For that matter, a Darkspawn horde shows up out of nowhere to attack Amaranthine in Awakening, and no one sees them coming either. I can imagine something like this happening if the Darkspawn used the Deep Roads to travel underground to Denerim and came up from out of the basements, like they did in Awakening, but no one suggests that they did so. How? This is right after the Landsmeet, so if you did what I did and went straight from Denerim to Castle Redcliffe, you somehow don't run into any darkspawn on the way. Towards the end of Origins, the entire Darkspawn horde somehow shows up in Denerim with almost no warning at all.

The former tends to be a lot shorter and lot more noticeable, for one thing. There's a difference between a really bad nightmare / panic attack / bout of sudden narcolepsy and being magically forced into murder or sex slavery or demon bondage or who knows what else.Or the Chantry and the Circles turn a blind eye to that because the Tevinter Imperium was funded on blood magic and not on something else, and the Chantry was founded by freed slaves of the Tevinter Imperium. Well, while the mind-altering is indeed there, it's probably on a different level than the outright mind control of blood magic.The Codex makes a big deal of how it's only through evil, evil blood magic that the human mind can be affected - so what about the Entropy spells Fear, Sleep or Waking Nightmare? The entry about Entropy magic specifically notes that it would be wrong to confuse it with blood magic, and even if it didn't, the fact that all mage characters can use it and it clearly doesn't have the characteristics of blood magic means it isn't.

Dragon age origins the landsmeet