owlmoose | DAI ridiculousness

I haven't even finished my Lavallen game (doing character quests, buildings up enough power to go to the Arbor Wilds) and I'm already hyped up planning for the next one.

So long-time followers of me and my Dragon Age adventures may recall that the first time I played Origins, T and I played a Cousland who romanced Alistair. When we got to the Landsmeet, recruiting Loghain to the Wardens seemed like such a reasonable suggestion that we went along with it -- and then Alistair left, and never came back, and I was so distraught that I convinced T to go back and play the Landsmeet again. So the official canon for this game is that Loghain was executed at the Landsmeet... but the other outcome has always remained in my head as an AU, and I've written multiple stories set there. But of course the original DA:O save is long overwritten, so I figured headcanon AU is where that world would remain.

Fast forward 10 years (has it really been 10 years???) to picking up DA:I for the first time in ages, rolling up my first male Inquisitor, and facing the impossible choice: Cassandra or Dorian? Not just for my Inquisitor -- who is head over heels for both of them, and never have I regretted more that the DA games force you to choose one and only one love interest -- but for me. And I've come to the realization that I need to play out the Cassandra romance sooner rather than later. And suddenly it occurs to me: thanks to Dragon Age Keep, there's no need to play out an entire canon to create a new DA:I universe. Instead, I can tweak my Cousland save so that Alistair leaves the Wardens and Loghain makes the sacrifice, and bam! My wandering drunk Alistair AU is AU no longer, but a full universe with a complete canon (I don't foresee needing to make any changes to DA2 -- the only real difference is that Carver won't have known Alistair as a Warden, which doesn't have series repercussions to Marissa Hawke). And this works perfectly, because the Inquisitor in Elissa's prime universe is Kendra Trevelayn, true believer, but because of whatever butterfly ripple effect, in this AU her older brother, a mage of the Ostwick Circle, attends the Conclave instead. (I have tentatively named him Alexander.) Said brother didn't exist before, but it's easy enough to headcanon him in. This is the perfect solution, and I don't know why I didn't think of it earlier.

Another upside is that this gives me a DA:I with no Old God Baby, at least none that the Warden knows about, so I get to see how that's handled, if at all.

So I'm pretty excited to see this play out. But of course I need to finish Mahanon's story first. Fortunately, I'm also enjoying that game for its own sake, and there are things still ahead of him that I'm very excited to see.