I'm thinking about starting a quest-mod for Morrowind, taking place after the main quest and Tribunal, but I can't remember some things from the end of those questlines (and I didn't find anything in the Imperial Library).


Vivec says the Temple will try to patch up it's relations with the Dissident Priests (DP from here on), but I suppose it's safe to assume that people will not just turn around in a second and say "Oh, my... I guess you were right and we were wrong. The Temple svcks", but rather still persecute the DP for a while, though more secretly? After all, most of the followers of the Temple must still be in denial, and even more people would not know a thing of what has happened? All those hundreds (or is it thousands?) of years of worshipping the Tribunal must have left a huge trace in society and customs. I suppose the temple would try to keep up its appearances for as long as possible? It is, after all, quite a mighty institution with roots deeper than who-knows-what.

I haven't even started the mod yet, so be blunt, please I don't want to start anything that "doesn't compute."

That sounds like a great idea! And I think you're right, people's attitudes aren't going to change so suddenly. I think only the Temple and its supporters (House Redoran, for instance) actually are upset by and angry at Dissident Priests. I can't imagine the Telvanni, who don't really care much for the Temple to begin with, are overly concerned about the religious squabble between the Tribunal and the nay-sayers. Hlaalu... maybe thy go with whatever way the wind is blowing, politics-wise.

An idea for your mod might involve releasing the prisoners in Lie Rock and beginning to shut down that facility, issuing formal pardons. Perhaps the Ordinator faction will be split among those who will follow Vivec's new orders, and those fanatics who are dead-set against anyone besmirching the sanctity of the Tribunal (such as by implicating they are false gods). Some 'rogue' Ordinators may continue persecuting accused heretics and dissidents, even ones that have been given the formal pardons and a-okay from Vivec.

The Ordinators and Buoyant Armigers might be on even shakier ground than this. The lore forum once speculated that the Ordinators were Almalexia's troops, keeping Vivec under surveillance (practically house-arrest) for her, while the Buoyant Armigers had always been Vivec's group. With Vivec gone, possibly to Aetherius as mentioned in "The Trial of Vivec", the Armigers will probably be floundering too. Though the Oblivion Crisis and the Red Year would have decimated both factions even more.

Thanks for the answers

I don't want to start another thread, so I'll just use this one.
The basic premise of the mod, as it stands now, is that a new religion/philosophy is beginning to emerge, which goes against the Temple's beliefs. I've written a short text that details the fundamental aspects of this belief, but as it is closely related to CHIM, I figured I'd best be asking how correct it seems to be before making anything out of it
Keep in mind that, as all lore written by a character in the game, the author doesn't know everything. He doesn't know what CHIM is, but he is getting on to something. (I made this all up by myself, but there might be lore that says all this already? Don't know.)

i'm pretty sure that the buoyant armigers will follow vivec's lead in pardoning, and perhaps coming to terms a lot faster than the rest of the temple. the ordinators, especially the ministry of truth, will likely be defiant. afterall, the grand inquisitor felt he didn't have to answer to the patriarch of the temple in morrowind. i wouldn't be surprised if the ordinators still suppressed the DP. while no longer persecuting them, they still intimidate and limit their influence. wouldn't surprise me one bit if they felt they didn't answer to vivec.

as for the rest of the temple, most likely the older members and ranks will have a harder time accepting the change, while the younger members will adapt easier.

as for emerging religions, those will still get persecuted, if not only because the ordinators want to vent their frustration with vivec's pardon. the ordinators still hunt witches and daedra worshippers, and other heretics. the DP are still temple members and follow temple princples, they just object mainly to the ordinator practices.

Is the mod Before or after the events of Tribunal? because if it is after, the soldiers of House Indoril (Ordinators) would bow to Vehk as well.

After, as I said.

EDIT: I changed the excerpt I posted earlier a bit, might clear things up slightly.

Highly doubt it. They're indoctrinated to Almalexia. Likely they'll just do their own thing, imo.

Don't be so hasty. The only Ordinators who absolutely answer to Almalexia and only Almalexia are Her Hands and to a lesser degree the High Ordinators. They answer to Fedris Hler and Gavas Drin, who in turn answer to Almalexia. I think the Ordinators of Vivec City, while Indoril loyalists and loyal to Almalexia, officially answer to the Temple Archcanon Tholer Saryoni and to Lord Vivec, since they guard his city and all.

Some of them may undermine his and the Archcanon's authority and conspire behind their back but I doubt any of them would have been so bold as to refuse a direct order from Vivec. He'd have reduced them to a pile of ashes and picked his teeth with their bones.

However, with the collapse of the Temple, death of the Tribunal and later the Red Year, I'm not sure if there would be any Ordinators left at all, and the ones that remain are probably more loyal to the ideals of ALMSIVI or to the Good Daedra than any specific person. If any Ordinators remain at all they're probably currently committed to defending the Dunmer people from persecution and from natural predators in the wastes of Solsthiem.

Exactly. I imagine their numbers were decimated by the Oblivion Crisis and then the Red Year. By the time of "The Infernal City" around 4E40, there are probably a relative handful of grizzled veterans wandering around, maybe similar to ronin (masterless samurai). That's just my guess, though.

House Indoril is a very minor house by the time of Oblivion, since two tribunes are dead and the third is either dead or...in hell. Telvanni is said to have "picked the carcass of indoril" and so i'd imagine many tevanni moving from port telvannis to mainland Morrowind, not a wise choice considering that the Red Year was coming up...

To clarify you, Telvanni did hold land in the mainland, towards the west and I think a bunch of northwest territory. What we saw was only the Vvardenfel branch in MW.

I meant 'heartland' or 'central.' South of Red Mountain in anycase.

the temple archcanon and patriarch didn't have authority over the ordinators. that was clear as part of the quests in morrowind. the player had to do a quest to help saryoni have influence over the ordinators. the ordinators more or less made it clear they were seperate from the temple.

and i highly doubt vivec would interfere if the ordinators went against his will. vivec no longer cares really, he knows his time is coming to an end. otherwise, vivec would've dealt with the dissident priests himself, no?

the ordinators, the ones that didn't commit suicide, would still hunt heretics and daedra worshippers after the fall of the tribunal. their house was picked apart by the telvanni, and the hlaalu/dren alliance. perhaps the rest went to house redoran, which are closer in spirit to house indoril, and became commanders.

Vehk's time is not coming to an end. He is not quite mortal and not quite god. He is lord of the middle sky.

but, didn't vivec even admit this to the nerevarine, that his time is near?

however, pertaining to this topic, the temple most likely will persecute any new religions. the dissident priests have have been pardoned, but i doubt this would extend to any other groups, or to existing dissident priests continuing new heretical preachings.

Sort of broadly--

One of the most common ways, throughout history, for religions to deal with heretics who turned out to be fundamentally correct, or to at least have enough broad support to appear to be such, has been to revise their own doctrines to include the formerly heretical viewpoints, and to essentially put a "That's what we meant all along" spin on it all.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the councils at which such issues of doctrine are often revised and settled are called, among other things, "synods."

Yups = my vote

We only saw Mounhold/Almalexia outside of Vvar and Almalexia was there so we have may have a hint how things were elsewhere re Ordinators. We do know they had a strong presence at GhostGate as well as Vivec city, but they recruited and trained somewhere. Given they were in 3 locations, one of which was not directly linked to a Tribunal member there may have been other locations on the far more heavily populated mainland. Remember that a lot of dunmer left Vvardenfell because of Dagoth Ur and Vvardenfell was not a heavily populated area in the first place.

As for the Dissident Priests - they had a hidden stronhold protected by Azura. The trial would not change that.

It is reaasonable to assume that they were accepted back into the fold and that their doubts about Vivec played a part in things

Do you seriously believe him? He's mephala's son-daughter, what do you expect, man. LIES LIES LIES.

lol - some folks even deny that Vivec could possibly lie at all. The reasoning given is that if it is Lore it must be true in the absence of anything else. It does not seem to occur that Vivec's words could truly be a lie

To expand a bit and drag my own input a bit back toward M'Aiq's OP-- I don't believe that the Temple hierarchy (unless they're self-destructively short-sighted, which I guess is a possibility) would continue to persecute the DP, just because that's a losing tack. The DP were right, essentially, and there's really no way to avoid that fact. So, as I said earlier, I think the best approach (and the approach that a skilled and self-interested temple hierarchy would, or at least should, take) would be to incorporate some of the DP views, most notably the ones that can't be dealt with any other way (such as the diminishment of the Tribunal's powers, the connection between those powers and the Heart, the validity of the Nerevarine prophecies and thus the unacceptability of the suppression of the Nerevarine Cult...) They certainly wouldn't want to advertise that-- there's nothing to be gained from actually coming out and saying, "We were wrong and they were right." So the better approach would be to quietly incorporate the things that the DP were right about into mainstream Temple doctrine, spin it all in such a way that it still fits with existing Temple doctrine (or at least as much of it as can be salvaged) and just go on as before, counting on the average person's unfamiliarity with and lack of interest in all of the fine details to allow one to get away with it. Give it a few years, and that new, revised doctrine will be the official dogma, and nobody other than a few scholars that the common people ignore anyway will even note that there's been any sort of change.

As for the Ordinators, if it was me, the first thing I'd try to do is to find someone to replace Berel Sala-- someone who has or can easily gain the respect of the Ordinators, but whose first loyalty is to the Temple-- then give Sala the boot. Probably have him quietly killed, then put out the story that he's retired to a life of silent contemplation of the wonder and mysteries of the Temple. Barring that (and this might be the better approach anyway-- I haven't fully considered it yet) the thing to do would be to place all remaining blame, if necessary, for the suppression of the DP and the NC on Sala and the Ordinators and cast them as the new enemy of the Temple.

Yeah.... actually, depending on how one spins the changes to doctrine necessitated by the fulfillment of the Nerevarine Prophecies and the disempowerment/destruction of at least the mundane aspects of the Tribunal gods (and that's an important aspect of it), it could well be very advantageous to portray it as a part of a power-grab by Sala and the (undoubtedly unpopular) Ordinators, justly countered by the glorious Temple....

.....have to think on this some more now.....

Ah... but does he, technically, lie?

That, to me, is the most fascinating part of The Trial-- Vivec basically says that he tells the truth when he claims that he didn't kill Nerevar, because he didn't-- Vehk the mortal did.

Arguably insane, but not technically a lie.....

I think it's quite safe to assume that when Vivec tells the Nerevarine that his time is drawing to a close, he's telling the truth, but, as with the Trial, only the very specific truth, and only so far as it goes. All he'd really have to be saying is that the time of that particular facet/manifestation/aspect of Vehk/Vivec is coming to an end-- not that each and every possible one is.

... or something like that.....

There again would you want to fight the Ordinators if you were a weakened Temple? Because that is what it would come down to. For that to work you would have to rope in another force to take their place - and Helseth aint the power-sharing type ...



Well I think you have answered that opening question of yours (emboldened) by the end of your post here = a lie by any other name. He is using part of the truth to mislead in the full knowledge that it will do so = another sort of lie. Call it prevarification or whatever. What it is really about is the intent to mislead. Well think of that as lying.

True enough, but a weakened Temple would seek ways to replenish its power, and rallying the people against an already unpopular foe is one relatively dependable way of doing that. True, it can backfire. For instance, if one fails to make sufficient headway against the "enemy," then the people begin to see it as an unwarranted sacrifice, or if the "enemy" begins to gain some popular support (which was one of the problems with the Temple's earlier moves against the DP and the NC, which could well make them hesitant to simply set up and pursue another "enemy"), then the people begin to see it as unjust, and one ends up in an even worse position than one started in. But when it works, it works wonderfully-- the people rally to the cause, good triumphs over evil and all live happily ever after. For a few years at least.....

I'm not saying it would necessarily work-- merely that I think it's a tactic that the Temple would consider, and potentially follow.


Well.... yes and no, but probably mostly yes. But then.....

I was fascinated by the (now closed before I could get in on it) thread about Vivec's potential "insanity." I think there's a lot there, and I'll just sort of hit the high points as they come to me, and maybe make some sort of sense of it later.

In the first place, I just don't think that we can apply our notions of truth, intentionality, causality, reality-- any of that-- to a god. Regardless of the details, it seems obvious that his perception of those things differs markedly from ours. As M'Aiq pointed out, his actions and statements could well be entirely explicable and straightforward from his own viewpoint, and merely inexplicable and devious from ours. As a matter of fact, it seems that they are such to him, in any event, though whether that's because of some true insanity (that is-- his misperception of his own reality), an appearance of insanity (that is-- our misperception of his reality) or simple duplicity on his part is not particularly clear, and, I would hazard, cannot be made clear. We have nothing to really measure it by-- we can't access his reality and compare his purported perception of it with the reality itself, so we can't know if his reports of his reality truly do differ from the reality itself, much less, if they do, whether that's through deliberate misrepresentation or inadvertent misperception.

Now-- it can certainly be said that he... let's say he plays his cards close to his chest. He certainly seems to have more of an understanding of what he's doing and why than he chooses to share. I'm not even convinced though that that implies duplicity as we'd think of it. Though it's not (so far as I know) part of the ES lore, I'm reminded of the notion (best expressed by Douglas Adams) that the universe is purposely inexplicable-- that if anyone were to come to possess a complete understanding of the workings of the universe, that universe (or potentially simply their place in it-- the Dwemer?) would cease to exist. Maybe, from his viewpoint, he's protecting the universe by withholding a broader understanding of it, and of his role in it, from mere mortals.

Okay-- that last is pretty much pure supposition, but I at least can't discount it as a possibility. In any event, to go back and I guess wrap up, I think it's a mistake to try to apply our perception of reality to a god.

That said though, he was and is clearly presented as a character of superficially dubious trustworthiness, and it's only really the source of it and the potential significance of it that's at question. I'm not content with the simple notion that he lies not because I don't believe he does, but simply because we can't know that that which we see as untruth is such from his own inaccessible viewpoint.

And I think that about empties my brain on the subject, for the moment.....

It could be also that we're reading too much into it. I wouldn't be surprised if Vivec doesn't lie when it comes down to really important matters.

This is one interpretation of "Morrowind" and its aftermath: Vivec knew the day would come when the true Nerevarine would show up and clean house. He tests the player character and ultimately helps him, even though Vivec knows what the results will be. Vivec already knows that the Tribunal's day is drawing to a close. After the deaths of Almalexia and Sotha Sil, Vivec moves on to Aetherius (if you take "The Trial of Vivec" seriously, which I'm willing to do because of the devs and devoted fans who wrote it). The Nerevarine, a puppet whose strings are cut at last, leaves for Akavir out of curiousity. All has unfolded as it was destined to do.