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Chronicles of Maxwell: Part 3 - Varric...

Tags: #Dragonborn1721  #Dragon Age  #DA:I  #Chronicles of Maxwell 
  • October 28, 2018

                                                                         Varric Tethras,  The Best Damn Writer in the World                                                                 

    Varric Tethras, what can you say about the man who conquered the world? Not literally of course, the man is hardly the ‘World-Conquering’ sort with a lack of any real ability to sound commanding, though he might be cunning enough to… No Varric is, as far as I can tell essentially a divine being sent down by the Maker to write and write he does. Hard in Hightown, Swords and Shields, The Tale of the Champion or my personal favourite, The Dasher’s Men. It’s a little less known than the bulk of his work but Varric portrays the life of Dwarves in a fascinating way, especially the ‘Casteless Dwarves’. I’m not too familiar with Orzammar so I don’t know how realistic it is (I’d imagine the answer is incredibly) but he wrote everything so vividly that it makes you wonder if it’s a true story. The man is simply an amazing writer who doesn’t get nearly enough credit for it, and he gets a lot of credit. I mean Divine Justinia was a fan of Hard in Hightown…I honestly thought she only knew of the Chant of Light and a few other chantry texts but...Hard in Hightown apparently.

    Ahem. I really need to stop ranting about Varric's writing, anyway. Varric is the easiest to get along with out of all my new Companions. Solas is a bit of an asshole, Cassandra is too uptight. The jokes, the stories, the constant prodding of Cassandra (Again, non-sexually thank the Maker), we’re similar in a lot of ways…He’s got more chest hair though, and not enough facial hair to match up to my magnificent beard. We’re both questionable people, prefer fighting with dirty tricks and deception, both make excellent fashion decisions (unaided by others). So that might be a bit simplistic, the point is we get along really damn well, and the world should be afraid (for their purses, nothing more nefarious than that). 

    Varric’s whole tinkering and love of traps isn’t something that’s for me. I love the idea of throwing around giant spikes and setting up traps, but I don’t have the patience for it. He claims that he’s part of a unique camp of ‘Artificer’s’ which from what I can gather are essentially Dwarves trained primarily in explosives and mining that then combined their skills with a few tricks and, well turned out to create an entire form of combat based entirely around explosives and traps. It’s fun and all, and Varric can talk about traps for hours if you get him in the right mood (and a game of Wicked Grace, though I think he might’ve made it up because I haven’t figured out how to play yet), and the way he talks about it will make you think that it’s the only way to prepare for battle. Me, I prefer to focus on Poisons if I can, why throw traps around when you can just stab someone with a poisoned dagger? Or just stab them a lot, and that’s only if you can’t just escape combat entirely.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

    Dragonborn's Notes

    I was a little puzzled at what to write here, was honestly the first time where I hit a bit of a bump in the roads. The start was easy, I wanted to portray how immensly popualr Varric seems to be in a bit of a comedic way...Not sure if I pulled it off, but yeah I just think it's weird how popular Varric seems to be. It seems like every single companion has read (and enjoyed) at least one series that Varric wrote, and of course you've got that weird fact that Divine Justinia wanted a signed copy of Hard in Hightown from Varric...could be a joke but I'm taking it literally because, well Cassandra is still in her 'serious all the time' mode.

    Honestly I wanted to discuss a fair bit about the Artificer class as well because Maxwell is a Rogue, Varric's a Rogue...but not sure how that worked out. I feel like it's a weaker section but yeah. That said, it's an important aspect of the story I'm aiming to develop, and why not I threw in some Lore that might work, I did check to see if there was anything consistant like the Reaver Class, or Templar which are pretty well formulated and worked into Lore.

    Anyway, let's talk about Varric. He's absolutely (in my opinion) the single best Companion in all of Dragon Age. I know that might be a controversial statement, but honestly he's really well developed and has multiple, logical arcs throughout the two games. The Varric that starts off in Dragon Age 2 is different from the Varric that begins and ends each arc in the same game, and then different from the Varric who you end up with in Dragon Age: Inquisition. He becomes a Hero, maybe not one on the same scale as some other characters (as in he's still got that Chaotic Good swing to him) The voice actor is great (not on the scale as Morrigan or Alaistair's IMO, but still excellent). There's just a lot more to him than most other characters, and yeah he obviously gets more time, but his personality and the effort put into Varric just push him above everyone else in all three games...Though a lot of the Origins characters are close.

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  • October 28, 2018

    So just need to write the Solas one and then it'll be back to the main storyline...well not quite, I've written the first part so that really I just need Maxwell to decide between the Templars and Mages and then I'll be back to writing that...Though I haven't figured out how to tackle the side content, I might just write them as somewhat seperate sections after each 'Main Quest' period. So once the Templar/Mage part is done (which should be three or so Parts) I'll move on to the Storm Coast and just do the basic parts of that (with Iron Bull). 

  • October 28, 2018

    I like Varric too, he was a constant member of my party in both DA and DA:I. Such a nice fellow. In DA2 I liked him the most because uhlike the rest, he didn't want to just use Hawke or have him solve his problems, their friendship looked genuine. And in DA:I he is one of a few (the others are Iron Bull and Dorian) who don't try to make you adhere to their ideals and expectations.