I figured that I've had this question about enough different mods that it was worth making a thread about it to ask. My question is relatively simple: are the following mods lore-friendly and not "over the top?" And by that I mean, do they fit in well with the content of vanilla Oblivion, or do they branch out and become insanely melodramatic and/or break the established lore of the Elder Scrolls series? As a point of reference, for anyone who has played them, I consider "Returns of Shadows Chapter I" to break lore and be over the top, but I do not think "The Dungeons of Ivellon" does.

The mods in question:
http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=12016
http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=37587
http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=3027

I appreciate any insight.

Yeah, definitely agree about "Return Of Shadows" Especially with the whole credits and screwy weather it brings up right after you install it... not to mention the whole flying to an arena in the sky after attacking some guy. I kind of stopped playing it shortly after that.

Blood and Mud: Maybe a bit over the top... the obvious thing is a roaming Star Wars reference. There's a rickity boat that shows up in several ports with a man and a khajiit acting as a close parody to Han Solo, and chewbacca. It does add a lot of extra character and grittiness to Bravil though which is nice... not quite sure about the quests because I've never really devoted much time to them. I've done some of the smaller ones and they were good, but the larger ones involve some hard riddles and stuff.

Sundered Keep: Never played it... the "ancient god" thing kind of points towards some lore breaking, but it might not be too over the top.

Ruined Tails Tale: Not really over the top.... doesn't introduce any new gods, or have factions/characters doing things completely out of character.... it's really good, if you look hard enough you're bound to find lore issues with any mod, but I can't think of anything with Ruined Tail off the top of my head.

I wonder if anyone would consider Integration as 'Over the top'... it almost has more lore and references to old Elder scroll games in it than the core game does.

It only gets worse from there. That is, "worse" in the sense of being over-the-top. If I didn't care about lore or things like that, it would probably be pretty cool, but the fact that it seemed to try to be lore-friendly is what put me off.


Blood and Mud puzzles me, and I don't really know what to expect from it. A bunch of skeletons and heads on pikes seems a bit odd for an Imperial city that's just supposed to be a bunch of poor people and skooma addicts. I played it very briefly and found some ghost that was speaking an "ancient Rune language." That, combined with a Mystic Elf walking around Bravil kind of put me off.


Integration is another good one I've wondered about in the past. On one hand, as you say, it seems like it's all backed by lore and has clear references to past Elder Scrolls games. On the other hand, it seems like there are demons and Seducers walking around like they're all friends with everyone.

To clarify the mod starts out with like.... 2 Daedra in public areas. 1 is an imprisoned Xivilai, and the other is a Golden Saint outside of the Imperial City. A lot of the daedra and other characters don't show up until much later in the quest line when you do a whole bunch of good deeds to make people less afraid of them. Also a lot of the characters have to pretend to be something they're not like Mazken pretending to be Dark elfs, and Aureal pretending to be High Elfs

As for why Daedra wouldn't be violent.; think about it: there's this big war going on and all the mortals are referring to it as an Oblivion invasion, and you just happen to be stranded in mundus(Cyrodiil). You're massively outnumbered, you don't like Dagon, and you don't really have any issue with mortals. Thus you must find a more subtle role than just attacking whatever comes your way. Most Daedra aren't "animals" they think, reason, have personalities of their own, and they don't always agree with other Daedra even if those other Daedra happen to be the same race as them, or they happen to be the lord that most of their race follow. Granted, just like humans there are some cultural, and physiological tendencies that they might have based on race (ie: like how certain diseases, and mental illnesses run in genes) but as a whole they have a large control over their own personality, actions, and schemes.

As far as I know there isn't much in the lore that would dispute this, and none of this is just thrown in and forced upon you out of the blue.... it's all explained, reasoned, and believable. I mean it's not like random hostile Xivilais will just start hugging you or anything. Integration just brings together the small minority of "weird" Daedra that don't follow those cultural norms.

EDIT: Also worth noting that not all of the Daedra are "friendly" there's still plenty of characters that think they're sooo much better than you and you're just a worthless mortal.... and that's not even counting the Daedra that are openly hostile to you.

In regards to Blood and mud, he does try very hard to fit his ideas into lore, even if they don't fit too well. Not to mention I found it to be one hell of a good quest regardless, high quality throughout. Atleast give that one a shot if not the others.

Just to throw in my two septims about Integration, I'll go ahead and say that the screenshots of the characters in it were enough to turn me off of trying. The references and the interactions between everyone makes a lot of sense, as Phoenix said, but the visual aspect was a bit too much for me. The demons like a bit too stereotypical to be associated with Daedra in my mind.

That sounds good then.


I'll probably play all of them, the question was more to figure out if I should go with a TES roleplaying character or one designed to just play through a story. They all look excellent, which is why I ask in the first place.


I agree, the judging-at-first-glance is what initially made me curious about how much I might enjoy the mod as well. Talking to an NPC with red hair, horns, and large bat wings seems a bit over-the-top, despite that it isn't unheard of in TES lore.

The only problem I would/could have with Integration is the dependency on RPB and LAME. both of which IMO alters just a little too much for me.

@Matthew & Velorien:

Bah.... the folly of cosmetic mods I guess. There is an alternate faces plugin that's been available for most the development:



Explanation: The usual complaint seems to reference them as looking "anime." One thing usually referenced is the characters having big anime eyes, when in fact that's not really the case and most of the eyes are in fact shaped the opposite of common anime eye formats. The 2nd thing referenced is usually the hair. As I referred to above that's more the cosmetics fault. Most hair mods come from Asian influenced modders, as such the majority of the hairs in RBP have an "anime" skew to them, and Integration uses hair from RBP's resources. It's basically ugly repetitious vanilla hair, or crazy anime looking hair. 3rd: never really heard any complaints about the clothing/armor, but there's also two options there. vanilla stuff, or custom clothing/armor for NPCs. 4th: Personally the weird look sort of fits for me. most of the characters are pretty well defined and eccentric in their own ways. so it makes sense that they would look a little different than most.


Just curious: What are the main screen shots that give you a bad impression? From what I've seen http://theelderscrolls.info/images/artikel/oblivion/plugin/sonstiges/rbp/integration_dialog.gif seems to be the main offender. What's funny though is that Kenerial is a "recruiter" for Sheogorath, shes basically one of the Mazken who's job it is to drive mortals insane, and lead them down the "golden road." She must very good at her job seeing as how she has such a profound effect even outside the elder scrolls universe :rofl:


@Shikishima: There should be a version without gameplay changes some time in the future. bg started working on it about 2 months ago.

Well, I personally have always been more of a fan of the vanilla hair selection. It may get repetitive at times if you pay attention, but I only really pay attention to people's hair in the game if it stands out, which I know would be the case with the NPCs from Integration. I'm also not a fan of RBP and the races that were included with it. I know Integration uses those races for its characters, which is why I decided just not to do it. Maybe at some point I'll give it a shot with an install that has more mods in it that make the original Oblivion NPCs look similar, but for now I'm playing through a game that does very little to the original style of character design.

Yeah, probably Kenerial. She has dark skin, bright eyes, and really light blonde hair that just made me have no idea what she was.

Like Matthew, I'm also not a fan of RBP.