This "Landfall" is mentioned in the Loveletter and apparently drives people under ground and is some sort of apocalypse. Really, the whole Loveletter confuses me. If anyone could give a somewhat boiled down description of what it means, I'd be grateful. I understand it talks about Landfall and how to avoid it, but I don't understand the rest, or even how we are to avoid Landfall.

People stop loving vivec-- Giant turd falls on Vvardenfell-- ENORMOUS explosion--- nearly everyone dies.

I think its where someone does the Lorkhan dance backwards too close to a Tower, and the planet falls up and bumps into the sky. People move underground because they can hollow out decent headroom there.

Nicely put, Wierd.

Synopsis:

According to the http://www.imperial-library.info/mwbooks/lessons.shtml#33, "Lie Rock" was one of Vivec's monstrous children from his coupling with Molag Bal. It was born from his "Second Aperture" (*cough*), and hid in the heavens, believing itself to be "born of golden wisdom and powers that should have forever been unalike," meaning that it was spawned in the moment that Vivec achieved CHIM. When Vivec sent Nerevar to find it, it hurled itself at Vivec City, and Vivec froze it in space above the High Fane. It is now the Ministry of Truth.


Lie Rock's impetus was frozen with it - when the magick that holds it in place disappears, it will collide with Vivec with the full force of a Deep Impact asteroid. This is why the central message of the Loveletter is to "know love to avoid the Landfall".

I'm guessing in the end they don't end up avoiding the Landfall?

The jury's still out, unless we learn more in the next Elder Scrolls game. I'm betting the Landfall is as unavoidable as the Oblivion Crisis was, but maybe not.

I was thinking along the lines of the time paradox this letter causes.

Time on Nirn is linear, which (kinda) means that even if the people of "now" knows what will happen to the people of "then", they cannot change it, because it has allready happened.

That's what I was thinking, so what was the purpose of the letter if the future cannot be changed?

Oh, I misunderstood your post then.

Well, it could be to warn the people, so they can hollow out the earth in time and live there. I have not read the letter throughoutly, and I do not remember if it was said that they created the "caves" after the Fall.
But that would be an easy explanation, so it's probably wrong.

It refers to the time when Bethesda will drop its Elder Scrolls series to instead adopt a franchise about people living in vaults after an apocalypse... There'd be "Fall" in the title, but I think that land is out, though.

Of course, from Vivec's temporal point of view, that is, from the outside, Lie Rock has probably crashed into Vvardenfell infinitely many times and is in fact probably doing so at every given moment. Which can make one question with what precognition he put it there in the first place.

If it were impossible to change the future, the Loveletter would be rather pointless. Its tagline was "know love to avoid the Landfall", not to forestall it.

Nirn is the Consequence of Variable Fate, after all.

So, is it Vivec's way of telling his people that to stop loving him would result in their death? Or is it more complicated than that?

I still wonder whether this was meant as "prevent the Landfall" or, alternatively, "survive the predestined Landfall". I don't think Vivec is petty enough to be saying "Love me or perish", more likely he's either warning the Dunmer how to prevent the Landfall (or warning them how to survive it, if it's inevitable).

I get the impression that miners were among the few survivors of Vvardenfell, and then enlarged the network of tunnels over the succeeding generations.

OMG

That could be the funniest thing I've read on here!!!!!!!!


sigged BTW

All signs point to inevitability. As MK has stated when the question of landfall comes up, "None shall survive". But it's not a life and death kind of survive, it's a changed or unchanged kind of survive. So technically even if you reach the final subgradient and avoid landfall you will still change yourself in the process, and that is the only way to avoid it.

Well actually time doesn't run as blandly as that in the TES world; the fabric of Time and Space may be bent and broken at any moment, such as with Time Travel (example; Pelinal['s armour]), and Dragon Breaks (example; The Warp in the West), though these require certain metaphysical changes to occur in Mundus (e.g. the addition of a Tower, the Removal of a Tower, etc).

Shouldn't' you be arguing that time is something that can be controlled? That's the whole point of a Dragon Broke, several gods come about and they control time differently resulting in multiple possibly contradicting timelines.

None of these Dragon Brokes changed the past though (or we wouldn't know they had taken place) so they're not good examples to show that the past can be changed.

Well, a Dragon Break could be created at the time/just before Landfall (based on someone reading the letter then going about creating a DB), then when Landfall occurs inside of the Dragon Break only one timeline is affected (the god who emerges stops the colision in atleast one timeline). Though, I wouldn't be so sure on how the timelines would merge together after the DB, one where Nirn is destroyed, and another where it isn't.

Oh, and also before I forget, in Oblivion there is an event where the past changes by using an Elderscroll (theives guild questline).

You don't change the past. The curse just prevented you and everybody from realizing who the person you were looking at was.

Except no, because you're forgetting about the Dareloth-Theives Guild Hall that appears.

It didn't appear. The house was there all the time and it's boarded up from the other side. When the back door appears, it doesn't really appear but you are able to notice it. People still remember it's Dareloths Garden though.

I still can't get over how a rock of that size would cause a cataclysm. To affect Earth significantly, a rock has to be much bigger. And since it supposedly orbited Nirn, it can't have been going at an insane speed.

Well, it was a child of Vivec, wasn't it? It seems to have a will of it own, though that might be myth-lies. Also: He [Lie Rock] was hastened by all three of the black guardians, who wanted him swiftly gone, though they meant no hostility to the lord of the middle air (http://www.imperial-library.info/mwbooks/lessons.shtml#33)
Whatever that means.