I did the Winterhold questline on my breton mage, but some things never clicked in my head and was hoping that someone here could possibly explain it to me a bit better than the game did, or maybe I didn't pay enough attention myself, but I feel I did my best to try and understand what the hell was going on.

First of all, Ancano, from the moment I saw him I knew he was gonna turn on me/college in some way, don't know why just did, so I wasn't that surprised when I returned to the college to find him doing something with the big ball of something?

Anyway, what my questions are:

How did Ancano do whatever he did? and Why? (I assume to destroy all men, as he is Thalmor, and that's their ultimate goal?)

What was the big ball of magic? What was it's original purpose?

What was going on with all those ghosts around Labrynthian? I get the storyline of them dieing one by one, and at the end the sacrifice that Savos had to make to hold that priest in place to escape. What were they doing there in the first place? Looking for the staff I was? For what purpose? As the ball hadn't been found at that time.

Something else that strikes me as a bit weird too, in Mzulft (?!) there was that mage from Cyrodiil that was going to report me and the college to his superiors for hiding powerful things away from them, I was half expecting having to deal with them after I had sorted out Ancano, but no, I guess the cyrodiil mages forgot about it? Or the guy never made it back to cyrodiil alive?

Anything else that might help me understand this whole thing? Please throw any info you can think of my way.

Thanks.

The college is an odd collection of individuals... they enlisted my barbarian nord as a student just because he nearly shouted the lady at the entrance off the bridge. My (naked) barbarian nord is now Arch-mage even he only spouts some ancient nord nonsense and spend the days drinking mead with the Draugr. No wonder why necromancers run so rampant in Skyrim.

The big ball of magic is a relic of creation in the same way the hearth of Lohrkan was. At least this is what my illiterate barbarian nord understood. He cannot be sure though. He never learned to read and he failed to grasp the meaning of what the Psijchic guy said.

Ahh okay, so Ancano was using a relic of creation to un-create? Like Dwemer tried before? (I think, Dwemer lore confuses me even though I read quite a bit of it)

So, how did it get leftover from the creation process of Nirn/Mundus?

I just feel the big orb wasn't studied enough before those Psijics took it away.

Beats me... maybe in the same way the heart was still there. There is lore and then there's the truth. It's hard to tell the difference sometimes.

The college guild storyline had potential but it felt a bit rushed. Seeing the condition of the college and Winterhold in general, I had hoped that the story would be about rebuilding the lost credibility and re-establishing the college (maybe helping Winterhold in the process). Instead, we deal with a corrupt arch-mage (mages corruption to a darker side was also the leit motif in Oblivion, albeit it was somehow better fleshed out) and the others around us seemed a bit too clueless for my taste. Maybe they deserve to have an illiterate barbarian as arch-mage!

Ancano is Thalmor and an agent of the Aldmeri Dominion who are obsessed with ruling everything and believe themselves to be the true keepers of all things magical. He made you nervous because he's a whack job.

The orb isn't fully explained, though you get some insight when you do the Focusing the Oculory because the Imperial mages are working on finding massive sources of magical power and the orb blocks this from being entirely successful because it is the only thing that they can see on their Oculory.

The story itself just suggests that the orb was locked up to prevent man and mer (so man and elves) from finding and using it. I get the impression that it's another Dwemer artifact we shouldn't be messing with or that it predates the people's of Skyrim, including the Dwemer.

Ancano was experimenting trying to see what would happen and figured out he could be shielded while he was manipulating it with spells. The more he put into the orb the more it put out that I doubt he had control of, I figured the orb was sending out wild magics and that Ancano was just feeding it the energy to do so without knowing or caring what the result of his actions were. He DID go talk to the all knowing guy under the college, he probably knows something we never get him to share.

The ghosts in Labrinthian were a party of mages from the Mages College, including Aren, the former Arch Mage. You were seeing their ghosts because you had his necklace with you and were seeing that you can do alone what they couldn't succeed at as a party of 6 or 7. They were dying one at a time as they went through the trials you were completing alone. The Staff of Magnus has more power than just to try to use it against the Eye of Magnus or glowy runed blue orb at the Mage's College. The staff absorbs power/magicka... a nice tool for one mage against another in any time.

The Cyrodiil mage is one of the Imperial mages assigned by the Emperor to investigate magical items. I translate this to be very much like a group of the CIA or FBI dedicated to unusual phenomena and making sure that the Empire has all of it locked up for study and "preservation." He's a pompous little man with a big title and thinks that threatening you will get you to tell him more than you have.

I only wanted to get to know more about the Psijic's and was really bummed when they pretty much promoted me to Arch Mage and took off without leaving me so much as a calling card. He was cryptic because they're not a fleshed out faction in the game and to stay secretive and hidden you have to be careful what you say. I'm reminded a bit of an interview with a designer for Shadowrun, the old rpg by FASA who said that they don't give stats to some of the NPC's because no matter what stats you give them, eventually a gamer will manage to kill it and some NPC's don't die.

The less they tell us about the Psijics the less they have to know themselves?

I saw nothing that suggested that Aren was corrupt, did I miss something?

Aren, like lots of peeps in Skyrim, was having a hard time balancing between the implied power of the Aldmeri Dominion and Imperial loyalty and the necessary freedoms of a teaching mage in a backwards supersticious place like Skyrim where the Nords blame everything they don't understand on magic.

Ancano is an agent of the Aldmeri Dominion and was not the Arch mage and actually had no real power at the Mage's College, he was taking advantage of his implied power and doing a darned good job of keeping everyone nervous and ill at ease.

I only agree that I wish we could have rebuilt the college in much the same way that we are able to rebuild the Thieves' and Dark Brotherhood guilds.

So Ancano had less of an idea of what he was actually doing than the player does, makes sense, those searching for ultimate power usually end up being killed by that which they seek.

I don't like Thalmor. Screwing everything up more than the Mythic Dawn did during the Oblivion Crisis.

I totally get that Beth don't wanna flesh out guilds/clans that are barely touched upon, makes it easier in future games to change them without having to ask the player to forget everything they already know, kinda how I feel about the blades. In Oblivion there were kick-ass, honorable warriors, now they are just a dead guild (bar the 2 most moronic blades ever to be born) that used to be dragon slayers. :/