Just wondering if there is any information anywhere, either in game or online, about why the people you're assigned to kill during the Dark Brotherhood questline deserve to die? I remember reading somewhere about Rufio, though I don't remember where, implying he tried (or did) [censored] someone, or kill them, but I can't remember where I read that.

The reason I ask is, I'm doing the Next of Kin quest, and I feel a little bad about it, since Perennia seems like a good woman who genuinely loves her kids. Plus she's got a dog, and I feel bad for the dog, who didn't do anything wrong, and now he's going to be stuck alone in a remote farmhouse with only his previous owner's rotting flesh to keep him alive....

Also, I'm just curious.

-y

The Dark Brotherhood isn't like the Morag Tong. Somebody, for some reason, hates those involved in the Next of Kin quest, contacted the Night Mother, and you're to kill 'em all.

If you're having moral issues about your quest, you've chosen the wrong profession, my friend. If you're told to kill a 6-year-old girl at her birthday party, you kill the 6-year-old girl at her birthday party.

Have you looked into the Fighter's Guild? Nothing morally off about them.

I haven't really had any moral problems until the dog was involved, I didn't actually feel that bad killing Perennia. As I said, I'm a svcker for animals.

I understand the difference between the Morag Tong and the Dark Brotherhood, but the people who solicit the Dark Brotherhood must have their own reasons for wanting the people dead. It's meaningless to me, the character, but me the player is curious if there's any information on the motives of the people who hire the Dark Brotherhood.

The DB is insidious. It is quite easy for a reasonably honorable character to trigger a visit from LL.

Rufio can be justified w/o too much trouble. He had his way with and killed someone's wife or daughter.

The pirate captian is not all that hard to rationalize. His first mate makes her lethal intentions quite clear to you and the captain is, after all a pirate - by definition a target for the law. Ok, maybe not so bad.

Then it gets quite hard. Even a fairly creative character who has reasonable moral fiber cannot muster the mental gymnastics to realistically justify most of the rest of the contracts.

The one to take out the whole family is quite simply to embrace evil in its fairly pure form or walk away.

What if find ironic is that some of the same players who happily slaughter that innocent family of five, then cry about taking out their fellow psychopaths during the purification. :rofl:


I'm not trying to belittle or minimize the quality of the DB questline - it is a fine questline. It is also evil and should be understood as such. If your character is a psychopath or evil or both, go for it. The beauty of a game is that it allows us to do things that we might not choose to do IRL.

Edit: Oh the DB accepts contracts for gold. Beyond Rufio, you will find little to no background. Greed, petty squables, revenge for peceived affronts. . . .

It's too bad they didn't put more backstory in the game about the people who do the hiring and their reasons, though I agree that the Dark Brotherhood is evil, and it makes sense to kill for potentially petty reasons, or no reason at all. I'm mostly just curious (something that gets me into more trouble than not) and I hate not knowing if there's a way to know.

But i do these things in real life! thats why i play this game...

Easily, the family, you don't know them more than that they need to be dead on orders of the Night Mother.
The Sanctuary purification, thats like your twisted family, they accept you for you. They are your brothers and sisters, and annoying Khajiit who is lucky he is in the faction,or would be dead in a pool of his fur and blood.

Yes, the mental gymnastics of rationalization. :rofl:

*raises hand* Yo.

Really though, I did feel like a jerk doing Next of Kin, it just didn't make me sad like the Purification.

Also, I tell myself that all the victims sold poison milk to school children. Sometimes that makes it easier.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMGMZsKXz94

This is how I did it:

Rufio- He assaulted Cladius' wife/daughter. He deserved it.

Pirate- Uh...he's a pirate. And his second-in-command made it quite clear that she'd kill if you so much as step onto the ship. This is a threat she carries out if you do so.

Baelin- He was...a noble? A rich Breton in a city of poor ones? Nobles are bad?

Valen Dreth- He was in jail for a reason. Plus, he talked bad about your character. I hope you made him pay for dissing Buffy, Acadian. I'll always remember how Gregreo carried out his vengance.

Motierre- You can't really kill anyone here, so this doesn't count.

The drunken high elf- He was a poor husband to his dear wife. Plus, he's an altmer for you anti-altmers.

The folks in the party in Skingrad- They did something bad at some point in their lives.

Rodrick the Warlord- He's a bandit. Preying on the civilized people of the empire. Killing him would serve the empire as well as Sithis.

Adamus Phillida- He's a snobby Imperial elite and doesn't respect your character. Kill him.

The high elf mage- Necromancy (or whatever he was doing) is baaaaaad. Gregreo was archmage at this point and had every reason to stop this madman. For all he knew, this altmer could've been plotting to attack the Mage's Guild!

The Draconius family- Um...they did something bad at some point in their lives? Especially the two that are guards and that one who lives in a cavern?

Most of the DB quests seem to have some degree of ambivalence. Baelin v Caenlin for example. Did Baenlin steal Caenlin's inheritance, or did you just help do the opposite? You aren't supposed to know the whole story in most of them, just do the part you were hired to do.

The Draconis family are a nice mixture of nasty, nice, and who cares? I've always wondered why the whole family had to go, but since the DB itself ends up using Applewatch, maybe it's an "inside job"?

Aside from the problem where if you ask Vicente about the details of the contract, he says something along the lines of: " I [Vicente] has hesitant to accept the contract, and that the dark brotherhood requires a life to be paid, Motierre was happy to oblige with his mother".

Yes, Motierre sacrificed his mother for that contract, that was the one time I felt emotional during the DB quests. Well, not the only time, Lucien's death made me a little mad.

Many of them don't deserve to die. Your character is in many cases killing innocent people to gather their souls for the Night Mother.

For example, Baenlin was an upright, respectable citizen of Bruma. Apparently his nephew wanted him kill to inherit the house.

Francois Motierre had Lucien kill his mother so as to get out of his gambling debts. The Dark Brotherhood was perfectly happy to him is mother for her soul, even though she did nothing wrong.

Even Adamus Phillida devoted his career to attempting to protect others from the Dark Brotherhood.

Not to mention the poor family in Next of Kin, or the party goers in Whodunnit.

If your character does the Dark Brotherhood quest he or she is murdering people who have done nothing wrong period.

And your friends are fine with that. And fine with killing a little girl at her 6 year birthday party.



Rufio apparently killed someone (a female) close to Claudius Arcadia who is now imprisoned for apparently arranging the mission.

If questioned Rufio says:



Some people think that implies attempted [jeepers the implied crime was auto censored, okay let me reprhrase doing something to an unwilling female], but it seems to me there are other possibilities, some not evil at all.







Another hand raised. Acadian knows how I feel about the DB.

If you really need to rationalise why you're doing it - someone wants your victim dead. If you don't do it, another assassin will - they're dead anyway. Gogron gro-Bolmog likes his victims to know they're being murdered, at least you can do it when they're not expecting it. Rufio has been expecting it for a while, so not much you can do there, but in all other cases there's a way to make it a surprise, and some of the quests require that.

I would not do the DB questline with a character who has to rationalize their actions. The Dark Brotherhood is not about justice, or even revenge. They worship Sithis, which is to say, murder itself. If you cannot embrace the enormity of that evil, then you are in the wrong line of work.

I did it with Lilith Arcadia, Claudius' daughter who was [censored] and left for dead by Rufio (at least that was how I RP'ed it). Murdering Rufio was pure vengeance. After him she found that she had a taste for murder. It made her feel powerful and in control. She did not care who she killed, or why they were selected. She was the beast, and they were the meat, and that was all there was to it.

For me, it stops being a "roleplaying game" when I have to rationalize doing something I don't want to do. I can't play a role I don't believe in. It becomes a matter of "game-beating" then, and at that point, it stops being fun. If it's not fun, it's not a game I want to play.

I simply don't do the DB stuff. I'm not bashing Bethesda for putting moral choices into the game, nor do I have a problem with other people playing (and enjoying) those quest lines. It's just not for me.

If you want a slight bit more info on the whole Rufio story, check out Claudius Arcadia's house (basemant). I think it's in the IC Talos Plaza District, right around the corner from the main IC gates. It's now the property of the Imperial Guard or something like that (note on the door before you enter the house).

Well they live and breath my air! How dare they!
Well most of the people you kill are stuck up arses that probably did something wrong.
As for the Draconis family im pretty sure that you were not suppose to murder them but the intercept happen.
I was really sad when I did the purification quest, even the Khajjit started liking you. They were all my big disfunctional family , if I had the pc I would have ressurected them.

The DB is really very simple and very straightforward-- if your character is really the sort of person who should be an assassin, then none of it matter in the least. If any of it matters, then your character really isn't the sort of person who should be an assassin.

I honestly think that's the explicit point of the Purification and Next of Kin in particular-- they're set up the way they are specifically to drive home the fact that your character is in an evil, vicious, cruel line of work. If that's a problem, then s/he's in the wrong line of work.

I appreciate the DB questline for just that reason-- it doesn't mess around with just being sort of cool evil, so it doesn't allow people to just play around with being a sort of a dressed-up-in-black badass. If you're going to play through that line, you have to be ready for your character to be totally and completely heartless. I think that that's really a much better way of dealing with it, since it throws it right in the player's face. If this is what you're going to be, then this is what you have to do. Don't like it? Then you shouldn't have gone down that path in the first place.

Which is probably a good part of why, out of twenty-some characters I've played, only two have ever done the DB and only one finished it.

Well and thoughtfully put, gpstr! :goodjob:

No, Lucien wants to to murder that lady and her family. I happens before the switch. With no reason other than your boss says so. And your character says "Duh, okay boss" or some such thing.



I'd like to repeat Acadian's point above:



I think if your character is "sad" about the purification, then your character is a crummy DB member. A true Dark Brotherhood member would brutally murder their Mother, Sister and/or Daughter without a second thought and for no reason other than their boss told them to. That's what it takes to be an upstanding DB member, I think. That's what they are all about.

Exactly - just like Slayer said: "Show no mercy."

For the acausal, for Sithis, in the name of chaos.

Chisato (my RP character) was simply tempted by the gold and other rewards offered by the Brotherhood, and didn't really care why she was ordered to murder them, once she "disposed" of Rufio, she realized she had a talent for killing people and didn't feel remorse at all.
She did have some moral complexes, but since she was a total stranger and had no emotional connections to all those people she killed, she decided to fulfill all contracts, even if she was ordered to kill her fellow assassins, or a 6 year old child at her birthday party.

All this killing did make her a bit paranoid and she couldn't trust anyone, sometimes barely herself, but hey, she had a very messy childhood including abuse and seeing her parents getting murdered (I know, it sounds a bit cliche), so all this killing might have been a way of "releasing" all that fury she had built up over the years as a child/teenager.


If you find yourself asking "why do this people have to die?", you might wanna stop doing the brotherhood questline and get expelled by breaking the tenants, and then seek redemption for your crimes at a church =)

Sometimes people are ordered to be killed by a reason, may it be politic or revenge, and some people just want to kill someone to get their inheritance (money, a horse, a house, etc). Altho, this raises another question, if you are ordered to kill a 6 year old child at her party, are you more "evil" for doing the job then the person ordering the hit? Bear in mind that if you refuse, another assassin will do the deed any way, so if you are doing the Brotherhood questline, you could imagine yourself doing it for the reason that you don't anyone else to kill them in order to make their death more merciful, the target is dead anyhow.

Or, we could just realize that this is a game after all, play it your way!