History Headscratchers / DragonAgeOrigins

* Assuming you kill the Cult and the High Dragon, and let Brother Genitivi live, then the Urn and it's temple become a mecca for pilgrims. Except that the cultists and dragon weren't the only dangers. There's still the ''Film/TheLastCrusade''-esque Gauntlet that could very well kill you. How did they get around that?

During the Nature of the Beast quest, when choosing to attack the Dalish you have the dialogue option to expose Zathrian and reveal he's the one who cursed the werewolves. Yet no one from the clan- Lanaya, Athras, Sarel, no one- bothers to call him out on it and his refusal to revoke it being the reason for their troubles.

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*** Just to play Devil's Advocate, being born has a one hundred percent mortality rate. Die now, die later, you'll die eventually. . . why not put your time to good use? By, say, stopping TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt?

*** You don't have to go all the way to fool around.

A big deal is made about dwarves going to the surface losing their castes. One step outside, and '''boom''', you're a casteless. It doesn't seem to apply to the legion of the dead (since, legally, they're dead), but the shaper we meet in '''Descent''' has to avoid even standing in the sunlight that's seeping through the storm coast fissure for fear of losing her caste. However, during the fifth blight, a huge mass of warriors left the gates of Orzimmar to help us fight the blight in Denerim. Did all the guys who aided us lose their caste?
* Presumably there's an exception when the King directly orders Dwarves to the surface.

By the time the warden first arrives at Ostagar, it seems that the scope of the darkspawn problem is only just becoming apparent, and even then only Duncan seems to believe that an actual blight is underway. However, by the time the warden reaches Lothering, he will already find Sten imprisoned. For Sten to be here, word of the blight first needs to have spread all the way to Par Vollen (the other side of the known world, though admittedly the known world isn't that big), then Sten and his party need to travel all the way to the Korcari Wilds (slowed down by having to stay hidden), then Sten and his party would need to do some adventuring, and then Sten needs to spend more than a week in a cage. How in the world did this happen in the same span of time it took to go from Ostagar to Lothering? [[WildMassGuessing Did we spend a few months in Flemeth's hut? Did the Arishok already know of the blight?]]
* And for that matter, if Sten and his squad got ambushed near Lake Calenhad, ''why was he in Lothering''? The two points aren't even ''close'' to one another!

A big deal is made about dwarves going to the surface losing their castes. One step outside, and '''boom''', you're a casteless. It doesn't seem to apply to the legion of the dead (since, legally, they're dead), but the shaper we meet in '''Descent''' has to avoid standing in the sunlight that's seeping through the storm coast fissure for fear of losing her caste. However, during the fifth blight, a huge mass of warriors left the gates of Orzimmar to help us fight the blight in Denerim. Did all the guys who aided us lose their caste?

*** How could they possibly know that it destroys your soul? And why do the Grey Wardens keep the reason for their existence a secret? Riordan says that if they revealed that only Grey Wardens could kill an archdemon, and that the Warden so doing would die in the process, no one would become a Warden. That makes no sense. First of all, it's a military order; plenty of Wardens will get killed in other ways. Second, plenty of people die during the Joining. By contrast, no more than seven Wardens will ever die from killing archdemons (and by Riordan's time, only three). So why the secrecy? Consider the public relations value if people knew that only a Grey Warden could stop a Blight.

*** If it did happen, why is it never mentioned, even in the codex? And yes, you are training the Wardens in Ferelden, but wouldn't the rest of the order want to hear from you? As for what you could teach them, how about what it's like to fight an Archdemon? For example, how high and how fast it could fly, and how maneuverable it was; how much force was required for a projectile to penetrate its hide for a given angle of incidence; what spells were effective against it, and which were not; how long it would stay in one place to fight before leaping into the air to assume a new location, and its other tactics; how frequently it could use its breath weapon, how much damage it did, and what could defend against it; how much damage to its wing(s) was needed to ground it; and many other things besides. As for what they could learn about fighting the Darkspawn armies, how about how much their tactical efficiency could be reduced by killing their generals, or how much better organized they became when the Archdemon was present? It seems to me that there's a lot to be learned from the only Grey Wardens to fight an Archdemon in four centuries. That's to say nothing of the benefit to morale: it's one thing to read about your predecessors' successes centuries ago; it's another to hear from your peer that, yes, it can be done.

*** Really? It's ''all'' "common knowledge"? Nothing of what they learned from the past Blights has been lost in the past four centuries? There are no lacunae in the records? There's nothing confusing or mysterious in the archives that could be illuminated or cleared up by more recent information? I cannot help but suspect that you have never done much archival research yourself, at least not with archives that are even decades old, never mind centuries. As for the Hero going on a book tour, if anything like that had happened, why isn't it in the epilogue?
*** No, I said it's ''either'' common knowledge, common sense, or known by the Wardens already. I think you're seriously overestimating how unique or complicated the Hero's accomplishments actually were. How do you kill an Archdemon? The same way you kill everything else you run across in the entire game world over the course of all three games -- hit it with swords and axes and arrows and magic until it dies. Do you need to know how much pressure to use with the sword? No, because you're just going to hit it as hard as you can. Do you need to know how fast it flies? No, because you can't exactly fly to follow it, and if it's flying around, then you can see how fast it's moving first-hand.\\\

And it is canonical that the Hero travels. That the codex and epilogue didn't satisfy your every nitpick doesn't mean that nobody ever asked him any questions (even though, again, the answers to them would be by and large useless).

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* This is the inverse of the previous headscratcher, but why is no one the least bit concerned that the Warden is a blood mage? Alistair trained as a Templar; Leliana was a lay sister in the Chantry; Wynne is a Circle Mage. Not one of them seems the slightest bit concerned when I'm using blood magic right in front of them, even when I'm using it to control the mind of an opponent to force him to kill his own companions. Why are they all okay with this?

*** How could they possibly know that it destroys your soul? And why do the Grey Wardens keep the reason for their existence a secret? Riordan says that if they revealed that only Grey Wardens could kill an archdemon, and that the Warden so doing would die in the process, no one would become a Warden. That makes no sense. First of all, it's a military order; plenty of Wardens will get killed in other ways. Second, plenty of people die during the Joining. By contrast, no more than seven Wardens will ever die from killing archdemons (and by Riordan's time, only three). So why the secrecy? Consider the public relations value if people knew that only a Grey Warden could stop a Blight.

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[[folder:Grey Warden secrecy]]
* Why do the Grey Wardens keep the reason for their existence a secret? Riordan says that if they revealed that only Grey Wardens could kill an archdemon, and that the Warden so doing would die in the process, no one would become a Warden. That makes no sense. First of all, it's a military order; plenty of Wardens will get killed in other ways. Second, plenty of people die during the Joining. By contrast, no more than seven Wardens will ever die from killing archdemons (and by Riordan's time, only three). So why the secrecy? Consider the public relations value if people knew that only a Grey Warden could stop a Blight.
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