you ask astarion for a hug bc honestly i think we could both use one a majority of the time.

[omo321]

two playthroughs later I still have no idea how to build communism

[a2zillustration]

Tragedy in, tragedy out

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[[ All Croissant Adventures (chronological, desktop) ]]

[[ All Croissant Adventures (app) ]]

[voided-selfships]

Bonus achievement if you give the letter to everyone BUT Capochin at first

[Taglist]

@fagthesis @comfycozycirrus @ghost--girlfriend @kylilah @arothroughtheheart-selfship @lovebandit42069 @love-birds-stuff @permafrown @cherry-bomb-ships @tropicalgothships

[vigilskeep]

as a fellow rook de riva player i’m really curious how sol took the whole… house egrativi being founded with the specific intention of taking in orphaned kids to become crows. final nail in the coffin moment for my rook personally

this plot thread was the first and easiest target of my mental rewrites because it just... doesn’t make sense, to me? functionally, regardless of thematically. like, i think it suffers the most obviously from the writers not really getting into how the crow power structure works. crow houses are business ventures that require money and manpower. you can’t just start one with a name and a dream while everyone smiles approvingly. also, you can’t just not have belonged to one in the first place! i spent all game trying to figure out if he belonged to the de rivas or the cantoris or the dellamortes or someone else, and when he started his own house at the end of his arc (again, ???) it was very apparent to me that this is just a misinterpretation that there is a general force of crows and the houses are simply nobility among them. no, somebody paid for your training and they want back on that investment so they own you. also, taking in orphans being your grand new venture for the crows is both insane and doesn’t make sense because the crows already do that as one of their main recruiting strategies. teia cantori is standing right in front of you as the evidence!

my provisional rewrite which i think works fairly smoothly without losing too much is that jacobus & his cousin are the sole surviving heirs of one of the three houses whose talons were killed in the antaam plot in tevinter nights: balazar, valisti, and arainai. (my self-indulgent vote is balazar, because the tevinter nights context of the dynamic with teia and viago is juicy. there’s no real reason for it to be arainai and bringing in that name for no reason would be cruel, but you could definitely cook with it if you really wanted to go for it.) naturally, these kids already have a grudge against the antaam, one that teia and viago are struggling to corral while having to treat them like crow hierarchy equals (iirc a balazar or valisti would actually technically outrank them both), and the elder cousin goes and gets himself killed trying. we’re now forced to operate with one of the four houses present in treviso being led by an even younger grieving child who is obviously a liability. this should be good for paralleling lucanis’ immediate future and highlighting what the crows do to their younger generations. in my most ideal of worlds where the crows are truly crow-ish on screen, maybe you’d have a plot choice with no good answers like...

a) teia would present this option. you decide to take a risk on this kid and believe in him and let him stand on his own two feet, and this actually pays off with sudden help in your fight against the governor like it does in the game. he chooses this idealistic, childish direction for his house where they’re taking in kids who have lost their families like him and it will all be one big family again! and he says some suddenly very nervewracking things about how they’ll understand it’s the best place to be eventually and one of the kids got hurt in the governor’s estate but heir has promised they’ll take care of it and train them all so hard they’ll never lose anyone again. he’s going to make sure of it. you’ll see! they’ll take the best contracts until they’re godslayers just like you! there’s a final shot of him standing very small and very alone. and that’s on you

b) viago would present this option. you decide this kid is too much of a risk to count on while you’re trying to save the city and the world, and maybe you care that he’s also a danger to himself. you back house de riva to forcibly seize jacobus’ house and all its assets to get the job done with, while jacobus himself is locked up out of harm’s way until the fight is over. this route also helps in your fight against the governor, there’s no sudden chaotic helping hand but everything goes smoother and cleaner, and hey, there are no children in the fight, if that kind of thing matters to you. however, all the ferocity of jacobus�� grudges turns on you and viago. he hates you. and letting him loose afterwards and giving back his house would be viago, the most paranoid man in thedas, handing a knife back to someone who wants to kill him. (which is, i suppose, the utmost charitable interpretation of viago’s main reasoning to keep hold of a bunch of assets, but no less true.) so they’re just keeping hold of jacobus... indefinitely. and that’s on you

but that’s me being self-indulgent and making it a bigger choice lmao. in answer to your actual question about my rook rather than this massive tangent, yes it was dizzying to stand there as another child was given full crow status and already planning to train other children. the cycles are cyclinggg

[zipmode]

I didn't realize Arcade would stop being a companion after you did his quest he was like. Thanks for helping me assemble the elderly avengers. Here's my dad's 300 pound armor so you can't fast travel while you're in the middle of the wilderness. Goodbye forever 😁👍

[aroaceleovaldez]

i think a lot about how Leo didn't use his cabin on the Argo II, and instead just always slept in the engine room or on deck (or let's be real, probably in the walls once or twice). And how Nico and Reyna never even got cabins on the Argo II, since they were unexpected passengers and so probably had to just sleep in the sickbay (if they slept at all, which they probably insisted they didn't need to - or fell asleep in odd spots around the ship) and so were forced to be roommates for a little bit before their quest, or shared a room with someone else on the ship.

[creeperthescamp]

what (or who) convinced y'all to get into tes?

i think when I was about 15 a family friend showed me skyrim since i was already into fallout, and she was showing me her dunmer assassin with her little house and her wife and I was like 'yea that looks pretty cool, i might try it out sometime'

however as soon as she mentioned there were cat people I immediately went 'OH FUCK I need this game RIGHT NOW' lmao I don't even remember if I knew anything else about the game! the existence of the khajiit was all I needed to know (and that you could be gay)

[kobadit]

Rogue City was so good, you guys

[46hasu]

Cyno Lore in his demo: he's a cop and he likes justice

Cyno Lore in Archon Quest: He was a cop until he realized that the Akademiya is up to something and left for justice

Cyno Lore in Story Quest: he's back to being a cop and it's a rough job ig but justice is important

Cyno Lore in the limited time event Windblume that takes place in Mondstat where he just happened to be visiting for a vacation: With the spirit of Hermanubis and his background as a dessert dweller he could have very well be subjected as a an experiment among those of the Akademiya. However through the compassion of a certain professor he was given the tools he needed to be one of the very few desert children that had received education while learning a way to control the ancient power that had once caused him great misery and strife. Driven by his strong sense of justice and through his professors help, he then became the General Mahamatra though he still faces the blatant discrimination due to his background leading him to have a tough exterior with very little genuine connection to anyone. Also, he thinks TCG is really rad and goes out of his way to share this hobby as a way of growing closer to someone.

[frameconfessions]

Eleanor mentions polyamory canonically and some of The Hex in my opinion have a polycule vibe to them with some of their lines. Either Eleanor is an ally or she's been in a polycule or two, that's all I'm saying. Also Dagath was canonically in a polycule. GIVE US MORE POLYAMORY, PLEASE DIGITAL EXTREMES! 😫