Woodlings draw near!

I was in an exploring mood in Oblivion. I helped the smugglers against the slavers just because I happened to be in the area anyway and it was there. On my way out from Red Gill Cave, I saw two other Argonians "fishing" (sprinting around with broadswords drawn, throwing themselves at every mudcrab and slaughterfish in the area as if they were at war,) and, once the carnage had settled, I followed one of them back to his home in a quaint little floating fishing village. Then I climbed a mountain and just looked around and took pictures of the view before finally moving on to my next quest. It was just a nice, lazy stroll around the Panther River area. I'm level 33, the main quest is over, and this game is almost ten years old. I'm allowed to take it easy and enjoy the view while I pick at the new modded-in quest lines.

• Most is Endless Jungle
  
• Unique Landscapes
  
• Various texture packs and weather stuff probably

Pretentious in-character way of saying "oops I'm 147 hours into this file and just now realized there's a journal mod."

I swear I will stop installing mods and get back to actually playing this game at some point, but I wanted to have a journal before I start werewolfing for, um, reasons. Plus it would be kind of neat to have a log of whatever I do from this point on, and it's much easier to make small routine updates as they happen than to novelize my entire adventuring career.



Also the Hello Scampy cover is amazing. I'm not going to use it because it's not exactly lore/immersion friendly, but, you know, just saying.

I can't help but feel somewhat accused.

Hauls-Ropes-Slower who was Hauls-Ropes-Fasters brother was one day in a tavern talking about fish. He got a letter from his brother that said that daedras and monsters were attacking his place and aksed him for help so he went.

(Actually I have no idea what their relation is. I got this mod partly because I was curious but they never say. Hmph.)

My book collection was starting to outgrow those two shelves I added in Benirus Manor's living room. Then I remembered that I have an entire basement full of barrels and crap I'll never use, the console's "disable" command to take care of those, and the furniture store mod to put shelves and lighting in their place.

( Pictures! )

I'm pretty sure this vampire lair in Lost Spires is just screwing with me now.

It had a trapped and max-level-locked Ayleid treasure chest in a very conspicuous central important-looking location. I saved before touching it just in case the trap went off, but was apparently able to disarm the trap successfully anyway. I then eventually broke through a max-level Very Hard lock, and was rewarded with... a single platinum coin.

There was a conjurer's skeleton on a bier that could not have been more ominously-placed, like this entire three-level dungeon was this one guy's heavily-guarded tomb or something. Freaking Lorgren Benirus was less central and important-looking than this, and he could even be activated except activating him did literally nothing and all he had was a fairly crappy staff.

The final Ancient Vampire lair room (which had no actual Ancient Vampires thanks to OOO, one or two Fearsome ones though) had not one but two easter egg-type almost-inaccessible rooms that I could only just barely access by disabling the Realistic Gravity mod and reactivating freaky moon gravity, and using that to make a series of impossibly tricky jumps like I was suddenly playing an N64 Rare game. Each room was good for about 56 gold and a lockpick when I finally got in.

Thank goodness the Vampire Matriarch had some decently cool-looking and powerful enough I guess (I mean my armor rating literally maxes out when I've only put about half of it on anyway, so it's okay if it's actually one or two points weaker) Elven Night Greaves, because otherwise that whole dungeon would have had nothing after it deliberately tried to get my hopes up at basically every opportunity it had.

Then again, the greaves may actually have been the cruelest prank yet, because they look cool and all but I'm probably never going to get lucky enough to find the entire rest of the set in random loot tables. Wah.

Since I'm modding the hell out of Oblivion anyway, xyzzysqrl directed me toward The Lost Spires, a giant quest/guild/entire quest line thing I'd never heard of before. Yay, more content! I was looking for some more content to pass the time, since Ruined Tail's Tale has a ton of "after X battles/X days pass/basically just spend time with Ruined-Tail then the next quest stage will trigger" flags. I don't know anything about Lost Spires (no spoilers please) but it looks really promising and I'm already excited.

Joining the guild starts ominously enough. Ignore the YouTube LP commentary, just focus on Teav's voice. The Archaeologist's Guild has, like, the Vin Diesel of Argonians as their receptionist. For a fanmade mod effort, those are actually some really good production values. Hell, Ruined Tail's Tale doesn't even have voice acting, just silence and text captions. So this is pretty awesome already, even if it is a little...

"SSSSSO YOU'RE GOOD IN COMBAT, YOU SSSSSAY. WELLLLL." [in the voice of Satan]

I'M SURE NOTHING BAD COULD POSSIBLY COME OF THIS.

Aw man, and I thought Hannibal Traven banned necromancy in Cyrodiil.

ANYWAY HI REMEMBER THIS BLOG

I don't have any real particularly structured plans to come back or anything; I just wanted to talk about Oblivion and this seemed like the most appropriate platform to do it. Maybe this will continue to happen to be the most appropriate platform for video game posts in the future (assuming I make any) or maybe it won't. Who knows!

Anyway, so my friend Bird sort of indirectly pulled me back into Oblivion presumably as revenge for me pulling him into Prequel. He loved the comic enough that he wanted to try out the game to see all the references, say hi to Quill-Weave, etc. I loved the game so much that every time I tried to give him advice on how to play his character, it came with a free "oh God I remember that part" stab of nostalgia right to the heart.

OKAY FINE LET'S GET BACK INTO THIS. I GUESS. LOUD THEATRICAL SIGH.



Oh... oh, no. No, no, no. This will not do.

*MODS MODS MODS MODS MODS*



There, that's a little better. Robert's Male Body Replacer v.5.2 to replace the stock figure with a very nice, and I do mean very nice new body. Qarl's Texture Pack III Redimized to make the rest of the world prettier. Argonian Beautification (using the "AB Requirements" plugin to get the claws and such for Robert's bodies without the no-longer-available Slof's Better Beasts prerequisite) and Improved Argonian Facial Textures.

Something seems a little off, though. The new facial texture and body texture are each better and higher resolution than the stock vanilla counterparts, and each on their own are dramatic improvements, but put together they don't match at all. I'm not super picky about the neck seam--like, the amount of seam on the neck in the stock vanilla textures was acceptable--but this is just too much even for me.

Fortunately, I'm not done prowling the internet for new Argonian textures! In fact, the next one I found is literally called New Argonian Body Textures. (Well, New Argonian Body Textures Robert - Vanilla - Robert Argonian Normal Skin 2048.)



Oh, my.

Okay, not going to lie. That in and of itself is a much better body texture even than the AB texture, let alone stock. It's probably my favorite body texture I've encountered so far. It really, really accentuates the Robert body, too.



Like hey there cutie, are you doing anything after the Oblivion Crisis because God damn I gotta get me some of that.

But.

As you may have noticed.

I'M GREEN.

Not only am I green, but I'm green in patches that are superimposed over the rest of me, like I caught some sort of hideous jungle blight that is very slowly consuming my body.

Also the IAFT head is even more mismatched, but that part was easy to fix. There's a New Argonian Head Textures mod by the same author as the New Argonian Body Textures mod. They're supposed to go together, you see. Which is good for reducing the neck seam with a matching head and body, and as a bonus the head even looks fine on its own, but the body is STILL GREEN.

I tried messing around with this in character creation, but no matter what color I make the rest of my lizard, there does not seem to be a setting to cure me of the greenscale infection. Unless I missed it? If someone stumbles across this post by Googling Oblivion mods or whatever and knows of a way to fix it, please let me know because NABT actually still is my favorite body texture mod so far otherwise and I really hate not being able to use it because of this.

But, alas.

Anyway, I mentioned that there's a head texture that does work out well for me even if the body counterpart doesn't, which is good, because the IAFT texture is definitely improved--it is much higher resolution--but it is also a bit... smooth? compared to stock. The detail is stunning when viewed up close, but from any sort of distance the much much more subtle scales kind of blur into a smooth featureless whole.

So, in a desperate gamble to make a pretty lizard, I swapped them around. I turned off NABT and went back to the AB replacement, but I also turned on NAFT (replacing IAFT.)



Yeah, there we go. I still wish there were a way to make NABT work but this will definitely do in the meantime. The face is almost the perfect opposite of IAFT--it is very noticeably rough and lizardy. I almost thought it was too rough and lizardy at first but I'm getting used to it and it's definitely the best-looking one so far. Stock is just too low res and IAFT isn't rough and lizardy enough, so NAFT is fine. As for whether NAFT and AB replacement body play well together... well, they do a lot better than IAFT and AB replacement body, at least. Not as well as NAFT and NABT would have, but, you know. Green. Basically it's good enough unless NABT can be fixed.



Also that's still an awesome bod.

For the one or two people out there who still actually play Oblivion (it's a long shot, I know, but hey:)
PLAY RUINED-TAIL'S TALE.

It's story/quest-driven companion mod that has a gripping, moving, powerful story--moreso than anything in the official game! I was utterly blown away by how compelling and well-made it was. The only downfall was that it was so good that finishing it basically killed the rest of Oblivion for me. Like, I still have the Knights of the Nine quest half-finished, and I haven't even started Shivering Isles yet, but there's just...I don't know...now that I've been through RTT, it just seems like something is missing with the entire rest of the game. It's that good. Plus I need someone else to play it so we can cry about the ending together

An evil option exists, but it is much much better if you are good. Of course, one of the things I like about it is that the good-or-evil choices are hard. I mean, I'm used to the kind of painfully obvious "would you prefer to donate to a needy homeless shelter or set live kittens on fire while cackling maniacally" Lawful Stupid/Chaotic Stupid crap you see from Bioware, where it's painfully obvious that they're just including random acts of "what would Jesus and/or Emperor Palpatine do?" just so you can get karma meter points without even trying to be compelling. By contrast, allow me to repeat myself: the ethical questions in RTT are hard. Yet so incredibly rewarding.

Here is me gushing on it at much much greater length on the official forum thread for it, but there are heavy spoilers.