Dragon dragon dragon age age age
No pretense of actual purpose to this post, just more Dragon Age!
Spoilers through end of Redcliffe Castle.
When we last left our heroes... oh, boy.
Lyna the Dalish elf and recently-initiated Grey Warden is traveling with her ever-weirder bunch of companions, ranging from the model of sanity (Alistair the Grey Warden, winner of the Century's Greatest Man award as well as this year's award for Most Hug-Worthy Reveal of Royal Parentage) to the weird-but-still-stable (Morrigan the witch, strong contender in Ferelden Weekly's 10 Hottest Apostates of the Dragon Age, winner of the So Powerful It's Scary award, and recently voted Most Likely to Kill Alistair in his Sleep (beating out the favorite, Teyrn Loghain, by only a handful of votes!)), from loose-grip-on-reality (Leliana, the former cloistered Sister, voted Most Convincingly Harmless Killer) to convicted-mass-murderer (Sten the barbarian, now in the running for Most Timely Discovery by Video Game Protagonist, and former Qunari Iron Man Competition winner). And, of course, we'll not forget Thracys, the best dog ever.
We have spent the greater part of the day preparing the village of Redcliffe for a zombie assault. Yes, so, the arl of the surrounding land, Eamon Guerrin, had fallen ill a few weeks ago, and then, just a few days ago, undead horrors began to spew from the castle by night. Nobody knows the status of the arl, or if there is anyone alive in the castle at all. Well, bugger that! We need Arl Eamon to help us gather armies and secure alliances in order to fight this fucking Blight! Man, why does everything bad always happen all at once?
In the midst of all this, I take a moment to ask Alistair why he waited so long to tell me that he is King Maric's son. He gives me a few exceptionally legitimate reasons, things like how he was used to never ever telling anyone, and how it never seemed like the right time to tell me, and then finishes this rather awkward and embarrassed thing by saying, “I guess part of me liked you not knowing.”
;__; Oh, god, Alistair.
Why, I want to know, what happens when people know?
“I become the bastard prince to them, instead of just... Alistair,” he says. And if all that alone weren't enough, he has to follow it all with, “I guess I was just hoping that you would like me for who I am.”
;_________________;
I accept his apology, genuinely. As an elf... I can understand that sort of thing.
Anyway, the last details of the upcoming battle are sorted out, and we make our stand to prepare for the zombie hordes. Night falls. Leliana and I hang back with the archers, while Alistair and my dog prepare for melee. We use some lantern oil from the general store to set up a fiery barrier at what is judged to be the most strategic point (I want to know, we did not decide to put this barrier on the narrow stone bridge through which most of these creatures are coming, why?, but I guess I should not question the game logic). The night is dry and the sky is bare and cold, but the heat of the fire can be felt even from where we stand. The undead advance, coming across the bridge, and then... run at us... one by one? Am I missing something? I started wondering if I'd done something wrong or if I was supposed to go actively heckle them or something (not really an option given the fire that is in the way), but after several long minutes of single shamblers moving in, broken up by the occasional group, a cutscene happens! We're told that there are more of them coming out of the lake, and the rest of the village needs to be protected.
Don't worry, guys. We got this.
The party and I hurry down to the lake and get to kicking some soggy zombie butt, assisting the militia already posted there. Now this is some good zombie fightin'! They come in waves, but too close for us to gather and recuperate, and they come from several directions to keep us on our toes. Leliana hangs out on one side, shooting over a barricade, while Alistair and Thracys and I hack and slash in the thick of things. Only a couple of the militia end up getting killed, and when the battle ends, there is great celebration. Holy shit, we survived the night, guys! Awesome! Yeah!
Dawn comes, and Bann Teagan asks me to meet him at the mill to discuss the situation at the castle. We still don't know what's going on there, only that we have to know if the arl is alive, and what has become of his wife and child. He says there is a secret passage beneath the mill that his signet ring unlocks, and that we have a chance of sneaking in unnoticed there-
-as the arlessa, Isolde, comes running to us over the hills, guards at her sides, in a clear state of panic and anguish.
Dismay is expressed. She snaps at us (mostly Alistair) and we remind her kindly that we have been saving your goddamn village, thanks so much. She is somewhat kinder after that, but explains that the mage whom she'd hired to tutor her son, who was showing signs of magic, had in fact been hired by that total douchebag Teyrn Loghain to poison the arl, probably to prevent him from assuming the throne or at least keep him from raising resistance to Loghain's bid for power. She says the mage must have summoned some sort of awful power, which has been creating all of these creatures, and that this entity allowed her to go to fetch Teagan at her son Connor's behest. She requested that Teagan come alone.
This smells like a trap to all of us, because we have a handful of living brain cells split among us, but Teagan insists on going. He tells us to go in through the secret passage, and that he will distract whatever evil is there, as much as he can.
So... in we go. In the lower levels, which is evidently a prison, we find a living fellow-some sort of miracle, I'd say-who turns out to be the mage who was tutoring Connor. He confesses to being a blood mage, an apostate, and to poisoning Arl Eamon, but he denies having anything to do with the evil that has taken up residence within the castle. I figure he could be useful and offer him the chance to come with us; he declines, preferring to have nothing to do with the mess upstairs. Unfortunately for him, he doesn't get that choice; he can come with us, or he can sit in his cell. He (wisely) chooses the cell, and we move on.
The castle's swarming with undead, but all in all, we have a marvelous time mopping them up. It's not hard except for one battle with some shades that kicks us around pretty thoroughly... and then we accidentally run into a room full of Mabari hounds, and we get fucking slaughtered. We were seriously toast in about ten seconds, making it the meanest utter beat-down I have encountered so far. I reload at the beginning of the castle and make use of the auto-save from here on. Anyway, leaving the Mabari Kennel of Death alone, we power through the castle until we hit the courtyard, where a Revenant makes clean work of pretty much everyone except myself and Alistair (and even then, the two of us are down to our last pixels of health by the end of it). Only after we have picked our party mates' pieces up off of the ground do we notice... oh, hey, there's the castle gate, where Ser Perth and his men are waiting outside for us to let them in. That... would have made this easier. Oh, well! :D We let them in, and the lot of us charge the Great Hall to finally get some fucking answers.
At the front of the hall, we see... Isolde, standing with her son, and a handful of guards, and then Bann Teagan... doing backflips, or some such nonsense? What is this malarkey? THAT IS WHAT WE GREY WARDENS ARE HERE TO FIND OUT, THANKS. We march right up to them and demand an answer.
Allow me to illustrate the moment.
That's right. These Grey Wardens (and their dog) are not taking your shit.
When Connor speaks... all is clear. There's an awful, evil timbre to his voice, the sound of something whispering behind his words. He's been possessed, and by something nasty, I will bet. He tells us that he's been sending the undead out towards the town with the notion of conquering it for himself. Isolde begs us not to hurt him, but he sets his guards on us, and Bann Teagan, under his control, attacks us as well.
We don't waste much time. Most of the guards are dead and Teagan is on the floor before you can count to twenty. The fight ends as Isolde runs to his side and tries to clean him up... it seems that his possession has waned and that Connor has escaped to the family chambers.
Thus begins the deliberation. What will we do with him? We can't let him go on like this, but how do we deal with demonic possession? The decent people in the party (read: not me) really do not want to kill a kid (I am just ambivalent to it), but Isolde says that the mage could have an answer, if he's still alive. Well, handily enough, we left him in the cellar to chill. He is fetched, and offers us an alternative.
He says he can send a mage into the Fade to confront the demon there, thus preventing us from needing to kill the boy... but in order to do this, he needs a sacrifice. Isolde jumps at the chance to save her son, and after establishing that we have no other options, I fetch Morrigan. The mage performs the ritual, and as the powers fill him, he stabs Isolde in the chest. Blood flies everywhere and Morrigan falls to the ground.
(At this point, I got to take control of Morrigan! IT WAS AWESOME. SPELLCASTERS ARE LEGITIMATELY TERRIFYING.)
Morrigan regains consciousness in the Fade, surrounded by dead spirits, thin and white, wandering aimlessly. The boy's voice leads her forward through the haze and the alien terrain, and she finds him-or at least a thing that looks like him, standing beside a ghostly image of his bed. She demands answers from him, but he only taunts her, and his shape gives way, surging into the form of the demon. Sweeping horns, fangs, almost nude female body, purple-gray skin, long corpse-like fingers.
It's suggested that the demon came to Connor in a dream and offered him the chance to save his father... but as does not surprise me, demons are lying jerks, and having possessed the boy, this one has been using him to wreak havoc for her own amusement.
I expected this battle to be difficult, but using a combination of Vulnerability Hex and various elemental spells plus Life Drain, the demon went down in about twenty seconds. The same was true for the next couple times that we clashed, each time after chasing the boy's voice to another location. The last battle was more difficult mostly because of the demon's use of a spell to duplicate her body and then regenerate health rather than her increased health in and of itself, but Morrigan was never in serious danger. This is because Morrigan is SCARY AS SHIT. Seriously, I hadn't realized what kind of power magi in this world can acquire. They are fucking terrifying. This plus a predilection towards being possessed means that I can actually really understand why the state would want to control the magi as much as they can. It's easy to see why even the smallest handful of renegade magi would be a serious threat to even the most powerful non-magical people.
Anyway, having defeated the demon (after some sexy banter on the demon's part and general snark on Morrigan's), she returns to this world. Alistair and I chat with Bann Teagan about Arl Eamon's condition. Now that he's no longer being slowly poisoned, one would hope he'd have a chance, but he seems to have fallen into a kind of coma. Isolde, previously, had sent out the arl's knights to search for the Urn of Adraste, the prophetess of the human's god, the ashes in which are said to be able to cure any malady. Various people, myself included, think this is an absolute fool's errand and that the thing can't possibly exist, but Teagan insists we pursue it. He feels that it's the only way. I am reluctant, but as he points out, we need the arl's help if we're to raise any sort of a resistance to the Blight, especially considering that Loghain is determined to smear the name of the Grey Wardens and, apparently, to incite a civil war. GREAT. WE COULD REALLY USE ONE RIGHT NOW, THANKS.
So, I agree to help search for it (probably while we continue to seek out the people who are bound by our treaties to help us). Who knows. We'll try.
We cut to the village. Bodies are being loaded onto boats or heaped on a pyre to be burned, but the town rejoices nonetheless, as they survived the night and the threat (well, one of the threats) to the town has been dealt with. We are praised, but we can't stick around. There's a Blight to deal with, and for better or for worse, that falls on us.
And now we cut... to Teyrn Loghain, the douchebag general who is responsible for the king's death, for our leader Duncan's death, and for the fall of Ostagar. An adviser approaches him as he leans over a table, drinking. The man says that his sources say that two Grey Wardens managed to survive the battle at Ostagar... and that he's arranged for them to be taken care of. Loghain asks, “... an assassin?”
Into view steps an elf, with long light hair and just a few tattoos in a jagged pattern on one cheek. He smirks. “The best,” he says, “and the most expensive.”
Loghain gives him a long look over, and then downs the last of the contents of his goblet.
“Just get it done.”
original entry @ DreamWidth.org -
comments - use OpenID
Spoilers through end of Redcliffe Castle.
When we last left our heroes... oh, boy.
Lyna the Dalish elf and recently-initiated Grey Warden is traveling with her ever-weirder bunch of companions, ranging from the model of sanity (Alistair the Grey Warden, winner of the Century's Greatest Man award as well as this year's award for Most Hug-Worthy Reveal of Royal Parentage) to the weird-but-still-stable (Morrigan the witch, strong contender in Ferelden Weekly's 10 Hottest Apostates of the Dragon Age, winner of the So Powerful It's Scary award, and recently voted Most Likely to Kill Alistair in his Sleep (beating out the favorite, Teyrn Loghain, by only a handful of votes!)), from loose-grip-on-reality (Leliana, the former cloistered Sister, voted Most Convincingly Harmless Killer) to convicted-mass-murderer (Sten the barbarian, now in the running for Most Timely Discovery by Video Game Protagonist, and former Qunari Iron Man Competition winner). And, of course, we'll not forget Thracys, the best dog ever.
We have spent the greater part of the day preparing the village of Redcliffe for a zombie assault. Yes, so, the arl of the surrounding land, Eamon Guerrin, had fallen ill a few weeks ago, and then, just a few days ago, undead horrors began to spew from the castle by night. Nobody knows the status of the arl, or if there is anyone alive in the castle at all. Well, bugger that! We need Arl Eamon to help us gather armies and secure alliances in order to fight this fucking Blight! Man, why does everything bad always happen all at once?
In the midst of all this, I take a moment to ask Alistair why he waited so long to tell me that he is King Maric's son. He gives me a few exceptionally legitimate reasons, things like how he was used to never ever telling anyone, and how it never seemed like the right time to tell me, and then finishes this rather awkward and embarrassed thing by saying, “I guess part of me liked you not knowing.”
;__; Oh, god, Alistair.
Why, I want to know, what happens when people know?
“I become the bastard prince to them, instead of just... Alistair,” he says. And if all that alone weren't enough, he has to follow it all with, “I guess I was just hoping that you would like me for who I am.”
;_________________;
I accept his apology, genuinely. As an elf... I can understand that sort of thing.
Anyway, the last details of the upcoming battle are sorted out, and we make our stand to prepare for the zombie hordes. Night falls. Leliana and I hang back with the archers, while Alistair and my dog prepare for melee. We use some lantern oil from the general store to set up a fiery barrier at what is judged to be the most strategic point (I want to know, we did not decide to put this barrier on the narrow stone bridge through which most of these creatures are coming, why?, but I guess I should not question the game logic). The night is dry and the sky is bare and cold, but the heat of the fire can be felt even from where we stand. The undead advance, coming across the bridge, and then... run at us... one by one? Am I missing something? I started wondering if I'd done something wrong or if I was supposed to go actively heckle them or something (not really an option given the fire that is in the way), but after several long minutes of single shamblers moving in, broken up by the occasional group, a cutscene happens! We're told that there are more of them coming out of the lake, and the rest of the village needs to be protected.
Don't worry, guys. We got this.
The party and I hurry down to the lake and get to kicking some soggy zombie butt, assisting the militia already posted there. Now this is some good zombie fightin'! They come in waves, but too close for us to gather and recuperate, and they come from several directions to keep us on our toes. Leliana hangs out on one side, shooting over a barricade, while Alistair and Thracys and I hack and slash in the thick of things. Only a couple of the militia end up getting killed, and when the battle ends, there is great celebration. Holy shit, we survived the night, guys! Awesome! Yeah!
Dawn comes, and Bann Teagan asks me to meet him at the mill to discuss the situation at the castle. We still don't know what's going on there, only that we have to know if the arl is alive, and what has become of his wife and child. He says there is a secret passage beneath the mill that his signet ring unlocks, and that we have a chance of sneaking in unnoticed there-
-as the arlessa, Isolde, comes running to us over the hills, guards at her sides, in a clear state of panic and anguish.
Dismay is expressed. She snaps at us (mostly Alistair) and we remind her kindly that we have been saving your goddamn village, thanks so much. She is somewhat kinder after that, but explains that the mage whom she'd hired to tutor her son, who was showing signs of magic, had in fact been hired by that total douchebag Teyrn Loghain to poison the arl, probably to prevent him from assuming the throne or at least keep him from raising resistance to Loghain's bid for power. She says the mage must have summoned some sort of awful power, which has been creating all of these creatures, and that this entity allowed her to go to fetch Teagan at her son Connor's behest. She requested that Teagan come alone.
This smells like a trap to all of us, because we have a handful of living brain cells split among us, but Teagan insists on going. He tells us to go in through the secret passage, and that he will distract whatever evil is there, as much as he can.
So... in we go. In the lower levels, which is evidently a prison, we find a living fellow-some sort of miracle, I'd say-who turns out to be the mage who was tutoring Connor. He confesses to being a blood mage, an apostate, and to poisoning Arl Eamon, but he denies having anything to do with the evil that has taken up residence within the castle. I figure he could be useful and offer him the chance to come with us; he declines, preferring to have nothing to do with the mess upstairs. Unfortunately for him, he doesn't get that choice; he can come with us, or he can sit in his cell. He (wisely) chooses the cell, and we move on.
The castle's swarming with undead, but all in all, we have a marvelous time mopping them up. It's not hard except for one battle with some shades that kicks us around pretty thoroughly... and then we accidentally run into a room full of Mabari hounds, and we get fucking slaughtered. We were seriously toast in about ten seconds, making it the meanest utter beat-down I have encountered so far. I reload at the beginning of the castle and make use of the auto-save from here on. Anyway, leaving the Mabari Kennel of Death alone, we power through the castle until we hit the courtyard, where a Revenant makes clean work of pretty much everyone except myself and Alistair (and even then, the two of us are down to our last pixels of health by the end of it). Only after we have picked our party mates' pieces up off of the ground do we notice... oh, hey, there's the castle gate, where Ser Perth and his men are waiting outside for us to let them in. That... would have made this easier. Oh, well! :D We let them in, and the lot of us charge the Great Hall to finally get some fucking answers.
At the front of the hall, we see... Isolde, standing with her son, and a handful of guards, and then Bann Teagan... doing backflips, or some such nonsense? What is this malarkey? THAT IS WHAT WE GREY WARDENS ARE HERE TO FIND OUT, THANKS. We march right up to them and demand an answer.
Allow me to illustrate the moment.
That's right. These Grey Wardens (and their dog) are not taking your shit.
When Connor speaks... all is clear. There's an awful, evil timbre to his voice, the sound of something whispering behind his words. He's been possessed, and by something nasty, I will bet. He tells us that he's been sending the undead out towards the town with the notion of conquering it for himself. Isolde begs us not to hurt him, but he sets his guards on us, and Bann Teagan, under his control, attacks us as well.
We don't waste much time. Most of the guards are dead and Teagan is on the floor before you can count to twenty. The fight ends as Isolde runs to his side and tries to clean him up... it seems that his possession has waned and that Connor has escaped to the family chambers.
Thus begins the deliberation. What will we do with him? We can't let him go on like this, but how do we deal with demonic possession? The decent people in the party (read: not me) really do not want to kill a kid (I am just ambivalent to it), but Isolde says that the mage could have an answer, if he's still alive. Well, handily enough, we left him in the cellar to chill. He is fetched, and offers us an alternative.
He says he can send a mage into the Fade to confront the demon there, thus preventing us from needing to kill the boy... but in order to do this, he needs a sacrifice. Isolde jumps at the chance to save her son, and after establishing that we have no other options, I fetch Morrigan. The mage performs the ritual, and as the powers fill him, he stabs Isolde in the chest. Blood flies everywhere and Morrigan falls to the ground.
(At this point, I got to take control of Morrigan! IT WAS AWESOME. SPELLCASTERS ARE LEGITIMATELY TERRIFYING.)
Morrigan regains consciousness in the Fade, surrounded by dead spirits, thin and white, wandering aimlessly. The boy's voice leads her forward through the haze and the alien terrain, and she finds him-or at least a thing that looks like him, standing beside a ghostly image of his bed. She demands answers from him, but he only taunts her, and his shape gives way, surging into the form of the demon. Sweeping horns, fangs, almost nude female body, purple-gray skin, long corpse-like fingers.
It's suggested that the demon came to Connor in a dream and offered him the chance to save his father... but as does not surprise me, demons are lying jerks, and having possessed the boy, this one has been using him to wreak havoc for her own amusement.
I expected this battle to be difficult, but using a combination of Vulnerability Hex and various elemental spells plus Life Drain, the demon went down in about twenty seconds. The same was true for the next couple times that we clashed, each time after chasing the boy's voice to another location. The last battle was more difficult mostly because of the demon's use of a spell to duplicate her body and then regenerate health rather than her increased health in and of itself, but Morrigan was never in serious danger. This is because Morrigan is SCARY AS SHIT. Seriously, I hadn't realized what kind of power magi in this world can acquire. They are fucking terrifying. This plus a predilection towards being possessed means that I can actually really understand why the state would want to control the magi as much as they can. It's easy to see why even the smallest handful of renegade magi would be a serious threat to even the most powerful non-magical people.
Anyway, having defeated the demon (after some sexy banter on the demon's part and general snark on Morrigan's), she returns to this world. Alistair and I chat with Bann Teagan about Arl Eamon's condition. Now that he's no longer being slowly poisoned, one would hope he'd have a chance, but he seems to have fallen into a kind of coma. Isolde, previously, had sent out the arl's knights to search for the Urn of Adraste, the prophetess of the human's god, the ashes in which are said to be able to cure any malady. Various people, myself included, think this is an absolute fool's errand and that the thing can't possibly exist, but Teagan insists we pursue it. He feels that it's the only way. I am reluctant, but as he points out, we need the arl's help if we're to raise any sort of a resistance to the Blight, especially considering that Loghain is determined to smear the name of the Grey Wardens and, apparently, to incite a civil war. GREAT. WE COULD REALLY USE ONE RIGHT NOW, THANKS.
So, I agree to help search for it (probably while we continue to seek out the people who are bound by our treaties to help us). Who knows. We'll try.
We cut to the village. Bodies are being loaded onto boats or heaped on a pyre to be burned, but the town rejoices nonetheless, as they survived the night and the threat (well, one of the threats) to the town has been dealt with. We are praised, but we can't stick around. There's a Blight to deal with, and for better or for worse, that falls on us.
And now we cut... to Teyrn Loghain, the douchebag general who is responsible for the king's death, for our leader Duncan's death, and for the fall of Ostagar. An adviser approaches him as he leans over a table, drinking. The man says that his sources say that two Grey Wardens managed to survive the battle at Ostagar... and that he's arranged for them to be taken care of. Loghain asks, “... an assassin?”
Into view steps an elf, with long light hair and just a few tattoos in a jagged pattern on one cheek. He smirks. “The best,” he says, “and the most expensive.”
Loghain gives him a long look over, and then downs the last of the contents of his goblet.
“Just get it done.”
original entry @ DreamWidth.org -
comments - use OpenID