First post ever! lol. Anyway, sorry for the big, hidden spoiler, but I didn't want to ruin it for anyone else. I've been a big fan of the Elder Scrolls universe since the release of Morrowind, and I know quite a lot more about the games' lore than the average player (although obviously not as much as the average forum-goer, here; I'm only just delving into the metaphysics), but I am struck with several tough decisions.


Thanks for any comments and help in advance, and I hope to be posting my thoughts on other threads in this forum, becoming more active, in the near future.

If strengthening the empire is your thing, you can recall that Mero says something akin to that

We don't know too much about the composition of the modern Elder Council, or the state of Mede family. As long as he has successors ready and waiting, destabilization will be minimized, but so far we don't know what the line of succession is like. If he doesn't have any successors, and the Elder council can't replace him, standard procedure would be to declare a potentate (think interim ruler). Based on Potentate Ocato's experience, it wouldn't go well.

As for policy, we also don't know too much about where any possible replacements stand on the Talos issue, or foreign relations with the Dominion. Perhaps more information is still waiting to be retrieved from Skyrim, but so far we don't have it.

If you don't kill him, someone else from the Dark Brotherhood probably will. If assassination is your thing, I cannot think of a bigger prize than killing the Emperor.

Yes, keep in mind that there is one canon, regardless of your actions.

That means in a sense that this is out of your hands - the assassination could happen, which means it will happen, just not always in the same way.

With that said, it's your own choice if you want to be an active part of it.

The Dark Brotherhood in and of itself is a nihilistic death cult. It essentially believes in "serving" the the notion of entropy through nigh-indiscriminate murder. To join it, in the terms of the meta-game, you are joining the force of entropic decline within the gameworld, involving the gradual elimination of characters from the story until it reaches the perfect state of emptiness where all NPCs are gone, and none will replace them. If you believe in the meta-game version of Sithis, Sithis is the state where there are no characters left in the game, just the void of having killed everything.

That's a little extreme, even for the Dark Brotherhood. They don't kill that indiscriminately. If that were the case, we would see instances of mass murder on a grand scale -- hundreds at a time. Why make it gradual as you say? Why bother getting individual targets from the Night Mother (via the Listener) when you could just poison whole villages or burn towns down to the ground with magicka? I don't think the Dark Brotherhood fits neatly into a little package we can easily explain. If anything, they enjoy the 'theater' of it -- http://www.imperial-library.info/content/source-chaos. Killing everyone off would rob the stage of all of the actors and stop the performer forever.

Of course, that's just speculation. But it makes sense to me, and the parallels to certain other mythic events are striking.

I said nigh-indiscriminately.

In the meta-game, you kill anyone who has a plotline to go with them. You can then kill extra radiant characters. You can kill either because you just enjoy killing, or because you just want to see the end of the plotline, even knowing it involves an inevitable spiral towards the conclusion of killing everything to be killed with a quest plotline attached. That is serving the metagame of Sithis - the entropic end state where you have impacted the plot in every way you can, and you hit the big empty.

Of course, all the same, you COULD just go on a murderous rampage and kill everyone (so long as you take off all essential flags), and that would be as much serving the metagame Sithis as anything.

The Dark Brotherhood are also, I would think, not really fully aware of what it is they "serve", or that it really doesn't need them to serve it. The only purpose the Dark Brotherhood serves in the metagame, of course, is to give you the chance to have some comedic sociopathic moments before getting wiped out in a cosmically retributive way.

This, of course, has little to do with the in-game lore, and is just one facet of the lore.

Agreed. Well said.

Titus Mede was murdered. He ain't mantling anyone.

Some would like to believe that the emperors have divined their own destinies and are in control, but was Reman in control when the Morag Tong killed him? Or any of his heirs? Nope.

And (imo, farfetched) presumption that a "New Empire" is suddenly going to pop out of a hole in the ground, is wishful thinking. It's not going to happen, not with the same, aged foundations of this empire.

And that doesn't mean a new dynasty.

I'm just going to throw this out there, but with the end of the DB questline it could play into the next TES game quite a bit. Possibly having your character become the new Emperor or something of that nature?

The answer to that is a big fat "no".

Not only does the player have basically no means to claim the throne from a point where the only people who have ever heard of him/her are in Skyrim, the province which may well have just broken away from the Empire in rebellion thanks in no small part to the very same person who is also the previous emperor's murderer.

Mostly, however, it would be completely impossible to have a next game with an emperor that actually says or does anything if that emperor could be of any gender, any race, have any background, be a warrior/mage/thief/jack-of-all-trades, be a sociopath/knight-in-shining-armor/mercenary/scholar, or generally be an absolute blank slate about which almost nothing is known.

Nothing about the player characters of any of the games can be written, except that they participated in the main questline, which cannot be made non-linear for the purposes of keeping lore coherent. Otherwise, they have to Dragon Break again.

Arena's Eternal Champion is basically never really mentioned again.

After Daggerfall, they just killed the main character to stop him/her from mattering anymore. The multiple plotlines required Dragon Breaking.

Morrowind sent the Nerevarine off to Akavir for no particular reason where he/she could play around in someone else's back yard without having to **** up the lore because nobody knows what happens in Akavir.

Oblivion converts the player character into Sheogorath, which is somewhat better than saying they got on a boat to nowhere or killing them off, since it seems kind of cool, but it also involves overwriting your character's original personality by going insane as the Madgod where they will presumably forget who they were before, and may just change what their form is at random just for fun so that what they used to be wouldn't matter so much anymore.

Skyrim has to dispose of the Dragonborn in a way that sounds nice and epic so it doesn't hurt people's feelings, but so that it makes sure the Dragonborn can't **** up lore any more than necessary.