Dragon Age: Redemption

Dragon Age is a computer roleplaying game that first came out in 2009 from BioWare and has continued in a 2011 sequel- Dragon Age II. The setting has been expanded into other media such as tabletop roleplaying games, novels, comics, and now a web series.

There are two novels out now and one very soon making a trilogy set in the Dragon Age setting written by David Gaider. It looks like sometime in 2012 there will be a Dragon Age comic book.

I have very little experience with the Dragon Age computer games or the tabletop RPGs. We do know that the tabletop paper and pencil game was produced by Green Ronin which as proven itself to be a pretty good little game company. The blog is a fan of True20 for example. The BioWare game is considered the spiritual successor to the AD&D Baldur's Gate computer game series. There are flash games based on the setting in Facebook and Google+.

The series is a low budget web series hosted on YouTube by Machinema. The production quality of the series is pretty high with even some big names on board. In fact it was through the star's Google+ posts that even landed the series on my radar- Felicia Day promotes the series shamelessly.

Felicia Day has made a nice career for herself working with Joss Whedon on projects like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. She has also been in the recently cancelled Eureeka and can be seen all over Google+. Her own web series, The Guild, has done quite well winning a few awards even. I intend to look into the show at a later date.

We just looked at JourneyQuest, another YouTube fantasy web series. JourneyQuest takes itself far far less serious than Dragon Age. It also is created on a much smaller budget (or so it would appear) and half of the point of it's existence is to be made without a large financial backing like Machinima, etc. Dragon Age is the better production because of it's advantages, actors, and an already established setting, but I still favor JourneyQuest because it definitely has more heart and the generic fantasy setting is great and practically universal. Also, JourneyQuest doesn't have a Mature ESRB rating like Dragon Age does! (although, some of it's jokes might warrant one)

Here are the first four episodes: