This guide will help introduce you to the different territories in Dragon Age 2.

Gallows

The Gallows is an area of Kirkwall. Statues of tortured slaves fill the Gallows courtyard, a ghastly memento of Kirkwall’s history. The statues are not monuments to the suffering of slaves. Every inch and angle of the courtyard was designed by magisters bent on breaking the spirit of newcomers. Executions here took place daily, sometimes hourly, and corpses were hung from gibbets throughout the yard. New slaves trudging in from the docks saw what awaited them.
It is the home of the Circle of Magi and an army of templars in Kirkwall.

Hightown

Everyone who is anyone in Kirkwall lives in Hightown, and they give little thought to what goes on in Lowtown other than to complain when the wind drags up the stench from its foundries or ancient mines. People in Hightown feel safe, not because the city’s walls are impregnable, but because an invader would need to scale the stairs from Lowtown in order to reach them. Many bloody battles have been fought on those narrow stairs, and in several wars Hightown has held out for months after Lowtown was taken. The wealthy often forget, however, that those stairs are also their only escape.

Kirkwall

Kirkwall (also known as The City of Chains) is a coastal city and a major population center located in the Free Marches. It is on the southern edge of the Vimmark Mountains, east of the Planasene Forest, and north across the Waking Sea from Ferelden. Hawke is known to become the Champion of Kirkwall.

Any ship approaching Kirkwall will first see the cliffs – the “wall” that the city is named for – from many miles off. This sheer cliff is made of the same black stone that the city was built on, a pantheon of vile guardians representing the Old Gods carved into its face. Over the years the Chantry has effaced many of these profane sentinels, but it is next to impossible to destroy them all.

A channel has been carved into this cliff, allowing ships to sail through a dark corridor with sheer walls hundreds of feet high into the city’s interior. Flanking either side of this channel are the “twins of Kirkwall”, two massive bronze statues that are present for more than show: the city sits next to the narrowest point of the Waking Sea, and a massive chain net can be erected between the statues and the lighthouse on the nearest outcropping of rock that marks the edge of the narrow navigable lane. This stranglehold on sea traffic is jealously guarded by the ever-changing rulers of the city for the wealth of tolls, taxes and extortions it has allowed; the transitory politics of Kirkwall are as brutal and treacherous as the sea currents below.

The city is wealthy from its position on the Waking Sea but there are still many decrepit areas. Much of the destruction caused when the Empire fell has never and can never be repaired. Although the Chantry and the Keep are visible from most of the city it is easy to get lost in the maze of dwarven courtyards and prowling groups of outlaws prey on those who travel through Lowtown without a reliable guide or map. Lowtown is perpetually smothered in black smoke billowing from the many foundries. When the air is cleared by cold winter storms the baleful howl of wind over the open mouths of abandoned shafts is hardly better. These haunted pits occasionally erupt with gouts of foul air known as “chokedamp” and it is not uncommon to find whole slums silently suffocated, frozen in the midst of everyday activity. Outside of the Kirkwall the remnants of the oldest slave quarries still remain in the mountains, most abandoned and some haunted by spirits clinging to the memories of the torture inflicted on those enslaved long ago.

Fundamentally then, Kirkwall still resembles its ancient self; greed drives the ragged and dispossessed scum of Thedas to its cursed shores and the unscrupulous consume them

Lowtown

A ship that sails past the twin statues and through the narrow corridor enters a cauldron-shaped area of Kirkwall called Lowtown. Once this was the first quarry, where slaves carved out the harbor and their own living quarters from the rock-face before new quarries needed to be created in the Vimmark Mountains just beyond the city. Lowtown is literally a pit where the slaves were once quartered in dwarven-engineered courtyards: “hexes” in the local common parlance. The hexes in Lowtown are plainly built and bear the unrepaired scars of damage caused by collapsing walls.

This is also where one may find Kirkwall’s alienage, elves who have secluded themselves into one of the largest hexes-with a great iron gate that the City Guard will close up at night. For their safety, of course. In the alienage one finds the massive, gnarled tree that the elves call the “vhendadahl”, and possibly the only greenery in the entire district. Some consider it odd that the poorest part of Lowtown should also be its most colorful and most lively. The elves, at least, comfort themselves with the thought that as poor off as they are they are still not the worst in Kirkwall. That honor belongs to those who have descended into Darktown, the nickname given to the truly desperate who have taken refuge in the city’s sewer tunnels.

A newcomer to the city will find Lowtown a vast maze of shantytowns and labyrinthine corridors, all clustered around the busy man-made harbor. Clearly visible in the center of that harbor is the tall fortress once known as the Gallows. There the slave ships were received and their slaves processed and sold; it was a brutal prison, reserved for anyone that dared to challenge the authority of the Imperial magisters. It was a symbol of oppression and was burned after the rebellion but never destroyed, and today the Chantry has converted it into a massive barracks for the Templar Order and a home to the Circle of Magi. The mages live in the cells once reserved for slaves, and the irony is not lost upon them.

The rocky walls surrounding Lowtown are highest beyond the harbor, with the busiest streets lead directly up to Hightown where the wealthiest citizens in Kirkwall perch high over the rest. The stairs to Hightown climb for hundreds of feet, and have spawned an entire economy of porters to haul goods up and down, not to mention dwarven contraptions that bring baskets directly and quickly up the cliff-face for a fee. When someone stands in Lowtown, the rocky walls of the pit around them are all they’re really going to be able to see (if they can see anything past the crowded buildings) – and Hightown glitters high overhead, the Viscount’s Keep and the Chantry always in sight yet always beyond reach.

Sundermount

Kirkwall is guarded by mountains to its north, the tallest of which is Sundermount. The mountain has a fearsome reputation. Legend says it was the site of a vicious battle where both sides unleashed horrors into the waking world, and unholy creatures prowl the heights to this very day, unaware that the war for which they were summoned is long since over.

A clan of Dalish Elves have settled here, led by their Keeper, Marethari, and it is here that Hawke completed the task set by the Witch of the Wilds, Flemeth