Dragon Age: The Veilguard lore for beginners and fresh fans

There’s a fresh Dragon Age game out, and for fans who’ve been tapped into the series for 15 years, it’s an incredibly breathtaking time (especially since 10 of those years active simply… waiting for this game). But 15 years and 3 games means a lot of lore for fresh fans, especially if you’re a fresh fan coming from last year’s sprawling choice-driven fantasy RPG.

If you’re a fan of Baldur’s Gate 3 who’s decided to take a chance on Dragon Age, jumping right into the lore can be a lot. It’s not totally inaccessible, but there are quite a few large reveals that will feel more impactful if you have any context about the planet of Thedas and what the erstwhile 3 games have built toward.

Dragon Age is defined by apocalypses

The past of Dragon Age’s setting is kind of like a rolling succession of apocalypses. For close to a millennium, Thedas (an interior BioWare abbreviation for “The Dragon Age Setting” that stuck) has been plagued by 5 Blights, in which monsters called Darkspawn erupt from underground, spreading a bloodborne illness (the Taint) that turns victims into more Darkspawn.

But even before the Blights, Thedas was rocked by upheavals — the emergence and fall of the Tevinter Empire, which at 1 point had conquered nearly all country you’ll see on Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s planet map, and the mysterious fall of the elven empire that preceded it. History, in Thedas, is very much written by survivors, victors, and another biased sources, and all this upheaval has meant that even scholars don’t know what really happened “back then.” The Dragon Age games themselves are frequently about revealing that what everyone thinks is actual is at best a simplification and at worst an outright lie.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s setting in Northern Thedas is simply a large example of this: It’s a bunch of countries that the games have never actually let us visit before, and that have until now mostly been defined by outsiders. In erstwhile Dragon Age games, Tevinter is known as the last remnant of the conquering empire whose yoke was thrown off centuries ago, a place where mages sacrifice slaves to fuel decadent blood magic (think late Rome, or Byzantium). Rivain is known as a nation of piracy and witch-like seers (and kind of the Spanish Caribbean in the age of sail?), Antiva as a mercantile nation ruled by a cabal of unstoppable assassins (fantasy medieval Italy, but with Spanish accents for any reason), and Nevarra as a creepy place where they let spirits inhabit the bodies of their dead loved ones in massive tombs (instead of cremating them, like fundamentally everyone else in Thedas does).

But if you know anything about Dragon Age, you know that what we “know” about these places is, again, at best a simplification and at worst an outright lie. If you’re a fresh fan, Dragon Age: The Veilguard will give you everything you request to know about them, and it’ll be the old fans who’ll gotta update their assumptions.

…Basically zombie infestations. but in this case, the zombies are called Darkspawn and they’re more akin to the “infection” zombie trope versus the “resurrected undead” one. The Darkspawn are always around, usually lurking underground. But a Blight kicks off erstwhile they corrupt a powerful sleeping dragon (one of a pantheon of “the Old Gods” erstwhile worshipped in Tevinter), which ends up rising as an Archdemon and leading a horde. Usually, it turns everything dark and grey and dead. The only way to halt the Blight is to slay the Archdemon that’s leading it, and the only way to slay that Archdemon is to have a Grey Warden sacrifice their life to do it.

The Grey Wardens are a mysterious order dedicated to eradicating Darkspawn. Their joining ritual gives them a insignificant version of the Taint that allows them to sense Darkspawn and fight them. The first game’s protagonist was a Grey Warden who fought off the Blight in Ferelden (fantasy England), so that faction has been a immense part of the lore from the very beginning.

One of the series’ biggest mysteries is how the Blight came to be. Most humans who follow the in-universe fantasy Catholicism attribute it to divine punishment from the Maker (God), after a group of human mages from Tevinter got besides cocky and marched upon the Golden City (heaven). But there have been hints in past games that this widely believed explanation is not the actual story, especially considering how comparatively late humans have been around Thedas.

What are gods in Dragon Age?

If you’re utilized to Baldur’s Gate 3, in which characters can talk with gods, kill gods, and even become gods, you’ll want to adjust your expectations for Dragon Age. Andrastianism, the largest human religion in Thedas, worships a single god, the Maker, who does not talk to his subjects, and the games have never explicitly weighed in on whether he even exists.

Maker-worship began centuries ago erstwhile his prophet, Andraste, rallied the armies of confederate Thedas to emergence up and overthrow the Tevinter empire. And though her forces did win in liberating the nations that yet became Ferelden and Orlais (fantasy England and fantasy France), she was betrayed, captured, and burned at the stake in the capital of Tevinter.

Andrastianism (often simply called “the Chantry”) has immense Catholic Church vibes — but if Joan of Arc was Jesus, and if 1 of those anti-popes had actually succeeded in causing a full schism. The Cult of Andraste yet grew into the dominant organized human religion in Thedas, administered through churches called “Chantries” and led by a pope-like figure called the Divine. Then the Chantry divided into 2 based on a disagreement about the function of magic. The confederate Chantry adopted the thought that mages were dangerous and should be controlled by the church, while Tevinter’s Chantry broke distant and appointed its own Imperial Divine (known as “the Black Divine” in the South, which we mention only due to the fact that it’s metallic as fuck), adopting the thought that the Maker wanted his people to usage magic to its fullest extent, actually.

Both Chantries teach that for the crime of killing his prophet, the Maker turned distant from his people until specified a time that the words of Andrastianism’s holy text, the Chant, were sung in all corners of the world. But the scattered elves of Thedas, who are treated as second-class citizens in many places, especially in the South, have an even more distant relation with their gods. For centuries, elven legend held that the trickster god Fen’Harel, the Dread Wolf, trapped the elven pantheon in their realm in the heavens, cutting the elven people off from the protection of their gods and leading to the fall of a golden elven civilization.

But as late as the final DLC of Dragon Age: Inquisition, the heroes of that game discovered that the elven gods were never gods at all: They were just truly powerful mages who had enslaved their own people. 1 of that game’s companion characters, Solas, turned out to secretly be Fen’Harel, late woken from a 1000 years of slumber, an ancient rebel who had sealed those elven mages distant by creating a barrier between the material planet and the Fade.

But for as much as Dragon Age games show the flaws of organized religion — peculiarly the bias in how institutions like the Chantry massage past to their own advantage — it is besides a franchise full of characters who have deep and individual relationships with faith.

OK, so how do mages work?

Unlike in D&D lore, where magic can come from a wide variety of places, the magic in the Dragon Age planet comes from 1 circumstantial place: the Fade, a metaphysical realm separated from the planet by a barrier known as the Veil. Humans, elves, and Qunari enter the Fade in their dreams; dwarves, however, are cut off from it and cannot dream (Why? Nobody knows).

The Fade is simply a reflection of the actual world, populated by spirits, beings of pure magic who frequently embody a character trait like Compassion, Faith, or Justice. There are besides spirits who embody negative traits, like Despair, Vengeance, or Spite, usually due to the fact that they’ve been corrupted in any way — or due to the fact that the limited human viewpoint sees them as vices. Many people mention to these ones as demons, but the more we’ve learned about how spirits work, the blurrier the line between sprites and demons gets. Regardless, they’re all fueled by the presence of the human emotions they embody, which means demons tend to be aggressive and frequently appear erstwhile things already kinda suck.

Anyway, any humans, elves, and Qunari are born with a connection to the Fade, which allows them to manipulate it in the form of magic. This besides leaves them more susceptible to possession by harmful spirits, which is the origin of the South’s fear of mages. Magic can be utilized to manipulate elements, converse with spirits, heal wounds, and shape-shift, among another things.

There’s besides a special, magic, glowing blue mineral called lyrium, which strengthens a mage’s connection to the Fade. Only dwarves can mine natural lyrium without side effects, due to the fact that they’re cut off from the Fade. erstwhile games besides introduced the concept of red lyrium, which is lyrium corrupted by the Blight that drives people to madness. It’s bad! TL;DR: glowing blue stone = powerful, revered, good; glowing red stone = powerful, destructive, BAD BAD BAD.

In the erstwhile 3 games all set in confederate Thedas, being a mage was a large no-no, due to the fact that the Chantry had a doctrine that “magic must not regulation over man,” which everyone interpreted to mean “magic is evil.” But it’s been over 10 years since the Mage Rebellion fixed that to any degree, and the regions you visit in The Veilguard have historically been beautiful chill with most mages, so all you truly request to know is that there’s any passing mentions to how barbarically the South treats their mages.

Blood magic is mostly seen as a bad thing, though the games’ definition of precisely what blood magic is has varied. quite a few the Death Caller abilities in The Veilguard are actually beautiful akin to what erstwhile games called blood magic. (And this can most likely be attributed to how the different regions view magic). For the purposes of this game — and Tevinter specifically — blood magic involves utilizing the blood of others to augment magical powers, oftentimes utilizing it to control others’ minds and summon demons. Blood magic is unique in that it actually doesn’t require tapping into the Fade, and in fact, it makes entering the Fade harder.

Who is this Solas guy and what does he want with the Fade?

Your player character initially knows that Solas is actually Fen’Harel, the elven god of lies, who is out to destruct the planet by getting free of the Veil that separates the Fade from the real world.

That’s the fast and dirty version.

The longer 1 is that in the erstwhile game, Solas was introduced as Just any Mage who decided to come and aid the Inquisitor (the player character) out of the goodness of his heart. He spends the full game with the Inquisitor, sharing stories of his explorations of the Fade in his dreams and his cognition of magic. The Inquisitor could forge a relationship with him, or find him annoying, or — if they were a female elf — start a romance.

But Solas mysteriously vanishes after the events of the main game, and in the epilogue DLC, he reveals that he was the power behind Inquisition’s biggest bad guy. erstwhile he woke up from his thousands of years of slumber, he was devastated to find that his actions cut the planet off from magic — and deprived the elven people of their culture and heritage. His first effort at fixing the planet active a massive detonation that ripped a teardrop in the Veil, and besides unintentionally gave the Inquisitor (who just happened to be in the incorrect place at the incorrect time) the Anchor, a mysterious glowing green mark that could seal the rifts in the Veil. This time, Solas wants to get it right, even if that means destroying the known planet in the process. And in the case of a romanced Inquisitor, even if it means losing her.

The default setup in The Veilguard is an elven Inquisitor who romanced Solas and wants to save him from himself — which isn’t so much BioWare declaring canon as it is setting up the juiciest storyline for people who didn’t play the erstwhile game. But if you want to mess with the defaults, you can make a fresh Inquisitor who didn’t romance Solas at all, or who wants to halt him alternatively of save him (or any another combination). Regardless of who they romanced, the final large choice the Inquisitor makes in Inquisition’s DLC Trespasser is whether or not to save or halt Solas. Oh, also, he cuts off the Inquisitor’s hand, since the Anchor is slow killing them.

Varric Tethras is simply a fan-favorite Dragon Age companion who is now on his 3rd game moving as a major character. He started out as a full companion character in Dragon Age 2, a game where it’s easy to piss off your companions so much that they leave or outright stand against you. But Varric was designed to be your biggest supporter, no substance what — he was the game’s narrator, and so he had to be there for the full story.

That early function as your best bud endeared the deadpan dwarf with a heart of gold to many players. He returned as a companion character in Dragon Age: Inquisition, where he had a caring but more standoffish relation with the Inquisitor. His side hustle as Thedas’ most popular author has had him publishing tell-all books about the heroes of Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition, so he’s intimately acquainted with the wildest events in Thedas’ fresh history. It was his brother’s risky underground expedition that first discovered red lyrium, 1 of his friends started the Mage Rebellion, and he adventured alongside Solas with the Inquisition, helping discover the fact about the elven gods.

And now here he is, 20 years older than erstwhile we first saw him, gray-haired, with fresh facial scars, inactive adventuring on (presumably?) the behalf of the Inquisition, and seemingly truly invested in talking Solas down from his full destroy-the-world plan. To give you a bigger peek behind the fandom curtain: quite a few us are really worried that his communicative function in Veilguard is to make us very sad, in 1 way or another. Knock on wood he makes it out OK, but with BioWare, you never know.

Veilguard won’t give you the same freedom as Baldur’s Gate 3 — but that’s the point

Computer RPGs can never be as flexible as a tabletop role-playing game, and different franchises work around this problem in different ways. Baldur’s Gate 3 made its mark with a frankly unbelievable level of choice complexity. Historically, Dragon Age has taken a different tack.

Lacking the technological, financial, or human resources essential to make a game that complex, Dragon Age games are frequently very straight about characters whose choices are constrained. That franchise subject that the real past was usually more complex than the communicative told about it? Dragon Age 2 applied that thought straight to its main character, Hawke, with a framing device in which Varric was being interrogated about the book he wrote about Hawke’s life, on the suspicion that it was all besides coincidental for so many bad things to have happened to 1 individual without it being a plan all along.

In Dragon Age: Inquisition, the Inquisitor is swept up in a communicative — that they’ve been touched by the Maker — regardless of how they personally feel about it. All they know is that if they don’t choice up the power of that communicative and usage it for good, the planet will end.

Dragon Age is, in many ways, the “doomed by the narrative” CRPG franchise. The choices that tend to be reflected most in future games are the impact your character has on their companions, not the world, as if to say: Individuals can’t actually change the planet on their own; what matters is who you love and how you do it.

“Yeah, that inactive kind of sucks, though,” you might say. “It’s more fun erstwhile a player can make choices that truly matter.” But look at it another way: Given the sheer number of divergent endings to Baldur’s Gate 3, it would be prohibitively hard to make a direct sequel to it. But Dragon Age fans have been able to return to Thedas, and get an update on at least any of their old buddies (or in the case of characters like Varric, adventure alongside them again), for 3 sequels and counting.

There’s nothing inherently bad with Dragon Age offering little choice than Baldur’s Gate 3 — you just get different results for it. Give Dragon Age: The Veilguard a shot, and you just might find yourself hooked.