DRAGON AGE PEOPLE HAVE SUCH EXTENSIVE DRAGON AGE OPINIONS

I AM AFRAID TO PLAY DRAGON AGE BECAUSE I DONT KNOW AT WHAT POINT I WILL START FEELING AN IRREPRESSIBLE URGE TO WRITE ESSAYS ON MY DRAGON AGE POLITICAL OPINIONS

THIS DOESNT HAPPEN WITH AMERICAN TRUCK SIMULATOR

CUT IT OUT !

Dragon Age is so utterly haunted by the spectre of Canadian settler liberalism it is not even funny

LOVE when a video game protag is called a title. The Warden, the Watcher, the Exile…. Yessss be defined by a concept greater than yourself that will ultimately overtake your life

Everything that defines you: a name, a personality, your loves and cherished moments, your decisions good or ill, are all forgotten in favor of a single word, a concept that annihilate any shred of your humanity as time continues on. It is a horror. Sometimes it is even a mercy

a quick guide to dog lords, telling your arls from your teyrns, and generally how ferelden works

okay, this isn't quite what anon asked for, by which i mean not at all, but unfortunately they activated my interest in some of my favourite lore. it should hopefully contain a lot of the relevant stuff and i’ll try to branch out to less fereldan specific information in other posts!

okay, let’s start with the hierarchy. there’s four kinds of noble in ferelden

royalty: you know who these guys are. except for during the orlesian occupation, ever since ferelden became one kingdom, it’s been ruled by the theirin family. which i think is for 388 years, i really hope that’s right, i got out a calculator

teyrns: these are super powerful lords, basically banns so powerful that other banns swear fealty to them. they’re second only to the king, who is essentially just the most powerful one of them. there used to be a lot of them, but with one dynasty in power for so long, that kind of opposition has been eroded away. there are only two remaining: the couslands of highever in the north, and the mac tirs of gwaren in the south

arls: these are extra special banns. they answer to a teyrn or king and hold a strategic fortress for them. we know of six—amaranthine, south reach, denerim, redcliffe, west hills, and edgehall—but i’m unsure if that’s because they are only six or because there are unnamed others

banns: these are your common or garden noble, the lowest ranking and most common. this is your local lord type. they seem to vary the most in power, though, with some banns having big speaking roles in the landsmeet

but i kind of should have written that list in the opposite direction. what do i mean by that? well, in your standard medieval hierarchy, and in a lot of the rest of thedas, power comes down from the king, who lets you hold the land. but in ferelden, most of the land is owned by freeholders: commoners, well-off enough to own their land but still not by any means nobles.

how does that work? well, let’s say i’m a freeholder.

I genuinely don't understand how people can hate solas when he literally set himself on fire and then tried to play it off like he didn't. like. he's a disaster.

shout out to that time the dread wolf literally set himself on fire and a very special shoutout to vivienne for making absolutely sure he knew she noticed <3

Healing Herbs of Thedas

Sans magic and game mechanics, what do we know about what they actually do?  Here’s what I can find.  I have left out any herb for which no in-world use or effect is given besides crafting, for brevity’s sake.  I have also left out herbs which appear to be strictly poisonous.  This is all information from the wiki, so if anyone has more information from, say, the RPG guide, I’d love to add it.

Keep reading

More Medicinal Herbs and Spices

These are herbs and spices which exist both in the real world and in Thedas and which have medicinal uses that you can incorporate into your writing.  For herbs specific to Thedas and their non-magical uses, see here.

Note: these are mostly folk remedies specifically, since that’s how people in Thedas would likely be using them.  Before you actually try to use any of these things medicinally, definitely do your own research.  This is in no way intended as an exhaustive exploration of the potential of these herbs; it’s only a reference for adding a little color and depth to writing.

Healing and Medicine in Thedas

This is a collection of posts and conversations about healing and medicine, both magical and non-magical, in Thedas.  A lot of it is necessarily headcanon, but reading through some or all of these may help people formulate their own ideas of how these work, for writing purposes.

If you’re aware of any posts, conversations, or links not included here that you think should be, please let me know or reblog and add.

A very short and messy How I draw mabari!

Also I just find it really funny that both Zevran and Nathaniel were in the final battle with Meredith. Like one of them had to have told the Warden about Anders, right?

extremely funny to me how solas literally cannot catch a single break. not a SINGLE ONE of his plans has gone off correctly. score 0/3

“chaperoning” as lighthouse shorthand for being the third member of the party with rook and their love interest

i’ve always found it peculiar how during meeting the chargers cutscene the game just assumes your character automatically understands what krem is talking about when he mentions binding (though, granted, it’s all very unsubtle). like, this is a roleplaying game. what if i want to play a character who just doesn’t get it

I just want everyone to remember how precious Cole is. 

And thank you for 3500+ followers, guys! :D

since we're talking magic healing headcanons, it's always been my thought that normal, non-spirit healing is just a mage accelerating the body's natural healing process. which is all well and good in battle when you want to stop someone bleeding out, but if you try and use pure creation magic on something like a broken bone you are just going to straight up heal it wrong. normal creation healing also scars a lot because that's the body's natural healing mechanism. the level of scarring will differ with the severity of the wound, how long it is until the mage can actually get at it, how much mana the mage expends on it (whether or not they try to heal it to the absolute best of their ability or if their priority is "get it to a point where you're not going to bleed out then move on"). spirit healing, on the other hand, is a lot less likely to scar, because it's not just the body going ham on its natural healing - it has spirit help, and a lot of spirit healers being trained in how the body actually works tends to help a fair bit too. you might still get a scar from a wound healed by a spirit healer, but it's less likely, and it'll be less gnarly.

thinking about that dialogue where sebastian suggests turning merrill and anders over to the templars and fenris completely shuts him down:

fenris at most loathes the both of them, and at the very least mistrusts them and thinks they're dangerous and says unkind things to them (not necessarily unprovoked in anders' case, but still). and yet he does not seem to even consider turning them into the templars.

you can argue that fenris does it out of respect for hawke, but whether fenris is friends with hawke depends entirely on one's playthru, and also, though he uses that as a jab at sebastian, he doesn't use it as an excuse for himself. he is simply completely firm on the fact that he isn't going to do it.

and i think the reason for this is that fenris knows what it's like to be hunted, to have to hide, to always be looking over your shoulder. he might agree with the circles, but he knows what it's like for anders and merrill to live in a city like kirkwall as apostates. and while he might despise having to admit any similarity between himself and them, i'm sure he's aware of it on some level.

and in conjunction with that, there's something of an unacknowledged quid pro quo. merrill and anders could turn fenris over to bounty hunters just as he could turn them over to templars. but they don't, and he doesn't. it's an understanding of being in the same social group. he might hate them, but he won't betray them. and he, of all people, will not be the one to bring his companions' pursuers down on their heads.