Silgrad Tower from the Ashes

Not sure if this is the right place to put this... if it's not, and you can, feel free to move this. I was tired of working on finals, so I wrote some notes on a quest that I'd like to be implemented in to Silgrad Tower, as it's one of the few mods that will be massive enough to contain it. Here are my notes, sorry if they are hard to read.

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I don't know about you, but I really like gigantic mysteries. I've come up with one, or at least a small portion of one, and I call it the ?Grandis Mysterium?. It is about the blade of Tiber Septim, called Stormwrend. It would be a great mystery to be implemented when all of Skyrim and Morrowind are rebuilt within the Oblivion engine. It will require the user to find 12 ancient artifacts previously unmentioned. It will take place when the user reads a book entitled Theory of the Grandis Mysterium.

The user will receive a hint that the first clue as to the location of the blade is located at the Mage's Guild in the Imperial City. He should go there, talk to Tar-Meena and she will provide another book. This will be a short manuscript called Grandis Mysterium, and it will explain that the user must travel to Solsthiem to recover a key. This key is actually an amulet with an enchantment to be decided later. It will be deep within a cave filled with liches, wolves, and whatever other baddies we want.

Here the user will find the Amulet of Hjalti, a powerful artifact that will act as the key to Tiber Septim's blade (Hjalti was one of Septim's many secondary names). They will also find, carved in stone, a riddle to find the second artifact needed to open the location of Stormwrend.

This second item will be a ring that will act as a passport into the chamber that houses the blade. How we will do this can be decided later. It will also have a great enchantment on it: resist fire, frost, and shock 15 points CE. Call it Stormward unless the collective minds of the people here can come up with something cooler.

The quest to get it will be a ripoff of Indiana Jones... why not?

The riddle, which I am horrible at coming up with, will hint that the user must find a big map with light shining on it at a specific time of day. At that time of day, the user will see the beam of light cast upon the spot that he needs to travel to in order to obtain the ring. Since nobody has found the riddle yet, let alone solved it, we don't have to worry about this map being a public place or not. When the user asks about ?A big map? or something like that, most people will point out that they have never heard of such a map, though the Cartography Academy in Silgrad Tower (Or anywhere else if there are disagreements) should be able to point you in the right direction.

The user travels to Silgrad Tower's Cartographorium, where he learns there is only one map that fits the description in all of Tamriel. And it's downstairs.

The user goes downstairs and finds people looking at the map, and there is a beam of light that travels across it every day. Can we make a beam of light that shines at a certain point on the map depending on the time of day?

Anyway, the proper time, which is 7:00 PM ish, will have the beam shining directly on to a small hill in Skyrim, near Dragon Wood. When the user asks the person in charge at the Cartographorium, he says that there is a hill near Dragon Wood known as Drake Hill. The user should travel there.

When he gets there, he will see a stone shaped like a chair. If it's 7 PM, the user can use the seat (But only if he possesses the Amulet of Hjalti)and it will move to the side, revealing a passageway into a tunnel below. Here the user will find high level wraiths that guard the ring Stormward. There's item two, only 10 more to go.

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I'll write about them later... feel free to add what you would like. This quest has to be huge, though. And the rewards have to be big. And it has to make you use your brain as much as it makes you use your sword.

Sounds like a good idea. But what if Skyrim doesn't have a landmass built by time you get the chance to implement this? And what will the items do? Will they just be enchantments or will they do something special?

The items all have to be present in the user's inventory before he can enter wherever we decide to put the blade.

We should implement what we can into Morrowind's landmass and tackle Skyrim as it comes. We can put the Cartographorium in Silgrad Tower, we can place dungeons, we just can't implement the entire quest. We could also implement interiors from Skyrim. We will be making mod resources for Solsthiem, correct? All we will need is a few caves unless something comes up and we decide to put one item in an ancient hall or something. Anyway, the resources and meshes will be there when we are done with Morrowind. Therefore, we could have NPCs teleport you to these locations just to get the quest playable until Skyrim is done, or we could leave out the quest entirely until Skyrim is done and put it in an updated version of Morrowind.

I just thought of something. How are we going to implement dialouge for characters that allready exist? Should we just have it silent and text? Or should we try to find somebody that can sound like the original chatracters?

Otherwise, we will have to find somebody other than Tar-Meena to give you that manuscript.

I like your idea, Zarf, but I see a few problems with it. For instance, there isn't any goal to rebuilt the whole Morrowind province - 'just' the northwest mainland and Vvardenfell. And waiting for that to be completed, not to mention Skyrim, would most likely project your quest at least a year into the future. Who knows what things will be like then.

But, trying to find a middle way, what would you think of the idea of building your megaquest in installments, and make one installment take place near Reich Parkeep? Then, if you complete the installments you want, you could tie it all together. And the Reich Parkeep installment could be started on and added as a stand-alone quest (for the moment) at your leisure. Sounds like a win-win situation in my humble opinion. You'd get to start your megaquest and we'd get a fun quest near the town.

Quote:I just thought of something. How are we going to implement dialouge for characters that allready exist? Should we just have it silent and text? Or should we try to find somebody that can sound like the original chatracters?

We shouldn't implement dialogue for Bethesda's characters at all in my humble opinion, or do anything else with them for that matter.

Hah! Perfect! That is a win-win situation, and I do like the Installments idea. Gives me time to flesh out the quest to gain each artifact. Though, as you suggested, it might never get completed. Oh well.

When I came here, I figured we intended to rebuild all of Tamriel. Anything short of that is just too little. Aim higher! Yeah, we would have to recruit another hundred people.

I do hope someone makes the rest of Morrowind. If someone was making the rest of Morrowind, high rock, and summerset isles, and they all finished there projects we would have all of tamriel modded in.

How hard will the puzzles be, and how hard will the dungeons be. You don't want a clever level 1 to be able to blow through the quest easily, and you don't want a moronic level 50 to be able to easily complete the puzzles. Make it so the dungeons are hard too. And the puzzles.

The installments thing is a good idea. You might have to reorder some of the dungeons so you could get the ones in the completed areas done first.

Yeah, I plan to make you "Use your brain as muchas you use your sword".

And I will reorder everything. The first six items will feel like a complete quest, I'm thinking, and I will add the other 6 items and the uber reward when Skyrim is done. I just need to come up with the reward for Morrowind's side of the quests.

Here's an idea. It will be the blade itself, but it turns out that the blade is incomplete. It will function as normal, but that's it. In order to unlock it's true power, you must travel to Skyrim to find the extension or whatever isn't part of it. Then to Hammerfell to get it repaired. Just kidding about Hammerfell. Unless somebody REALLY wants to make it.

Tamriel rebuilt was making Hammerfell but that's a different mod.

Honestly, I have little to no faith in Tamriel Rebuilt. It's taken them so long to produce anything, and they have very little to show for it and it's still very messy. I hope they do something awesome though.

Well, we're called the Silgrad Tower team for a reason. =) And us oldies in the core have a vested interest in that particular region of the Morrowind Province. I don't expect anyone who wasn't a part of our mod team back then to care nearly as much as we do about these lands, but hopefully we'll have as much fun now as we did back then and the regions and towns will grow on ya.

Apart from that, personally I care about the whole Province on a certain level and would love to experience for instance a Dres city. But I don't really give a hoot about the other Provinces.