Veilguards Runecrafter New or Sandal / Dagna again?

I'll bet it'll be Bellara. What with her Lara-Croft-meets-MadScientist-GenkiGirl vibes I'm getting.

I also miss our boy Sandal. I hope we get to see him beyond a short cameo.

How can this even a question?

*Sandal's voice* Enchantment? ENCHANTMENT!

According to this odd finding in Trespasser he was still alive in 9:42 Cloudreach, the 4th month of the year. Very excited about something. Of course, we know that a Titan was awakened in the Deep Road under Ferelden at some point after the Breach occurred in 9:41 but there may have been others. May be one of them called to him or may be he joined up with Valta. I doubt he is dead. Just off doing his thing. He was quite capable of freezing an ogre into crystal and dealing with a host of demons in the Gallows, whilst Bhodan apparently found him wandering a very deep level in the Deep Roads, so he does seem perfectly at home there.   He might have been a lot happier once Solas absorbed Mythal.   He mentioned about a scary lady visiting him in his dreams, which I took to be Flemeth.  I wonder why she was so interested in him.  It becomes more sinister when now we know of her connection with the ancient dwarves.  Note also that he has dreams and the old elven rhyme said of the dwarves "Mythal gives you dreams".  This was odd because the dwarves don't dream in the Fade, unless it was that she gave them different dreams so they would no longer remember the Titans except vaguely as The Stone.   The line before did say "I am empty, filled with nothing."  She must have done something bad to either the Titans or the dwarves to sever the connection between them.

Further thoughts on this.   He started getting excited around 9:41 Kingsway and Havestmere.   That would be around the time we were dealing with the mage/Templar problem and closing the Breach (because if you do In Hushed Whispers in the dark future Fiona tells us the date is 9:42 Havestmere and we had jumped forward a year in time).   Then after the attack on Haven we journey to Skyhold, when the Descent mission will first show up on the War Table and until we complete it the Titan is active.   So, it does seem likely that his diary entries correspond with an active titan and he likely went off in search of it.   Hence us not seeing him at Celene's court.   In any case, he and Bhodan had originally been invited to her court at Val Royeaux before the civil war, so they may have left after it began.

Hopefully, Bodhan is retired and has faith in his son to look after himself after all these years.
Sandal has come a long way after over 20 years since the days of the Fifth Blight.

My apologies. My brain seems to do a lot of that of late. I read one thing but it processes as another. I mean to type one name but type someone else. Hopefully it is not a sign I'm going senile but just processing everything too fast.

Both is good. Sandal for making Rune and stuff. Dagna for implementing the rune and stuff to items.

It was strange how they used him. In DAO he did come across as more of a joke character until we encountered him in Fort Drakon surrounded by dead darkspawn and I thought there is obviously more to Sandal than meets the eye. Then again in DA2 initially he just seemed to be there as fan service and a bit of levity until we went into the Deep Roads and he did it again with the ogre. I started thinking does Bohdan really know anything about him, he can clearly take care of himself. Then it turns out it is not just darkspawn he is effective against when we find him in the Gallows surrounded by dead demons. Not to mention his strange little monologues. It seemed like they were building up the mystery surrounding him that would be resolved some time in the future and then nothing. We never saw him again. The strange cameo of his diary in Trespasser seemed back to the old joke character persona and that was disappointing if they definitely don't intend using him again. If they were worried by his limited dialogue seeming insensitive to people with disabilities, if anything it did the opposite by showing they can have abilities we just don't appreciate if you judge intellect by conventional methods. Then they could have overcome his communications problems by perhaps making contact with a Titan and recovering his full faculties or something. It really is disappointing that they built up his character in the way they did only to drop him entirely.

May be in DAO because we had fought our way across the city but the Gallows sequence wasn't that big and by that stage why do you need to buy and sell stuff anyway? If you didn't plan ahead and buy stuff when you could, tough.

It wasn't just in game as well. In WoT2 his entry added to the mystery. They wrote how Bhodan found him not just wandering in the Deep Roads perhaps only a short way from Orzammar but in a very deep part a long way away with strange murals on the walls. There was no need for that if they didn't plan on using him again. It was just an unnecessary mystery box to tease the reader/player with no pay off in the end. Remember WoT2 came out after the release of DAI, so they already knew he wasn't included when they approved the lore book. That sort of thing is annoying.