What do you think happened to Cyrodiil 200 years into the 4th era? Is there an official explanation as to what happens? Does the Arcane university still exist? Is Cyrodiil in as much a decline as portions of Skyrim are?

I'm just wondering about all this, as I just tried to do some research and can't find anything official. I only looked at UESP, though.

The Imperial Library's 4th Era Timeline is probably your best bet.

In a certain quest you meet someone that I got the impression was from the Arcane University.

Ah, thanks to you both. I'm gonna read that link ASAIC. That means as soon as I can...

I keep wanting to use Cyrodiil as a reference for a couple of my Skyrim character's games, but I didn't know how bad it's supposed to be there and stuff...

Here's a very short book from the game that might help: The Great War


ETA: From the game Skyrim. I didn't realize we were in the Oblivion section, but the book addresses post-Oblivion events.

*Yawns*... ...

Prefer my version... ...

Don't forget the Greg Keyes novels...They apparently are cannon...

And although the Arcane University is there, the Mage's Guild has been disbanded...


EDIT...I worried all afternoon that the yawn looked rude...Sorry about that...I meant it towards the book...I have made my feelings on the Thalmor idea quite plain... ...

ha ha I was a little hesitant about the subject matter. Is it Skyrim? Or is it Cyrodiil? I put it in the Oblivion forum because technically it is about Cyrodiil.

Oh and look everyone. I did it! 666 topics in the Oblivion forum due to this thread! 6 6 6...the number of the beast!!!!

sorry...a little Iron Maiden there.

Hee! I looked at the thread title 'What happened in Cyrodiil' and thought this would be chatty thread about what our characters did today in Cyrodiil. Sort of like what they have on the BethSoft forum or like the one McB started here.

Urg. I didn't know it was a quiz about future history. I quickly figured it out though when I saw that SageRosa was the first responder on the scene.

Gawd. You know, i just started to read this as I'm having some dinner. Wow, it really kinda bummed me out. White Gold Tower and the IC get taken over by a warlord? That's horrible.

Really makes me realize how special that particular time is...you know...after we close all the gates and save Tamriel from Oblivion, etc. There's a period of real peacefulness in Cyrodiil, if we want to experience the game in such a way.

OTOH, I'm glad to read stuff like this because it's lore. And paying attention to lore will strengthen my roleplays with Crystal Beth, Dyami the Scout, and all of my future characters.

I have to admit, that while it's fine for Bethesda to go "This is our sandbox and we'll do what we want with it"...What they did to everyone that played the earlier games is just childish...



I did get really angry with it all about a week after the game came out...I was really depressed about it all...I may have been rude to people... ...And I still feel really stupid about it...Because it is - when all is said and done - a game...However, it's also a world that we all devoted many hours and emotions to...So to see it all...As they have made it...Really depressed me...

Espescially as (from a personal point of view) the KOTN were just ignored and the only book in Skryim about them says nothing about what supposedly happened to them...

I said something on my thread about ignoring Skyrim altogether in my story (I think)...And both the legendary Haute Ecole Rider, on the thread, and Subrosa, somewhere else said, "Go for it. It's your story, do what you want."

Lore...Pfft... ...Break it...*Shrug*...

As I touch on in my story...There's many universes out there...This is how all of the stories have the same events played out by all our characters...Containing the same people like Uriel Septim and Dagon and all that...Therefore, the lore is only as strong as you want it to be...And personally, the Lore is as confusing and contradictory as are real religion's... ...

I see. I'm not angry at Bethesda about this. It's the story. It's what happens, plenty of horrible things have happened on Earth, too. It just bummed me out last night as I was reading it.



This is just weird, though. I've heard about this, that KotN aren't mentioned in Sky's books. That seems like a huge oversight.
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I was book-flinging furious when I read the first Greg Keyes novel. (Thankfully it was a paperback. No one was harmed. ) Eventually I got used to it being a part of what happened. Still not happy about it, though. My ideas for Morrowind and Black Marsh will just take place in the thousands of years before those events. Actually, I’m getting ticked off just thinking about it again. Grrr!

I’ll pass along what I’ve been told: Lore serves your story, not the other way around. McB’s Knights stories give me a lot of inspiration to go my own way when it suits me, as well as his stories being so very enjoyable to read.

I agree. I'm not going to change lore around to fit any of my stories, though, if that's what you're suggesting.

Bethesda's lore is more contradictory and confusing then any real religion or history, because they make no attempt to keep it consistent at all. In fact, they change it not only between games, but in the same game. I do not think that the people they hire to write the stuff have any idea of what was written before, or what others are writing at the same time. There is plainly no editor to keep it all straight and make sure it makes sense either. It is like hiring six different contractors to build one house. It is no wonder it is a disaster. Since they have no respect for their lore, there is no reason we should either.




I think Bethesda destroyed Morrowind in a fit of pique, because of the snobbish and just plain obnoxious attitude so many Morrowind players have. Just ignore that crap, and tell the story you want to. If it does not fit their lore so what? Most of what they put out does not fit their lore either.






Go ahead and change it. Bethesda's lore is, how can I put this nicely, not very well done. There is no thought put into any of it, and no effort made on their own part to follow it. If you have a good story, go ahead and use it. Ignore, bend, or create whatever lore you want to back it up. That is what Bethesda does after all.

*Applauds Subrosa with great affection*...

Bravo!!!... ...

Encore!!... ...

YOu know....but isn't this true about Earth as well? History books from my generation are gonna be different from those of my daughter's generation. They're always getting bits of history wrong, even here on Earth. And then they change portions of it during the next edition of books if they need to.

I don't know if anybody has ever noticed, but I often subtly change the way some of my characters spell their name. Eradi~Kate could also be known as EradiKate, for instance. Luci Ferria could be Luci Pheria. Some of my characters also are known by different names, as well. The Grey Wizard is known as "Beujok" by some, and Eradi~Kate is also known as Miss Terri. Ann Thraxx may or may not wind up being known as Renee Gade III.

I do this because as I write about my characters on the forums (especially in the Where are you Now threads), I'm pretending different writers are scribing up the stories. And mistakes are made. Some of these writers are mis-informed.

If Bethesda's lore is screwed up, perhaps this is also the case. They get stuff wrong, but after all, so have Earth's scribes, historians and story-tellers. Know what I mean? Inconsistencies are a part of it all.

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Well so far, I haven't seen any need to do this, so we're all good.

I just knew Cyrodiil itself isn't supposed to be as glorious as it was in the 3rd/early 4th era, I just wasn't sure how much of a change it's been thru by the time we get 200 years into the 4th era. Has the IC been destroyed? no. Has its traditional leadership of Councils and The Emperor been sacked? Yes. Is it still a functional city? Yes. Can I roleplay it that my characters therefore come from Cyrodiil in search of a better life? Better looting? A job? Absolutely.

I would not mind that. In fact I like it. There are some books in the game which were written with a very clear bias, like the Talos Mistake, or the Bear of Markarth. It is nice seeing that sort of thing, where one side warps history to suit their political agenda. As you said, that is how things are in the real world.

But it is more then that with Bethesda. Take Mankar Camoran, whose mother and father were Bosmer. But somehow he is an Altmer? He was born at the end of the reign of Camoran Usurper (the Usurper being his dad). But we are also told in the main quest that his writings are contemporary with the life of Tiber Septim, which was centuries earlier. So then are we to believe that he must have somehow traveled back in time, and changed races while it was at it?

How do you make such glaring mistakes with your master villain? That's like us being told that Darth Vader was a Jawa, and that he was born after Luke blew up the death star. Mankar Camoran was important enough for Bethesda to shell out big bucks to pay Terence Stamp to do his voice. But he was not important enough for them to bother getting his race and background correct? This is why I say Bethesda has no respect for the lore it creates.

Well, my problem was that I had this bunch of Knights running around that had just saved Cyrodiil from Mehrunes Dagon...And basically in 200 years they didn't exist...And so if they did exist, how would any of the invasion stuff happen? Because my Knights wouldn't let it happen...And as one of the in-game Knights is Altmer, he could conceivably still be alive 200 years later...Oh, and Brellin the Bosmer...Also could be alive...

You see what I'm getting at?...

From my point of view...Not only did the Greg Keyes books make for a horrible idea...The whole Thalmor thing seemed, as Jack Cloudy pointed out to me, completely arbitary...An "oh look a huge army to wipe out what I accomplished with my game"...Which my Knights, wouldn't let happen...

My idea for the KOTN was basically like the Templars...Without the absolute devotion to the point of misogeny, celebacy and pauper-ness...And the Templars became huge...The biggest thing...And yes, 200 years later they were destroyed...But I said like...

I had to completely change the history as written by Bethesda to make myself happy and to wrestle the story away from what is, to what I want...And this is entirely the ONLY reason I can now play Skyrim...

Still agreeing with Subrosa...

I know there are those here who will vehemenently side with your good self though LS... ...

Not that there's sides...It's just a chat...Just...Ach... ...

Those are mistakes for sure. They are big mistakes, but I'm not "blaming" Bethesda for them. It is possible a real-life historian on Earth could have made a glaring mistake of the same magnitude, and for eons nobody knows the difference. It took awhile for people to realize some of Hitler's ancestry was Jewish, for instance. We were never taught this when I was in school. Not that some historian screwed up by not getting this into the original history books after WWII; my point is mistakes and inconsistencies can and do happen.

I wish my memory were better sometimes. There are things I've heard about throughout my life. About the Civil War here in America, about Africa. About Constantiople. About this about that, where history was a certain way, and then someone or some peoples do some better research only to discover the original historians got it all wrong...

So I'm not blaming Bethesda en masse. I'm blaming the "historian" who screwed up when he was writing about Mankar Cameron before I'd blame Bethesda as a whole. And look...its not like I'm blindly defending Beth, here, okay? There's stuff I actually do get mad about, like the dumbed-down hotkey system in Skyrim. But screwed up lore? I can live with it. It's possible and plausible, the way I see it, especially in a roleplay sense, that some "scribe" somewhere just didn't get the story right..

Absolutely I do. I haven't had a character who's had any attachment to the KotN of Cyrodiil's past, yet, but it's possible it could happen at some point....If it does happen, I'll be able to work this glaring hole into my roleplay ("where are all the tales of this group of knights? Certainly not in the books" she pondered), but it's still a glaring plot hole.
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We also got a new faction; The Evil Vigilantes of Stendarr.\

Cocky

I think the reason Morrowind was destroyed was not to spite fans, as many have suggested, but instead simply because they knew it would invoke an emotional response from players who loved Morrowind.

If you think about it the fact that it angered people just goes to show that the lore is good because you actually cared that Morrowind had been destroyed.

yes but the horrible things on earth tend to make the human race stronger as a whole , i think that its same in tamriel , yes we can have lambs and bunnies and la la la laa la but at the same time people want hard violence , they want death , they want DE-STRUCT-TION

skyirm was a lot more darker than oblivion or morrowind , playing skyirm you feel like your at a real crisis point in tamriels history . the biggest land war ever fought has ended in stalmate and eveybody know another huge war is coming round the corner - does this sound like anytime we have i nhuman history ? .....

for me its like the 1930's , after WW1 a lot of countries were angry at the treaty of V because they thought it was unfair ,

treaty of versailles - the white gold - congordant ( both are very similar by the way they caused long lasting resentment )

some want peace , actually lots of people in skyirm want peace , the whole of the country is in brutal civil war , people are preeaching from the rooftops , swarms of vampires ( we do at least dont have to contend with flying dragons and vampires) are killing people on the streets, dragons are roasting people from the air . yeah its not a great time to be living .

i think that we are right on the cusp on the second great war , the "war - to - end - all -wars" , by the nine elisi will be saying " we will fight them on the mountains" soon

but i think what they have done is very clever , the lore is pretty intense , i think its going to just make the TES series stronger.

Good lord. Thanks for bouncing this topic up, flowerboom. Sheesh, I was on fire a year ago or something!

I think I’m still on fire about it!

The lore is the single thing that I love most about this series. To me the history of Tamriel is one of the most detailed and fleshed-out backstories of any continuing series now running... in any genre or medium.

The one thing that we know, given what we have seen, is that Tamriel’s history has always been one of violent dispute and upheaval. No matter what era you look at the single constant is cataclysmic change. You have the Night of Tears and the Alessian Rebellion. You have the Battle of Red Mountain which results in the sudden disappearance of the dwarves and the spontaneous ‘ashification’ of the Chimer. You have a Thrassian plague and a Knahaten flu that decimate entire populations. Akaviri invasions occur at the same time as sieges of Orsinium. The giant Numidium destroys so much of Nirn that the survivors bend the knee to a half-breed Atmoran general. The Camoran Usurper uses armies of the undead to terrorize the entire continent. Dagoth Ur rises in the east... and an Oblivion Crisis deposits armies of daedra on the fields of Tamriel.

Mixed in with all of that you have the wars: The War of Succession, The Dragon War, The War of the First Council, The War of Righteousness, The Four-Score War, The War of the Isles, The War of the Red Diamond, The Five Year War, The Arnesian War, The War of the Blue Divide, The War of the Bend’r-mahk, The War of Betony, and on, and on, and on.

All of that does not even include the fact that, every once in a while, time itself seems to have a stroke and the Dragon breaks... and sometimes stays broken for a thousand years! What we have going on in the Fourth Era is just a logical continuation of what has come before.


I couldn't agree more!

WARNING: RANT INCOMING -

That is not to say that I agree with everything done to the lore in the wake of Skyrim. My biggest problem is that the writers have taken a very significant chunk of the established history of Tamriel and changed it in order to accommodate the return of the dragons. Throughout Oblivion (and, to a lesser extent, throughout Morrowind) we are told that the Septims possess the dragon blood, which allows them to wear the Amulet of Kings, which keeps the dragonfires burning in the Temple of the One, which keeps the doors of Oblivion shut and all mortals safe from the hordes of daedra lurking beyond. We are told that the Amulet (and the blood) were gifts from Akatosh to Alessia and that, ‘so long as Alessia’s generations were true to the dragon blood, Akatosh would endeavor to seal tight the Gates of Oblivion.‘

NOWHERE in the lore does it say that Alessia then picked up a sword and proceeded to use her dragon blood to shout dragons out of the sky! Was that something that Akatosh forgot to mention when he was handing the Amulet over? Given the fact that every depiction of Akatosh we have ever been given identifies him as a dragon, one can see how a small detail like that would slip his mind. What really drives me crazy is that the only explanation we are ever given is from a guard at the Western Watch Tower:


Now I would probably accept it if they had told me that Red Mountain’s eruption and the subsequent destruction of Morrowind resulted in yet another Dragon Break, and that this Dragon Break awakened Alduin and resulted in the shifting of the role of the dragonborn from protector to slayer. That at least makes sense (insofar as the Elder Scrolls universe is concerned). They could have come up with a million reasons to explain the rise of a new dragonborn. You can't call something 'canon' and then remake it on a whim. As it stands now everything surrounding the dragonborn rings false because it doesn’t match with what came before. That isn’t a mistake, that’s just flat out lazy!

*Stands up and applauds*...

Oh, well done that man!!...

Me too

And in my version Cyrodiil lives on as it does in Lothran´s game. No wars, no gates, no trouble. Everyone just explore and raid caves

And thereby hangs Bethesda's problem. What the player does becomes canon, and the TES series is a success because they made it so open. So the lore has to constantly accommodate multiple incompatible situations, because even for one user, their characters leave the world in multiple states.

But they don't want to create a whole scenario, and new lore, for each game they bring out. Building on the existing makes it all richer, but increases the difficulty of incorporating the player's actions. Maybe they need to eliminate the player for TES:VI?

Although I'm there for the open world, I don't have a problem with a Main Quest. I would be perfectly happy to have the option of telling the game that my character is not cut out for a Main Quest and allowing the game to use an 'NPC' to complete the quest so that it happens around her - but still happens. I think that would be a cool option for future games - you could do the MQ, ignore the MQ, or decide to let the game have the MQ happen around you. I long ago outgrew playing th only 'Chosen' prophetic slob who could save the world.

In fact, having heroes complete the MQ while my character's role is somewhere between sidekick and observer is exactly how we handle the Oblivion Crisis in Buffy's fanfic.

Good point about the MQ. Oblivion is the one example where the hero of the MQ isn't the player, it's Martin.

If only they'd found a way to do that with all the other quest lines in the game. Arquen taking over as Listener in the DB line, Raminus becoming Archmage, Modryn as FG Guilmaster etc. The TG isn't too much of a problem, as the ending changes the whole of history anyway, which can include hiding the player's participation.

Then they'd have canonical plots for each of them and the player would just be a facilitator.

Ahh. I read this bit just now. This is going to be the basis of a future RP I've been thinking of. I'm going to make a mage who come to Skyrim (a Gandalfy Mage) because his attempts to revive the Mage's Guild in Cyrodiil have been met with red tape.

Disbanded isn't quite the case. It split into two. The former would have left no replacement guild, so it might have been easier to re-construct.

One assumes the College of Whispers and the Synod have differences it might be hard to reconcile. I'm currently working on trying to create a post-MQ quest that explains that separation, probably based around whether to pursue the Necromancers after Mannimarco is gone.

The Mages Guild had a teaching arm, and an "action" arm at each Guildhall (in theory according to "The Origin of the Mages Guild") with a Master of the Incunabula, and a Master at Arms in change respectively. I can see those roles becoming separated into the College and Synod over the Necromancer issue. Raminus, Tar-meena, Bothiel, Julienne Fanis are all the classic academics who'd stay at the Arcane University and form the College. Some of the chapter heads, like Carahil, Teekeeus, maybe Dagail would support the Synod, and I suspect some of the others at the University would too. Skingrad would probably be all-College, except for Erthor. Bruma, if reconstructed, would be pro-Synod! Cheydinhal, while anti-Necromancer, would have had enough of dealing with them and probably go College, as might Bravil.

By the time of Skyrim, each part would have adopted some of the functions of the other, as the College needs to protect itself, and the Synod needs to train its recruits. Because they're more self-sufficient, they don't need each other any more. I haven't played Skyrim, so I don't really know whether the specializations of the Guildhalls have influenced the College/Synod ones. Anyhow, there were chapters in other provinces that would have contributed.

I vote for Acadian as Beth´s next lead developer!

I hate The Chosen One thingy. It´s been done to death so many times I wanna punch someone in the face whenever I hear it. Having the option of having the MQ happen around you would be a great idea

Wow. Hey thanks! So the Mage's Guild in Cyrodiil splinters, is what you're saying. Man, my head's about to explode at all this new info (new to me).