This week we\u2019re going to have a bit of fun looking at some of the interesting armor choices for the recent Dragon Age: The Veilguard<\/em>. In a way, this is an extension of the post on \u201cThe Problem with Sci-Fi Body Armor<\/a>,\u201d because I think Veilguard<\/em> provides a pretty exceptional example of visual character-design armor borrowing from other character designs \u2013 rather than from historical armors or armoring principles \u2013 resulting in some odd outcomes and unusual patterns.<\/p>\n That said, before we get in, I want to clarify this isn\u2019t a review<\/em> of DA:VG<\/em>. For what it is worth, I liked the game, though I found the move away from what I\u2019d term \u2018sociological storytelling\u2019 \u2013 the emphasis on culture, politics and institutions in previous titles \u2013 really disappointing as that had been a major strength of the Dragon Age<\/em> titles and Veilguard<\/em> gives it much<\/strong><\/em> less attention, a real shame because we were at last in Tevinter! That said, the combat is good, the companions are mostly agreeable and the Big Lore Reveals are mostly fairly well handled and also appropriately Big. The writing is uneven and one can feel the scars of executive meddling, but the end result isn\u2019t bad. It\u2019s a shame it may be the end of the franchise, given the way Bioware is going \u2013 cursed by a decade of catastrophic mismanagement by EA \u2013 but at least DA:VG<\/em>, if it is the last entry, closes the circle on a lot of the Big Questions raised in the first three games in a satisfying way.<\/p>\n But that\u2019s not what we\u2019re here to focus on, we\u2019re here to focus on the armor design. And it should be noted at the outside that the Dragon Age<\/em> games have always had something of a \u2018house style\u2019 in armor design<\/strong> (particularly the first two). Interestingly, while I\u2019m going to be fairly critical of a lot of designs here, DA:VG<\/em> makes some notable alterations to that \u2018house style\u2019 towards better, more function designs: there are now choices without comically oversized pauldrons, and the breastplates are all properly shaped now (as opposed to the flat-and-too-long designs from the early Dragon Age<\/em> titles). As we\u2019ll see, they still struggle with tassets and faulds, but the old bad solution of \u2018skirt of something with tassets on the sides where they don\u2019t cover anything\u2019 is out and that\u2019s at least some improvement.<\/p>\n Veilguard<\/em>\u2018s other deviation from the \u2018house style\u2019 is that it takes a \u2018shotgun\u2019 approach to armor designs, from some pieces that seem almost historical in their design to other outfits that are pure absurd fantasy. Part of that comes out of Veilguard\u2019s effort to express several different cultures (Rivain, Tevinter, Daelish, Nevarra and the Grey Warden\u2019s Orlesian-anchored style) with very different outfit designs. The raw variety means that there are both a lot of very silly<\/em> designs, of course, but also some interesting designs as well. It\u2019s a little messy and all over the place, much like the game itself, but in the end I quite enjoyed it.<\/p>\n But first, as always, if you want to help me afford my own suit of historically accurate armor,, you can support me and this project on Patreon<\/a>. Equipment, as I always stress, isn\u2019t cheap! If you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on twitter (@BretDevereaux) and Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social) and (less frequently) Mastodon(@bretdevereaux@historians.social) for updates when posts go live and my general musings; I am in the process of shifting over more fully to Bluesky than Twitter, given that the former has, of late, become a better place for historical discussion than the latter.<\/p>\n I want to start with the bags and pouches, because they were the first things I saw that made me think I ought to write this up. DA:VG<\/em> really loves bags and pouches; a notable slice of its outfits have not just one or two pouches but a host of them, strung along belts and bandoliers all over the place. I\u2019ve pulled a few examples; for the sake of keeping them straight as I talk about them, I\u2019ve lettered them on the image below:<\/p>\n Now, I suspect for a lot of players, these pouch-heavy designs (note, specifically, box pouches<\/em>) look practical and ready, the sort of thing for a character who isn\u2019t some pampered knight, but a work-a-day adventurer who has to carry their own kit. And I can see the appeal for designs that indicate that sort of practical mindset, as compared to some of the flashier, more posh-looking armor.<\/p>\n You can see the same sort of thinking going into something like Skyrim\u2019s Thieves Guild armor. Clearly folks like the design a lot because a mod that repurposed assets to allow players with other armor to equip bandoliers and pouches in the same style<\/a> has also been very popular in the Skyrim modding scene. So clearly this isn\u2019t just<\/strong><\/em> a Veilguard<\/em> thing.<\/p>\n That said, if you go looking at pre-1500 armor, you will not find a lot of box-pouches. Indeed, given the prevalence of bandoliers, pouches, satchels and so on in the depiction of fantasy \u2018adventuring kit,\u2019 the modern reader may be surprised to find functionally no pouches<\/em><\/strong> on medieval or ancient armor or campaign wear. A soldier\u2019s gear was instead carried in a pack, sometimes (as with the Roman sarcina<\/a><\/em>) at the end of a stick to make it easier to carry, or sometimes in a satchel or hunting bag<\/a>. If you had a horse, of course, saddle bags might equally store supplies and other necessities.<\/p>\n And that actually makes a fair bit of sense: if you expect to be fighting in close combat, you hardly want anything on your person adding encumbrance or weighing you down or providing an extra easy hand-hold for someone to grab and pull at. And more to the point, your ancient or medieval soldier doesn\u2019t need them<\/em> because he has nothing to put in a bag or pouch that he needs to grab in combat<\/em><\/strong>. His primary weapon and shields, after all, are carried in his hands, his armor is worn on his person, his backup weapon is in a scabbard at his waist\u2026and that\u2019s it. Archers might carry arrows in a quiver, of course and slingers stones in a small bag, but that\u2019s just one small container of clear and distinct purpose, generally at the waist. This is just a design feature one does not find<\/strong><\/em> in the kind of technological environment posited in these games.<\/p>\n But of course that made me wonder where<\/em> all of these pouches, as a visual design language, were coming from. Because there is a kind of soldier who has a use for a whole bunch of pouches and pockets all over the front of their equipment so they can quickly grab at things: gunpowder infantry<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n Of course the way that gunpowder infantry store their ammunition varies based on the sort of weapons they use; it is technologically sensitive. Above, you can see how an early musketeer might carry his ammunition. The cartidge hasn\u2019t been invented yet, so his ammunition load comes in three distinct parts: measured powder charges for the main charge (loaded down the muzzle) carried in small wooden vials attached to his bandolier, a powder horn (the canister over his leg) for priming the pan before firing and of course the actual bullets, in the pouch at the base of bandolier. Note he also carries a lit matchcord (in his left hand, just over the butt of the musket, lit at both ends, so if one end went out, it could be used to reignite the other) but has a spare matchcord, unlit, also dangling from his bandolier. This fellow is pre-flintlock, so he is relying on that lit matchcord to ignite the powder in the pan of his musket which in turn sets off the main charge which sends the bullet down range.<\/p>\n By contrast, for the soldier using a paper cartridge<\/strong>, carrying his ammunition was made a lot simpler: cartridges could be carried in a cartridge box, typically a single, square leather box with rigid sides, carried on a shoulder-belt and suspended at the waist for easy access. The paper cartridge might contain enough powder to both prime the pan and load the musket, removing the need for a separate powder horn or powder flask, which of course was useful both to speed loading as well as reducing the amount of loose black powder in a combat situation, which reduced the chance of your musketeer exploding at an inopportune time. Consequently, where your early musketeer has a bandolier with a whole bunch of wooden powder flasks hanging off of it, with the paper cartridge, all of that fits into a single cartridge box. There\u2019s generally not a need to carry multiple boxes, because these weapons fire so slowly.<\/p>\n But that\u2019s not what we see here; what we see here is a chest rig with at least half a dozen large pouches, generally rectangular in shape. And it was actually in looking at Armor C, with its huge<\/em> chest-mounted squared off box-pouches that I realized what was driving this tend, which I will note I\u2019ve also seen everywhere<\/em> in fantasy adventurer concept and character art. It is, of course, this:<\/p>\n Modern<\/em> combat load equipment generally includes a whole mess of pouches \u2013 or in more sophisticated versions, a modular pouch attachment system, as with NATO\u2019s MOLLE <\/a>\u2013 for carrying all sorts of things. Now some of this is what we might term general equipment: communications equipment, water, first aid kits, and so on. But most of it is for magazines<\/em><\/strong>. Because a modern soldier has to carry a staggering<\/em> amount of ammunition. While a soldier using paper cartridges and firing a muzzle-loading musket or rifle might have carried ammunition for just a few dozen shots, the standard U.S. Army combat load, I believe, includes something like 210 rounds of ammunition, which is seven<\/em> 30-round magazines. Those magazines need to be carried in combat and they need to be carried somewhere they can be retrieved quickly and without looking, thus they end up carried (and indeed have been since the World Wars) on waist- or chest-mounted rigging in the front where they can be easily reached. Because magazines are generally rectangular(ish), the pouches that carry them also<\/em> tend to be rectangular<\/strong>.<\/p>\n And, just so this doesn\u2019t remain unsaid: you are only going to keep on your person<\/em> in these sorts of pouches things you need in a fight<\/em>.<\/strong> Marching equipment, supplies, those neat crafting ingredients you picked up, those are all going to go in a marching pack, either carried or worn, which can be dropped<\/em> if you get into a fight. In short, what I think is happening with the proliferation of pouch-heavy fantasy armor designs \u2013 especially with lots of on-the-front square or rectangular pouches \u2013 is that that artists, riffing off of later gunpowder<\/em> equipment, have imported elements of that equipment into a context where they don\u2019t actually make a great deal of sense.<\/strong><\/p>\n As an aside, the usual counter-argument here is that these pouches are either for potions or reagents. But as we\u2019ve already seen, even just ammunition pouches<\/em> change in form substantially depending on how the ammunition is carried, so I have to imagine the carrying system for \u2018magical ammunitions\u2019 like potions or reagents would equally be different. For one thing, cartridges are uniform, but reagents and potions might be particularized; you need a way to make sure you aren\u2019t grabbing the wrong one! Of course in the case of DA:VG<\/em> it doesn\u2019t really matter: the only in-setting reagent is lyrium (carried in glass bottles) which is no longer represented in the game mechanics and in this game potions have been streamlined into a single resource of which you only carry three.<\/p>\n But even in a Dungeons and Dragons<\/em> setting with lots of reagents and potions, I think we might well imagine them carried differently than modern warfare-inspired box-pouch webbings. Personally, I actually think the early gunpowder bandoliers might represent an easier way to carry such things: premeasured amounts stored in wood bottles (more durable and much cheaper than glass). For that purpose, modern magazine pouches or mid-19th century cartridge boxes (Armor A appears to have one on the right leg) probably aren\u2019t ideal. Everyone so often I see one of these where the bandolier is a potion bandolier<\/em>, with slots for each standardized potion vial to fit in and that actually makes a lot more sense to me in a fantasy setting.<\/p>\n But what I find most interesting here is the way in which the self-referential nature of fantasy armor design has taken a design element \u2013 lots and lots of pouches \u2013 which is almost entirely out of place in this context<\/em> and made it somewhat standard<\/em> as a way to signal that a design is \u2018practical.\u2019<\/strong> <\/p>\n That said, we also have some oddities with armor, and we can start with my perennial complaint:<\/p>\n This, of course, picks up directly<\/em> where our pieces on The Problem with Sci-Fi Body Armor <\/a>left off. There we noted that using rigid materials to armor a human body without inhibiting movement is an extremely solved<\/em> problem \u2013 that is, humans have already come up with a wide range of solutions on how to do this effectively. One of the key problem areas for armorers is the waist<\/strong>. To fight effectively in close combat, humans need to be able to bend and turn at the waist, so any armor there needs to allow a wide range of motion. Consequently, the breastplate \u2013 the rigid plate covering the upper-torso \u2013 can\u2019t extend much further than the natural waist<\/em> (the thinnest point on your torso, which is generally a couple inches above<\/em> the belt-line) without unacceptable inhibiting movement.<\/p>\n There are a few ways to solve this problem. Some beastplates flair outward at the base in a \u2018bell\u2019 shape allowing them to extend a little below the waist (but not very far) without inhibiting movement. That might be paired with a flexible protection of leather, textile or mail extending below, like Greek pteryges<\/a><\/em>, or it might be hanging flaps of lamellar armor as with Japanese kusazuri<\/em> <\/a>upper-leg protections. You can also try to cover part of the area with a broad metal \u2018belt,\u2019 basically continuing the protection of the chest-plate with a disconnected (so it can articular) piece of armor that can at least cover some of the hips, which we see, for instance, in central Italic armors from the fifth to the third century BC. But in the medieval armoring tradition that most Dragon Age<\/em> armors draw from, the solution arrived at was probably the most comprehensive: tassets and faulds.<\/p>\n And I know someone<\/em> at Bioware knows this because they did it right, once<\/em>, on Armor E above. You can see the breastplate which effectively terminates at the natural waist (where they have a high belt, but not how high that belt is \u2013 up at the waist not down at the hips \u2013 flaring out just a bit below that belt (the \u2018bell\u2019 shape noted above). Then below that are attached a set of thin, curved metal plates (faulds), three in total, which run parallel to the ground and are going to be connected to each other by leather straps on the inside which allow those faulds to telescope in. That lets the wearer bend at the waist and rise the legs and even sit down: the faulds just telescope in. Finally, beneath the faulds, to protect the upper legs are two solid, hanging metal plates; these are called tassets. Note how those tassets are \u2018cheated forward\u2019 \u2013 they cover the front<\/em> not the side<\/em> of the upper legs. In a lot of historical armors, they\u2019d be even more to the center, making that center gap between the thighs smaller (particularly as this character does not require an open space to permit a large mostly cosmetic armored codpiece).<\/p>\n So they do know how it works! Or perhaps more accurately, one of what was probably a team of artists noticed and incorporated this feature into this armor<\/em> but not any of the others<\/em>. Which creates the problem: Thedas has invented faulds and then just\u2026decided to almost never use them.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not hard to see the problems with the comparison armors D, F, and G. Armor D lacks faulds, so the tassets have to begin really<\/em> high up and they\u2019re tiny<\/em> leaving an enormous gap in protect over the upper legs. That\u2019s quite bad<\/em> because the upper legs are filled with big arteries moving lots of blood, meaning that a wound there can quickly cause disabling or fatal blood loss. By the time you are going in for dedicated knee plates<\/em> and huge, oversized decorative pauldrons, you probably want to have tried to do what you can do to protect those upper legs.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Armor G has a host<\/em> of problems, but among them are its absurdly massive<\/em> tassets. Once again, there appears to be no fauld and instead they use a sash combined with what appears to be at least three belts to conceal the fact that the breastplate extends too far down the torso to connect to these gigantic single-piece tassets. To understand why you don\u2019t see that very often, just imagine running<\/em> in that setup and how the tassets are going to react as you bring your knees up, flapping upwards in your way.<\/p>\n And then there is Armor F, which fits a pattern I see more and more of in concept fantasy art and such: the \u201cI give up\u201d solution in which the groin and belly are just left entirely unprotected because it is really hard to figure out what to do there. I should note that while I picked \u2018F\u2019 (the starter warrior armor) because it was really clear, there are several outfits in the game that follow this pattern. The problem here is that there\u2019s a lot<\/em> of blood vessels and vital organs in the groin and belly \u2013 a strike in either is extremely<\/em> likely to prove both immediately disabling and eventually lethal. What needs to happen ehre is the chest plate needs to extend down to the natural waist (it terminates too high here) and then something<\/em>, even if it is just thick leather straps (note that Armor D actually has something like pteryges<\/a><\/em>, though they ought to be more substantial) to cover the groin. Meanwhile, it preserves the \u2018sides only\u2019 school of tassets that has been part of the Dragon Age<\/em> \u2018house style\u2019 since Origins<\/em> (also common in MMORPG armors) but hasn\u2019t started making sense at any point in all of that.<\/p>\n Now I rather assume some of this aversion to tassets is that they might be hard to animate, though unless the player is looking close, the traditional expedient in video game armor animation of \u2018making the rigid thing bend\u2019 will work just fine to give the impression<\/em> that they\u2019re telescoping. But with the amount of resources on display here \u2013 all of these intricate armors, with lots of moving parts and cloth physics \u2013 I have to imagine tassets and faulds could be made to function properly or at least \u2018faked\u2019 convincing.<\/p>\n More broadly, I think a big part of the issue here is precisely that fantasy armor design has become really<\/em> disconnected from historical originals, to the point that folks drawing and designing these armors are unaware of the common solutions to their common problems, in a way that comes out pretty clearly with Armor F\u2019s, \u201cI didn\u2019t know what to do\u201d solution to the center torso or some of the awkward \u2018just cover it with belts\u2019 solutions from games like Baldur\u2019s Gate III<\/a><\/em>. It\u2019s that sort of thing which suggests to me this isn\u2019t that artists have made a conscious choice to avoid a specific historical solution, so much as that they do not know it exists<\/em> and so are at a loss as to what to actually do about that region of they body: they know they can\u2019t just extend the breastplate down because it looks wrong, but they don\u2019t seem to know how to fix it.<\/p>\n The irony is I think faulds and tassets can do a lot for the other problem these artists seem to struggle with which is maximizing visual interest. We\u2019ll come back to this in a moment, but western audiences kind of expect armor to come in an \u2018alwyte<\/a>\u2018 style, which is to say with lots of uncovered, polished visible steel<\/strong>, as opposed to facing armor with colored textile or putting things like surcoats and tabbards over it and so on (which was, in earlier periods, very common!). But there\u2019s an aversion to just having a lot of solid steel surfaces which don\u2019t have a lot of bits and bobs of visual interest. You can see that really clearly on Armors D and E; the former uses a LOT of fluting, kind of like Maximilian plate armor<\/a>, while the latter presents a breastplate riveted together unnecessarily from a bunch of smaller plates mostly just to break up its lines and curves.<\/p>\n But while breastplates weren\u2019t usually composites of half a dozen plates (they were sometimes composites of two<\/em> plates), protections like tassets and faulds give a lot of opportunity to add layers and movement, as well as decorative surfaces to make visually interesting armor that doesn\u2019t end up feeling quite so overwrought as most fantasy armor does. After all, while tassets and faulds look neat, they\u2019re also clearly practical<\/em>, quite obvious in the way they protect part of the body.<\/p>\n And that brings us to problems with\u2026<\/p>\n Now I should note at the beginning that the Dragon Age<\/em> \u2018house style\u2019 started in 2009 when the World of Warcraft<\/em>-inspired vogue for gigantic pauldrons<\/em> was still very much in effect and so if you look at the armor of the Dragon Age<\/em> games, particularly Origins<\/em> and II<\/em>, you\u2019ll see nearly all of the heavy armor has really big \u2018bubble\u2019 pauldrons, much larger than what we\u2019d generally see historically.<\/p>\n Veilguard<\/em> moves away from this: some of the pauldrons are still jumbo-sized, but the classic oversized \u2018bubble\u2019 shape, already relatively rare in Inquisition<\/em> is now basically gone. What is unfortunate is that the designers don\u2019t seem to have quite known where to go from there: Veilguard <\/em>features a lot<\/em> of pauldron designs and almost none of them are quite right.<\/p>\n The easy problems to point out here are poor Davrin\u2019s armors, G and I (G is also available for Rook), with just use pauldrons. Armor G in general is just kind of a trainwreck. The in-game description makes a point that Armor G is basically the heaviest of all heavy armor and everything about it is a bit over the top. We\u2019ve already mentioned the gigantic tassets (but alas, no faulds!) and the massive pointed pauldrons are likewise just silly. As an aside, sharp or spiked armor is very rare, historically, for the obvious reason that you are going to spend more time wearing and marching in any kind of armor than fighting in it and so lots of sharp edges.<\/p>\n But equally awkward is this armor\u2019s deeply silly enormous bevor<\/a>. A bevor (or bevor plate) is a metal plate which extends up from the breastplate to protect the neck, often intended to be used with a type of helmet called a sallet<\/a>, which could interlock with the bevor to provide pretty darn complete protection. Now this bevor that Davrin has with Armor G is too far from his face to work with a sallet, but more to the point when you look closely you realize that entire<\/em> plate, which runs down almost to Davrin\u2019s naval, is the bevor: there\u2019s an entire second<\/em> metal plate (the actual breastplate) behind it.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/acoup.blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/DragonAgeTheVeilguard-1200x675-1.png?resize=1024%2C576&ssl=1\")
<\/figure>\nBags and Pouches<\/h2>\n
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<\/figure>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/acoup.blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/SR-item-Thieves_Guild_Armor.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024&ssl=1\")
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No One Knows How Faulds Work<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/acoup.blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/DAVG-Tassets-and-Faulds.png?resize=1024%2C550&ssl=1\")
<\/figure>\nPauldrons<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/acoup.blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/DAVG-Pauldrons2.png?resize=1024%2C464&ssl=1\")
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/acoup.blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/DAVG-Coats-and-Cloaks.png?resize=1013%2C719&ssl=1\")
<\/figure>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/acoup.blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/34734001.jpg?resize=781%2C1024&ssl=1\")