Recruited a couple more party members. Found Blackwell in the hills above the crossroads of the hinterlands and, I mean, he's allegedly a grey warden but doesn't seem to have a clue what happened to the rest of them. Granted, the only evidence we have that he's a grey warden is that he says he is, but it's not like I can throw him at some darkspawn at the moment to determine if he's the genuine article so I recruited him.
After getting a message in Haven, I went to the Storm coast and met Iron Bull, a big boy Qunari(like I think he's bigger then the Arishok) with an eyepatch who runs his own mercenary company and he's offering to help the Inquisition. Interestingly, right off the Bat he tells me he's Ben Hassarath, the Qunari religious police and spies. Which is odd but he tells me he is going to send reports to keep his bosses happy, but he's also going to share intelligence with me. He also mentions part of the reason he's doing this is that the breach is bad for everyone and hints if the Inquisition can't handle this, the Qunari might invade to make sure the job gets done, which most people don't want. So a lot to unpack there. I grill him but decide to let him to join because, again, we need all the help we can get, the Breach is the biggest threat right now and well, having another Qunari on staff would be interesting.
Back at camp, I do talk to him for a bit, which reveals some interesting nuggets of info, like clarifying the "Qunari" race and religion aren't the same, even he doesn't seem to know the actual race name and the Qunari came from the North...for some reason, a while back. Notably, talking to him as a Qunari Herald has him saying "No, you're not a Qunari, you're Tal-Vashoth", or essentially an Apostate Qunari(as opposed to an Apostate mage, which is basically you don't have the Templars bossing you around), despite, you know, never having actually followed the Qun. Pressing him on this, he says "Well, you and your parents aren't bandits causing problems, so you're not the Tal-Vashoth I have a problem with". While my Herald was canonically a merc, I mean, so is Iron Bull. You can have some discussion with him about the Qun and Qunari and he's a lot easier to talk with about it then Tallis, who defaults to just pretending the problematic issues of the Qun just don't exist when she's pressed on it. No idea if Tallis even shows up again in this game but it would be interesting to see if she's changed.
Not much beyond that, but it does appear I'm going to have to pick sides between the Mages and Templars at some point in the near future and based on the Templar quest I don't quite have the power needed for yet(Champions of the Just), picking either side means I can't work with the other one and unlike in the previous game, I don't feel like I know enough to really want to pick a side here. I've finally gotten some background on what happened between games but I also had to look shit up on the wiki to get any real detail on it, and apparently I was expected to read like 2 novels for homework instead of just laying it out that some circles got purged completely, the mages declared independence from the Chantry, the Divine told the Templars to back off a little and then they rebelled too and because of the Conclave explosion now the Chantry is effectively decapitated and can't control anything at this point. Even then I'm not sure I've got everything for a series that's fairly good at worldbuilding I feel like they're falling down on their job here. It doesn't help that the Mage Templar war that Anders effectively kicked off pretty much all seems to happen offscreen and what we see here are little skirmishes here and there.
So yeah, not really sure who I want to back here or how long I have before I have to decide to push the plot forward, but I need some power points first and I unlocked a swampy area now to explore, so we'll see what happens.
