Just a little something I noticed in the DB questline. If you talk to the other family members, they say things that put the risk and importance of your contracts into perspective.

Example: the Valen Dreth contract. Ocheeva says that no member of the DB has infiltrated the prison successfully in over 300 years, yet it's perfectly possible to do this quest completely undetected even without any magic.

Fran?ois Motierre. Vicente doesn't want to give the contract to anyone but the PC, the new recruit. All the others have years of experience yet the PC is chosen for this contract.

Adamus Phillida: Three assassins have tried and failed to kill him. The PC succeeds.


Doesn't it seem like the only truly competent people in the DB were the PC and Mathieu Bellamont? Maybe the Night Mother had a point in allowing so many members to get offed. Or the writers got a bit lazy... Either way, it makes the DB a lot less threatening to me. What do you think?

Remember that Vincente is trying to test you. That's probably why he gave the player character the Motierre quest.

The Valen Dreth contract, Vincente mentions something implying he knows about the PC's escape. Therefore the PC would know the sewers better than any of the other members.

I've not done the Adamus Phillida quest, but remember that the PC is on his/her way to the top of the guild, therefore it makes sense that he/she is a better assassin than the other members.

i agree that there is some sloppiness in plot's consistency. while it is true that someone who managed to escape the prison is a better candidate than any other, you are given a key (?) to open that sewers door...

i think the questline would be a little better off if somehow during one minor quest the player were to stumble upon a situation (a person, an evidence, hint, rumour, etc...) that lead him to something the guild deemed valuable or important somehow. in other words, something that would surprise the guild by the member deciding to bring it to the attention to the guild without searching other venues (and again something that cwould e.g. shift the balance of power in term of guild dominance / influence in the cities' life.

still, most of these quests are good.

100% agree with this. They are a bunch of incompetent bumblers. Lucien LaChance too, after all he had everyone killed by mistake. And you have a novice (your character) killing all of these supposedly skilled assassins.

And it's mentioned at the end by the Night Mother that she wanted to clean house.

If only it was possible to side with Mathieu.

Well, it's not really his fault that the Dead Drops were changed and that he was led to believe the betrayer of the DB was in the Cheydinhal Sanctuary...

That was something else that bothered me. The dead drops. Who came up with this system? At least two dead drops were in locations where anyone could find them easily: the one in Chorrol in the bag under the oak, and the one in Skingrad (the first switch). Not only that, the PC is left with no way to contact the Speaker if something goes wrong for whatever reason.

This is ultimately what destroyed the DB: poor communications.

Just curious, how many people realized the dead drops had been switched before the game revealed it?

It was probably used for conveniece, so that the Speaker (who is supposedly giving orders to a whole bunch of assassins, I believe) wouldn't have to visit each and every one singularly. Admittedly, they could have done a better job in hiding the orders, some of the locations were a bit... obvious.

Actually, according to in-game information each Speaker has a Silencer and a sanctuary to manage, and the sanctuary master handles all the lesser contracts for him. So he has to meet with the Listener, distribute contracts between his Silencer and his sanctuary and recruit new members. They could have spared themselves a whole lot of trouble if they had just set up a special safe location for the Silencer to meet regularly with the Speaker. Then that whole dead drop switch could have been prevented.

I'm just being picky though. I enjoyed the Db questline. I would just have preferred it to be handled a bit more like the thieves' guild. Lex was built up as a genuine threat and annoyance to the guild, and the PC had to deal with him several times before getting rid of him. Phillida was completely irrelevant until the mission to kill him. I would have liked him to have more presence in the questline, have him be a proper nemesis to the DB.

I remembered wrong, then, it's been too long since I last played the Db-questline... Anyway, he's still pretty busy, but with only one Silencer it would have been a lot more convenient to set up a meeting place.

Oh well, bad planning ruins even the best of them.

We don't know what jobs the other Cheydinhal Sanctuary personnel are getting, just that they never seem to be out doing them when you visit. So nothing to compare with.

The way into the prison only became available as a way back in when the Emperor's Blade guard unlocked it, and left it that way because the route was compromised, and no longer useful. That's why nobody used it in the 300 years before. The Blades may have had guards on it earlier, as well.

Phillida hadn't retired before. The other assassins tried to do it while he was on duty in IC, which would have made it harder. He'd only have been unarmored when he was in barracks and well-guarded.

Motierre could have been anyone's job, but as said before, it was a test.

The dead drops are a problem, but the main point was to make the communication untraceable. I doubt that Lachance placed the originals himself, so only an intermediary could be caught doing so, and he'd be killed before he could lead the authorities back to LL. Since the same place isn't used again, intercepting one only reveals the next, and if it's known to be intercepted, that doesn't happen. The DB does have its spies, or they wouldn't know if the contract conditions are being met properly, so I'd assume the drops are watched by those spies. Note that once the third one is switched, the locations are all the choice of an insane Matthieu Bellamont, who probably had the spy job for that one he switched, and so didn't report himself.

With regards to Phillida, they did give you an arrow crafted to kill him specifically,
I always thought the surviving members of the black hand were laughably pathetic, dying so easily with such rubbish weapons.
Perhaps the night mother is helping the PC throughout the questline, since she knew what was going on and wanted it to happen.

Good points all around. I'm mostly annoyed with the forced cluelessness of the PC during the dead drop switch. The rest is just nitpicking.

I didn't really mind the DB questline much. That one part, where you're in the Anvil lighthouse's basemant, and you read the book... The rhymes kinda freaked me out :blink: .

The way I thought of it with the Motierre quest is that Vicente didn't want to give it to anyone else because he trusted you to get the contract done better. After all, you DID rise in the ranks probably in the span of 12 hours .