Dragon Age Comics Writers Talk Dark Fortress, Characters, and What Comes Next

On Managing the Party

ComicBook.com: At this point, you've assembled a motley crew of adventurers together in your Dragon Age comics. But as the cast grows, so too does the number of interpersonal relationships. How do you go about managing your little adventuring party and how they interact together?

Nunzio DeFilippis: It isn't easy. It's a very big group we're playing with, and in the last miniseries (BLUE WRAITH) we split them up and put a lot more focus on one half of the group. And the other half got most focus on Ser Aaron and Calix.

Christina Weir: This miniseries, they are all together, and trying to give each person in their group their moments. And they all have a role to play when the final conflict comes.

On Favorite Characters

Speaking of the adventuring party, we're several series deep at this point, so I have to ask: do you have a favorite character you've created for the comics? If so, why? If not, why not?

ND: While Autumn the mabari makes me very happy, I'd say my great love in this series is Vaea, with Ser Aaron just the tiniest bit behind her. While KNIGHT ERRANT was seen through Vaea's eyes, we moved away from her perspective on DECEPTION. It was nice to get her back in the middle of things in BLUE WRAITH.

CW: I somehow feel compelled to give a different answer from Nunzio. But no offense to our other characters, I love Vaea. She's smart. She's sassy. She can break into buildings undetected. What's not to love? But I do want to give a shout out to Francesca. She was interesting because she was designed as an obstacle, a minor opposition to our main group. I wasn't that invested in her at the start. But she came in and carved out a space for herself in BLUE WRAITH. And now she holds a special place in my heart.

ND: I think we can thank the team at BioWare for that. We'd already changed our plans to bring Francesca with the group at the end of DECEPTION. But we started writing BLUE WRAITH as a much more "balanced among the characters" story and it was the folks at BioWare who felt like trying to focus on everyone made us give too little focus to anyone. We had a conference call about it and streamlined the narrative. It became much more Francesca and Fenris focused. And that's when she really came into her own.

On Dark Fortress

What can you tell us at this point about the new comic series overall? Any teases for upcoming issues that you can share?

CW: The miniseries breaks into 3 parts: Issue 1 is Figuring out how to get into Castellum Tenebris, which requires Fenris to come face to face with the heir of House Danarius. Issue 2 is getting into the Castellum and trying to stop the ritual in time. And Issue 3 is the big battle when they get there.

ND: She's not kidding. Most of the third issue is this battle, and then we have the wrap up – the consequences, what's next for the characters.

On Crossover Characters

Not that you can talk about it at all, but what would your reaction be to see some of these characters show up in the games?

ND: A big squee? Is that a legit answer?

CW: We'd be thrilled to see them in the games. We're not sure how likely that is, though. We have always assumed that the characters we're writing (including Fenris) were going to stay in the comics, and not appear in the games themselves.

ND: Some part of me hopes for mentions of our characters in the War Table. That would be cool enough, honestly. I think I secretly hoped our characters would be multiplayer characters. But with the removal of multiplayer, that hope dissipated. Still, like most Dragon Age fans, we'd rather have the game focused on the great single player storytelling experience that BioWare does so well, so it's better this way.

On Plans for the Future

Obviously, it's not entirely your call, but any plans for further series after this?

CW: Well, the quick answer is absolutely. We know these characters so well, and while we feel like we wrapped the story we set out to tell, there is always so much more we can do with them.

ND: We don't know if there will be more stories with this group, but if there are, this story points you towards what they're doing next. We wrote it as an ending, so that "what they're doing next" is a bit like Rick and Louis walking off into the night talking about the French Foreign Legion. So if it ends here, we're wrapped. And if we get to do more, then we know where to go.

CW: A big part of what we'd do next will become clear when people read the ending. It really does, as Nunzio says, point you forward. But there are other things we'd want to tackle. Going deeper into Fenris' memories of his time in Kirkwall would be one of them, which might require another Varric cameo.

ND: But that part hasn't been run by the BioWare and Dark Horse teams. Some of the plans for what comes next was mentioned to them before we started writing Dark Fortress. There are no solid plans for there to be more miniseries. And we are planning that this is the end. But if they decide to do more, they know what stories we were looking at, and they liked the broad strokes of those, so that'd be where we'd start the discussions.

CW: And then we'd ask for Varric.