Am i the only one who found the Black Sacrament stupid? You had to sacrifice someone every time you wanted to contact the brotherhood? if you had the will and the tools to kill someone, why contact an assassin's guild in the first place? Moreover, i cant imagine everyone being able to do that.. since all sorts of clients come to the brotherhood apparently. rich, poor, etc..

Someone for the love of god, explain to me how that Aretino boy managed to get a skeleton inside his house in Windhelm?

The ritual's concept is so dumb.

Where does it say you have to kill someone? As long as you have the right pieces and parts, you can do the ritual. Ever hear of grave-robbing? There have been several murders in Windhelm; relatively fresh pieces and parts were accessible.

Getting anything in the house wouldn't be that hard. My character evaded the guards who weren't really doing their jobs very well. Pretty sure a kid would be even better at it than an advlt in full armor.

Nowhere in the book does it state you have to kill anybody.

Guess skeleton parts just grow on trees then..

A boy breaking into the hall of the dead, transporting a full skeleton into his house through the city's streets doesnt make sense either. I know it does not say kill someone directly in the book, But logically i assumed the easiest and fastest way to do the ritual is to have someone already dead and use his body parts.

And the heart and the flesh? going by the grave-digging theory, can you rely on finding those parts that are not rotten and decayed? The whole ritual is too inconvenient. Normal clients, not killers and what not are the ones requesting the brotherhood's services, you'd think they would make it easier to them.

Nowhere does it say the organs have to be fresh.

For that matter, nowhere does it say they even have to be human or mer body parts. You're building an effigy, a concept, not a literal representation.

Finally, who says he dragged the entire skeleton all at once? Can just make multiple trips and take it out a bone or two at a time.

I think that by calling out the absurdity of the ritual one is sort of missing the point. It's supposed to be absurd, to require a certain level of investment, particularly emotionally. The Black Sacrament is a ritual of devotion, a prayer to the night mother. Whether that entity exists is beside the point. The ritual is a transformation of the client rather than just a transaction. It's nearly proselytizing.

Why go to all these lengths to kill someone when you could just pay some knave to off them with a half brick in a sock? Well, firstly, the vast majority of murders are not perpetrated by the Dark Brotherhood. What the Dark Brotherhood gives is a feeling of personal significance. This is what you do when you really hate someone and want that hate to manifest through unnatural means. Secondly the Brotherhood give security and anonymity to their clients - at least, more than the knave with the sock, who will blab to the gendarmes under pressure.

The ritual component of it is a sort of dignity. I should imagine someone well acquainted with killing would never make use of the Brotherhood--those who use the Sacrament are very often people who struggle with the contradiction of committing an act they find horrific, and so they cannot help but aggrandize the killing through the use of a ritual cult. Plus, the Brotherhood has been around a long time; to anyone who knows about them they are a self-sustaining myth, and for anything that entrenched a degree of nonsense ritual is fitting.

Graveyards, yo.

Honestly the Black Sacrement makes sense to me, what doesn't make sense is there being only one listener and one night mother.

Because nobody ever dies and live is good and there isn't a large open tomb in the city full of corpses.Oh wait.

Spare me you witless sarcasm. I addressed that in my post.

My point is its too hard and gruesome, Imagine a noble doing it every time he wanted to contact the brotherhood. and you guys are talking about gravedigging like its a walk in the park.

What i could get behind is that its intended to be that way to see how far the client is willing to do. It makes sense in that regard.

Have you seen how many unguarded tombs there are in Tamriel? And how many adventurers there are? Hell, I can imagine gangs and the Thieves Guild making a fortune selling parts to Necromancers and other questionable people.

If were talking gameplay wise then sure.

That isn't a gameplay thing. Tamriel is a continent filled with adventurers, outlaws, petty wars, murder and various other means of death that could lead to body parts being easy to get, and of course the people that don't get lost or eaten would need to be buried. Not everyone gets the luxury of a burial in a graveyards inside a city or they decide screw it and make a elaborate tomb somewhere else.

#1- There's an advlt-sized skeleton in his home. He's kneeling over it when we first see him.

#2- There are 200+ bones in an average advlt human body. You any idea how long it would take him, how many trips he'd have to take to transport all the bones and restructure the body (and just how he was able to do that as well is a mystery)? Would explain why half of Skyrim knows what he's up to, though...

While I know that suspension of disbelief is called for here, the only reason I can think up of for someone to go this far is the game showing just how badly they want whoever they hate dead and not have the finger of blame pointed at them when people start asking questions.

#1 You're ignoring the context of my post. I was talking about the Black Sacrament in general with my first two points, not just what Aventus was doing.

#2 Bear in mind that some/all might already be pinned or strapped together, or still have enough flesh holding it together. Sure, it would still take a while if the skeleton's in many pieces, but as you said, everyone seems to know what he's up to.

Ignoring magic for a moment, it does serve a practicality in keeping the rabble who might entertain the notion of offing someone from making regular contact with them. As was said before, its that sort commitment that signals that this person is a truly serious client who is unlikely to back down from a deal and discreet enough to not get caught in the act of doing it. Oddly enough, its sort of a sound business model they have going on really.

As to how Aretino pulled it off? Who knows. Maybe somebody lent him a sympathetic ear about Grelod the Unkind and agreed that she was the type of person who axed. The real elephant in the room is why the guards didn't do anything about it. They all knew it was going on and gave them the heebie jeebies, but that more seems like a hand wave to let the quest continue as it was. Maybe if he did it some place else that wasn't his families home, but eh.

My guess is that all the jarls were distracted by the war to give a [censored], and so the guards on their own were scared [censored]less of getting involved in anything brotherhood related. The war in Skyrim gave advantage to many things happen.

But i always disliked how this quest was handled.

Windhelm guards are pretty inefficient as guards, they couldn't even solve the easiest to catch serial killer that some wanderer could catch in one day.

You mean a rich and powerful person who has the coin to buy get the pieces they need from unscrupulous people willing to get their hands dirty or look the other way?

As for the gruesomeness, to perform the Black Sacrament obviously means you have to have a strong animosity against someone, considering you want to see them dead. I doubt the icky factor is really going to stop them. And again, they could always pay someone to do it for them.

Yeah, the sole Listener thing doesn't really seem efficient. It would make establishing a continent-wide network nearly impossible.

i think the whole one listener/night mother connection was a retcon.. wasn't there an NPC in Morrowind that was the "local Night Mother" of the Dark Brotherhood presence in Vardenfell that you had to kill as part of the Morag Tong?

Yep, you're right. Here's the journal entry that refers to her as local Night Mother:

"The Dark Brotherhood in Vvardenfell keep their headquarters in the ruins of Ald Sotha, which is northeast of Vivec City. I must go there and honorably execute the local Night Mother of the Dark Brotherhood, Severa Magia."

Simple, they're of the nobility right? They can just pay off a bunch of street thugs to get the parts and bribe the rest to look away. If all else fails, they can just state that they're collecting the parts for some local alchemist in another province, or is a medical student conducting a study on bones and bodies and things like that.

Didn't Lucien say that there was a Listener for every province in Tamriel?

Thanks funnybunny and Pseron for this info. I think you are right in it being a retcon. I also think that as the series has progressed, the realism and quality of the Dark Brotherhood as an organization has gone downward as far as the writing and protrayal of the group goes. they seem less real to me, more of a caricature than a functioning guild, as the TES games progress. In Morrowind, they were believable as an evil and efficient guild. In Oblivion, somewhat less so. I enjoyed playing the Oblivion version, but really, it was too nice and neat for the reality of what they were doing. By Skyrim, no longer so nice and neat, but rather, completely absurd and juvenile. Cicero is indeed a fitting representation for what they had become...

Back on topic, the ritual to me does make some sense within the overall lore and world of Tamriel. And whoever made the "effigy" comment seems to have the essence of it for me. However, I agree with the OP that for the Arentino kid, it never made sense to me. The whole DB plot set-up for me comes off as weak and implausible. IMO, this is not a knock on the DB itself, or on the idea of the ritual, but rather, the Skyrim version of it was just poorly written.

Can't remember that, but Vicente mentions that "The Night Mother speaks to only one member of the Dark Brotherhood -- the Listener of the Black Hand"

Arguably Oblivion (and later Skyrim) was a form of returning to what the Brotherhood originally was back in the days of Arena - a death cult serving a god named Sithis. Of course why did anyone think returning to that was a good idea is a complete mystery...

The whole Night Mother identity isnt clear to be honest. I do feel that they've changed a lot about the guild since Morrowind.

And who says there is one Listener? It seems absurd, given that there are brotherhood guilds all over Tamriel.

Death cult serving Sithis may have never changed, and that is all just fine. It is not so much a question of whether or not they are a death cult (they clearly are), but of the kind of organization and structure of the cult, and whether the structure and function of it are plausible, realistic, make sense. Multiple listeners for the entirety ot Tamriel, in differing provinces, with professional discipline and practice, would make sense. Could even be one supreme head-listener conntected to Night Mother would have priority, I suppose. Still, there would have to be a realistic chain of comand, a realistic internal order, and some semblance of mature professionalism. But logistically, a single listener for an entire world with a bunch of psycopathic juvenile-minded followers is not really a credible DB.

(edit) Although, as I think on this more, maybe the single listener thing has some plausibility after all. There can't be that many Black Sacraments performed, even in the whole of Tamriel. It is not something that most people would do. Assassination is not the most common of activities. So a single listener actually could easily receive the information from the Night Mother, and pass it along. And this also fits with the in-game literature and lore -- see here http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Dark_Brotherhood

(Especially note the books section at the bottom, with the accounts of DB and Night Mother history.) Nevertheless, a solid organization and professionalism are still needed.

Moreover, in Skyrim,

So the Skyrim premise and plot are still completely illogical and faulty, regarding the DB.