Dragon Age: Thedas At War Developers Explain How This Crusader Kings 3 Mod Was Made

Dragon Age: Thedas at War is the Crusader Kings 3 expansion of my dreams. If you’re a fellow Dragon Age fan, you need to play this, even if you’ve never even touched the game it's built on top of before. Lovingly created by a team of volunteers, Thedas at War turns Crusader Kings 3 into a Dragon Age grand strategy game, letting you play across Ferelden and Orlais, and choose from a variety of different backgrounds and religions. There is a world of preset characters you can choose to play as representing all of the different factions across southern Thedas, or you can make your own and try to build up an original in-universe dynasty. As any Dragon Age fan will tell you, the series lore is incredibly expansive. There are even two books that just focus on that, giving us details on the countless characters that roamed Thedas long before the games take place. Much of this lore was never supposed to be adapted into a game, but the team behind Thedas at War have done just that. The overhaul kicks off in the Glory Age, hundreds of years before the titular Dragon Age, dealing with characters that many fans probably didn’t know existed. Now, fresh off the mod’s wildly successful launch, I spoke with some of the Thedas at War devs to dive into how this CK3 overhaul was made - and what we can expect from future updates. The Team Behind Thedas At War Dragon Age: Thedas At War was brought to life by hobbyists with different passions. I spoke with Rislav, the art lead who got his start modding Crusader Kings 2 as a portrait artist; Rex, the community lead who started out in Skyrim modding; and Rislav, the lead writer and passionate roleplayer who started out working on the mod between running D&D campaigns. Development kicked off in 2023, with the three leads joining throughout the year. They began work on the first “bookmark” - a starting point in any Crusader Kings 3 run. While the game launched with the Glory Age bookmark, we were originally going to get something much closer to the official games. “The original plan was actually to do a Ferelden Rebellion start,” Rislav tells me. That would have put Thedas at War towards the end of the Blessed Age, which is just a couple of decades away from Dragon Age: Origins. As any CK3 player will tell you, decades can pass in the blink of an eye, and it was this proximity to the main games that didn’t work for the team. “We thought it would be too hard to do a Ferelden Rebellion bookmark because that's too close to the Fifth Blight, and then we'd have to do all the [Dragon Age] Origins stuff and all the canonical game stuff,” Rislav explains. “We didn't want to mess with that.” “CK3 benefits most when you have the time to play multiple generations and dynasties,” community lead Rex argues. “It was about picking a period that's early on enough that you have that time to do things, have that time where events can happen over multiple generations. “If we're too close to the game, we have a much smaller time span before you hit [the period where] we know nothing, because we’ve never seen anything.” Rislav agrees. “What age is after the Dragon Age?” he says. “Who knows?” With that said, lead writer Korin is a big fan of The Stolen Throne by David Gaider, the Dragon Age book that details the Ferelden Rebellion. Alas, the story just doesn’t work with CK3’s structure. “The rebellion lasts, at best, two years,” says Korin. “And even then, we're following a very loose timeline. I don't ever think the book really tells us [...] they talk about battles. So you're trying to follow the different battles that Maric went through, that Loghain went through, and you're trying to place how far along this likely was. And then a character just one-off mentions ‘two months ago we fought and nearly died’, and ‘now we're doing it again’.” This wasn’t just a problem with the scrapped Ferelden Rebellion start. What little we know of the Glory Age comes from significant battles that only ever get a passing mention. “There's a lot of good lore written about these time periods, but not a lot of specific characters written about these time periods,” Rislav explains. Community lead Rex uses one of the premade characters you can control in Thedas at War as an example: King Roux. “I can tell you the entirety of the lore about Roux,” Rex laughs. “Roux is king of the marshes. He came from the Nahashin Marshes. He rebels against Orlais. And he loses.” Using that, the team created a fully fleshed-out character. “Oftentimes, we fill in the gaps. Why did he rebel? We work that out. Who was the knight he fought against that was so notable it was mentioned? Make that the prince.” With that in mind, it sounds like a delicate balancing act: Loghain has too many details that get in the way, but King Roux has just enough to build upon. Are The Main Dragon Age Games Always Off The Table? Of course, I have to ask if this focus on the Glory Age means that we’ll never touch on the Dragon Age. When we first touch on this, it seems to be a very definitive no. “The games are so RPG-focused,” Rex argues. “They're so about your choices. We wouldn't be able to respect everyone's possibilities as much as the RPG games can.” For the team, that more or less settles it. “When we're asked about the question of, is there ever going to be a Dragon Age bookmark, set at the time of the games themselves, our answer is no,” Rex says. “We'd be stepping on toes. We wouldn't do it justice. If you want to do that, go play the games. They're awesome.” "The games are so RPG-focused [...] We wouldn't be able to respect everyone's possibilities as much as the RPG games can" - Rex I ask if that’s a definite no, to which the response is never say never. “Nothing's ever certain,” Rex admits. “Time may pass, years may pass, but for the moment within our current team, it's pretty hard line.” For Rislav, the answer is simple: they have so much more to explore before they even think about the Dragon Age. “Just talking about bookmarks even, [we have] so many other bookmarks to do before we get to that point,” Rislav says. “CK4 would be out by the time we get to that point.” What Comes Next For the time being, the team just wants to expand on the story content in Ferelden and Orlais. However, they know what area will come next as we start to see the rest of Ferelden - and it involves the ancestor of a fan-favourite Dragon Age: Inquisition character. “The immediate future is Nevarra,” Korin says. “In this time period, Caspar Pentaghast rises up and breaks away from the Free Marches and forms the kingdom of Neverra, having defeated Orlais and taken a bit of their lands.” We’ll also start to see more canon characters pop up, with the game telling us when a major player in the story has been born. At the moment, the only one is Flemeth, but they’re also toying with the idea of Calenhad Theirin rocking up and uniting Ferelden if you haven’t done it by a certain date, which would kick off the dynasty that eventually leads to the birth of Alistair from the games (or probably not, in this case, given player interference). Once we get to the Free Marches, the time period that the mod explores will also fit in nicely with the “reign” of King Fyruss, who declared himself king of all the city-states. As you will remember from the games, the Free Marches cities are fiercely independent, so this would show us how history could have been very different. How Much Creative Freedom Does The Team Give Itself? Unfortunately, some of the juiciest stories in Dragon Age just don’t fit the long-winded gameplay of CK3 - not in the same way we see with the equivalent Game of Thrones mod, which has plenty of generational wars to pull from. But some just feel like they’d fit the tone of CK3 perfectly. In that regard, will the team allow themselves to play around with the facts and lore to make it work? Rex tells me they’re taking it “case by case”. Touching on a potential bookmark that covers the expulsion of the Grey Wardens from Ferelden, Korin would love to make Sophia Dryden - a claimant to the throne who used the Wardens in an attempt to overthrow the king - a playable character. She would get story events that take her up until her death, or beyond, if you play your cards right. The only issue is, much like the Ferelden Rebellion, these events happen quite quickly. And like King Roux, we know little of Sophia Dryden outside of her bid for the throne. She’s still under consideration, but they will be careful in how they adapt her. If you don’t play as these set characters, your custom characters could become them if they tick enough boxes. Speaking hypothetically here, Rex suggests that a Grey Warden character who owns a castle could kick off the war themselves. But it isn’t just the lore that the team has to adapt; it’s the tone. Famously, the tone is all over the place in the Dragon Age series, with each game having its own feel, reflecting different fantasy tropes. That meant that there were sometimes contradictions in both facts and vibe. “Dragon Age: Origins, Dark Fantasy-that's what the mod is going to focus on, generally,” Korin tells me. “However, we will take elements from the other iterations to match at any given turn, and that's the same rule we follow with the lore as well.” Rex expands on what this means in practice: “Let's say Origins mentions something in one sentence, and then Inquisition has like three whole quest lines dedicated to the retcon. They put a lot more effort into it. At that point, we recognise that the retcon had to occur.” "Dark Fantasy-that's what the mod is going to focus on, generally" - Korin The elven language is an example of this, with the team going based on what Inquisition says about it, since there’s much more effort put into it there than in other games. Sometimes, it’s a matter of taste, too, as the team was more inspired by the artwork found in Dragon Age 2. The appearance of the elves was a bit more difficult. As the team points out, they look different in every game, with Rislav joking that in Origins, they’re just “humans with pointy ears”, before Dragon Age 2 gave them very distinctive facial features. Inquisition walked back on that again, focusing on their slender frames, before Veilguard kept everything open, letting them look largely however they wanted. So, in Thedas at War, we get elves that are an amalgamation of all these designs, trying to fit BioWare’s wider vision. Want To Thank The Thedas At War Team? Play Dragon Age As we wrap up, we talk about the impact the mod has had already. To my surprise, a lot of people checking it out have never played Dragon Age before. I’m told this is fairly common in the CK3 scene. “A lot of CK3 fans, they will get into a medium that they've never experienced like Game of Thrones [through a mod], and they won't actually go read the material or watch the show,” Korin explains. “We have repeatedly told people the best thing you can give us in terms of a reward is to go play the games, give BioWare some love for what they've done. “We've had so many people in the last few weeks just be like, ‘Oh yeah, I'm gonna go play it,’ they just ride off into the sunset, and it's so amazing.” On the flip side, Rislav has seen Thedas at War turn Dragon Age fans into CK3 heads: “I'm surprised by the sheer amount of people that bought CK3 just to play our mod.” When BioWare was hit with layoffs after The Veilguard, there was a real fear that this was it for the series. However, writer Sheryl Chee said this would never be true, because Dragon Age belongs to the fans. Seeing the love that has gone into Thedas at War proves her point perfectly. Here we have what is essentially a new game, and an incredible love letter to the source material. Released September 1, 2020 ESRB T for Teens: Drug Reference, Language, Mild Violence, Suggestive Themes Developer(s) Paradox Interactive Publisher(s) Paradox Interactive Engine Clausewitz Engine Multiplayer Online Multiplayer Franchise Crusader Kings Genre(s) RPG, Grand Strategy