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For 16 years, Dragon Age fans have flocked to the fantasy world of Thedas. Across the series' four RPGs, players have overcome betrayal and one disaster after the next; becoming unlikely heroes with powerful allies. True to the spirit of the series, when Dragon Age's creative team was disbanded in 2025 following the launch of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, those same fans quietly rallied to carry its legacy forward through a fan-made compendium.
With a decade of development hell and ballooned costs behind it, the fourth mainline Dragon Age had an uphill climb to be labeled "profitable" by EA. Hopes were high, despite the deck stacked against its developers at BioWare, but unfortunately, sales weren't high enough. Expectations were missed by half. Six months later, BioWare laid off the over 100 developers who worked on Dragon Age, effectively icing the series.
With the future of Dragon Age unclear, many took heart in a Bluesky post by writer Sheryl Chee. "There's fic. There's art. There's the connections we made through the games and because of the games," it read. "Technically EA/BioWare owns the IP but you can't own an idea, no matter how much they want to. DA isn't dead because it belongs to you now."
In February 2025, 7 fans (credited by their Tumblr handles) formed the "Mod Team," to helm an ambitious homage: a third volume for The World of Thedas tie-in encyclopedias, whose first two volumes were published by BioWare and Dark Horse Comics in 2013 and 2015.
"Creating something fun by fans, for fans, felt like embracing [Chee's words]," Dalishlicious, the founding mod, tells me. "All of a sudden we got to see more of this continent than we ever had in the three previous games combined, even if limited to one game's runtime. Which means we have a lot of new pieces to play with, but not necessarily answers to go with them," said Ser Atlantisite, the mod who led the art group. "As a fan drawn in initially by Dragon Age's theme of 'we have no answers, only legends and interpretations,' it's a really compelling place to be left in."
Every story has its heroes
Dragon Age The Veilguard review: "an approachable, expansive action-oriented RPG and feels like a true end to whatever the franchise was before."
During the next 10 months, the Mod Team recruited an additional 30 writers and 39 artists to produce 125 art pieces and over 100,000 words.
"It was a lot of managing in different segments by various mods and coordinating through a Discord server with deadlines, reminders, extensions, and checkpoints," formatting mod DalishRanger explains. "Not to mention various technical issues when compiling the book at different stages, which we've affectionately nicknamed Blights (a reference to the disease-like phenomenon in Thedas)."
The team didn't want the end result to be a standard fanzine, either. Meetings were held to determine how it could sit next to the original volumes authentically, in style, tone, layout, and detail. At the same time, they wanted contributors to have ownership over the project. It was a delicate balance — a "process,'" as social media mod Poppy, who saw every step as the first to join Dalishlicious, phrases it.
"It did help that there was a lot of teamwork from all parties involved," she says. "Our contributors were joined in groups to tackle their chapters and I would often see the conversations flowing and everyone was super excited. There were hurdles in our way, sometimes life happens, but in the end it all worked out."
The World of Thedas Volume 3 was completed in December. Just in time for release on Dragon Age Day, on December 4
Studying each page, it's impossible not to admire the passion holding the book together. Dragon Age may be on ice, yet for almost a year, over 70 people chose to dedicate spare time to making their love for the series tangible. It's not only an answer to Sheryl Chee's Bluesky post, but an embodiment of it.
Perhaps more importantly, it's a needed reminder that success and value ought not be solely measured by financial profit, and that executives aren't the final arbiters of artistic legacies and human worth. They may like us to believe they are; according to the State of the Industry 2026 report, one in four developers were laid off in the past two years. Ubisoft alone shut down 2 studios, canceled 6 projects in development, and laid off over 200 staff in January. Meta cut 1,500 people from its Reality Labs division. And tech companies across the board continue to gut the people who built them. The year has barely begun.
The great beyond
"If EA won't give us a Dragon Age 5, I will!"
DalishRanger
In this light, it's easy to ask ourselves what the point of anything is. Why invest ourselves in an industry that will not invest in us? But every now and then, something like World of Thedas Volume 3 comes along. A reminder that most people do what they do because they believe in the ability to connect, communicate with, and comfort people in their lives and people they'll never meet.
"I loved Dragon Age so much that I applied for the zine before I actually played [Veilguard]," graphics mod Epilogue shares. They ended up live-streaming their playthrough of it for their fellow mods on Discord.
Every mod cites Dragon Age's unique take on the fantasy genre, storytelling, and characters as elements of the series' values. Many of the contributors to World of Thedas Volume 3, including Poppy and Epilogue, only journeyed to Thedas after Veilguard's release in 2024. Others arrived at the fictional continent two decades ago. But it's clear that though they came for BioWare's worldbuilding, Dragon Age's ability to reflect themselves back at them and its strong fan community are what will fuel them to hang around for 2026 and beyond.
In fact, we know at least one fan who's plotting the next instalment at weekly tabletop games with friends. "As a gamemaster," DalishRanger explained, "if EA won't give us a Dragon Age 5, I will!"
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