


There's Duncan, who initially recruits you to the Wardens, whose heritage is mixed with Rivaini. There's also Isabela, the Rivaini pirate who can teach you the Duelist specialization. Except these NPCs and a few incredibly minor encounters (blink and you'll miss 'em) on the map, there aren't many characters easily identifiable as people of color, like Zevran Arainai, the Antivan assassin who you encounter after he's been hired to kill you. Let's have a look at the history of representation in my favorite game series.Īcross the series' first two games, it seems that except for a handful of NPCs (non-player characters), Thedas is overwhelmingly white. So if we know brown folks definitely existed in actual Medieval Europe, why are they absent from a made-up fantasy world only loosely inspired by Medieval Europe? Where are the brown folks in Dragon Age's Thedas? My colleague MedievalPOC's blog uses art, history and other resources to regularly debunk the broad but rarely-questioned misconception that only white people were around in medieval times. Elves, magic, dragons, shapeshifting and ancient powers of world destruction are somehow totally believable, but the idea that brown people might exist is somehow not.
