SSE Infiltrate the Dark Brotherhood [Request]

[ExpatLuke]

One of the most popular guild overhaul mods currently for SSE is Penitus Oculatus, which allows you to kill Astrid, get recruited into the Penitus Oculatus, and get some follow-up quests to take down the rest of the Dark Brotherhood, which incidentally also awards you most of the unique items you miss by just doing the Vanilla destroy quest. While this is a good mod, I find myself wishing I can still join and experience the Dark Brotherhood questline, but still destroy them by taking them down from the inside.

 

My suggestion is not over complicated because it would use most of the Vanilla assets, but it adds just a few extra things along the way.

 

The quest-line would start the same way as it does in Vanilla, where upon investigating the rumor of Aventus trying to contact the DB, you end up killing Grelod and are kidnapped by Astrid. You choose to kill one of the captives, but after receiving the password from Astrid upon leaving the shack, you get a letter delivered by courier from Commander Maro informing you that he has had agents watching the shack due to suspected use by the DB, and he knows what transpired there. He invites you to meet him at the Penitus Oculatus outpost in Dragon Bridge,

 

Upon going to meet him, he instructs you to atone for the murder, you can be deputized as an agent with the task of infiltrating the DB in order to 1) find and bring to justice those who is putting out murder contracts, 2) uncover any plots against the emperor, and 3) to ultimately take down the DB and destroy them. Upon agreeing to this, you are sent to the Falkreath sanctuary to begin earning their trust.

 

To do this you just progress through the vanilla DB quest-line. However, you would have to report each new contract you receive to Commander Maro, who would give you some supplies/advice. You either choose to kill the contracts you are given as an "ends justify the means" type of deal, or have a special conversation option to warn the target, and that they need to flee to Dragon Bridge, where they are kept safely hidden inside the PO outpost. You could even have to plant some evidence to make it look like you killed them, such as planting a charred corpse, some human flesh + skull, or whatever.

 

Once being promoted to the rank of Listener and getting the quest to kill the Emperor, you need to progress a little further (in order to continue collecting the rest of the unique items), you do this under the guise of learning how the DB plans to execute their plan. You would kill Cicero upon Astrid (and Commander Maro's) orders. You would kill/warn the gourmet. You would then be given the mission by Astrid to kill the Emperor (the decoy), instead when you report the plan to Commander Maro, the "Betrayal" quest where you return to the DB and find Astrid has sold out to the PO begins. If you did it this way, the only difference would be the PO attackers would be friendly to you, and quest ends with Nazir and Babette surviving to regroup in the Dawnstar Sanctuary.

 

Once there, they continue their plot to kill the Emperor, leading you to finding the new location of Amaund, then boarding the Kataria, not to kill the emperor but to make an official report about Amaund and get his orders. He asks you to kill Amaund, using some tweaks to the dialogue of the vanilla quest. You then leave, kill Amaund, and finally finish the job by executing Nazir and Babette in the Dawnstar sanctuary to finally wipe out the brotherhood for good.

 

Doing it this way would ensure you experience 90% of the DB quest-line and have a chance to obtain all the unique items from it, while still wiping out the DB in the end.

 

If anyone does decide they'd like to design this mod, I have an idea for tweaking it so that you could start the quest without having to kill any people (including Grelod) as well.