It's ALL make believe, Lady Nerevar. A lot of ideas from these forums have later made it into games, and a lot of the kids who grew up playing Arena and Daggerfall are probably programmers for TES V. So in a way, fan canon can become actual lore over time.

we can tell

what didn't fit into my original post is that by pretending well enough to fool people you actually learn. in order to not look stupid while answeing a topic that would make you look like a master one needs to read up on the material. in order to propose a theory to make you look smart you need to understand the material. knowing and understanding is really what makes a master, so by faking long enough and well enough one fools oneself as well as others.

Hairdo: i don't deny fan made ideas making their way into games or into lore, but as far as i know no member of this community has been officially hired by bethesda softworks. any contributions we make to the lore are either unofficial or coincidental. if i say that TES5 will revolve around the player repealing an invasion from Atmora* and it turns out to be true it doesn't mean that bethesda liked my idea so much they used it, it means that we happened to have the same idea. that or beth owes me royalties

*purely hypothetical

Regarding manteling, check out the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerald_tablet.

Compare the second line: "That which is below is as that which is above, and that which is above is as that which is below, to perform the miracles of the one thing."

With Mannimarco's last sentence in http://www.imperial-library.info/obscure_text/complete_dragonbroke.shtml "The Maruhkati Selectives showed us all the glories of the Dawn so that we might learn, simply: as above, so below.”

Other lines have similar parallels in TES works.

Anyhow: "The Stormcrown manted by way of the fourth: the steps of the dead." "'The sage who is not an anvil: a conventional sentence and nothing more. By which I mean dead, the fourth walking way.'" "For by the word I mean the dead." "'The sage who suppresses his best aphorism: cut off his hands, for he is a thief.'"

In what way did Tiber steal from the dead?

he stole Lorkhan's identity and place in the pantheon. btw, i don't think all those sentences are necessarily related.

LN: Turned jungle into forest? What do you mean? Is that a reference to why Cyrodiil doesn't look like the lore says it ought to? Do we have an explanation for that?

Also "build a giant stompy time defying robot," - I love it! I don't think he quite built it as much as found batteries for it, though...

yep, the http://www.imperial-library.info/obscure_text/many-headed_talos.shtml

he managed to wrastle it away from the dunmer, then assemble it, and then engineer a battery. close enough

P.S. you name is too close to mine D: anytime you post i think i've posted and become confused.

No, Tiber Septim did rebuild the Numidium. However, the original battery was missing, so he used the Mantella. It's like receiving a really neat toy, but it says "assembly required" and "provide your own batteries."

Ya, Vehk shipped it to him in peices (do you think there would be a way to move http://www.uesp.net/wiki/File:MW-place-Akulakhan.jpg in one solid piece, even with today's technology?). It was assembled in the Halls of the Colossus. To give perspective, the average PC is as tall as fro th ebottom of the Doom Drum to the top of the shortest tube.

In searching for the picture, came across http://www.myspace.com/warlocksmith Dagoth Ur's Myspace profile.

What's Myspace?

Terribly sorry. Thank goodness for icons, though!

Septim the Builder indeed. Must've been a wizard with legos.

Interesting text, though. Where's it originally from?

Hellmouth: Ah, so Vivec just handed him the pieces? I suppose that makes sense, else he might've used it himself to stop the Empire.

it was posted on these boards by Michael Kirkbride (MK).

Is it meant to be taken literally? And NPCs in Morrowind are still quoting the 1st PGE bit about jungles even 300 years after Septim's death...

yes. its weaseling, meant to explain the boopup. either you accept that cyrodiil just turned into forest sometime in the 5 years between MW and OB, or you accept that its been forest for a while and the MW dialog is lying (not that i actually recall any about jungle, come to think of it).

well we know somepne with Chim changed it, read the Commentaries on the Mysterium Xarxes

It's the lore dialogue for Cyrodiil--so any time you click on "Cyrodiil" in the dialogue menu, it'll say "Cyrodiil is the cradle of human imperial high culture etc etc most of it is endless jungle etc etc rainforests etc etc sloping gently to the west and sharply to the north etc etc"

But that bit from the Commentaries is interesting. That actually made it into Oblivion... The trouble is that "Provinces of Tamriel" in the same game uses the first edition PGE descriptions, like Morrowind. So either 400 year old books are lying around, or people haven't noticed the jungles are gone? It makes absolutely no sense.

simply put, there is no perfect explanation for it. why do the Imperial and Orc races suddenly show up in Morrowind? Where did Ald Redaynia go? Why is Sheogorath not a banker looking dude? the Many-Headed Talos gives us the most plausible and cool explanation (and the only explanation, really), but it does ask us to forget about a few references in earlier games. its not the first time something got retconed, and it certainly won't be the last.

400 year old books are lying around in reprinted editions we still have robin hood and king arthur, so it could be.

The Orc one was actually one of the main story elements of Daggerfall, but the Imperial one is a bigger issue since it was flat out stated up through the Daggerfall era that Cyrodill had no native race.

She means their appearence as a playable race in Morrowind is a result of retcon. Until Morrowind, there was no indication the orcs would be a playable race, because the Blades had cononically suppressed the Illiac.

About the Daggerfall Cyrodiil, it is still a province of divided nationalities, with no truely dominate race. This was not excluded from the first pocket guide's vision, but emphasized. Even beyond the obvious Nibenay-Colovia division, there are hundreds of tribes and nationalities, between the two. To say it has no culture or race would be true, from a certain point of view.

The geographer, by whom the profile's written, didn't risk disenfranchising the other nations of Cyrodiil, who only grew more contentious in Uriel's years. I also see this as the meaning behind the part of the Covenent, that Alessia would depart from the land, and Cyrodiil would be roiled into perpetual conflict, w/o a Dragonborn; which Uriel was, but a very lacking one and imprisoned for a decade, in hell. Yep.

I would say the first pocket guide is a fulfillment or exposition of that Arena/Daggerfall description.

It's not as they didn't exist before Morrowind--they just weren't playable. I don't think the various tribes and groupings are much of an issue either, especially considering that the Bretons were hardly unified either. The appearance of new material is not the same thing as blatantly contradicting old material: they are two distinctly different things.

As far as reprints, eh, you'd think a factual book would have been corrected and/or updated. It's not a book with a named author, so there's no reason in preserving the errors--Robin Hood and King Arthur are fictional stories. Even then, look at the MSS of something like the Aeneid. Lines are routinely rejected as spurious or removed from the main text, even if these disputed lines are of greater antiquity than the rest--consider the bit in Book II where Aeneas relates meeting Helen, for the clearest example of such.

So we agree?


It was updated - twice. Clearly, in his state, Talos intimately knew the avenues of and around spacetime, so he took advantage. The Many-Headed Talos isn't just a retcon of the jungle, it's the meeting of two different Cyrodiils, and a victory of the one over the other.

eh, clearly my examples did not prove my point, which was that games constantly update and contradict each other. perhaps a better example would be origin on the name "redguard". what i've been trying to say all along is that you either try and point out the inconsistencies between games and even within games, or you accept a more-or-less solid explanation to erase most of them. does it make sense for cyrodiil to change its climate in the years since MW? no, not particularly. but having it change prior with the help of divine intervention is much more plausible, even if it does ask you to ignore a couple later mentioning of jungle.

Well, the alternative is to pretend the forest is just a game mechanic (like the miniaturized map, cities, etc) and only follow what the texts say.

iirc, the infernal city has it as a forest. landscape seems a bit too much to "game mechanic" away imo, though i choose to believe that the forests are a whole lot more dense and vine-y. more like http://img362.imageshack.us/img362/304/65610694gs4.jpg, really.

I wonder if the Imperial city is plagued by the unholy cicada army?

once every 4 years, yes. after the mating season is over their shells are collected and assembled into something that vaguely resembles Dunmer bonemold, but more transparent and scalemail-like.