Exhausted Archi's Archives

I'm finally wrapping up the first draft of Chapter 1 and am now on the hunt for some beta readers/play testers! As a beta, you'll help identify typos, coding errors, pacing issues, and other general story/ game balancing problems. I'm not looking for line-by-line edits or anything too intensive, just a few extra pairs of eyes before publication in September. I don't anticipate the time commitment being more than a couple of hours--just however long it takes to do a few playthroughs of the new Ch1 content (~60k words).

In addition to general playtesting, I'm also looking for sensitivity readers for specific characters, routes, and plot points. This would include nonbinary and/or transgender MCs, Arden (a dark-skinned, gay, cisgender Dalish elf), and Asi (a brown-skinned, lesbian, transgender surface dwarf). Specifically, I'm looking for folks who are First Nation/Indigenous North American, Black or Brown POC, trans women, and/or nonbinary. If you identify as any of the above and are interested, please apply! Your application will be given priority.

If selected, I will message you here on Tumblr and add you to the Discord! Additional details will be provided there.

canon is what happens in the text. e.g. merlin tries to poison morgana

a headcanon is a fact that you have personally made up as an elaboration of canon. it is your invention. e.g. i think morgana and gwen had a teenage lesbian situationship before the events of canon. or, i think modern morgana would love evanesence.

an interpretation is how one reads the existing text. it is not an invented fact nor is it a headcanon, it is a reading. e.g. i think merlin tries to poison morgana out of misplaced self-hatred. or, i think that one line was delivered with suppressed malice and shows a nuanced relationship.

fanon is the general fandom’s accepted headcanons and interpretations that elaborate or recontextualize canon. e.g. merlin is a badass waif and morgana is a bitch.

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The veil is wobbly here.

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so what i’d like to establish is that a) mages are really in-world using these common spells and knowing them by their names i.e. they literally think “i’m going to cast winter’s grasp” and not just “i’m going to freeze that guy” and b) they have very good reasons for doing so. and the main three reasons for using established, known spells would be:

efficacy. spellcasting in dragon age is, as i mentioned, about imagination, belief, and willpower. isn’t it much easier to imagine an effect, and to force it into existence with your willpower, if you’ve seen it done? i think this is probably one reason why getting a teacher for magic is so important. you want to see a spell done a hundred times before you can replicate it with the kind of confident willpower that makes it enforce itself on the world and do decent damage. (incidentally, i think this is also why elemental damage is popular rather than more inventive obviously magical styles; the elements can be observed and replicated, we know what to expect and to imagine. i think baby mages spend a lot of time looking at candles and mages in icy regions are better at ice and so on.)

predictability. “friendly fire” exists as a mechanic in these games to demonstrate that once a spell is cast, it is no longer in the mage’s control, and can cause harm they didn’t intend. “free casting” instead of using a known spell could lead to even more unintended consequences.

resources. mages are reliant on their own reserves of magic (and occasionally lyrium or blood) to allow them access to the fade. they would know exactly how much a known spell will “cost”, whereas “free casting” could cost anything and immediately exhaust them or push them beyond their reserves.

of course, none of this means that mages can’t invent their own spells. after all, someone had to invent them in the first place. it’s likely something that mages often do once they’ve reached a certain level of skill, and i think it’s really fun to imagine. (a circle mage apprentice required to make a small, frivolous spell of their own as a project; a tevinter magister fashioning something new and flashy to impress their rivals; a dalish keeper regularly crafting fresh spells to suit their clan’s new needs.) loving the image of a mage excitedly making a new spell only to dig through the books and then grimace and groan as they realise some enchanter from the towers age already published a better version. i think there are lots of mages who try to branch out from the standard elements and so on, and find that it doesn’t “catch on” because what’s familiar becomes efficient becomes familiar and so on. i also think a mage who never invents their own spells could do perfectly fine

all this also doesn’t mean that one person’s winter’s grasp is necessarily the same as another’s. i think it would be sooo fun if something always slightly changes about a spell as a new mage adapts it for their own, and for spells to become unrecognisable over the centuries as they keep passing between hands. that would also be a neat way to explain differences between versions of spells between games.

Now the meta for why a Dalish/Vashoth PC uses the same magic trees as every other pc in both the video games and the TTRPG isn't a lack of creativity on the devs part, because it is in the lore, but because of game restriction; from the general mechanic design, to not having the scope to make that complex of a system, to it being cut, to it just not being intuitive on a player level. (This is why the spell trees get simpler with each game. Because the magic system was too complex for a majority of players plus other things.)

But I digress, the best examples we see of this is the difference between standardize circle magic and then all "hedge" magic (as the Chantry Circles call it). Hedge magic would be everything from Avvar, Chasind, Dalish, Qunari, and Rivaini magic. You can really just put any traditional magic or non-Chantry (Orlesian or Imperium) magic in this category. This much is called out and stated in various codices and spell descriptors across the series as well as novels.

You can really dig into it here on the wiki about Hedge Magic.

It is stated in lore and errata that once you learn how to do magic one way it is incredibly difficult/impossible to learn any other way. So hedge mages typically cannot learn circle magic, or at the very least struggle to do so and come up with an augmented methodology.

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