faderiftooc | MOD POST ↠ WINTER PLACE & MISCELLANEOUS UPDATES

UPDATE: WINTER PLACE

When the dust settles after the battle at the Winter Palace, Orlais will discover that its murky balance of power has been rapidly clarified. Empress Celene rises victorious, crushing the Freemen's Revolt with the aid of her palace guard and Inquisition forces. Grand Duke Gaspard emerges from the rubble her prisoner, accused of colluding with the Freemen, and evidence is allowed to circulate through the Imperial Court that it was Gaspard's agents who helped the attackers gain access to the Winter Palace, after which they went rogue and attacked both sides instead of just Celene as planned.

Not all believe this evidence or the convenient confession of one of Gaspard's lieutenants, and even for those who do, many questions still linger: how did the Freemen manage to attack the Winter Palace in such force? Who invited Red Templars? Why were they assisted by elves? (Why isn't it ever dwarves?) Who is Calpernia and why does anyone from the Dales care what she thinks?

Despite all the remaining uncertainties, the case against Gaspard is sufficiently strong to allow the newly-empowered Empress to execute the Grand Duke and several of his generals. This takes place in a public beheading that officially brings the War of the Lions to an end as, without their leader and his cause, Gaspard's remaining forces quickly capitulate. Celene follows this moment of triumph by granting her elven servant Briala the Marquisate of the Dales.

Over the next month, the Empress will announce several changes to Orlais' laws, chief among them equal punishment for the murder of an elf as that of a human, removal of restrictions on elves' rights to own weapons, and a requirement that the nobles in charge of each city tear down the walls surrounding their alienages within the year. This move will outrage many Orlesians, and baffle nearly all of them. Peace is returned to the Empire, but many wonder: for how long?

OOC EXPLANATION

For those of you who care how we arrived at this end point, we tallied up all of the tags for each character who participated in the Winter Palace logs. Then we used those tags to assign point values to the three leaders. If a character supported Briala the most, each of their tags counted as +1 for Briala. We decided who "won" the negotiations based on who had the highest score. Translated into "real life," that person had the most adamant support going into the negotiations.

By that count, Briala had 307 points, Celene had 294, and Gaspard had 94. So Briala entered negotiations with the most vocal political support and is considered the "winner" in that regard. (Congratulations, you won a country full of people who hate you!)

However, to determine exactly how much political power each person had, we also counted who characters supported the least and calculated an overall balance. (Think of it as someone winning the U.S. election but still having to deal with not necessarily having majority support.) So if a character supported Briala the most and Gaspard the least, they also added -1 to Gaspard's overall balance. That overall balance was used to determine how polarizing each person was, how delicate their position was overall in Orlais, etc.

For their overall balances, Celene had 260 points, Briala lost nearly half of her initial total to arrive at 161, and Gaspard had an astonishingly awful -430. This translates into Briala being the most polarizing figure and a leader who would face much stronger opposition than Celene, even though she had the biggest stick in the negotiations. Given that Briala is not an idiot, she therefore didn't attempt to actually unseat Celene, and instead used her support to secure power and concessions for elves.

Gaspard, meanwhile, had nothing but his own head, and he was promptly relieved of even that.

Those of you who incorporated NPCs into your logs or participated in the scenario prompts, thank you! There will be fallout.

Not to sound ominous.

COMPLETELY UNRELATED INFO ON GRIFFONS...

As a reminder, Griffon Rider will become available as a specialization on February 1. So those of you who are interested have time to think about which griffon you're interested in, we've made a list of the griffons available. Answers to some potential questions:

1. Yes, those are their names! If your characters call them something else, that's their prerogative. But Maja (the Warden griffon keeper from Weisshaupt) will continue to call them by their baby names, as will we for recordkeeping purposes, and they will only really answer to their baby names.

2. You can come up with your own personality and physical details in addition to those listed.

3. Griffon riding will count against the cap on total number of specializations.

4. For FR purposes, the griffons do not imprint like mabari, because that will create too many problems with sharing them and so on. However, they are very picky about who they permit to ride them, and earning their permission is a capital-p Process. When you purchase the reward for your character, what you're buying is the right to say that one of the griffons will let your character ride, as well as training from Maja on how to not fall off and die.

5. The capital-p Process mainly involves grooming them in exchange for them doing you the favor of taking you places.

6. In general, griffons are not particularly friendly and not good pets. They're ill-tempered and finicky cat-hawks large enough to fit a man's whole head and possibly his shoulders into their beaks.

7. We aren't limiting who can have this reward or policing how the griffons are used, but please be sensible! The griffons are a valuable asset in a military organization -- not to mention the only thirteen hopes for the propagation of their species. There is no accidental bonding, and no one is going to invest time into training a griffon and rider to work together just for the fun of it or risk their lives for sightseeing tours. But characters who don't have a good reason to ride griffons are still welcome to go hang out with them! Especially poor Buttons.

... AND A DARK FUTURE FOOTNOTE

A rough draft of the list of fates for NPCs, including unplayed companion characters and important game NPCs, can be found here. That list is subject to change until February 1, so if there's someone missing or something more you need to know, tell us!