Dragon Age 2 - Interview with David Gaider

A website called Swooping is bad has an interview with David Gaider. They made an interview with him at event called Thedas UK Con. They did the interview with David Gaider over Skype.
The interview deals with revelations about the Calling, the mages, a discussion of various npcs, among them Anders, Sandal, and also some info about Templars and the history of their order and more. Thanks to surfgirlusa_2006 on the BSN forums for finding this.

A sample about how the Magic Circles came to:

TUK: Were the Magisters trying to accomplish anything in particular with what they were doing in Kirkwall, or was it just a convenient location?

DG: It was a convenient location. It wasn't like they created Kirkwall in order to do something sinister, it's that Kirkwall having A) a ready available of sacrifices and B) a very thin Veil, I mean why do they put the Circles of Magi wherever there's a thin Veil? It's really dangerous, but it's sort of a chicken-egg thing. Even if they did build a Circle where there wasn't a thin Veil eventually over time the Veil would thin anyhow. And it happens to be that these are the more magical places, the thinner the Veil is the more magic you have available. It's arguable, you could say 'Well if we want to control mages, maybe we should them in places where there isn't a lot of magic!

TUK: [laughing] That would be too logical.

DG: Yes and no. The thing to remember as well is that the Circles were created to help Thedas as well. We had the Blights, and the first Circles were created shortly after the first Blight. The mages become vitally important when there's a Blight in order to combat the darkspawn. So it wasn't like the Chantry wanted to cripple the mages, they wanted them to have the power they needed to help humanity. But to give on one you lose the other, there's a bit of a conundrum. As to what the Tevinters were up to in Kirkwall, when they realized what they had available, you had some mentions of it in the codex. I don't know whether we'll ever follow up on that story. Ultimately they did not succeed because the slaves eventually rebelled, there was the giant rebellion. What you have left is the remnants of what they were attempting at the time.

A quote from David Gaider on the Dark Ritual:

TUK: Slightly related to that, will we see...some of the big decisions from Origins and Awakenings are do you go through with the Dark Ritual so that Morrigan has a child with an Old God's soul, and the Architect, whether or not you kill him. Will those characters come back later on, or those decisions come back and be relevant in the third game?

DG: When you're talking about decisions that the fans expect to be treated as sacred, the big decisions are the ones that....the small ones, whether a character lives or dies, or smaller side plots and stuff, that seems less important overall, but for the big ones like the Dark Ritual I don't think we can not respect the Dark Ritual. It's going to be tricky, and I think the problem we encounter with some of the big decisions is the level of expectation.