Marin (´｡• ω •｡`)

Ferelden, 8:82 Blessed.

The Orlesian occupation rules the land with an iron fist while revolutionaries fight and die under the Rebel Queen's banner. As the recently promoted Knight-Corporal of Kinloch Hold's Circle of Magi, you are a proud member of the Templar Order, a 'politically neutral' force for good in this time of great darkness. So when your Knight-Captain absconds with a heavily pregnant mage, you are assigned the arduous task of hunting them down—as quickly and as discreetly as possible.

Yet all is not what it seems. Malevolent forces prowl both the dreaming and waking worlds, and a betrayal from within your ranks forces a choice: deliver the child to a distant safe haven, or die. Now saddled with a newborn and with no real alternatives, you find yourself leading an eclectic group of outcasts through a land torn apart by civil war, where loyalties, allegiances, and faith will all be put to the ultimate test.

Story & Features

A story-rich interactive fiction game set during the Orlesian occupation of Ferelden, about fifty years before the events of DA:O.

Make choices and face outcomes, but be warned: the consequences are not always yours to pay.

Customizable PC including appearance, name, and gender identity.

Choose from four different backgrounds to determine your surname and unique starting origin in the Prologue.

Are you merciless or empathetic? Loyal or rebellious? Devout or questioning? Unlock special dialogues and actions through sheer force of personality.

Balance your lyrium gauge to utilize powerful templar abilities...or don't. Only good dogs heed the leash.

Multiple endings for both the main story and individual companions, including romances.

Companions & Romance

Lead a group of five companions through civil war-torn Ferelden and beyond. Form connections: influence and be influenced in return.

Will you cultivate an unbreakable bond with a friend, or earn the begrudging respect of a rival? Featuring a DA2-inspired friendship/rivalry system.

Pursue one of four romance options with or without your pants on (ace friendly). Two options for PCs of all genders, one for males, and one for females.

Sometimes a crew is six strangers, a weird baby, and a dog. The dog's name is customizable; the baby's is not.

Links

ffffffffffffffFFFFFFFFF okay I’m sorry but I still have more things to say about Anders, I can’t seem to shut up. unsurprising, seeing as he’s one of my favorite characters, but yeah.

I want to talk more about what I was saying the other day re: my thoughts on how much of the endgame decisions are Anders’ versus how much of it is Vengeance’s influence. Also: some general in-defense-of-mages stuff and some more rambling about bipolar disorder & neurodivergence re: Anders.

Long story short: On a friendship route, if Hawke asks if Anders’ endgame actions were his own or Justice’s idea, Anders will take responsibility for it and basically say that he and Justice are the same person. I think Anders is full of shit here—that is, I think he’s lying (perhaps even to himself). I think there is still a distinction between Anders and Justice/Vengeance, and I think Justice/Vengeance actually has more influence over the endgame events than Anders wants to admit.

Note that this is just my interpretation of his character. I’ve done eight playthroughs so far and ultimately this is how I’ve come to read him. I’m not saying anyone has to agree. I’m also not saying that my interpretation is how the devs/writers intended him to be interpreted, because I honestly don’t know—I don’t know if they even thought that far into it and it’s entirely possible I’m just overanalyzing it. But I think my interpretation makes sense in the context of Anders’ characterization and I wanted to flesh out my thoughts on it.

(More under the cut; cw for suicide & abuse mentions)

1, Nonbinary option.

2, Every LI is written to be bi/pan.

3, Jealousy and Fenris-Anders level of cat fights between the romanced LIs.

there's an anders short story. theres an anders short story . there is. an anders short story.

His name is Selvetarm, son of Vhaeraun and Zandilar, so Lolth's grandson. He's the champion of Lolth and the patron of drow warriors. He's portrayed as an eight-armed drow that represents the epitome of fighting prowess. However, Lolth keeps him snared by unbreakable webs she removes only in times of need.

This lil guy is cruel and malicious by nature and cares only for battle and destruction. He harbors a deep hatred for all living things, including Lolth.

I love this part: "his path crossed with that of Eilistraee, and he began to appreciate the goodness of the Dark Maiden, as exhibited in her teachings and deeds. By aiding in Selvetarm's redemption, Eilistraee hoped to begin to heal the breach between drow and the Setdarine".

Unfortunately, it is a vain hope as she has not taken into account Lolth, who swept away Eilistraee's hope, since the Spider Queen had woven her insidious plot: "the Queen of Spiders had long resented the existence of Zanassu, a minor demon lord that competed with her for divine authority over spiders. She hated almost as much the possibility of Eilistraee's winning an ally among the drow pantheon. A prime opportunity arose when the spider demon lost much of its power in a conflict on the Material Plane. Lolth convinced Selvetarm to destroy Zanassu in its depleted state and seize the spider demon's burgeoning divine power. She did so by suggesting to Selvetarm that a victory would win him favor in the eyes of Eilistraee, whom he greatly admired. But when Selvetarm prevailed in battle over the spider demon, the wholly evil and chaotic nature of the divine power he absorbed overwhelmed Selvetarm's innate goodness and weakened him enough that the Spider Queen could bound his will tightly to her own."

We can describe Selvetarm as an eight-limbed maestro of slaughter. If allowed to operate unchecked, he could rend his way through an entire drow city in a berserk rage. Keeping him restrained is one of the few acts of Lolth that can be described as merciful.

I truly love this guy! He could become a good boy thanks to Eilistraee, but neither of them came to terms with Lolth's wickedness.

if youre only planning on posting your art online, them please save it as .png ;this is also better for transparencies as well

BUT

please, if youre planning of printing your art, NEVER use png. it makes the quality of the image pretty shitty. use jpeg or pdf instead. and always set your work at 300dpi to get a better printing quality - this means, the images are crisper and sharper and theres no slight blurriness. i had a talk with my friend who is currently taking design, and pdf is much better to use when youre working with a bigger publishing company because it still has the layers intact, but if youre only planning on printing your stuff at staples or at some small publishing store, the jpeg is the way to go.

This is all utter bullshit.

I’m sorry but if your qualification is working on the school yearbook, you have no qualifications. Do not pretend otherwise. As a former professional photo manipulator for advertising brochures, I can say that you’re not comparing apples to oranges here - if anything, you’re comparing fruit to farmyard machinery:

JPEG is a lossy format. It is suitable for web imagery because it sacrifices detail for reduced file sizes, but in doing so it introduces artifacts that weren’t in the original; if you load a JPEG for editing, then save it as a different JPEG, then you’re adding more artifacts formed from those first artifacts. Do this often enough and you end up with a horrid glitchy mess that looks like a puddle’s reflection after a stone’s been thrown in. You’ve seen those memes that have 3 or 4 different “found at” tags along the bottom, that look like fingerpainted copies of the original? That’s why.

PNG is a lossless format that comes in two primary flavours, PNG-8 and PNG-24, which use 8 and 24 bit colour respectively. 8-bit colour is what you have in GIFs, a limit of just 256 different colours in a predetermined palette, usually automatically chosen by your software when saving. These files will look the same as GIFs, potentially with large patches of solid colour instead of the usual gradual shading seen in 24-bit imagery. This is usually better for small banners or pixel art, as it can yield smaller filesizes than GIF format. (There is an animated version called MNG but it has very little web support, hence the continued use of GIFs.)

PNG-24 is great for larger images where detail is as important as colour depth, as well as printable RGB images and (if supported by the client) full colour images with gradient transparencies. It most certainly does not make “the quality of the image pretty shitty,” as it preserves every nuance. File sizes can be smaller than JPEG for small images, or significantly larger for large images.

PDF is a container file, whatever you put into it will be pretty much preserved as it was, so you gain nothing but lose nothing.

TIFF is what you need to be using for archival or print-quality imagery. It has support for multiple layers, multiple colour channels (RGB as well as CMYK, which is essential for accurate print rendering), and everything is preserved exactly as it was seen on-screen when being composed. There are compressed versions available, they use similar methods to PNG in order to maintain detail without sacrifice; next to whatever your graphics program uses natively, this is the most interchangeable format available for professional use.

DPI is important only when used in combination with image dimensions; in and of itself it serves no purpose. If you make a brilliantly detailed 640x480 image & set it to 300dpi, you’ll receive a brilliantly detailed 2 inch x 1.6 inch print. This is great if you want to make a postage stamp, but not if you’re creating an A4 flyer! Determine the image’s dimension then set the DPI accordingly; 72dpi isn’t hideous especially for text-heavy work (it’s ~3 pixels per millimeter), and 150dpi can be suitable for many images. Unless you’re interested in photo realism, 300dpi is usually overkill - for our hypothetical A4 flyer, you’d need a file of 2490x3510 pixels for edge to edge printing, with a correspondingly high memory requirement and filesize even if using a compressed format.

Keeping the layers intact is utterly unimportant for print work unless you want to use a separated colour print method that requires multiple passes to lay down each ink. If you send a file with all the layers, masks, etc. off for printing you’re liable to get it sent back unactioned, as they won’t want to take responsibility for choosing the wrong elements for printing. Save your work with everything intact, then save a flattened copy especially for printing purposes - this is one of the reasons Save Copy As… is a common option in graphics manipulation software.

As a designer who’s worked a few years for a newspaper, I cannot begin to tell you how much OP’s post (edit: response, technically) made me cringe. I would have killed to get a photo as a TIFF for once instead of having to tear apart PDFs only to find a 50x100px 72dpi shitty JPEG inside for the 5 millionth time…