Dragon Age

Avvar seem more chaotic to me than order Chaotic barbarians don't mean they don't have honor codes or rules, its in general attitude and values

They seem more Neutral to me on that regard.

I don't think lawful, chaotic, and neutral are real things I admit. They're abstractions which don't reflect any real societal influence.

You know, except for their successful revolt and overthrow of their masters.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jan 20th 2019 at 2:09:38 AM

I mean... yeah. They're D&D alignments. No one's making real societal analysis here.

...point at which the Circles are dissolved, so, really, they're no longer the Circle of Magi. The Circle as an institution is still completely opposed to chaos.

Edited by TheLovecraftian on Jan 20th 2019 at 9:39:21 AM

How do I keep forgetting about my Dragon Cultist buddies the Disciples of Andraste As A Fucking Awesome High Dragon?

They are a good Chaotic Evil faction.

Eh, it's too small to really qualify. They certainly aren't on the same scale as Menzoberranzan. Hey, you were the one making Drow comparisons.

True but they're all I could think of after a day's worth of asking about this. It's not much but it's all Thedas really has.

Speaking of which, maybe there is some Chaos Empire over yonder. Isn't that a popular fan theory that the Qun is a response to the Horned People all being crazy Reavers? Although I'm not sure if they are explicitly from another continent. I know some say they are Tevinter experiments so....I dunno. I honestly don't read that much "lore" or background stuff. I feel like they were supposedly not from Thedas, though....

You know what I love?

The whole Urn of Sacred Ashes quest is just randomly moving from high fantasy LOTR and GOT into Indiana Jones.

And then it's back and you might as well have never diverged.

I wish we had more of it in DA 2 and DAI.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jan 20th 2019 at 11:23:00 AM

Edited by TheCuriousFan on Jan 21st 2019 at 5:57:45 AM

It's still not quite enough to classify it as a Chaotic large scale society in the same vein as Dn D Drow.

They're Neutral Evil!

:)

None of these cultures are chaos personified the way the drow are, but they do lean toward chaos compared to, say, Orzammar. But I'd say that's pretty much the point of the darkspawn, to both stand in for and deconstruct the idea of an Always Chaotic Evil orc/undead/drow/zerg society, since they don't really even have a society as such because of their hive mind. In that sense, feral, ravening hordes though they might be, they're ideologically pure in a way many "lawful" regimes can only dream of.

Most of these debates are over semantics, I think. The argument over whether the Circle is worth keeping seems more over whether the name is synonymous with the organization, and whether the organization is equivalent to its policies.

Edited by Unsung on Jan 21st 2019 at 10:33:30 AM

You know, I wish they'd redesing the Darkspawn. I quite like the mechanical changes they did to how each kind of Darkspawn works, but their models are so ugly and generic to look at. I think they had something better when it was along the lines of Origins.

Edited by TheLovecraftian on Jan 21st 2019 at 2:50:07 PM

The Origins designs were also thematically similar - the Hurlocks were clearly monstrous humans - skeletal, rotting, bestial. The genlocks similar for Dwarves.

The Wraiths were the weird ones - so utterly different from the elves - more like Lictors.

The DA 2 redesign feels off - they look like budget cenobites and almost comedic the way the Hurlocks run at you spinning their swords like a conga line. The genlock redesign I can see why they went with it but it feels just weird.

It was also interesting how the genlocks COULD use magic despite being corrupt dwarf offshoots / spawned from a dwarven broodmother.

And then in DA: I they're just reskinned bandits. Until the Deep Roads DLC where they felt a little more back on track. Though I'd still struggle to pick them out of a DA: I bad guy line up.

Genlocks can use magic because they are empowered by the Taint. Whatever it is that prevents Dwarves from tapping into the Fade doesn't apply to Genlocks. They are empowered by something otherworldly.

I barely noticed them in Inquisition at all, to be honest. If the characters hadn't specificaly said those were Darkspawn, I'd have mowed them down without ever noticing the difference.

I do like the ideas they went with for the Genlocks, the Alpha Hurlocks, and the Emissaries, and I get what they were trying to do with the new Shrieks. But the Origins designs had a lot more character and were much more distinctive from the other enemies in the game, and I feel since 2 they've lost a lot of that, the Hurlocks especially. I really think they could do with a redesign, particularly if the next game goes along with those hints of a new possible Blight that Inquisition threw around.

I don't love the DA 2 darkspawn redesigns other than the ogre, but I always felt that the original designs, other than the broodmothers, were just zombie orcs. I did like DA 2's attempt to give their armor and architecture a more unified aesthetic, even if I still think it doesn't make much sense for them to apparently build or craft as much as they've always done.

Yeaaaaaaah, I honestly prefer DA 2 and Inquisition designs to original ones because original ones, while having old school charm, were kinda generic zombie orcs.

I've been on a new playthrough of Inquisition these days, and I'm feeling like in this game it's a bit harder to play like a complete and total asshole than it was in the other ones.

See, I find it easy to play as the complete psychopath who was placed in charge of saving the continent from a world-ending threat by any means necessary and as the human-shaped disaster area that descends on a city and spends seven years fucking things up so hard that the entire world feels like it needs a spring cleaning afterwards, but unless I'm specifically playing a power-hungry tyrant, I find it hard to play a complete monster in Inquisition, mostly because, by the time of the attack on Haven and the first meeting with Corypheus, the character is being far too altruistic to take seriously as someone who's just there because the biggest organization around was stupid enough to put an utter dickwad in power just because their hand glows funny.

And even before that, the Inquisition always expects the Inquisitor to solve every little problem that gets thrown their way, something that I feel this specific kind of brutish dick just wouldn't stick around for. Hawke I could understand: Snarky Hawke does everything in town so they get to have fun at all the stupid people, Diplomatic Hawke goes along because they're just that compulsively helpful, and Agressive Hawke really just wants an excuse to hit people. And the Warden is in a situation where if they don't stop the Blight there'll soon not be enough world for them to be a dick in, so ultimately, they have to do the small tasks so they can gather an army and stop the Blight. But the Inquisitor, if not being played as someone who wants to lead the Inquisition, gets kinda difficult to play as.

I feel like they should have had something, like having Cassandra roll back into the role of a leader if your character starts slacking too much and just tries to have all the pies without hiring all the bakers in southern Thedas first. Make it so you can play the unrepentant psychopath who just hangs around because sitting on the throne and distributing beheadings is fun, and because they're the one Corypheus wants anyway so they might as well hang out in Skyhold with the huge army all around them.

Also, small sidenote, but of course this Inquisitor gets along swimmingly with Vivienne.

Edited by TheLovecraftian on Jan 22nd 2019 at 12:15:35 PM

I don't think Vivienne would get along with psychopathic murderer though <_<

Depends on how obvious the "psychopathic" part is. Viv is the kind of person who respects drive and ambition, especially if she can benefit. And of course no one in the party cares about the murderer part.

Granted, killing and murdering are not the same thing.

My greatest fear for my Inquisitor is that future generations will scribble out the fact he was a Pro-Elf Pro-Mage freedom wizard like they did Shartan or that Jaws of Haakon Saint.

They'll just say the Herald of Andraste was a miracle worker and forget that he was also a mage and reformer.

I wonder if they'll try to obliterate Pope Leliana too.

Well, this Inquisitor and Vivienne do disagree a bit on where exactly to draw the line between justified killing and "he stared at me for to long, I'll feed him to his children" once in a while, but at least as far as I've gotten in the story yet, most of the decisions I've made happened to cross with Vivienne's approval. Like, for example, allying with the mages under the conditions of rebuilding the Circles, which I chose because I figured this Inquisitor would find it hilarious to take everything that had been fought over the last few years and then force the mages back into servitude again, thus making the entire war pointless (And because this Inquisitor is a Two-Handed Warrior and had a nagging feeling that siding with the Mages now meant getting a really cool red lyrium sword down the line), but hey, Vivienne doesn't know what I'm thinking.

Given that we're not even sure on Andraste, the big historical figure of the setting, I'd say that kind of thing is a given, not just to the Inquisitor, but to the Warden and Hawke as well. Hell, it's already happening: Justinia considers a psychopath Warden just as eligible to lead the Inquisition as a stable one. There's gotta be some level of hero romantization going on there considering the stuff you can get up to as the Warden.

Psycho Warden: I did every evil deed from creating golems to cheating on Leliana with Morrigan, the Queen, plus a nug with a dwarf to save the world.

Grey Warden: I believe this.

Psycho Warden: Also, I did NOT recreate the god I was supposed to kill as a baby to cowardly save my own life.

Grey Warden: Gotcha.

Psycho Warden: Plan B# was to let Alister die for me.