I've been working on the related novel all month, and finished a draft of the first third yesterday. Some things I learned in the process:
a.) Jumping mentally from victorian historical to post-apocalyptic fantasy takes time, even though both stories were supposed to be traditional, 3-act romances.
b.) Modeling every character's skills strictly on D&D 3.5 requires surprising in-world explanations for why some magical acts are easy and others are impossible. (Solution: Do not try.) Extra credit challenge: explaining why one needs to leave home and kill things to get better at unrelated skills, like cooking pies.
c.) When you make the heroine's mom a vampire and the primary antagonist, the story immediately stops being a romance novel and turns into women's fiction.
Oops.
Well! I don't suppose anyone would ever want to read a women's fiction novel set in post-apocalyptic fantasy Iowa with Dungeons and Dragons-style vampires?
Isedar Tabris's face was modeled after Zhou Yu, from Dynasty Warriors 2 through 5. Kudos to the Dragon Age Origins face generator for allowing me to bring my evidently eastern sensibilities into this very western game.
As someone who plays a lot of D&D, it's a fairly natural step to take characters I've created for other stories and import their personalities into the Bioware games I've played. Isedar Matine, of Chain of Fealty, was a pretty good fit for the City Elf Warden—maybe it's just Isedar's fate to constantly be trading his freedom in exchange for the safety of a fiancée he feels obliged to protect. [Unfortunately for his Tabris incarnation, Duncan isn't nearly as hot as Selunaya. - R]
Even if I hadn't brought a ready-made personality to the game, Isedar's playthrough showed me that the DA:O origin stories prompt role-playing in a way that most RPGs do not. By showing you who your character is before they are thrown into the Epic Storyline, DA:O invites you to explore its myriad of choices in light of the individual you happen to be playing. It isn't just about race, or class, but a whole life's outlook. Isedar taught me this because I didn't realize how different my two playthroughs would be, until I started the second one.
(Dragon Age: Origins story spoilers below.)
My human mage, Vermille, came from a place created and constantly influenced by the fear of others. From the templars who warned her about the predations of demons, to the disorienting effect of being thrown into a playthrough that starts in the wonky Fade, Vermille has always been motivated by stomach-churning fear—fear of not having a weapon (Fight Valor for Staff!), fear of losing her valued place as Irving's teacher's pet (tell Irving about Jowan and Lily), fear of going to prison (go with Duncan to Ostagar). Her spell choices leaned heavily towards protecting herself from harm and bolstering her companions, to the point that she had almost nothing to use to hurt her enemies in the parts of the game where she was forced to travel alone. She avoided unnecessary combat (Flemeth, the High Dragon, all the Revenants) because she was afraid of getting hurt; of provoking something she could not overcome. Her personal arc, as I told it to myself, was about how her compassion eventually helped her overcome that fear and instead act with optimism—she saved Colin, trusted Harrowmont, believed that the werewolves could be redeemed, and tragically, let herself fall in love with Alistair, and turned down Morrigan's Dark Ritual. When her optimism was betrayed by Riordan's death, proving that there were, in fact, fears her optimism and skill could not overcome, she shut down, sleepwalking through the Battle of Denerim and all of her time as Arlessa of Amaranthine, until finally, I knew, time and experience would bring her to a new place, and a new equilibrium.
My City Elf, Isedar, is having a completely different playthrough. Isedar is instead fueled by rage. His time in the alienage taught him that his people are hated and oppressed, and his wedding day showed him that taking vengeance—and being honest about it—is rewarded with accolades and freedom. He revels in his untouchability as a Gray Warden because he considers it the world's recompense for his people's oppression. He tells King Cailan that he killed an Arl's son for raping his cousin. He sides with Zathrian against the werewolves because he is still angry about Shianni, and instinctively understands how Zathrian might still feel the same. Despite all of his desire to turn the might of the Anvil of the Forge against the darkspawn, he cannot allow someone like Branka to live, not when she oppresses her people the way the Bann's son oppressed his. He actively seeks out confrontation, because he has come to believe that all who stand against a Gray Warden in the middle of a Blight must be removed for actively aiding the Archdemon. Isedar has come to think of himself as righteous, and does not realize that both his moral compass and his blade are motivated by anger. When he demands Loghain's fealty, in cosmic justice for the Teyrn's shortsightedness, it's going to cost him Alistair's friendship. I look forward to discovering if that changes him—if anything will.
...Damn this game is good. Now if only DAII (which I also love, but for different reasons) had an Origin or two for Hawke...
The Fade was always the same. Disorienting. No matter how many times she came here, each visit contained the same kernel of wonder and terror as that first time, when she had swooned over the bowl of lyrium at the top of the Circle tower, and had been left to find her own way in this strange, uncanny place.
Seheron, here, was a maze of yellow ochre streets, canted just off the perfectly geometric angles they formed in real life. Yellow tropical sun poured down from a sky filled with greenish clouds. In the distance, Vermille could hear the tinkle of bells, the chatter of disembodied voices, all as if they wound down to her through a long, twisted stone tunnel.
Carefully, she took a step forward. This first step was always so important. Rational thought. Will. Nothing else was real. As her foot touched the cobbled stone, she felt her mind align with the dream logic. The Qunari lord was here, somewhere in these twisting corridors. As she watched, the grand library materialized in the distance, its pyramidal stones rising above the rooftops. There. She would have to go to him.
At her next step, she realized she was not garbed in the simple smock and apron she had been wearing just a moment before, in the waking world. Her baker’s clothes had been replaced by long robes of red worked with gold. The fabric smelled just as she remembered it—of herbs and blood and crushed earth. Two golden belts wound around her waist, their pouches heavy with components and supplies. Her feet were cased now in soft leather boots that felt lighter than air. Gloves worked with runes and symbols of fire sheathed her fingers. Her hair was no longer plaited down her back, but wound around her head, pinned in place with pearls, and disguised under a delicate cowl crowned with the ridiculous cascade of feathers and plumes favored by Ferelden’s archmages.
Vermille felt her mouth flatten with equal measure dismay and nostalgia.
It seemed that someone—even if that someone was only her unconscious mind—found the prospect of a widowed baker venturing alone into the Fade... preposterous.
I wonder.... She held out her hand, and exerted her will.
She did not have the knack of lucid dreaming, so it was not her archmage’s staff that came to her hand, but a silvery pearl and soap-bubble construction that looked at once impossible and hauntingly familiar. Valor, she remembered, as she wrapped her fingers around the haft. The staff created for her by the spirit she had met, on her Harrowing. So and so.
Clothed once again in the pageantry of the life she had left behind, Vermille stepped forward into the Qunari’s dream.
It was morning when Sten came by her cabin with news that Seheron was at last in sight. She had visited him before in Par Vollen, but Seheron had a larger foreign population, and greater diversity even in its now-native Qunari, thanks to its proximity to the mainland.
She smiled to herself as the city spread out before her, white and golden sandstone, rising gently from the coast to the Arishok’s fortress at the crest of the cliffs. Around the hard white stone walls, the emerald colors of the jungle spread, dotted here and there with curls of smoke from dormant volcanoes, and crowned by wheeling, tropical birds.
Vermille could imagine no place less like home, to come home to.
Her bakery was in the middle of a small side-street. It was a good part of the foreign quarter, just as Sten had promised. Yellow sandstone walls caught the city’s sunlight and held it until the cobbles themselves were warm to the touch. Succulents in pots cascaded down the stairs leading to the second-floor houses, and the riotous colors of their blooms lent the buildings liveliness, despite the neighborhood’s relative tranquility. Since Vermille did not trust herself to keep even hardy, spiny plants alive, she put curtains in all of her windows: red and saffron cottons with tiny violet diamonds. Merely looking at them made her happy.
And there were cats. One, at first, then a few, then a dozen. Vermille was charmed by their aloof affection. She fed them cream and watched them climb over and sit on Einrafel as if he were a large, mabari-shaped throne. Einrafel didn’t seem to mind, and Vermille enjoyed the company. The cats were creatures of Seheron’s heavy sunlight, and they warmed her, long after the city turned purple in dusk.
The bakery itself was tiny—barely large enough for an old stove, a sturdy table to prepare her goods, a cupboard for supplies, and a chair for the occasional guest. She sold cookies and sweetbreads over the top of the white-painted, two-paneled door. Sten had planned it this way, so that people would not be encouraged to sit in the shop itself, talking and potentially learning about her.
Behind the main room was a small closet, just large enough for a bed, a washstand, and Einrafel. Under the building was a cellar and storeroom. The floor above was rented to an Orlesian woman and her young son, and though Vermille did not ever attempt to become friends, she found their presence around the building restful.
Within two months of her stay, the line for cookies wound around the block on Tuesday and Saturday mornings. Those were her baking days. At first, her customers were mostly other foreigners, looking for a familiar breakfast. A few were even Ferelden, and their accent made her smile, even if she pretended not to recognize it. In a little while, some qunari craftsmen, exchanging goods in the docks, came by with mild curiosity. Then scholars, minor officials and priests. When guardsmen on their patrols began visiting regularly, Vermille decided that her shop had arrived.
Such as it was.
Qunari, she learned, did not use money inside the environs of the city. Some vast and terrifyingly organized system of barter and allocations would see that she received raw materials in excess of her need as soon as enough native Seheron inhabitants patronized her shop, Sten had explained. True to his word, small sacks of flour and sugar began to appear by her door in the early mornings, delivered by Officials of the City Storehouse. Vermille had managed tax levies in Amaranthine in her tenure as its Arlessa. Imagining the workings of this system made her head hurt.
She was learning the qunari language from these people, bits and pieces that became the whole in her hungry mind. She practiced with Sten, when he visited, and in little phrases befitting a woman shopping at the marketplace. Under the heavy black veil she wore, she played a game with herself—to go as long as she could without having to resort to the common tongue, and reveal herself a foreigner. Though the clothing was heavy in the warm weather and the heat of the stoves, it was a style common among the older women of the city’s foreign quarter, and Vermille liked the way it concealed every curve of her body and every expression of her face. I do not need to lie, here.
A foreign widow, she heard some people murmur. Perhaps her husband was a friend of the Beresaad.
It was not entirely inaccurate. Vermille did not bother to issue corrections.
Sten came by every Tuesday and Saturday night, when he was in town. Vermille made a special batch of cookies just for him, right before he arrived, so that the whole room would be full to the brim with the scent of caramelizing treats.
Though he was often his usual, taciturn self, he brought her books and newspapers, and interpreted town gossip and local custom. His continued visits also kept away less welcome attentions from her neighbors and customers, for which she was very grateful. She did not want to have to defend herself here, for these peoples’ sakes. And her own.
