Does this thread belong here?, pieces of quest Options

[ghastley]

Most of the threads in this forum are naturally about "my character's adventures in a TES world", and the rest are meta-threads about writing them.

I'm coming from a completely different direction, or maybe not. I'm trying to create quest mods for Oblivion with a whole lot of NPC's who have linked stories, and I need all the help I can get with those. It's not entirely a different problem from writing the support cast in a regular FF, but it does leave out the central character, who will be the player, and I don't want to write that one.

I like to build a character in Oblivion and play it for a while before making an NPC from it, as this helps to give me some idea of how a pure mage thinks, or an archer, or an axe-wielding Orc, and I can make the NPC more credible that way. I'm currently playing a stereotypical big dumb blonde Nord called Hidy Heidi, who aspires to joining the Imperial Mountain Riders and patrolling the Jerrals on a white bear. I started her off trying to use poisoned daggers and stealth, but found that it's not too viable at low levels, because the damage she could inflict was never enough for a one-hit kill, and using a dagger put her too close for comfort in the remainder of the encounter. So she switched to a Claymore to better use her Blade skill, although she still tries a sneak attack with a dagger first, some of the time. She'd probably use the Claymore if she got a bear to ride, so maybe it's for the best.

This experience now has to be distilled down to some dialog for the NPC in-game, and that of her colleagues, and that's the sort of thing I'd want to post here for criticism and advice. And the content of books, notes, journal entries for the quests. Many of you have experience of rewriting bits of lore for your narratives, or fitting a new piece into the incomplete jigsaw puzzle Betheda provided, so I know it will help me if it works.

Heidi is intended to become part of this mod, of which only the first two quests have been released as a beta. I have another dozen or so in development, including an arc of quests that happen after the player is both CoC and Madgod, based on the idea of Dagon taking revenge on the player by opening gates in his/her new realm.