How come the dead Akaviri soldiers in Oblivion all look like normal human skeletons? I tried looking this up and found that there were four races in Akavir- vampiric snakes, monkey people, demon-like people, and tiger-like cat people. Which one of these four races would the soldiers be?

:P It's just game mechanics. It wasn't really important enough to encorporate a whole new race just for that one instance. (would of been cool though I suppose)

The vampire snakes; and no, that is not contradictory.

There was also a group of akaviri humans at one point. Legend says that they were all eaten by the "snake people", but I personally believe that is a metaphor.

That said, it probably was just laziness that created a human ghost, but as far as I know (which is very little), it is never specified which akaviri race invaded via pale pass. There were also rumors of canine or rat people during the akaviri invasion of tamriel.

Reoite

Edit: Found a source for that canine/rat people
(from the Imperial Library http://imperial-library.info/akavir/index.shtml#others)

"We ate them to become them."

I saw snake-men. Scaly, fanged, slithering snake-men.

Anybody who says different is wrong.

Two possibilities. The simpler is that, through some mytho-magical process, the Tscaeci ate the men of Akavir... and then became them. So while they were immortal snake men, the claimed the forms of men well before invading Tamriel.

But then, what of the descriptions in certain stories of very snake-like fighting styles?

My theory is that the people found at Pale Pass were, in fact, men of the land. The Akaviri Potentate had been established generations before, and no would-be ruler ever lasts that long without the consent of the ruled. The impression I get is that the crossing between Akavir and Tamriel is a long and difficult one, and there have only been a few such crossings over many a century. As a result, I suspect that the conquers, while probably technologically superior to the people they invaded, were numerically inferior. Had they attempted to rule through brute force alone, they would likely have been marginalized through a war of attrition by the hostile people surrounding them.

No, the main advantage would have been not technological (that provides only a temporary advantage, until the locals figure out how to duplicate and use said technology) but social. We see evidence of this in the Origin of the Fighters Guild, which was among many trade organizations established under the Potentate. Very likely, when the Tscaeci arrived and saw a few victories, some joined them because they wanted to be on a winning side, but more joined, and stayed, because the potential economic benefits were enormous. (It is also possible that the Akaviri invaders tapped a deep current of resentment of existing political institutions.)

By the time of the Battle of Pale Pass, I suspect that the actual number of Tscaeci involved in the Potentate was rather few, and that the government was Akaviri more in institutional descent than in biological composition. Indeed, I see no evidence that the Potentate was ever part of a larger trans-oceanic institution linking it politically to Akavir.

Please note that this isn't just some fanboyish attempt to retcon the skeletons at Pale Pass into the existing corpus (not that I have any problem with doing that ). This is what I would have expected, had I considered it, even before playing the Pale Pass quest.

Gee, less than 24 hours later, you're suddenly an expert Tarvok?

I'm tellin' ya guys, those were snake-men at Pale Pass. I don't know where you guys got the idea that they were humans, but as for me, I saw nothin' but IMMORTAL. VAMPIRE. SNAKE-MEN.

Try eight years later. I'm not quite as well read as some here, but I've been playing TES games and reading the lore for quite some time, now. I just like to poke fun at those whose first resort in explaining the unexplainable is reference to the moral failings of the developers. Probably I've been damaging my image in the process, but I don't really care about that any more.

Oh, and Khajiit_Thief01, you might want to cut back on the skooma a bit, eh? (Actually, if there had been enough tscaeci for all garrisons to consist primarily of tscaeci, there would still be tscaeci around Tamriel today, enough to make either a player race or an entire class of monsters.)

Cool. Now explain Wes Johnson's Colovian accent. I dare you.


Edit: Holy crap, Tarvok just explained Wes Johnson's Colovian accent. For the first time ever. He ascends to stand by Adventurous Putty on the pedestal of Eastern Awesomeness.

I can't say I blame them. They weren't going to create snake skeltons with a unique locomotion for one quest. Besides, we hardly know anything about Akavir anyway.

And they may not even be snakes.

But in the end, that's just my opinion.

I assumed the akiviri soldiers were human because when the Akiviri were driven out of Tamriel, their 'exotic weapons and armour' were adopted by some tamrielic cultures.

The 2920 books have a few lines that make me believe the Tsaesci are more snake-men than humans with scales. There is also the theory that there were "normal" humans with the Tsaesci as well.







And various others throughout the story that hint at them being snakes, of course one could consider them all to be metaphorical.

http://www.imperial-library.info/mwbooks/2920.shtml

Chapter 2 of http://www.imperial-library.info/obbooks/remanada.shtml also mentions the Tsaesci origin of the blades and idea of human-tsaesci interbreeding.

DUDE! You saw those same snakey lookin' guys, didn't you? :clap:

I agree, anybody who says that they saw something different is

Walter:
Serpents? In my Pale Pass?

Apparently it's more likely than I think.

Game mechanics, blahblahdefreakitydoodablah.

Who said that the Akaviri snake-men (I'm not even going to attempt to spell it) couldn't use human soldiers anyways? It makes sense, considering they enslave just about anything they come across. I could concieve them using their own slaves as infantry. Maybe that's just me.

And how do you know those descriptions are flowered up to make the snake-men more monster-like?

Have YOU seen one of those vampire snake-men? Hmm? HMM? HMM? I thought not.

So the Akaviri race at Pale Pass was definitely the vampiric snake-men?

I did.

At Pale Pass.

Like I said earlier.

It's true, ya know.


By the way, Zarr, good to see ya back.

Oh yes very cool.

I don`t see why not, other than intentionally keeping AKAVIR in the shadows.

Or they cant open the door between the writing department and the design departments.

I thought that was already obvious.

Thieves have stolen the Stone of St. Alessia? It's blessed? THAT'S ALL YOUR GOING TO TELL US?!?

You make did an excellent job explaining it, but I truly think it was the devs being lazy. I'd rather go with your explanation though.