It was in my bathroom earlier, it has since gone into hiding. I'll keep looking.

You do that, I'll check the bedroom.

Buuuuh....

Anyways, yes. So.

Here's the progression. Tolkien made up a cosmology taking things from Christianity and Norse Mythology then injected some of his own ideas into it to make what is the modern archetypal fantasy. Dungeons and Dragons comes along and takes the overall aesthetic (humans, elves, dwarves, orcs, etc.) then begins to branch off in their own direction. Elder Scrolls goes one step further, branching off from Dungeons and Dragons and making it's own cosmology heavily influcnced by numerous real-world religions such as Hinduism and the Gnostic Gospels, but like LotR adds a brand new spice to the source. So TES is two steps removed from Tolkien's Legendarium.

However, Dragon Age is different from this. It is, like Mass Effect, not a part of the direct progression of a set. Both Fantasy and Science Fiction have been heavily deconstructed over the years, and BioWare seems to have made Reconstruction its business. The reason Mass Effect seems so much more original than Dragon Age is because there were more famous works of sci-fi that they could use as sources for their reconstruction. So Dragon Age is simply taking all the straight examples of Fantasy, acknowledgeing the Deconstructions like Second Apocalypse and the like, and rebuilding. So of course it will have a lot of fantasy tropes played straight, that's the point.

Although those two guys talking about the world being a dream of a great enlightened being is a direct reference to CHIM, and the whole "Dweomer" being the tevinter name for Dwarves to seem to be direct references, but those are shout-outs, not ripoffs.

That struck me as breaking the fourth wall rather being a reference to chim. Their talking about being in a video game.

Hate to break it to ya, but CHIM is hardly an original thought. It has parallels in every (major?) world religion.

And even if not for that, it's hardly an original thought. It was made to be a parallel.