Deviation Actions
Description
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More Dragon Age Keep tiles! This time Avrum (Bun's) and Rion (mine). You can keep only one of them (Avrum gives you Tranquils + he becomes Cullen's agent and Rion gives you few rebel mages at your service + he is Leliana's agent).
From Bun's post mygoodrabbit.tumblr.com/post/1… :
You’re given a quest to locate a small group of Tranquil that your elven contact Marchon believes escaped the attention of the Tevinter in Redcliffe before the Tranquil there were “banished,” which you now suspect means that they were ritualistically killed by the Vints to create more Ocularum. Your leads take you to a rebel mage in the Hinterlands, Enchanter Rion, who says he’ll tell you where the Tranquil are if you’ll agree to kill the Templar he knows is with them, a nasty old bastard who was a terror to everyone in the Circle and is surely abusing the Tranquil. If you’ll do this for him, he and his small group of rebel mages will be willing to fight for the Inquisition.
When you locate the group of Tranquil on Enchanter Rion’s instructions, you discover that the Templar, Ser Avrum, is an elderly man barely even capable of standing for long, never mind fighting- he’s suffering from lyrium withdrawal on top of the effects of decades of lyrium use that likely mean he wasn’t operating at peak even before withdrawal set in. The Tranquil seem to be tending to him. You can kill him outright and end the quest here, and the Tranquil will follow your orders without dispute. If you try to question him you will discover that he is nearly incoherent, but the Tranquil are willing to speak on his behalf. One of them, an elderly human woman named Leah, explains that Ser Avrum helped them escape safely when the Circle fell and protected them until his withdrawal symptoms overwhelmed him.
If prodded about why he’s done this with the right dialogue choices, Leah will briefly explain her personal history- she was once an apostate, and she hid her magic from Avrum when they were married in their youth. Eventually she became too fearful of her powers to bear her secret any longer and voluntarily turned herself over to the Circle, where her consistent failure to control her abilities resulted in her eventual request to receive the Rite of Tranquility. Unbeknownst to her at the time, her husband joined the Templar Order after she left him, neglecting to inform the Order that he had family in the Circle in order to secure an appointment there. By the time they saw one another again she had been made Tranquil. Ser Avrum has protected the Tranquil of Kinloch Hold as best he could from the neglect and cruelty of both mages and Templars ever since, for which the Tranquil, in their own way, are grateful. They follow him because they know that he represents safety they are unlikely to find elsewhere, and now that he has been crippled by his lifetime of lyrium addiction, they tend him because he was kind to them.
If you mention Rion in his presence, Ser Avrum breaks through the fog of his delirium long enough to become enraged, struggling to get up and search for the mage in order to kill him- he insists that Rion must be punished for some past transgression, but isn’t coherent enough to express what it was. You can, optionally, question the Tranquil further, and it will be revealed that the Tranquil are wary of Enchanter Rion because there was a scandal some 20 years ago during which Ser Avrum accused him of abusing Tranquil, but the previous Knight Commander swept it under the rug shortly before his retirement. The Tranquil know the charges to have been true.
You can, at any point in this conversation, still choose to kill the mostly-helpless Avrum, collect the Tranquil and return to Enchanter Rion. The Tranquil will follow you without objection. There you will have the option to confront Rion about the charges against him, but can also choose to say nothing or even to agree that the old Templar deserved it- the latter two choices enable you to collect Rion’s recruitment reward before you return to Marchon to finish the questline. The first may initiate combat depending on dialogue choices, but can also potentially be resolved without combat, in which case you can still collect Rion’s recruitment reward.
You can alternately choose to let Ser Avrum live, in which case you collect the Tranquil and Avrum’s recruitment reward, and get a quest to return and confront Enchanter Rion. If you question him further about why he wanted Ser Avrum dead, he will grudgingly admit that the old Templar was a thorn in his side for years and he just wanted to finally bury the hatchet of an old grudge… preferably in Avrum’s face.
Depending on your dialogue choices, Enchanter Rion may attack you at this point in his own defense, or you can choose to initiate combat yourself, either path resulting in a fight with him and his group of rebel mages, and their subsequent deaths. If you enter combat with Rion it will always result in his death, and you cannot collect his recruitment reward. If you let Enchanter Rion live, you can either demand that he and his mages leave the area, force him to submit to the judgement of the Inquisition for the past crimes of which he is accused, or you can allow him to bribe you with the offer of he and his followers’ services and thus collect his recruitment reward and Ser Avrum’s.
(If you let Ser Avrum live, you later discover that Commander Cullen knew Ser Avrum during his time as a young Templar in Kinloch Hold, where Avrum was in fact known as quite a terror to mages and Templar recruits alike. Apparently Ser Avrum has always been known for having a distinctly disagreeable personality. Cullen expresses the theory that Ser Avrum has managed to survive both the Broken Circle during the Blight and the recent mage rebellion purely by dint of being the toughest, meanest, stubbornest old sonuvabitch Thedas has probably ever seen.)
