Adventures in Thedas

Uggh Arl Howe is always trying to pawn his son off on me.

Well everything has a beginning, and this is Elaina Cousland's.

I was called in by my father, the Teryn of Highever.  Annoyingly Arl Howe was there and he's just creepy, but a grey warden was there too, Duncan, so hey take the good with the bad right?

Ser Gilmore is good people

Hey that is a pretty good idea!

 Duncan came to look at Ser Gilmore for the grey wardens.  Hey he's an able bodied warrior, why not?

Then Duncan looked at me.  Heck yeah!  Get me out of this dress, I'm the second born let me go kick evil's ass!

Daaaaad

Dad wasn't too thrilled about that.  Just because Fergus is off to war doesn't mean I should have to stay at home and guard the castle. Uggh over protective parents!

After that I guess Dad wanted me as far away from Duncan as possible until he left.  So I was sent off on an errand to find my older brother and tell him to get his butt off to war. Don't we have servants for that kind of stuff?





The great thing about the opening scene is that it shows off some of the mods already.  The major one is called Dragon Age Redesigned and it is just amazing. Basically it tweaks a huge amount of the npcs in the game nothing that is overtly obvious (except for the companions, more on that in another post), but it gives an overall improvement to your experience. The second one is the one that sticks out the most, the fact that my human noble is dressed like an actual noble. I didn't have armor until I was woken up to Howe's men trying to bust down my door and I had to bare fist punch the rats in the larder. Of course the hair is also another mod, and though you can't see it in the above image I installed a mod that made teeth a pretty white and not falling out brown.

Nice portrait dad.

So I dallied around the hall for a bit trying to see if I could catch any interesting tidbits and then decided I better go find Fergus.  I hadn't gone more than 20 feet when I ran right in to Ser Gilmore.

Hello good looking.

Apparently my Mabari was terrorizing Nan in the larder again and he wasn't going to leave my side until I collected the hound.  Though first he had to ask about Duncan and we both agreed being Grey Wardens was awesome.  Well maybe he'll get to be one and I can sit at home and watch my brother come home from war.

Good Boy

So off we went and Nan was in an uproar about my dog in her larder. Well she changed her tune when she found out that Legion was hunting huge rats. Though he was able to cajole a nice bit of scraps from her for his trouble.  That dog is such a sweet talker.

With that done Ser Gilmore left to attend to his other duties and Legion and I went off to find my brother.

Why are these people obsessed with marrying me off?

Though we ran into my mother first with her friend.  Instantly the talk turned to trying to get me to marry Lady Landra's son, Dairrien. He's okay, but I've always had a crush on Ser Gilmore and these foppy lord's sons just really don't do anything for me. Then I made the mistake of mentioning Duncan to mother and she let me know in no uncertain terms that I am not to join them. Being the baby of the family has it's downsides.

I don't care what Oriana says, I'm teaching Oren how to use a "sward".

I found Fergus and told him to get his butt downstairs and off to war, since Howe's men are apparently walking backwards and won't be here until tomorrow.  Though it hadn't been more than 30 seconds after I delivered the message that both our parents came in.  I knew father was just getting me out of there!  He could have delivered the message himself and then we all go sent off to bed. I was going to need all my energy to look after the castle. Hmmph.

Then in the middle of the night Legion wakes me up growling and barking at the door. I got up to check what was going on and these men just comes bursting in my room! And me in just my undies! 

Rude

Who do they think they are?! Well I wasn't about to just let them get away with this nonsense. I snatched up my bow, sic'd my mabari on them and we brought down some Cousland justice.  Once they were dead I grabbed my armor and ran out in to the hall to see just what the hell was going on.

My mom's a badass.

That's when I ran in to my mom, fully armored and wielding a long sword. Howe's men were attacking the castle and my father had never came to bed.  Well shit I wanted war and adventure, looks like it came to find me. I told her we needed to look in on my sister-in-law and nephew first.  Their room is right across from mine.



We shouldn't have looked. . .

Oh it's on now.

Seriously Howe? My sister-in-law and nephew? What did they do to you?  You're just going to slaughter my whole family? We dried our eyes and headed downstairs.  We needed to find father.  I was hell bent on killing every single one of Howe's men, but my mother convinced me that was a suicide mission.  Instead we went in search of my father and I sated my blood lust on every single soldier I came across in the process.

He even looks good covered in blood

After slaughtering our way to the hall we found Ser Gilmore barricading the door against more of the invading forces. He let us know that my father had refused to leave until we were located and he promised to keep the enemy at bay as long as he could to buy us time to get away.


I wasn't going to miss what was most likely my last chance, I thanked him, grabbed him, and kissed him like my life depended on it. Hell maybe it did.

I should have done this years ago

After saying our goodbyes we ran in to the larder to find my father...who has been mortally wounded.  Then in strolls Duncan and offers to get us all to safety, but father is dying and my mother refuses to leave his side.  There's a catch though, Duncan came to Highever looking for a Grey Warden recruit and he isn't leaving without one.  Well umm Ser Gilmore is in the other room, snatch him up too!  But nope it's got to be me. I was his first choice anyway.  Well as long as Duncan will let me slice Howe open when I get the chance I'll gladly become a Grey Warden. So mom started killing any guy that walked through the door and Duncan pulled me down the secret entrance and off to Ostagar.

I will dad I will

So one of the appeals of playing a game you love on a pc is the modding community, and the modding community for this game is pretty large.  At last count I had over 130 mods, about 80 of them are 'active' according to my Nexus Mod Manager.  If you're interested in modding I highly suggest you check it out here.

Modding is a learning process and I had my fair share of humorous consequences. The nice thing about the community on Nexus Mods is the fact that many of the modders will tell you what mods you need to make their mods work (it's a whole infrastructure going on in your game!) and what mods, to their knowledge, won't work with it.

I didn't catch all the needed mods sometimes and ended up with some interesting results. Such as..

'my..my glorious red hair..what have you done?'

That's suppose to be Ser Gilmore.  You meet him in the human noble origins story.  He seems just as shocked as I am that I forgot to give him hair.  The mod overall was chosen to improve his looks...I'm pretty sure he disagrees with me on that.

*Note* I also have another Ser Gilmore mod but more on that in another post.**

She didn't age as well as I remembered.

My next "oh crap what did I do?" moment was after I got to Ostagar.  I ran up to see Wynne.  She looked a bit different. . .

After blinking confusedly at the senior mage I backed away cautiously and pulled up the mod to  find out what I did wrong this time.  Turns out I needed seven additional mods to make it work.  I ended up just changing Wynne as I couldn't get her eyes to ever look right.

Another mod change I made was to get out of those ugly loin cloth undies first I grabbed a mod that made the undies just pretty, and they look pretty good but then I realized I didn't want my 'romance' scenes to have undies I wanted the full adult version, so back to mods I went.




This had unexpected side effects.  Such as running in to a prisoner in a cage at Ostagar. . .

He's really happy I was able to get him a meal.

Awkward second meeting. . .

And when I woke up in Morrigan's bed after the battle of Ostagar....












I also modded the 'commoner' clothes.  I hadn't realized that's what Flemeth wears.

Always trying to one-up her daughter.

Morrigan is wearing a modded robe based on her outfit from the "Sacred Ashes" trailer.  I'll probably touch on that in another post as well.

All in all I'm loving playing Dragon Age on the PC the mods are giving it a whole new element that I didn't get to experience on my 360.  Plus my little snafus add all kinds of hilarity to my experience.

Until next time- Sway

-Side note.  I did add one more 'horrifying' mod to terrify a friend of mine who is following my mod experience.  I added a very NSFW ogre mod in and recorded my character's first encounter with an ogre (Tower of Ishtar).  If you are interested comment below and I'll link you to the video.  He found it both horrifying and amusing.

I'm a huge fan of the Dragon Age series (yes even two!).  I've been playing them for years (2009) on our Xbox 360 and recently I decided to give them a try on the PC and blog about the experience and what I do.  I've installed mods on it, but they're adding new content and enhancing looks.  Nothing like "God mode" or anything like that.  So welcome and I hope you enjoy reading about my adventures in Thedas!