Since the Mass Effect trilogy remaster came out I've been on something of a Bioware kick, and being in a point in my life where most of my doctors are recommending writing, reading, and really anything else I can do to occupy all of this free time while keeping my brain active, I've found myself back to trying to write fanfiction for the first time in an eternity, and attempting to read it accordingly. Then it occurred to me that basically everything from when Bioware made decent games is probably a fandom on life-support, if not completely dead, and by now I'm just writing for an audience of one anyway.

Then I remembered that I'm a member of a forum for these things that is one of the few places I could conceivably go to ask for fics and actually receive replies that are not completely nightmarish.

I distinctly remember being referred to a few decent ME fics back when I was active here (I remember one in particular that I didn't love or anything but I remember being told to read multiple times on IRC and cannot find today; a drink-addled shepard trained at Jump Zero who was everyone's second-choice for the gig until the Hero of Elysium died) and the search I did before posting this thread points to there being people on here who have actually written dragon age fics, so there's definitely a much higher chance of actually finding something worth reading and maybe getting an honest assessment of the State of the Fandoms than I'd be able to find anywhere else.

With all that rambling out of the way: does anyone have any decent Mass Effect / Dragon Age / at a stretch, Knights of the Old Republic fics to recommend? My preference kind of trends towards newer ones because I'd like to see what the fandoms' have been up to in the last five or six years, but I'd settle for reading material anyone here thinks highly of.

 

This might be the specific ME fic you mentioned, and if it's not you should read it anyway. It has a sequel that is abandoned, but they're both still cracking fics from what I remember.

There's also Interstitium, which is one of the greatest pieces of fanfiction I've read. Real labour of love around ME2, and just an incredible piece of work.

 

I was a huge fan of Bioware games growing. Here is a few I like for Dragon Age:

The Telling Tale

Dreams of a New Age (Dragon Age Quest)
Up to end of Brecellain Forest quest then it goes downhill


Take It Back (DA/LoZ Dynasty Quest)
More LOZ then DA but stll fun though more of a kingdom building quest


Andraste's Chevalier (Warcraft x Dragon Age)

 

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/7300672/1/Corin

Summary: The provoking young Cousland Grey Warden stands squarely in the way of Anora's ambitions.

It's a political romance with a gary-stu cousland (to be fair, the Warden is an OP badass in the game anyways). It goes on for quite some time but I remember it being a fun read.

Surprisingly, or not surprisingly, most of the good ME fanfics tend towards Self-Inserts.


For KOTOR: None off the top of my head but some exist. I do know of a SWTOR fic I read recently on SB about a guy from our world who ends up getting sent to the sith academy. Is pretty decent.

https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/path-of-ruin-star-wars-si.541256/#post-36622370

I don't know of any 5 star fics though. You might get some in the 4 star range.

If you want a story with a similiar game vibe, Dragon From Ash for Skyrim is 5 star quality.

 

Dragon Age

Seconding the "Telling Tale". That was a good one and I still remember it years later. Though, unfortunately, it's not finished.

The probably most famous -- and, IMO, with the best world building -- is Victory at Ostagar. It is finished and very long. Sometimes, it seems too long, but if you enjoy world-building and focus on characters, then this is for you. But, be warned: the author liked some unconventional pairings and characters. Namely, Loghain. The same author also wrote Keening Blade and Dragonsteeth. Unfortunately, Keening Blade isn't finished, because the author died in 2016. It did end on a finished arc, though. Dragonsteeth is a series of what-ifs.

If you're not against trying something from DA:I, then Rest in the Warmest Places might interest you. It's post-canon DA:I and has Cassandra being a bad-ass. It is Cassandra/Varric, though.

Kotor

Kotor is difficult. There aren't a lot of good stories, unfortunately. Revanchism is pretty good, though it isn't finished. It's about Bastila joining Revan during the Mandalorian Wars. KOTOR:The Power of Choice was decent, IIRC, and finished.

 

Mass Effect:
Living an Indoctrinated Dream: A simple premise, the Illusive Man is sent back in time and gets to change things. It is a long story and has a slow start, but has a great portrayal of the Illusive Man, is not a canon rehash and can in my mind be considered a decent one.

Of Sheep and Battle: One of the big AUs in the mass effect fandom. It has a massive amount of angst and the influence of Warhammer can be seen. While I don't like it, I know that many consider it a great read.

Fight for the Lost: It is one of the few decent novelizations of canon. Some slight expansion of it, but mostly you are taken along the canon ride. Has follow-up works till the end of ME. Some problems with typos and grammar, but nothing problematic.

Uplifted: Yeah, this is truly a good story, but the themes and storyline is brutal. What else could it be if the Quarians uplifted the Nazis?

 

The best Dragon Age fic I've read is actually from one of our own:

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10209639/1/Blight-Queller

I don't remember much of it, beyond knowing I adore it. It might be time for a re-read.

Another DA fanfic that I'm very fond of is this one right here:

https://forums.darklordpotter.net/threads/mala-suledin-nadas-by-heartslogos-t-dragon-age.32683/

 

Thanks guys. Being able to just post as generic a request as this (after spending ten minutes trying to figure out if I was in the right subforum because I'm still not used to the jump to Xenforo) and immediately get a half-dozen genuine, positive replies, including from people I actually used to know, was genuinely the highlight of my uneventful day, and reminded me why I loved this place so much growing up. There's something so refreshing about being able to post a thread somewhere and not need to disable inbox replies for my sanity.

By the by, since I tend to prefer saying this upfront, sorry about the verbosity of this post and these replies. I'm aware that the way I write, particularly with my constant and often nested digressions and run-on sentences, and the number of words I inevitably use toe express simple concepts, can be annoying to a lot of people. This isn't deliberate. As best as I can tell it's a medication side-effect, and is a major part of this renewed interest in writing. -Fiat, after re-reading this post.

Rather than just sycophantically gushing about how much I love this place, though, I figured I might as well do my best to give back to the thread; A Mass Effect fic I've come back to over the years, over and over again, and is pretty much responsible for every ME kick I've gone on between 2012 and the remaster (weirdly enough, usually because of someone else mentioning it on completely unrelated subreddits) is Renegade, Peptuck's take on "what if his vision of the GDI from Tiberium Wars was the version of humanity that made first contact with the Turians".

The writing isn't perfect. Neither is the pacing, or the characters, and reading it as a 'finished' product all these years later, it bears the scars inherent to serialized fiction written weekly for a community of adoring fans a bit more openly than most fics I actually like. It feels very spacebattles, for lack of a better adjective, though obviously not to the degree of something like Glorious Shotgun Princess. More than that it feels very Military Sci-Fi, as in the genre and the style of prose commonly employed within it, and whether that's a good or bad thing depends on if you like that genre. As such it probably falls into the Guilty Pleasure pile rather than a true recommendation, but I just can't *not* bring it up.

I think the part that really speaks to me - and something about it absolutely does - is the crossover/fusion aspect, and how well done that is. It's always made me want to try my hand at something that captures a similar concept, and inspired several hundred pages of absolute trash I never posted anywhere back in University. And to me, there's always something special about those stories that just make you want to go out and write.

With that out of the way, I guess I should respond to specific things people said.

Yes, Mind over Matter is definitely that one fic someone I respected swore by repeatedly on IRC. That you found a story from that description says a lot and is ridiculously impressive.

I remember Interstitium by reputation, though I mostly just remember not being able to enjoy it for whatever reason. I'll definitely give it another go as a proper adult now, if only because I've heard praise for it phrased that adoringly more than once by authors on this site. My problem may well be that ME2 is the nadir of the series in my mind, though. I'm convinced you can see Bioware's classical development process and the failings of it on display in ME2 as clearly as you can in DAI or Anthem.

Yep, this has been one of my core problems with both attempting to write and attempting to read Mass Effect fanfiction, and bioware-series fiction in general. The main character is a literal self-insert, every time, and for the most part people only want stories about them...so they want stories about a blank slate who is going to be totally unrecognizable between stories.

It's simultaneously fertile ground because that's just what most fanfiction does anyway - hijacks a protagonist character and turns them into something else entirely to tell the story they want more easily than if people weren't attached to these names - and completely barren, because it's a lot harder to tell a story with the prompt "you can do whatever you like" than with limitations (i.e. character traits).

Plus, it's very easy for your version of that character to veer into so unrecognizable that the audience is no longer invested in them. Normally a fandom would just project consistent traits onto their new character, but it doesn't quite work here. Especially in Dragon Age where, at best, you could have a preferred fanon version of every possible Warden origin.

It's a real pain in the ass I'm not sure how to deal with, tbh.

The most interesting part of this comment is that from the way you worded this, am I to assume that the fandom's feelings on DA:I are at least conflicted enough that people won't read stuff about that part of the timeline? Because that's kind of a shame. As much as the game disappointed me, it presents some of the most interesting setting stuff to build on and plot hooks (well, obvious 'what if' scenarios, at least) to seize upon.

Cassandra/Varric is...a pairing that actually works surprisingly well, I guess, save him having a long-term significant other with whom he has a vaguely open relationship but is never going to actually leave, while she's practically ( possibly literally) sexually aroused by traditional societal norms and exaggerated fantasies of traditional gender roles. There's totally enough complexity there for an interesting love story there, just one that could only be bittersweet / tragic without the use of plot contrivances (Ron The Death Eater/Die For Our Ship).

That's genuinely the kind of thing I would like to see done right, as the focus of a story even, even though I'm not especially into romance stories. I doubt that is what the fic you just recommended is, but I'll definitely give it a read.

Honestly, any decent DA:I based stuff is probably my preference as far as recommendations go, if only because it's the most recent part of the franchise and represents an active fandom moving forward rather than people just quietly making their fanworks about one cRPG from the 360 era as, one by one, people inevitably lose interest.

I'll read anything KOTOR because those games defined my childhood (and two years of my relationship with a friend who died this year, so there's some complicated feelings there), but I know the fandom is mostly MMO players at this point. I'd be willing to sift through a lot of mediocre Mass Effect stuff if I knew where to find it because the best thing about Mass Effect was always the potential we all saw in the series and setting, and that they never delivered on it doesn't really matter because that's what fanworks are all about.

Dragon Age, even as things stand at the end of Tresspasser, is an incredibly interesting setting full of a ton of great and well-fleshed out characters, tons of potential divergence points to pick as easy plot-starters and most critically a great big world to play with such that the huge god-tier shit going on in the background doesn't necessarily have to influence much less dominate any story.

It's just that so many of those interesting divergence points hinge on Self-Insert characters each reader is going to expect to be different. IMO, you kind of need to focus primarily on someone other than the game PCs even if they're major players in your world to avoid running into Mary Sue problems. It doesn't hurt that the Hero of Ferelden is a canonical Mary Sue who can do fucking anything, apparently.

 

Speaking of KoTOR, I remember this being great. Candle In The Dark, a retelling of the first game with all the different plot threads given time and attention. It's complete too.

DA:I is a weird place for fiction - there is a metric fuckton of 'Modern Boy/Girl in Thedas', some more bearable than others. Once you sweep away the mountain of fics that are written to pair the insert with their husbando, there are some half decent ones left. Sky Touched is one that ticks a few boxes for me, being what I guess you'd call isekai but with an actually realistic degree of uplift (no to printing presses, but yes to basic sanitation) and an outsider's view on magic and what can be done with it. Plus the main characters are Avvar, which I dig.

 

I've got a lot of time for the Newtons Law series by Raven Studios, https://m.fanfiction.net/u/1558759/Raven-Studios They've recently finished the ME3 entry, with a planned epilogue apparently coming later in the year. Broadly, it's a novelisation of the trilogy with some tweaks and divergences here and there, but if that's not too much of a concern I'd say it's well worth a read. Starts with Cause and Effect, which covers Shepard's youth and early Alliance career.

 

Huh. I find that way more depressing than I should, I guess. I'm just not a fan of real / explicit self inserts, even less of a fan of the idea of "modern man goes to medieval fantasy world and shows them the wonders of technology', and Isekai is just the (again, my personal opinion, not pretending I'm unbiased) the worst form of self-insert, given legitimacy by a whole damn genre of it .

Like...the series is full of people you could just self-insert into and hook up with your waifu/husbando/whatever. There are ten million other ways you can go about this and this one if the one people are choosing?

Yeah, this kind of confirms to me that at this point I'm struggling to write fanfiction for an audience of one, because it doesn't seem like there's much of a conventional market for...well, actual fanfiction that tries to tell stories based on the series, And that's fine. When you're writing by yourself and too embarrassed at its quality to post it anywhere, the size of an entirely hypothetical reader base should have no impact on anything.

 

@Fiat

So take this recommendation with a grain of salt because I read this years ago, and the author himself says they wrote the first story in the series when they were 15 years old, but I have fond memories of Masses to Masses. It is a self-insert, so you know, if you're not into the tropes associated with this, skip it.

It's a pretty huge series, I don't recall if it covers the whole trilogy, but the unique thing about it I enjoyed the most are parts of the story that don't cover the events of the games. First in the series is when the SI ends up on the Citadel 2 years ahead of ME1 and spends that time palling around with Garrus in C-SEC. Then MtM2 is ME1, and MtM3 is a huge sprawling story about the SI joining Garrus' gang on Omega and that story develops Garrus' whole crew.

 

I found that most DA:I stories are either Mary Sues or SI and sometimes they're both. In most cases, if you filter by main pairings, you can anticipate if it is one or the other. I don't know how the fandom looks upon post canon DA:I stories. I haven't found many good ones I could recommend.

Though if you want one, where the Inquisitor doesn't simply fall in line right away, you might try Enemies to Lovers. It's the only story I found so far where a mage Inquisitor actually uses her power for her own goals. I'm not a fan of the Cullen romance, though.

As for Cassandra/Varric...yes, it surprised me when I first read that pairing, but I agree that it can and does work pretty well, if done right and mostly it doesn't have that tint of Mary-Sueism that so many stories have. For more of them, check out Dreaming Red.

For non-centric PC stories there's Apprentice Guerrin, a story about Connor Guerrin post DAO and into DA:I. Mind you, I've read it so long ago, I don't remember it very well.

 

Yes, I really liked The Telling Tale because it felt like the MC had agency and was proactive. Wish there were more stories like that. Dragon Age has such an amazing world to explore that I am super dissapointed when I read another railroaded romance. SI away but have them DO SOMETHING.

 

"Enemies to Lovers" being the title of a story is actually just so funny to me, because I've recently watched/read a ton of fandom retrospectives on the nature of fandoms and most fanfic within them (Iet's be real; the bulk of all fanfiction is written by teenage/preteen girls and some boys trying to work through and process the sorts of romantic relationship dynamics they like and don't like using characters and worlds that are already familiar to them) and the whole "enemies to lovers" trope comes up as an example of that all the damn time. That also says a lot about the state of the fandom, helpfully - I might be presuming a little too much but mentally I sort fandoms into a handful of different categories and the box for "it's all OCs /self-inserts/self-inserts onto OCs and romance" is like one box over from the Onceler fandom.

Sorry if that digression sounds like I'm mocking your earnest recommendations - I am not and sincerely appreciate you putting in the effort to keep coming back and provide responses to my obscure and kind of bizarre request. I'm genuinely not and will read it, I just find the completely on-the-nose title hilarious for reasons that are only barely connected to it.

And yeah, Inquisition is kind of a really hard one if you want to focus on the main character, because unlike the other two (the Warden has an established life and backstory that you actually play through and usually interact with again in some way during the game; Hawke is just an actual character with a whole family who are front and center) the character is 100% a PC. You determine your relationship with your family and past events in your life and who you did or didn't know via in-game dialogue options that a lot of players will never even encounter. Basically nothing is fixed about them for a writer to work with.

They are a total blank slate for the player to project onto. As a human mage, you could be the reviled black sheep of a family who is in love with the Templars, or Lord Daddy's Little Favourite whose wealth and privilege got him special treatment like the ability to leave the tower, earning the eternal hatred of your local Templars. Vivienne's friend could have been your mentor, or you could have never met her. That, unsurprisingly, makes it hard to write them because no matter what you do they're an OC who is also the fucking chosen one worshipped like a demigod, canonically does a ton of impossible things, and everyone just goes along with his decisions even when there's no real reason to - former prisoner/current soldier promises an alliance all of your leadership opposes, well shit, gotta keep our word - which basically makes a straight novelization of canon into a Mary Sue that can be hard to read.

Also, I'm really glad someone else commented on The Telling Tale, prompting me to actually open it; it basically starts on the exact premise I have been toying with lately and the one that prompted me to post this thread (though the various Transhumanist Mass Effect drafts I have piling up contributed at least as much). This is genuinely good - not just the writing and having something to read, but to allow me to both refine my own idea and avoid doing what others have already done better. I get the distinct impression that had I not clicked through and posted something (objectively terrible) in WBA in three months, there would have been accusations of plagiarism I wouldn't be able to defend from.

Edit: Though, I have to say, totally different ideas for stories, and mine definitely does not involve a grown woman fucking an emotionally vulnerable 15 year old, who the fandom primarily knows as a young child. First time I've been squicked out by fanfiction in a while.

 

Bruh what

 

That happens in The Telling Tale, the fic I was talking about in the previous paragraph, towards the end (who knows, maybe the author realized they'd gone down a weird fucking road and stopped writing for the same reason I stopped reading. The Warden-Commander takes Connor as an apprentice, and in a section where it literally mentions he's fifteen, fucks him.

I'm sure there's context (I was kind of skimming the chapter just to see where things were when it stopped updating, fairly early into my reading of the story) that potentially involves the kid's susceptibility to demons and the thin fade in the area or whatever but like...what is this I don't even.

I'm sure there was a point when I would have been totally cool with Teenage Harry Potter fucking Grown-Ass Woman Nymphadora Tonks or whatever because of the adolescent fantasy involved on the younger party's side. Hell, I'm pretty sure there was a point I would have high-fived a friend for the same thing at that age. But all distant past Harry/Molly shipping aside, The "Older Man or Woman on Literal Teenager of either gender who's still written a lot like a kid" thing is pretty squicky to me today.

And the author had to have had a real reason to do this - like, from a storytelling perspective, or in-universe one, or something else that made sense in their head, because it's not like anyone was ever getting wish fulfillment out of their Canon OC banging Connor. No one looked at that 3D model in 2010 and went "I wish I could romance them". Hell, I doubt anyone did that when they saw him in Inquisition either.

I have other criticisms of the story too, of course. It's very much the kind of story that used to be popular on this site a long time ago - where Harry has real agency and starts reshaping the Wizarding world to work better and be a better place and fixing everyone's prejudices and all the people/factions the author doesn't like end up flanderized to extremes. Then again, if it isn't an actual contemporary of those stories in the HP fandom, it's not far from being one, and does just seem to be a common kind of fic across fandoms (though I once thought of it as a phase most fandoms go through and eventually grow out of).

 

Well, there's a quick fix for that where fanfiction is concerned. I haven't ready any Mass Effect fics since I never played those games and I haven't really been impressed by any KOTOR fics I've read, but one exceptional Dragon Age fic I came across a while ago, Beyond Heroes: Of Sunshine and Red Lyrium, flips the blank slate Inquisitor thing on its head by making Bethany Hawke the Herald of Andraste. I need to get back to reading it, and it is told in epistulary style which might not be the best choice, but it's got excellent characterization and interactions as a result, and I'm sure you can imagine some of the resulting dilemmas.

 

Seconding these two so hard. Indoctrinated Dream is a peggy sue, but it's everyone's (least) favorite person, Martin Sheen Jack Harper himself who gets sent back in time. It really fleshes out the character in a way that the games never did, and is my personal favorite characterization of The Illusive Man.

OSaBC is the realpolitik version of Mass Effect, where the future isn't so squeaky clean and every race has its own share of dark secrets, including the Alliance. Also includes a flawed, imperfect Shepard who isn't the amazing supersoldier the games make them out to be and Admiral of the Red Tradius Ahern, a man so badass he manages to beat Shepard's entire team in full kit while he's wearing a basic spacesuit and using only a pistol.

 

Of Sheep and Battle Chicken is a case study in jumping the shark. I'd call the worldbuilding a 3-4/5 and the actual story 2/5.