Dragon Age's Varric just got a real-life publishing deal for his novel, Hard in Hightown

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Penguin Random House will be distributing the novel from July.

Varric, the wise-cracking dwarf from Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition, is arguably one of the best companions in any RPG. He's funny, smart and—as you probably know—something of a wordsmith. His breakout novel Hard in Hightown is a bestseller in Thedas, and it's so famous that he's even got imitators pushing out fake sequels, something the player can put right during a couple of tongue-in-cheek side quests.

In Inquisition, you can find 19 chapters of the book scattered around the world, and now thanks to publisher Dark Horse Books (and co-author, Bioware's Mary Kirby), it's making its way to shelves in the real world. Penguin Random House will be distributing it, and it'll be ready to buy at the end of July.

The publisher describes it as a "collected edition", and it's going to be 96 pages long, 24 of which will be full-page illustrations. In game, those 19 chapters are very short (around 250-350 words), so this version might flesh out certain bits of the story. Here's the publisher's summary:

"Twenty years of patrols have chiseled each and every stone of the Kirkwall streets into city guardsmen Donnen Brennokovic. Weary and weathered, Donnen is paired with a recruit so green he might as well have leaves growing out of his armor. When the mismatched pair discover a dead magistrate bleeding out on the flagstones, they’re caught up in a clash between a shadowy organization known only as the Executors and a secretive group of Chantry agents—all over some ancient artifact."

You can read the in-game version online in the Dragon Age wiki, but I can see why fans of the series might want to have a copy on their shelves at home, especially if it's at all extended in print.

Samuel Horti
Samuel Horti

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.