#varania

Magister Erimond.

The asshole who was controlling the Wardens at Adamant.

FANFIC UPDATE:

Chapter 43 of No Town More Barren Than Our Town is up! In this chapter, Fenris confronts his sister with documents from his past and finally asks for her help with them. Here's a little excerpt. Thanks so much to everyone who's still excited about this fic after so many chapters. It means the world.

I think it’s weird that lots of minor choices are recorded in the Keep, meanwhile seemingly important things that affected companions are not recorded. This is of course relevant because we have to import a world state from the Keep. The only choices that future games can react to are the ones in the Keep. They are the choices that can matter in the long run.

Here are some examples for the choices recorded in the DA Keep:

 did the warden give an amulet to a beggar?

 did the warden take part in a bar fight with troublemakers?

 did the warden return a book to the Shaperate library?  

 did Bella, a random tavern waitress start a brewery? died? etc.

 did the warden bring Varathorn ironbark? (no story significance, he just makes something from ironbark that we can use)

did Hawke return some cargo to Martin? ( if yes, then he starts a shop, we can trade there but it has no relevance beyond DA2)

... and so on, you get the picture. (Imagine if they also kept a list of every sidequest from Inquisiton where we herded sheep, asked someone to be an agent or collected flowers for a widow.)  I could list soooo many choices which almost certainly won’t be relevant in the future. While I think it’s cool to keep a record of these small things, the problem is many other choices should take priority. So why keep a record of these choices and not the things I am about to list below?

Some choices that are NOT recorded in the DA Keep:

did Alistair get hardened?  (This isn’t that relevant for Leliana because for a time she is hardened no matter what and her final ending in DAI is recorded as it should be. However it’s important in Alistair’s case, especially if he becomes king. Logically the future of Ferelden should be different at least slightly. It should matter who the ruler is and what kind of ruler that person becomes. In DAO even the dialogues are different with Alistair if he is hardened yet in later games this change is erased? So is it meaningless?)

for each of the companions in DA2, were they rivals or friends of Hawke?? (for Inquisition it’s recorded about every companion whether or not they became friends with the Inquisitor. Yet this is not recorded for the game that had a rivalry system?? It’s also not recorded if the warden had a bad relationship with anyone. Of course this was unlikely because of the many gifts, still.)

the fate of Velanna and Sigrun? (it’s pretty clear that Bioware isn’t interested in continuing their story, they will never return. Still their fate at least could have been recorded in the Keep.)

the fate of Jowan? (originally there would have been an option to recruit him as a companion, this didn’t happen but he still played a significant role. The warden can free him and tell him to leave, in that case he survives and goes on to help refugees. Otherwise he is usually executed, yet these differences are not shown in the Keep.)

did Fenris kill his own sister?!? (it’s pretty evident that this could be important to him. Plus the next game takes place in Tevinter and she is there if she is alive. Maybe Bioware never wants to bring back most of the companions from DA2 other than Varric or maybe Isabela so they don’t care about their personal stories, I don’t know. But this tapestry should keep track of any potentially unfinished story threads. If characters ever return even for a short cameo and we ask them about things, certain answers should be different.)

I could probably keep listing important choices which are missing from the Keep, but this is already a long post and we can all see the problem here.

Bioware said that they don’t have a fixed planned ending for the Dragon Age series, it’s an evolving universe. They rework cancelled projects and change things all the time. They can’t know which choices will be relevant. They might decide to follow up on some story threads.

https://www.nexusmods.com/dragonage2/mods/3944

Nicol's Varania Morph by Aveneri

Rating: G Characters/Pairings: Fenris/Hawke, Sebastian Word Count: 5.5k this chapter, ~96k total Summary: Fenris, captain of Starkhaven’s White Guard and the dearest friend of that country’s prince, has arrived in the kingdom of Kirkwall with a retinue of noble-born guards and a carriage brimming with lavish gifts. How else to win over the hearts of a suspicious mountain people who would rather break teeth on stone than accept the prince of Starkhaven stealing away their heir princess?

But stone is all they have in their kitchens lately, and gravel in their quarries and ice in their bitter rivers, and Starkhaven sits abreast the richest lea and moorland south of the Minanter.

And Sebastian Vael, the young prince of that country, needs a wife.

—

Varania, despite considerable effort and a—frankly—rather resilient will, was going to cry.

Even the bustling cheer of the tavern around her could not stop it. Cupped between her hands was a bowl of thick broth, a few potatoes and carrots idly floating through it; she had tried to taste it twice, but disappointment had made her throat too tight to swallow and she could not bear to try again. Her eyes burned badly; she blinked and the bowl blurred, wavered, then reformed.

The image rose again in her mind. A great hall, lit warmly with fire and welcome, clear afternoon sunlight spilling through the towering windows. A crowd of many others, a hundred like her and unlike her in every way, waiting patiently between her and the raised dais at the end of the room. And upon the dais two black thrones; and seated on the rightward one a man dressed in soft, expensive leathers, his skin a rich brown, his stern eyes a familiar mossy green, and his brow crowned in black and twisting iron…

Someone laughed two tables over and the reverie shattered. The inn was overwhelmed by the dinner crowd, every table bursting; the only sign of the waitress was an occasional overloaded platter glimpsed above the throng’s heads, and a piercing whistle which summoned kitchen boys like magic.

She had thought the letter had been magic. What else could it have been, a starlit hand reaching out of the black morass of her future like a lifeline from the gods themselves, promises scrawled across the page like jewels spilled from an upturned sack.

A brother yet alive.

—