Most lore-friendly mods?

[VikingofTamriel]

With the amount of great mods available, have anyone made any research into which mods can be said to be most lore-friendly? Not only in respecting established Tamriel/Cyrodiil lore in the main general setting (i.e. tying in with the main Oblivion/Cyrodiil setting, story and era) but also with regards to things like having proper NPC scheduling (i.e. shopkeepers closing their shops at night, NPCs taking breaks to sleep/eat, so on) and not to mention following established lore when it comes to NPC's names (i.e. Roman/Italian names for Imperials, Norse/Scandinavian names for Nords, Francophone names for Bretons, etc)? I've tried many otherwise good mods where the immersion has been somewhat broken by characters just standing around in the same place all day long, Imperials/Nords having modern-day English names (or Imperials having obivously fake Monthy Python-style names like Smellus Butticus and so on)...

[Seqeu0]

To help you out, here's a list of some Oblivion mods I liked. I think most of these are quite lore-friendly as they involve a bit of the history of Tamriel.

 

- Carcernus Prison

- Imperial City Foreign Quarter

- Ayleid Water Tower

- Falkreath

- Imperial City Palace Expansion

 

I hope this helps.

[Lanceor]

What sort of mods do you have in mind? Quests? Items? Dungeons? Also, what do you think of when you think of "lore friendly"? There's a few different ways that a mod could be considered lore-friendly.

 

- Realism - you mentioned merchants with schedules. I'd consider this to be realistic details rather than lore-friendliness. (The reason why not every NPC has a schedule is because it's more work, more things to go wrong.)

- Look and feel - armour, weapons, places and names that match the look and feel of vanilla Oblivion (and doesn't conflict with Tamriel's history).

- Background story - the mod's backstory that uses cues from history books found in the game.

 

Anyway, sorry to plug my own mod, but Knights of the Nine Revelation explores the fall of the Ayleid Empire 4000 years before Oblivion using the in-game books Song of Pelinal and the Adabal-A as primary sources. The entire mod is based around Tamrielic lore. Maybe this is what you're looking for.

 

P.S. What's wrong with Smellus Butticus? :P

[JCP768]

Integration: The Stranded Light is extremely lore friendly. Which is amusing since the main guild involved is a group of largely female Daedra that want to play nice with mortals.Could, have gone in a completely different direction there lol.

 

The mod deeply integrates oblivion's main quest, guilds, misc quests, settings, and lore in it's quests, characters, story, and even the gameplay. It even goes so far as to include a large number of lore elements from the Elder Scrolls which are neglected or missing from Oblivion. As an example, by and large in Oblivion Daedra are largely relegated to "generic bad guys", whereas in Morrowind they had a much wider and more diverse role.

 

As for the quests themselves: They have their own storyline but they recognize, respond to, and reference vanilla game actions, and quests all the time. For instance you might succeed in convincing the mages guild to help you because you're arch mage, or you've uncovered the Necromancer threat, or you did a number of misc quests for their members, or you just give them money, or you convince them with a very high persuasion skill, etc. Additionally the quests occasionally go deeper into some of the more obscure lore elements and explain them through fun, unique little quests... things like: CHIM/Zero sum, Dragon Breaks, Jyggalag, khajiit races, etc.

 

Lastly there is a huge amount of detail and polish with the NPC schedules. towards the end of the mod there is a new town with about 30 or so NPCs living there, and most of them have a unique schedule with animations and everything.... for each day of the week. Even before that, just about every friendly NPC added by the mod has a daily schedule including: eat, possibly work, recreation, sleep, etc.

Also worth mentioning is the romance; instead of just blazing through it the romance has a large focus on the character's schedule, dialogue, and your actions. She responds to a lot of the things you do, talks to you about a lot of things, and her schedule gets increasingly diverse and more complex as the romance progresses, and certain progression points are tied to catching her while she is doing a number of scheduled actions and talking to her at that time to get unique dialogue. all together the mod is 24+ hours of silent dialogue, and the romance is about 20,000 words all together.