Avowed Game Wiki: Complete Guide to Quests, Companions, and Lore

There's a moment in Avowed, somewhere around chapter seven or eight, where you realize the Aedyr Empire might not be the good guys. The game doesn't announce this. It's not a cutscene. It's just a slow accumulation of small things. An offhand comment from Marius. A document in a ruin. The way an NPC flinches when you mention your imperial credentials. I wasn't expecting that depth from what looked like a fantasy Skyrim clone. But Obsidian has always been good at this stuff. And Avowed, for all its rough edges, earns its place in the Eora canon. Let me walk through what you actually need to know. No filler. The quest structure in Avowed is built around the 11-chapter main story. Each chapter takes place in one of the four major zones. Dawnshore is chapters 1-3, Emerald Stair is roughly 4-6, Shatterscarp is 7-9, and Galawain's Tusks wraps up 10 and 11. The pacing is weird because you can spend twenty hours in Dawnshore doing side content before touching chapter 2. I did. And I don't regret it. Side quests are not marked with difficulty levels. You can stumble into a level 15 fight at level 6 if you wander into the wrong part of the map. The game does warn you. Kind of. Enemies have skull icons if they're way above you. But the skull only appears when you're already close enough to aggro them. So you learn to read the environment instead. If the enemies look different, bigger, glowing, probably turn around. The Dream Scourge is the central threat. It infects souls, twists bodies, creates monsters out of people who were fine yesterday. The main quest is about tracing its origin and deciding what to do about it. Along the way you'll meet every faction in the Living Lands and most of them want to use the Scourge for their own purposes. The Steel Garrote wants to burn it all down and start over. The locals want to survive. The Empire wants to contain it and extract resources at the same time. Nobody is fully right. Your companions each have a perspective on this. Kai is a soldier. He follows orders until he can't anymore. His loyalty quest in Emerald Stair is about confronting a former commander who did terrible things. Marius is a hunter from the Living Lands itself. He doesn't trust the Empire or the Garrote. His quest is tracking a beast that turns out to be something sadder than a monster. Giatta is an animancer. She studies souls. Her loyalty quest in Shatterscarp digs into the origin of the Scourge and the implications are disturbing. Yatzli is an orlan wizard, and if you know anything about orlans from Pillars of Eternity, you know they don't trust easily. Her quest is about recovering lost knowledge from a pre-Silence ruin. I lost Giatta's loyalty on my second run. Not because of a big choice. Because of a series of small ones. I kept choosing the expedient path. Destroy the corrupted creature instead of studying it. Kill the possessed villager instead of trying to save them. After about the fifth time she confronted me and I brushed her off, she stopped talking except for combat barks. Then she left. The game doesn't warn you when a companion is close to leaving. You just come back to camp one night and their tent is empty. About the lore. Eora's history goes back thousands of years. The gods created the world, the kith (that's the collective term for the mortal races: humans, elves, dwarves, orlans, aumaua) built civilizations, empires rose and fell. The big event that defines Avowed's era is the Silence of the Gods. About fifteen years before the game, all divine communication stopped. No visions, no miracles, no answering of prayers. The Godlike, people born with fragments of divine essence, became the closest thing to gods left in the world. That's you. That's why you're important. The factions in the Living Lands reflect different responses to this new reality. The Steel Garrote, which started as a knightly order dedicated to Woedica, has become an inquisitorial force that burns villages to purge the Scourge. The Wild Hunt are nature spirits and druids who think civilization caused the Scourge. The Free Settlers are just people trying to live. And the Aedyran Empire is a colonial power that sees the Living Lands as a resource to exploit. I found the faction politics more interesting than the main plot, honestly. The Scourge mystery has a satisfying answer but getting there involves a lot of exposition dumps. The faction stuff is show-don't-tell. You see the consequences of Empire policy in the villages you visit. You see why the Garrote has followers despite being monstrous. You see why the druids are hostile despite having a point. If you care about getting the most lore out of the game, push Intellect to at least 6. A lot of the best dialogue and environmental storytelling is gated behind Intellect checks. There are books scattered everywhere that fill in the history. Read them. Or at least open them. Some of them trigger quest updates or map markers. Exploration is where Avowed feels most distinct from its peers. The zones are big but not empty. Every ruin has something in it. A weapon, a lore book, a quest trigger, a boss. The verticality is impressive too. Dawnshore has cliffside paths above the beaches. Shatterscarp has canyon walls you can scale with the right abilities. Galawain's Tusks is basically all vertical. Bring a Ranger ability that lets you reach high ledges. You'll use it constantly. There are also underwater sections. Not many. But a few caves and ruins require swimming through flooded passages. There's no underwater combat, thank the gods. Just exploration. Some of the best loot is behind underwater sections that most players skip because the water looks dark and uninviting. The game doesn't have a bestiary in the traditional sense. You learn enemy weaknesses by fighting them or reading about them. Scourge-infected creatures are weak to fire. The wildlife in Galawain's Tusks resists physical damage but takes extra from shock. The Steel Garrote knights are heavily armored but slow. Dodging works better than blocking against them. And the ending. I won't spoil it. But know this. The final choice isn't a binary good vs evil thing. It's about what kind of world you want Eora to become. All the options have costs. All of them leave you feeling slightly uncomfortable. That's the Obsidian way. And it's why I've played through it three times.