As much as I love our "canon-divergent DAI" (and, mainly, BECAUSE my love for it), it cannot just always be Dragon Age. We with @ashuldur.bsky.social have changed a lot in it, and we do a lot of additional worldbuilding. I don't have any "publishing" ambitions, quite the opposite ->
That is not to say that we are abandoning DA, because - of course not! Obelerio started as a DA blorbo, and his first version will always be special to me. But I still want to try doing a whole separate story/setting for them. If I fail, I can always backtrack, so I lose nothing.
But I DO want to have a full creative control, and the fandom framing just cannot give it to me, even if I slap "canon-divergent" onto it. So a new world, and a new story, is to be created.
I want her to feel like the version of Cassandra I draw, but also be a separate character. The new framing should help a lot with that.
Cassandra is a canon character, and I am not going to mindlessly copy-paste her into an original setting. That would be disrespectful, even considering my lack of ambition and doing all that just for my coauthor and myself