Have you or someone you care about decided to play the fourth installment in the Dragon Age franchise without playing any of the prior games or having only played one or two of the previous entries? Has it been multiple years since you played a Dragon Age game and the constant stress of this past decade have driven all recollection of them from your mind? Well, I’ve got everything you need right here because I played through all of them, and every single bit of extra content, be it game expansions or downloadable content, in the last three months. Rather than bore you with the specifics of every single one of those games, though, I’m going to tell you everything you need to know to be able to make some amount of sense of the world based on the thirty-ish hours I’ve put into The Veilguard as of writing this on Monday afternoon (two days before this goes up) and what I’ve gleaned from other people about what I haven’t yet played. There will, of course, be spoilers for all of the three previous games (Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening, Dragon Age 2, and Dragon Age: Inquisition), but those games are at least ten years old and the entire point of this post is to tell you what you need to know, so I’m assuming you’ve already left if you want to avoid spoilers or don’t feel like there’s anything you need to know. They will be fairly light spoilers, scant on the details and the execution of things, so you should be able to enjoy yourself if you go back to the older games in the franchise after playing through Veilguard (but, honestly, probably don’t do that because the game play is RADICALLY different in the original game, more so in the second game, and then slightly less so in the third game), but you will know all the important bits from those games. Now, without further ado, Dragon Age: Origins: Awakening.

None of this game really matters. You play a Grey Warden, a member of an order that is established specifically to fight Darkspawn, creatures born of the “blight” (which the Grey Warden consume as part of their initiation rituals in order to better sense and combat said darkspawn) that occasionally rise up from beneath the ground to try to destroy all of life (this is the fifth time). You get betrayed, you call in some favors, either usurp or recruit the betrayer, and then kill the leader of the darkspawn (known as an Archdemon). None of this will come up and, at this point, only serves as worldbuilding and setting the stage for later games by introducing a bunch of background information that will only be relevant in passing in the second and third games and then, apparently, entirely irrelevant in this, the fourth game.

In Dragon Age 2, you play a character who is leading their family away from the invading darkspawn from the first game. They all sail across the sea, take refuge in a place called Kirkwall, and slowly the protagonist works their way up through an entirely unbelievable meritocracy until they’re known as the Champion of Kirkwall because they got a bunch of people (the Qunari, who ARE eventually important, even if their involvement in this game isn’t) to stop destroying Kirkwall just by kicking the ass of their boss. Once you’re at the top of the heap, so to speak, it turns out the incredibly authoritarian leader of the Kirkwall Magic Police (known as templars but “Magic Police” is better because it carries with it the abuse of power that the word “Templar” doesn’t always conjure to mind) has been losing her mind due to the corrupting influence of the Red Lyrium (which will be a background detail by the time the 4th game happens) she made her sword out of. Even before that, though, she was lobotomizing mages willy-nilly, which pissed of a bunch of mages, and one of them (a companion whose name will likely never come up again) decided it was a good idea to blow up a church about it because then it would FORCE the mages to completely rebel since the Magic Police would be coming for them anyway. This, of course, drove the Authoritarian Magic Police General Lady fully off the grounds of sensibility, burned most of the city down, and saw your character rise to their full prominence either by siding with the Magic Police and putting down the rebellious mages (your companion included) or by siding against the Magic Police for their egregious abuses of power that drove the mages to drastic measures in order to protect themselves. It doesn’t matter which you do because all that matters is a church got blown up, a rebellion got started, and that you, somewhere in all that (the DLC is set up to be able to happen at literally any point in your playthrough), got tricked into letting an ancient, unkillable evil out of a prison that had successfully contained it for at least a thousand years because that ancient evil could trick people who had been corrupted by the blight (like grey wardens and darkspawn). Yes, it is obvious that this evil actually possessed someone you were helping when you “killed” it. No, you can’t do anything about it.

In Dragon Age: Inquisition, the mage rebellion has turned into a giant war between the mages and the Magic Police. The church, the greatest imperial power in the world of this franchise, has been trying to reconcile the groups without success. Then, the guy your protagonist let out of prison in a Dragon Age 2 DLC shows up with a magic ball that blows up the peace talks, the mages and Magic Police blame each other, and your character is installed as the figurehead of the militant order trying to take control of the chaos by trading on the authority of the now-dead leader of the church because they’re the sole survivor of the explosion. Which granted them special magic powers that one of your early companions was somehow able to help you control and prevent from consuming you utterly. If you’re playing a female elf, you learn enough about this male Elf, Solas, to figure out that he’s definitely way more than he appears to be, something that is eventually revealed at the end of the base game when he turns an ancient, powerful witch/”god” to stone and steals her soul(s) (whether she has more than one depends on choices you made in previous games that no longer matter past Inquisition). If you, however, played any type of person OTHER than a female Elf, he’s just kind of a bossy, condescending, know-it-all who thinks you’re stupid and takes every opportunity he gets to imply that the people around him don’t compare to the lofty pedestal he is placed upon by the natural order of things. There’s a lot more game in there, but none of it matters other than you killing the bad guy so thoroughly that the whole world notices and, two years after the end of the game (and the moment that bald, egg-headed jerk-ass Elf Solas disappeared without a word), they decide you’ve had your power long enough and decide to take it from you during what coincidentally turns out to be the weekend your special magic powers are going to kill you.

Turns out the only stuff that matters from this game, other than introducing Solas and letting you decide if your character feels angry or sad about his choice to leave you (after taking your arm so your magic thingy won’t kill you and being a real sad sack about it if you were a female elf who romanced him and pined after him and let him be a self-pitying edgelord about it all), is stuff set up in the DLCs. Sure, the big one (Trespasser) ends with the whole “take apart the Inquisition because they’re too powerful” and your inquisitor losing an arm to Solas’ misguided attempts at mercy while he still follows a plan that will doom the world anyway, but the other two end in ways that don’t matter but do establish lore that DOES matter. One of them, Jaws of Hakkon, lets the players know that the chantry is full of shit and has heavily rewritten history to keep Elves and magic down (which we already knew) but also showed us that all the “gods” of the world are just powerful spirits (beings who live in the realm of magic) that have been let into the material world. Also that these spirits, should they be sufficiently powerful, can be stuffed into dragons in a way that turns them into enormously powerful threats (which explains why all the Old Gods have dragon forms or are maybe just spirit-empowered dragons). The other one, “The Descent,” tells us that Lyrium–magic supposedly in mineral form–is actually the blood of creatures called “Titans” and that that the Dwarves are related to them somehow. Also that Dwarves, who have been magic-less for all three games, can do magic if they get in contact with a Titan, which happens to one of your companions in this DLC but in a really weird way that leaves you wondering if this magical awakening was a good thing or a bad thing. It’s great that Dwarves have access to magic (only magic about stones and rocks, because the games are nothing if not thematic), but it really raises some questions about why the Dwarves worked so hard to forget about all of this… This stuff is also important because it finally explains why Red Lyrium is a thing: Red Lyrium is just normal Lyrium that has the blight (which it can catch because Lyrium isn’t actually a mineral, just very much like a mineral. Which you’d probably have guessed is true given how many people drink it to empower their magic), which was a central part of Inquisition and is just sort of background information in Veilguard since now everyone has Red Lyrium even though it doesn’t seem to be actively spreading the way it did in Inquisition.

There’s probably other stuff that is good to know, given how many characters have once again graced my screen while I’ve been playing Veilguard, but this stuff is all you really need to know. Everything else gets sufficiently explained as you play and Veilguard actually has a pretty comprehensive glossary to help you out if you’re not sure what any of the terms mean. I’d also recommend reading all of the Codex/Lore information you get as it comes up, since it says a lot about the state of the world and all of the people moving within it, but the game is pretty good at making sure you can still enjoy your experience without it. You’re just going to have to deal with a lot of references that don’t land for you because Veilguard, the sequel we all waited a decade for, has to pay off that wait somehow and just really milks some of the reveals. Which probably doesn’t feel like a milked reveal if you don’t know what’s happening. Then it’s probably just a character introduction that maybe lasts a little too long. Regardless! If you’ve read this blog post, you known everything you need to know and most of it isn’t terribly biased! I mean, I’ll admit to enjoying my dislike for Solas (because that bald little man needs to just slow down and, like, talk to people for just a bit so he can be grounded by someone explaining to him that his ideas are fucking whack), but the guy has some issues and at no point is the game ever really trying to make him look like the good guy. I’m just having some flavorful fun with my depictions of him. So now you know everything you need to know and can go into the game with all the important callbacks explained. Enjoy!