I dont know if this is doable or even a good idea for a start, but heres the general idea that poped in my head while reading the last 2 pages.

The idea is that you start off in a bar or if theres a gambleing type place, you would start there. You lost all your all your property/items in life gambling and
while doing that, you racked up a huge dept. So your start off rather empty of stuff. Now when your out in the wilderness (or if i can be done in town without
guard trouble) a "collector" comes to get the money you owe from gambling. Of course the debt is more then you will have on you. The npc takes all your coins
and leaves, saying he will be back to collect the rest of it later (which of course the debt gets bigger for "interest".) The collect is always a bit higher level then the
player, and you will always owe him money, unless he dies by your hand. On his corpse would have a note or a map to the location of your belongings you
originaly lost gambling.


Even if this idea svcks, maybe it will spark other idea's.

Another one could be a Invester. Where you own stock or whatever it is, in a few buisnesses. I seem to recall being able to invest in merchants or something.
Or i could be thinking of a entirely differnt game.

Btw, love the differnt starts in this. I just came back to Oblivion after a 2'ish year break and i saw this posted while i was installing my setup and love it!
Perfect timing

Firstly, I really like this mod - excellent work

I do have a request/suggestion - when you start off owning a player house, it looks like no matter the house (even the IC shack, which I tested) you wear fine clothes, have a reasonable amount of septims and some nice weapons. What would the possibility of different houses having different levels of "prosperity" (ala http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=3973 ). In the IC shack for example you would be poor - little to no money, poor clothes, maybe a rusty dagger, etc?

One other request, I often play a ranger type - woodsman, loner, only travels to the big cities for trade, etc. I'd love to see a start location in your own small wilderness hunter camp (not a bandit camp) Maybe some skins and meats you have collected for sale, ranger/woodsman clothes and weaponry, portable camping gear, etc?

Just suggestions not demands

Keep up the great work :celebration:

A Hunter / Ranger type start would be fairly awesome...

As well, so would be the option to begin as a farmer with your own little homestead and an open field. Of course, this would require an actual homestead... which is a permanent structure which one would then have to hope didn't conflict with the millions of other mods in their game... but eh.

It could be worse. Hell, there's a few places like that which are otherwise entirely unoccupied. One start could just 'commandeer' them for the player.

Sorry about the double-post... but it wouldn't let me open the edit function for some reason. :confused:


Anyhow, I came up with a few more interesting start locales... such as a member of one of the various town guards throughout Cyrodiil. While Kvatch would again be the difficult one to make work, and would likely be an entirely separate 'beginning' from these... it would be rather easy to make the player a member of the guard for any of the other cities without really causing a problem, would it not?

There are a few mods which let you join the Imperial Legion... but an option to begin the game as a Legionnaire would be rather awesome.

If only we could get a mod like "You've Violated the Law!" for Morrowind in Oblivion... then these two options would be even more fun.


Other ideas:

Member of the Elder Council - Begin the game with access to the Imperial Palace, your own chair in the Elder Council Chambers, and the respect of the masses. Or maybe just some fancy clothes and a chip on your shoulder... but hey! (Besides, they took out the only quest which allowed you to become a member anyways. So it doesn't really interfere at all.)

Ancestor Moth Monk - Start out the game blind! Or at least at the Temple of the Ancestor Moths, with a monk's robe and plenty of yarn and cloth.

Black Horse Courier - Start out the game with an inventory full of broadsheets and a pocket full of Septims.

Beggar - Begin your adventure in rags, on the streets, begging for a few coins to feed your (nonexistent) children. From humble origins, indeed!

More Ideas to Come! Stay Tuned!

Or don't... :shrug:

If with this mod active and say you run up to Kvatch without first getting the letter - what happens?

Do you just do the Kvatch siege and then gates start opening?

[edit] my memory is vague but doesn't completing the siege at kvatch also start or include stages of the main quest?

I wasn't sure, but I just checked it through the CS. If you go to Kvatch before taking the letter to Jauffre, you'll participate in breaking the siege, but there will be no mention of Martin or who he is. In order to get that you still need to deliver the amulet. Finding the Heir does not start until you've done so.

Breaking the siege and even liberating the entire castle does nothing with the main quest itself. So in theory that would make a pre-invasion Kvatch feasible since the MQ will not be a factor until you've delivered the amulet. It's still out of scope for what I want this mod to do though, but it would mean that this mod would be compatible with another that ONLY deals with building a pre-invasion city there and doesn't also try to double as an alt-start.

Oh well I was mainly asking just so that if I use this I know where not to go, but that is good info.

Still though I was under the impression that it is the closing of the Kvatch gate that then starts the opening of gates everywhere - is that not the case. Is that instead tied to the main quest?

I believe it is the completion of the Weynon Priory quest which initiates the 'Oblivion Crisis'.

If I am not mistaken, the gates begin to randomly spawn once you have successfully gotten Martin to Cloud Ruler Temple.

Nope. I don't see any indication in the scripts for MS48 or MS49 that update the MQ gate counters or tell the MQ to start spitting out gates.

Gate spawnings are only started once MQ03 is done (Finding the Heir). So if you don't deliver the letter, Kvatch is still destroyed if you approach it, but the gates don't spawn. So it's kind of a schism really. Things shouldn't fall into place that way, but it's possible to cause the same thing with a standard vanilla game if you never go to Weynon Priory after leaving the tutorial dungeon.

Arthmoor, could you also consider doing a simple tutorial for a basic new start in a new land? I would love to make an alternative start in Mesogea but the trouble is, too few people working on it means I have to spread my time across all kinds of things such as models, textures, making the world etc. A simple tutorial would cut straight through the trial and error stuff for me and get me up and running quickly. Is that at all possible later?

I'd need to know what something like that should contain. Since you wouldn't want anything from Oblivion's chargen to remain behind that would remove a lot of the complications that trip these things up normally.

If you want to PM me with details of what you want I'll see what I can do.

Hey, hey-- just loaded up 1.1 for a quick test run and I just love the shipwreck start! The pre-start, while not exactly a pillar of immersion , is attractive (the statues look really nice), neatly laid out, easy to follow and worked perfectly. Then I got to the shipwreck and was just charmed by the start cell, crookedly tilted (sliding around was a blast), with just the kind of semi-useless flotsam you might expect to see bobbing (bobbing! I realy liked that those books and whatnot were bobbing in the water, but still easy to reach) about in the half-flooded cabin.

Now naturally I'm a bit greedy, and had to try to get/find some of the more immediately useful flotsam (if it exists, but I would imagine it does), so I didn't see too much of the ship interior before I drowned (should have tried the other exit, assuming the cabin door would have been the correct thing to do), but it was a lot of fun, despite the fact that it resulted in my near-immediate death. At least I did feel a true sense of urgency at the situation, and it was definitely a more enjoyable experience than I've had from the "get from the starting cell to the 'real world'" sequence in a long time. And of course it does bring a welcome, for me, breath of Morrowind-- with a twist-- back to the proceedings, starting on a boat like that.

Thanks ever so much!

@karithian: Have you read this -> http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/WorldBuilding_101#Part_4:_Are_we_there_yet.3F.21. That's what I use for Balzu. It strips down the chargen quest/script to basics and then you just build your custom start around that. You still have to strip out dialogue, etc., that relates to Tamriel, of course.

No probs, I will do asap.

I remember a few years ago making a test world for Mesogea, then merging in a plugin for a totally new start where a menu would appear without going into the Imperial dungeon. It caused every door in the new world to disappear whether linked by teleport or not. What a weird glitch!

Speaking of weird glitches....

While doing testing for some OBSE stuff that will apply to an Open Cities update down the road, I removed the Outer Districts module from the game. Imagine my surprise when I entered the original worldspace to find all of the non-persistent objects GONE. Imagine my further surprise at figuring out it was caused by not deactivating a patch for Frostcrag that changed the teleport pad destination to the open worldspace. That was all, switched the teleport, and it blanked the entire worldspace. Makes no sense, but deactivating the patch restored everything to normal.

Ok, serious question time.

I've now got 3 different people who are able to load the mod but cannot get the bedroll to operate. Two of whom confirm they've got OBSE 0020b5 installed, one I still need to wait on a reply from.

The two people on Nexus both confirmed that my chargen quest is still running and is at the appropriate stage to use the bedroll, but nothing happens.

At the same time, it works flawlessly for me with 0020b5, and most of the Nexus users are proof it works for other people. Some of whom are using 0019b without a problem.

Frustrating to say the least, but does anyone have any theories on why this would be the case? The only thing I can come up with is that these people THINK they have OBSE installed but actually don't, or they have it installed but something is broken.

You could put in an OBSE installed check... I just finished doing this for Oblivion XP because my previous check wouldn't work if someone was using the Steam version and hadn't enabled the in-game community (so OBSE doesn't actually load). PM me if you want the code.

Gah. How wonderful. Valve must be giddy with laughter over that one. Yet another reason to dislike a service that serves no purpose in a single player game. I'll have to find out of the affected people are using Steam. In the meantime, if you wouldn't mind, please PM me that code. It may come in handy for more than just this mod.

I'm just glad that Valve bothered to implement obse into their version, anyone playing the Direct2Drive version of Oblivion is forced to do without.

This looks like an interesting mod to use if I ever start a new character but I don't think I'll be doing that anytine soon

Artorius.

Just uploaded version 1.1.1 - only addition being the use of an OBSE detection script. I suspect nearly all of the reported anomalies with this mod are due to botched OBSE setups or from people using versions older than what the mod needs to run.

During this testing I was able to certify that it will run without issue on OBSE 0019b, so anyone who was shying away due to needing 0020, don't. It's fine, as others have said.

One of the things i was going to request for future updates is a possible light source. Over by one of the beddings or a torch on the table. Im sure default lighting its fine, but if you use any darker atmosphere / lighting, you cant see where to sleep at. I have had to load a spell and cast heal self over and over untill i could get the sleep icon up.

Ive done a bunch of starts and everything seems to be going pretty good. My first toon when i came back to obliv and used this, i choose house owner in skingard. With
my zillion mods i useally have going, i had weekly taxes on the house and i spent bout 4 months spending every coin i made to pay my 700 gold a week house tax. LOL


I think thats a sign, especially with what time of the year it is

Hint: You can tweak the ini in Enhanced Economy to lower the tax rate!

I just saw that but I notice another thing I think you should know and that's on the description tab on Nexus have you stated that it requires obse0019b while on the OP here have you obse0020 or higher. Just a friendly gesture.

Btw... Thanks for sharing this. :thanks: :celebration:

Opted for the Shipwreck and had Stirk installed - swam there instead of mainland.

Some kind of request though. Since I have RAEVWD installed and the ships folder - what I'm seeing after the ship sinks is the ship still floating out there from both Stirk and the mainland. So it sinks when close then is forever on the horizon after that. Anyway to make a special ship that will not have LOD info to be used by tes4lodgen?

thanks for considering.

@Leonardo2: Always somewhere that gets forgotten - I'll change the OP.

@Psymon: No, but I can disable the ship initially, which will cause tes4lodgen to ignore it, and only have it enabled on the outside at the appropriate time. If I don't need to include resources things stay nice and simple.

As you might guess, the wreck placement was deliberately engineered to make swimming to Stirk a viable option. If your borders were enabled, you'd quickly realize I stuck the wreck as close as possible without it going over.