Amra's Ariel, Witchhunter in Oblivion

This is not going to be such an involved thread as the one I made for Skyrim, but I wanted to post it anyway. Over a week ago I got an offer on Gog.com for (amongst others) the Morrowind and Oblivion games, and I got them both if only for archive purposes. And the copy of Oblivion is also useful (mainly for its sound files) if the Skyblivion overhaul ever gets finished, which allows you to play the entire game of Oblivion with Skyrim's engine. I was tempted to install it and have another look at the game now that I'm able to max it out, even on my 8 year old PC, which I couldn't do when I played it to death back in 2006-2007. Of course it looks dated now, especially the characters, but once you're in the game for a while you don't notice it as much anymore. It's still a good game! I'll show some landscapes and stuff later, and I might even throw some mods at it to make it look and play better. I made a stealthy Assassin-class character who mainly uses a bow. Have a look!

Oh, it's been so long since I played this game. I recall decking my gal out in Mazken armour. Really too bad all of that was lost with my old website.

I've been looking into mods for this old game last night. So far I've figured out that you need the official patch (or patches, there's a separate one for the Shivering Isles DLC), then the unofficial patch(es), the Oblivion Script Extender which is required by many mods, and another file needed for the GOG version that I bought. It doesn't all work properly yet according to the Vortex mod manager that I got from Nexus because of version inconsistencies, so I'll need to fix things first before I start adding mods that I'll actually notice in-game. What a hornets' nest I've gotten myself into! I just want to make its looks a little prettier, at least at first. At least it's a nice rehearsal for my other game. Adding mods to Skyrim should be somewhat easier, but I'm still in the middle of a vanilla playthrough there so I'll leave it alone for the time being.

I looked some stuff up to try and make the new faces mod work properly, or rather the Blockhead mod that it relies on, and I succeeded! It turned out I had to start the Oblivion loader straight from Explorer instead of through the GOG client or the Vortex mod manager or whatever, in order to get Blockhead to create an ini-file. Nice! So of course I started looking at my old saves - I still have one of every character I ever made in the game - to see how their faces turned out after the overhaul. I didn't take screenshots of all of them but this should give you an idea of the change. Some turned out better than others, have a look:

















The last one is of course our doomed emperor. Oddly enough I don't have a screenshot of his old look but you may remember it yourself. Generally a lot of the roundness is gone and you can make them look a lot better with the mod, provided you put some effort in. Somehow the ladies didn't convert as well as my male characters; Ariel (from my previous post, not shown here) turned out particularly poorly, so I'm going to create a new char again and see how well I can make them. I'm aiming for a spellcaster class with little or no armor who can sneak and lockpick well and hopefully keep their enemies at a distance.

Here's the rest of my saved characters, before and after applying the face overhaul.













The last two are characters I just created today. The High Elf is the new Ariel, no longer a Wood Elf and with a change of profession from Assassin to Witchhunter. She will be the magic user that I wanted, fast with no armor to slow her down, fighting from a distance and able to pick a lock or two. Very suitable for tomb raiding and oblivion gate closing, I think. I didn't tweak their faces much, they were randomly generated and only had their hair changed and their face color. The Redguard is an Assassin-class with The Atronach as her sign merely for its 50% protection against magical attacks. She won't be using magic much, but I think protection like this is more useful than a simple attribute boost in the long run.

Azura the Redguard and Ariel the High Elf at the start of their adventures. Azura just delivered the amulet and she'll stay at the priory for the time being, because Ariel will be my main. She just joined the Mages Guild in Skingrad, which gives her a free place to stay in every city, easy access to the spells she might need to learn, and some nice job opportunities if she isn't busy saving Tamriel from hell (not from Doom, that's another game ).

Ariel collected the Imperial heir Martin from the mess in Kvatch and took him through Skingrad (where a horse and goat were blocking the gate, maybe on strike?) and further, following the roads to Chorrol to arrive at Weynon Priory, where the Mythic Dawn agent patiently waited until the stable hand had told his account of events. After sorting those guys out Ariel took Martin and Jauffrey on a roadtrip north, but their horses returned to the stable when we dismounted to address a bandit with cashflow issues. Their horses were almost back at the starting point where Ariel found them near a dead bandit who they presumably had stomped into the ground, head first. Fortunately the second attempt at travelling succeeded without further incident, ignoring a freshly opened Oblivion gate (Ariel would visit that on the way back) and going around Bruma to reach the publically secret base of the Blades.

After a good night's sleep and a change of shirt at the Blades' base, Ariel decided not to use any of their equipment on offer because she doesn't wear armor and she only has a bow as a physical weapon. She relies mostly on spells. She spent a day with the Mages Guild in Bruma, earning the recommendation she needed for her advancement, and talking to the locals about their issues. She had neither the time nor the inclination to stick around and solve them though, she had to move on to the capital to continue her investigations of Imperial importance. She did close an Oblivion gate on the way, a minor distraction.

The Mythic Dawn plot thickens. Ariel made progress in tracking down where this cult has its base, but Baurus, the last remaining Blades operator of the former emperor's personal guard detail, died during the mission. Maybe one of Ariel's fireballs intended for the cultists hit him by accident, I don't know. The Dark Brotherhood seems to believe Ariel committed murder; one of their recruiters visited her when she was taking a nap. Is it murder if you kill a cultist clearly intent on killing you? Either way, Ariel has no ambition whatsoever to join that band of killers for hire. She works directly for the emperor's heir now! And also for the Mages Guild, because she has to learn the tricks of the magic trade somewhere. She needs access to the Arcane University to be able to make her own spells, and she has to work her way up in the Guild to get there.

Ariel has been travelling around the west of Cyrodiil, working on getting the recommendations she needs from each city's Mages Guild. While underway she's seen many new Oblivion gates popping up. She entered a few to clear them out, although she doesn't actually fight every opponent inside, given her lack of armor. With her speed she's better off running through the place to reach and remove the sigil stone as fast as possible, and absorb the enemies' blows while she waits until the whole place collapses and disappears. There are way too many to deal with on her own, though. It's nice training but she'll be better off focusing on her missions.

Of course she also encounters the odd bandit while on the road, but oddly enough they usually attack her horse instead of herself. It's still prior Maborel's horse, which probably had Blades' training by the looks of it because it can pretty much deal with those bandits by itself. She prefers practicing her Destruction skills on those bandits, though. Unfortunately the ones she has are getting weak and she desperately needs better attack spells; another reason to visit all of the Mages Guild establishments, although their prices have been rather steep so far and the available spells not quite suitable for her. Next up is Chorrol, maybe they have something she can use. A simple but powerful freeze on touch would be nice.

Well, Ariel did get that freeze on touch but it isn't enough. She needs much more power in that touch because right now she takes way too much damage during the time she needs to take a tough enemy down, given that she's not in armor. All she can do otherwise is cast some weak fireballs or shoot an arrow or two and run, although just now she bought a slightly stronger fireball, with 20 damage on target instead of 5 damage for 3 seconds in a 5 ft radius around the target (you always hit something but it barely singes their hair, so to speak, unless the target is really weak).

Her mission for the Blades to retrieve the Amulet of Kings led her to a hideout of the Mythic Dawn, where she posed as a prospective candidate. During the ceremony Mankar Camoran, the cult leader who held the amulet, disappeared to what he called Paradise, some as yet unreachable realm that he built, while taking the amulet with him. The mission wasn't a complete loss, though, because Ariel stole the book that might hold the key to that realm somehow. Of course the cultists did not appreciate that: they pursued her through the cave and did their best to kill her with their conjured weapons or even more hurtful lightning spells.

Ariel managed to escape but all her stuff is still in a chest somewhere in that cave, and she's too weak to fight all those cultists. Her summoned skeleton gets destroyed with a single lightning bolt, and she can barely survive an attack by a single cultist with their conjured armor and weapons and their lightning strikes, let alone a bunch of them. She'll have to return later and kill them one by one if she can, to retrieve her equipment - what little she had, aside from a crate of potions just a bow and arrows and some clothing - and her money.

Martin will need some time to study the book, so in the meantime she'll be able to focus on gaining strength and progressing in the Mages Guild. She just needs to get a couple of recommendations in the south, and maybe plunder some caves and ruins to earn money for better attack spells. She won't easily run out of magicka to cast them, as a High Elf under the Mage sign and with high and fast increasing intelligence and willpower she has more than enough for even lengthy battles.