This has happened with several characters. I leave the Skingrad main gate headed for Anvil. My character encounters a bandit and being a little chicken-hearted she runs back to town. At this point she has never stolen anything. As she approaches the stable area she hears a shout "Put that back", and "Thief". If I check her stats she has some random number of 'items-stolen'. Out of curiosity I reloaded from her exiting the gate and her stolen items was zero. I went through the same sequence until arriving back at the gate and one time it was 15, another time 3 but the point is it was zero up to this moment. Anybody know if this is a glitch or some mechanism programmed into the game to introduce the Thieves Guild?

It's not from the Thieves Guild or anything similar. The only way I can think of that you might accidentally steal something in that situation is if you're sneaking when you encounter the bandit, and pick their pockets. Even then, you'd get the usual loot window to show that you've interacted with the bandit :shrug:

Unless there's another explanation, it sounds like it's probably a glitch.

Something simmilar happened to me when i was traveling from Bruma to the Imperial City. A bandit attacked me on my way, and while i was fighting him i got massage: "You have stolen from mages guild" and I lost the mages guild key. Few seconds later, I got another massage that says: "You have stolen from thieves guild". And i got bounty. I just reloaded the game and it hasn't happened again...

I guess it's a glitch or something

First and Third post you guys have patched your games?? On which platforms are you playing?

Skingrad Main Gate is one insane place in-game. There are always sheep roaming around for starters, usually Shameer tries and pick-pockets someone, when the guard approaches, I guess he decides to "Resist Arrest" because they start battling it out, all the NPC's take part in one huge slobber knockers, fists and blades everywhere, Dion steps out and accidentally gets hit by Bernadette Penelles who then begin a Skirmish of their own, which leads into the city. Suddenly Toutius sixtius pops in outta nowhere and svckers punches Shameer. He drops dead. Everyone left alive flees into the stable house. And they live happily ever after. It's madness I tell you, madness.

So, yeah, that area of the game is glitched, I can tell you that much, but in several ways, I don't know what warranted your problem in particular. Im on 360, if it matters.

I'd be grateful if someone could confirm that this actually does happen. It has happened to me with three different characters and with totally different installs. I am at the current patch level on a PC. One thing that maybe makes a difference is that Shameers body is lying near the stable house where he was killed as my character approached the city for the first time. I wonder if the 'Shameer' script somehow ends up playing out again and since Shameer is dead, my character gets the blame.

If you were traveling by horse, then chances are you accidentally hit your horse, that is known to cause this if you are not fully patched.

The thing with Shameer is; he is scripted to eat at a certain time. However, I guess the devs forgot to put any food in his inventory. His AI tells him to steal some.

Since it's just AI, he doesn't know how to sneak properly so he just crouches and steals from someone right infront of the guard. The guard naturally slays him. :shrug:

Yeah there was my horse around... i patched the game yesterday, cause I didn't know it wasn't patched ( I reinstal Oblivion frequently)...

Dude its written in the left lower corner of the main menu screen...

The glitchy thing I have happen at Skingrad is this: I leave my horse by the gate with the stables (is that the "main" gate?) I go in town and fiddle around, then I go back out of town via one of the other two gates, else I fast travel somewhere. I'll frequently fast travel back to Skingrad stable gate after I make my trip to say Derelict Mine, and when I get back, my horse is not there. The thing says "Your horse is stabled outside the city" but he isn't where I left him. Sometimes he'll be down there by the east gate with that little shelter thing, sometimes not.

In short, fast traveling back to, and/or out of Skingrad seems to inconsistently cause my horse to disappear. Saving and then reopening it generally makes him reappear.

Actually, now that I think about it, this also happens for Imperial City.

Could be the MD Saddlebags mod I guess.

So..... I took Lydia (who currently has 802 stolen items and no bounty) out through the west gate and went up the road until she met a bandit, then turned around and ran back to the gate. Things started to go all pear-shaped when we passed Uuras and he put up his dukes and went after the bandit. The bandit stopped following Lydia, but didn't go after Uuras either-- instead he started killing sheep. Uuras was naturally upset. "Hey!" he shouted, "Those are mine!" and he started whaling on the bandit. The bandit (Lydia's level 18) was in mithril and elven and wielding an ebony warhammer, so, much though I admired Uuras' determination, it was a bit one-sided. After taking one hit too many, Uuras turned and ran toward the gate, so Lydia also ran the rest of the way to the gate, getting there just in time to see two Skingrad guards kill the bandit. She didn't get any "Stop thief!" cries or anything like that, BUT, when I checked her records, she had 805 stolen items.

So yes-- apparently there's at least a glitch that adds to the stolen item count, and maybe if the guards weren't distracted with Uuras and the bandit and all, she also would've gotten the "Stop thief!" dialogue.

I'll check it again with a lower level character and hopefully when Uuras isn't around and see what happens.


*edit to add*

I just checked it with Jana, my level 3 Nord goddess, from a save at the west gate, before her first trip to Anvil. She had 800 stolen items and no bounty (funny how they all end up with 800-and-some stolen items :whistling:). She went up the road until she met a bandit and (much though it pained her to do so), as a public service, she turned around and ran back to the gate. And.... sure enough.... we ran into Uuras, who promptly killed the bandit quite dead. On a whim, I checked her records then, and it still read 800 stolen items. So she slogged back up the road and met another bandit, then turned around and ran back to the gate again. Deftly avoiding Uuras, we were pounding up the road between the vineyards, when someone to her right (of all people, it was Shameer) shouted, "Thief! You're not going to get away with this!" I stopped and checked her records and..... 801 stolen items. Then a guard ran up and gave her the "lawbreaker" speech and tried to arrest her, and I stopped the game and came back here.

Definite glitch. Makes no sense at all.

:shrug:


*and another edit*

Just tried it again with Jana, and checked some things along the way. First, I completely emptied her inventory, because I was curious if she really was picking things up. And I did it in the middle of the night, so there was nobody else around (it's nice that Uuras wants to help, but I'd really rather he didn't). And I stopped and checked her records at various points along the way. About the time she passed the cart on the right, she showed 801 stolen items, so she'd already picked up one, but with no "Thief!" accusation (of course, there were no NPCs around). As she got closer to the gate-- about at the stable-- she got a "Thief!" accusation from a guard. I checked her record then and it showed 804 items, so she had picked up three more from the earlier point at which I checked. So they don't just pick up some number of stolen items all at once, but apparently pick them up one or maybe a few at a time, more than once.

She had no additional items in her inventory though.

:shrug:

I used to be a town guard in Skingrad, and yeah...I know the gate your talking about....THE gate. I've heard stories of residents going out to pick graqes at the vineyard, and they never come back. Some say the gate is a portal to a place worse than Oblivion itself. Others believe its a hoax, but one night I was running graveyard shift and as I passed by that gate I swear I saw it glowing and as I approached a hand reached out and stuffed random objects in my pockets!!! The next day I left Skingrad for Anvil, figure they might need a new guard and plus, there is a cheap house on the market I should probably check out.

BTW, the whole haunted gate thing never happend with me, I was just pretending to be the old superstitious guardsman ^_^

I am eternally grateful to your two purloiners for their curiosity and salute their scientific bent. I consider this new revelation as a vindication of my decision to wipe this stain from my Altmer's good name. She has a new respect for the sticky-fingered despite her reluctance to get involved in such activities herself.

When this happened to Sarrah, she was absolutely devastated. She was unaccustomed to the vile names the smug, sarcastic guard called her. After paying her fine she ran all the way to Rosethorn hall fighting back tears. In the privacy of her Skingrad home she blindly crashed into the walls at every turn in the stairs as she rushed to her bedroom to cry herself to sleep.

She eventually got her revenge. The Skingrad guards had a rash of incidents involving flares spells applied to the seat of the problem from some undetectable source. It was hilarious to watch them jump and then start running around as if their pants were on fire. Come to think of it, they were.

I have this happen all the time. Once I was Playing on a completely new character I had just escaped the sewers I went to the market district to buy and sell stuff and I accidently hit someone with my sword so they attacked me but I didn't realize that I hit him so I just thought I would let the guards handle it so the guards attacked me and people were screaming "Stop! Theif!!" and "Put that hack theif!!" and I hadn't stole anything but to make sure I checked and it said stolen goods : 0 so that was weird.. Sometimes if I hi people they call me a theif so...... Very odd

:rofl: :foodndrink:

Sounds strange, i use Skingrad frequently, but i never tried anything strange.

Did anybody else notice there are a lot of balding men in Skingrad? And there seem to be virtually NONE in Leyawin Cheydinhal. That is very suspicious to me. I think there must be a connection to the haunted gate. Indeed, I will not be the least bit surprised if, in the long run Glarthir turns out to have absolutely correct.

One time at skingrad i was infront of the main gate and my horse (shadowmere) just "went unconsuose" and i died :/