Erik Amundsen's Blog, page 2
January 23, 2015
A Whole Lot of Silence and Trousers - Meet Shale
Dragon Age Origins [DAO] Character
Content - Project Management, Enslavement, Imprisonment, Identity and Gender-Identity Issues, Animal Cruelty.
I didn't get DAO until it came out bundled with Dragon Age Awakenings and all the various DLC, so I am not entirely certain, but I think that Shale was Day 1 DLC, and that requires a bit of explanation.
For those of you not familiar with last and current generation video games (and I am not actually familiar with current gen, so I'm with you), DLC, Downloadable Content is stuff for a game that they did not put in the game when it launched. You can get it later, usually buying it and downloading it to the thing you use to play your games. This stuff ranges from trivial (new outfits and "skins" for characters), to important (new areas to explore in game and things to do), to infuriating (a hard-to-get in-game currency), to very ill-advised (super weapons you can use from the start), and usually camps in several of those categories at once.
Day 1 DLC is a particularly controversial* form of the above. It's on the game disk you buy in the store, but it is content that often has to be purchased separately, and in this case, the content you are downloading is the key for unlocking that part of the disk.
What the fuck, right? Ok, there are reasons behind this, and I am not saying they are persuasive, but I probably ought to tell you what they are. First explanation is that it's an not-necessarily-intended** feature of the way games, and indeed, any large project gets made. There are things you set out to make when you make a game, and the list of features and content changes over the life of the project. Things go well, things go poorly, things get added and taken away. A lot of things that were intended to be part of the game don't get done in time, but some other things that might just have been given "it would be nice if" priority are ready on launch. The former sometimes end up as DLC, while the latter sometimes end up getting thrown on the disk and if you want to throw five more bucks at it, then we can let you play with it. Or, if you buy the collector's edition, and a little extra content provides incentive for the non-collector to step up to the collector's edition (bundled with the strategy guide and the soundtrack CD, oh yes***).
The justification behind this is that the stuff wasn't really intended to be on the main release, and who knows, if we couldn't sell it to you, we would have just left it derelict on our servers until the next maintenance cycle when it would be gone forever. The rub is, do you believe them? Bioware is owned by EA, a company that has managed, in odd years, to beat out Monsanto, Bayer and Comcast as the shittiest corporation in the world, and the video game industry has a repuation for utter, withering contempt for its customers, so anything that comes out of the mouths of one of its gray faced, soul deficient shills is not to be uncritically accepted.
Anyway, Shale. Shale speaks in a booming, echoing, somewhat dry and andogynous voice and refers to Sooney as "it." Shale has somewhat less flattering designations for the rest of the group. Shale is fascinated to the point of provocation, or maybe arousal at the fragility of organic life, particularly that of birds and mages, against both of which she has justifiable grudges. She killed Willhelm because one day, she could, and Willhelm treated shale as an object that could follow commands. Everyone did. Everyone has.
Shale doesn't remember much before coming into Willhelm's possession. Shale doesn't remember her identity, name or gender, or even that she had a name or gender. Those things get revealed in Orzamar, where you find out how golems come to be.**** She does telegraph a bit of feminine stereotype in that she is eager to get more crystals, which she can stud her body with in lieu of more traditional weapons and armor, and the desire to be sparkly, but I took that more as a "fuck it, I am three tons of granite, fierce and fabulous," than "lol chicks dig jewelry." Your milage may do what it does on that account. Shale also makes a comment about being afriad of looking "wide" that did not go over nearly so well, and I forget it when I can. That one gets a particularly tragic cast when Shale reveals that she does not look like the traditional golem (which is significantly larger and bulkier) because Willhelm's wife insisted on having her chiseled down to fit in the house.
Shale misgenders because she has been misgendered. She refuses to use names because no one bothered to learn hers, and let her forget she even had one. She depersonalizes and objectifies, because she has been treated like an object. She was forced to stand in one place for 30 years and watch the people of Honnleath go about their lives, forgetting her as a witness.**** So she isn't a big fan of people. The thing is, she doesn't always seem to remember why she feels the way she does. Certainly not that she was once and is still a person, a woman, and what is merely rude to an apparent automaton is downright intolerable to a living person who made the kind of sacrifices Shale made.
When Sooney activates her, it uses up the last juice in the control rod. Shale asks her to test it, to order her to do things, and feels no compulsion to do what Sooney tells her. The fact that she doesn't begin her rampage then and there gives Shale a lot of points in my book. At loose ends, she agrees to go with Sooney, a little curious about the person who went out of her way to collect a golem and was neither surprised nor too upset when that didn't turn out as advertised. Had she not volunteered, Sooney would have asked, anyway, never having seen a golem before and fascinated by the person she found. It's not a perfect relationship, not without problematic elements, but mutual curiosity is better than a lot of things.
I think Sooney would have been more comfortable using the control rod to control Shale had it worked than I would have been, but Sooney didn't know that there is a person in there, at first, and I do. Once she got into the habit of not seeing that person, she might not have ever broken it.
* Contraversy being what it is when it involves gamers. Something something, primates, feces, something.
** Not necessarily not intentional, either.
*** Not that I bought anything like that. Well, not for Dragon Age. Dark Souls 2, on the other hand... I stopped short of the bundle that included the Faraam Lion Knight Statuette.
**** Shale implies that her garden was a popular place for illicit sex, which she found really super revolting. As one does. Shale is asexual, but lacking flesh, let alone genitals, she's not an unproblematic representation. That said, it's very clearly established that she is a real person, and there is always a chance that in the body to which she was born, she might have also been asexual. Thin, I know.
Content - Project Management, Enslavement, Imprisonment, Identity and Gender-Identity Issues, Animal Cruelty.
I didn't get DAO until it came out bundled with Dragon Age Awakenings and all the various DLC, so I am not entirely certain, but I think that Shale was Day 1 DLC, and that requires a bit of explanation.
For those of you not familiar with last and current generation video games (and I am not actually familiar with current gen, so I'm with you), DLC, Downloadable Content is stuff for a game that they did not put in the game when it launched. You can get it later, usually buying it and downloading it to the thing you use to play your games. This stuff ranges from trivial (new outfits and "skins" for characters), to important (new areas to explore in game and things to do), to infuriating (a hard-to-get in-game currency), to very ill-advised (super weapons you can use from the start), and usually camps in several of those categories at once.
Day 1 DLC is a particularly controversial* form of the above. It's on the game disk you buy in the store, but it is content that often has to be purchased separately, and in this case, the content you are downloading is the key for unlocking that part of the disk.
What the fuck, right? Ok, there are reasons behind this, and I am not saying they are persuasive, but I probably ought to tell you what they are. First explanation is that it's an not-necessarily-intended** feature of the way games, and indeed, any large project gets made. There are things you set out to make when you make a game, and the list of features and content changes over the life of the project. Things go well, things go poorly, things get added and taken away. A lot of things that were intended to be part of the game don't get done in time, but some other things that might just have been given "it would be nice if" priority are ready on launch. The former sometimes end up as DLC, while the latter sometimes end up getting thrown on the disk and if you want to throw five more bucks at it, then we can let you play with it. Or, if you buy the collector's edition, and a little extra content provides incentive for the non-collector to step up to the collector's edition (bundled with the strategy guide and the soundtrack CD, oh yes***).
The justification behind this is that the stuff wasn't really intended to be on the main release, and who knows, if we couldn't sell it to you, we would have just left it derelict on our servers until the next maintenance cycle when it would be gone forever. The rub is, do you believe them? Bioware is owned by EA, a company that has managed, in odd years, to beat out Monsanto, Bayer and Comcast as the shittiest corporation in the world, and the video game industry has a repuation for utter, withering contempt for its customers, so anything that comes out of the mouths of one of its gray faced, soul deficient shills is not to be uncritically accepted.
Anyway, Shale. Shale speaks in a booming, echoing, somewhat dry and andogynous voice and refers to Sooney as "it." Shale has somewhat less flattering designations for the rest of the group. Shale is fascinated to the point of provocation, or maybe arousal at the fragility of organic life, particularly that of birds and mages, against both of which she has justifiable grudges. She killed Willhelm because one day, she could, and Willhelm treated shale as an object that could follow commands. Everyone did. Everyone has.
Shale doesn't remember much before coming into Willhelm's possession. Shale doesn't remember her identity, name or gender, or even that she had a name or gender. Those things get revealed in Orzamar, where you find out how golems come to be.**** She does telegraph a bit of feminine stereotype in that she is eager to get more crystals, which she can stud her body with in lieu of more traditional weapons and armor, and the desire to be sparkly, but I took that more as a "fuck it, I am three tons of granite, fierce and fabulous," than "lol chicks dig jewelry." Your milage may do what it does on that account. Shale also makes a comment about being afriad of looking "wide" that did not go over nearly so well, and I forget it when I can. That one gets a particularly tragic cast when Shale reveals that she does not look like the traditional golem (which is significantly larger and bulkier) because Willhelm's wife insisted on having her chiseled down to fit in the house.
Shale misgenders because she has been misgendered. She refuses to use names because no one bothered to learn hers, and let her forget she even had one. She depersonalizes and objectifies, because she has been treated like an object. She was forced to stand in one place for 30 years and watch the people of Honnleath go about their lives, forgetting her as a witness.**** So she isn't a big fan of people. The thing is, she doesn't always seem to remember why she feels the way she does. Certainly not that she was once and is still a person, a woman, and what is merely rude to an apparent automaton is downright intolerable to a living person who made the kind of sacrifices Shale made.
When Sooney activates her, it uses up the last juice in the control rod. Shale asks her to test it, to order her to do things, and feels no compulsion to do what Sooney tells her. The fact that she doesn't begin her rampage then and there gives Shale a lot of points in my book. At loose ends, she agrees to go with Sooney, a little curious about the person who went out of her way to collect a golem and was neither surprised nor too upset when that didn't turn out as advertised. Had she not volunteered, Sooney would have asked, anyway, never having seen a golem before and fascinated by the person she found. It's not a perfect relationship, not without problematic elements, but mutual curiosity is better than a lot of things.
I think Sooney would have been more comfortable using the control rod to control Shale had it worked than I would have been, but Sooney didn't know that there is a person in there, at first, and I do. Once she got into the habit of not seeing that person, she might not have ever broken it.
* Contraversy being what it is when it involves gamers. Something something, primates, feces, something.
** Not necessarily not intentional, either.
*** Not that I bought anything like that. Well, not for Dragon Age. Dark Souls 2, on the other hand... I stopped short of the bundle that included the Faraam Lion Knight Statuette.
**** Shale implies that her garden was a popular place for illicit sex, which she found really super revolting. As one does. Shale is asexual, but lacking flesh, let alone genitals, she's not an unproblematic representation. That said, it's very clearly established that she is a real person, and there is always a chance that in the body to which she was born, she might have also been asexual. Thin, I know.
A Whole Lot of Silence and Trousers - Shale Lived in Honnleath, but She Emphatically did not Frolic
Dragon Age Origins [DAO] DLC Content - Story and Character
Content - Massacre, Child Endangerment/Possession, Gratuitous Demons, Animal Cruelty, Slavery
Near Redcliffe, our army if six encounters a merchant menaced by a broken cart and the loss of his mules. The merchant was on his way to Honnleath, suspiciously south of here, to take possession of a golem, but now he's so soured on the whole business that he's willing to sell its control rod at a deep, deep discount. Like free.
Ok, so now we have to unpack what golem means to DAO. Golems are things the dwarves make* out of stone, and lace them up with lyrium so they walk around, follow commands and break things. They're ten foot tall glowing statues who have some limited executive function and a lot of smash. They generally aren't good conversationalists. They are also just the thing Sooney thinks might be good to add to her very low number fighting the horde, so trusting that nothing happens in video games unless there is a protagonist there to react to it**, she turns the party south.
In another long-standing tradition of video games, the Blight has arrived in Honnleath five minutes before our heroes, which means darkspawn to fight, and corpse assets*** all around. Also Olaf's Cheese Slicer, a pretty cool dagger**** that is fated to be Sooney's best friend for the better part of the game. The golem, looking somewhat smaller and rougher than the ones pictured in the opening cinematic, is standing in a KAAAAAHN! pose in the middle of a garden scattered with birdseed. Sooney brandishes the rod and shouts "Klaatu! Berrata! Ni... Ne... N-something... NECKTIE! I said it! I said the words! I did!*****" And does not suffer the fate of our Mr. Williams.****** There are a few more deadites darkspawn, sure, but Sooney's graduated to the chainsaw-for-a-hand level of things at this point, so no big. But the golem just stands there. Maybe it smirked a bit.
Ok, so searching the place. It turns out that there's one house in Honnleath that has the kind of basement of which Jame Gumb would much approve. Within are some more darkspawn and a group of survivors hiding behind a barrier erected by Local Ponytail Mage. Upon being freed, he reveals that the owner of the golem was his dad, the magician Willhelm, who was, by all accounts a bit of a Willhelm, if you know what I mean.******* The golem killed Willhelm and PTM's mom******** used the control rod to freeze it in the garden. Sooney's not all that surprised********* to learn that the activation words aren't right, and he's willing to tell her what they really are, but she needs to do something for him first.
Because video game tradition.
PTM's daughter ran further into the depths of Willhelm's man-cave when the darkspawn came, and no one has been able to get to her. There's defenses or something. So Sooney, not having anyone in the party to tell her that they will think less of her if she doesn't just beat the words out of PTM, agrees to go collect the kid.
Now the kid is on the other side of a handful of shades, in a very cave like portion of the man-mage-cave talking to a calico cat that has glowinf purple eyes, who also talks. Morrigan identifies the cat as a titty demon, and Sooney is not all that surprised. The demon's trapped on this floor of tiles by Willhelm's magic, but the kid is with her. Kitty (the titty demon) offers possibly the shittiest bargain ever: let me out and let me possess the girl and I'll behave,********** or I'll just possess her now and destroy her. Sooney, at this point, has invested fully in telling people what to do, but then she looks up Alistair's copy of the Grey Warden's Guidebook and learns the Warden strategy for dealing with demons: offer them whatever they want and then sword them when the try to collect. This works literally every time.***********
So one tile-sliding puzzle later, the demon tries to take possession of PTM's daughter, but Sooney tells Kitty tough titty, and Kitty gets mad, and also assumes her traditional form. The kid gets freaked out and runs off, and Olaf's Cheese Slicer proves to be up to the task of the second part of Warden demonic-relations protocols. Family is united, "Klaatu! Beratta! Nictu!" is spoken and Shale comes to life, to the extent that life is giving Morrigan a free clinic on how to really condescend and stomping a chicken to death on the way out of town.
We'll talk about Shale, and how using her proper pronouns is a spoiler in the next entry.
* Professor Tolkien, what have you fucking wrought? I feel like I ought to drink any time someone links dwarves to Jewish stereotype (or a did-not-do-the-homework version of Jewish folklore, to the debatable extent that that's different than stereotype).
** Except when that doesn't happen, and things do take place while you are elsewhere. Those events only tend to happen once a pattern is established that you have all the time you need to do all the things you need to do, and there is never a cue that this one thing is time-sensitive. It gets costly, what with the expense of current generation game controllers.
*** Assets being objects created to be put in a setting, in this case.
**** Daggers in video games frequently being 20-24" and what the Romans, who knew a thing or two about war, would have called "swords."
***** http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106308/?ref_=nv_sr_1
****** Ashley Williams is also the name of a character in Mass Effect, where she is a possible love interest that I never actually met, since Mass Effect 1 was until very late, an Xbox exclusive. When I started Mass Effect 2, she was the one who died in the interactive comic book intro bit. I have no idea how much personality she shares with her namesake. The team member I did save, Kaiden, turned out to be kind of a grouchy jerk.
******* I mean penis. The man was a dick.
******** Who actually might have been an evern bigger dick than her husband, at least from Shale's perspective.
********* Here lies Sooney Cousland, Daughter of Dad and Mom Cousland. 9:09 - 9:32. She was not all that surprised.
********** A desire demon, combination of lust and greed, behave? If allowing that thing to inhabit a child's body wasn't already icky beyond comprehension. Bioware is not always good at protraying subtle, possibly justifiable evil, and they did not take their subtle supplements on the morning when they scripted Kitty.
*********** Billy Dee Williams level smoothness is not attainable by mere mortals, however capable. Thus the swording part of the protocol.
Content - Massacre, Child Endangerment/Possession, Gratuitous Demons, Animal Cruelty, Slavery
Near Redcliffe, our army if six encounters a merchant menaced by a broken cart and the loss of his mules. The merchant was on his way to Honnleath, suspiciously south of here, to take possession of a golem, but now he's so soured on the whole business that he's willing to sell its control rod at a deep, deep discount. Like free.
Ok, so now we have to unpack what golem means to DAO. Golems are things the dwarves make* out of stone, and lace them up with lyrium so they walk around, follow commands and break things. They're ten foot tall glowing statues who have some limited executive function and a lot of smash. They generally aren't good conversationalists. They are also just the thing Sooney thinks might be good to add to her very low number fighting the horde, so trusting that nothing happens in video games unless there is a protagonist there to react to it**, she turns the party south.
In another long-standing tradition of video games, the Blight has arrived in Honnleath five minutes before our heroes, which means darkspawn to fight, and corpse assets*** all around. Also Olaf's Cheese Slicer, a pretty cool dagger**** that is fated to be Sooney's best friend for the better part of the game. The golem, looking somewhat smaller and rougher than the ones pictured in the opening cinematic, is standing in a KAAAAAHN! pose in the middle of a garden scattered with birdseed. Sooney brandishes the rod and shouts "Klaatu! Berrata! Ni... Ne... N-something... NECKTIE! I said it! I said the words! I did!*****" And does not suffer the fate of our Mr. Williams.****** There are a few more deadites darkspawn, sure, but Sooney's graduated to the chainsaw-for-a-hand level of things at this point, so no big. But the golem just stands there. Maybe it smirked a bit.
Ok, so searching the place. It turns out that there's one house in Honnleath that has the kind of basement of which Jame Gumb would much approve. Within are some more darkspawn and a group of survivors hiding behind a barrier erected by Local Ponytail Mage. Upon being freed, he reveals that the owner of the golem was his dad, the magician Willhelm, who was, by all accounts a bit of a Willhelm, if you know what I mean.******* The golem killed Willhelm and PTM's mom******** used the control rod to freeze it in the garden. Sooney's not all that surprised********* to learn that the activation words aren't right, and he's willing to tell her what they really are, but she needs to do something for him first.
Because video game tradition.
PTM's daughter ran further into the depths of Willhelm's man-cave when the darkspawn came, and no one has been able to get to her. There's defenses or something. So Sooney, not having anyone in the party to tell her that they will think less of her if she doesn't just beat the words out of PTM, agrees to go collect the kid.
Now the kid is on the other side of a handful of shades, in a very cave like portion of the man-mage-cave talking to a calico cat that has glowinf purple eyes, who also talks. Morrigan identifies the cat as a titty demon, and Sooney is not all that surprised. The demon's trapped on this floor of tiles by Willhelm's magic, but the kid is with her. Kitty (the titty demon) offers possibly the shittiest bargain ever: let me out and let me possess the girl and I'll behave,********** or I'll just possess her now and destroy her. Sooney, at this point, has invested fully in telling people what to do, but then she looks up Alistair's copy of the Grey Warden's Guidebook and learns the Warden strategy for dealing with demons: offer them whatever they want and then sword them when the try to collect. This works literally every time.***********
So one tile-sliding puzzle later, the demon tries to take possession of PTM's daughter, but Sooney tells Kitty tough titty, and Kitty gets mad, and also assumes her traditional form. The kid gets freaked out and runs off, and Olaf's Cheese Slicer proves to be up to the task of the second part of Warden demonic-relations protocols. Family is united, "Klaatu! Beratta! Nictu!" is spoken and Shale comes to life, to the extent that life is giving Morrigan a free clinic on how to really condescend and stomping a chicken to death on the way out of town.
We'll talk about Shale, and how using her proper pronouns is a spoiler in the next entry.
* Professor Tolkien, what have you fucking wrought? I feel like I ought to drink any time someone links dwarves to Jewish stereotype (or a did-not-do-the-homework version of Jewish folklore, to the debatable extent that that's different than stereotype).
** Except when that doesn't happen, and things do take place while you are elsewhere. Those events only tend to happen once a pattern is established that you have all the time you need to do all the things you need to do, and there is never a cue that this one thing is time-sensitive. It gets costly, what with the expense of current generation game controllers.
*** Assets being objects created to be put in a setting, in this case.
**** Daggers in video games frequently being 20-24" and what the Romans, who knew a thing or two about war, would have called "swords."
***** http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106308/?ref_=nv_sr_1
****** Ashley Williams is also the name of a character in Mass Effect, where she is a possible love interest that I never actually met, since Mass Effect 1 was until very late, an Xbox exclusive. When I started Mass Effect 2, she was the one who died in the interactive comic book intro bit. I have no idea how much personality she shares with her namesake. The team member I did save, Kaiden, turned out to be kind of a grouchy jerk.
******* I mean penis. The man was a dick.
******** Who actually might have been an evern bigger dick than her husband, at least from Shale's perspective.
********* Here lies Sooney Cousland, Daughter of Dad and Mom Cousland. 9:09 - 9:32. She was not all that surprised.
********** A desire demon, combination of lust and greed, behave? If allowing that thing to inhabit a child's body wasn't already icky beyond comprehension. Bioware is not always good at protraying subtle, possibly justifiable evil, and they did not take their subtle supplements on the morning when they scripted Kitty.
*********** Billy Dee Williams level smoothness is not attainable by mere mortals, however capable. Thus the swording part of the protocol.
January 20, 2015
A Whole Lot of Silence and Trousers - Meet Morrigan
DRAGON AGE ORIGINS [DAO] - CHARACTER
Content - Sideboob, Reproductive Choices, Atheism, Mother-Daughter Realtionships.
Morrigan would like you to know that she can be friendly when she wants to be. She'd like Alistair to know that desiring to be more intelligent doesn't work as well. She'd like Leliana to know that magic and spirits does not prove the existance of a god, nevermind Leliana's god. She'd like Sten to know his incomprehension of her being both a woman and fighting in battles is the thing she likes best about him, and she doesn't like it very much at all. She'd like Shale to know she's more comfortable when Shale is over there, and not getting that wild glow in her eyes when she talks about crushing the bodies of avians and mages.
I like Morrigan a lot more this run than previous ones. She's closed-off, condescending and brusque, she wears a top that is essentially a scarf that has a hood an is spirit gummed to her breasts and a skirt that I think Siouxsie Sioux will want back before long, and she gives zero fucks. She also turns into a spider, sometimes. Or a bear.
Morrigan came to troll Sooney, Alistair, Biggs and Wedge when they came to the wilds outside Ostagar to collect the Warden treaties. Well, it seems like that, but then she leads them back to her house, where her mom had kept them safe all along, and I suspect Flemeth asked her to go fetch them. But that's the way with Morrigan. She's here to help, but she wants to be very clear that helping is the decision she made, even when it's not. Sooney respects this. I respect it. Because, seriously, if you aren't playing a mage, then you've only got her and Wynne, and Wynne is kind of easy to get killed before she joins you. You need her. She's well aware of that.
It's worth noting that Harriet ditched her circle robes for leather armor after she met Morrigan.
So Morrigan lived with her mother Flemeth in the middle of the scrub-forest/swamp that is southern New England are the Korcari Wilds among a bunch of superstitious yahoos that are Yankees fans Chasind.* She's had to move around a little, any time the Templars found out about them. She says Flemeth made evading and/or killing the templars into a game, using Morrigan as bait, once she was old enough to get in on things. Morrigan learned how to take animal shapes and used to go wandering around where people live, to see what they were up to. Since she's an apostate,** these sort of things, and spending most of her time living very far off in the wilds, were her life. Then Flemeth sent her off with Sooney and Alistair to save the world.
We really only see vulnerablitiy in Morrigan where her mother is concerned. And given what Flemeth turns out to be (aside from a starship captain), it's FUCKING JUSTIFIED.*** It just shows that she's good at identifying threats. Also that she cares about the biggest threat in her life. The rest of the time, she's in 0 fucks mode, whether it's pulling some little mage kid away from a titty demon**** who's possessing him, mouthing off to clergy or telling enemies they will learn to fear her a moment before she winter's grasps them into a state that is decidedly post-fear. I also love the fact that she's an atheist, and that she finds nothing in the existence of spirits and magic that necessitates the Maker or any other deity. The game seems to support her in this - the things that show up that have been thought of as gods are generally just kind of powerful jerks. My own spirituality (atheism turned out to be too much effort for me, so I believe whateverthefuck it is I believe and pretend to whichever of C, P or A is most useful for the people around me at any given time) notwithstanding, this makes me happy.
Morrigan is not particularly complex, but she's not simplistic, either. She's not deceptive unless she has to lie, and she's certainly not trying to deceive about her nature. She is as she appears. Even when she's a spider. She's certainly aware she's closed off, certainly aware that she comes off as cruel. These things don't bother her. Shes' not afraid of letting people close, she just doesn't feel a need to do so. I've never romanced her (she only likes men, and I don't play hetero men if I have a choice in the matter, I get enough experience of being one of those elsewhere*****), so I don't know if this gets undercut. I hope it doesn't. She does care for her mother, and, if she has him, her son,****** and seems to do so genuinely, which fuels a lot of her character.
If Alistair is about confidence, then Morrigan is about control, and I will give Bioware some credit for this, they seem to respect her on this. Most of the time I see a woman in fiction whose theme is control, I wince. I wait for the point where she loses her agency******* and it gets coded as a good thing, something that makes her happy. Again, I haven't romanced her, so who knows, but from the point of view of all my playthroughs, she doesn't lose her agency. Morrigan is who she is and wants what she wants (even when it's a child; a child for the purpose of housing the soul of the archdemon, sure, but she does apparently put a lot of effort into raising the quantum child better than she was raised, which is pretty much the standard for parents, AFAICT).
Morrigan has already asked Sooney to kill Flemeth. Morrigan found one of Flemeth's grimoires and found out that her mother steals the bodies of her daughters on down the line to maintain immortality, and she's hoping Sooney can do the old starship captain in for good (the borg couldn't, nor the embarassment that episode where Flemeth and Lt. Doucheface turned into salamanders and made salamander babies. Hell, even Vee******** couldn't and she was fucking terrifying, so Sooney's not real sure she's going to succeed where they failed). I don't know if Sooney's going to try. She might. At some point, Morrigan is going to ask Sooney to convince Alistair to sleep with her for the purposes of making said child, and Sooney's going to go along with it. She'll respect Alistair's decision, but she won't tell Morrigan no.
I'm not sure what that's going to mean for our hero, but we shall see.
* I got cut off by a pickup with an NY sticker on it this morning, so I am a little bitter. In all fairness, though, Boston fans are more like darkspawn.
** Recap - illegal mages, because Thedas, like the US, likes to make people illegal.
*** SHE TURNS INTO A FUCKING DRAGON. Also survives a slocking.
**** Okay, technically they are "desire" demons, but desire as filtered through the lens of a 13 year old hetero boy.
***** My own sexuality (a weak 2 on the Kinsey scale, for the record) notwithstanding, video game protagonists - white cishet dudes, most of them have brown hair.
****** Keiran, the quantum boy.
******* Usually giving it up to a may-un.
******** All props to Lorraine Toussaint for making Vee a just a pure, forceful, neck hairs standing villain. Role is not without its problematic elements, no doubt, but still...
Content - Sideboob, Reproductive Choices, Atheism, Mother-Daughter Realtionships.
Morrigan would like you to know that she can be friendly when she wants to be. She'd like Alistair to know that desiring to be more intelligent doesn't work as well. She'd like Leliana to know that magic and spirits does not prove the existance of a god, nevermind Leliana's god. She'd like Sten to know his incomprehension of her being both a woman and fighting in battles is the thing she likes best about him, and she doesn't like it very much at all. She'd like Shale to know she's more comfortable when Shale is over there, and not getting that wild glow in her eyes when she talks about crushing the bodies of avians and mages.
I like Morrigan a lot more this run than previous ones. She's closed-off, condescending and brusque, she wears a top that is essentially a scarf that has a hood an is spirit gummed to her breasts and a skirt that I think Siouxsie Sioux will want back before long, and she gives zero fucks. She also turns into a spider, sometimes. Or a bear.
Morrigan came to troll Sooney, Alistair, Biggs and Wedge when they came to the wilds outside Ostagar to collect the Warden treaties. Well, it seems like that, but then she leads them back to her house, where her mom had kept them safe all along, and I suspect Flemeth asked her to go fetch them. But that's the way with Morrigan. She's here to help, but she wants to be very clear that helping is the decision she made, even when it's not. Sooney respects this. I respect it. Because, seriously, if you aren't playing a mage, then you've only got her and Wynne, and Wynne is kind of easy to get killed before she joins you. You need her. She's well aware of that.
It's worth noting that Harriet ditched her circle robes for leather armor after she met Morrigan.
So Morrigan lived with her mother Flemeth in the middle of the scrub-forest/swamp that is southern New England are the Korcari Wilds among a bunch of superstitious yahoos that are Yankees fans Chasind.* She's had to move around a little, any time the Templars found out about them. She says Flemeth made evading and/or killing the templars into a game, using Morrigan as bait, once she was old enough to get in on things. Morrigan learned how to take animal shapes and used to go wandering around where people live, to see what they were up to. Since she's an apostate,** these sort of things, and spending most of her time living very far off in the wilds, were her life. Then Flemeth sent her off with Sooney and Alistair to save the world.
We really only see vulnerablitiy in Morrigan where her mother is concerned. And given what Flemeth turns out to be (aside from a starship captain), it's FUCKING JUSTIFIED.*** It just shows that she's good at identifying threats. Also that she cares about the biggest threat in her life. The rest of the time, she's in 0 fucks mode, whether it's pulling some little mage kid away from a titty demon**** who's possessing him, mouthing off to clergy or telling enemies they will learn to fear her a moment before she winter's grasps them into a state that is decidedly post-fear. I also love the fact that she's an atheist, and that she finds nothing in the existence of spirits and magic that necessitates the Maker or any other deity. The game seems to support her in this - the things that show up that have been thought of as gods are generally just kind of powerful jerks. My own spirituality (atheism turned out to be too much effort for me, so I believe whateverthefuck it is I believe and pretend to whichever of C, P or A is most useful for the people around me at any given time) notwithstanding, this makes me happy.
Morrigan is not particularly complex, but she's not simplistic, either. She's not deceptive unless she has to lie, and she's certainly not trying to deceive about her nature. She is as she appears. Even when she's a spider. She's certainly aware she's closed off, certainly aware that she comes off as cruel. These things don't bother her. Shes' not afraid of letting people close, she just doesn't feel a need to do so. I've never romanced her (she only likes men, and I don't play hetero men if I have a choice in the matter, I get enough experience of being one of those elsewhere*****), so I don't know if this gets undercut. I hope it doesn't. She does care for her mother, and, if she has him, her son,****** and seems to do so genuinely, which fuels a lot of her character.
If Alistair is about confidence, then Morrigan is about control, and I will give Bioware some credit for this, they seem to respect her on this. Most of the time I see a woman in fiction whose theme is control, I wince. I wait for the point where she loses her agency******* and it gets coded as a good thing, something that makes her happy. Again, I haven't romanced her, so who knows, but from the point of view of all my playthroughs, she doesn't lose her agency. Morrigan is who she is and wants what she wants (even when it's a child; a child for the purpose of housing the soul of the archdemon, sure, but she does apparently put a lot of effort into raising the quantum child better than she was raised, which is pretty much the standard for parents, AFAICT).
Morrigan has already asked Sooney to kill Flemeth. Morrigan found one of Flemeth's grimoires and found out that her mother steals the bodies of her daughters on down the line to maintain immortality, and she's hoping Sooney can do the old starship captain in for good (the borg couldn't, nor the embarassment that episode where Flemeth and Lt. Doucheface turned into salamanders and made salamander babies. Hell, even Vee******** couldn't and she was fucking terrifying, so Sooney's not real sure she's going to succeed where they failed). I don't know if Sooney's going to try. She might. At some point, Morrigan is going to ask Sooney to convince Alistair to sleep with her for the purposes of making said child, and Sooney's going to go along with it. She'll respect Alistair's decision, but she won't tell Morrigan no.
I'm not sure what that's going to mean for our hero, but we shall see.
* I got cut off by a pickup with an NY sticker on it this morning, so I am a little bitter. In all fairness, though, Boston fans are more like darkspawn.
** Recap - illegal mages, because Thedas, like the US, likes to make people illegal.
*** SHE TURNS INTO A FUCKING DRAGON. Also survives a slocking.
**** Okay, technically they are "desire" demons, but desire as filtered through the lens of a 13 year old hetero boy.
***** My own sexuality (a weak 2 on the Kinsey scale, for the record) notwithstanding, video game protagonists - white cishet dudes, most of them have brown hair.
****** Keiran, the quantum boy.
******* Usually giving it up to a may-un.
******** All props to Lorraine Toussaint for making Vee a just a pure, forceful, neck hairs standing villain. Role is not without its problematic elements, no doubt, but still...
January 15, 2015
A Whole Lot of Silence and Trousers - Meet Alistair
DRAGON AGE ORIGINS [DAO] - CHARACTER
Content - Grief, extramarital affairs, manipulation, codependence.
You know those romantic comedies where the male lead is some irresponsbile nebbish whose only redeeming feature is his (increasingly optional or problematic*) sense of humor? The guy who fails his way through the first two acts, but then kind of turns it around to get the much more accomplished, intelligent and attractive female lead (who is often protrayed as humorless and demanding in the more retrograde ones, or, gods help us, an MPDG**)?
That's almost Alistair. Except that he's fighting his way through the same horde, sincerely putting effort into doing the right thing all the time while dealing with some heavy personal trauma. Also Morrigan, but I repeat myself, where trauma is concerned. He's the male romantic comedy lead done as a decent and competent human being. I get the impression that fandom likes him (love is saved for Zevran, among the DAO fandom, because elf boy), probably a little more than he deserves. This is not to say he's not deserving, because he is. He's kind of doofy and charming and willing to grow and rise to whatever occasions call for his rising. It's just to say that I feel more positively toward him than I probably ought, just because he's more a Jimmy Stuart than a Seth Rogen. That the fact that he has substance is such a breath of fresh air is kind of saddening.
So, Alistair, short blond hair, a face slightly stronger than he can handle and a quip for most every occasion. Likes: doing the right thing and little carved knick-knacks. Dislikes: swooping, being in charge of anything. And Morrigan. And when you convince him he has to sleep with Morrigan so she can conceive a demon baby so you and he can survive killing the archdemon and aaaaaaaaaaaa... Anyway.
You might be wondering why I waited until we got to Redcliffe to introduce him.
Erik, why did you wait until Redcliffe to introduce the guy who's been in Sooney's party longer than anyone but the dog?
I'm glad you asked. I waited because it's not until Redcliffe that you get a full picture of Alistair's situation. Or until you realize that from the eyebrows down, Alistair and King Cailin are the same model. At Redcliffe, Alistair finally decides to let Sooney in on the fact that he's the old king's bastard son, and half-brother to the recently late king. Ferelden nobility works on a sort of primogeniture-based system, and bastards, especially ones who don't get recognized by their fathers,*** get nothing-good-day-sir. He's only bringing this up because it might come up in the town where he was raised (by the Arl, who was the old king's brah... actually, I think he was his actual brother. I'll have to check the codex on that****), and he wants to make sure that Sooney doesn't faint dead away of shock.
Sooney, who noticed sometime around Ostagar that putting a hat on Cailin and Alistair and playing "guess which is the king" would be tricky and who knows or has at least been educated about what the wandering cocks of errant nobility are want to do really does try to pretend to be shocked, but she can't help making a little fun.
It's hard not to make fun of Alistair, and this is not because he deserves it. He got hounded out of Redcliffe by his aunt, shuffled into the Templars where the implication is he was not expected to excel, nor was he breaking that expectation before Duncan came to get him. Duncan was the first and, to date, only person who ever chose Alistair. Apparently, he had to go to the ancient legal rights Wardens have to take what they need to fight the Blight where Alistair was concerned because the Chantry didn't want to give him up. Alistair's pretty clear that he thinks the Chantry's reluctance was entirely a desire to not give the Wardens anything rather than to keep Alistair specifically. Problematic as Sooney's brief relationship with their mentor was, she's got the empathy to see why Alistair is grief-stricken at his loss. I think they underplay that grief a little - it happens off screen, existing mostly as one of the litany of faults Morrigan recites any time the two of them are in your party.
It's a little hard not to make fun of Alistair becuase they load your dialogue options with snark and sass. Alistair is at his best when he gets to sass back, but he is sincere as a puppy-dog and almost as accepting of what others put on and think of him. Sooney tries to be kind because she shares his grief, if not the person grieved and because she's rebelling against her own worse instincts where he's concerned.
Sooney's also attracted to him, but that's a trickier place to get to. Alistair is one of four possible lovers for your Warden among the companions, in this case, the straight man flavor.***** He's the one Sooney's going to maybe make her guy. At first, I wasn't certain why. It's easier to have a healthy, albeit casual relationship with Zevran, the elf assassin, but we haven't met him yet, and Sooney's not, as far as I know, attracted to women,****** and even if she was, she's a little put off by Leliana in any case. So she has been pursuing Alistair.
Side trip for the sexuality of a spreadsheet entry. I know Sooney likes boys. I'm pretty certain that she liked Ser Ginger McHunksalot, and when speaking of sexuality with the (revealed virgin) Alistair, she speaks as though she has experience, and thus, I've decided that she and Ser McHunksalot had a thing which ended amicably. She might be bluffing on the nature of that thing, but I don't think she was. There might have been others. Sooney strikes me as the sort who would have been interested in experimenting and not shy about those interests when she found someone she was interested in experimenting with. Also, she can turn invisible, which really makes any shenanigans she wanted to get into that much easier.
Bioware makes me think of these things. Even in games which are not theirs. Even in games where there is limited player agency or romantic content.
Anyway, it took me a while to figure out why Sooney was interested in Alistair. He's not (sexuality notwithstanding, because I will be playing a manquisitor at some point for the expresss and sole purpose of getting with Dorian) the player's type, by any means. The puppy-doggish, low self-esteem we share to a degree is something that I dislike in myself, and in potential lovers, it's a thing that used to endear me to everyone's detriment. And shared grief doesn't make for a good relationship choice any more than shared catastrophe or working in the same place. Sooney wants Alistair partly for reasons of attraction and affinity, I am certain. I hope. Those aspects of Sooney are opaque to me. What isn't is that Sooney is the leader of the Grey Wardens in Ferelden, with literally five minutes of training under her belt when Duncan goes off to die. She's not expecting backup or, Maker help us, an Adult. She's got Alistair. He has no confidence in himself, so she, like many young and kinder than they are wise folks, believes that she can make him feel worthy of his task, and to his credit, he does rise to it, over the course of things. She's not the first to get romantically entangled in that particular ill-conceived (if not ill-fated) project.
I mean, I don't think, whatever happens, it's got a chance, and now that I think about it, Alistair's lack of confidence puts him in a position where he's kind of, against his will and without his knowledge, manipulating Sooney into a relationship which probably isn't great for either of them in the long run.
Maybe that's why there are so many snarky responses to everything he says.
:/
* This is probably me being an old man shouting at clouds, but damn, male romantic leads have become vile human beings.
** Manic Pixie Dream Girl, that is. Which in this run of DAO will be played by Sooney Cousland.
*** Who actually knows. This part strikes me as Americans writing about hereditary nobility. It's not like we haven't always had it in fact, but we're really bad at groking it.
**** And two days later, I still haven't.
***** Implied joke aside, you have two heterosexual choices (Alistair and Morrigan) and two bisexual choices (Leliana and Zevran). In DA2, if you're going to bed with someone, you are going to bed with a bisexual (Anders, Fenris, Isabella and Merril are all bi, also all extremely broken people). DAI introduces two gay love interests (Dorian and Sera), three bi (Iron Bull, Josephine and Vivienne), two hetero (Cassandra and Cullen) and Solas. There's also Blackwall, but he's super daddish, so no.)
****** A previous incarnation started flirting with the boys, but then dropped everything when Leliana came on to her. First time I ever had an RPG character come out to me. I like to think that she went on to find a more stable and less murderous lady than Leliana to be with...
Content - Grief, extramarital affairs, manipulation, codependence.
You know those romantic comedies where the male lead is some irresponsbile nebbish whose only redeeming feature is his (increasingly optional or problematic*) sense of humor? The guy who fails his way through the first two acts, but then kind of turns it around to get the much more accomplished, intelligent and attractive female lead (who is often protrayed as humorless and demanding in the more retrograde ones, or, gods help us, an MPDG**)?
That's almost Alistair. Except that he's fighting his way through the same horde, sincerely putting effort into doing the right thing all the time while dealing with some heavy personal trauma. Also Morrigan, but I repeat myself, where trauma is concerned. He's the male romantic comedy lead done as a decent and competent human being. I get the impression that fandom likes him (love is saved for Zevran, among the DAO fandom, because elf boy), probably a little more than he deserves. This is not to say he's not deserving, because he is. He's kind of doofy and charming and willing to grow and rise to whatever occasions call for his rising. It's just to say that I feel more positively toward him than I probably ought, just because he's more a Jimmy Stuart than a Seth Rogen. That the fact that he has substance is such a breath of fresh air is kind of saddening.
So, Alistair, short blond hair, a face slightly stronger than he can handle and a quip for most every occasion. Likes: doing the right thing and little carved knick-knacks. Dislikes: swooping, being in charge of anything. And Morrigan. And when you convince him he has to sleep with Morrigan so she can conceive a demon baby so you and he can survive killing the archdemon and aaaaaaaaaaaa... Anyway.
You might be wondering why I waited until we got to Redcliffe to introduce him.
Erik, why did you wait until Redcliffe to introduce the guy who's been in Sooney's party longer than anyone but the dog?
I'm glad you asked. I waited because it's not until Redcliffe that you get a full picture of Alistair's situation. Or until you realize that from the eyebrows down, Alistair and King Cailin are the same model. At Redcliffe, Alistair finally decides to let Sooney in on the fact that he's the old king's bastard son, and half-brother to the recently late king. Ferelden nobility works on a sort of primogeniture-based system, and bastards, especially ones who don't get recognized by their fathers,*** get nothing-good-day-sir. He's only bringing this up because it might come up in the town where he was raised (by the Arl, who was the old king's brah... actually, I think he was his actual brother. I'll have to check the codex on that****), and he wants to make sure that Sooney doesn't faint dead away of shock.
Sooney, who noticed sometime around Ostagar that putting a hat on Cailin and Alistair and playing "guess which is the king" would be tricky and who knows or has at least been educated about what the wandering cocks of errant nobility are want to do really does try to pretend to be shocked, but she can't help making a little fun.
It's hard not to make fun of Alistair, and this is not because he deserves it. He got hounded out of Redcliffe by his aunt, shuffled into the Templars where the implication is he was not expected to excel, nor was he breaking that expectation before Duncan came to get him. Duncan was the first and, to date, only person who ever chose Alistair. Apparently, he had to go to the ancient legal rights Wardens have to take what they need to fight the Blight where Alistair was concerned because the Chantry didn't want to give him up. Alistair's pretty clear that he thinks the Chantry's reluctance was entirely a desire to not give the Wardens anything rather than to keep Alistair specifically. Problematic as Sooney's brief relationship with their mentor was, she's got the empathy to see why Alistair is grief-stricken at his loss. I think they underplay that grief a little - it happens off screen, existing mostly as one of the litany of faults Morrigan recites any time the two of them are in your party.
It's a little hard not to make fun of Alistair becuase they load your dialogue options with snark and sass. Alistair is at his best when he gets to sass back, but he is sincere as a puppy-dog and almost as accepting of what others put on and think of him. Sooney tries to be kind because she shares his grief, if not the person grieved and because she's rebelling against her own worse instincts where he's concerned.
Sooney's also attracted to him, but that's a trickier place to get to. Alistair is one of four possible lovers for your Warden among the companions, in this case, the straight man flavor.***** He's the one Sooney's going to maybe make her guy. At first, I wasn't certain why. It's easier to have a healthy, albeit casual relationship with Zevran, the elf assassin, but we haven't met him yet, and Sooney's not, as far as I know, attracted to women,****** and even if she was, she's a little put off by Leliana in any case. So she has been pursuing Alistair.
Side trip for the sexuality of a spreadsheet entry. I know Sooney likes boys. I'm pretty certain that she liked Ser Ginger McHunksalot, and when speaking of sexuality with the (revealed virgin) Alistair, she speaks as though she has experience, and thus, I've decided that she and Ser McHunksalot had a thing which ended amicably. She might be bluffing on the nature of that thing, but I don't think she was. There might have been others. Sooney strikes me as the sort who would have been interested in experimenting and not shy about those interests when she found someone she was interested in experimenting with. Also, she can turn invisible, which really makes any shenanigans she wanted to get into that much easier.
Bioware makes me think of these things. Even in games which are not theirs. Even in games where there is limited player agency or romantic content.
Anyway, it took me a while to figure out why Sooney was interested in Alistair. He's not (sexuality notwithstanding, because I will be playing a manquisitor at some point for the expresss and sole purpose of getting with Dorian) the player's type, by any means. The puppy-doggish, low self-esteem we share to a degree is something that I dislike in myself, and in potential lovers, it's a thing that used to endear me to everyone's detriment. And shared grief doesn't make for a good relationship choice any more than shared catastrophe or working in the same place. Sooney wants Alistair partly for reasons of attraction and affinity, I am certain. I hope. Those aspects of Sooney are opaque to me. What isn't is that Sooney is the leader of the Grey Wardens in Ferelden, with literally five minutes of training under her belt when Duncan goes off to die. She's not expecting backup or, Maker help us, an Adult. She's got Alistair. He has no confidence in himself, so she, like many young and kinder than they are wise folks, believes that she can make him feel worthy of his task, and to his credit, he does rise to it, over the course of things. She's not the first to get romantically entangled in that particular ill-conceived (if not ill-fated) project.
I mean, I don't think, whatever happens, it's got a chance, and now that I think about it, Alistair's lack of confidence puts him in a position where he's kind of, against his will and without his knowledge, manipulating Sooney into a relationship which probably isn't great for either of them in the long run.
Maybe that's why there are so many snarky responses to everything he says.
:/
* This is probably me being an old man shouting at clouds, but damn, male romantic leads have become vile human beings.
** Manic Pixie Dream Girl, that is. Which in this run of DAO will be played by Sooney Cousland.
*** Who actually knows. This part strikes me as Americans writing about hereditary nobility. It's not like we haven't always had it in fact, but we're really bad at groking it.
**** And two days later, I still haven't.
***** Implied joke aside, you have two heterosexual choices (Alistair and Morrigan) and two bisexual choices (Leliana and Zevran). In DA2, if you're going to bed with someone, you are going to bed with a bisexual (Anders, Fenris, Isabella and Merril are all bi, also all extremely broken people). DAI introduces two gay love interests (Dorian and Sera), three bi (Iron Bull, Josephine and Vivienne), two hetero (Cassandra and Cullen) and Solas. There's also Blackwall, but he's super daddish, so no.)
****** A previous incarnation started flirting with the boys, but then dropped everything when Leliana came on to her. First time I ever had an RPG character come out to me. I like to think that she went on to find a more stable and less murderous lady than Leliana to be with...
January 9, 2015
A Whole Lot of Silence and Trousers - The Standard Six
DRAGON AGE ORIGINS [DAO] GAME MECHANICS
Content - Game Mechanics, Dork History, Dick Jokes
This is not the first time I've talked about the long shadow that THE WORLD'S MOST POPULAR TABLETOP ROLE PLAYING GAME cast on all aspects of gaming (especially computer/console role playing, but really, everywhere else, too), but it might be the first time I've said straight out that it does. If not, now's a good time.
The old Double-D casts a long shadow on gaming. I sort of alluded to it in the notion that there is a difference between Warriors and Rogues that extends beyond simple prefernce for fighting style. In DAO, this is less pronounced than in DA2 and DAI; in DAO, you can have your rogue wield a two handed sword and wear clanky-ass armor while your fighter runs around in leather and shoots a bow. Those choices are possible, just not optimal. Once we get to DA2, however, Warriors do great weapons or sword and board, rogues do double daggers or bow, and you cannot so much as equip weapons or armor not in your class.
Why is this? It's because Uncles Gary, Dave, et. al. were wargamers, and in a war game, what you bring to the battlefield is what you are. If you have a horse or a tank, you're cavalry. If you have a cannon, you're artillery. An infantry unit with a bunch of captured cannons is just a kind of badly trained artillery unit. Take horses away from your cavalry and they are disgruntled infantry. Each unit does a strategic thing, and the thing the unit does defines what the unit is. When they took that rubric into the dungeon, they matched it up to the tropes of fantasy literature and ran with it. Fighters are infantry. Mages are artillery. Rogues are kind of like light cavalry, though they did not show up in the first iteration of the game. Clerics, who don't show up as a character class in DAO are like medic/support.
This convention propagated on down the lines of games for literally my whole life* (plus a year and change), so I accept it without notice most of the time. You have someone who fights with magic, someone who fights with big weapons and someone who fights with small weapons and sneakiness. That's how it goes. Fictionally, it looks a little weird; in Thedas, the major fictional difference between the capabilities of violent, adventurous folk is can you do magic? If yes, mage; if no, not mage. There's no reason
Another convention for how things go are character attributes; Stats.** Stats are a weird idea, if you think about them from a fictional standpoint, and a super damaging one, if you bring them to making fiction, without examining them. In the beginning, there were six*** attributes with numbers attached to them that controlled a character's destiny. These were randomly assigned in the old days, so you could sit down saying "I want to be a fighter" roll some dice and end up playing a mage. Or a simpleton with a prolapsed mitral valve and congenital syphilis. Or a fighter with a prolapsed mitral valve and congenital syphilis. You never know.****
Six shall be the number, and the number of them shall be six; attributes objectively measured, comparable, immutable, except for when you get hit with nasty magic which makes your luckily rolled fighter into a simpleton with a prolapsed mitral valve and congenital syphilis. Six is an important number, here, and a benchmark with which all tabletop and computer games that trace their lineage back to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin must contend. Some games add more as a show of being more realistic. Some games subtract a few for reasons of ease-of-play or whatever the fuck GURPS was after, but six is the magic number. Dragon Age also uses six, and they are a very similar six.
Stats do two major things. First, they serve as gates. You cannot wear this armor unless you are this Strong. You cannot cast this spell unless you are this Sparkly. You cannot learn this skill unless you are this Happy. This lets people who are Strong carry big weapons but not cast spells that Sparkly people can cast. It lets you, the player, feel special about your guy, whatever they happen to be good at, because the other player's guy may not be able to do the thing at all, depending on what their stats say.*****
The other major thing stats do is act as a kind of measure of how much goodness and light comes into your character's life. If you are not Strong, hitting someone with a sword is not going to do a lot. If you're really Happy, you can learn extra skills. If you're kind of average Sparkly, your spells cause the expected effect. It's like a ladder rising out of a cesspit. At the bottom of the ladder, you're covered in crap. In the middle of the ladder, you're clean, but you can still smell the crap below. At the top of the ladder, it's all fresh air and the songs of angels.******
So below, I'm going to tell you about the original Standard Six and how things changed to the Standard Six of the Dragon Age Trilandahalfogy.
STRENGTH - While it does have some say in how you lift things or carry things, Strength is mostly the stat of hitting guys. How well you hit guys and how hard. All the other stats get their names changed in other games or their portfolios reallocated based on designers' philosophies, but Strength is always the same. It's always Strength and Strength is always the hitting guys stat. In the old days, it was a gate on taking the Fighter class. In DA it's still Strength and it's still the stat for hitting guys, but since computers are a lot faster than your Dungeon Master,******* it also covers how likely you are to get knocked over by special attacks that knock you over or how long you are stuck in those fecking webs when all the giant spiders in Lothering home in on you. In DA, it also controls what armor you can put on and weapons you can pick up, beyond just gating the Warrior class. In both cases, having a higher strength means guys hurt more when you hit them.
DEXTERITY - The not getting hit stat.******** Also, the getting to that inaccessible place stat. It's grown over time to the stat of hitting guys with light weapons and bows, but it wasn't at first. A lot of games call it Agility, too, but it's almost never not in a game. In DA it's one of those two, but I can't be assed to check and it's mostly the stat of hitting guys with daggers and bows, which is how Sooney rolls, so she's got a lot of it. Having more of it makes guys you hit with daggers and bows hurt more, and makes it more likely that every sixth swing they take at you misses. For what that's worth.
CONSTITUTION - Also Stamina in some games and Endurance in others. Having this stat up high gets you a couple more Hit Points. It also gives you slightly better chance to not die when poisoned. That's all it does, but considering "Keeping your guy from dying" is really important, that's all it really needs to do. In DA it's still Constitution, and if you are starting to see a trend, keep looking, things are about to get a little different. But not yet. Constitution in DA gives you more Hit Points. I think it helps you take less damage from ungoing badness (being poisoned or on fire) or have those things end faster (fun fact, tough people are less flamable than delicate people), but all of that is invisible, so I don't care. Hit Points are reason enough.
INTELLIGENCE - Sparkly, from above. This is how good you are at using magic if you are a mage. It also might give you another language to speak. Later games will have it fuel other skills, but in the beginning, it was just for wizards. In DA it's Magic, and it's just for wizards. In DAO, having more of it also helps you get more out of healing items, for reasons. This matters even less than it sounds like it matters.
WISDOM - This is how good you are at using cleric spells, if you are a cleric. In the old days, it also helped a little with resisting magical mindfuckery. To that end, it ends up in other games as Willpower, or even Common Sense.********* It's gotten expanded to include everyone's ability to notice things, which makes it very important. In DA, it's Willpower and while it does protect against magic mindfuckery, there is something more important it does. Every special thing you do in DA is fueled by Stamina (for not-mages) and Mana (for mages), and regardless of what it is, the more Willpower you have, the more fuel-for-special-moves you have. Thus it is good to have a lot of it.
CHARISMA - How pretty you are. Well, not really, but kind of. In the old days, it came into play when you met critters in the dungeon and the Dungeon Master hadn't decided whether they were just going to attack on sight or not.********** Later, it fueled talky skills. Some games with pretensions of being socially focused branch this out into a lot of different stats, but if you are playing one of those games, find out which one controls your ability to lie and you can happily ignore all the others. They will never, ever come up. In DA, Charisma is a skill (called Coercion) you can learn, not a Stat. The Stat is Cunning and it gates the Coercion skill. It gates the levels of all the non-combat abilities to one extent or another, and, I think, also gives bonuses to picking locks. Since Coercion is a skill only the main protagonist can get and levels of Coercion gate certain dialogue options and outcomes, there is no reason not to get all four levels of the skill and also the amount of Cunning you need to get the fourth level of Coercion.
Like with Hit Points, you can tell a lot about a game from the Stats it's chosen. Here, it's pretty clear that DAO wants to wear its heritage on its sleeve and give you nothing you don't expect from a fantasy role playing game. At the same time, its aware of the advantages technology gives it in regards to character bookkeeping and, further, it knows that only one character in all of Thedas needs Charisma at any given time and allows you, the player to decide how much your character has. It's not bad.
But it's not perfect, by any means, and possesse one bugbear that I find increasingly bothersome. In tabletop RPGs you advance your Stats rarely, if at all, your maximum values are almost always bounded and an advance means a great deal to the capabilities of the character. In DAO and DA2, you get three points to spend on Stats every time you level up, and your maximum Stats are far beyond anything I've leveled a character up to, if there are any bounds at all on it. This does two things I kind of dislike. The first is that it makes your choices in how you want to allot your points mean less than I think they should. That's just my gripe, but the second, I think is less a matter of taste and more a matter of good design.
If I am a Warrior and I level up, the conventions surrounding character level make me expect I am going to become better at Warrioring. Since the conventions of character class define Warrior as the class that hits guys with weapons and takes more hits than your allies can, I expect to get better at those things. If you make it my responsibility to allocate stat points when I level, you leave me a bunch of choices, but only two of them make a lot of sense - do I choose to throw all 3 points into Strength so I can hit guys harder, or do I throw 1 in Strength, 1 in Constitution and 1 in Willpower so I can get a tiny bit better at all the important aspects of Warrioring. You do get a little more of all of these things just for leveling, I *think* (I imagine its some formula that takes your class and you Stats into account each time you level to advance your abilities), but to the extent that I control the kind of warrior I am going to be, I would like my choices to mean something to the game.
In a tabletop game with a responsive person running it, this is possible. If I am a warrior and my GM*********** notices I am throwing most of my advances into upping my Constitution and Willpower, I hope they will notice and say "Erik is interested in getting his character's endurance tested. I should try to make that happen," and throw things my way that test my character where my character is strongest, such that my character needs all that strength (and maybe some good rolls and expendable resources) to carry the day.
I don't expect a computer game to do that for me. I expect it to throw at me what it's got, regardless what I bring, which means many of the choces I make will be dumb, useless choices.
There's a learning value to being allowed to make dumb, useless choices in a tabletop game, because, again, a GM can be responsive to the choice and give the player something cool to do with that choice regardless, and, even if they don't, they can teach the errant player better system mastery through the consequences of the dumb, useless choice. Essentially, in a tabletop game, choices are only dumb and useless if the GM, the player who made the choice or the table at large decides it's a dumb and useless choice. Even then, there's fun to be had in making dumb and useless choices at a table. Ask the people I game with. I bring those to game like I bring the Yuengling.************
In a computer game, dumb and useless choices are dumb. And useless. In worse games than the Dragon Age ones (and there are many), dumb and useless choices can make the game unfinishable. Which makes making the correct choice or choices a bit of a guessing game. The fact that I know what to guess isn't helpful, because I hate the correct answer. RPGs like Dragon Age, descendents of the modified wargames of the upper midwest in the mid 70s are offensively focused. Which is to say, it's more important to do damage to the other guy than anything. Which means if there is a Stat which affects the damage you do, the optimal choice is to put everything into that Stat. Always. Science fact. When there is a best choice, why let me choose?
For something called "The Standard Six," this is actually kind of long.*************
* It weirds me out how D&D and Neoliberalism have defined my life; one is a little older than I am and one is a little older than I can remember what the world was like before. One of them imrpoves my life a bit, though it makes me seem a little weird to most folks. The other will be the death of me. The one might be the death of me, too, actually...
** Short for Statistics, which I know they are not, but I didn't name them, so don't blame me for it.
*** You got 3D6 (thats 3 regular dice [with 6 sides]) assigned in order down the line. Life was hard in Carter's America, apparently, so hard we had to replace it with the nightmare dystopia I mentioned in *
**** What you could be sure you were not getting was a Conan-esque pulp hero, that's for damned sure. Despite Gary and Dave and all them wearing their influences on their sleeves, the work of fiction that Old School D&D most reminds me of is Cormac McCarthy's The Road.
***** Things get rougher when there are more players at the table than there are meaningful class/stat combos available.
****** Unless your Dungeon Master likes to make you "role play it out." If you hear this from the person on the other side of the cardboard screen, bend all of your efforts into doing more damage in combat. It's your only hope.
******* That's what they were called. DM for short. Nowadays we use Game Master or GM, so as not to be confused with the kink community (we never actually are. As the joke goes, I went to see The Opposite of Sex (1998) but it wasn't about D&D at all!)
******** A LOT less useful than it sounds. "Missing" in combat, whatever that means, is not fun or interesting, so the math is set up that you will usually hit, and you will almost always be hit by most of the things you fight. That's what makes Hit Points such a weird concept. 8 Hit Points damage is the maximum amount that a 110cm blade can do to a person. The most damage that a 110 cm blade can do to a person is messily kill them. What happens when you messily kill a person, but they still have 32 Hit Points left? What does that look like? I tried to explain in my last dorky post, but it was overlong, and also dorky. I really don't expect you to have read this far.
********* HA! Hahahahahahahahaha!
********** In my experience, they always did. Thus Charisma is where, if you had a charitable DM who let you assign your stats where you wanted, you ALWAYS put the worst one in Charisma. Thus its official name: The Dump Stat.
*********** GM being short for Game Master, which I technically already explained in a footnote. Kill me.
************ Not every time, but almost every time. And six of them, only one or two of which I aim at myself. Seriously, Yuengling is brand new to Connecticut and for a decent beer it's super cheap and for a cheap beer, it's surprisingly decent, so thanks, Pennsylvania! I forgive you for taking my nursary school girlfriend away from me.
************* That's what she said never.
Content - Game Mechanics, Dork History, Dick Jokes
This is not the first time I've talked about the long shadow that THE WORLD'S MOST POPULAR TABLETOP ROLE PLAYING GAME cast on all aspects of gaming (especially computer/console role playing, but really, everywhere else, too), but it might be the first time I've said straight out that it does. If not, now's a good time.
The old Double-D casts a long shadow on gaming. I sort of alluded to it in the notion that there is a difference between Warriors and Rogues that extends beyond simple prefernce for fighting style. In DAO, this is less pronounced than in DA2 and DAI; in DAO, you can have your rogue wield a two handed sword and wear clanky-ass armor while your fighter runs around in leather and shoots a bow. Those choices are possible, just not optimal. Once we get to DA2, however, Warriors do great weapons or sword and board, rogues do double daggers or bow, and you cannot so much as equip weapons or armor not in your class.
Why is this? It's because Uncles Gary, Dave, et. al. were wargamers, and in a war game, what you bring to the battlefield is what you are. If you have a horse or a tank, you're cavalry. If you have a cannon, you're artillery. An infantry unit with a bunch of captured cannons is just a kind of badly trained artillery unit. Take horses away from your cavalry and they are disgruntled infantry. Each unit does a strategic thing, and the thing the unit does defines what the unit is. When they took that rubric into the dungeon, they matched it up to the tropes of fantasy literature and ran with it. Fighters are infantry. Mages are artillery. Rogues are kind of like light cavalry, though they did not show up in the first iteration of the game. Clerics, who don't show up as a character class in DAO are like medic/support.
This convention propagated on down the lines of games for literally my whole life* (plus a year and change), so I accept it without notice most of the time. You have someone who fights with magic, someone who fights with big weapons and someone who fights with small weapons and sneakiness. That's how it goes. Fictionally, it looks a little weird; in Thedas, the major fictional difference between the capabilities of violent, adventurous folk is can you do magic? If yes, mage; if no, not mage. There's no reason
Another convention for how things go are character attributes; Stats.** Stats are a weird idea, if you think about them from a fictional standpoint, and a super damaging one, if you bring them to making fiction, without examining them. In the beginning, there were six*** attributes with numbers attached to them that controlled a character's destiny. These were randomly assigned in the old days, so you could sit down saying "I want to be a fighter" roll some dice and end up playing a mage. Or a simpleton with a prolapsed mitral valve and congenital syphilis. Or a fighter with a prolapsed mitral valve and congenital syphilis. You never know.****
Six shall be the number, and the number of them shall be six; attributes objectively measured, comparable, immutable, except for when you get hit with nasty magic which makes your luckily rolled fighter into a simpleton with a prolapsed mitral valve and congenital syphilis. Six is an important number, here, and a benchmark with which all tabletop and computer games that trace their lineage back to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin must contend. Some games add more as a show of being more realistic. Some games subtract a few for reasons of ease-of-play or whatever the fuck GURPS was after, but six is the magic number. Dragon Age also uses six, and they are a very similar six.
Stats do two major things. First, they serve as gates. You cannot wear this armor unless you are this Strong. You cannot cast this spell unless you are this Sparkly. You cannot learn this skill unless you are this Happy. This lets people who are Strong carry big weapons but not cast spells that Sparkly people can cast. It lets you, the player, feel special about your guy, whatever they happen to be good at, because the other player's guy may not be able to do the thing at all, depending on what their stats say.*****
The other major thing stats do is act as a kind of measure of how much goodness and light comes into your character's life. If you are not Strong, hitting someone with a sword is not going to do a lot. If you're really Happy, you can learn extra skills. If you're kind of average Sparkly, your spells cause the expected effect. It's like a ladder rising out of a cesspit. At the bottom of the ladder, you're covered in crap. In the middle of the ladder, you're clean, but you can still smell the crap below. At the top of the ladder, it's all fresh air and the songs of angels.******
So below, I'm going to tell you about the original Standard Six and how things changed to the Standard Six of the Dragon Age Trilandahalfogy.
STRENGTH - While it does have some say in how you lift things or carry things, Strength is mostly the stat of hitting guys. How well you hit guys and how hard. All the other stats get their names changed in other games or their portfolios reallocated based on designers' philosophies, but Strength is always the same. It's always Strength and Strength is always the hitting guys stat. In the old days, it was a gate on taking the Fighter class. In DA it's still Strength and it's still the stat for hitting guys, but since computers are a lot faster than your Dungeon Master,******* it also covers how likely you are to get knocked over by special attacks that knock you over or how long you are stuck in those fecking webs when all the giant spiders in Lothering home in on you. In DA, it also controls what armor you can put on and weapons you can pick up, beyond just gating the Warrior class. In both cases, having a higher strength means guys hurt more when you hit them.
DEXTERITY - The not getting hit stat.******** Also, the getting to that inaccessible place stat. It's grown over time to the stat of hitting guys with light weapons and bows, but it wasn't at first. A lot of games call it Agility, too, but it's almost never not in a game. In DA it's one of those two, but I can't be assed to check and it's mostly the stat of hitting guys with daggers and bows, which is how Sooney rolls, so she's got a lot of it. Having more of it makes guys you hit with daggers and bows hurt more, and makes it more likely that every sixth swing they take at you misses. For what that's worth.
CONSTITUTION - Also Stamina in some games and Endurance in others. Having this stat up high gets you a couple more Hit Points. It also gives you slightly better chance to not die when poisoned. That's all it does, but considering "Keeping your guy from dying" is really important, that's all it really needs to do. In DA it's still Constitution, and if you are starting to see a trend, keep looking, things are about to get a little different. But not yet. Constitution in DA gives you more Hit Points. I think it helps you take less damage from ungoing badness (being poisoned or on fire) or have those things end faster (fun fact, tough people are less flamable than delicate people), but all of that is invisible, so I don't care. Hit Points are reason enough.
INTELLIGENCE - Sparkly, from above. This is how good you are at using magic if you are a mage. It also might give you another language to speak. Later games will have it fuel other skills, but in the beginning, it was just for wizards. In DA it's Magic, and it's just for wizards. In DAO, having more of it also helps you get more out of healing items, for reasons. This matters even less than it sounds like it matters.
WISDOM - This is how good you are at using cleric spells, if you are a cleric. In the old days, it also helped a little with resisting magical mindfuckery. To that end, it ends up in other games as Willpower, or even Common Sense.********* It's gotten expanded to include everyone's ability to notice things, which makes it very important. In DA, it's Willpower and while it does protect against magic mindfuckery, there is something more important it does. Every special thing you do in DA is fueled by Stamina (for not-mages) and Mana (for mages), and regardless of what it is, the more Willpower you have, the more fuel-for-special-moves you have. Thus it is good to have a lot of it.
CHARISMA - How pretty you are. Well, not really, but kind of. In the old days, it came into play when you met critters in the dungeon and the Dungeon Master hadn't decided whether they were just going to attack on sight or not.********** Later, it fueled talky skills. Some games with pretensions of being socially focused branch this out into a lot of different stats, but if you are playing one of those games, find out which one controls your ability to lie and you can happily ignore all the others. They will never, ever come up. In DA, Charisma is a skill (called Coercion) you can learn, not a Stat. The Stat is Cunning and it gates the Coercion skill. It gates the levels of all the non-combat abilities to one extent or another, and, I think, also gives bonuses to picking locks. Since Coercion is a skill only the main protagonist can get and levels of Coercion gate certain dialogue options and outcomes, there is no reason not to get all four levels of the skill and also the amount of Cunning you need to get the fourth level of Coercion.
Like with Hit Points, you can tell a lot about a game from the Stats it's chosen. Here, it's pretty clear that DAO wants to wear its heritage on its sleeve and give you nothing you don't expect from a fantasy role playing game. At the same time, its aware of the advantages technology gives it in regards to character bookkeeping and, further, it knows that only one character in all of Thedas needs Charisma at any given time and allows you, the player to decide how much your character has. It's not bad.
But it's not perfect, by any means, and possesse one bugbear that I find increasingly bothersome. In tabletop RPGs you advance your Stats rarely, if at all, your maximum values are almost always bounded and an advance means a great deal to the capabilities of the character. In DAO and DA2, you get three points to spend on Stats every time you level up, and your maximum Stats are far beyond anything I've leveled a character up to, if there are any bounds at all on it. This does two things I kind of dislike. The first is that it makes your choices in how you want to allot your points mean less than I think they should. That's just my gripe, but the second, I think is less a matter of taste and more a matter of good design.
If I am a Warrior and I level up, the conventions surrounding character level make me expect I am going to become better at Warrioring. Since the conventions of character class define Warrior as the class that hits guys with weapons and takes more hits than your allies can, I expect to get better at those things. If you make it my responsibility to allocate stat points when I level, you leave me a bunch of choices, but only two of them make a lot of sense - do I choose to throw all 3 points into Strength so I can hit guys harder, or do I throw 1 in Strength, 1 in Constitution and 1 in Willpower so I can get a tiny bit better at all the important aspects of Warrioring. You do get a little more of all of these things just for leveling, I *think* (I imagine its some formula that takes your class and you Stats into account each time you level to advance your abilities), but to the extent that I control the kind of warrior I am going to be, I would like my choices to mean something to the game.
In a tabletop game with a responsive person running it, this is possible. If I am a warrior and my GM*********** notices I am throwing most of my advances into upping my Constitution and Willpower, I hope they will notice and say "Erik is interested in getting his character's endurance tested. I should try to make that happen," and throw things my way that test my character where my character is strongest, such that my character needs all that strength (and maybe some good rolls and expendable resources) to carry the day.
I don't expect a computer game to do that for me. I expect it to throw at me what it's got, regardless what I bring, which means many of the choces I make will be dumb, useless choices.
There's a learning value to being allowed to make dumb, useless choices in a tabletop game, because, again, a GM can be responsive to the choice and give the player something cool to do with that choice regardless, and, even if they don't, they can teach the errant player better system mastery through the consequences of the dumb, useless choice. Essentially, in a tabletop game, choices are only dumb and useless if the GM, the player who made the choice or the table at large decides it's a dumb and useless choice. Even then, there's fun to be had in making dumb and useless choices at a table. Ask the people I game with. I bring those to game like I bring the Yuengling.************
In a computer game, dumb and useless choices are dumb. And useless. In worse games than the Dragon Age ones (and there are many), dumb and useless choices can make the game unfinishable. Which makes making the correct choice or choices a bit of a guessing game. The fact that I know what to guess isn't helpful, because I hate the correct answer. RPGs like Dragon Age, descendents of the modified wargames of the upper midwest in the mid 70s are offensively focused. Which is to say, it's more important to do damage to the other guy than anything. Which means if there is a Stat which affects the damage you do, the optimal choice is to put everything into that Stat. Always. Science fact. When there is a best choice, why let me choose?
For something called "The Standard Six," this is actually kind of long.*************
* It weirds me out how D&D and Neoliberalism have defined my life; one is a little older than I am and one is a little older than I can remember what the world was like before. One of them imrpoves my life a bit, though it makes me seem a little weird to most folks. The other will be the death of me. The one might be the death of me, too, actually...
** Short for Statistics, which I know they are not, but I didn't name them, so don't blame me for it.
*** You got 3D6 (thats 3 regular dice [with 6 sides]) assigned in order down the line. Life was hard in Carter's America, apparently, so hard we had to replace it with the nightmare dystopia I mentioned in *
**** What you could be sure you were not getting was a Conan-esque pulp hero, that's for damned sure. Despite Gary and Dave and all them wearing their influences on their sleeves, the work of fiction that Old School D&D most reminds me of is Cormac McCarthy's The Road.
***** Things get rougher when there are more players at the table than there are meaningful class/stat combos available.
****** Unless your Dungeon Master likes to make you "role play it out." If you hear this from the person on the other side of the cardboard screen, bend all of your efforts into doing more damage in combat. It's your only hope.
******* That's what they were called. DM for short. Nowadays we use Game Master or GM, so as not to be confused with the kink community (we never actually are. As the joke goes, I went to see The Opposite of Sex (1998) but it wasn't about D&D at all!)
******** A LOT less useful than it sounds. "Missing" in combat, whatever that means, is not fun or interesting, so the math is set up that you will usually hit, and you will almost always be hit by most of the things you fight. That's what makes Hit Points such a weird concept. 8 Hit Points damage is the maximum amount that a 110cm blade can do to a person. The most damage that a 110 cm blade can do to a person is messily kill them. What happens when you messily kill a person, but they still have 32 Hit Points left? What does that look like? I tried to explain in my last dorky post, but it was overlong, and also dorky. I really don't expect you to have read this far.
********* HA! Hahahahahahahahaha!
********** In my experience, they always did. Thus Charisma is where, if you had a charitable DM who let you assign your stats where you wanted, you ALWAYS put the worst one in Charisma. Thus its official name: The Dump Stat.
*********** GM being short for Game Master, which I technically already explained in a footnote. Kill me.
************ Not every time, but almost every time. And six of them, only one or two of which I aim at myself. Seriously, Yuengling is brand new to Connecticut and for a decent beer it's super cheap and for a cheap beer, it's surprisingly decent, so thanks, Pennsylvania! I forgive you for taking my nursary school girlfriend away from me.
************* That's what she said never.
A Whole Lot of Silence and Trousers - Redcliffe, Recap
DRAGON AGE ORIGINS [DAO] GMAEPLAY/STORY - REDCLIFFE
Content - Recap
I feel like a recap is in order, since I've spent most of the new year, in true corporate fashion, cleaning up lingering action items from the previous year while hung over. When last we left Sooney, she'd stopped in Lothering to supply up and listen to Alistair and Morrigan make her wish she'd just taken the dog. We retrieved delusional church lady Leliana and grumpasaurus rex Sten and abandoned the village to its fate. Harriet got through her harrowing, narced* on her turns-out-he-was-a-blood-mage Ron Weasley expy (and you can take as rote went to Ostagar and things went just as badly for everyone as it did for Warrior!Sooney and Rogue!Sooney).
So the king is dead, betrayed by his father-in-law. All the Grey Wardens except Sooney (or Harriet**) and Alistair died with him. Said father-in-law took over the country, sort of, but made decisions along the way that proved or will prove to be disastrously wrong and cause untold death and magical fuckery along the way. The two Littlest Wardens were snatched from certain death by the captain of the USS Voyager/an inmate at Litchfield Correctional**, supplied with the most condescending misanthropic version of Officer Aeryn Sun and sent along their way. Their mission consists of knocking on the doors of the Elves, Dwarves and Mages to make them help stop the Blight and the dragon-looking jerk who runs it, as well as maybe rounding up some sympathetic human Fereldens at Redcliffe. And, you know, taking the country back from Teyrn Loghain. And getting me a milkshake. Chocolate. With whipped cream.
Our party consists of:
Sooney Cousland - Batmanned scion of a noble house, looking for revenge on Arl Pennywise the Clown, but not her brother, who was the other sole survivor of the line, missing in action after Ostagar.
Alistair - Slightly glib would-be Templar who is absolutely allergic to authority and decision making to the point that he put Sooney in charge of fighting the Blight, even though he's the senior Warden in Ferelden.***
Morrigan - Sooney's self-appointed shoulder devil, witch of the wilds, Peacekeeper officer of the Klaizar regiment, whose two favorite hobbies are being condescending and docking you reputation for every non-shitheel choice you make.
Leliana - The last person you'd expect to turn into Pope Vader by the end of the third game, but there she is. Slightly dotty seeming chantry sister who talks to the Maker and implies that, for all Andrastianity is crystal dragon Christianity, it lacks it's real world counterpart's tradition for mysticism. I suppose it's also important to note that in other game worlds influenced by uncles Gary, Dave and C., Leliana would be a cleric as a character class, with magical powers, distinct from those Morrigan has, which were given to her by the Maker. In Thedas, Leliana has to content herself with being a rogue**** and having been given unlimited arrows.
Sten of the Barasaad - There are actually a lot of seven foot tall, gray-skinned dudes in the Barasaad named Sten; it's a rank and a job. He's the only one without horns, though. Also, the only one in Ferelden, the only one who got sentenced to death in a gibbet for murdering a whole family with a grumpiness flare. He's a fighter, in case you were wondering.
Mr. Bitey - Sooney's faithful doggie who does not get used the moment Sten and Leliana show up because you don't need to win his approval. He loves Sooney unconditionally already.
That's a lot of recap. I'll be launching into a more thorough introduction of each of Sooney's companions, actually, probably after this post.
Anyway, Sooney chooses to go to Redcliffe first, for reasons. First, she thinks it's what Alistair would choose to do if he wasn't allergic to choosing, and Sooney is still looking to him for cues on how to Warden. Second, the idea of dropping in on Orzammar, the Elves or the Magi - each of those is more imposing than dropping in on an Arl to see how he's doing. I suspect she's at least seen her dad do that last bit, if not been involved. Lastly, the forest is a pain in the ass, Orzammar has this sort of ...reputation in my household and the circle is a good place to die a lot if you don't have a couple levels under your belt*****.
Actually, along the way, Sooney decides to take a detour to Honnleath to get my favorite character in DAO, but that's for later.
* Narcked? There doesn't seem to be a way to render the past tense of "to narc" in a way that looks right.
** By the time you get to Ostagar, the only difference between the different origins in story is the occasional line of dialogue and how much of a son of a bitch the fade sequences are, we can just assume that Harriet is there in spirit. That said, I wish she was there in Sooney's run, or Sooney was there in hers. Mages are hard to come by in DAO, annoying to maintain and easy to lose. Darkpaisley's final confrontation with the archdemon was mageless, thanks to Petal Pie's poor decision making skills.
*** In his defense, he's been on the job like two weeks longer than Sooney. Also, he has good reason to fear being seen as someone who could lead buzzards to a cooling body. Okay, he's been on the job more like six months longer. In my position, he'd still be processing the trademarks, poor boy.
**** The concept of character class and the Rogue in particular is something that probably deserves its own post, but I trust everyone to intuitively accept the fact that the difference between Warriors and Rogues is that Warriors use heavier weapons and heavier armor and have more hit points. Rogues use daggers (one in each hand, natch) or bows and lighter weapons, and have special skills. Still, we shoudl come back to this sometime.
***** Also, the fecking fade. And it's insta-kill fire.
Content - Recap
I feel like a recap is in order, since I've spent most of the new year, in true corporate fashion, cleaning up lingering action items from the previous year while hung over. When last we left Sooney, she'd stopped in Lothering to supply up and listen to Alistair and Morrigan make her wish she'd just taken the dog. We retrieved delusional church lady Leliana and grumpasaurus rex Sten and abandoned the village to its fate. Harriet got through her harrowing, narced* on her turns-out-he-was-a-blood-mage Ron Weasley expy (and you can take as rote went to Ostagar and things went just as badly for everyone as it did for Warrior!Sooney and Rogue!Sooney).
So the king is dead, betrayed by his father-in-law. All the Grey Wardens except Sooney (or Harriet**) and Alistair died with him. Said father-in-law took over the country, sort of, but made decisions along the way that proved or will prove to be disastrously wrong and cause untold death and magical fuckery along the way. The two Littlest Wardens were snatched from certain death by the captain of the USS Voyager/an inmate at Litchfield Correctional**, supplied with the most condescending misanthropic version of Officer Aeryn Sun and sent along their way. Their mission consists of knocking on the doors of the Elves, Dwarves and Mages to make them help stop the Blight and the dragon-looking jerk who runs it, as well as maybe rounding up some sympathetic human Fereldens at Redcliffe. And, you know, taking the country back from Teyrn Loghain. And getting me a milkshake. Chocolate. With whipped cream.
Our party consists of:
Sooney Cousland - Batmanned scion of a noble house, looking for revenge on Arl Pennywise the Clown, but not her brother, who was the other sole survivor of the line, missing in action after Ostagar.
Alistair - Slightly glib would-be Templar who is absolutely allergic to authority and decision making to the point that he put Sooney in charge of fighting the Blight, even though he's the senior Warden in Ferelden.***
Morrigan - Sooney's self-appointed shoulder devil, witch of the wilds, Peacekeeper officer of the Klaizar regiment, whose two favorite hobbies are being condescending and docking you reputation for every non-shitheel choice you make.
Leliana - The last person you'd expect to turn into Pope Vader by the end of the third game, but there she is. Slightly dotty seeming chantry sister who talks to the Maker and implies that, for all Andrastianity is crystal dragon Christianity, it lacks it's real world counterpart's tradition for mysticism. I suppose it's also important to note that in other game worlds influenced by uncles Gary, Dave and C., Leliana would be a cleric as a character class, with magical powers, distinct from those Morrigan has, which were given to her by the Maker. In Thedas, Leliana has to content herself with being a rogue**** and having been given unlimited arrows.
Sten of the Barasaad - There are actually a lot of seven foot tall, gray-skinned dudes in the Barasaad named Sten; it's a rank and a job. He's the only one without horns, though. Also, the only one in Ferelden, the only one who got sentenced to death in a gibbet for murdering a whole family with a grumpiness flare. He's a fighter, in case you were wondering.
Mr. Bitey - Sooney's faithful doggie who does not get used the moment Sten and Leliana show up because you don't need to win his approval. He loves Sooney unconditionally already.
That's a lot of recap. I'll be launching into a more thorough introduction of each of Sooney's companions, actually, probably after this post.
Anyway, Sooney chooses to go to Redcliffe first, for reasons. First, she thinks it's what Alistair would choose to do if he wasn't allergic to choosing, and Sooney is still looking to him for cues on how to Warden. Second, the idea of dropping in on Orzammar, the Elves or the Magi - each of those is more imposing than dropping in on an Arl to see how he's doing. I suspect she's at least seen her dad do that last bit, if not been involved. Lastly, the forest is a pain in the ass, Orzammar has this sort of ...reputation in my household and the circle is a good place to die a lot if you don't have a couple levels under your belt*****.
Actually, along the way, Sooney decides to take a detour to Honnleath to get my favorite character in DAO, but that's for later.
* Narcked? There doesn't seem to be a way to render the past tense of "to narc" in a way that looks right.
** By the time you get to Ostagar, the only difference between the different origins in story is the occasional line of dialogue and how much of a son of a bitch the fade sequences are, we can just assume that Harriet is there in spirit. That said, I wish she was there in Sooney's run, or Sooney was there in hers. Mages are hard to come by in DAO, annoying to maintain and easy to lose. Darkpaisley's final confrontation with the archdemon was mageless, thanks to Petal Pie's poor decision making skills.
*** In his defense, he's been on the job like two weeks longer than Sooney. Also, he has good reason to fear being seen as someone who could lead buzzards to a cooling body. Okay, he's been on the job more like six months longer. In my position, he'd still be processing the trademarks, poor boy.
**** The concept of character class and the Rogue in particular is something that probably deserves its own post, but I trust everyone to intuitively accept the fact that the difference between Warriors and Rogues is that Warriors use heavier weapons and heavier armor and have more hit points. Rogues use daggers (one in each hand, natch) or bows and lighter weapons, and have special skills. Still, we shoudl come back to this sometime.
***** Also, the fecking fade. And it's insta-kill fire.
December 31, 2014
A Whole Lot of Silence and Trousers - Things to Do in Lothering, When it's Dead.
DRAGON AGE ORIGINS [DAO] STORY - LOTHERING
Content - Child Abandonment, Conjectured Cannibalism, Objectivists, Grumpopotomi, Bronson Pinchot
The thing about Lothering is that it's mostly just a place to get your bearings, Leliana and Sten, before you take those things to choice-of-four trainwrecks in progress:
REDCLIFFE - your persepctive ally is poisoned, his son is possessed and the dead are attacking every night.
CIRCLE OF MAGI - Blood magic and abominations ahoy!
ORZAMMAR - Prince Satan-dwarf and Lord Conserva-dwarf are fighting over the crown that Prince Satan-dwarf killed his dad and siblings to get at.
FOREST - The elves are getting bit by werewolves? Ok, this one is a little weak
With all of that going down, you might be forgiven for wanting to light out of Lothering as fast as you can. But the other thing about Lothering is that the moment you roll out the darkspawn roll in, and kill everyone. So here, since it's New Year's Eve,* and super lists are a thing on the internets, are things you can do in Lothering.
1. Collect Sten. Not that you need all the fighters they give you, and he's the grumpiest grumpasaurus in the grump brigade. But he has no horns, which, as you will later find out, is pretty unique among Qunari. Don't ask about Qunari, though. No one but Sten knows about them and STEN IS NOT HERE TO EDUCATE YOUR BAS ASS.
2. Troll Chanter Devins. That never gets old. A Chanter says what?
3. Talk to the Chasind doomsayer. That's not a cultural title or anything. He's just a Chasind (that's local swamp folk) who looks like Balki Bartokamos and speaks of DOOOOOOM! I think you can fight or intimidate him. Sooney was nice and then inspired the other people to maybe do something brave before they all died. She left before that could shake out.
4. Threaten the Revered Mother! +5 Reputation with Morrigan never felt so satisfying. Trust me, most of the time you have to be a much bigger shitheel to get her approval.
5. Troll the ginger moppet who's lost his mother. Actually, I gave him some money and then went looking for his mom. She's been killed by bears. I assume that the money I gave the kid became something he ate and, in good time a little more meat on his bones when the darkspawn roast him alive. It's the circle of life. people.
6. Don't give money to the elves who got robbed. Sooney was given three different shades of telling them to eff off and one option where she could tell them she killed the bandits who robbed them (she didn't). I have a feeling I sent that family to their deaths.
7. Trolling Morrigan by talking to the Templars. They have freaky eyes in their helmets.
8. Finding Bodan and Sandal, who will tell you they aren't traveling with you, but will then immediately show up in your camp every time you make it.
9. Negotiate a trade dispute between a war profiteer and a Chantry Sister. Annoy Morrigan if you do anything other than throw your unstinting support behind the guy offering you a handful of silver coins.
10. Spend all your money buying crap from the war profiteer before you realize the guy in the tavern has better stuff.
11. Wonder why you decided to let the religious maniac come along.
12. Wonder why you let grumpopotomus out of his cage.
13. Wonder why you let Morrigan follow you. Realize that the reason for #13 is so you can listen to Morrigan troll Alistair and Leliana, and the reason for #11 and #12 is so they can troll Morrigan.
14. Make normal traps for a local lady, not any of those poison traps.
15. Find out the Qun doesn't like women fighting.** And that Qunari are as obtuse as Objectivists, though the Qun is collective. Imagine the heads of Objectivist exploding. Perhaps when Qunari hit said heads with axes.***
16. Get mobbed by spiders and spend the entire fight in webs while your friends do... who knows what.
17. Get mauled by bears, such that only Morrigan remains standing. Flee the bears, run into town, realize the bears are still aggroing you. Consider trying to lead them into the Chantry and then barring the door from the outside. +5 Reputation with bears.
18. Tell the leader of the Templars you're Wardens. Get told by the leader of the Templars that you didn't just tell him that.
19. Fantasize about how much better the later games in the series look and control.
20. Be a dick to the Redcliffe knight and tell him that his friend is dead only after you've pumped him for information about the Urn of Sacred Ashes, because you know he'll leave the moment he knows.
* I prefer New Years to Christmas in most respects, since it's more elective and less obligatory, as well as more friends and less family. Don't get me wrong, I love my family, but they're mostly teetotalers out of necessity or inclination, and I am kind of not.
** They are okay with transfolk, though! Also with people boinking who they want to boink as long as they only have kids when and where and with whom they are told. Non-binary folk, though, are right out.
*** -5 Reputation with Ayn Rand, which makes a very, very low number for me, since I cannot, in any way, be described as "angular."
Content - Child Abandonment, Conjectured Cannibalism, Objectivists, Grumpopotomi, Bronson Pinchot
The thing about Lothering is that it's mostly just a place to get your bearings, Leliana and Sten, before you take those things to choice-of-four trainwrecks in progress:
REDCLIFFE - your persepctive ally is poisoned, his son is possessed and the dead are attacking every night.
CIRCLE OF MAGI - Blood magic and abominations ahoy!
ORZAMMAR - Prince Satan-dwarf and Lord Conserva-dwarf are fighting over the crown that Prince Satan-dwarf killed his dad and siblings to get at.
FOREST - The elves are getting bit by werewolves? Ok, this one is a little weak
With all of that going down, you might be forgiven for wanting to light out of Lothering as fast as you can. But the other thing about Lothering is that the moment you roll out the darkspawn roll in, and kill everyone. So here, since it's New Year's Eve,* and super lists are a thing on the internets, are things you can do in Lothering.
1. Collect Sten. Not that you need all the fighters they give you, and he's the grumpiest grumpasaurus in the grump brigade. But he has no horns, which, as you will later find out, is pretty unique among Qunari. Don't ask about Qunari, though. No one but Sten knows about them and STEN IS NOT HERE TO EDUCATE YOUR BAS ASS.
2. Troll Chanter Devins. That never gets old. A Chanter says what?
3. Talk to the Chasind doomsayer. That's not a cultural title or anything. He's just a Chasind (that's local swamp folk) who looks like Balki Bartokamos and speaks of DOOOOOOM! I think you can fight or intimidate him. Sooney was nice and then inspired the other people to maybe do something brave before they all died. She left before that could shake out.
4. Threaten the Revered Mother! +5 Reputation with Morrigan never felt so satisfying. Trust me, most of the time you have to be a much bigger shitheel to get her approval.
5. Troll the ginger moppet who's lost his mother. Actually, I gave him some money and then went looking for his mom. She's been killed by bears. I assume that the money I gave the kid became something he ate and, in good time a little more meat on his bones when the darkspawn roast him alive. It's the circle of life. people.
6. Don't give money to the elves who got robbed. Sooney was given three different shades of telling them to eff off and one option where she could tell them she killed the bandits who robbed them (she didn't). I have a feeling I sent that family to their deaths.
7. Trolling Morrigan by talking to the Templars. They have freaky eyes in their helmets.
8. Finding Bodan and Sandal, who will tell you they aren't traveling with you, but will then immediately show up in your camp every time you make it.
9. Negotiate a trade dispute between a war profiteer and a Chantry Sister. Annoy Morrigan if you do anything other than throw your unstinting support behind the guy offering you a handful of silver coins.
10. Spend all your money buying crap from the war profiteer before you realize the guy in the tavern has better stuff.
11. Wonder why you decided to let the religious maniac come along.
12. Wonder why you let grumpopotomus out of his cage.
13. Wonder why you let Morrigan follow you. Realize that the reason for #13 is so you can listen to Morrigan troll Alistair and Leliana, and the reason for #11 and #12 is so they can troll Morrigan.
14. Make normal traps for a local lady, not any of those poison traps.
15. Find out the Qun doesn't like women fighting.** And that Qunari are as obtuse as Objectivists, though the Qun is collective. Imagine the heads of Objectivist exploding. Perhaps when Qunari hit said heads with axes.***
16. Get mobbed by spiders and spend the entire fight in webs while your friends do... who knows what.
17. Get mauled by bears, such that only Morrigan remains standing. Flee the bears, run into town, realize the bears are still aggroing you. Consider trying to lead them into the Chantry and then barring the door from the outside. +5 Reputation with bears.
18. Tell the leader of the Templars you're Wardens. Get told by the leader of the Templars that you didn't just tell him that.
19. Fantasize about how much better the later games in the series look and control.
20. Be a dick to the Redcliffe knight and tell him that his friend is dead only after you've pumped him for information about the Urn of Sacred Ashes, because you know he'll leave the moment he knows.
* I prefer New Years to Christmas in most respects, since it's more elective and less obligatory, as well as more friends and less family. Don't get me wrong, I love my family, but they're mostly teetotalers out of necessity or inclination, and I am kind of not.
** They are okay with transfolk, though! Also with people boinking who they want to boink as long as they only have kids when and where and with whom they are told. Non-binary folk, though, are right out.
*** -5 Reputation with Ayn Rand, which makes a very, very low number for me, since I cannot, in any way, be described as "angular."
December 29, 2014
A Whole Lot of Silence and Trousers - Lothering: 3 Kinds of Fight
DRAGON AGE ORIGINS [DAO] STORY/MECHANICS
Content - Robbery/Shakedown, Killing Refugees. Violence against Sex Workers. I'm really bad at predicting what I'm going to get to in each post, let alone what parts are going to be triggering.
ROUND 1 - FIGHT! Sooney, Alistair Morrigan and Mr. Bitey get accosted by a group of bandits along a raised road, structure that kind of looks like someone Hi-Lined Roman aqueducts.* They engage "The Pretty One" (Sooney) in conversation, assuming she's the leader and offer safe passage for a nominal fee of ten silver. This fee is kind of nominal, technically, and I believe they're as good as their word if your pay them. I never have, and Sooney isn't about to either. Fortunately, you can talk your way out of the fight, assuming you have been taking Coercion every time it comes up as a level-up option, like it's your job (and she has). Unfortunately, if you touch any of their stuff** after you've talked your way out of the fight, it automatically talks you back in.
The fight ends when you've landed what would be a killing blow on the leader. You go into a cut scene where the remaining bandits beg for you to not beat the XP out of them. Sooney let them go. I was feeling magnanimous, and I see Sooney as someone who won't just kill someone she doesn't have to. The bears later made me regret that choice. I might have leveled before I met them if I'd killed those bandits.
ROUND 2 - FIGHT! Sooney and the others go into the inn, where a couple of Loghain's men correctly identify them as Wardens, tell them, if they didn't already know, that there's a bounty on Wardens and Loghain wants Sooney and Alistair dead, in specific. One wonders how he knew they survived. I'll give it to them as Loghain starting to realize that every decision he'd made up to that point had turned out worse than he could have reasonably been expected to imagine, so two surviving Wardens with a hate on for him was just something he was going to have to assume from now on. Despite the fact that you get dialogue prompts, here, there's no way to talk yourself out of this one. But hey, you get backup*** in the form of Leliana, a Chantry lay sister who's going to be joining your party and speaking delusional religious nonsense at you all the way to the top of that big tower in Denerim.****
This one ends as the bandit fight did, with Loghain's men surrendering, and Leliana strenuously persuading you to accept that surrender. Sooney kind of didn't want them to report back to Loghain that a) they were alive and b) they'd passed through Lothering, but actually talking your way back into that fight is nigh unto "but thou must" territory with Leliana, and Sooney eventually settled on letting them take a warning to Loghain that she and Alistair were, as his clairvoyance had foretold, coming for him. Then Leliana asked to join, and Sooney, genre savvy enough at this point, to know whither plot lies, accepted. To which Morrigan, quite reasonably inquired if Sooney had been concussed in the fights.
FINAL ROUND - FIGHT! Sooney and company (active party + Leliana, - Mr. Bitey) must have wandered into the rough part of Lothering, because up jump a bunch of refugees who really want some sweet Warden bounty. There's no way to get out of this fight, not even dialogue options. Cut scene and then rush. The fight ends when you kill the refugees. Yep.
You also fight bandits, darkspawn, wolves, spiders and bears, none of which you can really avoid if you are in their area, and which will Benny Hill you all through the village of Lothering (as a bear did to Morrigan) endlessly, once aggroed.***** There are also fights that I haven't gotten into, like against the Chasind doomsayer.****** I bring up those three above because the first two are there for a reason and the last might... be...?
In the first fight, you're allowed to talk your way out of the fight to show that you can talk your way out of some fights. And by some, I mean like four. And only if you maxed out your coercion.******* Also, that you can choose to spare guys you fight. I think. Maybe later on in the game. I think I remember you can not kill some werewolves.********
In the second fight, it's mostly to get a feel for the character of Leliana, only she really doesn't act that much a pacifist in the rest of the game, and she becomes Darth Fucking Vader by the end of Inquisition.********* Also, I think that making you feel like an asshole for insisting on the deaths of Loghain's men gives them a chance to escape and justify why Evil McJerk hires Hot Bisexual Assassin to come after you. Not that the inn wasn't full of people who couldn't report the same thing, including the bards that switched to fight music when swords got drawn.**********
The third fight is... I don't know. Maybe as punishment for not being quieter about being a Warden? Maybe punishment for revisiting parts of Lothering you've already looted for sparklies when you get lost? Maybe to GRIMDARK GRIMDARK about how GRIMDARK can convince a desperate group of men to attack a far better armed party and fight to the death?
There's an interesting game mechanic implied in avoiding Loghain's notice, but not used in DAO. I would love to see the idea actually used somewhere, though; it's something that I think could actually work as the backbone mechanic of an RPG. You need to be careful and stealthy and leave no witnesses or buy off people in order to avoid official notice, and the more notice you get the more often you get in tough encounters with groups that are annoying to face and give off ever diminishing returns of XP and gear, such that there's no real mechanical benefit to fighting them. GTA has something similar with the wanted meters, but I think this could actually sing in an RPG, since there would be actual consequences for just causing all sorts of destruction.
Of course, I also want sandbox games like GTA to spawn implacable killers to stalk characters whose players think it's jolly good fun to kill of npc sex workers and other background NPCs just because.
Ones who then erase the game's save files and email the players' mothers.
* They do look like you should be able to walk in them. You probably even could, but I bet it was a bad idea.
** And of course you will, since everything shiny you encounter goes in your inventory and this is the only time in game that there is any consequence for the rampant larceny you engage in as passed down through the generations from Link.
*** For very poorly equipped values of backup.
**** The capital city, where you fight the archdemon at the end of the game.
***** Aggro (v) To Aggro, Aggro, Aggroes, Aggroing, Aggroed. 1) To activate in pursuit or with violence toward a designated target in the vicinity. 2) To cause an entity to activate in pursuit or with violence toward you upon entering the vicinity. Sooney aggroed the bear when she found that little refugee boy's dead mum.
****** I don't think I ever have, but I assume you can, since he's standing around howling with a big old battle axe on his back.
******* And Sooney has.
******** But you can't get werewolves in your army without being a massive shitheel :(
********* You can think of Leliana in DAO as wee Annikin, in DA2 as grown up - ish Annikin (and unlike him, she only has 2 minutes screen time tops in DA2) and in DAI as EASY THERE SATAN.
********** Don't think I didn't notice that, you assholes. Or that I don't appreciate it.
Content - Robbery/Shakedown, Killing Refugees. Violence against Sex Workers. I'm really bad at predicting what I'm going to get to in each post, let alone what parts are going to be triggering.
ROUND 1 - FIGHT! Sooney, Alistair Morrigan and Mr. Bitey get accosted by a group of bandits along a raised road, structure that kind of looks like someone Hi-Lined Roman aqueducts.* They engage "The Pretty One" (Sooney) in conversation, assuming she's the leader and offer safe passage for a nominal fee of ten silver. This fee is kind of nominal, technically, and I believe they're as good as their word if your pay them. I never have, and Sooney isn't about to either. Fortunately, you can talk your way out of the fight, assuming you have been taking Coercion every time it comes up as a level-up option, like it's your job (and she has). Unfortunately, if you touch any of their stuff** after you've talked your way out of the fight, it automatically talks you back in.
The fight ends when you've landed what would be a killing blow on the leader. You go into a cut scene where the remaining bandits beg for you to not beat the XP out of them. Sooney let them go. I was feeling magnanimous, and I see Sooney as someone who won't just kill someone she doesn't have to. The bears later made me regret that choice. I might have leveled before I met them if I'd killed those bandits.
ROUND 2 - FIGHT! Sooney and the others go into the inn, where a couple of Loghain's men correctly identify them as Wardens, tell them, if they didn't already know, that there's a bounty on Wardens and Loghain wants Sooney and Alistair dead, in specific. One wonders how he knew they survived. I'll give it to them as Loghain starting to realize that every decision he'd made up to that point had turned out worse than he could have reasonably been expected to imagine, so two surviving Wardens with a hate on for him was just something he was going to have to assume from now on. Despite the fact that you get dialogue prompts, here, there's no way to talk yourself out of this one. But hey, you get backup*** in the form of Leliana, a Chantry lay sister who's going to be joining your party and speaking delusional religious nonsense at you all the way to the top of that big tower in Denerim.****
This one ends as the bandit fight did, with Loghain's men surrendering, and Leliana strenuously persuading you to accept that surrender. Sooney kind of didn't want them to report back to Loghain that a) they were alive and b) they'd passed through Lothering, but actually talking your way back into that fight is nigh unto "but thou must" territory with Leliana, and Sooney eventually settled on letting them take a warning to Loghain that she and Alistair were, as his clairvoyance had foretold, coming for him. Then Leliana asked to join, and Sooney, genre savvy enough at this point, to know whither plot lies, accepted. To which Morrigan, quite reasonably inquired if Sooney had been concussed in the fights.
FINAL ROUND - FIGHT! Sooney and company (active party + Leliana, - Mr. Bitey) must have wandered into the rough part of Lothering, because up jump a bunch of refugees who really want some sweet Warden bounty. There's no way to get out of this fight, not even dialogue options. Cut scene and then rush. The fight ends when you kill the refugees. Yep.
You also fight bandits, darkspawn, wolves, spiders and bears, none of which you can really avoid if you are in their area, and which will Benny Hill you all through the village of Lothering (as a bear did to Morrigan) endlessly, once aggroed.***** There are also fights that I haven't gotten into, like against the Chasind doomsayer.****** I bring up those three above because the first two are there for a reason and the last might... be...?
In the first fight, you're allowed to talk your way out of the fight to show that you can talk your way out of some fights. And by some, I mean like four. And only if you maxed out your coercion.******* Also, that you can choose to spare guys you fight. I think. Maybe later on in the game. I think I remember you can not kill some werewolves.********
In the second fight, it's mostly to get a feel for the character of Leliana, only she really doesn't act that much a pacifist in the rest of the game, and she becomes Darth Fucking Vader by the end of Inquisition.********* Also, I think that making you feel like an asshole for insisting on the deaths of Loghain's men gives them a chance to escape and justify why Evil McJerk hires Hot Bisexual Assassin to come after you. Not that the inn wasn't full of people who couldn't report the same thing, including the bards that switched to fight music when swords got drawn.**********
The third fight is... I don't know. Maybe as punishment for not being quieter about being a Warden? Maybe punishment for revisiting parts of Lothering you've already looted for sparklies when you get lost? Maybe to GRIMDARK GRIMDARK about how GRIMDARK can convince a desperate group of men to attack a far better armed party and fight to the death?
There's an interesting game mechanic implied in avoiding Loghain's notice, but not used in DAO. I would love to see the idea actually used somewhere, though; it's something that I think could actually work as the backbone mechanic of an RPG. You need to be careful and stealthy and leave no witnesses or buy off people in order to avoid official notice, and the more notice you get the more often you get in tough encounters with groups that are annoying to face and give off ever diminishing returns of XP and gear, such that there's no real mechanical benefit to fighting them. GTA has something similar with the wanted meters, but I think this could actually sing in an RPG, since there would be actual consequences for just causing all sorts of destruction.
Of course, I also want sandbox games like GTA to spawn implacable killers to stalk characters whose players think it's jolly good fun to kill of npc sex workers and other background NPCs just because.
Ones who then erase the game's save files and email the players' mothers.
* They do look like you should be able to walk in them. You probably even could, but I bet it was a bad idea.
** And of course you will, since everything shiny you encounter goes in your inventory and this is the only time in game that there is any consequence for the rampant larceny you engage in as passed down through the generations from Link.
*** For very poorly equipped values of backup.
**** The capital city, where you fight the archdemon at the end of the game.
***** Aggro (v) To Aggro, Aggro, Aggroes, Aggroing, Aggroed. 1) To activate in pursuit or with violence toward a designated target in the vicinity. 2) To cause an entity to activate in pursuit or with violence toward you upon entering the vicinity. Sooney aggroed the bear when she found that little refugee boy's dead mum.
****** I don't think I ever have, but I assume you can, since he's standing around howling with a big old battle axe on his back.
******* And Sooney has.
******** But you can't get werewolves in your army without being a massive shitheel :(
********* You can think of Leliana in DAO as wee Annikin, in DA2 as grown up - ish Annikin (and unlike him, she only has 2 minutes screen time tops in DA2) and in DAI as EASY THERE SATAN.
********** Don't think I didn't notice that, you assholes. Or that I don't appreciate it.
December 25, 2014
A Whole Lot of Silence and Trousers - Harriet Amell and the Chamber of (Intro) Sequence (Part 3)
DRAGON AGE ORIGINS [DAO] STORY - Circle of Magi Intro
Content - Occult, Demonic Possession, Non-conesensual Drugging, Incarceration, Lobotomy, Self-Harm.
Our story begins when Harriet Amell* is dragged out of bed in the middle of the night, dosed with lyrium and sent unarmed and unprepared into the spirit world to face a demon. The Ferelden Circle is the worst Hogwarts ever.**
The Fade is a yellow sky, floating islands and random art assets that make sense in other parts of the game.
As I think about this sequence, I start to wonder about things. My first wonder is what the win condition is for a mage undergoing their harrowing. It's not explicitly to go kill a demon (except when it is), because that's not how Harriet's harrowing goes, and a lot of the mages in the Circle really don't seem like the demon killing type. It's not a timed thing, at least not in the sense "last 2 hours in the Fade without getting possessed;" it is timed in the sense that, if you take too long (for undisclosed and possibly whimsical definitions of too long), a Templar will sword you. It might be a matter of getting back out again (except when it's not), but that's not clearly communicated, either.
What does happen is that Harriet meets the ghost of someone who was a little pokey in their Harrowing and got sworded. This is Mouse. Mouse is all "this Harrowing thing sucks and it's unfair and the Templars are salivating over the thought of getting to sword your currently uninhabited body the way they did to mine. Also, I can turn into a mouse." Thus the name. Mouse shows you the arena where you're supposed to fight a demon, so maybe you are supposed to kill a demon and bring its ectoplasmic hide back to hang up on the tower's wall. That would kind of make sense.
Not far from the arena, there's a glowy Templar who is, apparently, a spirit of Valor, and not a demon at all. He offers to let Harriet tool up out of his toolbox once she's proven she doesn't need aforementioned tools. This is accomplished with her starting spells and an even more awkward than usual fight sequence. Equipped with a mage staff, Harriet can now throw 3 point little blasts of light ever second in addition of the 24 point blast every 15 seconds.***
The only other thing to talk to in this area is a Sloth Demon**** that looks a lot like a shaved bear with random extra twisty horns. This is not the hide Harriet has to tack up on the tower wall, and he's not very interested in helping, harming or hindering you, because sloth demon. Mouse suggests that you could talk the bear into teaching him how to a be a bear. This sounds fishy to Harriet, and she leaves, but soon realizes her actual demon target is not going to arrive until she convinces the sloth demon into doing what Mouse wants. This she does and then she and Bear!Mouse head back to the arena.
The rage demon that's supposed to be her target shows up and gets its ass kicked in short order. Then Mouse congratulates Harriet for being much stronger and smarter than all the other apprentices he's helped, and prettier, and BTW, can I hitch a ride back to the physical world with you?
Yeah, so Mouse is a demon, and Harriet asks him just how dumb he thinks she is. Mouse turns into a Pride Demon, 15 feet tall, all lightning bolts and ridiculous elbow spurs. Harriet is a level 2 mage, at this point, and even on casual, there is no way she's getting out of this one. The Pride demon ganks her and possesses her body, except, no, that's not what happens at all. Instead he warns her not to get cocky and lets her go back to her body unmolested.
So the object of the Harrowing is to hang out with a surprisingly reasonable and, hell, even charitable demon, and kick around some jerks with his help?
Anyway, whatever the object, Harriet Calvinballs her way into it, and the next thing she sees is her Ron*****, an ostensible shlmozzle named Jowan. Jowan is all impressed that his bestie managed to ace the Harrowing (and asks her what it entailed, which she is NOT ALLOWED to tell, and hell, I don't think she could, because I don't know what it entailed, and I was fucking there), and really upset that he hasn't been called to do it, which means he's likely to get the forehead brand of magic lobotomy or the sword of Templar stress-relief. But Harriet's got to go visit First Enchanter Dumbledore Irving and talk to him about things. Also, if the dialogue options are any indication, Harriet doesn't think very highly at all of her friend Jowan
On the way, Harriet meets a couple of people - a sweet, slightly senile enchanter, a brusque elf-jerk enchanter, and Cullen, a blond boyscout of a Templar that has Thedas' most obvious crush on Harriet. He was also assigned the task of swording her if she took too long, which I don't think is a good way to tell a girl you like her.****** Irving is talking to Duncan, who's at the circle looking to recruit mages for the king's army at Ostagar, and making the Knight Commander's blood pressure spike. Knight Commander allowed seven whole mages out of the Circle under strenuous protest and that should be enough for anyone. Also, he really wanted to make Cullen sword Harriet, if the looks of disgust and hatred he gives her are any indication. Meanwhile, Irving crows about Harriet acing her Harrowing and Duncan is certainlt considering putting the girl in his Warden punch line.
Harriet meets Duncan. This part is pretty much the same as the sequence Sooney went through, so we'll spin on. Jowan really wants to talk to Harriet, and Irving asks if she's noticed him acting squirrelly, and if she didn't mind, would she make her first assignment as a full fledged mage narcing on him?
OK, so Jowan is in the chapel with a perfectly vacuous looking Chantry sister whose name I already forget, and don't care to look up. They're in love.******* She knows that the order for Rite of Tranquility has been put in for Jowan and wants you to help them break into the place where they keep the phylacteries and break his so they can escape. Harriet thinks this is an endeavor doomed to fail and since my dialogue cues are that she doesn't care much for him, she chickens out on it.
But Irving wants to talk to her again, and a little way into the conversation, Harriet admits what Jowan and Chantry!GF are trying to do. Irving says he knows already and he thinks it's a great idea for Harriet to help and then Judas Jowan and his lady over to the Templars. His reasoning is that if he stopped the whole thing before it began, the Chantry would say that Jowan blood magicked his lover into helping, and the only way she'd take the fall is if they were both caught red-handed. Jowan's fate is sealed, but he wants a little blood from the muggles.
And that's an order.
Fuck you Dumbledore.********
Actually performing the task isn't really worth relating in its entirety. There's some fetch questing, attacking statues, a creepy talking statue, a cursed staff that Harriet steals, and Harriet's conscience finally convincing her to confess that she's a plant, Irving knows everything. Jowan is upset, but before they can try to figure out how to all be fugitives together, the Irving and the Knight Commander pop up and bust the lot of them. Irving says Harriet was acting under orders, but the Knight Commander wants two dead mages and a Chantry sister in Azkaban, and Irving better shut his mouth unless he wants it to be three dead mages. Jowan then reveals himself as a schlemeel all along, assuming the soup in question is actually blood magic. Big flash, exit Jowan, stage ...Fade? Maybe?
Knight Commander is now suffering from a semi case of blue sword (SEE WHAT I DID THERE), but there's one mage for him to punish for this. Then Duncan steps in and sword-blocks, and says "Nope, she's a Grey Warden, sucker."
Needless to say Harriet can't agree fast enough. She doesn't even get weirded out when Duncan later kills Wedge.
* The Amells show up in DA2 as a family from Kirkwall, but somehow Harriet ended up in the Ferelden Circle. Girl has no idea how lucky she's got it. The horrors that inevitably visit the Ferelden Circle are what they call "Tuesday" in Kirkwall.
** This leads me to wonder what would happen to Hogwarts if it was full of magically roided up US police. I can just see the T Shirts with some handgun bearing the words Avauda Kedavra.
*** I have no idea what I was going to footnote here.
**** There are five canonical categories of demon, in rough order of ascending power - rage, sloth, not appearing in this game, titties and pride. DA:I introduces two more - those burrowing motherfuckers and those flying ice dicks.
***** And Ron is ok, age 11 to 17, but Jowan looks about 32, when the charms of Ron-ness is long since worn off.
****** I could be wrong. Some people might be into that. Harriet is not one of them. Also, her dialogue options don't let her make any decisions about Cullen's apparent feelings or even acknowledge them. But being told by someone who has a crush on you that they were assigned to pierce you with a sword... It doesn't seem like an opportune time to confront feelings, requited or no.
******* I'm not sure if the mages are supposed to be celibate. None of them seem to be married, and since magic is hereditary, you'd think they'd strongly discourage known mages making babies. You learn from Anders in DA2 that celibate or no, none of the Ferelden Circle mages were chaste, but it's strongly implied that the Kirkwall Circle mages are expected to be chaste. And Knight Commander Meredith just does look like a panty-sniffer, anyway. It's implied that the sister is an ordained sister and therefore supposed to be celibate and chaste. In any case, tranquil aren't able to feel, let alone requite attraction or love, so that's all academic.
******** He comes off as unbelievably petty and spiteful, here, but petty spite is the alpha and omega of his actual power, so I kind of get it. But still.
Content - Occult, Demonic Possession, Non-conesensual Drugging, Incarceration, Lobotomy, Self-Harm.
Our story begins when Harriet Amell* is dragged out of bed in the middle of the night, dosed with lyrium and sent unarmed and unprepared into the spirit world to face a demon. The Ferelden Circle is the worst Hogwarts ever.**
The Fade is a yellow sky, floating islands and random art assets that make sense in other parts of the game.
As I think about this sequence, I start to wonder about things. My first wonder is what the win condition is for a mage undergoing their harrowing. It's not explicitly to go kill a demon (except when it is), because that's not how Harriet's harrowing goes, and a lot of the mages in the Circle really don't seem like the demon killing type. It's not a timed thing, at least not in the sense "last 2 hours in the Fade without getting possessed;" it is timed in the sense that, if you take too long (for undisclosed and possibly whimsical definitions of too long), a Templar will sword you. It might be a matter of getting back out again (except when it's not), but that's not clearly communicated, either.
What does happen is that Harriet meets the ghost of someone who was a little pokey in their Harrowing and got sworded. This is Mouse. Mouse is all "this Harrowing thing sucks and it's unfair and the Templars are salivating over the thought of getting to sword your currently uninhabited body the way they did to mine. Also, I can turn into a mouse." Thus the name. Mouse shows you the arena where you're supposed to fight a demon, so maybe you are supposed to kill a demon and bring its ectoplasmic hide back to hang up on the tower's wall. That would kind of make sense.
Not far from the arena, there's a glowy Templar who is, apparently, a spirit of Valor, and not a demon at all. He offers to let Harriet tool up out of his toolbox once she's proven she doesn't need aforementioned tools. This is accomplished with her starting spells and an even more awkward than usual fight sequence. Equipped with a mage staff, Harriet can now throw 3 point little blasts of light ever second in addition of the 24 point blast every 15 seconds.***
The only other thing to talk to in this area is a Sloth Demon**** that looks a lot like a shaved bear with random extra twisty horns. This is not the hide Harriet has to tack up on the tower wall, and he's not very interested in helping, harming or hindering you, because sloth demon. Mouse suggests that you could talk the bear into teaching him how to a be a bear. This sounds fishy to Harriet, and she leaves, but soon realizes her actual demon target is not going to arrive until she convinces the sloth demon into doing what Mouse wants. This she does and then she and Bear!Mouse head back to the arena.
The rage demon that's supposed to be her target shows up and gets its ass kicked in short order. Then Mouse congratulates Harriet for being much stronger and smarter than all the other apprentices he's helped, and prettier, and BTW, can I hitch a ride back to the physical world with you?
Yeah, so Mouse is a demon, and Harriet asks him just how dumb he thinks she is. Mouse turns into a Pride Demon, 15 feet tall, all lightning bolts and ridiculous elbow spurs. Harriet is a level 2 mage, at this point, and even on casual, there is no way she's getting out of this one. The Pride demon ganks her and possesses her body, except, no, that's not what happens at all. Instead he warns her not to get cocky and lets her go back to her body unmolested.
So the object of the Harrowing is to hang out with a surprisingly reasonable and, hell, even charitable demon, and kick around some jerks with his help?
Anyway, whatever the object, Harriet Calvinballs her way into it, and the next thing she sees is her Ron*****, an ostensible shlmozzle named Jowan. Jowan is all impressed that his bestie managed to ace the Harrowing (and asks her what it entailed, which she is NOT ALLOWED to tell, and hell, I don't think she could, because I don't know what it entailed, and I was fucking there), and really upset that he hasn't been called to do it, which means he's likely to get the forehead brand of magic lobotomy or the sword of Templar stress-relief. But Harriet's got to go visit First Enchanter Dumbledore Irving and talk to him about things. Also, if the dialogue options are any indication, Harriet doesn't think very highly at all of her friend Jowan
On the way, Harriet meets a couple of people - a sweet, slightly senile enchanter, a brusque elf-jerk enchanter, and Cullen, a blond boyscout of a Templar that has Thedas' most obvious crush on Harriet. He was also assigned the task of swording her if she took too long, which I don't think is a good way to tell a girl you like her.****** Irving is talking to Duncan, who's at the circle looking to recruit mages for the king's army at Ostagar, and making the Knight Commander's blood pressure spike. Knight Commander allowed seven whole mages out of the Circle under strenuous protest and that should be enough for anyone. Also, he really wanted to make Cullen sword Harriet, if the looks of disgust and hatred he gives her are any indication. Meanwhile, Irving crows about Harriet acing her Harrowing and Duncan is certainlt considering putting the girl in his Warden punch line.
Harriet meets Duncan. This part is pretty much the same as the sequence Sooney went through, so we'll spin on. Jowan really wants to talk to Harriet, and Irving asks if she's noticed him acting squirrelly, and if she didn't mind, would she make her first assignment as a full fledged mage narcing on him?
OK, so Jowan is in the chapel with a perfectly vacuous looking Chantry sister whose name I already forget, and don't care to look up. They're in love.******* She knows that the order for Rite of Tranquility has been put in for Jowan and wants you to help them break into the place where they keep the phylacteries and break his so they can escape. Harriet thinks this is an endeavor doomed to fail and since my dialogue cues are that she doesn't care much for him, she chickens out on it.
But Irving wants to talk to her again, and a little way into the conversation, Harriet admits what Jowan and Chantry!GF are trying to do. Irving says he knows already and he thinks it's a great idea for Harriet to help and then Judas Jowan and his lady over to the Templars. His reasoning is that if he stopped the whole thing before it began, the Chantry would say that Jowan blood magicked his lover into helping, and the only way she'd take the fall is if they were both caught red-handed. Jowan's fate is sealed, but he wants a little blood from the muggles.
And that's an order.
Fuck you Dumbledore.********
Actually performing the task isn't really worth relating in its entirety. There's some fetch questing, attacking statues, a creepy talking statue, a cursed staff that Harriet steals, and Harriet's conscience finally convincing her to confess that she's a plant, Irving knows everything. Jowan is upset, but before they can try to figure out how to all be fugitives together, the Irving and the Knight Commander pop up and bust the lot of them. Irving says Harriet was acting under orders, but the Knight Commander wants two dead mages and a Chantry sister in Azkaban, and Irving better shut his mouth unless he wants it to be three dead mages. Jowan then reveals himself as a schlemeel all along, assuming the soup in question is actually blood magic. Big flash, exit Jowan, stage ...Fade? Maybe?
Knight Commander is now suffering from a semi case of blue sword (SEE WHAT I DID THERE), but there's one mage for him to punish for this. Then Duncan steps in and sword-blocks, and says "Nope, she's a Grey Warden, sucker."
Needless to say Harriet can't agree fast enough. She doesn't even get weirded out when Duncan later kills Wedge.
* The Amells show up in DA2 as a family from Kirkwall, but somehow Harriet ended up in the Ferelden Circle. Girl has no idea how lucky she's got it. The horrors that inevitably visit the Ferelden Circle are what they call "Tuesday" in Kirkwall.
** This leads me to wonder what would happen to Hogwarts if it was full of magically roided up US police. I can just see the T Shirts with some handgun bearing the words Avauda Kedavra.
*** I have no idea what I was going to footnote here.
**** There are five canonical categories of demon, in rough order of ascending power - rage, sloth, not appearing in this game, titties and pride. DA:I introduces two more - those burrowing motherfuckers and those flying ice dicks.
***** And Ron is ok, age 11 to 17, but Jowan looks about 32, when the charms of Ron-ness is long since worn off.
****** I could be wrong. Some people might be into that. Harriet is not one of them. Also, her dialogue options don't let her make any decisions about Cullen's apparent feelings or even acknowledge them. But being told by someone who has a crush on you that they were assigned to pierce you with a sword... It doesn't seem like an opportune time to confront feelings, requited or no.
******* I'm not sure if the mages are supposed to be celibate. None of them seem to be married, and since magic is hereditary, you'd think they'd strongly discourage known mages making babies. You learn from Anders in DA2 that celibate or no, none of the Ferelden Circle mages were chaste, but it's strongly implied that the Kirkwall Circle mages are expected to be chaste. And Knight Commander Meredith just does look like a panty-sniffer, anyway. It's implied that the sister is an ordained sister and therefore supposed to be celibate and chaste. In any case, tranquil aren't able to feel, let alone requite attraction or love, so that's all academic.
******** He comes off as unbelievably petty and spiteful, here, but petty spite is the alpha and omega of his actual power, so I kind of get it. But still.
December 24, 2014
A Whole Lot of Silence and Trousers - Harriet Amell and the Chamber of (Intro) Sequence (Part 2)
DRAGON AGE ORIGINS [DAO] STORY - Circle of Magi Intro
Content - Occult, Demonic Possession, Non-conesensual Drugging, Incarceration, Lobotomy, Self-Harm. Eventually. For now, just some vocabulary and a Chant-Day school lesson.
I really hate doing these, especially on Christmas, when you're probably starved for entertainment, but fantasy begets vocabulary, and there's a lot of vocabulary you need in order to make sense of the mage intro, so here we go.
THE CHANTRY - The church for southern Thedas, follows the Chant of Light, written by the setting's Crystal Dragon Jesus, Andraste. The Chantry is led by a Divine, controlled by Grand Clerics pulled from the ranks of Revered Mothers (Andraste was a lady, so most of the Chantry's hierarchy is women, though some men get to be highly placed bureaucrats), who come from the ranks of Sisters (there are also Lay Sisters, who aren't fully ordained). There are also ordained and lay Brothers, and some folks, men and women who are Chanters, under a vow to only speak when quoting the Chant. The Divine is in Val Royeaux in Orlais. The Chantry has authority over the Templar Order and the Circle of Magi. The games don't make a lot explicit, but what you know about Catholocism, if you're not actually Catholic and don't know much about Catholicism at all, seems to apply. Ordained clergy are ostensibly celibate and chaste, a matter which comes up in the sequence.
THE CIRCLE OF MAGI - Refers to the organization as a whole and individual towers where they keep mages - about 1 per nation, for reasons which aren't explained, but easy to speculate (no nation wants to have no mages, just in case they need them, and no nation wants all the mages, just in case they all go off at the same time). Membership is mandatory. Attendance is mandatory. Wearing the awful robes and hats that look like the glans of a penis (often in purple) is mandatory. Ferelden's circle is housed in a tower on a lake in the less fashionable west of the country. It looks like a boarding school designed in the round by an asshole. Mages are only permitted to leave the circle under extraordinary circumstances and heavy supervision. Most who check in never check out.
THE TEMPLAR ORDER - Knightly order whose members get dosed with Lyrium to make them resistant to magic. Those who are not housed in the circle are tasked with hunting mages who aren't in the circle. In both cases, their remit is to protect normal folks and, ostensibly obedient mages from mages who have gone off the straight and narrow. Tamplars seem to have similar issues that American law enforcement does these days with occupying force mentality and abuse of authority. Add to that the fact that lyrium is addictive, and while the effects of lyrium use aren't ever stated explicitly beyond potential memory-loss, most of the templars are characterized as more than a bit aggressive and paranoid (though that could be the stress of the job as much as it could be the blue sauce). Templars are effectively lay brothers and sisters in the Chantry under authority of a Knight Commander (who runs things at the individual Circle level). One of your companions in DA2 starts the game married to a Templar, so I assume that they aren't under explicit vows of chastity and celibacy, but the sympathetic Templars you meet are rather inexperienced to say the least (and there is, apparently, a problem with Templars sexually assaulting mages in some circles). The Templars in the Ferelden Circle are, apparently, a lot nicer than most, and the Knight Commander is a paranoid tinpot who's fairly adversarial, if not hostile toward his charges.
APOSTATES - Any mage who is not safely in the Circle right now. Templars who don't live in the circle are tasked to hunt them down and given authority to do what they feel is appropriate. I get the impression that only very young or exceptionally pliable mages don't get killed on sight.
MALEFICAR - A blood mage. Someone who uses blood (theirs or someone elses') to fuel their magic and access powers that law abiding mages cannot - primarily those involving summoning and binding demons and controlling minds. Blood magic carries a mandatory death sentence. Being suspected of using blood magic carries a fairly certain death sentence. Being suspected of looking a little too long at the picture of the desire demon in your defense against the dark arts textbook carries a mandatory Rite of Tranquility sentence. Apostates are considered maleficar unless proven otherwise (and the proof is mostly posthumous).
THE FADE - Place where mages get their power and you get those dreams you dream when you eat cheese to close to bedtime. It's full of demons, who really want to get into the physical world. They do that by possessing mages who aren't paying attention or by getting bound into the body of someone who is not a mage with the help of a mage. Once in the physical world, they get overstimulated and go nuts.
RITE OF TRANQUILITY - A process by which a mage's connection to the Fade is cut off. The mage is no longer in danger of being possessed, but they lose most of their emotions and executive function. They are good at working lyrium into enchanted objects, which makes them pretty valuable, though, in the circle, most of the tranquil you see are support staff and maintenance.
LYRIUM - A blue metal that the dwarves mine. It powers rituals, restores the personal energy of mages, gives Templars resistance to magic, and makes enchanted items. It's also addictive when ingested and causes ... stuff to happen to normal folk who work with it. Dwarves can make things with it because they have no connection to the Fade natually (and they don't dream!), Tranquil can use it safely for the same reason. Everyone else takes their chances.
PHYLACTERY - Every mage who ends up in the circle has a vial of blood taken and stored either in the circle itself (for apprentices) or in the nearest important Chantry (for actual mages). Templars use the phylactery to track down the mages not accounted for if they skip out.
RITE OF ANNULMENT - The Knight Commander at a Circle can invoke this to signify that the circle has fallen to corruption. When this happens the Templars have to kill every single solitary mage in their local circle. I don't think I am spoiling anything to say that every time you as a player are involved with the Circle, this is a possibility if not an inevitablility.
HARROWING - Some point, when they figure it's time to end your apprenticeship, they drag you out of bed, dose you with Lyrium and send you into the Fade with a demon, thunderdome style. If the demon gets you, the Templars kill you. if you take too long, the Templars assume the demon got you and kill you. If the Knight Commander doesn't like your face, the Templars kill you. Also, there's the demon to consider. The stated goal for this is to see if you can handle demonic assault under the worst possible circumstances. The practiced goal seems to be keeping the number of mages low. Any mage who doesn't undergo the Harrowing, at a certain point is either made tranquil or a corpse.
ENCHANTERS - To the extent that any mage has authority, these are they. I'm not sure why they are called enchanters when enchantment seems to be something dangerous for anyone who isn't tranquil or a dwarf to do, but what the hell. Enchanters are lead by a First Enchanter, who has the authority to argue with the Knight Commander on behalf of the mages on the days when the Knight Commander is feeling indulgent.
Blah. So that's it. Yay. Tomorrow, you get story for Christmas.
Content - Occult, Demonic Possession, Non-conesensual Drugging, Incarceration, Lobotomy, Self-Harm. Eventually. For now, just some vocabulary and a Chant-Day school lesson.
I really hate doing these, especially on Christmas, when you're probably starved for entertainment, but fantasy begets vocabulary, and there's a lot of vocabulary you need in order to make sense of the mage intro, so here we go.
THE CHANTRY - The church for southern Thedas, follows the Chant of Light, written by the setting's Crystal Dragon Jesus, Andraste. The Chantry is led by a Divine, controlled by Grand Clerics pulled from the ranks of Revered Mothers (Andraste was a lady, so most of the Chantry's hierarchy is women, though some men get to be highly placed bureaucrats), who come from the ranks of Sisters (there are also Lay Sisters, who aren't fully ordained). There are also ordained and lay Brothers, and some folks, men and women who are Chanters, under a vow to only speak when quoting the Chant. The Divine is in Val Royeaux in Orlais. The Chantry has authority over the Templar Order and the Circle of Magi. The games don't make a lot explicit, but what you know about Catholocism, if you're not actually Catholic and don't know much about Catholicism at all, seems to apply. Ordained clergy are ostensibly celibate and chaste, a matter which comes up in the sequence.
THE CIRCLE OF MAGI - Refers to the organization as a whole and individual towers where they keep mages - about 1 per nation, for reasons which aren't explained, but easy to speculate (no nation wants to have no mages, just in case they need them, and no nation wants all the mages, just in case they all go off at the same time). Membership is mandatory. Attendance is mandatory. Wearing the awful robes and hats that look like the glans of a penis (often in purple) is mandatory. Ferelden's circle is housed in a tower on a lake in the less fashionable west of the country. It looks like a boarding school designed in the round by an asshole. Mages are only permitted to leave the circle under extraordinary circumstances and heavy supervision. Most who check in never check out.
THE TEMPLAR ORDER - Knightly order whose members get dosed with Lyrium to make them resistant to magic. Those who are not housed in the circle are tasked with hunting mages who aren't in the circle. In both cases, their remit is to protect normal folks and, ostensibly obedient mages from mages who have gone off the straight and narrow. Tamplars seem to have similar issues that American law enforcement does these days with occupying force mentality and abuse of authority. Add to that the fact that lyrium is addictive, and while the effects of lyrium use aren't ever stated explicitly beyond potential memory-loss, most of the templars are characterized as more than a bit aggressive and paranoid (though that could be the stress of the job as much as it could be the blue sauce). Templars are effectively lay brothers and sisters in the Chantry under authority of a Knight Commander (who runs things at the individual Circle level). One of your companions in DA2 starts the game married to a Templar, so I assume that they aren't under explicit vows of chastity and celibacy, but the sympathetic Templars you meet are rather inexperienced to say the least (and there is, apparently, a problem with Templars sexually assaulting mages in some circles). The Templars in the Ferelden Circle are, apparently, a lot nicer than most, and the Knight Commander is a paranoid tinpot who's fairly adversarial, if not hostile toward his charges.
APOSTATES - Any mage who is not safely in the Circle right now. Templars who don't live in the circle are tasked to hunt them down and given authority to do what they feel is appropriate. I get the impression that only very young or exceptionally pliable mages don't get killed on sight.
MALEFICAR - A blood mage. Someone who uses blood (theirs or someone elses') to fuel their magic and access powers that law abiding mages cannot - primarily those involving summoning and binding demons and controlling minds. Blood magic carries a mandatory death sentence. Being suspected of using blood magic carries a fairly certain death sentence. Being suspected of looking a little too long at the picture of the desire demon in your defense against the dark arts textbook carries a mandatory Rite of Tranquility sentence. Apostates are considered maleficar unless proven otherwise (and the proof is mostly posthumous).
THE FADE - Place where mages get their power and you get those dreams you dream when you eat cheese to close to bedtime. It's full of demons, who really want to get into the physical world. They do that by possessing mages who aren't paying attention or by getting bound into the body of someone who is not a mage with the help of a mage. Once in the physical world, they get overstimulated and go nuts.
RITE OF TRANQUILITY - A process by which a mage's connection to the Fade is cut off. The mage is no longer in danger of being possessed, but they lose most of their emotions and executive function. They are good at working lyrium into enchanted objects, which makes them pretty valuable, though, in the circle, most of the tranquil you see are support staff and maintenance.
LYRIUM - A blue metal that the dwarves mine. It powers rituals, restores the personal energy of mages, gives Templars resistance to magic, and makes enchanted items. It's also addictive when ingested and causes ... stuff to happen to normal folk who work with it. Dwarves can make things with it because they have no connection to the Fade natually (and they don't dream!), Tranquil can use it safely for the same reason. Everyone else takes their chances.
PHYLACTERY - Every mage who ends up in the circle has a vial of blood taken and stored either in the circle itself (for apprentices) or in the nearest important Chantry (for actual mages). Templars use the phylactery to track down the mages not accounted for if they skip out.
RITE OF ANNULMENT - The Knight Commander at a Circle can invoke this to signify that the circle has fallen to corruption. When this happens the Templars have to kill every single solitary mage in their local circle. I don't think I am spoiling anything to say that every time you as a player are involved with the Circle, this is a possibility if not an inevitablility.
HARROWING - Some point, when they figure it's time to end your apprenticeship, they drag you out of bed, dose you with Lyrium and send you into the Fade with a demon, thunderdome style. If the demon gets you, the Templars kill you. if you take too long, the Templars assume the demon got you and kill you. If the Knight Commander doesn't like your face, the Templars kill you. Also, there's the demon to consider. The stated goal for this is to see if you can handle demonic assault under the worst possible circumstances. The practiced goal seems to be keeping the number of mages low. Any mage who doesn't undergo the Harrowing, at a certain point is either made tranquil or a corpse.
ENCHANTERS - To the extent that any mage has authority, these are they. I'm not sure why they are called enchanters when enchantment seems to be something dangerous for anyone who isn't tranquil or a dwarf to do, but what the hell. Enchanters are lead by a First Enchanter, who has the authority to argue with the Knight Commander on behalf of the mages on the days when the Knight Commander is feeling indulgent.
Blah. So that's it. Yay. Tomorrow, you get story for Christmas.
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