The next DRAGON AGE™: Behind the scenes at BioWare

I wonder which nation in Thedas is based on the Vikings?

Well I expect people to regard other humans differently from guns. There's a gulf of difference between restricting access to weapons and restricting a person's freedom of movement and communication.

Many people will be fearful and bigoted for literally any reason. The remedy, as it is for all forms of bigotry, is exposure and education (and shunning the staunch holdouts till they die off). I don't believe anyone here is saying that dismantling the Chantry would cure anti-mage sentiment overnight, I certainly don't believe that, but the Chantry is a clear and obvious barrier to improving the relationship between mages and non-mages, not only because they fearmonger, but because they monopolise and restrict (or even destroy) access to magic and the research of magic.

The Avvar and Rivaini had a societal model and practices that allowed mages to remain integrated into their society. Their methods should be studied, hopefully without the involvement of the Chantry, who would only skew the process with their bias (if not suppress it entirely).

Which one?

This comes down to a couple of factors.  1.  Cullen has been a Templar for years, he has been training with the order for years and years ever since he was a young (pre teen ? ) boy.  He has a very intimate understanding of what it means to be a Templar and what they are capable of.  He was also the 2IC for the Kirkwall circle so he was also internally well respected.  If anything Leiliana and Josie's motives seem a little suspect to me given that Lel should know better given her experience with Templars and Josie would be ignorant on the subject.  2.  Cullen's description matches up with what we have seen in the previous two games and even further expanded on in Inquisition (my understanding anyways).  Templars are specialists in disrupting and dealing with magical problems, weakening it, reinforcing reality, etc.  All of which could be very useful in stopping the breach.  To call this 'nonsense Templar rhetoric' certainly seems biased in the extreme.  And yes they may not fully know the ins and outs of their abilities but then I do not need to understand how exactly a gun works in order to shoot an intruder dead *looks at the above conversation...chortles*  

Champions of the Just is a line in the Chant of Light...all of the main quests in DAI was inspired by the Chant of light.  

If its not a truly valid comparison then why did you make it in the first place?  In either case though, at least for me, it does not really work.  In neither case were any of the characters ruined (I still like both Han and Fiona, loved Luke), and none of the new characters needed any help being awesome, they were great in their own right.  Adding flaws to characters and having them make mistakes isn't ruining a character, I tend to think it actually improves them.  

And yes, which is why I will be sorely tempted to drive a arrow into Lucanis's eye if I ever meet him in game.  

I disagree with that assessment.  Granted the Chantry also has a looooonnnnnng way to go before it can become a true force for liberty and safety for all members of theodosian society but they are far more along the road then any other major organization or race in the setting.  (Unless of course the Qun is also a perverted version of what it once was)...you know as odd as this sounds I am going to shift gears majorly here kind of mid stream and mid sentence so bear with me.  And granted I still maintain the above to be true from a certain perspective, after all the Chantry has had its history of reformers and those who have treated other races and the oppressed kindly, and even today that is especially true given most of the leadership options of the modern organization have seen the problems with Chantry dogma and are working to change/ reform it in their varying ways.  

However given how much the Chantry has been a problem organizationally and given how much Dragon Age seems to look down on organizations in general (Solas's speech at the end of Tresspasser) I think it would be better to distinguish between Andrastanism and The Chantry.  The Chantry is a corrupt continent spanning organization which tends to encourage people's worse instincts but Andrastianism...if we are to believe a whole host of historical figures we have bumped into and statements in the lore...was very tolerant of other people's beliefs and existance.  Now the question then becomes can the chantry be brought in line with the original intentions of Andrastae or will the organization need to be disbanded and we start from scratch  (like we can already do with the Templars), only time will tell...but yes as of now freedom/safety is more possible along those lines then under any of the other major organizations on the continent, especially the Qun.


This post makes me remember/ makes me feel compelled to point out that remember what happened when the Chantry was removed from the situation?  Death, destruction, mayhem, general war and nastiness.  Seemed the Chantry was a moderating influence on the Templars...even despite their issues.

I'm kind of wary of any in-game justification for Thedas not having people of Asian appearance until now. And making them different from the other people of Thedas in some sort of mystical/mysterious way is... not great.

Given that they never should have been excluded in the first place, I think they should just be folded in with the other humans of Thedas. No comment or justification is required.

Don't see why they'd need to be different in a mystical/magical way. All humans in Thedas came from other continents, so just have them be from another. I do agree that they should avoid making them exotic like that though, since yeah implications unpleasant. 

I was under the impression that the humans of Thedas all migrated at once from the same continent (assuming they migrated at all and aren't creations of Ghilamagillagorilla or whatever), and that most of the existing human civilizations are offshoots of Tevinter.

That's why I think it would be weird/uncool to have the people with Asian characteristics be from some new place.

I don't believe the Chantry at large would endorse such research at all, or they would have done it already, instead of slaughtering the Rivaini for their violation of doctrine.

As much as the Chantry appears/claims to be a neutral organization working purely for the good of mankind, they did little/nothing to ensure the safety and wellbeing of the mages in their "care", and the benefits of having a monopoly over mages and magic (which would be undermined if society at large started to fear mages less) should be obvious.

I have never believed that the main actors in the Chantry were acting out of any genuine belief in their doctrine (which they violate when it suits them), or the interests of the public. I have always believed them to be acting in the interests of the Chantry as an organization, to maintain and increase its hold over Thedas.

The good-natured ones I would expect to mostly be too invested in their beliefs to entertain the idea of research that might contradict them.

And my own metric for sensibility includes parameters like "doesn't believe in invisible sky-men just because a moldy old poem said to".

I still think the best way to conduct an unbiased study is to do it without Chantry affiliation. They have a history of suppressing research, ever since Origins. It's just better to leave them out.

I don't know much about the Byzantine, so I'll defer to your authority as an arbiter of all things obvious.

I'm actually half-serious since a lot of people have pretty much made that connection and told me about it. And I am quite the history buff, though I'm certainly no expert. It's pretty obvious from what "Freddie Mercury" (I genuinely forgot his name) tells you of the Tevinter Imperium that they're sort of like the Roman Republic and yet "not what they used to be" in terms of prestige and power. So... basically Byzantium... which was essentially the Roman Empire before Edward Gibbons decided to rename it or some shit like that. I don't know the particulars of the historiography so don't @ me. But yeah, I suspect that Tevinter is more analogous to the Roman Empire post-Fall of Rome.

Yeah I've wondered a lot about maybe if it ties into the sinner too. They probably left it all intentionally vague so they could expand on it later at some point.

But there is an altar at the main Venatori camp in the hissing wastes which looks very similar to the one in the temple which makes me think Corypheus knew a lot more about these old gods than he let on...maybe his plans include bringing them back somehow.