Dragon Age II Dwarves, Elves, and Qunari Detailed

A new entry on BioWare’s Blog provides some background lore for three of the Dragon Age races as they’re envisioned in the sequel: the dwarves, elves, and qunari.

The people of the Qun are, perhaps, the least-understood group in Thedas. The Qunari Wars were brutal, but so was the Chantry Schism. So was the fall of the Imperium. Some of this misunderstanding is an accident of nature: The race we call (qunari) are formidable. Nature has given them fierce horns and strange eyes, and the ignorant look on them and see monsters.

Some is an accident of language: Few among the Qun’s people speak the common tongue, and fewer speak it well. In a culture that strives for mastery, to have only a passable degree of skill is humiliating indeed, and so they often keep quiet among foreigners, out of shame.

But much of it is a result of the culture itself. The qunari view their whole society as a single creature: A living entity whose health and well-being is the responsibility of all. Each individual is only a tiny part of the whole, a drop of blood in its veins. Important not for itself, but for what it is to the whole creature. Because of this, the qunari most outsiders meet belong to the army, which the Qun regards as if it were the physical body: Arms, legs, eyes and ears, the things a creature needs in order to interact with the world. One cannot get to know a person solely by studying his hand or his foot, and so one cannot truly (meet) the qunari until one has visited their cities. That is where their mind and soul dwell.

In Seheron and Par Vollen, one can truly see the qunari in their entirety. There, the unification of the qunari into a single being is most evident. Workers, whom the Qun calls the mind, produce everything the qunari require. The soul, the priesthood, seeks a greater understanding of the self, the world, and exhorts the body and mind to continually strive for perfection. The body serves as the go-between for the mind, the soul, and the world. Everyone and everything has a place, decided by the Qun, in which they work for the good of the whole. It is a life of certainty, of equality, if not individuality.

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