No, I'm not saying I don't think there should be religion. It adds to the setting. I just don't like it when the god of that religion actually comes in and starts messing with things.

Look at Dragon Age for an example of what I mean here. There's the Chantry with its Maker and Andraste, but the Maker doesn't have a direct role in anything and it's put into question whether he exists at all. Same with the Elven gods. Andraste was theorized to have been a particularly gifted (and crazy) mage, and the Chantry tried to burn the book that detailed that theory.

Another example, at least for how I'd like to see the humans/gods relationship subverted is if gods are real, but are human creations and not the other way around. I don't know if I've seen that take on things very often.

Well... when you put it that way it admittedly sounds bad. And just for the record I'm not a "militant atheist" or anything.

Let me try to rephrase then. I generally prefer things be kept more down-to-earth. These cosmic struggles between gods always seem to overwrite the human (or humanoid, whatever) struggles, and in the case of TES it really feels like mortal affairs have no meaning at all when you've got stuff like CHIM.

 

To be entirely fair, I don't think you can classify it as creationism the way we think of creationism. When the gods can literally come down to Earth and bitch slap you, there has to be a little change in perspective. Our viewpoint is from a world where the existence of God/god/gods is something that can always be in doubt. You can't doubt shit in Tamriel, because it's all around you, fucking up your day.

Look no further than the temples of the divines. You pray at one and you're sick, and then IMMEDIATELY you're cured. That's a verifiable damn miracle. Hard to be a skeptic in that kind of world.

 

Holy long post, Batman. Have a thumb.

Even though I feel guilty that you wrote all of that for me, while I knew most of it, I feel like I should defend what I wrote. I feel like you and the others who responded to me with the "Thalmor want to kill everything" argument are misunderstanding my post.

What you have there in your post is heavy, heavy lore. Like Dragon Break/Warp in the West level lore, and possibly CHIM for good measure. Now Daedra is a term that every player will have heard of, they're literally everywhere, especially in TES:IV. But how many of those will have heard of Lorkhan, or the Et'Ada? Not many I'd wager. Even more relevant to the Thalmor, I don't think Crystal Tower is even mentioned in Dialogue in Skyrim, let alone what the Thalmor want to use it for.

And this is the thing, to the majority of people who's knowledge of the lore is limited to the surface level, the Thalmor's philosophies are irrelevant. The reason they will hate them is because they are smug, arrogant, racist, genocidal bastards who've clearly crippled the empire you might have grown an attachment to (especially if you played Oblivion.)

The thing about that though, is that nearly every major "mortal" event has something to do with a god or a Shezzarine. Nothing of significance is ever a mortal affair.

 

Talos was a mortal who ascended into godhood. Nobody argues otherwise. Arkay may have been - see Arkay the God, which also suggests that all Aedra were once mortals. The current Sheogorath is the protagonist from Oblivion who took on the roll of Sheogorath when they broke the curse upon Jyggalag. Almalexia, Sotha Sil and Vivec were mortals who ascended into godhood by tapping into the power of Lorkhan, and Dagoth Ur did something similar yet entirely different.

Then you get into the heavy metaphysics, in that all men, mer, aedra and daedra share a common ancestor in the interplay of Anu and Padomay. When Lorkhan tricked the et'Ada (the aedra and daedra before there was a distinction) into the creation of Mundus, all of them changed. Magnus, God of Magic, decided 'fuck this shit' at the last moment and punched his way into Aetherius, leaving the hole in Oblivion known as the Sun - which is why magic has no limits. Other, lesser et'Ada tried the same, creating the stars and becoming known as the Magne Ge, 'star orphans', and also reside in Aetherius. Many, primarily Y'ffre, sacrificed themselves entirely to create Nirn and the Earthbones - combined with Magnus' exodus, this stabilized Mundus and Nirn into the form known today. The Ehlnofey were those without enough power to find a niche of their own and lost their immortality. Some embraced their mortality as an opportunity to learn and grow, and became Man. Others resisted it bitterly and saw Mundus as their prison, and became Mer - their descendents were the Aldmer. This is why Mer live longer than Men.

The Aedra were those that heavily invested themselves in Mundus' creation, and were incarnated as planets within it. They turned upon Lorkhan for his bullshit, and ripped his heart out and him in two - the heart fell to Nirn, creating the Red Mountain where it impacted, and his corpse became the two moons Masser and Secunda. The Daedra were those that were not, but were trapped nonetheless and took the realm of Oblivion as their own, and divided it amongst themselves.

The deities in the Elder Scrolls are not unknowable all-powerful beings - they are the cousins of mortals, those who were part of or rebelled against the creation of Mundus. To differentiate between a cosmic affair and a mortal affair is meaningless pedantry. The gods became man and mer, and men and mer become gods. A mortal who dies becomes a servant to the daedra or remains in Aetherius or is reincarnated via the dreamsleeve. Every being is eternal and capable of attaining great power, the gods are just those who are currently holding said power.

Edit: Oh, yeah, then there's the Hist, who gave birth to or created the Argonians. We're probably going to have to wait for Elder Scrolls: Black Marsh to find out what their deal is, but one possibility is that the distinction between Ehlnofey and Hist is that the Ehlnofey were Anu-aligned and the Hist were Padomay-aligned.

 

Is one guess made popular by the people in-universe who don't like him.

We don't actually know what happened during the Sundering. We just know it happened.

 

I'll admit, you guys know how to present this stuff. I don't think I've seen TES lore laid out so plainly before, or if I have I didn't pay as much attention to it. Now I'm curious enough to run through all the games again and see if I'll have a different perspective on things.

Of course that'll take forever, even without all the damn modding I'll inevitably be doing to each game. And my backlog is big enough as it is. FML.

 

I'm trying to get Skyrim + all dlc + hd textures + visual mods working on my new laptop and i'v gotten to the point where it is almost playable.

I get constant a constant flickering when in local map and ocasional horizontal flicerking every 2 minutes or so while in the main world. It looks amazing but the flickering it's really bothering me!

Has anybody else encountered this?

 

This attitude annoys me more than most things do.

It's possible you're referring to the meldy of mods, in the conext of "I've gotten [all of these mods to work together without shanking each other in the liver] to the point where it is almost playable," and if that's the case, then that's perfectly fine, and I have no problem whatsoever with it, and I apologize for misunderstanding you. But I've seen just too many people who have this attitude about every game they play.

"This game is completely unplayable for these reasons."

No. It isn't. You're just a spoiled brat, and can't have fun unless it's in ultra-ultra-ultra-ultra high def, and all of the followers look like porn stars and dress like Conan extras, and your sword is the size of whatever new thing they're building in Dubai this week.

Skyrim does not need mods to be playable. It does not even need mods to be a fun, entertaining experience. Very, very few games actually exist in a state of being "unplayable without mods." We've gotten to the point where our rendered cinematics are almost, literally almost, photorealistic, and our in-game content to the point that you could mistake it for being photorealistic if you weren't wearing your glasses, or were standing a distance away and the HUD wasn't turned on.

Not that we ever needed fancy graphics to begin with, dwarfortressonmydesktop.jpg, but even if you wanted to make that argument, we're officially splitting hairs about it now. Someone could actually make Final Fantasy Advent Children now alone on their computer, provided the movie had no character dialogue (and quite frankly, that probably would be a major improvement).

You don't need a zillion mods to make Skyrim playable. You can use it to make Skyrim niceer and more playable than it is, but you don't need them to fix some massive intrinsic flaw in the game. This isn't Superman 64 we're talking about, here. Unless you don't like first-person hack-and-slash, but if that's the case, then why are you playing an Elder Scrolls game? Hell, Morrowind was, both asthetically speaking and in terms of a lot of player elements, a steaming pile of crap, and yet it's still a great game, even by today's standards. The massively better graphics mods and better gameplay mods for it just make it better. They don't make it "playable" where it was not before.

I may have just ranted for no reason. I'm going to get some caffine now.

 

Don't turn my question into a straw man argument.

It's unplayable because the flickering hurts my eyes and gives me a headache, I have 6 mods installed(immersive weapons, enhanced flora/sky/fire, alternative start and glowing ore veins).

 

So out of curiosity, what are the implications of whole disappearance/reappearance of the moons that the Aldmeri Dominion use to win over the Khajit, in light of the Lunar Lorkhan thing?

 

Background facts: To the Khajiit, the moons are super important. There's actually seventeen known varieties of Khajiit, and what type a particular Khajiit becomes is determined entirely by what phase of the moon they are born under. I haven't seen any details about what happens if there are no moons, but I can't imagine it's very good. And that's without going into the religious significance of the Lunar Lattice to them - the moons actually represent gods in their pantheon, Jode and Jone, and each subspecies revere them in their own way.

So needless to say, the Khajiit absolutely lost their shit when the moons disappeared.

When they reappeared after two years of moonlessness, the Thalmor instantly claimed credit, saying they had brought them back with hitherto unknown 'Dawn Magicks'. The Khajiit took this at face value and gave the Thalmor so much influence that they were able to pull off the coup that resulted in a divided Elsweyr becoming part of the Thalmor Dominion.

So, riddle me this. Why would a movement utterly dedicated to the destruction of Lorkhan's creation bring his corpse back?

Answer: Surely they wouldn't. However, they may try to get rid of it.

Their entire strategy is 'out of sight, out of mind'. They want to exterminate Talos, the man-turned-god, the Shezarrine, the incarnation of Lorkhan, by forcing everyone to stop believing in him and, ideally, wiping out the race that gave rise to him. So it's not much of a stretch to theorize that if someone tried to erase Lorkhan's corpse, the Thalmor are probably the ones to blame. And though it failed, them being the ones to make them disappear would have given them advance knowledge to when the moons would reappear, allowing them to be in position to claim credit and use it to undermine Imperial influence in Elsweyr.

That's the surface truth. Let's talk unknown unknowns.

There's also the possibility that the Khajiit colonized Secunda and transposed said colony onto Nirn, creating Elsweyr, and were ruled by a god-king known as the Satellite Lord in a third, invisible moon that orbits Secunda/Elsweyr in an indecipherable trajectory. This is why Moon Sugar comes from Elsweyr and is so important to the Khajiit. Thus the Khajiit would lose their shit even more when the moons disappeared. It also suggests that their God-King was not returned though the primary two moons were, since Elsweyr was dissolved by the Thalmor.

---------- Post automerged at 16:13 ---------- Previous post was at 16:10 ----------

I concede the point. The view of Lorkhan as a trickster-villain is common, but it is too Mer-ish for me to present as truly canonical.

 

That's not what a Straw Man argument is.

A straw man argument assigns a position to someone and then attacks it. I didn't assign you a position. I made two educated guesses as to your position and responded to both, as should be apparent in this part, which you seemingly forgot about:

While I probably did rant when a rant was unnecessary, it's hardly my fault that you choose to be ambiguous. You didn't say anything about mods conflicting in your original post. You just said the game was "almost playable now."

 

This is incorrect. It's not an issue of "We have no connection" it's an issue of "Vivec, or at least Kirkbride, says there is no connection very explicitly."

 

Skyrim Legendary Edition is being released on June 4th So little to np hope left for extra dlc, just in case you were holding out.

 

A fair point, but in riposte, Vivec is not infallible, and has been quite wrong before. He is also a shameless and self-professed habitual liar, to the point that he himself admits that you really shouldn't trust anything he says, and Almalexia says that his ability to distort the truth with exaggerations, dismissals, shadings of meanings, and outright falsehoods is, in fact, his greatest and most terrible power, to a measure full beyond any arcane might or strength of main force that his ascension to demigodhood granted him. This makes sense, because he was a poet before he became a god, and in the words of Almalexia (paraphrased), no one lies more than poets and storytellers, and, in her words, Vivec can lie so well that reality itself might well believe the story he tells.

And Kirkbride has backpedaled before for the sake of doing something cool. And "join the PSJJJJ, punch the Thalmor in the face" would be fairly objectively cool by most definitions of the term, in my opinion.

 

While a fair point, the whole "Vivec is a liar" response tends to work better when directed at the sermons or the more incoherent / self-agrandizing bits of "Vekh's Teachings." These parts of Vekh's teachings are significantly more substantial and seem to be closer to an actual attempt to explain things clearly. The one directly before this was, basically, a FAQ about The Tower. Not saying that you're necessarily "wrong" but your interpretation requires quite a few logical leaps and definitely isn't an obvious assumption.

 

True. But then, the whole point of Vivec being such a good liar that we can't tell his lies from this truths, is that we can't tell his lies from his truths. We could have it completely backwards, and everything we think that is him lying is actually him telling the truth, and vice-versa.

He'd be a fucking amazing drinking buddy or party partner, he can tell tales that have baby birds falling out of trees to get closer and hear better, and I'm sure he and the Nerevarine got gloriously, epically lost and punched a great many naga vampire things to death while drunk, but I'm not sure I'd trust the bastard any further than I could throw him.

 

Just picked up Dragonborn off of Steam and Im trying to decide if I want to do a new play through or not. I love my character that I've already beaten the main quest line and Dawnguard line with but he's so retardedly powerful now there is exactly zero challenge to anything. Hes a Breton covered with Daedric/Witchplate armor head to toe fully upgraded and enchanted with the only exceptions being Daedric artifact pieces such as The Ebony Mail, a full powered Ebony Blade which heals me faster than absolutely anything can damage me and Im a vampire lord with all of the trees for it maxed out. Killing dragons, Giants and pretty much whatever looks at me funny barely even amounts to swatting flies.

If I do start a new character Im thinking either Nord or Dunmer. Anyone got any suggestions? Also is playing a Mage fun? I never bothered much with magic, it seemed like so much overkill with my character it would have been pointless.

 

Have you fought the ebony warrior with your character yet? That's probably your last challenge, though he only shows up once you reach level 80.

 

Nope, like I said I literally just grabbed Dragonborn yesterday. I played through a little bit of it on my high end character and while I liked pretty much everything about it from the couple minutes I played, one shotting everything kinda got boring. Even if I didn't have the armor that I do a fully powered Ebony Blade is so retardedly powerful it sucks the challenge out of pretty much every fight for me. I heal so much faster than anything at all could ever damage me. Just for giggles one time when I got bored I rounded up a high end Dragon, three Giants and a pack of bandits and as long as I kept swinging I never once dropped below even 3/4ths of my health. The quest for it is fun, it looks awesome and Mephala is one of my favorite Daedra Lords but while I can't believe Im honestly saying this the damn thing really needs a mod to nerf it or something. From what Im told about the Black Knight he's the one and only fight I know of so far I think it would be worth the effort to bring it out.