The games leading up to this point have painted horrific pictures of what Tevinter is like, as well as Antiva where we waded through the bloody narratives of life there through the assassin Zevran. In the same game, we also met Cremisius “Krem” Aclassi, a transgender soldier stuck in the middle of slavery and the elite, a class abandoned by common kindness, again chased out for being anything other than what Tevinter wants a citizen to be. He was also the victim of an attempted blood ritual, by his own father nonetheless, due to Tevinter’s scorned eye on homosexual relationships.

We were later enthralled by Dorian Pavus in Inquisition, an Altus on his way to becoming a magister a compassionate character bent on making his countrymen see where they have gone wrong while learning key lessons about his own problematic upbringing. We were introduced to Fenris in Dragon Age 2, an escaped slave that teased the horrors his kind-faced at the hands of blood magic-wielding magisters. While the associated novels and comics have taken us deep within the underbelly of power-driven mages and a society built on the backs of slaves, the games themselves have only skirted this expansive location through characters met throughout the franchise.

Dragon Age 4 is poised to take fans of Thedas where they have never been within the video game franchise: Tevinter.

Blood magic dragon age origins