I'm at the Mantella Crux for the first time ever, in the room full of stone skulls and the riddle about the blind god. It seems that nothing is getting those blue bars to open. There doesn't even seem to be any way of cheating my way past them.

Both the guide at the UESP Wiki and Jormungandr83's say to click the skulls that face the big skull shaped room at the center. That's the first skull you encounter going straight from the door, and the third skull after hanging a left from the door. So when I'm done with them, both of them are spinning, and none of the other skulls are. But the doors won't open.

I'm not even sure what to ask; two hint guides can't be wrong. But does anyone here have any suggestions?

Are you sure you clicked on them? They would start spinning after you did so. Other than that, I can't imagine what it could be.

Oof, that was silly of me.

I wonder if we'll be able to journey back to Aetherius again in the following Elder Scrolls games, like TESVI or TESVII. With Daggerfall graphics, Aetherius was cool looking, especially those giant cross bow things in the air with all the daedra lords around. Just think of what it would look like with the technology in the year 2026? (or whatever year....)

p.s. I beat Daggerfall last year for the first time, after playing it for 12 years. It was quite a moment for me to say the least. hehe

I think that, in my messing around with the skulls before going for the hint guide, I got something "stuck", as in I broke the puzzle. I reloaded from an earlier save, worked my way through again, and managed to reach the mantella room... but found myself without so much as a potion of levitation. I tried jumping across to it, managed to do so, but found that I couldn't climb the wall to reach the opening. My climb skill is plenty high; I just couldn't get the character into climb mode.

So I reloaded again, to a point before I had used my one potion of levitation to get into the dimensional door (that's what I call the "doors" in the starry walls) to reach the Benefactor. I tried the climb trick, no luck, until I decided that instead of reloading to the platform, I'd just hit alt-F11 (which, I must remind since all the guides are still incorrect on this (I just edited UESP to fix this), you DO NOT need cheat mode activated to use) to return to the platform, and skip the lengthy reload. Instead of returning to the platform, I returned to the beginning, right next to the demon head statue!

I clicked it until it cast levitate on me, and rushed to the area so I could get to the door before levitate ran out. I got the Benefactor to open the pyramid, and from there, it wasn't too difficult (other than having used up my Resit Shock potions before getting to the room with all the Daedra Lords and Sheggie's giant weapons). I got to the mantella chamber, levitated across, grabbed the green gem, and lo and behold, Gortwog now rules a newly risen Orsinium! (It sure would have been nice if they'd done something to reflect this, even added a new rumor or two, in the game after ending this quest. Even nicer would have been if finishing up either cleaned up or added a note to my journal.)

I sent you a message but I'll post it here, too.

I think there's a glitch in the Pyramid stage but it eventually works somehow.

I use this as a walkthrough:

http://www.uesp.net/dagger/hints/wt_aeth.shtml



This trapdoor at the very bottom is the one I can never ever get to open!!! That is where I'm having trouble.
http://img341.imageshack.us/img341/7567/scr0.jpg


So first I click this hedgestone (where arrow is pointing)
http://img197.imageshack.us/img197/5778/scr1a.jpg

Then this one. (where arrow is pointing)
http://img266.imageshack.us/img266/5034/scr2.jpg


Then I levitate to this lever.
http://img36.imageshack.us/img36/5139/scr3n.jpg


And pull it.
http://img196.imageshack.us/img196/2486/scr4.jpg


Then I type Benefactor
http://img197.imageshack.us/img197/7947/scr5.jpg


And the door is still closed. I click those hedgestones again and it's still closed.
What did you do? In what order?

I sent you an answer via PM, but I'll also mention here that, if I recall correctly, Jormungandr83's guide at Gamefaqs.com mentions this problem specifically. You might check it out.

Yea, it's very easy to click on the headstones twice when you only thought you did it once. Might want to go check them.

Also, you didn't flip the lever inside the island, behind those blue bars; that may have something to do with it.

Ah! That's what it was. It was that stupid lever inside the island that I had to activate. No wonder I could never get that final trap door to open. Thanks guy! I want to take some screenshots and post them somewhere on here so we can see how Bethesda portrayed Aetherius. Or is this set in the Mundus?

Actually, the nightmare world a certain mage in Oblivion (the one that stole Vaernima's orb, or whatever it was) got himself trapped in looks a lot like the Mantella Crux.

But come to think of it, I don't recall seeing the word "Aetherius" used as a description for the place Nulfaga sends you... and I was looking for it. The only place I recall seeing that word used was in the King of Worms' description of what he intended to do with the totem.

Yeah, you're right. She says I send you to the Mantellan Crux. But if you read here: http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Mantellan_Crux#Mantellan_Crux

The Mantellan Crux is a small, self-contained world (reputedly located in Aetherius) that served as the prison of the Mantella. And you apparently retrieved the Mantella from there just prior to the event known as the Warp in the West.

But this should be saved for the Lore thread. Interesting, huh?

No, it's on-topic for the game. Though it would be good to ask at the Lore thread where the notion that the Mantella Crux is located in the Aetherius comes from, since I see little or no in-game evidence for this. I think I'll do that now.

Well the quest is called "Journey to Aetherius" is it not?

Yes it is... by the editor who contributed the guide to that quest. Daggerfall's quests have no "official" name, unless in an official published hint book I've not seen.

At any rate, I have found it. The answer lies in a letter I should have received shortly after getting the Emperor's letter back from Gortwog, but never saw. I probably didn't realize it was there, and then it disappeared when the quest ended. At any rate, it was http://www.imperial-library.info/tsod/numidium.shtml at The Imperial Library:

You've never seen the Daggerfall Chronicles book? It refers to that quest by that name.

If I have, it was many, many years ago. I seem to recall paging through a Daggerfall book in a Barnes and Noble a very long time ago.

No, try to stay away from Arena/Daggerfall topics in the Lore forum. They are mainly concerned with stuff that pertains to Morrowind and onward. Besides, lots of Arena/DF lore conflicts with MW/OB, so you'll just confuse things. They'll probably try to explain it all using Vivec's teachings and whatnot, or dreamsleaves, or some other bizarre stuff like chim. They'll try to make sense of a DF situation with MW lore.

... which, glancing at the topic you made in there, is exactly what happened

Well, I'm an old Lore hand myself. Most of them ignore Daggerfall, because most of them got started with Morrowind. I've been posting in such threads since the days when alt.games.daggerfall was the hub of the Elder Scrolls fan community. Personally, I regard all the games as fair game for drawing inspiration, and believe regarding each game as a stand-alone and explaining away every seeming conflict between them using metagame logic (that is, regarding the fiction from the perspective of "it's just a game" and slamming the devs, rather than judging from an internal perspective, which is what the Lore forum was originally about) is both arrogant and lazy. The Morrowinders (which I sometimes call the Cult of Michael Krikbride) do the best at sounding haughty and mysterious, but they're neither the original, nor the only, inhabitants of that board. Remember: Elder Scrolls Lore (the forum) was established BEFORE (at least a year before, I think) Morrowind was even released. I remember. I was there.

In a way, I regard it as my personal mission to return and remind them of that fact every now and then. I won't surrender Daggerfall to Morrowind any more than they are going to surrender Morrowind to Oblivion. I regard the whole series as a whole, and where there are conflicts, I presume either a difference of believe between in-world authors, or a deeper truth that allows both to be true, or one to be a lie, or both to be lies, depending on the evidence with within and around the text.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, don't try to tell me where I can and can't post.

Well, it seems I may struck a nerve, which wasn't my intention. Nor was that meant to be an order. Just saying that if you're looking for an explanation of something that happened in Daggerfall, you'll be less likely to find it in that forum with present occupants--because, as I said, they will try to explain it in terms of Morrowind and not Daggerfall.

There is quite a difference in the gamelore between the games--especially between Daggerfall and Morrowind--both in substance and style, that I can't help seeing their worlds as sort of separate (perhaps a better word would be reinvented, which is more what it feels like). But that doesn't denigrate either game. Treating them as separate may make me arrogant (probably true) and slamming devs is entertaining (my mantra is Daggerfall and Morrowind are perfect, Oblivion is [censored]), but making up excuses for when their laziness makes holes (and acting like they must have planned that all along), well, that's kind of delusional. Twisting lore is what that is; it happens a lot in the Lore forum, and it is almost exclusively the result of trying to reconcile the differences between the games. So I don't try to reconcile.

(This reminds me of that Douglass Goodall interview. Is that still banned content in there? Either way, I'm a big fan of superglued legos; masticated spaghetti isn't my tea.)


Hilarious... and true for some.

If by "struck a nerve" you mean "gave me an excuse to kvetch about the lore forums", then perhaps; I took no offense from your post. But the quality of posting in that forum has declined over time. A lot of the old lore scholars have left the community, and, for the most part, haven't been replaced with people of a similar caliber. I seem to recall some of them being either made moderators, and a few of them actually went to work for gamesas.

I think the problem is that where Arena and Daggerfall were purely cult hits, Morrowind and, even more, Oblivion, attracted a much wider fanbase. This had two effects.

On the one hand, forums that were once the enclave of a small but vibrant community of particularly dedicated fans now had a greater variety of members; not only hardcoe roleplayers who loved the games for the sheer ambition behind their design, but also more mainstream "video game players." Roleplayers generally have a greater degree of creativity than your average person: it's what makes it possible to enjoy roleplaying games. In particular, you need imagination to enjoy Daggerfall. I don't think lore was lacking in Morrowind (and believe me, Morrowind had its detractors when it was first released), or even Oblivion, for that matter... but to an increasing degree, the lore is buried under a video game that is more enjoyable as a video game in and of itself. So we get a lot more players who regard the process of building fan speculation upon gaps in the lore not as a joy in and of itself, but rather as a chore that should have, even could have, been already taken care of for them, but weren't because the devs were "lazy". We get more fans that lack the ability to respond to conflict with creativity.

It doesn't help that Kirkbride began a tradition in TES fandom of overwriting and discrediting previous lore, rather than accommodating it. For example, "Arkay the God" could have been interpreted differently, or ignored (allowing the fans to decide what to do with it), or anything else... but Kirkbride, whose words are regarded as "Word of God" for this series by far too many, threw in a comment about "lies from a previous age" to discredit it because it didn't fit his personal vision of the metaphysics of the world portrayed in the Elder Scrolls.

The climate in Cyrodil is another example. Everybody was expecting Cyrodil to be a jungle. When it wasn't, they cried foul. But the problem is that the portrayal of Cyrodil as a jungle is found only in the most obvious document: the first edition of the Pocket Guide to the Empire, published in the age of Tiber Septim and Cyrus the Redguard. IIRC, there were Morrowind in-game books that portrayed it differently, and my determination was that Cyrodil had to be at least somewhat cooler than it was when the First Edition was published: Atmora was also warmer back then, still being somewhat habitable at the time (though the temperature was already dropping, even then). This is an easy and obvious explanation. But because Michael Kirkbride "doesn't like" the idea of Nirn as a world where material forces operate alongside mythic ones, he throws in a comment about the "Red King Once Jungled" in yet another piece of out-game "lore" designed to discredit in-game lore. I actually prefer the lack of explanation given by the current set of devs to Kirkbride's continual effort to assert personal control over the metaphysics behind the fiction of a game series that did not begin with him, and will not end with him.

gamesas's naysayers are partially correct: gamesas has failed to shepherd the lore community that once formed the backbone of TES fandom. In courting mainstream approval, they have allowed the quality of the series, in the areas most appreciated by its oldest fans, to deteriorate. But that doesn't change the fact that the current crop of fans, being the sort of people who regard gaps in the lore not as an opportunity, but an eyesore to bemoan, are far "lazier" than the devs they accuse of that crime. People work their butts off in the software business. They're not "lazy", they're just not working on what a particular fan would prefer they were working on.

This thread speaks truth.

I still say they're lazy no matter what.

Yes. One of the things that keeps me away for such extended periods. Vivec's cult following is, um, displeasing to me, to put it mildly.



First. I agree that the developers work their butts off.

Second. (And I'm not disagreeing with you - I'm just saying...) Lore didn't bring me into Tamriel, but it kept me here (for a very long time). That being said, I will be one of the first to admit that Bethesda has to worship the almighty dollar before its small Lore-fan-base. MW was intended to do many things; graphics break throughs, more lore, etc, but making more money was the first priority. On came the throngs of people. *shrug* That's life. I do wish, occasionally, there were fewer 10 year olds who would claim to be lore masters.