Okay, so I've mentioned on Twitter how I'm going through DA2 again, trying to pick up the last few trophies that I hadn't gotten on my other three and a half plays. There are only three trophies that I need to get the plat, plus the friendship/rivalry trophy for Sebastian. In addition, I'm trying to get the Sebastian romance completed, just to say that I have. All's been going well--made a rogue, avoided flirting with everyone else, and was about to head into the Deep Roads to finish Act 1. I had been very careful in any quest-related areas that I knew I couldn't return to, making sure I'd gathered up every crafting resource in each area, since "Supplier" is most time consuming of the three trophies I need. It occured to me more than once that I should probably print out a list of every resource in the game with its location, but with the exception of the Bone Pit Mines, I knew I had gotten every item out of every quest area, and I could always go back to the Mines to get anything I'd missed there.

The good news, I guess, is that I did in fact check my list for Act-One-completion before heading down to the Deep Roads and I was right! I'd successfully found every single crafting item I thought I had, and the only ones left were in areas I could return to any time, like the Wounded Coast in general. Unfortunately, when I went back to the Bone Pit to recheck the mines (I figured I left some lyrium down there) the icon on the map for the mine entrance was still on the map, but the entrance itself was invisibly roped off by the game and I couldn't get inside.

Well fuck, there went about 10 hours of gameplay.

Anyway, I went back and remade Ria (all my Hawkes outside of the first Marian and Garrett have names that are a play on the original default name, omitting letters or syllables here and there) last night and started Act 1 over. I'm just shy of five hours back into the game, I'm a bit over half way through the Act, and I'm marking each material off a list before continuing from one area to the next this time. I've got all the items but the ones in the Bone Pit and the Tal-Vashoth cavern, excluding those found during the Deep Roads expedition.

As for the other two trophies I need for completion, that's just Master Craftsman & Archaeologist. I should have had archaeologist last time through, but forgot in Act 3 to get a third "Band of Three" codex entry. Master craftsman should be much easier, since you only have to craft everything from one of the crafting trees, the potions tree only has six recipes to begin with, and from what I understand (I'm marking these off on a list as I go as well) you get all of those recipes by the end of Act 2.

In the meantime, as inspiration for my goal of getting the Sebastian romance this game, I've been reading DA2 fics featuring him lately. Lots of these are angst-ridden, but the best ones are by far the ones that either feature Isabela being a bad influence on Hawke and convincing her to taunt the poor choir boy, Isabela taunting him herself, or are complete and unabashed smut that turn out to be Varric embellishing the story to Cassandra again, pissing her off and having her call him on his bullshit. Actually, I might just switch from searching for Sebastian fics altogether and set my search to character = Varric / genre = humor and see what I find overall. I can't imagine any character in the game would be as much fun to tease as Sebastian, but I'm sure there have to be a few good fic authors out there who can handle Varric's story-telling prowess.