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Apr. 12th, 2015 06:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sidewaysA truly excessive amount of rambling on Lewen and magic.
Firstly, I just want to come right out and say the DA magic system is a bit shit insofar as narrative satisfaction goes. I have scoured the codices and wikis, played the mage origin, played a mage Inquisitor (obvs), listened to character discussions, and even bloody well read one of the novelizations, and I still don’t really know how it feels to be an individual casting a spell or pretty much anything about how a mage is trained or what distinguishes magic styles between cultures. At the end of the day it’s a video game system, not a story system, and most of what’s below is shameless headcanoning in an attempt to fill in the gaps.
• Inquisition’s set-up pretty much stripped a mage character down to the primal school as far as I can tell? Strongly offensive/defensive magic that draws on elemental forces, plus that one convenient spirit tree and the specialisations. I was happy enough to roll with it, since at the time I didn’t really know how much they’d chopped out; took a liking to the storm tree and subsequently ended up crafting Lewen as a weathercaster with a selectively lightning-based array of battlefield tricks.
• The difference between Circle magic and Dalish magic is not well-explained. “Magic is magic, like water is water,” Solas says so very helpfully, and then goes on to admit Dalish magic does have a “subtler” bent to it. The Keeper specialisation involves summoning from existent elements, such as calling up roots or thorns from the earth to assault foes; the Circle spells seem to involve a lot of energy bolts in various flavours and warping physical states, like turning an enemy to stone or setting your allies’ weapons aflame.
• Obviously the Dalish are designed to be all about ~nature magic~ because they are ~wood elves~ but broadly speaking it’s possible to argue theirs is a very practical magic. The Dalish mages are a significant part of daily life, bearing a respected talent that is put to use for the clan’s benefit; they’ve also lost much of their knowledge and don’t have libraries of past texts to draw from, and their magic has been shaped over the generations to reflect that. (It’s also fun to think of the Dalish as being shaped by their environment – desert-based Dalish wreaking hell with sand and wind, coastal Dalish all salt and tides and harsh grass, etc.) The Circle, in comparison, provides a more…academic education. Magic for magic’s sake, often funnelled down purely scholarly or battlefield paths. There was a really great post floating around that talked about how the Circles keep their mages even further corralled by keeping them sheltered from life and not teaching them spells that would be handy outside of classrooms or frontlines, and I like that notion.
• So a Circle-trained Lewen would probably have been a straight-forward spirit mage with a dash of primal, but as a Dalish he is a weathercaster who eventually gets really good at electrocuting people. Among his clan, his most useful knack was honestly just providing forecasts – the ability to give warning of a dangerous storm well before the air thickened and the clouds started rolling in, or affirm that they were better off leaving a site now because the snow wasn’t going to let up any time soon. It wasn’t flashy, but for a nomadic group exposed to the elements? Invaluable.
• He can also influence the weather, but in careful measure; I’ve read too much of Tamora Pierce’s Emelanverse to not take cues from their weather witch, and one of the interesting twists for her was that she couldn’t go yanking a weather system around without repercussions. Lewen can tweak impending hail into less damaging rain, but a spontaneous thunderstorm channelled through the Fade still has to go somewhere and he’ll often refuse to call up something of that scale because, for example, their location means that dumping that much water out of nowhere risks a flash flood, or would cause clashing wind patterns that would muck up the region’s weather for weeks afterwards. The reason he ends up favouring lightning so much in battle is because it’s effective and versatile and doesn’t rip big holes through the natural state of things.
• Which isn’t to say he doesn’t have other tricks up his sleeves. I see him being capable of occasional airbending as t’were, lashing out with a slice of wind sharp enough to knock someone off their feet (or a cliff). He can flash a glare of sunlight into your eyes, call or dispel a creeping mist, whip an ongoing drizzle of rain into an acidic waterspout – smaller, shorter notice spellery that might not have the oomph of a tornado but does him much better in an actual fight as far as control and energy expenditure goes.
• Most of these things don’t kill or thoroughly disable though, and that’s where the sparks come in. Of the actual canonical tree, he leans most on chain lightning and lightning bolt as active attack styles, and stormbringer, gathering storm, and static charge as passive techniques, roughly speaking. (I’m also very fond of energy barrage and static cage in the game itself, but they strike me as more Circle-esque spells.) That might seem a limited repertoire at a glance, but of course outside of the game you don’t need to hit your enemy with fifty lightning bolts to kill them.
• As well as all that, I figure any trained mage knows how to create a flame and cast a barrier: fire because it is one of the easier spells with a wide variety of practical applications, and barrier because lbr when it comes to novice magic something is going to explode at some point and it’s thus both a useful spell and a basic safety precaution. Lewen’s fire magic is mostly restricted to conjuring a small palm-held flame for light / starting a campfire that he can turn into a larger, briefer flamethrower blast, though the latter doesn’t tend to burn hot enough to do serious damage since he’s not particularly trained or skilled in fire magic. (Good way to make enemies take a jump back, though.) His barrier spell, on the other hand, started out fairly basic but got a heck of a workout during his time with the Inquisition, and by the time they bring Corypheus down he can stop quite a lot of things dead in their path without blinking.
• I like to think lightning suits Lewen both because of the weather knack and because it is an element that responds best to focus, awareness, and micromanaging. Lightning is single-minded; it follows the easiest path, it strikes, it dissipates. In order to subvert physics you need to know where it will naturally want to go and then convince it your path is the better one; you need to ensure it forks only when and where you wish it to; and you need to have worked all this out beforehand, because it’s going to be over too quickly for you to be making these decisions after you’ve launched the strike. A poorly trained lightning user can easily kill their friends with lack of knowledge and a careless expectation that lightning will simply go straight in the direction it’s pointed. Being naturally attuned to weather gives Lewen something of a natural grasp for the flow of electricity, which was a useful leg-up in mastering lightning on the field, and he ends up skilled enough to go throwing it around while they’re fighting knee-deep in water though it’s always something of a…hair-raising experience.
• (Fire responds best to someone quick-thinking, adaptable, and frankly some flair helps as well. Fire wants to live, will leap eagerly into being and is fluid enough to be moulded, but just as quickly it can bloom out of control. Clamp down too tightly, like one might with lightning, and you stifle it; be hesitant or inattentive, and it will go in the direction you have pointed it and then gleefully keep going. Ice, on the other hand, responds best to patient determination and raw power. Electricity exists everywhere, fire will consume what it must to lengthen its own life, but winter is inherently temporal. It comes when it will, it leaves when it will, and all but a few environmental conditions suppress it. For ice to be an effective weapon you must have both blunt force of will and a deft touch, to cast a solid wall in sunlight in one turn and freeze without killing the next.)
• I think the rift-mark is inclined to affect a mage in various ways, and for Lewen it often makes it feel like the veil is always thin. It’s suddenly that much easier to pull things out of his magical hat, and that contributes to his ability to quickly adapt existent skills to battlefield purposes and to start learning a whole new branch of magic when they start training him as a rift mage. It’s both fascinating and frustrating journey for him; it’s been a long time since he’s had any other teacher than Deshanna and even longer since he’s had to push himself this hard to learn a new technique, and the first time he successfully punches something via the Fade his victory dance is not really befitting the dignity of an Inquisitor.
• Overall: Lewen entered the Inquisition as a talented weathercaster who mostly used passive, productive techniques but could throw a bit of lightning, and finished the game as a highly effective battlemage who could turn the field to his advantage and then single-handedly beat up a platoon of soldiers within it. It was hard work and plain necessity and it left him feeling a little melancholy sometimes; in his time with his clan he’d killed at least once and expected he would again, but he’d never intended to specialise in aggressive magics. He likes being capable of more, he just wishes that “more” was something other than “more destructive”.
Firstly, I just want to come right out and say the DA magic system is a bit shit insofar as narrative satisfaction goes. I have scoured the codices and wikis, played the mage origin, played a mage Inquisitor (obvs), listened to character discussions, and even bloody well read one of the novelizations, and I still don’t really know how it feels to be an individual casting a spell or pretty much anything about how a mage is trained or what distinguishes magic styles between cultures. At the end of the day it’s a video game system, not a story system, and most of what’s below is shameless headcanoning in an attempt to fill in the gaps.
• Inquisition’s set-up pretty much stripped a mage character down to the primal school as far as I can tell? Strongly offensive/defensive magic that draws on elemental forces, plus that one convenient spirit tree and the specialisations. I was happy enough to roll with it, since at the time I didn’t really know how much they’d chopped out; took a liking to the storm tree and subsequently ended up crafting Lewen as a weathercaster with a selectively lightning-based array of battlefield tricks.
• The difference between Circle magic and Dalish magic is not well-explained. “Magic is magic, like water is water,” Solas says so very helpfully, and then goes on to admit Dalish magic does have a “subtler” bent to it. The Keeper specialisation involves summoning from existent elements, such as calling up roots or thorns from the earth to assault foes; the Circle spells seem to involve a lot of energy bolts in various flavours and warping physical states, like turning an enemy to stone or setting your allies’ weapons aflame.
• Obviously the Dalish are designed to be all about ~nature magic~ because they are ~wood elves~ but broadly speaking it’s possible to argue theirs is a very practical magic. The Dalish mages are a significant part of daily life, bearing a respected talent that is put to use for the clan’s benefit; they’ve also lost much of their knowledge and don’t have libraries of past texts to draw from, and their magic has been shaped over the generations to reflect that. (It’s also fun to think of the Dalish as being shaped by their environment – desert-based Dalish wreaking hell with sand and wind, coastal Dalish all salt and tides and harsh grass, etc.) The Circle, in comparison, provides a more…academic education. Magic for magic’s sake, often funnelled down purely scholarly or battlefield paths. There was a really great post floating around that talked about how the Circles keep their mages even further corralled by keeping them sheltered from life and not teaching them spells that would be handy outside of classrooms or frontlines, and I like that notion.
• So a Circle-trained Lewen would probably have been a straight-forward spirit mage with a dash of primal, but as a Dalish he is a weathercaster who eventually gets really good at electrocuting people. Among his clan, his most useful knack was honestly just providing forecasts – the ability to give warning of a dangerous storm well before the air thickened and the clouds started rolling in, or affirm that they were better off leaving a site now because the snow wasn’t going to let up any time soon. It wasn’t flashy, but for a nomadic group exposed to the elements? Invaluable.
• He can also influence the weather, but in careful measure; I’ve read too much of Tamora Pierce’s Emelanverse to not take cues from their weather witch, and one of the interesting twists for her was that she couldn’t go yanking a weather system around without repercussions. Lewen can tweak impending hail into less damaging rain, but a spontaneous thunderstorm channelled through the Fade still has to go somewhere and he’ll often refuse to call up something of that scale because, for example, their location means that dumping that much water out of nowhere risks a flash flood, or would cause clashing wind patterns that would muck up the region’s weather for weeks afterwards. The reason he ends up favouring lightning so much in battle is because it’s effective and versatile and doesn’t rip big holes through the natural state of things.
• Which isn’t to say he doesn’t have other tricks up his sleeves. I see him being capable of occasional airbending as t’were, lashing out with a slice of wind sharp enough to knock someone off their feet (or a cliff). He can flash a glare of sunlight into your eyes, call or dispel a creeping mist, whip an ongoing drizzle of rain into an acidic waterspout – smaller, shorter notice spellery that might not have the oomph of a tornado but does him much better in an actual fight as far as control and energy expenditure goes.
• Most of these things don’t kill or thoroughly disable though, and that’s where the sparks come in. Of the actual canonical tree, he leans most on chain lightning and lightning bolt as active attack styles, and stormbringer, gathering storm, and static charge as passive techniques, roughly speaking. (I’m also very fond of energy barrage and static cage in the game itself, but they strike me as more Circle-esque spells.) That might seem a limited repertoire at a glance, but of course outside of the game you don’t need to hit your enemy with fifty lightning bolts to kill them.
• As well as all that, I figure any trained mage knows how to create a flame and cast a barrier: fire because it is one of the easier spells with a wide variety of practical applications, and barrier because lbr when it comes to novice magic something is going to explode at some point and it’s thus both a useful spell and a basic safety precaution. Lewen’s fire magic is mostly restricted to conjuring a small palm-held flame for light / starting a campfire that he can turn into a larger, briefer flamethrower blast, though the latter doesn’t tend to burn hot enough to do serious damage since he’s not particularly trained or skilled in fire magic. (Good way to make enemies take a jump back, though.) His barrier spell, on the other hand, started out fairly basic but got a heck of a workout during his time with the Inquisition, and by the time they bring Corypheus down he can stop quite a lot of things dead in their path without blinking.
• I like to think lightning suits Lewen both because of the weather knack and because it is an element that responds best to focus, awareness, and micromanaging. Lightning is single-minded; it follows the easiest path, it strikes, it dissipates. In order to subvert physics you need to know where it will naturally want to go and then convince it your path is the better one; you need to ensure it forks only when and where you wish it to; and you need to have worked all this out beforehand, because it’s going to be over too quickly for you to be making these decisions after you’ve launched the strike. A poorly trained lightning user can easily kill their friends with lack of knowledge and a careless expectation that lightning will simply go straight in the direction it’s pointed. Being naturally attuned to weather gives Lewen something of a natural grasp for the flow of electricity, which was a useful leg-up in mastering lightning on the field, and he ends up skilled enough to go throwing it around while they’re fighting knee-deep in water though it’s always something of a…hair-raising experience.
• (Fire responds best to someone quick-thinking, adaptable, and frankly some flair helps as well. Fire wants to live, will leap eagerly into being and is fluid enough to be moulded, but just as quickly it can bloom out of control. Clamp down too tightly, like one might with lightning, and you stifle it; be hesitant or inattentive, and it will go in the direction you have pointed it and then gleefully keep going. Ice, on the other hand, responds best to patient determination and raw power. Electricity exists everywhere, fire will consume what it must to lengthen its own life, but winter is inherently temporal. It comes when it will, it leaves when it will, and all but a few environmental conditions suppress it. For ice to be an effective weapon you must have both blunt force of will and a deft touch, to cast a solid wall in sunlight in one turn and freeze without killing the next.)
• I think the rift-mark is inclined to affect a mage in various ways, and for Lewen it often makes it feel like the veil is always thin. It’s suddenly that much easier to pull things out of his magical hat, and that contributes to his ability to quickly adapt existent skills to battlefield purposes and to start learning a whole new branch of magic when they start training him as a rift mage. It’s both fascinating and frustrating journey for him; it’s been a long time since he’s had any other teacher than Deshanna and even longer since he’s had to push himself this hard to learn a new technique, and the first time he successfully punches something via the Fade his victory dance is not really befitting the dignity of an Inquisitor.
• Overall: Lewen entered the Inquisition as a talented weathercaster who mostly used passive, productive techniques but could throw a bit of lightning, and finished the game as a highly effective battlemage who could turn the field to his advantage and then single-handedly beat up a platoon of soldiers within it. It was hard work and plain necessity and it left him feeling a little melancholy sometimes; in his time with his clan he’d killed at least once and expected he would again, but he’d never intended to specialise in aggressive magics. He likes being capable of more, he just wishes that “more” was something other than “more destructive”.
