Hi I'm new here. so the Lilmothiit's fate is unknown so maybe the next elder scrolls game should cover this. yes i know there is a mod for them in skyrim but it still puzzles me. Let me know if you would like this to happen.

-DFox

What we know of the Lilmothiit indicates they suffered the same fate as the Kothringi and were wiped out by the Knahaten Flu. 'Extinct' isn't necessarily grounds for never seeing them, but it's unlikely we will ever see many of them...

A game set in Blackmarsh would almost definitely contain some kind of references to them, however. They were apparently nomadic, though, so i doubt they will have as significant a presence as, say, the Dwemer or the Ayleids, as they wouldn't be prone to large, permanent structures.

The Lilmothiit are rather enigmatic to me. They were mentioned in the PGE3 and said to have been taken out by the Knahatan Flu, and also that they were nomadic and left little to no trace of their existence. So they were brought up to say they're gone and there's little to see of them. That just strikes me as an odd thing to do from a story/lore perspective.

They could be in a secret city underneath Argonia. Nobody (in Argonia) knows about it, until the player character opens a passage in an ancient tunnel. Then all hell breaks loose and the player can choose to help diplomacy between the two worlds or open war.

Is there a reliable website that talks about this? I have never heard of this part of the lore and would love to learn more. I know I could Google it but you guys are really knowledgeable on where to go, and i trust you more than my searching skills.

http://en.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Lilmothiit. Never use the TES Wiki since it's stuffed with erroneous information. UESP takes all info from in-game books, developer interviews, and raw CS/CK/whatever data and is very good about using citations. The vast majority of info on the Lilmothiit just comes from PGE3, so the article is pretty short.

I think a sparing use of this sort of worldbuilding is good. It adds to the relatability of a world, by enhancing it's mystery and a sense of history. What happened to these people?

That's kinda what I mean though. The PGE says what happened, they were wiped out by the Knahatan Flu. It also says they left no trace of a civilization since they were highly nomadic. The "mystery" is "there were fox-people, they all died over a thousand years ago, and there's nothing left of them". They pretty much set themselves up to have to retcon something if they're going to expand on them, but if they don't, it seems like such a useless thing to bring up. Not that I don't want to learn more about them -- I'm personally curious why their name sounds distinctly Khajiiti even though they're from Black Marsh -- but I don't see a realistic way to do it in-universe without a serious hat-pull.

http://en.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Wet_Wilds_of_Black_Marsh. There's also a theory that Azura created the Khajiit from Bosmer. If that's true, perhaps the Lilmothiit were an earlier attempt?

Its also possible that it's just a shared language, and they spoke Ta'arga, rather than being related. iit just means 'One from' or 'One who does'. Lilmothiit literally just means they lived around Lilmoth.

Think of how much of West Africa was once called "White Man's Graveyard". Black Marsh is almost everyone's graveyard. The Lilmothit are a throw away race, but I think that's a way enriching Black Marsh's history to small extent whilst making the point that very little beyond the Hist and their memories last there*. I think of the place being full of lost civilisations that don't feature in history at all. I'd say that finity for lack of better word is a recurring theme of Black Marsh. Going by the opinion of the writer of Varieties of the Faith, they're the one major Tamrielic race that doesn't traditionally acknowledge Akatosh or an anologue in any way. Rather, they have Sithis. And in Infernal City, The city of Lilmoth itself is very much in decay, but Mere-Glim gets a vision of its past grandeur going before the Imperial colonisation as I recall. Speaking of which, the most recent colonisation of Black Marsh is implied to have been a failure in a few sources.

*The xanmeers are a good effort in permanence though.

Except the lack of anything remaining of their civilization is credited to them being highly nomadic, rather than Black Marsh aggressively wiping it away (not that the place is that kind to it, but their nomadic lifestyle was made an explicit point for why there's few traces of them left).

Hey, thanks for doing this. Much appreciated!

I don't expect them to appear in any capacity. Hell, I'd be surprised if they were even mentioned in a game set in Argonia.

A new Aldmeri race is more likely, and I figure that's not going to happen in all likelihood either.

MK said the beast races are just filler material for the men vs mer. Unless they fire MK and his ideas there will be no in game development for the beast races besides comic relief.

MK doesn't work there full time anymore and hasn't since Morrowind.

Even then, that's only in the context of the greater plot arc, which hasn't been directly touched upon in any of the games. And only applies to the Argonians (And the Dunmer, in a sense), and whether or not they have anything to do with the meta of humans and elves pummeling each other into the ground is irrelevant. If the next game hits in Argonia, we're not likely going to touch on that plot thread at all.

The Khajiit meanwhile...well, they are Aldmeri, after all, and its hard to imagine a game at this point not to deal with elements like the Thalmor, or the tensions between the Dominion and the presumptive existence of the Empire.

Depends on the interpreter. There seems to be a growing body of thought that the genesis of the Bosmer and Khajiit happened before the Aldmer distinction arose, and aren`t actually Elven... Personally, i think it`s poppycock, but whatever...

It's a combination of the two, and probably more. The flu wouldn't eradicate monuments or dwellings.

It's also not necessarily MK's idea that the beast races are just kind of there in the background. Bethesda Softworks (as the predecessor of Bethesda Game Studios) and Bethesda Game Studios has been downplaying the role of the beast races in the games starting with Daggerfall where there are no beast race NPCs anywhere in the game. Then in Battlespire, there are no Argonians or Khajiit in that game at all, not as NPCs, playable races, and for that matter I don't think they are even mentioned at all in that game either. Then with Morrowind, originally Imperials and Orcs outright replaced the Argonians and Khajiit as playable races instead of being added in next to them.

My guess is that long before Bethesda had any idea that the beast races actually have any popularity at all, the developers decided that Argonians and Khajiit do not fit the more serious tones of the stories and settings they wanted to tell, and therefore they have been keeping their presence at a minimum (and sometimes not bothering to have them in at all) and relegating them to minor roles, background characters, throwaway characters (especially in Dark Brotherhood questlines) and comic relief.

MK has not completely ruled out the possibility of an RPG set in Elsweyr or Black Marsh, but he seems to think that BGS has very little interest in those settings and that maybe the main story they are doing must conclude first ("The Story of the Fall of Man to Mer"). Mostly it seems that MK thinks that if any game is set in a beast race land, it's not going to be a BGS-developed game and therefore is not likely to be an RPG like Skyrim or Morrowind. He just didn't say that with that level of specificity (mostly it was implied that he thinks only non-RPG spin off titles may potentially be set in Elsweyr).

Granted, history of BGS relegating the beast races to the background doesn't necessarily mean that BGS intends to keep them almost strictly in the background, though. Hammerfell does offer opportunities for having more Khajiit characters than in Skyrim, especially in port towns and cities like Abah's Landing, Sentinel and Stros M'kai, for instance, whereas Skyrim is quite far and away from Elsweyr (plus I think they restricted themselves as to where you encounter Khajiit on purpose because of the Civil War theme as they wanted to make sure each and every settlement was predominantly Nord).

Anyway, back on topic, Blackrose is built on the ruins of a Lilmothiit settlement, so if Blackrose is featured in a game set in Black Marsh (or even in an ESO expansion), we probably would see stuff relating to the Lilmothiit. Lilmoth is also implied to have been a Lilmothiit settlement at one time as well, although it's unclear as to whether Lilmoth is an Argonian city that was conquered by the Lilmothiit or if it is an Argonian city built on top of a Lilmothiit settlement. That's another instance where they will have to flesh out the Lilmothiit in order to build the lore for that city.

Bethesda isn't a single entity with an idea. It's comprised of individual people who are all sharing ideas, and of those people, there's a constant flow of people coming and going. The people at Bethesda now aren't the same as they were during Daggerfall, or even Morrowind. Some select few people may remain, but not necessarily in the same capacity, and new people will have joined in while others have left.

The lack of beast race NPCs in Daggerfall was purely a technical one. As it is, the humanoid NPCs can barely be told apart by race, there's only a small handful of elvish NPCs, and the enemy NPCs have no differentiation between races. It'd have required making a whole slew of new sprites for them, for a game that was already stretched way too thin when it came to features. But the game data does have texts for beast race NPCs, including name fragments (which would pieced together procedurally to generate full names), and various exclamations, so it was at least planned to have them as NPCs.

Battlespire took out a lot of what made TES, so the lack of beast races was par for the course. That game felt like Julian taking the feedback of 'too many half-assed, broken, and incomplete features' to heart and cutting out everything that wasn't essential to what he wanted to make. Morrowind was heavily strapped for time, needing a number of time and budget extensions along with scaling back features. But the fan response to no playable beast races got them to change that particular decision even though they couldn't put in too much work to integrate them in "properly" as a playable race. Since then, there hasn't been any visible effort to remove or downplay them in the lore or the games. If anything, they've been given more consideration than previously and are given the same treatment the other races are. In Morrowind, their presence as a playable race makes them feel a bit out of place as you have the Dunmer talking about them as if they're only tolerated and used as slaves, while you can find "random" beast race NPCs roaming freely and with little suspicion. And of course the armor situation where they're left to languish without boots or helms regardless of what it would do to difficulty or balance. But with Oblivion, the beast races were given equal consideration and fit in just as well as any other race, and play just as well too. Oblivion even added a new system of deforming headgear so they could fit the beast races.

I still don't even know what "the fall of man to mer" is supposed to mean. Not all mannish races work together, and neither do the elvish races. You have the Dunmer and Orcs who will happily fight against the Altmer, with humans if needs be, and the Bosmer who aren't too happy with them either (sentiments I'm sure the Altmer share back), while the Bretons and Redguards don't exactly get along with the Nords all that well either. So what is "the fall of man to mer" supposed to mean, "the fall of Imperials/Nords to Altmer"? And if so how exactly does Morrowind play into that story? Because I gotta say, the Dunmer feel just as important in that regard as the Argonians and Khajiit do.

Well, Lachdonin is right in that "Lilmothiit" basically means ""one from Lilmoth" in Ta'agra. So the place must of have existed with that name when the Lilmothiit were given their name, and with them having some intrinsic connection to it. How they had such a connection to a place in Black Marsh while sharing a language with the Khajiit of Elsweyr, I have no clue. The Bosmer don't even share their language, despite having clearer ties to them. The novels visit Lilmoth with it under the control of the An-Xileel, but AFAIK there's no mention of anything relating to the Lilmothiit.

There's also the possibility that the name comes entirely from the Khajiit, who were the first to encounter and categorize them, and does not represent a shared language. Similar to how the Dwemer are known as Dwarves because that's how the Giants introduced them, but the name it's self has no actual bearing on their internal culture or identity.


This would present something of an issue, and an opportunitty, should the race be fleshed out in any way in a Blackmarsh game.

I just take that as developer weaseling. Standard dwarves were planned for TES, and were mentioned in Daggerfall (which had Dwarven weapon and armor types, maybe some obscure mentions in some books too I don't know). However, during the development of Redguard and Morrowind, they decided to make them another type of elf instead of their own race, and were given the name Dwemer along with the other elves getting the -mer names. The previously used "Dwarf" name was hand-waved with the "because giants" excuse.

If they have to do something similar to explain the Lilmothiit name, saying that its meaning is unrelated to their real identity and it was just the Khajiit that came up with the superficial-and-not-really-correct name that everybody uses, that just kinda proves my point that Bethesda set themselves up to have to retcon something to work with them as a concept.

ARGONIAN MASTER RACE!

Well said.

I assumed that the lack of racial diversity in Daggerfall was for technical reasons, but I did not know there was game data to suggest that they would be game NPCs. TIL.

I get why people say TES is the story of the fall of men to mer, but I personally don't like it being the singular focus. As one overarching plot-line it is okay I guess, but I am not keen on relegating Khajiit and Argonians to the backburner. Not just because I always play Argonians foremost, but because it just feels sort of (for lack of better terms) lazy and uninteresting. IMO, it detracts from TES to say that Argonians and Khajiit don't matter in the long run (especially based on what one person said at whatever point in time), are "filler material," or to lob humans and mer into their two respective groups when there is a great deal of dissension between the human races and the elven races (e.g. Redguards vs. Imperials, Altmer vs. Dunmer).

I'd like to see them but it's a question if they can find a good lore-based reason to include them. Although AFAIK Imperials and Orcs used to not be playable so, it's not like TES never adds new playable races.

I think a cool way of handling a Lilmothiit being playable, would be to make every other race start out mostly the same, but the Lilmothiit has a different entry to the starting quest. IE you start out in some hidden place with other Lilmothiit, and you are told the future of your starting village relies upon you leaving your hidden village and interacting with the rest of the world- then at some point you get captured, and then start out in the same prison everyone else does. The reason for them starting out different being, in this case the Lilmothiit just barely recovered from nearly going extinct- perhaps after the events of TES 6, the Lilmothiit are no longer near extinct so they don't have a special beginning in TES 7 but in TES 6 they would.

I like the idea in general, I just hope it'd be done well.

Is that true? I do know he apparently didn't want beast races to be playable from what I remember in Morrowind... I like about close to 99% of all of MKs work and story telling, I think I agree with him on pretty much virtually everything... Except for beast races, though when it comes to beast races I suppose I actually disagree with MK strongly.