No, I hadn't actually brought it up, now that I look.

Anyway, my thought was that there would be two different ways things could play out. One if you wanted to do the sewer stuff from jail, and the other if you don't.

The trigger would be being in Imperial City with a certain minimum renown. Oh lets say 30, for sake of argument. Enough that you've established a reputation, for good or ill. Once you've met the requirement, you are approached by a member of the Blades, who takes you to meet with Captain Renault (at whatever location. One of the guard towers maybe?). Anyway, she's offering a job. The Blades have heard rumors that something may be happening, and they want backup that no one would know about, and due to your reputation, she thinks you would be perfect.

This is the decision point. You have to either accept or decline. If you accept, you are taken to the Jail, only you aren't "really" a prisoner. (Ideally your equipment would be secreted away somewhere, maybe a short distance into the tunnel? Whatever.) Anyway, things would play out basically as in the Vanilla tutorial, only you don't have to do the divergence through the tutorial dungeon itself. Also since the player will be much more powerful, it would make sense to make the Mythic Dawn assassins more of a challenge. Also provide some sort of extra reward (Renault's armor?) for going through this.

On the other hand, if you decline, you are sent on your way. A few days or a week later, the Emperor will be assassinated. Another adventurer was hired by the blades, but he/she was not as good as you are, and falls on their way to Weynon Priory. (I like your idea of having them be an actual NPC, that would be really cool)

I like that as one possible scenario. Being drafted as an undercover would be quite different from the usual prison start, but the dialogue in there may not make much sense unless you set it up so that only Renault knows about this plan ahead of time. 30 fame I think is asking a bit much though. Maybe 10 or something instead. You want to get the Blades' attention without becoming well known generally.

Arthmoor does have a point about the relevancy of the dialogue. It would take some major re-editing to fix that up. There's always the option of an entirely different faction, or maybe a single individual that sends you in there. For example, a mage could recruit you to go in there because he/she had a prophecy of doom that might befall the emperor. That person who had the prophecy may not be on good terms with the Blades, and so would not consult them on it or tell them about it. She/he might even be an enemy, or perhaps an ex-blade who got kicked out for doing something wrong. But anyone who knows the consequences of the fires going out, regardless of their feelings about the blade or the emperor, if they don't want the Oblivion invasion, it would be in their best interest to help stop it. It could even be a prophet or priest of one of the other Daedra princes. If you accept, you get "arrested", but perhaps there is some special "invisible ring" that is not taken from you (cause they can't see it). Activating the ring calls forth the chest that has all of your possessions, plus maybe some extra. But it won't let you activate the ring until the guards have left. (Basically after you've killed the rats). I imagine there would probably be some way to bypass most of the "learner's dungeon". That first door you go through after killing the rats could in theory wormhole you out the exit of the Goblins lair and right back to following the Emporer, yes? Basically skipping the two cells in between.

Just some late night free-flowing thoughts. Dunno if that's helpful or not.

That sounds really good. I like that idea. The Blades were just the first ones who came to mind, but I'm not married to the idea, I just like the concept that you were sent to stop the assassination.

As for skipping the dungeon, I'm pretty sure that MQDelayer has that option, though obviously I haven't tried to find out for certain. But it seems that would be a fairly trivial thing to do.

Nice one Saebel. That's an idea I can get behind since it will leave the entire prison sequence intact and making perfect sense without having to hack up dialogue. The side area where the initial rat and goblin are would be perfect for warping that chest to as well. It would even make the whole idea of having to punch a guard useful too if that's something people still want to see, or we could just "fade to black" and punt moving to the prison cell.

There is one issue that won't be avoidable. The condition of the Kvatch landscape in Tamriel. It's going to be burned ground even if Kvatch starts the game intact, there's nothing that can be done about that unless someone is feeling generous and wants to provide a series of cell sized ground meshes that fit the terrain but are textured with normal grass etc.

Cool! Glad you like the idea. I'm totally digging it. That would be a really fun alternative beginning. Kvatch is there, gets raided, and then rebuilt. You start with lots of options, the emperor is still alive, you get recruited, go undercover, emperor dies, skip 90% of the training. The cycle is complete.

In fact, if you decide to do it, I might even be inclined to lend my voice to the character who does the recruiting if you want (assuming it's a male). I'm a semi-professional actor (I get paid once in awhile), and I've got all the recording gear. I did the voice of Gorax the Orc for the PC mods, and I can do the voice with just about any accent, age or style. Serious, funny, wise, cantankerous, sly, witty, oafish, any race (or even diety echo), whatever you want. Obviously, that's the last phase, since you'll want to work out all the kinks first.

If someone (not me, I don't have the skill) did provide not-burned meshes, would the game be able to swap 'em out later after the siege? Or would the siege of Kvatch have lovely grass? I would imagine it's possible, so I guess this is really just a question of how that would work.

I like the direction this thread has gone. I've never used an alternate start mod, but this might be something I'd try. A couple suggestions came to mind on possible NPC messengers (other than creating an entirely new NPC):
1. Thamriel from Tamriel is "touched by the gods" and "hears voices", we're told, though the vanilla game never gives us any further detail. Or Elragail, her caretaker, could be an intermediary messenger.
2. Any of the 3 Blind Moth caretakers could deliver a message of a vision from the priests.
3. Ontus Vanin, the retired mage who hates the mage's guild, though not sure if that's still true with the UOP.
4. Baeralorn (the Anvil castle mage) - I think the only closet necromancer who doesn't get killed in one quest or another.

The challenge with using an existing NPC comes into play if voice acting is desired. It's very difficult to go through all the voice files and construct a script based on what's available, and then try to edit it together and make it sound right. Much easier to write a script from scratch with a new voice. I suppose I could "try" to mimic a specific voice, I might be able to come close depending on the character, but that's not my strongest suit.

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Yes, if non-burned ground meshes that aproximately match the landscape detail in the area were provided they could be disabled at the proper time and the burned landscape would pop in normally. Further, the non-burned ones could be swapped back in after the city is sufficiently rebuilt. Same trick I used in OCR Chorrol for the Kvatch refugees area, although I flattened the landscape there to fit the flat square meshes I already have.

So far as I know the blind moth priests don't have any dialogue other than generic combat stuff. You could get away with that one and it would make some sense. Though I do agree, it's even better to use a dedicated NPC for the task.

If the ground mesh thing isn't possible, oh well, it can be explained as a bad forest fire outside the city at some point or something. The voice acting would be greatly appreciated either way.

It could also be explained as the remains of some cult activity where someone was intentionally burning the ground for some reason (prepping for the gate?)

Well, let me know if/when you need my services for this, and I'll help out as best as I can.

Still a ways off from that. Though the first initial dry run to toggle in the intact Kvatch worked. I just need to fix up the AI, stop the panicked guy from running to greet you right off, and make sure the pvssyr about the city being in flames etc is cut off properly. I just hope there's no hidden sneakiness involved in having the Stage 5 worldspace active this soon.

Getting much closer. Actually wasn't as much involved as I thought at first.

One small snag though, mainly for realism's sake. There are 27 instances of the "Assassination" article for the Black Horse Courier. Does OBSE provide a way to take a base object and disable every instance of this object that may be in the game, whether it be vanilla or from other mods? I really don't want to have to mark these 27 refs by hand and leave it at that when this thing could show up in 50 other places modders have used it. They would of course need to be turned back on once the Emperor dies.

I would assume the existing MQDelayer mods have dealt with this, right? You could check how they did it.

If you know a place in Anvil where "Assassination" shows up, I can go check right now and see if its there.

Actually I already solved it. I made use of the SetModelPath command to swap the base object for a model that doesn't render. That will cover all instances of it without any special code. They turn back on nicely too.

Actually, what would be really cool, would be to have those be the previous issue of the Black Horse Courier. Make a new story about something that happened shortly before the events of the game. I'm sure there is something in the lore that could be used.

How about "Emperor's Youngest Son Killed in Tragic Accident". He has two other sons that were also killed, but I don't recall if the sons were killed on the same day that the Emperor was or not. The idea here is that in actuality, the youngest son was assassinated, but it was made to look like an accident. Perhaps "foul play" could be suggested, but there is no evidence. Either that or perhaps an article about the banning of Necromancy by the nee Arch Mage. There's plenty of anecdotal data to construct an article about that, which would be big news.

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At risk of getting off-topic, http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=27029 Black Horse Courier Expanded has several articles about the Mage's Guild actions against the Necromancers (along with a bunch of other stuff - the Dark Brotherhood articles are the best as they change based on whether you botched the job or not). It also fixes some vanilla articles being present before their quests have been completed.

My impression based on the game's dialog was always that the emperors' sons were killed the same night.

I don't think that's off topic at all. In fact, it seems to resolve the issue as it has a lock/unlock option built in for alternative start mods with the emperor still alive, and with all the content it provides, maybe you could just recommend it.

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I have BHC installed myself. I never noticed if it accounted for the Emperor's death or not because I've never played with him still alive. Cool that it does, but even in that case it cannot prevent the article from appearing in a mod. Swapping the model out turned out to be a neat solution to the problem. The quest then progresses naturally, and the articles "just appear" as they would have normally.

The dialogue at the beginning of the game does imply heavily that the Emperor's sons were all killed either on the same night or very nearly the same night. They had enough advance warning to try and escape through the prison. Since it isn't ever said where his sons were when they were killed there's no way to know for sure, but one can probably infer that the news was not made public until after Uriel's assassination.

That makes sense. Glad the solution worked. I really like the idea of essentially making the main quest just like any other quest in that you can choose to follow it or not, but with the Emperor still alive and Kvatch not munched yet. I hope this works out.

So far so good from what I can tell. I did a run through where I participated in the sewer escape, and one where I blew off the new NPC entirely. The game reacted just fine either way.

Though there is one hitch. The Charactergen quest is not actually marked as complete until one of those paths executes. I noticed that it throws off any mods which rely on chargen being done. This would include all of the official DLCs as well. I'm not 100% certain how these will react since there can be a considerable amount of time go by before the fame requirement is met that triggers the courier dispatch. My testing has all been done with SM Plugin Refurbished installed so that has already altered the start conditions on all the official DLC.

In order for the prison sequence to work, charactergen has to be up and running and cannot have advanced past stage 5. Stage 88 is what closes it out. So you can see the dilemma here. Getting around this issue isn't going to be easy.

You'd pretty much have to alter the requirements for the quest itself, which I would imagine to be a lot of work. I'd be curious to see what you have. I'm no quest expert, but I'm pretty good with scripting, thinking outside the box and rerouting.

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Well the charactergen stuff is already in Alternative Beginnings, nothing is changing there. The Kvatch part is being developed as a patch/bridge between that and Kvatch Rebuilt. Mainly because I don't feel like duplicating a bunch of work when altering only a few things is actually needed.

The charactergen stuff is super-sensitive to being messed with and I don't think it would work at all if I were to attempt to clone the whole thing as a whole new quest. There are far too many things going on and it would also break the entire dialogue chain.

Hmm. Tricky. I guess just commenting out those character gen parts is too simple an option. For example, I altered three pressure plate scripts so that they functioned, but put in an "if/then" set of rules so that under certain circumstances the script would return out early, thus rendering the pressure plate harmless. Since those three pressure plate scripts were called by pretty much all the pressure plate object scripts I wanted to effect, the impact was fairly significant without having to alter every script attached to every pressure plate.

I wish I had more time on my hands, 'cause then I'd roll up my sleeves and dig around myself.

Yeah, the thing is, dialogue and questing is far beyond one script attached to a base activator object used 500 times in the game

Keep in mind that with the charactergen quest you're altering the vanilla intro sequence and game tutorial system. Dialogue requires exactly matching formIDs and everything or it just won't work. Unless you invest a bunch of time in making renamed copies of the files. Bethesda probably wouldn't appreciate duplicating the entire set of intro dialogue files that way. There are also numerous sub-scripts related to the whole thing.

Weighed against most of the official DLC not working entirely as expected while you play to raise the necessary fame seems like a fair trade-off. Using a mod like SM Plugin Refurbish ought to work out fine since that completely changes the start conditions on them all. This might be a case where the recommendation to use another mod alongside this can't be made strongly enough.

And one other slight disappointment. Having the adventurer who carries the amulet if you choose not to help doesn't work. He arrives at Fort Ash alive and well and the script simply refuses to kill him. So that's going to have to get dropped. It's a minor thing though.