Now I kinda want a tarot card set, DA art has always been gorgeous

Flissa, Menave, Adan, Threnn—all of them get fired one way or another after Inquisition moves into the Skyhold. I understand that they can die, but… they also don’t have to. And the replacement NPCs have hardly a lot dialogue lines or relevance either to justify the blatant replacement. Why did they not just let them keep their jobs if they survive? That would be like 5 more lines for each one of them, lol.

I think this will be my last post before a looooong period of coding and headaches...

Busy on the import functions of local save files of DAO, DA2, DAI .... and DAV.
Also the export to DAI....
See ya

I went back to finishing an old draft from a year or two ago. Proportions are weird cause I didn't bother to redraw, only shaded.

It would've been perfect for her!

I have a question: do you think the writers and devs wanted to make it obvious that they took from real life.

Ok, hear me out. Andastre is definitely a Jesus-like figure and I kind of love that as it makes the lore feel more real and make sense what they were trying to do with the lore.

Fereldan is basically Britain. Orlais is France. So Tavinter must be the Roman Empire. And who killed Andastre? Tavinter. Just like how Rome executed Christ. Also, Ashes of Andastre = The Holy Grail.

And just like real life faith you can infer that half the things spread by the Chantry never happened and all the lore in all the books you pick up are half truths.

I feel like it's actually a theme they tried to put in with all this which is basically that you shouldn't just assume everything written on paper is true and that history tends to be seen through a warped view.

Welcome to the headcanon sharing circle! Each week we post a few creative prompts for character development and share our OCs.

Sponsor the weekly thread!

We take turns picking the questions every week, so please volunteer to host if you enjoy the weekly posts!

• Mention your interest in the comments – this week's host will tag the next person.
• Then just copy and paste this pre-formatted pastebin text with any 2 questions of your choice.
• Browse, add, and get ideas over at the list of prompts.
• There is the OC Emporium that houses many of the OCs, feel free to put your OC there!
• Don't forget there is an OC wiki Discord server and we welcome everyone who wishes to join and share! (Linked on the front page of the Wiki)

September 08 –

September 15 –

September 22 –

September 29 –

THE PROMPTS:

(You can answer just one or both, with as many characters as you want. Pictures and character summaries are fine. Short answers or novel-length walls of text are fine.)

Prompt 1

Who brings out the best version of your character? Not necessarily their strongest or most capable, but the version where they're most genuinely themselves?

Prompt 2

What has your OC forgiven that they shouldn't have?

And don't forget to take the time to read and comment on other people's posts! The comments, questions and chats are what make the thread so much fun.

I don't know which video game RPG finally made you feel what Romances are supposed to make you feel in video games, but My Romance (Capital Letters) happened during Dragon Age: Inquisition, and I met Dorian.

I had already played some RPGs with romance options (I think I played Divinity before DA:I, I had also obviously played the previous Dragon Age...) but most of them were player-centric, so it didn't feel... real.

Then came David Gaider's absolutely masterpiece of a writing of a character: Dorian—And I know what I'm talking about, as I'm a writer myself, and after feeling what I felt by playing Dragon Age Inquisition as a canonically gay Inquisitor, who could fall in love with another canonically gay male... I mean, I became obsessed. I don't even know if part of me even fell in love with Dorian—not only for the looks, but obviously also for the looks—or what happened but, Jesus, to this day I still feel soft when thinking about what that game and the experience made me feel.

So much so you can see in the second pic I even got a small Dorian Tattoo on my "important symbolic things tattoo arm" (yes, you can also find Sailor Uranus symbol, plus a Moogle, the rest are things regarding my novels).

So I was rummaging through an an old external drive, I found those screencaps or edits I think I got from Tumblr by 2015 (if you recognize any of them as yours, please tell me so, for the proper credit, though the kissing scene is all mine LOL) and couldn't help but sharing I still love Dorian Pavus and it's been almost been 10 years since I met him.

And that's why, even though I loved the Romance options in BG3, or many other games, I think it's important (despite what, us, players want) for the characters and the game itself not to be player-centric when it comes to romance, so that each character has a cohesive and coherent story, and feel much more fleshed out. After all, isn't that what we all want—that is, full immersion—when playing a heavy story-and-character-driven RPG?

Backstory, lore, trauma, features, character-traits, and so on, together with gender, gender orientation or identity are, for me, part of the "human being" (whether it has a dog head or a cat tail, or not) the character is, and that's why I've never felt the same as I felt with Dorian, maybe he as My First Real Video Game Love Because He Was Also Gay So He Didn't Love Me Because I Was The Player And Every Character Will Fall In Love With Me Because I'm The MC, but because my MC met certain requirements for the character to fall in love with me (even if it's as stupid as just having chosen the "male" option) but it felt much more real.

Sorry for the rambling. I truly love Dorian.

P.S. And now I'm curious, which is your favorite Dragon Age / video game romance? The one who made you truly you were part of the story?

What a fearsome pose.

When we were told that the concept art project had an open theme, I didn't spend too long thinking about the subject matter I wanted to choose.
I sketched out the composition in Procreate, while we built the base of the scene in Blender using a plugin to generate the human figure. I tried fitting the clothing in Clo3D—honestly, it was torture for me.

What can I say? I'm Lavellan the fool.

I'm soon going to start Inquisition. I played the opening sequence and I have concerns.

I have played Origins and DA2... just finishing off DA2... I found combat encounters were generally designed very differently between the two games.

Origins Generally would give you wave after wave and you would have resource attrition during fights. Needing to manage potions, cool downs, Stamina and Mana usage and making sure you had time to let cool downs lapse before needing the next. The waves would go on and often leave the party down to basic attacks for 5-10 seconds waiting on a cool down. Fights often went on 1 or even 2 waves longer than was really fun. It really was a slog to get through (for me... many people would love it and I'm glad the game is there for them). Worse most fights start with Find the caster, kill the caster.

DA2 on the other hand seems like the worse part of the encounters is a 2H warrior for the first 2/3 of the game does nearly no damage compared to the rest of the party. Combat is generally just long enough to be interesting but not so long as to annoying. Boss Fights have interesting mechanics and require thought. If I screw up I usually can look at it and say... ah that is what I need to change. Fights for the first 2 acts are rarely just... find the caster kill the caster. (third act has started to seem like fights didn't have time to be tweaked and so are starting to go on a little long and start becoming a bit attrition like.

Based on the opening sequence... it feels like the game is going to be more like Origins in the combat feels much more like find the cast kill the caster and manage resources and have a spreadsheet on synergistic cool downs. With the Added Jump and the requirement to press attack for every single basic attack... this could get old quickly if that is the case.

So I am just trying to get into the right mind set. Should I expect the more tailored fights of the first 2 acts of DA2 or the more Attrition style fights of Origins?

To be clear... I'm not passing judgement on it. I have a personal taste and I don't deny it. I don't want them to change the game. I don't think they made a mistake making it that way. It is just what I like vs what is made. And I'm not entitled to them to make the game for me. I'm ok with that. I'm just trying to get an idea of what I'm in for.

Duncan says he wants Cailan to wait for reinforcements. It has confounded me for more than a decade at this point.

Wait how? Where? The army is already waiting at Ostagar, right? It's the horde that comes to them. It's not like they choose the battle. He can't mean that they should abandon Ostagar and retreat until the reinforcements arrive because he himself says, when he takes you there, that "the Blight must stop here and now, if it spreads to the north, Ferelden will fall".

Maybe he just means that Cailan should stay away from the front lines, which is a great idea, but that still doesn't make much sense. For one if he wanted Cailan away from the front lines why would reinforcements arriving, suddenly make it okay for him to be at the front lines? Most importantly, if he wanted Cailan to stay away from the front lines he would just say that, instead of that vague "wait" stuff*,* right? Doesn't "wait for reinforcements" imply "avoid battle until we're ready"? However they can't avoid a battle when they're defending a position! They're stuck there and their enemy chooses when the battle happens.

The only other thing I can think of is Duncan means that they should stay inside the fortress instead of pursuing open battle. However that explanation also has some problems. The fortress is ruined so, while defensible, I'm not sure it would be able to survive a siege like a normal non ruined fortress and also the darkspawn actually have siege weapons! Catapults that shoot huge boulders that can be seen making short work of the walls in the battle cutscene, so I don't see how they'd last nearly long enough.

The issue gets even muddier if you consider that Hollywood Tactics (heh the battle even has an entry there that tries to justify it) are also at play here. The charge outside the walls certainly looks cool even if it's stupid irl. Ultimately I don't think it's supposed to be seen as stupid in the story though. This is supposed to be master strategist Loghain's plan right? Not Cailan's. Sure we can say Loghain wanted to lose the battle to become King, but it's reasonable to assume the plan he presented would look convincing, not stupid, to the others involved. Ok, Cailan might have been too dumb to be able to tell but Duncan I don't think would go along with obvious suicide, so I don't think we can use too much real life tactics knowledge to judge the in world battle tactics. Duncan, when you ask him what he would have Cailan do, basically says: I'd have him wait for reinforcements because we wardens are too few, but he doesn't want to so we'll do what we can and Loghain will make up the difference. He's acting as if Cailan has rejected his suggestion of waiting but Loghain's strategy might be good enough to compensate for an army of wardens, so he seems to respect him and trust his strategy. That implies to me that it's not the strategy he has a problem with. It's that Cailan isn't waiting!

Here I could say some stuff about master strategist Loghain's whole "It's just a large darkspawn excursion incursion, it just defeated our entire army, it's not dangerous and can be ignored, let's have a civil war" plan that I keep seeing people insist is more sensible than what Cailan was doing and it actually saved Ferelden from Cailan's foolishness, but well I guess I did say some stuff so let's get back to Cailan. Edit: I agree with the top comment by the deleted user about Loghain.

Cailan is presented as naive, stupid and reckless and to be fair he is. He did join the vanguard after all. Still, the game implies that he also ignores sensible strategic advice by Duncan. That advice being to wait for reinforcements.

So yeah, we're back to that. What does he mean by that? How is Cailan supposed to wait? How does taking his army to the most fortified position, which, again, Duncan himself said if the Blight goes past, Ferelden will fall, not qualify as waiting? I just hope that after all these years someone just comes along and tells me that I've missed something completely obvious.

PS. Wait a second. I just remembered! During the final battle plan meeting Cailan himself says to Loghain "Maybe we should wait for the orlesians after all"! He said it about an hour before the battle! Loghain's protest wasn't "what the fuck are you talking about" as it should, it was about not needing Orlesians! What's going on?? They all agree that they can somehow wait!! Whenever the fuck they want! I'm losing my mind!

Was rummaging through some old folders from 2015, and I got so sad.

I remember the moment in Trespasser I was completely sure my Inquisitor was going to die. Man, after all that was happening with the anchor, I was sure that was what Solas was going to do to him when they finally meet. I was ugly sobbing for their entire encounter, and just aware I had just played my way through a masterpiece.Add to that scene, the incredible "Dreadwolf Theme" (which to this day remains in my Top-3-Videogame-Tracks-of-All-Time (and I've been collecting and listening to videogame soundtracks since 1995...).

The emotion I felt through all Trespasser was... I still long for going back to the days I played it for the first time (it even got me back to writing fic after many years).

The only thing I missed that would have made Trespasser Perfect would have been for your romance to actually acknowledge you-the Inquisitor were dying, for some more angst. I was romancing Dorian (and will always be) and I didn't get the banter (that's why I wrote it in fic). That addition would have been perfect.

Anyway, I just wanted to share both my nostalgia, some Inqui Casper Trevelyan I took in 2015, and the awesome work I commissioned from Cocotingo (in Tumblr / I know she goes by another name on Instagram but I never seem to recall it), and the awesome Tarot Card I commissioned from Qissus (also Tumblr, don't know if they'll go by another name, but the work they did with tarot cards was incredible).

So, yes. I'm one of those who played Origins in 2010, enjoyed his Hawke the following year, waited "only" three years for Inquisition, and cried at every WhateverCon because we didn't have any new Dragon Age news, and the ones we were getting were everything but good.

Also cried at the first Veilguard trailer, as I didn't mind whatever it looked so long they gave me what Trespasser proposed.

And I'm leaving it there.

My Rook is hot, though.

I would absolutely buy a game where you finally return as the Warden Commander that hears the calling and fights their way through darkspawn in the deep roads and helps reclaim dwarven keeps

I don’t even care if it’s a roguelike just miss my warden commander being badass

Promised implementing a surprise....done :-D

Tarot cards page. Will have to wait to know what it does ;-)

Else, you can now add all your accounts into the keep (like the original) but manually here. No link to the EA servers (logical).

Oghren ❤️

Doing a new world state where I marathon all 4 games again. Just finished an Origin run and wanted to add that character to the world state, but I couldn't find where to add the new character. I'm feeling very stupid right now because I've been looking for an hour 😭

I’ve played DA2 several times already and I always romance Fenris so I thought I knew most of his romance dialogues by now. But I just noticed a really small dialogue variation that I never got before.

Usually, after Bait and Switch, I pick the flirt option when Fenris talks about Danarius wanting him back. There Hawke basically says it would be a waste of a perfectly handsome elf. Fenris laughs/chuckles at it and that has always been my first flirt with him.

Later, during the conversation at his mansion in the Quest „Fenris Recruited“, Fenris says:
“Danarius used to have me pour it for his guests. My appearance intimidated them, he said, which he enjoyed.”
If Hawke has already flirted with him earlier and you choose the flirt response about not understanding why anyone would be put off by his appearance, Fenris answers:
“You say what’s on your mind. I’ll give you that.”

This time I didn’t flirt with him after Bait and Switch. I waited until the mansion conversation for Hawke’s first flirt.
And Fenris gives a different response:
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

It’s a tiny change but I had never seen it before despite romancing him multiple times.
I actually prefer this dialogue way more for their relationship. Flirting with him immediately while he’s talking about Danarius hunting him down felt a little fast to me, whereas waiting until the mansion conversation makes the first bit of flirting feel much more natural now. And I really like that his reaction is slightly different when Hawke hasn’t already made his interest obvious.

Edit: Someone in the comments pointed out that the difference might actually be tied to Fenris’ Friendship/Rivalry level rather than whether you picked the flirt during Bait and Switch.

That would make a lot of sense, especially since mage Hawke starts off with some Rivalry from that quest. So if you go straight to the mansion afterwards, you might get the „I‘ll take that as a compliment“ response, whereas gaining some Friendship with him first could be what changes it.

At this point I can’t say for certain what exactly triggers it.
Still a really neat little dialogue variation either way!

First time trying to mod DA:I. Using both DAIMod and Frosty. I have the Datapathfix installed.

I can get the game to launch through Frosty, but the mods don't appear.

I was dealing with this troubleshoot from the Datapathfix Github page: "If the game shows up as "DatapathFix" in Frosty, try to launch the game like normal and it should fix itself," and launched through Steam, and the mods showed up. I have the Origins font mod installed, which is how I knew.

What a finicky mod manager this is. I'm not supposed to launch through Steam with the Datapathfix in there, right? Anyone one have any idea what is going on here?

Okay this is my first time playing a dragon age game proper. I own origins and veilguard but origins I haven’t touched since I was 13 because my computer could barely run it and I was honestly a little bored, and veilguard I’ve just recruited Emmrich but it’s on a friends computer.

So, I made a lavellan with the intention of romancing Solas since I know there’s lore stuff there, but I’m 140 hours in and he’s just not doing it for me. I was immediately drawn to Blackwall, though. I recently decided to dump solas for him but when I went to do so, realized I’d already passed the point in game where I can do that before Wicked Eyes Wicked Hearts. Last night I went through my saves and realized the only point I have from before I did All New Faded For Her + had the balcony scene was when I first got to Skyhold, had just entered the plains (which I’ve since fully completed, parkouring up houses and all), and was when I only had 90 hours.
Currently I’m most of the way through the Emerald Graves, completed 90% of storm coast, finished the map w the shards dungeon (except for the spirit room), am lvl 15, and we’re all carrying very good gear.

So. I’m debating going back there just to romance the suave bearded guy. Looking for outside input that isn’t just “well solas is only romanceable as an elf” which is ofc a valid point but I’m such a completionist + in love w my inquisitor that I probably won’t play this game again all the way through as a different character. I’ve seen a few clips of Blackwall’s romance where he’s just super sweet and honestly my main thing I’m dreading when romancing solas to completion is missing out on all the couple stuff thats apparently in trespasser. I need a reality check on if it’s actually worth it.

Things I’ll say:
- I already vaguely know about the Blackwall twist. I was unable to resist ao3 when he started blushing and calling me ‘my lady’
- Blackwall and solas come with me literally everywhere for damage sponge + lore drops

Link: https://discord.gg/vAUtaDsXfD

Have you ever wanted to immerse yourself in the expansive and captivating story of the Dragon Age franchise? To play alongside canon characters that evolve and develop like true characters beyond the basic scripting of their games? To bring in your own characters and lore? To play beyond what the games give you? Well look no further, The Keep is where you can truly dive into the franchise with other passionate, and friendly writers that help to bring each character, and story, to life!

We're looking for literate RPers who have an interest in the Dragon Age games, if you've been looking for a space to get involved, check us out! We are beginner friendly and can help with everything to get started, and we have a core cast of writers who have many characters to engage with.

In addition to welcoming OCs, we currently we have a number of interesting canon characters without writers:

➹ DAO - Alistair, Zevran, Leliana

➸ DA2 - Isabela, Aveline, Anders

➸ DAI - The Iron Bull, Sera, Cole, Josephine, Cassandra, Blackwall

➷ DAVG - Taash, Emmrich, Davrin

The role of Hawke for DA2 will also eventually be available to apply for those who stick around in the server for a while.

So I stopped playing for like a week and I noticed this weird textures on the characters while playing my current save. I went to the CC and it seems like the hair textures are buggy?

I did not install any new mods and the visuals were good before I took a break. Has anyone experienced this? And if they have, is there any way to fix this without deleting all cosmetic mods/uninstalling?