The Dark Brotherhood | The Elder Scrolls Podcast #20

[Music] what is up ladies and gentlemen welcome back to fudge muppet this is the elder scrolls podcast i'm scott here with michael and drew as always and today we are talking all about the dark brotherhood yeah so probably the favorite faction of a lot of people listening to this potentially right and and one of the fondest ones what's the edge lord the edgelord faction and i have a lot of fond memories of this faction especially starting out with that quest line back in oblivion and of course going through skyrim and other elder scrolls games it it's a guild that i obviously as we know in the law has started to die out but i can't really see it not being an elder scroll six just just from pure fan appeal but they are basically an order of assassins oh you want you you never know we we we might get surprised and they might actually do something a little more i'm all dead i'm they'll be back in some form or another they'll be back because the void is always hungry for souls that's what syphilis himself says you know so well i don't know if sitha says well yeah sorry he doesn't directly he doesn't like say it to the microphone you know he like supposedly says it to the to the nightmare yeah but yeah so look they they may have something like say it said in hammerfell you could really see some like specifically like hammerfell deity themed assassin group hundred percent you could see that and you could just get the nod you could have nazir yeah as like a person you do a quest with on one occasion and that all sounds that all sounds great i'm just saying based on what we've seen like chucking the brotherhood of steel into fallout 76 you better believe the dark brotherhood is gonna be in elder scrolls six i just can't see them not doing it it's such a fan it's kind of cringe man well i think the morag tong will be in the elder scrolls six really i mean no like not necessarily in hammerfell but there's good reason to believe that they're gonna come back strong um as time progresses okay because uh i mean we'll get into it but there's a lot of you know uh theories relating to you know how much the tribunal were a part of causing the morag tong's downfall and what not now the tribunal are not around anymore things are things are changing we see a little bit in dragonborn as well but um okay well we should probably like pre-face this with the dark brotherhood that you're familiar with there are big assassins guild they're a giant death cult who worship the dreadfather sithus and this figure called the night mother and beyond that though they are just a bunch of assassins who are rather pragmatic and just take money that's not like i wouldn't consider there like a religiosity the same as some other cults and stuff they're fairly loose like you see and that's why they have such a sort of rag tag bunch of killers from all over the place they just most of the members are like yeah i like killing so i joined up with the dark brotherhood because um yummy killer yeah i mean you look at you look at how you join in uh oblivion for example you just kill someone kill anyone and you get visited in the night you know you're hardly going to become a devout worshiper of sithus or the night mother you know in a day yeah they basically have talent scouts that go around finding the coolest murders and just track you down it's it's effective and i think that's like overall that's like the dark brotherhood in my opinion as a faction is pretty like just an edgelord lackluster sort of thing but the thing is they've always had such a good cast of characters and they've also had some of the best quests and most fun quests and that's why they are so popular not not because ooh dark brotherhood like sith is this is so cool and edgy it's it's all of the characters and quests that make it what it is that's why in elder scrolls 6 they really could just do anything with the new assassins guild have all the same cool type of quests have a really cool bunch of characters and i don't think anyone can really complain yeah get some cool outfits absolutely and as edgy as they are there's something about an assassin's guild that is kind of it's just so crucial to to mundus and the mortal realm the way it kind of all began it's like if you think about it like during the dawn times or like going into the more effective times where you've got all these mortals who you know venerate the aedra and they they follow trinimac and auriel and whatever they say and then you get mafala and boefer coming out of nowhere just like no let's flip this on its head let's you know shame these gods and show you that you know through um through treachery and deception you can you can make just about anything happen just like shoving that chaos into this realm that you know kind of has become more chaotic as it goes and less orderly and you know you see it with the kaima when they move away and they're taught assassination and and foul murder as we see foul murder happen a bit over there but yeah and it's like um that's how we get to the dark brotherhood and mephala is is always somewhat involved well i guess we can probably start talking about the uh origins and we can sort of like preface this with that the dark brotherhood sort of come into appearance in tamriel during the second era around like three year 300-ish kind of thing i think their dates approximate dates like 358 something like that yeah um so after the assassination of versa douchey um and before him riemann iii by the morag tong um so there's a few theories about how the dark brotherhood came about and i think one of the more compelling ones is that they are a offshoot of the morag tong and the sort of schism happened and there's various reasons behind why that could have happened and there's some theories so did you guys want to start on on some of this well i could well one i'll go i was going to say there's some things you could start with that i don't think it is like you know you could kind of remove some of the theories so there's one where it's a there's a story about it kind of being an offshoot from the thieves guild where a bunch of thieves realized it was just easier to steal from their targets if they were allowed to kill them and it kind of went from there it's like wow this is way easier when we just murder our targets and then steal from them yeah i i feel like that's the writer's way of just sort of like adding in more theories quickly to just to just make sure that there is no one definitive story but even though that the morag tong one is far more compelling or you know what i mean they're just trying to cloud it in obscurity but you know it's kind of unlikely or at least it's not cool it doesn't fit the theme it's a really boring start yeah and you know all of that just comes from one woman who you know is interviewed by this one guy and it's like yeah it doesn't really connect to anything else and it's uh yeah it'd be boring if that were somehow the actual answer but then again it's probably you know if even if that were to have happened that this woman you know was like why don't we strangle the people we steal from even if that did happen you know it almost wouldn't take away from the other um causes the domino effect that led to the dark brotherhood yeah it's probably important to establish now that the dark brotherhood in the contemporary sense they don't uh at least seem to acknowledge kind of any connection to the morag tong or it doesn't seem like they have similar roots or like on the surface it doesn't seem like it like they all seem very uh secular is a funny word for them but they are just it's really is just sithus and this sort of night mother and the night mother to them is this is this woman that that um was she started off by she heard the father the dreadfather's voice and so on and then she supposedly bore his children and then killed them all um i think it was five of them i think that's to symbolize the hand um and yeah and then obviously the the village or the because i'm pretty sure the story takes place in breville i think yeah i can't quite remember but regardless the story is they um then they all come and kill her for what she for what she did but then um then the first listener started hearing like her voices the night mother's voice and she's supposed to be the one who's like delivering the will of her husband to the dreadfather sithus so it's all through the night mother which is important to remember because there are lots of things about the night mother potentially being um just another apparition of mephala like another aspect or something well that's the thing like um we the the morag tong took care of sending you know or like of killing people for so long that if you excuse my choice of words it's like when they disappeared it kind of left a void that needed to be filled by something and uh i mean like it's really we know we're not going to talk too much about the moro tong but it's really out of character for them that the kind of the turning point was the assassination of assassination of verse a douche and um and afterwards it almost seems like whoever did it was in some way kind of like being possessed by just something or or other even if you mean that in a metaphorical sense and and scrawled the words morag tong on the walls after like in the blood of this uh potentate and after that it's like even though everybody knew that the maurik tong were active it was the point where everyone's like no we're not going to accept this anymore and we're going to all outlaw it at the same time and and you know as a result it makes sense that something like the dark brotherhood's going to come along because you know it was missing and it's an it is a necessary part but to me to be honest what's kind of weird like i kind of i agree with what you're saying but it's it's kind of weird because there's this idea that you can read about where somebody can't remember who but they're saying like oh the dark brotherhood would never kill an emperor because then they'd have the whole empire on them and it would be catastrophic for them and they wouldn't be tolerated anymore because they are kind of tolerated as much as they're illegal like they're they're not a super super high priority for the empire and other provinces to deal with for example but the empire sorry but emperors have been killed before so plagueis was killed plagueis the first right praying while praying in the temple of the one so that's tiber septim's grandson and that that resulted in the the passing of the septum line to tiber septim's brother's daughter so that's kind of like the and then that's the end of his dream as we know in skyrim we don't know what the canon is but if we assume that the canon is all of the faction quest lines get done by somebody whether it's the dragonborn or just you know the listener or whoever um the emperor gets killed there again so yeah it's kind of weird to think that the morag tong even though that's kind of the story were looked at in a bad way after killing a potentate when really the dark brotherhood have done similar stuff i think you could almost say it's like a good piece of advice for the dark brotherhood is never kill a well-loved emperor you know if an emperor is only as powerful as their backing and say you've got someone else who wants the throne if you then assassinate that emperor and you've got a bunch of people supporting the the person who's going to take over it it's the problem kind of goes away you know whereas with this potenti it was such a a brazen display that you kind of couldn't just sweep it under the rug anymore you know you couldn't just have some guy come in and wash the walls after having riemann iii and him dead like people were scared like obviously of the mayak tonga and you know rightly so so the one of the chief theories is the idea that they're this sort of mephala worshiping cult as they sort of always have been and that basically when versus douche came about there were there was the morag tong basically went you know they were in morrowind but they basically sought refuge in morrowind and protection from the tribunal and so they go end up going to vivec which is you know um the the anticipation of mephala and vivec and they sort of have to agree to worship um vivec instead whereas they sort of do still secretly worship mephala and in ways they're interlinked because of the anticipation relation but basically there's this idea that the dark brotherhood um came about because like no way we're not not dealing with this we want to keep our cult of murder everywhere and also not worshiping vivec we're not going to swap it out so then there's the kind of idea that they had this night mother that was created and it's actually mephala's aspect so they're worshiping the mephala but through another name right through the night yeah the other thing that's worth pointing out is how the night mother was actually just the leader of the dark brotherhood like an actual person so it's kind of like this matriarchal group where the leader is the night mother and you see it in morrowind it's a dunmer lady you can speak to and in i think it's imperial imperial maybe the screenshot was just look they're morrowind graphics i just looked at the picture it's it's important to clarify this will help everyone out a lot but the dark brotherhood is a guild that's been made on the fly dark brotherhood and daggerfall they had a leader called the night mother and it was sort of just like all the night mothers kind of like you know just the leader but not in this sort of ghostly spiritual sense of story just like a very physical leader same in morrowind there was a dark brotherhood night mother which was just the leader of that sort of group of dark brotherhood but just to clarify it is it is an imperial it is an imperial it's just god your face is so jagged and then and then in oblivion um they started introducing this idea of the night mother being like the the dread father's wife and killing her children and all that kind of stuff got built so it kind of got built in in retrospect um and so you could kind of maybe if you wanted to rationalize it you could say that maybe female leaders of certain sanctuaries and stuff in the past have been called a night mother to sort of like honor them or something but to be honest it kind of is just retconned like i wouldn't put too much thought into it especially since eso which is you see a dark brotherhood that is so closely um you know it's only a couple hundred years or something away from its origins you end up they they have the night mother and the whole like exactly how it was in skyrim and oblivion so you sort of you know you can kind of just dismiss the other night mother talk there's also night mother is said to be the the leader of the morag tong in the last year series of books but once again that's just you know it is just a book it is like one of those sort of fictional stories about historical events like it's a drama kind of thing but so it could just be you know a mix of words also literally could just be older developer ideas about what the night mother is versus now that they're it's a dark brotherhood thing you know oh yeah i mean in any form it does just kind of seem to be a vessel that is there is a way of worshiping mafaala without explicitly saying it because you know even though um vivec is a you you associate him with mafala the tribunal were not really fond of anyone um getting too keen on the day the good daedra you know it was all about them not about the good daedra and uh you can imagine that would be a bit of a problem for the tongue and the dark brotherhood that followed you know you can almost see the um the downfall of the tongue to be almost like in a way kind of losing a bit of mafala's favor maybe not necessarily against them but just as kind of a way of lashing out at the lack of worship she's getting in general and then the dark brotherhood follows and you get you get a lot more of it back i don't know about you guys but i i'm pretty firmly of the belief that it is a religious schism between the the tongue and the dark brotherhood and that's what kind of creates them there's also like a reference to early reference to like a a it's like a note found in skyrim somewhere not in the game i think it's in um in the in history that references um like a war between like a references talking to someone like brother and a war between shadowy organizations and that's sort of thought to be the war between the dark brotherhood and morag tong when it was i actually had in in the video the that i made about uh microsoft and what they could potentially do with spin-off games i thought they would be a really cool like imagine you know like dishonored or even assassin's creed but also like a dishonored kind of style um assassin story game but set at the formation of dark brotherhood so like set at the schism and like maybe even the opening is kind of like you're actually assassinating versus douche along with others and so on and then after there's the there's the sort of whole storyline is establishing the dark brotherhood and fighting against morocco i feel like i'll become way more open to any suggestions like that once elder scrolls six is already out but until then every time i hear it i'm just like no give me auto scroll six instead but no my implication was that microsoft that arcane studios the guys that made dishonored cool yeah so you wouldn't have bethesda game studios doing it's not they're not good at that so just you know every you know the game i want i want elder scrolls yes but anyway it back to mafaala i can definitely see it being the kind of religious schism especially when you consider like mafala wouldn't care she wouldn't care she's still getting kind of worship and reverence from both guilds people are still killing like you know if she's the daedra of what murder and and sex and lies and you know yeah well eliza is kind of there it doesn't matter if she's lying yeah exactly exactly it suits her perfectly well you know to kind of be in control of both without the dark brotherhood at least fully realizing or at least most of the members like a lot of the members it's kind of like the companions a lot of the members aren't really in it for like the higher more metaphysical aspects of the guild it's just like oh yeah i like fighting or i like being an assassin yeah and you do get like direct examples of mephala specifically mafala looking out for the dark brotherhood like just before the warp in the west there's like a i think a guy in the iliac bay who discovers the location of the hidden nightside sanctuary and mafala offers the ebony blade to the adventurer who goes and slays him before he can basically spill the secret so you actively get her protecting the dark brotherhood not just through this other named vessel i'm not quite sure and can't quite be bothered to go back through all the the bits of like daggerfall law and arena law and like try and get the sequence of its creation but i have a feeling that the morag tong and dark brotherhood were kind of the same thing in daggerfall and then they're like oh look at the morag tong this is the morag tong and then they're kind of like oh but we want the dark brotherhood as well on the tribunal dlc so they kind of it's it's one of those out afterwards yeah yeah oh look i wouldn't put it past you know it's the way it works when you're making these games yeah absolutely but i guess we could kind of talk um maybe chronologically about some of their things so so after we sort of we there's a mention of um oh my goodness that name alma herrera of hegath basically talking about how her grandfather since the time of her grandfather they've enlisted the service of the dark brotherhood and this is in uh 4 12 of the second era so and like we said like it's probably around 358 360. something like that it could you know they could have a bit of flexibility with that date i think but still um we know since then but then we get to the events of eso the dark brotherhood quest line which features uh you're in the gold coast basically so um they're kind of separated from the from the empire because of varan's wall and stuff um they have um what's they call it um for fortuna app dugout right is that is the pirate queen that has i can't remember sorry anvil or kovach anvil anvil and kovach is under the and so you can also go to kevatch and kill the uh arch primate right of um of the order artorias of the order of the hour yeah yeah so um that i mean outside of that we know that the dark brotherhood there are like pretty established like and they've got their whole night mother thing going on so yeah that that happens they kill a bunch of important people they've got some wild armor as well some of the pictures they look like they need to be protecting snoke as the praetorian god seriously or you could chuck a lightsaber in their hand and throw them in knights of the old republic and they'd fit right in on the deck of a ship yeah power rangers yeah it depends it depends on which assassin some of them look more uh standard whereas others look a bit over the top as is often the case in the older scrolls online with their armor designs yeah yeah so that's uh yikes but yeah so i guess their next big significant thing really comes about in the third era because we don't hear too much more about the dark brotherhood and that's when they literally they they end the type of septum line by killing pelagius the first type of septum's grandson in the temple of the one but that meant that kintara who was tiber septim's niece got the throne but that kind of changes the septum line and so on so so quite significant it's a cool assassination as well it to me it has these real assassins creed vibes like the fact that he was assassinated while praying in some temple alone and like he gets killed you can imagine the blood on the temple floor and some shadowy figure fleeing away and maybe there's some pigeons going around you know i can hardly see it the the imperial city would be a good place for that kind of scene like you know remember the cinematic trailer and uh brotherhood yeah yeah yeah but then my father would be pretty pretty pleased about killing an aedra worshipper at their place of worship yeah but then we kind of get to the uh idea that um they had this power struggle over mayroon's razor apparently because back in daggerfall law like marion's razor was kind of associated with them like all sought after by them and that kind of gets um you know i i guess it would be a useful thing for assassins the thing that i don't like about it obviously it's a powerful dagger but if we're going off the game mechanics it's this really small chance to instantly kill so it's kind of like yay if i do 50 assassin contracts one of them will be an instant kill and it's kind of like if you're an assassin pretty much obviously in game there's things like damage and whatever but the idea is that if you stab someone in the throat in the older scrolls even if they have ten thousand health like they die you know so as an assassin it seems i don't know why they would want it so badly there is a uh just talking about the the the differences um one thing to point out is that and as we'll find out as we go through some history the dark brotherhood's kind of theme um is that they do kind of take on big figures and and part of the difference the separation between morag tong even could be that the morag tong you know have to have ritz you know ordained by the tribunal and so on um and it's kind of like a contained thing for like basically dealing with inter-house wars and stuff like that whereas the dark brotherhood will split apart because they want to keep murdering you know in the name of mephala or as the night mother later on but they take on really uh big targets and and one of the interesting ones is because you actually fight them as like antagonists in the tribunal quest line for morrowind um and basically so king lalu helseth which is the son of baron zaya and baron zaya if we remember was made um like queen of um of morrowind to like as a sort of puppet figurehead for the for the type of septum empire and then so you have her son hell seth right and then hell seth is so he's like the king of morrowind but they're very like imperial backers not to do with the houses so much and it's by that transition but basically that uh uh hell seth organized the dark brotherhood to assassinate you the nerevarine because you could potentially after doing what you did um and you know defeating dagothur and stuff like they didn't he didn't want you to challenge his rule um and then later uh later on um she they also make an attempt on baron's eye's life so on and the plot goes on but you basically thought them as the nerve ring but like that's a pretty you know after knowing who the nerve ring is and doing what the narrow marine did like going after the nerve ring is also a pretty big deal and i mean tying this back to the razer um all of what we're saying right here as much as mephala might hate me for saying it is very characteristic of mehrunes dagon you know like that the dark brotherhood and the morag tong they're kind of you know they they serve mephala and syphilis and it's all about it's it's chaos it's change it's it's taking out it's taking out um leaders who you know may maybe completely unchallenged if you don't have assassination and and marin stagon even though he's not associated with either of these guilds is going to love the the uh relevance of these guilds yeah and how they can take care of you know leaders who might not be so good the assassination facilitates the revolution exactly and you can also imagine actually there's a reason they would like the raza if they are going after some high-profile targets that kind of have more strength than your typical mortal for example the dragonborn if they wanted to kill a dragonborn you'd feel a lot better about it with a daedric artifact in your hands yeah we're going after high-profile targets like grelod the kind but i mean they do come for you in skyrim if you do wrong by them well that's another thing too to sort of point out is as well is is actually what the source of their assassinations are it's through legal ritz in the morag tong whereas there's this very hazy cultic sort of black sacrament which basically goes um to the night mother and the night mother hears it and then and then uh gives those missions to the listener and speaks to the listener and then you know that's where the black hand comes in you've got the listener who receives word from the night mother and then the four speakers who will kind of assign um assassins to go and take care of these jobs so which is why you know we'll get we'll get into it but why people like cicero will freak out if there's no listener present there's no one to take the night mother's will and essentially the dark brotherhood can only operate on hearsay which isn't quite as badass as their black sacrifice yeah and it kind of as it talks about in some of the texts and i think in his journal that it reduces the legitimacy of the dark brotherhood because if they if there's because obviously they're going through a pretty heavy downfall um if they're not fulfilling their contracts you know the black sacrament almost becomes myth it's like oh maybe it works you know yeah so yeah so that's why when they're talking about you know there was this argument as the dark brotherhood was facing troubles in the fourth era of kind of like should we expand or should we consolidate and i would be in favor of the expansion to be honest as much as they were facing troubles there's no point in even having the guild if you're not fulfilling contracts in different places you know like it's like oh the dark brotherhood the black sacrament only works in syria deal like it's like okay yeah the um one quick thing we'll we'll pelt through some of the third era stuff before we get to the fourth era stuff because that's where there's going to be some really interesting discussion um but the third area there is this i think people might want to know this this greywood blend with character who basically started he was part of dark brotherhood and started a crusade against them to remove all non-vampires from from the brotherhood and they were known as um he sorry he founded an organization called the crimson scars this is this little bit of law that was added in um for the vile and the violence deep scorn hollow layer explanation for oblivion i think it's called deep skull and hollow that like the actual name of the planet yeah yeah yeah but anyway so it's just basically a little cool story to facilitate why this place is here and so on and he fails obviously um and you know you never hear about the crimson scars again it's literally just that tiny little little piece of info but then let's move on to the actual oblivion questline with characters such as lucian le chance and and such so you basically get recruited and when you kill rufio well you know um not necessarily you your character but someone and uh that results in the purification the long line of quest lines of killing results in the purification of uh of um the schadenhaul sanctuary one big game of among us between all the members of the dark brotherhood i i like the idea as well that the who done it quest which comes not um not too long before uh was actually you being prepared to do the purification like they put you in this party house to kill off everyone without the people inside knowing that you're the one killing everyone so that yeah lucian lachance can kind of say okay he's ready to do the purification it's like training i think that's such a cool theory i'd love to make a video on it but i don't know how to say more than just that you know it's kind of yeah like i'm sure i could make a video about the quest because i just love it so much yeah and then there's the uh matthew belmont guy and he's the he he was the imposter well i mean what an effort because it's basically his mum gets killed by the dark brotherhood and then he goes and joins them in this big quest to get his ultimate revenge and bring the whole effect such an effort it is such an effort and he's and his diary is so creepy although in parts of his diary it just feels like the writers were like oh what what can we do that's like creepy oh let's write backwards lucy le chance must die but but there is some things in there any time the the fr the word mummy is used in a creative text it's just it's just like yeah well then there is i know some people say like the next 200 years uh sort of bad for the brotherhood but i don't think it gets particularly bad really until kind of close to the great war period which is sort of the end of that like it's reasonable to assume i guess that they were pretty fine for for the first century or kind of continuing as they were in varying degrees but it wasn't really until the great war and some of the big uh the outfall the what do you call it um not out for what's the word anyway look the results the results of of the great war um that caused some stuff so if you guys want to take the reins on on some of that this is all stuff we find out through citroen yeah cicero's journal which is kind of a gradual degeneration into madness um he kind of talks about i'll have to bring it up but um talks about how he's kind of he gets displaced and he moves to the shade and half sanctuary and just people stop returning until the point where it's just him alone and he documents like uh they stop being active in hammerfell there's the the argonians stop training recruits in arkhan yeah in arkhan scales yeah for the shadow scales and then um what what's the location in brazil falls in elsewhere yeah breville falls corinth in yeah the current sanctuary and it gets to the point where it's pretty much just dawns oh sorry not dawn dawn star is a potential for the future but you've just got the forests of fault grief and yeah and it's pretty much all that kind of writing or drug wars or stuff like that that are causing a lot of the problems like you know it ends up being uh we have the garnage character who goes to brazil and only he just manages to basically rescue i think he even loses his eye in the ordeal to rescue the night mother's coffin and with her and brings her back and and then you have cicero become the keeper and the last person he killed was a jester and then he kind of goes nuts and sort of takes on the identity of this yeah the idea is that the the laughter of the jester fills the void and that cicero is constantly listening to this silence but then instead his silence gets replaced by the laughter of this this gesture which is kind of you can imagine him obsessing over being an assassin because he talks about how you know that's why he joined he wanted to kill and then they basically like give him the job where it's like oh there's so much honor to this job but it's like the most boring one like clearing out insects and rodents from the night mother's corpse and oiling it up and and all this kind of like sensory yeah to an extent to an extent it's it's almost not the dark brotherhood's fault that they're going through a lot of this because they kind of seem to be getting abandoned you know that no listener is being chosen no one's there to hear the nightmare if she's even speaking at all so it's like the question becomes like why is there no communication happening anymore and you get to the point where uh one of the members whose name you'll remind me of um claims to become the lawyer raj and and essentially they're like okay well if you're the listener what's the what's the secret password i don't know it so they kill him good attempt man you probably could have thought that through a little bit more but and they go without a listener for a while like i calculated as well it takes it seems to take cicero about three to four months to go insane like when when you read he's not insane but when it there's this big skip in his um in his diary entries where he kind of goes from like kind of teetering on the edge and then it's like okay now he's just nuts yeah and then as we know astrid was sort of running a sanctuary in fall creek and sort of just kind of diverging a little bit and trying to run the dark brotherhood without a listener trying to keep up the image and then you come and then you're the listener and cicero comes back you've played the storyline it all results in another big purging of dark brotherhood characters by the penitus oculatus and then we end up with the emperor's assassination and basically you only have nazir babette and a few others in the dawn star sanctuary left but the dark brotherhood does survive and i think that i just found the i just found the quote so he's going crazy with the laughter and he's in his head and stuff not like crazy kind of crazy but then there's one entry is like it's not safe to leave the sanctuary we'll stay here all is well and then the next entry is just like garnage is gone gone gone gone gone gone left to get food but he'll be back it's only been three months three months three months 12 moths four sloths and you're just like okay all right cool meme entry yeah it's kind of funny how babette gets to uh gets to survive the uh the purging of this dark brotherhood because you know obviously children are immune and they've got plot armour in here the scrolls but she's not exactly a child so you'd think she might not be so safe but then again maybe she's just very skilled and evasive or maybe was just like no please don't don't murder me she was a really cool she was a cool character addition to the dark brotherhood right that's one thing maybe it's just nostalgia so on but some of the oblivion ones i think i just remember them more because i played them as a kid but i was kind of disappointed that again they did just kill off pretty much all the characters except bibet nazir like i wish they kind of i if they do have the dark brotherhood the next one i really hope it's not just another purification and kill yeah i was a little bit disappointed with that as well you know i as i am willing to make a video as well you know how i made one comparing the thieves guild of skyrim and oblivion i would love to go back and do a dark brotherhood one just to see if oblivion lives up to the hype and the nostalgia in my brain i know it's good but i just people will say it's so much better than skyrim's and it i think by default it has a longer quest line like there's more questions but it will be it'd the thing with skyrim is a lot of it a lot of the quests are these contracts that you get from nazir and they can be interesting but what they did in oblivion was they kind of characterized the contracts a lot more by making them main quests you know like killing um i think he's called bailin in bruma the bosma guy with the big nord guard that's not a crazy quest if you think about it you sneak into a house go upstairs and loosen the fastenings of a thing and then leave like it's a it's a pretty simple murder and you know i'm sure being sent to a farm in skyrim to kill some farmer who's actually like a vampire could have been made so much more interesting if there was more background more this more that but instead it just feels a little bit more like a radiant quest than like a well thought out thing and even in oblivion you have these little extra things where i think his name's grom off the top of my head but the guard to this guy who failed is upset and you find him in the bar later drinking his sorrows away and and stuff like that i think too i can't even remember if there is much in skyrim but for the most part in skyrim i think you can kind of just kill them whereas in in oblivion if you killed them the specified way or the way that you that you know that um you know that the contract giver or something wanted it to be done you would often get like a better like reward or something because i remember getting like suffer thorn this like little enchanted elven dagger for yeah and like the scales of deceivers finery um skyrim when when you kill vitoria vichy you can you can do that by pushing the statue yeah can't you but is there any which is really cool but is there any does that come up in dialogue or reward in any way i don't i don't think it does no i think it's just an it's just an option which i appreciate it's cool there is there are there are still bonuses in uh skyrim i believe they're just more monetary i just i can remember dialogue about bonuses but it's it's not the same so i am interested drew you were saying earlier about why you think the morak tong is going to come back in their relation to the dark brotherhood i'm curious what you're well it kind of says it all stems basically from the the change the the huge divergence in morrowind's culture when the tribunal cut rise to power because you know the way i see it is when mafala boeifer and azura are crea essentially creating these changed ones and teaching them how to live mafala has kind of set in motion an institution that is just like she doesn't even need to do anything it's just gonna permanently you know there's going to be lots of deception and murder and assassination and and plenty of souls are flowing um being you know people being killed and then um you know it's all focused around her as well but then you get the the tribunal come along who essentially just push them all aside and they take all the the attention to the point where if the murak tong are going to continue to operate i mean you know you know what the ordinators are like when it comes to religious dissidence as well um this this establish the morag tong doesn't want to be forced to really secretly worship their their god and a lot of them probably did just turn to worshiping the tribunal but with the events of morrowind um and the tribunal being gone and the reclamation's coming back the a resurgence in the morag tong especially with the dark brotherhood can consistently falling apart it really seems like a good time for the morag tong to just rise to prominence again because they're the alternative and especially i guess if you run with the like the dunmer refugee ideas or so on you could have like a broader network that you have a reason to expand your network beyond just morrowind it was all it was all a morag tong ploy let's erupt red mountain so we can send dark elves across the land have an excuse to get our assassins in places yeah i don't think so to clarify the morak tong were all like even in morrowind it says they're all still like attached to mafala and so on but i think it really is recognizing the tribunal and basically even maybe it's less of a reverence scenario but at least publicly more of a reference for that kind of thing or a um just sort of that you know you need ritz from the tribunal they need to operate under the tribunal's laws rather than this sort of secret cult that can do whatever the hell they want like before yeah exactly and now they can do it straight to my father again because the whole of morrowind is back to to worshipping the reclamations you know yeah exactly so yeah i wonder how that uh and if the dark brotherhood can't stay relevant and prevent you know not kill each other and all of this then um you know as i said before there's the in the story of the rise of the night mother when she's visited by by siphis and he begats her five children and and whatnot he you know there is specific mention of the void hungering for souls and and all of this so it's like an assassin's guild is always going to be essential in the mortal realm um and you know always has been with the the forces of chaos and stasis you can't just have order you know there always needs to be some chaos and and one form or another it's going to return well it's interesting too in some of the books they do reference this idea that i don't know if i buy but morag tong worshipping sithis originally um as well like at like in conjunction with the file which which is kind of like what the dark brotherhood is if you buy into the idea that night mother is mephala but i guess sith is just being sort of an embodiment of of chaos and stuff anyway like in a way through venerating the daedra you kind of by default venerate a sort of more chaotic element and stuff like that so it could be sort of related but the other thing as well is whatever gets worshipped gets more powerful you know so it's kind of it's kind of like the agony the ancient argonians worshipping sithus as a destroyer and then the modern ones worshipping him as a destroyer and a creator if you have an assassin's guild that perceives sithus to be super destructive then that kind of part of him i could imagine can be present or at least feel real to them imagine so yeah i don't i wonder how it works with some of those like things that sort of predate the forces that predate because i know that's how it works with the aedra but even with the daydream even though they choose to appear differently they have way more autonomy yeah that's true their actions i think the reason that we have this there's so much like inflict mortal perception perceptive influence on the aedra is because they are kind of unconscious or sort of dead in a way and but and they're tied to nature and the forces of nature which mortals are a part of as well so it's almost like the way mortals brains work does have an impact on the gods who created them and to be true all of the to be fair as well i'm pretty sure all of the sith stealing stuff he never speaks directly goes to the night mother and then two to the listener so there is no like it's not like all the dark brotherhood members are like listening to sithis or hearing synthesis or even the nightmare it's just the listener so well they think they think they do a lot of them think they've heard sithis tell them things but it's not it's strong like i mean i i'm pretty sure the crimson scars character thought that sithis told them to get rid of all the non-vampires and then like not what a loony well it takes a special kind of mind to be associated with a dark brotherhood in general i think you know if you're a cultist murderer there's always the chance you're going to hear voices that seem to go hand in hand yeah but yeah i i know with the elder scrolls six i it kind of depends my only take on the dark brotherhood is it just depends on the time difference if it's really close like two years i think that's kind of like silly just because of how you know there's only you know nazir berbet and like a listener and a few other like new apprentices having them expand into hammerfell all of a sudden or something is just so like sudden but maybe if it's something more like 10 years that is a lot of time 10 years is a lot of time so you never know what could happen because i can imagine like what they did with skyrim one of the gameplay demos and then they're like he get corey comes and delivers a letter and then it says we know on the thing like the black hand it's like everyone's like yeah for sure but yeah yeah i don't know what do you guys have anything else to uh to say about the brotherhood uh not really in terms of like theory crafting type of stuff i mean i'm always down to talk about the actual characters and the the quests and things like that but um actually just actually you know i was just mentioning about sethus or something one somewhat tangible element doesn't have to be directly related to see if it's like it could be created by the night mother or something but the wrath of sithis the the big like wraith ghost thing that attacks you if in oblivion if you um you know betray one of the five tenants yeah it comes in and it comes and visits you if you basically get exiled from the guild but if you beat it well but if it happens three times you have to defeat it and you're still permanently exiled yeah yeah it comes to visit you you kill it but obviously you can't join it's kind of like three strikes and you're out but as we see in skyrim they kind of stop following the five tenets anyway like astrid's just a very business oriented doesn't care type person you know it really feels like a big gang of mercenaries in a way hmm yeah yeah yeah big edgy mercenaries the other thing you're talking about sithis there is the artifact the fangs of sithus which is like a tool used in black marsh of like great power from long ago and it could like destroy the crops of enemies and do all other kinds of things but to relate that a little bit more too that is interesting that the sith um that the argonians you know they've had a connection to sithus but then also by extension have had a connection to the dark brotherhood through the shadow scale program thing so there's sort of a little bit extra that maybe yeah i wonder when that all started because we know it ends in like the late fourth era the whole shadow scale program thing but yeah there's talks in cicero's journal of um wanting it uh two members wanting to fund it but they didn't have the resources at the time so they decided not to yeah all interesting stuff but uh and yeah i think that i think that does cover everything else yeah yeah for sure although i do i think um i think i will end up making this video on the dark brotherhood skyrim vs oblivion yeah i'm just vibing it i didn't get to talk about all the quests that i wanted to so i'm gonna make a video about it instead yeah all right well ladies and gentlemen thank you so much for watching this dark brotherhood elder scrolls podcast and uh we will be back to nerd out with you all again next week or put your hands to the screen say we know do it true there we go

Channel: FudgeMuppet

Views: 76,188

Keywords: skyrim, elder scrolls, elder scrolls lore, skyrim lore, elder scrolls podcast, fudgemuppet, elder scrolls lore podcast, elder scrolls 6

Id: keENLIGY78k

Length: 48min 44sec (2924 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 22 2020