Dragon Age: Origins

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LynxThinks

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LynxThinks

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About this mod

A subtle head morph for Tamlen that's lore-friendly and uses minimal outside mods. (Updated)

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**This mod description contains spoilers for Dalish origins!**

I'm on my first Dalish origins playthrough and I think Tamlen deserves a little better. BioWare NPCs all sort of look old, so I did some subtle tweaking to Tamlen to make him look a bit younger and even less deserving of the fate he got. Included is his ghoul version, because I'm still a little unsure why Tamlen is the only ghoul that loses his hair while Hespith and Ruck got to keep theirs.

Changes Made (Simple)
I tried my damndest to make him as close to his in-game morph as possible, while also subtly making him look a little younger. His ears are a bit more elfy, the eyes are sized up, and I did my best to color pick as exact as I could to the original. His ghoul version has hair (obviously) and uses the same face as the morph, with very few changes. See the Details section towards the bottom if you want to know exactly what's different or if you wanted to color pick for another morph.

Mod Requirements
Thanks to some feedback (thanks, Makacha!) it turns out I did use some textures from Dracomies True Textures (located within the Dragon Age Redesigned mod) and Pineappletree's Vibrant Colors. While I originally set out to remake Tamlen using zero mods, I can't bring myself to give up the textures I used, and so the mod requirements list has been updated. If there are any other problems, please let me know!
Mods pictured, but not necessary: wes47's Light Armor Replacement Mod because I personally loathe in-game light armor (armor is to cover your soft squishy bits, not to show them off) so if that interests you, you should definitely check it out.

Installation Instructions
Unzip and place in Documents\BioWare\Dragon Age\packages\core\override. To uninstall, simply delete them, no need to restart the game. Rar contains two files: Tamlen's alive face morph (em_bed100_tamlen.mor) and Tamlen's ghoul face morph (em_cam110_tamlen.mor). If you want one and not the other, just delete the one you don't want.


This took maybe 4-5 hrs starting from zero knowledge of the toolset. Overall, I'm pretty happy with it. It was definitely a labor of love and was made for personal use, but I figure I can't be the only one who is bothered by some of BioWare's design choices. The two files should be all you need to morph him completely, since the Urn of Sacred Ashes quest utilizes the same head morph as the Dalish origins one, but I haven't reached that part in the story yet. If it turns out to be different, I'll note here.


Details
It turns out Tamlen has brown hair (I think I ended up settling on brown 3 or 4 as his canon hair color from Pineappletree's Vibrant Colors) and I darkened his eyebrows by one level compared to that (brown 5). His skin tone was altered a little, for aesthetic reasons. His original is most likely just one tone (t03) but I morphed it with the freckled female (freckledfema2, Dracomies) skin tone because I figured more elves should have freckles if they're going to be out in the sun that often. The eyes are a bit more blue compared to the original teal color and his (red) vallaslin is a little lighter than original for no other reason than I had to force myself to stop messing with it because it was getting late.

The ghoul version included has most of the same changes above. His cheeks were made more gaunt and I lowered his brows a bit to make him look sad. The hair was darkened all the way to black (bk3), with eyebrows also darkening to black (blk). His eyes were lightened to white (wht) as well. He's using the same ghoul texture for his skin as in vanilla (but utilizes Dracomies updated texture: dracoinfa) and he still has a vallaslin because face tattoos don't go away just because you're a ghoul and I'm pretty sure BioWare just plain forgot.