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Nine years ago, a mass hallucination woke what had been a sleepy section of southern Ferelden into screaming anarchy. Reports of people exhibiting strange powers, turning into monsters, and killing everyone around them ran rampant. In the end, an estimated twenty thousand people lost their lives, and three hundred thousand were displaced—shuttled from refugee camp to refugee camp. Much of the land from Lothering to Ostagar remains uninhabitable.
They called it The Panic, as if it had been merely the fancies of terrified farmers.
There’s a city on the shores of the Waking Sea that sprawls inelegantly between Sundermount and the rocky beaches, a city built on the bones and ashes of legends. It’s a city of glass skyscrapers and ramshackle slums, where elves and humans and qunari and dwarves rub shoulders, albeit sometimes unwillingly and always uncomfortably. People are drawn here by the promise of a new life from all corners of the world. On occasion, they even find one.
This is New Kirkwall.
And change is coming, whether or not anyone wants it.