A Whole Lot of Silence and Trousers - Redcliffe: the Recap Needs a Recap

Dragon Age Origins [DAO] - Actual Fucking Story, this Time
Content - Zombies, Coercion, Alcoholism, Grief, Implied Sexual Favors, Christian Theology Amateur Hour?  I'm terrible at content labelling.

On the road to Redcliffe, Alistair dropped the bomb of who his daddy was.  He'd been hoping it wouldn't come up, but now that we're going to where he grew up to help the man who raised him and knows where he came from, he's decided he can't avoid it any longer.

Too bad there is no option to say "You and Cailin looked almost identical from the eyebrows down, Alistair.  I am Sooney the Unsurprised, Teyrna of Genresavvy."  There are options to mock him, options to be mad at him, and options to be soppy toward him, and none of them fit.  Sooney has to split the difference between soppy and mockery.

And then she went into town with Morrigan, Shale and Sten, and maybe she should turn in her title, because she did get a little blindsided by their reaction to the situation in town.

The situation is fucked.  The castle is shut up, no one goes in, and the only thing that comes out are the LEGIONS OF WALKING CANNIBALISTIC CORPSES that come down to town to FEED ON THE LIVING.  Everyone who can fight is out in the courtyard of the Chantry and everyone who can't is inside talking to the Arl's brother, or something, Tegan, who has that ridiculous braided front and to the side rat tail that you couldn't skip fast enough when you were looking at men's hairstyles.  Of course he asks for help, and of course Sooney is going to give it to him.

And then everyone who walked into town with Sooney gets mad at her.

Morrigan says "why help these idiots at all?  Maybe well-fed zombies are slower, or they get sleepy and we'll have an easier time sneaking into the castle."

Shale says "Humans?  Meh.  But I am up for smashing things, if that's what we're doing.  Still, do these things have to benefit?"

Sten says "Undead =/= Darkspawn, so fuck that."

Sooney has to persuade most, if not all of them.*  And of the lot, I am disappointed in Sten.  Morrigan is just being an asshole, because that's her contractual obligation in this.  Shale doesn't care about people, and I don't blame her.  But you, Sten, you're a fucking soldier.  We need to kill a fucking horde of darkspawn, and right now there are Makerdamned SEVEN OF US.  Which is okay if you're samurai defending a town from bandits, but it's not any good against a FUCKING BLIGHT.  Alistair suggested we go here to get an army, and if the undead eat them all, we'll be stuck without.

Then again, if there's so few here that we make the difference, you might have a point.  BUT THAT'S NOT THE ARGUMENT YOU USED, so take your horns from out you ass and put them back on your head like a normal Qunari.

Thankfully, there are gifts in my inventory to bribe the fuckers so they don't hate me so much.  I give Bioware credit for making the "defend the village" sequence not mandatory, but I take it back for telegraphing that you are an utter shitheel if you don't.**  So it's still obligatory.  Well, if certain companions don't want to defend the town, they don't have to (except Morrigan, because she's our only mage.  She has to), so Sooney re-ups with Alistair and Leliana and starts searching the town.  During the search, Leliana comes on to Morrigan and Morrigan shuts that down real fast.  I'm not sure I understand your optimism, Leliana; this is a person who has shown you nothing but contempt from the moment you showed up and told you that the Maker said you got to come along... ok, there's your optimism, I guess.

First we find the smith (Alistair says "Someone's been drinkiiiing"), who Alistair correctly identifies as beening funk as druck and refusing to come out or repair any of the shit the milita's broken in the fighting.  Oh, yeah, we know about this guy from the mayor, who also didn't know that they made women Grey WarSHUT THE FUCK UP.  My fucking kingdom for a renegade prompt.***  The smith's deal is that his daughter was working in the castle when the dead started pouring out of it, and he's pretty sure she's dead.  Sooney's pretty sure he's right, but gives a promise to go up there and find her if he helps out, and because she'd maxed her Coercion, it works.

Redcliffe has a bunch of gated conversations that swing on how much coercion you've got.  The Smith is, I think, the easiest to persuade.  Next easiest is the Worst Spy in Ferelden.  I think.

Well, he is the next one we find, up in the tavern.  This songbird egg of an elf cracks under the mildest line of questioning, though, that might also be because Leliana is there, and since shade calls to shade, she seems to know he's up to something.  The something he is up to is watching the castle in case something happens and then go tell Arl Evil McJerk what it was.  Only he's stuck in town because of corpses.  A little arm bending persuades him to go down and join the militia.

Next, Sooney finds some oil, hanging out in the general store.  Might be useful later.  Also a dwarf who doesn't want to come out of his house.  She leaves him alone for the moment, only because we're going ascending order of difficulty to persuade.

Our next stop is the moppet closet.  The little kids in DAO are that kind of cute you see in the lesser live action Disney movies of the 70s and 80s.  That kind of creepy saccharine, mugging for the camera cuteness that I find equal parts cloying and unnerving.  But his sister is looking for him.  A quick interview as to why he's here (being scared with other people who are also scared got too much for him to handle, so the slipped off to be scared alone - I can't fault him that) reveals a possible good thing.  You can send the scamp packing to the chantry without much trouble, but getting him to tell you what he came here to get is trickier, and trickier still is getting the key, but Sooney can talk titty demons into doing what she wants so a 10 year old is no big deal.  This nets us the Green Blade, which Alistair is going to be carrying for a while.  It's ok, though, Sooney pays fair market value for it.****

Finally, we have the fucking dwarf.  He's not answering the door, and, for some reason, Sooney's and Leliana's lockpicking skills only end up wrecking the lock, so it's kick down the door time.  First, you have to convince the dwarf and his two human buddies with extensive facial tattooing not to attack you.  This is not so difficult.  What's difficult is trying to persuade him to join the militia.  Promises of favor with Ban Tegan don't cut it, bribes don't work, threatening starts a fight.  There is an option to offer sexual favors to the jerk, but I've never had the stomach to try it.  I've never played a man Warden, so I have no idea if that option is available to them.*****  So far as I can tell, you need to be maxed out in Corecion to get his help.  Which Sooney is.

Oh, but I forgot an equally difficult bit of persuasion!  The Reverend Mother.  I think of Sooney as a person a kind of tepid faith, but at least moderate respect for the Chantry, and yet she spends a lot of time either trolling, threatening or weaseling clergy into compromising their faith.  You see, up at the windmill, the halfway point between the castle and the town, the remaining knights of Redcliffe are trying to set up a position.  The oil comes in handy here, when you tell their commander, but he's hoping for a little more.  In this case, what he wants is a blessing from the Reverend Mother.

To explain why this is a problem, I need to reference Andrastianity's real world counterpart.  There are these religious tchotchkes that I think might be a Catholic thing called Cross in My Pocket.  XMPs****** are little cards in laminate that have a straw (I think) cross attached to them and the card has a disclaimer against any magical powers or protection from misfortune or evil spirits or any actual supernatural, spiritual or magical significance.  The language could be crassly insincere or mawkishly sincere depending on how you look at it, like most religious-inspired prose and poetry, but it's really super clear that this thing IS NOT MAGIC.  This is very important.

There's a lot of historical and theological reasons to be VERY CLEAR that magic and Christianity have nothing to do with one another; I can't do a lot of those reasons much justice and this entry has gone long, so just trust me on this.  There are a lot of words written about Tolkien and Lewis (both Catholic and devout, though the demarcation between Christianity and magic holds pretty much true throughout, even with the Charismatics who like to play with rattlers*******) and their approach to who has magic in their stories.  It's a thing.  It's important, and the Andrastians share it.  For good reason, too, since the Romans who killed their Jesus and oppressed their people were magic users.

So when the Revered Mother says, "No I am not going to bless the knights again," I come to understand, even though the above paragraph isn't communicated, nor the "Andraste doesn't cast cleric spells" nature of the faith in regards to what Sooney's asking.  But what the hell, Sooney's asking anyway, because I'd never actually made a character persuasive enough to convince her before (that I can remember).  But, lo, she comes around, taking a vacation from her principles, and she and Sooney work out a compromise that lets the knights think, just this one time, their sunburst medalions will give them something extra.  Leliana is upset, but, seriously, morale.  For the first time in my life, I as kind of wishing Joel Osteen had been in Redcliffe.********

With everything in place, all that was left was to wait for the night's attack.

And that's where I'll leave you.

* I don't remember if she had to justify it to Shale.

** And this is why Sooney will not have werewolves in her army.  Recruiting them involves fucking them over as well as the elves they've been gnawing on.

*** In Mass Effect, you sometimes get a chance to press a trigger button and enact options that either show you as a Paragon of what an N7 officer is supposed to be or as a Renegade COP ON THE EDGE.  The Renegade actions are usually a lot more satisfying.  In this case, I would have liked the Renegade option be to lay the mayor out with a left hook.  Actually, there are a lot of conversations in DAO I'd like to be able to end that way.

**** Assuming that Sooney is a capitalist.  It seemed fair to her.

***** I won't hold out a lot of hope.  If this was DA2 or DAI, maybe...

****** The fact that the acronym is what the weapons are called in Ingress kind of amuses me.

******* Many less theatrical Christians do consider serpent handling, glossalia and the like kind of tantamount to magic, or at least kind of dangerous and undignified, but Acts is almost as weird in places as Revelations, so different interpretations abound.

******** Now that I think of it, I'd kind of like to see Joel Osteen in a lot more violent video games...