I've been playing the game again after a while, having fun playing with mods i find and all that. and right now am doing the Knights of the Nine... and I noticed something I never noticed the first time I went through it. At first, the notion that 'religious = good' annoyed me, since I happen to be an atheist in real life, and that grew into really looking at the in-game lore and thinking about it, and came to the conclusion that by completing the quest line, my actions were not good. I wonder how many people feel the same? And I am forced to wonder how much was intentional by Bethesda, given how the addon is presented as: "A fallen King has been unchained from the darkness of Oblivion to seek vengeance upon the Gods who banished him. Only a champion pure of heart can vanquish the evil that has been released upon the land. You must heed the call, reclaim the lost relics of the Divine Crusader, and return the Nine to glory. New dungeons, characters, quests, and mysteries await." so it's presented as unambiguously good, essentially. But if you actually read the Song of Pelinal in the game, he is presented as a hugely racist violent maniac, prone to rages where he would destroy anything in his path indiscriminately. And if you think of it, he is actually a hero because he committed an act of genocide. I realize the Ayleds enslaved humans, and that was part of the motivation for rebellion, but don't you think genocide is a bit extreme? especially considering the Ayleids were tribal, and not all tribes shared the same beliefs/practices? It's been shown time and again in the real world that you can overthrow slavemasters without resorting to exterminating an entire race. I think Umaril is perfectly justified to extract revenge, what was done to his people was horrifically evil. though killing innocent people for the sins of their ancestors isn't all that great, either, but.... This all looks like perfectly intentional commentary on religiously motivated wars, I mean, the armor itself is clearly modeled after real life Crusader armor, the ultimate religious war. On the surface, this sounds great, I normally really like tough moral choices in games, but then you don't have the option of siding with Umaril (possibly getting some sweet Ayleid armor as a tradeoff to missing out on the Crusader armor), absolutely no NPC disagrees that Pelinal was good (though that may be justified, you tend to think of your own culture as good, and with time, a heroes faults tend to be overlooked), and then you have that official blurb, and the fact that if you get even one point of 'infamy' you can no longer equip the armor, and it's not so clear that it was actually intended to be a tough moral choice.....

anyway. It's just been nagging at my brain the last few days.

I mostly agree with you. I am also an atheist in reality, so I would normally find this very annoying, but I have come to accept that in most fantasy RPG settings, the gods people believe in truly do exist, and their enemies are not people who do not disbelieve them, but hate them and seek to cause them harm. In Oblivion, praying to a god's altar can heal you, and they can prevent you from even wearing the Crusader's Relics if you are evil, and I see that as a pretty good sign that they are real and are a force of good. What happened to the Ayleids is, at this point, irrelevant. All that matters now is stopping Umaril from destroying the gods, because no matter how bad what happened to him before was, the end of the gods would be worse. All NPCs you can talk to are part of the Cyrodiilic society, in which the gods are revered unquestioningly, so of course none sympathize with Umaril. What does annoy me in Oblivion is that criminals are seen as nonreligious, not that the nonreligious are seen as criminals. Why would any mortal, even a murderer, not feel some allegiance to the gods, knowing that they exist?

Well what I can think of is spite. "The Gods" spurn them for committing crimes and not healing their wounds or curing disease they have because they stole or murdered on the side. This is why the criminals in game could be hateful of the gods.

As for others think about real life criminals, some commit crime because its all they know which is not their fault they need some help. While others do it because they want to acquire things and stealing is easier then earning it and have no care for society and authority and the damage they cause, and others just want to watch the world burn they don't even care about anything.

Even with all these real reasons most people can only think of the negative ones of uncaring they don't think that these people may just need some help to get on their feet morally, financially, and in general mind set of how they should be acting.

This is reflected in the game with how npc's talk about criminals as how most people usually feel about them assuming all they care about is taking another persons hard earned gold or killing someone for their belongings they're carrying while the good god fearing people would never do this.

That's my thoughts...

Well, even in real life, the people who do/did engage in religious war also genuinely believe in the power of their gods, even if they believe that power is expressed in subtle or even invisible ways, and a lot of people DO believe in faith healing and such, so the motivation isn't actually THAT different, the actual power isn't the issue, it's the belief. (though a lot of religious war here have been nitpicking over details of scripture more than pitting one god against another, but still)

That they can prevent you from wearing the relics is a sign that they are real in the game, and that they value what would generally be considered 'good' action, but it doesn't mean they are always right about what is good, even if their devotees believe thy are unerrant. I think they were wrong about that when it came to the Ayleids.

But yeah. Oblivion is weird in that way with the criminals. They are totally http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FlatEarthAtheist. And then they had that character, Else God-Hater, who was a totally stereotypical depiction of angry, militant atheists, (except it was god-HATER, not god-disbeliever, but a lot of people don't get the distinction) and of course, she ended up being affiliated with the Mythic Dawn and tries to kill you. But on the other hand, a lot of the Daedra worshippers are perfectly nice, and I like most of the Daedra Lords a lot. Not all of them, it depends on the Daedric Lord of their choice, but Bethesda did clearly try to show that the Nine Divines weren't the sole source of morality. And though it was morally dubious at best, I actually really liked that Daedric quest where you cast the spell on the people trying to convert the daedra worshippers to the 9 Divines, so they could kill the proselytizers. Ok yeah, a rather extreme reaction, but hey, that kind of proselytizing is just plain rude.

My current character is a custom dryad race, next time I WAS going to do a Dark Seducer, but now I'm thinking Ayleid, (there are some books in game that suggest isolated pockets continued to exist) and I will keep Knights installed, but will intentionally snub the quest line. It's not as if I can't get comparably good armor in Mehrunes Razor or through player created mods.I think there is an option to tell that prophet in Anvil you're not interested, even. (though as mentioned, you don't have the choice of truly siding with Umaril, but you can still pretend to tell the guy to take a flying leap) I think i even saw (but didn't download) an alternate start mod that let you live out of an Ayleid ruin.... maybe I should go find that.

as an aside, I am writing a fantasy story where the gods will be presented as essentially powerless, (though stories of great acts in the past, of course) their actual existence will be up to the reader to decide, but the amount of influence they have over the world is basically exactly the same as on Earth... magic totally exists, it's just more.... Force-like, not necessarily tied to the gods, though people of course believe it is a god-given power. Just mentioning because of your comment about gods in fantasy.

Well, how many thousands of years ago did Peninal and St. Alessia overthrow the Ayelids? That's more than enough time to turn them into living legends. Hell, the outlaws of the West like Billy the Kid and Jessie James have been dead for a century at least and already they're legends.

People just like rebel types.

Do you think you were doing good and Umaril was evil because the prophet told you, believing as you were told? or you think that Pelinal was a tyrant because of a Book you read, and that makes his purity at murdering sinners deniable?
where did you find the dev-note that wrote "Gods Rock, Ayleids svck"?
as far as I'm concerned, altars at the Chapels may be a common enchanted object, which measures your Fame and Infamy and Blesses you based on it? is it an acceptable proof on existance of "Gods" in game? so far only one of them showed itself, and who knows what exactly it was...

you probably want to ask Mr. Howard, he'll tell you which is good and which is evil. the prophet has been messing with your brain telling you that you're doing good.

A few thoughts....

First, by way of context, I'm an agnostic, so I don't have a horse in the race.

On one hand-- the entire monochromatic fame vs. infamy / good vs. evil thing in this game was arguably poorly handled, specifically because it doesn't allow for ambiguity. But I forgive that, at least as much as I forgive any of the game's shortcomings, just because it's a product, put together with countless requirements, a limited time and a limited budget by fallible humans. And honestly, since philosophers have been arguing good and evil for as long as there have been philosophers and there still isn't any true consensus regarding what constitutes one or the other, I'd hardly expect a video game to make an unerriing judgement regarding them. And that's fine, and not just in the game, but in life. They're subjective concepts, so I expect different people to have different interpretations of them and their opinions have as much (or as little) bearing on my life as their opinions regarding pretty much anything else.

It would've been better had the game used some sort of much more complex system both for assigning fame and infamy and for generating the reactions to it-- to mirror the ambiguity of the actions themselves, the tendency for some personalities to seem more evil and others less, often regardless of the amount of actual "evil" in which each might engage, and the varying reactions to others to the appearance of widely-thought-of "evil." But it's an imperfect game in an imperfect universe, and as with so many things, I just hope they do a better job of it on the next one. I don't consider the game's shortcomings to be any sort of profound commentary on existence, but simply the result of fallible humans with their own relatively narrow perceptions working under a limited budget and limited time to put out a product for more-or-less mass consumption.

On another hand-- I'd say that the moral tone of KotN was firmly and unequivocally established at the beginning, when you walk into Anvil chapel and find it covered in the blood and corpses of innocents. I honestly don't much care what sort of hard time the Ayleids might've had at the hands of their former slaves centuries ago-- those were innocent people who were senselessly butchered. That's a pretty straightforward moral issue, really.

Agreed. We need to take the Anvil Chapel attack to the equation.

If anything, Umeril is going down because he ordered the deaths of those innocent people who's only crimes were being priestesses of Dibella.