From what you've said of your armor and weapons you two have pretty much the same set up except his ebony armor has a bunch of enchantments. I know that just cheating my stats up to max and smithing and upgrading and enchanting everything without the potion glitch still got me weaker armor and enchantments than him that's with legendary stuff too. I know for a fact working towards lv 80 and battling him (and winning after underestimating him the first few times) is super satisfying.

 

I actually didn't cheat mine up but they are maxed and all of my equipment is smithed and enchanted as high as I possibly can. Im definitely looking forward to fighting him though.

How are Dunmer? Fun to play? Im tossing around either making a new Dunmer or a Nord.

 

Dunmer make for great battlemages, although I personally think their racial ability is poor compared to some others. Bretons are probably better than them, honestly, but Bretons look terrible, whereas Dunmer look awesome.

 

One of the best things about Dunmer is their racial fire resistance, for the simple reason that you can easily sprint straight through the opening dungeon and Bleak Falls Barrow, fix yourself a sandwich while the Jarl is ballin', and take down Mirmulnir at the Western Watchtower, all with hardly pausing to swing a sword and level up a skill.

If you're eager to skip familiar ground from every character you've played, this works like a charm. Even on the harder difficulties.

Ancestor's Wrath is a nice little bonus in damage for occasional boss battles. Nothing too impressive, but it's effectively the same as dropping a higher level fire enchantment on your weapon for a little while. Damage-wise, at any rate - and I mean found enchants, not the crazy player-made ones.

If you're playing as a mage, Dunmer start with 25 Destruction, which lets you cast half-price runes with no magicka increase as soon as you have two perk points. Use them as your primary form of offense, and your Destruction skill will skyrocket. Without runes, it's easily the slowest offensive skill to raise.

Lore-wise, Dunmer have plenty of basis for completing some of the Daedric quests while still being, to their eyes, a good character. Could be interesting to integrate Daedric allegiance into a character more pious than your average all-killing all-looting son of a bitch. The Civil War takes an interesting turn for Dunmer as well. Most Dunmer either hate both factions or just don't give a shit. Unlike the Nords, torn between loyalties, Dunmer would just fight on the side of whoever's been pissing them off the least.

Really, though, your race choice isn't going to make much difference past the earliest stages of the game. Unless you roll a Khajiit. In which case you will become a furry and die.

 

CareOtters has the Dunmer down pretty well, so I'll cover the Nords.

Nords are warriors, for the most part. They start with +10 in Two-Handed and +5 in One-Handed, Light Armour, Block, Smithing and Speech so the natural route for them is either Two-Handed damage dealing, or One-Handed tank. They're easy to play in the early game, but tend to fall to the wayside later on, especially if you're unwilling to put points into Enchantments.

Battlecry is hands down the handiest power in the early game if you're like me and enjoy retardedly hard difficulty levels. Being able to cast an AoE Fear spell is incredibly useful when you're surrounded and need to heal (or just want them to scatter so you can pick them off). Be warned that it affects everyone/thing in its radius, followers and civilians included, and it counts as an attack so don't use it towns you want to visit later.

The innate resistance to frost basically makes you immune to Draugr and Frost Dragons. Bleak Falls Barrow is hilariously easy as a Two-Handed Nord since you can quite easily tank the boss' frost attacks while doing massive damage with your weapon. Couple this with some perks in Restoration (taking Novice Restoration is a must for any warrior simply for the beginner's healing spell) and you've got a good tanky character that can waltz through barrows with only minimal potions.

While playing One-Handed/Shield Nord I've found that one of the better strategies is to get a set of enchanted armour that brings you up to ~50% fire/shock resistance, giving you good passive defence against mages. Couple this with the Elemental Protection perk in the Block tree (50% resistance to fire/frost/shock) and you're able to tank any destruction mage until you get into close combat. As an added bonus you have to take Deflect Arrows to get to Elemental Protection so you're basically immune to archers too.

As for the lore; Nords are the soldiers and mercenaries of Tamriel, with a talent for bartering as well, so you're pretty safe to play just about any type of character you want. They're not so good with cowards, given that Sovngarde is essentially Valhalla, so if you're into roleplaying your characters you can play with that a bit and have fun (I should really get round to writing the Cowardly Dragonborn story). I don't really need to say anything on the Civil War since, well, it's a major part of the storyline. Judging by the number of times I've heard it said they're not much fond of magic either, so putting those points in Restoration is not really lore-friendly.

So yeah, Nords are generally warriors, but you can dual-class as warrior-thief if you're wiling to put some points into stealth. It can also be helpful to take some Enchantment perks if you want to up your elemental resistance/damage early, but you're going to struggle for soul gems if you don't equip your primary weapon with Soul Trap (which weakens you a fair bit since you're not doing any elemental damage with each hit).

On that note, it's generally better for a warrior's weapons to be enchanted with low-mid power spells with a lot of uses rather than full power. You're going to be hitting like a truck in the first place so attacking weaker enemies with a full power enchantment is simply a waste, whereas you're probably going to be tanky enough that bosses aren't going to kill you if you need a few more hits to bring them down.

 

Crap I kinda want to do both now xD. Just for varieties sake though Im thinking I'll go Dunmer first and then do a Nord run through later. How are Dunmer for stealth related skills? Also since I plan on making him a Mage primarily, any advice on what the best schools to max out are? Aside from the obvious one I mean. Last any good mods you'd recommend for a Mage? As of right now the only two I have are one that gives you a crapload more spells to learn/use and one that improves the graphics of the various elemental effects.

 

You want mods for a Dunmer? I can oblige.

In preparation for Dragonborn, I started playing a Dunmer battlemage who had a flair for stealth and assassination. I roleplayed that he was a zealot of the Reclamation, which meant serving the Daedra princes Azura, Mephala, and Boethiah. I completed their quests before venturing to Solstheim. My character's standard attire was a fully enchanted suit of gilded ebony, though he wore an Ebony Chainmail Hood and Boethiah's Ebony Mail instead of regular Ebony Helmet and Armor. He proudly carried Azura's Star, and wielded Mephala's Ebony Blade. He was always accompanied by Aranea Ienith - Skyrim's resident priestess of Azura - and the assassin Jenassa (I roleplayed that she was a member of the Morag Tong). I had Aranea dress in Temple Priest Robes (modified with this retexture), while Jenassa wore Morag Tong Armor and wielded a Falmer Sword. I've contemplated downloading this follower, since he would probably make a fitting addition to my character's entourage. If you, like me, want to have more than one follower at a time, I suggest the Ultimate Follower Overhaul mod. For me, Skyrim just isn't Skyrim without it.

Here's my character, Vaden:

​

As for mods that I found added something special to this particular playthrough, there's: Elemental Staffs and Deadly Spell Impacts. They both add a really nice, aesthetic touch to any mage playthrough. If you don't already, then use Ultimate HD Fire Effects. In my opinion, it's an essential GFX mod, but especially so if you want to play as a Dunmer. As a general facelift of the Dunmer, I really like the Ethereal Elven Overhaul mod. I think it makes Dark Elves look significantly better, but opinions vary.

I'm sure I'll remember more soon.

 

Fuck me that Gilded Armor is badass looking. I already had spell impacts but Im grabbing every single one of the other ones. Thanks

 

PUNCHCAT disagrees. PUNCHCAT punches all he disagrees with.

 

So the Empire is on the brink of destruction. War has stalled, but it is coming again at some point. Both sides have lost much, and have everything to lose in the coming days. No matter who you sided with, it's a gunslinger standoff at high noon. The Thalmor don't want to go for victory for the fear that their enemies have just enough strength to take them down with them, and those who oppose the Thalmor have neither the numbers nor the firepower to win in open conflict.

Everything has stalled. Everything has ground to a halt. It's as though everyone is waiting for the signal to start the war again.

But what could possibly turn the tide? Perhaps the appearance of a prophet?













Nah. It'll probably be a spatial-distorting hyperdimensional giant dwemer robot that just dropped back into the normal continuum of space and time after spending centuries of beating the shit out of Altmer.

Yeah. That would probably do it.

 

I want C0DA yesterday.

 

That looks sick but I have no idea what I'm looking at.

 

The Prophet of Landfall is the first(ish) of Kirkbride and friends' TES-related content to be released on the c0da, which leads up to next year's C0DA, which in turn is a 64-page digital comic about... Everything any lorefag ever wanted to know. And it'll be free.

More info here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/teslore/comments/1ptr0o/i_am_michael_kirkbride_ask_me_anything/

 

Sounds interesting, but how close is this to game canon now? As far as I'm aware, Kirkbride hasn't had much to do with the games themselves since Morrowind and only did a few in-game books for Oblivion.

 

Go make a sandwich. It's that time again. Also, have some tunes. I recommend 1, 6, and 7 in particular for this discussion.

Completely understandable. Allow me to lay it out. To do this, I’m going to have to retread a bit of ground, so stay with me on this. I’m going to copypasta myself for a bit from when I explained this elsewhere, and I apologize for that.

The world of TES is a dream inside the head of someone (called a god, for simplification), hence called the Godhead or the Dreamer. This god isn’t so much asleep as he is in a coma, with a shattered mind divided into many aspects of itself. First is the Godhead, then Anu and Padomai, who represent stasis and chaos, then the Et’Ada, the spirits born from Anu and Padomai’s struggles, agents of order and chaos, then all living things in the world, which are the results of the interplay of order and chaos.

The Et’Ada lived in the realm of Aetherius until an aspect of Sithis, which is a subgradient of Padomay, introduced a spirit called Lorkhan, who proposed to the Et’Ada to create a world. Some of the Et’Ada agreed and followed Lorkhan’s plan. The Et’Ada that helped would become known as the Aedra (Our Ancestors), while those that did not would become known as the Daedra (Not Our Ancestors).

When the world was almost done, the architect of the Et’Ada, Magnus, realized that the world would actually draw from the power of the Et’Ada and remake/destroy some of them in the process. Magnus accused Lorkhan of setting this up as a trap, and fled the world, tearing a hole in reality that became known as the sun, which is a hole into Aetherius. Some of the Et’Ada followed Magnus in his flight, which resulted in the stars, which are smaller holes in the sky to Aetherius.

Some of the most powerful Et’Ada who helped create the world stayed and bound their essences to the world. They are the 8 Aedra, the Divines. The Daedra created the planes of Oblivion and lived there. The most powerful among there number are called Princes, and are the Daedric Lords you’ve met, such as Molag Bal and Azura.

What happened next is up for contention. The elves, or Mer, would tell you that the remaining Aedra, led by the Time God Akatosh, stood in judgment of Lorkhan’s treachery, and punished him. In this telling of events, Lorkhan was indeed playing the villain, and was the satanic figure most Mer see him as. Others would tell you that Lorkhan took his own life, asked Akatosh and the Aedra to do it for him, or that the final steps in created the world somehow inflicted the injury upon Lorkhan. The truth is difficult to ascertain. What we know for certain is that the end result is that Lorkhan’s heart was torn from his body and cast into the ocean, binding the world to his essence. His body remained in the sky and became the two moons, Masser and Secunda, re: the Lunar Lorkhan (remember, in TES, gods are planets. There’s a reason the sun and the stars around it are a bunch of round holes in the sky and not shaped like Dagoth Ur and Vivec. Magnus and the other fleeing Et’Ada were celestial bodies).

In any case, the world is now created, and all of the Et’Ada whose divinity was drained away became the living things of Nirn, the Men, the Mer, the beasts, the fish, the trees, and everything else.

Tying this into one of my previous massive fuckoff rants, where I talked about how the recurring nemesis of TES is an idea and not a big bad or an eldritch abomination, over time the Mer’s belief became that, since they were once Et’Ada, they could return one day to Aetherius. Some saw the world as a prison to be escaped, and believed that they could go back to the way they were (the Chimer, the Ayleids, the modern-day Thalmor). Others believed that the world was a test that could be passed, and that greater heights could be achieved if they overcame this deliberate trial placed before them by Lorkhan, the Trickster-Tester (the Psijics, proponents of Dracochrysalis, anyone who believes or promotes the ideal of the Tri-Angled Truth spoken of by Vivec).

However, those who saw it as a prison saw that their god, Auriel (an aspect of Akatosh) left the world by way of Tower, and so they created more towers to connect Nirn with Aetherius. Or so they claim. Others say the Towers were already there, and the Chimer were just taking credit for things they found already there. Again, it depends on who is telling the story. Regardless, some Towers are clearly constructed, such as the White-Gold Tower or the Adamantine Tower, while others, like the Red Mountain or Snow-Throat (the Throat of the World), are clearly naturally occurring, and others, like Falinesti, the walking tree-city of the Bosmer, are a bit of column A and column B.

But at least one Tower was created. Because while everyone else was worshiping gods and proclaiming themselves to be descended from the divine, the Dwemer believed in science and their own potential, and utterly detested the gods and anything to do with them. This included magic, because magic, or at least magic as it’s understood in TES, is power that filters down from Aetherius through the hole Magnus tore in the sky, and, being a god, the Dwemer hated Magnus, and thus his hole and the shiny stuff that came out of it.

The Dwemer were always trying to find ways to gain the system of the universe in their favor, and one day, they hit the jackpot. They found Lorkhan’s Heart, and used it to create the only confirmed artificial Tower in the Elder Scrolls mythology.

They created Walk-Brass, or Numidium. They used the Heart to power it, and fielded it in their wars with the Chimer.

Now, the Numidium is so powerful, it breaks time when it’s activated, because that’s the kind of shit that happens when you shove the heart of an Elder God into a reality pylon that’s also a giant robot and set phasers to “kill everything.” When Tiber Septim used it, it allowed him to retcon Cyrodiil from being a jungle to being the place you saw in Oblivion, and it gave him the ability to conquer Summerset and everywhere else on the continent more or less single-handedly.

In Daggerfall, when the Numidium was activated, it appeared in six different places at the same time, in what is known as the Miracle of Peace, or the Warp in the West, which is an event that played havoc with the fundamental fabric of reality and the way the universe works. For instance, it temporarily introduced Metal as an element of Aether, and for a very brief window of time, Metal Atronachs actually existed.

In this event, the Numidium is destroyed, but a single version or iteration of it remains, and continues sieging Alinor, the capital of Summerset, in another dimension, periodically popping in and out of space-time to scare the crap out of some deer or chickens on Summerset Isle before vanishing again.

Now, we’re going to step sideways for a second and clarify something else, because you need to understand this to understand where I’m going with all this. What is CHIM?

Since the world is a dream, if you, a being or creature living inside the dream, realize this, you also realize that you don’t exist. This results in a “zero sum,” where “I Exist” and “I Don’t Exist” collide in the same way that 1 + -1 collide. The end result is that you disappear, much like how God did in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, “in a puff of logic.” The outcome of this is that anyone in TES who realizes that the whole shebang is just a dream ceases to exist, and in fact retroactively never existed.

CHIM has quite a bit to do with The Tower in ways we aren’t going to go into now because they’re not relevant. What matters for this purpose is that “the secret of the Tower” is CHIM.

“The Tower is an ideal, which, in our world of myth and magic, means that it is so real that it becomes dangerous. It is the existence of the True Self within the Universal Self…

[The secret of the Tower is h]ow to permanently exist beyond duplicity, antithesis, or trouble. This is not an easy concept, I know. Imagine being able to feel with all of your senses the relentless alien terror that is God and your place in it [The Godhead], which is everywhere and therefore nowhere, and realizing that it means the total dissolution of your individuality into boundless being. Imagine that and then still being able to say “I.” The “I” is the Tower.” – Vehk’s Teaching

For more on CHIM and the Tower, feel free to look up The Metaphysics of Morrowind on Google, and props to fallingawkwardly for keeping it up even though TESFU is long gone.

In any case, back on topic. To successfully attain CHIM, as spoken of by Vivec, you must take the next step beyond realizing that the world is not real. You must hold the two conflicting statements within your being simultaneously. To add one and negative-one, and come up with some number OTHER than zero. That is CHIM. Instead of following the path of “it’s all a dream, therefore I don’t exist,” you instead go “it’s all a dream, therefore I can control it.”

To give an analogy from another series, CHIM is not entirely dissimilar to what happened to Smith in the Matrix Trilogy, wherein a random ‘program’ in the ‘illusion’ realizes that it doesn’t have to play by the rules, and that there is nothing stopping it from doing so besides itself.

Now, why the hell does this matter? Because while others have supposedly attained CHIM, the only ones we know for a fact that have are Vivec and Tiber Septim, i.e. Talos Stormcrown.

We have a variety of facts that prove this, but I’ll cite one because it’s relevant to something mentioned earlier about the Numidium and Cyrodiil.

“CHIM. Those who know it can reshape the land. Witness the home of the Red King Once Jungled.” -The Mythic Dawn Commentaries

The home of the Red King is Cyrodiil, and it was, as the Commentaries suggest, “Once Jungled.” But you will note Oblivion did not take place in a jungle, now did it? No, it did not. Because Talos changed it, because he was Smith and also had a giant time-breaking robot.

Now, as I mentioned at the beginning, the gods have subgradients, which are lower aspects of themselves. Padomai has Sithis and then Lorkhan, Anu has Auriel and then Akatosh. But since we know that Anu and Padomai are the two base aspects of the Godhead, we can consider Akatosh and Lorkhan two faces of the same coin; respectively, they are the gods of Time and Space.

Lorkhan, even dead as he is, is as influential, if not moreso, in Nirn as the Aedra are. Remember, the Godhead is not consciously aware that TES exists within its own mind. It is the sleeping one, the Dreamer, and Lorkhan is not in a terribly different state of being than the Godhead itself is. He’s just a mirror of that state on a lower tier. So Lorkhan still exerts power, even if it is passive, on the world of Nirn. Throughout history, avatars and aspects of him have surfaced. Every religion has a Lorkhan equivalent, such as the Nordic Shor, or the Yokudan Raggedy Man, as well as a version of Akatosh, somewhere and by some name or face.

Lorkhan’s aspects are called Shezzarines, which you’ve heard me bring up before. They’re important, because it is heavily implied and sometimes hotly debated that every player character is a Shezzarine (at the very absolute least, the Nevarine is almost certainly one, if nothing else). What we do know for certain is that Talos is one, and that by doing all that he did, conquering Tamriel overnight, using the Numidium, and achieving the secret of the Tower, CHIM, he ‘mantled’ Lorkhan, and thus became the Ninth Divine, not Aedra, but still a god like they are.

Mantling is the idea of becoming someone else by becoming so similar to them that the Dreamer stops being able to see them as separate entities, and effectively merges them in the Godhead’s collective perception of the world. This is something else Vivec mentions in the Sermons, and again, I point you to Google and fallingawkwardly if you’d like to know more about it, because we aren’t getting into it here. Examples of mantling in the lore are few and far between, hotly debated, and not really relevant to the discussion at hand beyond explaining what it is so you understand what Talos is.

The beast races are interesting, however. Supposedly the Khajiit, like Men and Mer, are the result of Lorkhan tricking the Et’Ada into creating the world, and are some of the ‘fallen’ Et’Ada that had their power taken and fell down to the world to become other things. They (the beast races) are specially linked to Lorkhan, because they depend so much on the Moons. This is also why classic conservative Altmer doctrine spits on the beast peoples. They’re basically Tieflings to them, for anyone familiar with D&D; a cursed people with powerful ties to the great evils of the world, physically altered and clearly manifesting that corruption in their appearance and actions.

The Argonians, however, are different. Supposedly, the Hist, which are a races of sentient trees, were the first thing to live on Nirn after it was created, and have even been implied to have potentially come here from outside the world entirely from some other place. They are one of the biggest unknown factors of the TES mythos. The Argonians were created by the Hist, and that’s the limit of what we know about it.

And just to clarify, while life is said to have started in Tamriel, the original Mer were all from Aldmeris, and the first Men were in either Atmora or Yokuda. Neither Men nor Mer are native to Tamriel, which was originally, again, jungle, and was populated by many different kinds of beast races, the vast majority of which are now extinct, because the Chimer hunted them all to extinction when they arrived because they’re racist assholes.

So what the holy living fuck does this have to do with anything?

The Thalmor is what it has something to do with. Remember when I mentioned the Towers, and how they hold the world together? Well, the Towers were (alledgedly, according to the Chimer’s account) a means to escape the world and return everything back to the way it was in Aetherius, where it was all just a great big ball of glowing energy and potential. But the Towers didn’t work the way they were intended to (again, assuming the Chimer built them at all. I keep bringing it up because it’s important that we all understand we’ve only got their word on it, and nobody can figure out how the Adamantine Tower was even placed, let alone how the Chimer could have done it. You’d think they would have made a few utterly indestructible pieces of armor or weapons if they could make a giant tower out of it).

Anyway, instead, the Towers draw power FROM Aetherius and funnel it into Nirn, thereby making them the pillars of the world. This means that the Thalmor’s seemingly crazy plan to unmake the world and return everything back to the way it was in the Beginning Place isn’t actually impossible. They’d just have to destroy all the Towers. With them gone, the power of Aetherius cannot sustain Nirn anymore, and the whole place would go out like a city with its main breaker blown.

So the Thalmor believe the Towers, Men, and their belief in Talos, who is a Lorkhanic figure, are standing in their way of them returning to the godhood of the Et’Ada.

They are at least partially correct in that, in that the Towers, Men, and their belief in Talos are indeed standing in their way of unmaking reality.

As such, the Thalmor’s goal is to destroy or somehow figure out a way to deactivate the towers, which has been happening steadily throughout all the games, with or without their involvement, and to annihilate the races of Men and the beastmen from the face of the world, as well as scrub Talos from the tapestry of the Mythic, which is why they declared war on the Empire and have outlawed the worship of Talos. They’re trying to murder everything that is to do with Lorkhan.

So here comes the part where this all becomes relevant. Because now we’re going to talk about Landfall.

What the hell is Landfall? It’s a prophecy, an event of sorts, that we’ve known has been coming for a long time, but which we’ve had very little information about until just a few days ago, beyond the fact that it was going to be catastrophic.

Well, now we know what it is. It’s the return of the Numidium. The Walk-Brass walks again. It is literally the landfall of the Numidium back from where it was, fighting the Mirror-Logicians in the siege of Alinor, who combated it by fielding against it beams of light wrought from superheated mathematics. What exactly does that means?

It means time is going to be broken again, and considering what’s been happening leading up to this, the consequences are likely to be disastrous.

And then Amaranth becomes relevant. Remember what I said about CHIM? Amaranth is the step beyond CHIM. Not only do you lucidly dream in a world that is a dream, you become a new Dreamer. It’s said that Anu is himself the first Amaranth, and that the world is in fact his dream, rather than the Godhead, who in turn dreamed him (i.e. the Godhead/the Dreamer dreamed of Anu, who in turn attained Amaranth and thus created his counterpart Padomay and everything else that followed from it).

The new man, the Scarab, is the new Amaranth, and is supposed to rise during the Landfall crisis, and lead those who would follow him into a new dream, as the old dream starts to fade.

So wait, you ask. So who the fuck is KINMUNE, and why do I keep hearing this come up lately?

KINMUNE is a fully Kirkbride thing, and is, at the moment, semi-canon.

During the 9th Era (remember, we’re currently in the 4th) there are giant space battles between Hist-ships and math-weapons and sentient robots over mining the moons of Masser and Secunda for resources. KINMUNE is one of these robots, who got hit by one of the Hist’s math weapons and got thrown backwards in time as a result of that. She ended up in the First Era, and might be one of the Bosmer deities, potentially. She also has the power to take over and possess people who get close to her, among her other traits, such as being a giant transforming sentient space robot from the future.

She ended up hiding in Sarthaal, and might actually BE the Eye of Magnus, which would explain the Psyjiic’s interest in the Eye, and why they’re so keen on keeping it locked away and out of the hands of people who might want to pry it open and take a look inside. It’s because they know the truth about KINMUNE, and don’t want an angry, confused magical Transformer running around the countryside possessing Archmages and blowing up mountains.

The part of KINMUNE that is relevant to TESO (and the only part of TESO that is relevant to this discussion, thank God) is that, in TESO, the Aldmeri Dominion is being led by an Altmer queen that is only 27 years old. This would be the equivalent of crowning a toddler Grand Emperor of the Republic, and then actually taking what they say seriously, instead of it just being for show like it historically used to be with child-rulers.

This, by the way, is the source of all the people crying Mary Sue about Queen Ayrenn. It’s because she is one.

But in Kirkbride’s C0DA, he’s indicated that there is a possibility that Queen Ayrenn either is KINMUNE, or else is currently being possessed by KINMUNE, and is ruling the Altmer that way.

Similarly, you might hear some things in the lore on occasion about Pelinal Whitestrake being from the future. This comes from the fact that he had an “arm of killing light,” an “armor from a future time,” knew of people who didn’t exist yet, and only recognized eight Divines, not nine, which implies he comes from an era where Talos is not widely worshiped.

This means that either the Thalmor succeed in wiping out Talos from the Mythic, or that Talos worship never quite comes back the way it once was, but either way, it would indicate that Pelinal Whitestrake, in spite of being a historical figure from before Talos even existed, must have come from a future that is, at the bare minimum, after the current 4th Era.


So now we come full circle so I can answer your question and you can actually understand my answer. What you’re looking at is the return of Walk-Brass to the normal space-time continuum at the precise moment to either step on the Scarab or someone who is not the Scarab that we were merely lead to believe was for the sake of dramatic shock, which will lead to events where an archwizard Transformer that lives inside a bus-sized Pokeball is going to become relevant, time is going to break again just like it did in The Warp in the West, the Dragonborn will probably become the new Talos of the Fifth Era, somebody is going to attain CHIM, somebody is going to say “fuck this shit, I’m going to go make my own reality with blackjack and hookers and cosmic powers that aren't crazy self-contradictory assholes,” and there’s a fifty-fifty shot that tonight, a god is going to die, because the Odin comparison I drew five pages back wouldn’t be complete if he didn’t sacrifice his eye and then die and hang on a tree for three days.

Remember kids. Traditional fantasy can eat a dick.

 

No matter how much I disagree with you on some things, Raine, I've got to admit you know your ES lore. Had me grinning the whole way through.

 

Also, some highlights from Kirkbride's Ask Me Anything, because I know you're all lazy and can't be assed to read it.

-Pelinal Whitestrake is a robot/cyborg from the future. People are already starting to call him Prototype Extra-Liminal Interstitial Nirnian Assault Lattice.

-Sotha Sil is in fact dead, but we'll see him again in the C0DA. Kirkbride was always disappointed that he didn't get to work on Tribunal, and give Sotha Sil and Almalexia the same due justice he gave to Vivic in the main game, and he intends to rectify that at least with Sotha Sil in the C0DA.

-The C0DA will be free. If you want to give Kirkbride and his fellow criminal scum money for some reason, you can always buy a t-shirt.

-If you want to know the true nature of the Night Mother, go read Sermon 22, or if you're lazy, read my spoiler quotebox below.

-The reason there are so many motherfucking time traveling robots from the future is that they keep coming back to 'fix' the timeline. This does imply that there Umaril would have gone undefeated had Pelinel not done his Terminator impression, and that some radically different shit would have happened if KINMUNE hadn't Assumed Direct Control of the Aldmeri Dominion.

-KINMUNE being the Eye isn't canon (yet), but Kirkbride really, really likes the idea.

-He's not a huge fan of the whole "this is official canon and this is not" stamp idea, and thinks that all fiction should be an interactive experience. He also believes that TES lore should be open source, and that he thinks of it as such.

-When someone asked him "what is the Underking," he replied "a better question would be who ARE the Underkings?"

-Morrowind is and was written to be a straight example of science fiction/fantasy.

-Azura is a faker and got what she deserved at the Trial.

-Nir is the first Possipoint.

-When a fan asked what kind of political structure the An-Xileel have, since it seems odd that the Hist would need a political party to control the Argonians, Kirkbride responded that whatever the An-Xileel want you to believe, don't believe it.

-The Thalmor are a manifestation of The Other. You can't even understand their true motivations, because they themselves don't fully understand it. They hate everything that even smells like mortality, and they are going to win in the end.


So at least that answers why Pelinal doesn't worship the Nine. Mankind may survive the Landfall and what comes after, but Talos isn't going to.

Spoiler

Then Vivec left the first Whirling School and went back to the space that was not a space. From the Provisional House he looked into the middle world to find the second monster, which was called the Treasure Wood Sword. Within years of the Pomegranate Banquet, it had become a lessoning tune to the lower Velothi houses. They preached of its power: 'The Treasure Wood Sword, splinter scintilla of the high and glorious! He who wields it becomes self-known!'

The warrior-poet appeared as a visitation in the ancestor alcove of House Mora, whose rose-worn prince of garlands was a hero against the northern demons. Vivec congregated with the bones. He said:

'A scavenger cannot acquire a silk sash and expect to discover the greater systems of its predecessor: perfect happiness is embraced only by the weeping. Give me back (and do so freely) what is barren of my marriage and I will not erase you from the thought realm of God. Your line has a notable enchantress that my sister Ayem is fond of and from her murky wisdom alone do I condescend to ask.'

A bone-walker emerged from a wall. It had three precious stones set in its lower jaw, a magical practice of old. One was opal, the color of opal. The bone-walker bowed to the prince of the middle air and said:

'The Treasure Wood Sword will not leave our house. Bargains were made with the Black Hands Mephala, the greater shade.'

Vivec kissed the first precious stone and said:

'Animal picture, rude-walker, go back to the lamp that stays lit in water and store no more messages of useless noise. Down.'

He kissed the second precious stone and said:

'Proud residue, soon dispersed, serve no guarantees made in my fore-image and demand nothing of its under-skin. I am master evermore. Down.'

He kissed the opal and said:

'Down I take thee.'

And then Vivec withdrew into the hidden places and found the darkest mothers of the Morag Tong, taking them all to wife and filling them with undusted loyalty that tasted of summer salt. They became as black queens, screaming live with a hundred murderous sons, a thousand murderous arms, and a hundred thousand murderous hands, one vast moving event of thrusting-kill-laughter in alleys, palaces, workshops, cities and secret halls. Their movements among the holdings of the Ra'athim were as rippled endings, heaving between times, with all fates leading to swallowed knives, murder as moaning, God's holy rape-erasure of wet death.

The King of Assassins presented to Vivec the Treasure Wood Sword.

'Milord,' the King of Assassins said. 'The prince of House Mora is now fond of you, as well. I placed him in the Corner of Dagon. His eyes I set into a fire prayer for the wicked. His mouth I stuffed with birds.'

The ending of the words is ALMSIVI.

Remember kids, when Vivic laid down with Molag Bal, he bit the tip off.

True story.

 

Goddammit, I wish there were more good TES stories!

 

So the dweamer thought them selves out of existence, that's really cool but how do the Dweamer ghosts and ruins fit in if they zero summed and so never existed in the first place.

Is TESO cannon?

 

I was in the process of writing a TES/Demon Souls story, but it stalled out because I couldn't find anyone who had played both games to sound ideas off of or beta the fic. Everyone I know excepting myself has only played one or the other. So it sort of died.

The Dweamer didn't achieve CHIM. If they had, they wouldn't be so utterly gone. There would be some sort of Godwar going on, because again, they hated the very concept of the Divine, the same way the Thalmor hate the very idea of Mortality.

Officially, we don't know precisely what happened to the Dwemer, and the current party line is that they were fucking around with reality and accidentally fucked themselves right out of it.

Unofficially, we know what happened to them. They tried to ascend beyond the gods, and thereby prove that divinity was worthless, but in actuality they just all got absorbed into the skin of the Numidium, and thus suffered a horribly karmic and ironic death, because their attempts to prove that there are no gods accidentally turned their giant robot superweapon into a Mer-Made God. They became in death what they hated in life.

The ghosts are around either because the ascension-extinction event literally killed them, or because it didn't retroactively include Dwemer that had already died, and thus just left a bunch of Dwemer ghosts lying around from before the wipeout happened.

And Bagrum is still around because he was inside a kind of extradimensional space tinkering with something at the time of the event, and was thus excluded from it. Kirkbride cheerfully admits that, at the time, this was a blatant plot device, and that it's unreasonable to believe that he really was the only survivor, and that he survived in such a way when no one else did. But that's what happened. One in a million chance.