I think that hypothesis leans heavily on human notions and experiences of mortality, and leaves no room for Merrish longevity and vitality.

The Dwemer specters we see are not normal ghosts by any means, and the disappearance of the Dwemer certainly has something to with it.

Even if there were thousands of ghosts, it's complete conjecture and fancy to conclude that hundreds of them are sentient, as Radac is, as they would have been encountered by countless other adventurers during thier 4000 year existence... and consequently chased into extinction by scholars and wizards from all corners of Tamriel. That all specters are irreversibly demented could prove this point; that there is no need to study them and so they still exist.

Spirits are not destroyed by being captured. Also, it is likely that the first few centuries after the dwemer mass vaporization, these spirits would be considered monsters and boogeymen, considering that the people most likely to encounter them would be early dunmer. Thus, I find it unlikely that they would have been hunted as you say. In this time, the specters would have suffered the ravages of being mistreated by enchanters, being tormented by the mundus, etc--- and many will have gone quite mad. However, there is grounds to suggest that more than 1% of them are still sentient. In addition to the radac's forge ghost, there is also the unique dwemer ghost "That is up to something" in a local dwemer ruin near the bal isra. Darhk Mezalf or some such.


As for the first part--- Mer are not immortal. They just live longer, which makes up for their lower birth rate. At any given time, more of them are alive, since grandmamer and grandpamer are alive and kickin longer than grandpaman and Grandmaman. However, death rates when adjusted for this still would produce copious quantities of ghosts. Look at the Dunmer/Chimmer, and their need for places like Necropolis.

Also bear in mind the small size of Vvardenfell island, and the copious quantities of dwemer ghosts there. The mainland is many times larger, and also held many many dwemer ruins. Then you have the sprawling dwemer metropolises that now lie at the bottom of the sea of ghosts after the red mountain eruption. Is it pure coincidence that the sea is named such?

Sauce for the goose I was merely isolating pivotal parts of your argument etc ... :rolleyes: - so is only one of us allowed to ignore the other's statements? :shrug:


Well I never said you had said anything about a starter character - I merely used that anology to describe the kind of level you appear to portray Bagrum as being at ... ummm Luargar2, I think that bit referred to whether or not Bagrum knows how to fight in the Dwemer style. I believe you yourself were questioning whether he could fight or knew martial arts, questioning my assertions in response to others who said he could not. Before you assert such things maybe you ought to ask him - failing that I guess you might fight him with a med level character who has trained in martial atrs? Then decide for yourself. As I said the other players who fought him were not using starter-characters. and all but the uber-level Nerevarines found him tough opposition. Actually most said he was far tougher than Vivec who is a god-person and a 'general' - so please do some research first.

And I was saying that an intelligent, experienced and widely travelled Plains walker would naturally know how to fight and being a Dwemer and a 'scientist' I would naturally expect him to have taken the sensible precaution of studying the relevant texts and taken proper instruction in the correct and most efficient Dwemer way to do so - in other words I do not view him as a starter-grade character with no learning and merely basic knowledge.

Unsure where the 'what they think is an English village' could possibly refer to. I would have thought it pretty obvious that a Dwemer ruin is a Dwemer ruin. And I sincerely hope that you are never in a position where you have to judge the viability of a person's mental state based on your assessment of Bagrum - just go talk to Bagrum again - I am sure that you will find him far saner than you and others remember and maybe saner than some of the people you know - he was certainly very helpful to me and conversed most sensibly. I would think the fact that he was able to translate certain highly technical / scientific texts and remember their content would have told you much about his mental capabilities (with or without the use of a 'rosetta stone') Just because a person does not measure up to his own standards it does not mean to say that he is a total write off. Given the conversations I had with him I judge him to be a veritable fount of wisdom, sagacity and knowledge compared with the average mer in the street - and generally sane. And it was clear that he was well up to the general standards needed to teach children the basics of Dwemer culture. Go back to talk to Bagrum himself. He's waiting there for you.

In my lifetime I have seen the mainstream of England change so much that what I see now of education is a joke by comparison. Pre WW2 Matriculation on a subject-by-subject basis of compaison appears to have been superior to an average present day Degree ... but today's stuff is still English - however sadly debased. And you keep dismissing those spirits (Weird has now indicated the existance of 2 known sane Dwemer spirits) as well as the possibility they might be reincorporated in a clone ... Would you like to address that possibility?

One moment while I collect a quote from Putty: Looks to me that the putty person was definately arguing against cloning ... unless cloning does not really mean cloning? His statements led me to believe that he thinks cloning is not something that anyone should take seriously in a mythic/fantasy environment - sort of ignoring his support for the sf aspects obscure texts and Pellinal the spaceman So does that mean he was trolling as well as flaming?

Come off it - there have been people posting in this thread who have denied that cloning would work, that Divayth would do it and here is putty saying that this in-game fact is not fact ... I'm sure that putty knows what he is saying and doing even if the others do not.

I agree with you Luagar2 that it would be unlikely that the entire Dwemer civ could be revived ... some things are lost forever and others I would hope are lost. But a restart rather than allow genocide by one individual of that race? That I can support.

The way I feel about this is it's like the guy who walks down the street and watches a hokerr set off a bomb. A family is killed except for one member who loses his tackle and legs. The guy who sees it is a surgeon and can sew the guy's tackle back on and knows it will be in working order, but he says: 'Nah - even if I sew those bits back on he still would not be a man. Men walk erect on two legs and he does not have a leg to stand on.'

Regarding Weird's latest contribution:
I understood that Kagrenac's action ended a very bloody war? There must have been thousands upon thousands of spirits caught between those moments after death and before reincarnation ... and I do not believe such a process to be instantaneous either ...

It seems a bit strange to discuss science, given that few people actually believe that the same laws of science work in Nirn.

What ever happened to brevity?

The argument that the Dwemer can't be recreated because there are no Dwemer to teaches the clones how to be Dwemer, is countered by the argument that with actors imitating the Dwemer or more extraordinarily capturing their ghosts in machines to do the acting the Dwemer can be recreated.

Except that these actors are not Dwemer. The ghosts in machines... Well they are ghosts in machines.

For crying out loud I've seen fanfic that brought them back less jarringly then this! Right now I'm starting to think the Dwemer from Space were pretty cool actually.



It's the laws of physics that get turned off now and then, somewhat to be expected in a world of myth. Sociology, Anthropology, Philosophy, Biology and such all still work. /Nitpick

Absolutely nothing in this long rambling paragraph gives any credence to Yagrum knowing martial arts, there is no logical process and you have no argument for me to refute and so I'll leave you to your circular reasoning of him knowing martial arts because he's tough in-game and he's tough in-game because he knows martial arts (that is not logic). Not to mention that this entire discussion of martial arts doesn't affect the actual discussion either way...

The references to an English village were in reference to the society of the village, not its architecture, if you can't see that then I can now understand why you can't draw a distinction between a clone created through Dwemer genetics and an elf that is a Dwemer due to it's cultural heritage...

The second spirit Wierd mentioned wasn't sane, it was just a named ghost...

The only thing you show here is your amazing ability to remove quotes from their context and twist them. Those two statements are side-thoughts of his actual argument, which dealt with culture... however you refuse to make a legitimate rebuttal to anything to do with culture and instead keep reverting to cloning. Cloning is irrelevant to the subject at this point in the thread, even if we acquired an actual Dwemer baby that had been frozen in stasis somehow we still couldn't raise it up to be Dwemer, it would for all intents and purposes be just another elf...

It's quite possible that the clones would have a natural immunity should the genetic strand allow them. However, it would be curable now doubt.

I think he was a technician too, not so much a scientist. It was Kagrenac(sp?) who's brilliant mind inspired the hands of Yagrum, not Yagrum himself. Who, although said he was a great thinker and technical pioneer, couldn't match the cunning and intellectual prowess of the great Kagrenac, destroyer of his people. It would be poetic to think that the most diverse mind, claiming to have achieved immortality for his people, would ultimately be the destroyer.

And Luagar2, the dwemer haven't been extinguished quite yet. Yagrum Bargan is the perfect example.

Yagrum is the only example. And even despite Yagrum's presence, the Dwemer as a culture, as a society and as a race have been extinguished and cannot be brought back in any form worthy of calling them 'Dwemer' - they'll just be mer molded into what Tamriel in the 3rd Era perceive to be Dwemeri based on the guidance of some artifacts and a single survivor who even if he was fully there mentally still wouldn't be sufficient...


Edit @ Wierd: Your arguments are nothing more than conjecture. Mathematical anolysis cannot be applied to something that is not contained in any measurable medium, there are too many outside influences present which causes your argument to hinge too much on a series of ideal situations and assumptions which, due to lack of information, we cannot assume to be present... culture isn't a science and can't be treated in those terms...

I never said that mer were immortal.

The Necropolis serves the entire nation of Morrowind. I would understand your estimate if a single Necropolis were appropriated for every sector, but there isnt.

Dahrk Mezalf was not sentient. There really is no evidence to suggest that even 1% of dwemer specters are sentient. The name "Specter" itself implies that something is missing, or only half-there.

Yes, there may be thousands of specters, easily, but it is BATW for anymore specters to be sentient, and so much so to do anything along the lines of any idea presented in this thread. It simply removes the enigma of the dwemer's disappearance.

I think the Nerevarine was the only successfully cured person. Others ended up dead just like all before. That's why Nerevarine is who he/she is.

No it doesnt, because the ghosts wouldnt know either. They died BEFORE the brasswalk incident.

And yes, Specters lack bodies, and cannot experience sensations other than biting cold and hardship. (This is why many go insane.) They however, take comfort in each other's presence. This is why there are usually more than one ghost floating about in not only ruins, but in ancestral tombs.


Also, Vvardenfell has a lot of ancestral tombs in it, dont you think? Considering the number of Dunmer that get interred at local familial shrines and ancestral tombs, the number that make it to Necrom still speaks volumes as to the number of dead that get produced.

This thread still lingers? :blink:

It does. and likely will still for some time.

I don't think that. Usually ghosts just don't appear. We don't see Dunmer ghosts anywhere, not that of any other race. Undead are magical creations. Dwemer specters must have been the Dwemer that died during brasswalk.



Uhh, they do?

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

My parents are both Russian. I lived in Russia (well, Belarus, but its close enough) for the first 7 years of my life. I speak russian fluently, know russian history well enough, eat russian food, and go to russian church. i feel some awkward sense of patriotism for the 'mother land,' and i often sympathize with russia in political affairs. i have a Belorussian citizenship and go back to visit as often as i can. I am, however, not russian. No matter how hard my parents try i will never be russian. In order to be one of a culture you have to live completely immersed in that culture for a significant part of your life, you have to be surrounded by the customs and their variations every day of your formative stages. You cannot learn culture from two people, or even twenty. you have to live it to become it.

Taken.

It does not explicitly detail that Dwemer specters do so though. har har

This seems to suggest that not all spirits go mad - as I'm sure we all knew having read it previously. but for the record it is clear that there are exceptions ... and there is no reason to believe that the list of exceptions is all-inclusive of every possible variation.

Please note in the second emboldened line that (as I'm sure we all knew) spirits can be manipulated according to their fundamental drives ... in this case of those who did not serve faithfully in life - resentment of his own clan = the binder.

If a spirit can be manipulated by words after death then it intereacts with the living ... so it participates in the world around it.

If it can be manipulated it's mindset is not fixed, it is capable of change and upon re-incorporation can become more than it was perceived to be, or indeed was capable of being as a pure spirit. So Weird wins again though reasonableness.

And if the Dwemer are really as intellectually-oriented and emotionless as you (plural) seem to have claimed they would not get angry etc either - anger is an emotion that you attibuted to them is it not?

Re-incorporate enough Dwemer to put together a small settlement of those that could be returned in a sane enough condition along with the baby clones and you have a new beginning. Now I cannot see why Bagrum would not wish to give these tortured remnants of his people - the very best of his people who were of character strong enough to survive thousands of years as discorporated entities - that chance.

Hmm ... maybe we ought to roleplay this? Both those for and against. That might be about the hardest roleplay to bring off any of us have ever heard of - besides, who could be the DM?

And thus is the dreaded FAN [censored].

No thank you. I merely argue for the POSSIBILITY that it COULD happen. Not that it MUST happen.

Precisely. As albides put it, "It takes a village to raise a child."


In other words, you have to get the newly mechacorporeated dwemer to resume the normal ebbs and flows of daily dwemer existence, before even considering this prospect.

A potential solution to the "insane spectre" problem, as mentioned in Ancestors and the Dunmer (that is, assuming Dwemer ghosts are subject to the same "rules" as Dunmer ghosts):

These spirits usually go mad, and make terrifying guardians. They are ritually prevented from harming mortals of their clans, but that does not necessary discourage them from mischievous or peevish behavior. They are exceedingly dangerous for intruders. At the same time, if an intruder can penetrate the spirit's madness and play upon the spirit's resentment of his own clan, the angry spirits may be manipulated.

This suggests that while mad, they still understand human speech, and can be manipulated to work towards one's own agenda. Additionally, they won't harm a member of their own clan.

Therefore, all you have to do is trick the Dwarven Spectres into believing that the cloned Yagrummer or baby-snatched Altmer are indeed REAL Dwemer, and more specifically, relatives of the ghost in question.
I'm not saying it'd be easy, or if it's 100% guaranteed to work, but it could be a way to at least glean a little bit of information about real Dwemer culture and customs, and if the (recently re-bodied) Dwarven Spectre is of sound mind (at least a little bit), it could prove to be a way to raise cloned Dwemer as real Dwemer.

After all, if Shivering Isles has taught us anything, it's that crazies in the Elder Scrolls universe are relatively harmless, as long as you play along with their delusions.

This topic has been beat and beat and beat to death. Can we get over it and stop all the nonsense?? It's not gonna happen, never gonna happen, just please please stop with this nonsense!

Well, of course you don't have any interest in the idea, you like Oblivion better.

Both of you cool it. fanaticism of any kind never truly helps anyone.

I meant it as more of a playful tease, really.