Sixth House plans on Vvardenfell

[KuKulzA]

[update] nomadic 6th House barbarian clans

[KuKulzA]

from TES3 main quest


:Sixth House cult:
"This Addhiranirr knows about, because it is about smuggling. Some smart smugglers are suddenly too busy for their old clients, because they have a new employer, the Sixth House, who pays VERY well. But what do they smuggle now? Addhiranirr doesn't know, because they are very secret. And this is odd, because these smugglers are always loud and bragging, and now they hush up like fat-bellied kitties full of sweet-meats."

:Smuggling:
"Smuggling is big business. The Empire says we can't trade skooma, moon sugar, ebony, Dwemer artifacts, exotic Dunmer weapons and armor, and slaves. So smugglers trade these things. Smugglers also smuggle greef, shein, and sujamma to avoid Imperial tax. And now the Sixth House hires smugglers, though what they smuggle, Addhiranirr cannot say."

[KuKulzA]

Originally posted by KuKulzA

from TES3 main quest


:Sixth House cult:
"This Addhiranirr knows about, because it is about smuggling. Some smart smugglers are suddenly too busy for their old clients, because they have a new employer, the Sixth House, who pays VERY well. But what do they smuggle now? Addhiranirr doesn't know, because they are very secret. And this is odd, because these smugglers are always loud and bragging, and now they hush up like fat-bellied kitties full of sweet-meats."

:Smuggling:
"Smuggling is big business. The Empire says we can't trade skooma, moon sugar, ebony, Dwemer artifacts, exotic Dunmer weapons and armor, and slaves. So smugglers trade these things. Smugglers also smuggle greef, shein, and sujamma to avoid Imperial tax. And now the Sixth House hires smugglers, though what they smuggle, Addhiranirr cannot say."

Orvas Dren
:Hlaalu Hortator:
"I have long believed it was a mistake to turn from the old gods. Perhaps Azura is with you after all. And perhaps not. I will tell you that I've spoken with Dagoth Ur. He promised me the same thing. That he will drive the foreigners from our lands. But I am not one to ignore opportunity, nor am I one to be troubled by rubbing two sides of a coin. If you are a dunmer of your word, I am your ally. I will tell Velanda Omani and Nevena Ules to support you as Hortator of House Hlaalu."

hmmm.... interesting

[Vrenir]

Alright. Per request, this is my idea for House Dagoth questing. First, we need to understand that if House Dagoth begins its quest-line with the other Great Houses and continues through the entire Temple war, it's going to be huge. There was a mention somewhere about them possibly planting agents in other Houses, and that is where this idea really evolved from.

When the PC joins Dagoth, they are given the usual Housish quests, like 5-10. During this, they can get cool official "House Dagoth rewards" or transform to a point where they have no face, so long as they get their face back again (don't know quite how that works; perhaps it'd be better for them to do transformation after all the rest). Anyway, following these little quests, their quest giver tells them that for the coming House War, they need to put people on the inside of the other Houses. Choose a House and join. You will either be given a special ash statue or told where a hidden shrine is in each faction capital. The PC will then be able to use the statues either carried or in the shrines to report in prior to each House mission they recieve. Basically, they get to have a dual role and we don't have to worry about how to fill this huge middle section of the Dagoth quest-line. So when the PC recieves a quest from whatever major House they choose, they go to the shrine and open a dialogue with the statue. The conversation topic that they report the completion of their quest to appears in the list of options. They click on it to inform the Dagoth of their status and a voice from the statue (telepathically related) says something along the lines of "Proceed with your assignment." When they return, they just go to their cover House, recieve the rewards, get another quest, and repeat the process. Sometimes we could embelish the Dagoth's responses to convey a sense of how they will use this information to further their own cause.

When the PC gets to the point of conjunction with the other Houses, he should be given a quest to body guard his House's representative to a peace conference / alliance forming in Vivec. When he reports this to the Dagoth via the statue, he is told that he should "proceed with his assignment, but do not interfere and your life will be spared." On the road, his representative is attacked by a Dagoth assassin. This assassin will not attack the PC due to the faction membership, but the PC can betray that in order to help his representative. If he does so, he has switched alliegances and is now simply a member of his cover House. If he stays back, somehow the representative will successfully defeat the assassin, you will be viewed slightly with suspicion, but allowed to stay the course. Upon reaching Vivec, the alliance is formed and you are sent with a few other crack soldiers to attack a base on Red Mountain. The ash statue (either in your posession or somewhere pre-determined in Vivec) tells you that it is time to shed your cover and join them for the great battle. To this end, you reach Red Mountain and when the fighting starts, you switch sides. Whichever person you attack, your alliegance will automatically be identified with the opposite party whether Temple Alliance and your cover House or House Dagoth. Should the PC stay with House Dagoth, they will rejoin the normal House ranks following the battle and be given the final set of war quests (during which perhaps the final transformation occurs if it did not at the beginning of the quest-line).

As I said, this allows for us to keep it interesting while not having to do a Dagoth quest-line that's two to three times larger than any of the others. The ash statue dialogues shouldn't be that hard, and since the PC is already getting rewards from his cover faction, we shouldn't need to bother with any for Dagoth during that section. So, thoughts?

[Ixidors Bane]

I like that plan. Cuts down on our work a lot. :goodjob:

Also, I think the transformation should take place after the battle at Red Mountain. I don't think it would world very well to transform the PC and them transform him back later. Once should be enough.

[KuKulzA]

I think once you chose to be 6th House you are Sixth House forever although spying on other Houses is fine...
this is a tough issue that will be tough to work out...

I think the Ash statue idea is good...
but I think if you've chosen to be a member of the 6th House, you aren't planning to turn on them and you probably won't. I think that you can be "normal" and you can join a Great House but you cannot go beyond a certain rank. You can then fight on one side during th Great House War. The Dagoths won't mind since that will weaken 2 out of 3 alliances, and that will be good for the 6th House when it risies to rebel.

hmm... also corprus cannot be passed on as a disease like it was before...
I'll find a way around that... don't you worry...

[Vrenir]

But if you want the PC infiltrator to be able to fight in the House War, then where do you cut it off? If they can only rise to a certain rank in the cover House, then at some point, doesn't the quest-line have to stop? Isn't the House War quest-line only supposed to end with the Houses joining forces to take on the Sixth House? Therefore, shouldn't the infiltrator have to complete the House War portion before visibly defecting to House Dagoth? If so, then that would put the end of the covert activity part at the end of the normal House quest-lines and either at or just before the first battle with the Sixth House. The PC would thus have already earned their maximum rank in their cover House. Also, if we're trying to build the infiltration system, the easiest way is for the Dagoth quest-giver to tell the PC that he needs to pick one of the Great Houses and join, just check in with the ash statue before each mission they assign. From that point until the rejoining, all we would need to do for House Dagoth quests is enter the topics for each House mission into the ash statue's dialogue box. The ash statue never gives these topics, but it recognizes them. Thus, if the PC joins Telvani and is given a mission with the topic "daedroth," when he talks to the ash statue, the topic "daedroth" has been introduced by into the PC's topics list and the statue will give him the message for it. The same would be true for any quest. Then, at whatever point we want (I think logically at the end of the House War), the statue directs the PC to defect and return to Red Mountain, kill a faction member, something irreversible like that. Under this system, I really don't know how we could limit the PC's rank in the cover faction, because they would be advancing just like normal, just with the intention of double-crossing them when the ash statue instructs them to do so.

Additionally, the idea of killing people in your faction to defect is a product of the default game rather than something we need to program in. If you're with House Dagoth and infiltrating House Redoran, there will come a time when the two sides want you to fight the other for them. At this point, your membership list in the program should include both factions. If you kill somebody from either faction, you are automatically kicked out, so this isn't anything that doesn't automatically happen. The only part that I'm suggesting is that we place the House Dagoth quest-giver in the line of fire so that a player can't have played the whole game to this point as a Redoran and then decide to join House Dagoth at the end when this would spawn a ton of errors. If we want to go the infiltration route, there's no way to really keep the player from doing something stupid like that otherwise, because we can't make the Houses mutually exclusive with Dagoth.

[KuKulzA]

perhaps we should get rid of the ability to join more than 6th House?
we can still do spying quests, just you aren't a member of that House
but an unaffiliated commoner skulking around... a local bum
________________________________________________________

this is an idea I had.... for the main quests, the order of which is not officially decided...
mini-main quests
Atronach mini-MQ questline: foretells the great battle between Temple and 6th House
Helseth mini-MQ questline: immediate spark of the Great House War (Vvardenfell local)
big mainquests
Great House War MQ: the result of decades of tensions and the meddling of Imperials
Temple vs. 6th House :
result of centuries of oppression and conflict, Temple must set Dunmer on right course
the Sixth House must rise and rebel to survive and carve out their own land on Vvardenfell

that way it gets rid of complications with 6th House pertaining to main quest

[Vrenir]

I really fail to see the sense in getting rid of the Sixth House infiltation thing as it would be by far one of the easiest quest-lines to implement and I can see no problems with compatibility. Unless you're hiding some information, there's nothing that you have planned to invalidate it, and it makes perfect sense for Dagoth to have agents not even really doing anything (sleepers) in the Great Houses until they are needed. Am I just not understanding something in your case?

I've found that many people like to play as ton of factions during their games, mainly to get all the cool rewards. House Dagoth by itself would rule out not only joining a Great House but also performing the Temple quest-line at the end. That's four sets of quest and rewards that are automatically given up if the PC chooses to be a Sixth House member. It also might be discarded as a possibility simply by people who already like one of the TESIII Houses (i.e. - someone who just has to play as a Telvani). If we follow the infiltration plan with joining, the PC can choose any of the three Houses to play as in addition to House Dagoth. Suddenly, being Sixth House means a lot cooler stuff (you get rewards from two Houses plus intrigue!) and no giving up on old favorites. You get the best of both worlds, and just like that our new joinable becomes a best-seller! Plus, as I said, it should be a breeze comparitively to implement.

I guess we certainly don't have to decide on it any time soon though, so this could go on the back burner for a few months while we work out other stuff, like locals and misc town quests.

[Ixidors Bane]

Truthfully KuKulzA, I have to agree with Vrenir here. Dagoth is all about infiltration and sabatoge. It seems to me that them putting on of their own guys into one of the Great Houses would make perfect sense. And this would save us from having to make another large questline, and isn't that what we have been doing lately (trimming the fat, so to speak)?

But hey, nothing has to be decided now. Let it sink in and we'll come back to it later on. Maybe we should work on the other questlines for the Houses or Helseth or the Atronach