#vimmarks

[bohemiantea-scorpiocoffee]

Ser Jean-Marc Stroud’s Failure

I feel for Stroud. Out of all the ridiculous Orlesian characters we’ve been introduced to, there are few good ones that we *have* been introduced to, and he’s one. (Fiona being another.) He’s also the only chevalier I will ever like. Unlike a lot of his fatheaded brethren, he seemed to take seriously ideals like honor and not use them as props for his ego.

To illustrate: We know for a fact that Grey Wardens, though they are supposed to remain a neutral party, has never actually been so. Therefore we feel justified in making fun of Stroud for claiming the Grey Wardens can’t get involved while the Qunari are rampaging in Kirkwall. Or we roll our eyes a bit as he says that the Joining isn’t supposed to be a cure against the darkspawn taint. (My own Mahariel fucking *cackles* at that.)

But thing is, his particular background and history with the Wardens shows that these are his ideals that he upholds. He’s not just parroting rules at Hawke or the Inquisitor. These are things he believes in -- it’s like he transplanted all his “chivalric code” into the Wardens. He found another way to protect people, and he tries to do so scrupulously.

This is why the Nightmare’s taunt in the Fade is a lot more cutting than most would think. If you know nothing, or just a little bit, it comes off pretty generic, doesn’t it?

“Warden Stroud. How must it feel to devote your whole life to the Wardens, only to watch them fall? Or worse: to know that you were responsible for their destruction? When the next Blight comes, will they curse your name?”

Except that it isn’t generic at all. Consider: three times (potentially, but at least once) has Stroud failed to follow his own code, and those failures contributed significantly to the Breach and the fall of the Grey Wardens. And both failures center on Hawke.

Failure number one happens when Hawke & company hit the Deep Roads in ~9:31. Stroud and a company of Grey Wardens were somewhere nearby on their own mission -- what this mission was has never been stated -- and the failure was in not sensing the Blight of the red lyrium idol and allowing it to escape. Understand that I am phrasing it from his point of view and with the benefit of hindsight, because this is not a reasonable expectation, particularly if Hawke did not bring Anders (someone he would have more easily sensed, if possibly confused with another darkspawn, as Anders did with Stroud and the others). 

It’s the discovery of the red lyrium idol and bringing it to the surface that begins to doom the Wardens -- Corypheus would still be a threat without it, but red lyrium significantly amplified his power and that of his minions (like Samson).

Failure number two is the second part of the first failure if Hawke urged their sibling to become a Grey Warden after contracting the taint in the Deep Roads. Stroud states clearly that he does not believe the Joining ritual should be used as a cure for the taint -- not only because it might not work, but because he believes that being a Grey Warden is about feeling called to undertake the duty of protecting people from the darkspawn threat.

(Aside: there are two schools of thought among the Wardens. One is that Wardens are supposed to deal with the threat of the Blight by any means necessary. This school of thought is what dominates when Clarel agrees to the creation of a demon army to hunt the Old Gods. The second school of thought is that Wardens are supposed to protect people from the Blight. These are the Wardens who try to save people in the path of darkspawn instead of letting villages burn. Stroud and Alistair and Loghain are these sorts of Wardens, and are most likely to become the leaders of one side of a Grey Warden civil war.)

Allowing Bethany or Carver to become a Warden can be part of, and leads to, the potential third failure: that of failing to see what Janeka was up to at Corypheus’s prison at the Vimmarks.

In dialogue with Hawke’s Grey Warden sibling during the beginning of the Legacy DLC, we discover that Carver or Bethany are stationed under Stroud’s command at Ansburg. (Note on the map how far north Ansburg is from Kirkwall, and you start to understand that Stroud and other Grey Wardens present in Kirkwall is a pretty big deal.) You further learn that members of the Carta had somehow snuck in to get at the Hawke sibling, particularly after Stroud refused to release the sibling to Janeka’s command.

Now, why would Stroud refuse a seemingly reasonable request from a fellow Warden to have someone transferred to her command? Unless he had suspicions about her and what she was doing, that is -- and her command at the Grey Warden prison is a pretty fraught and risky place to be stationed at. (This would be why Stroud knows about Corypheus at all, even as a senior Warden. Unless there are other Grey Warden outposts in the Free Marches that Bioware has not told us about, Ansburg and the prison in the Vimmarks near Kirkwall are it.)

Sending the Carta after the Hawke sibling was a win-win scenario for Janeka. Either the Carta would be successful in kidnapping or killing (thus still getting the blood from) the sibling, or -- and this is what happens -- Stroud relents and lets the sibling go find out what the fuck is going on along with Hawke. For all Stroud’s strictness, apparently he has a soft spot for family -- and considering his own family’s murder, it’s understandable.

Releasing the Hawke sibling to go to Hawke leads them eventually to the prison, where Corypheus is freed. Stroud would have learned everything that happened from the sibling afterward, whether they volunteered the information or he asked for a report. Stroud would have felt responsible for everything that happened because of his lapse in judgment, regardless of Hawke’s actions (though he would certainly have had Words with them about that, as well).

The Nightmare fucked with Stroud hard, y’all, because that’s what Stroud does to himself.

[bohemiantea-scorpiocoffee]

The Grey Warden Prison

The lengths I am going to for my fic is just astounding when I think about it. I mean I’m also indulging the hell out of my lore nerd brain in doing this, let’s be real, but: trying to model Corypheus’s Prison from the game maps so I can reverse engineer it for my conception of the Aeonar is a little touched in the head.

Anyway. So this is what I have so far:

This is *really* roughly put together, if I wanted to do a better job I’d pull up my Fireworks. The right map is the Vimmark Chasm map: the white dot at bottom is where you enter from the Vimmark Wasteland map. Areas 3 and 4 are the “outpost” section, and that balcony thing on the right is pretty much a balcony:

Note where the party is standing/facing is where the blue dot is on the balcony map. To the right, then, we basically have a preview of the Final Seal floor. That orientation helps anchor all the rest of the floors with their seals, since the seal rooms will be right underneath each other in the tower stack.

The left map is the Carta Hideout map, aligned to match up with the Chasm entrance. Roughly, that is: there’s no mention how long the mining tunnel cart track takes from this front door:

(The door is behind Hawke: see the mini-map quest arrow vs Hawke’s position arrow.)

So from the Carta Hideout map, the white dot in the wide tunnel just past room 5 is where it enters the prison proper, AKA Sashamiri’s Floor AKA “fuck now we’re trapped in Hotel California.”

Sashamiri’s floor is the third map I added, and I aligned it this way so the tower (room 5, the seal where you fight your first gigantic pride demon) would be properly aligned how we saw it from the chasm balconies. This means going from the mining tunnels with the Carta to Sashamiri’s floor involves either a ramp or a stair that turns us where we emerge (the drumstick looking portion to the right of room 1).

Aligning Farele’s floor with the other floors is going to be a bitch and a half because I’m pretty sure the whole map will be cattywumpus to everything else.

(The reason why I’m talking about the Aeonar in connection with Corypheus’s Grey Warden prison is because of this piece I wrote some time ago.)