Unfair competition
On the Blackwood Company conspiracy

Things are getting difficult in the Fighters Guild. Contracts are getting scarce, and potential clients are instead turning to the rival Blackwood Company, which is having a boom of sudden and mysterious success... But just when we are beginning to despair, we receive an important medieval phone call from the Fighters Guild's second in command, Modryn Oreyn.

Azani Blackheart

Oreyn contacts us again and tells us to meet him in his house in the evening to talk about something secret. By the way, in spite of being Champion of the Fighters Guild, second in command to the Master... he lives in the slum of Chorrol, in a shack. Does he like living simply? Does the Fighters Guild pay him that little? Is it because he's a Dark Elf in a prissy town in Cyrodiil? Or is it because he's a Dark Elf with a dishonored family name?

He explains the background of what happened to Vitellus, the son of the master who recently died on a mission. Oreyn had been sent as the leader of a mission to fulfill a contract for a mage named Argoth. The Fighters Guild was supposed to retrieve a sword in the possession of a certain Azani Blackheart. It's not too clear if Azani had stolen the sword from Argoth or what, but since the guy is called Blackheart, we should probably assume he got the name from being some sort of villain - perhaps on the Care Bears cartoon. Oreyn and twenty of the top Fighters Guild members, among which Vitellus, went to the Ayleid ruin where Blackheart was said to be hiding. They ended up getting slaughtered, with only five survivors managing to escape. Vitellus died while defending the retreat. The Blackwood Company claimed they finished the contract, killed Blackheart, and delivered the sword to Argoth, for great glory and fame, while thumbing their noses at the Fighters Guild and calling them ineffective cowards. But, after all of this was over, Argoth died mysteriously, and the sword vanished. Oreyn suspects foul play.

We go with him to the ruin where it all happened and see if we can find Azani Blackheart, dead or alive. Adventuring with Oreyn, we can see his famous fighting abilities first-hand, and yeah, he's good. He doesn't need any special magical weapons, he just pirouettes around with his mace, looking absolutely beautiful as he destroys the enemies. We see why he's the Champion of the Fighters Guild.

In the ruin, we don't find Blackheart dead and we also don't find Blackheart alive, which convinces Oreyn that the Blackwood Company didn't kill him, and that the conspiracy goes even deeper. He decides that we should go to a different ruin nearby, where Blackheart might be hiding, since he's a known lover of Ayleid ruins.

For this part, Oreyn walks from the current ruin to the other ruin, and there's several bugs that could go horribly wrong at this point. The UESP mentions a bunch of them, and we encountered yet another terrible bug here: we tried to fast travel to the ruin, and the game completely crashed, forcing us to reload from a previous save. It sounds like we got lucky, as other game-breaking things could just happen without us necessarily realizing that the quest is now broken.

So, fast-travel is out, so we must follow Oreyn in the classic style: he walks slower than we run but faster than we walk. To feel like we got the best use of our time, we decided to practice our Mysticism along the way. He walks so slow we can meditate and train while we walk.

But we manage to make it to the other ruin, and we do find Azani Blackheart there, in the flesh, and holding the famous sword, proving that the Blackwood Company lied. Oreyn thinks they must have made a deal with Blackheart and did this whole scheme to set up the Fighters Guild for a fall on purpose. We kill Blackheart and take his ring as proof that it was the Fighters Guild who killed him in the end, and not the Blackwood Company.

This whole critical plotpoint is kinda convoluted and not explained clearly. There are a lot of points that are hella vague.

Hella Vague Plotpoints

• Why did all the Fighters Guild members die? Was it in a confrontation with Blackheart, or just because of the black Welkynd stones that were in the ruin?

• Did Azani Blackheart steal the sword from Argoth, or did Argoth want the Fighters Guild to steal the sword which does indeed belong to Azani Blackheart? What's up with this sword?

• Why did we and Oreyn jump to the conclusion that just because we can't find Azani Blackheart's body in the ruin, this was a giant conspiracy to bolster the Blackwood Company and shame the Fighters Guild? It could just be that the Blackwood Company did kill him there, but then pressed Z and dragged the ragdoll outside to wiggle it somewhere else.

• Modryn Oreyn knows that Azani Blackheart loves Ayleid ruins, so if he's not in his original hideout, he's probably hiding out in a different ruin. Oreyn picks a ruin to search, out of the 54 other Ayleid ruins in Cyrodiil, and he's right on the first try. Azani Blackheart must have thought, eyebrows awaggle, they'll never think to look for me in the ruin next-door. Wrong, Oreyn first picked the ruin next door. And Blackheart was indeed home and not out buying groceries when we showed up. (If we try to go there before the quest starts, we can search the whole ruin, but Blackheart won't be home then).

• Upon finding him, why should we kill Azani Blackheart? Wouldn't it be better to capture him alive and then that would be even better proof that he wasn't defeated by the Blackwood Company?

• Was it really the best idea to name this character Blackheart when we're talking about the Blackwood Company? Was it really the best idea to have Azani and Argoth? We need a cheat sheet to follow Oreyn's explanation.

• Why would us taking his ring prove that we killed him, and not that we took it from the Blackwood Company, or that we sneaked up in Azani Blackheart's shadow and sucked off his ring insane style? Also, funny that whenever there's somebody you want to prove dead, they have a piece of jewelry with their name on it. Seems like it's not the best idea to get personalized rings in the Elder Scrolls universe.

We are aware that some of these plotpoints are informed by the in-universe understanding of the situation that Modryn Oreyn has, but maybe not all of them, and we're not too sure where unreliable narrators end and vague writing begins…

The four fugitives

After this confusing but important quest, here is one that we completely forgot. Rightfully so. We're told from the get go, there are four fugitives. They are fuging. Go find where they are fuged, and unfuge them. Watch out, they're bad guys!

So we go to Bravil, ask around, get directed to a cave, and in the cave there are four fugitives, and we kill them. We don't capture them, we don't send them back to jail, we don't find out what they did, just, fuckin' murder. When we confront them, they say, You made a grave mistake! and This doesn't concern you! which seems like a hint of something, but it isn't.

Elante of Alinor

We are hired to escort a mage researcher through a cave. It's a pretty basic escort mission, complete with her walking really, really, really slowly. She can die, so at least there is a failure state for this mission.

Since it's a pretty boring mission and she walks so very very slowly, we have plenty of time to think about our client. A snooty high elf who calls herself Elante of Alinor. Like, her name is in cursive. Elante of Alinor. And Alinor is just the elvish name for the Summerset Isle. And she came to this cave wearing a dress and a full hairdo, expecting to not get one speckle of cave dust on her. She's not mean to us, and overall she's a good client, but just, lol, she wants to be a researcher of daedric shrines in caves in Cyrodiil, she wants everyone to know she's from the Summerset Isle, she doesn't want to interact with the daedra who live in the cave, she just wants them pre-emptively wiped out by her bodyguard, so that she can waltz through the cave in her dress and say, oh, this is very nice. The tourist experience.

And, wait, she wants to research daedra, and she has us kill the daedra who live in the daedra shrine cave. She doesn't even want to talk to the certain-to-spawn Dremora who lives here. She doesn't even want to fuck them. What's the point of getting all dolled up to go to the daedra cave then?

The turning point

After completing these standard missions, Oreyn needs our help again. He sent Viranus on another confidence-building mission, but he hasn't returned...

We arrive to the location, and it's a massacre. The corpses of Fighters Guild members are everywhere. After a while, we start finding Blackwood Company corpses, too. Not to mention the trolls that they were both supposed to be killing, instead of each other, as it happened. At last, we find Viranus, long dead. On his body there is his journal. We can read how much he enjoyed going on the previous mission with us, aw. Also about his boyfriend Eduard, who also died over there. And that the Blackwood Company is indeed responsible for their deaths. He wrote that they came in there and started slaughtering everybody, trolls and people and even each other.

We bring the journal to Oreyn. Now he has to deliver the bad news to his boss, Viranus's mother, and explain how this was all his fault.

It doesn't go well. He gets expelled, and we get demoted, presumably because Viranus mentioned us in the diary as having gone on the previous off-the-book mission with him.

We understand that it would be better if we stayed away from Chorrol for a while. We go to work in the other branches on some conventional missions.

The Stone of Saint Alessia

We are sent to Bruma to recover the stolen Stone of Saint Alessia, a precious and religiously significant artifact that we hadn't heard about until this very moment. It has been stolen by the thieves. The thieves have been last seen going east, and they're somehow still there right there on the eastern road out of Bruma no matter how long it took us to get here. They must also walk very very slowly.

So, east of Bruma, we find one thief who greets us with, "I hate my life." He explains, yeah, he stole the stone with his buddies. But then they were all attacked by ogres who like pretty necklaces, and the ogres killed all of his friends and then ran away with the stone. The thief even points us to the ruin where the ogres went, marking it on our map. Then he says, now fuck off and leave me to continue brooding about how much I hate my life.

We get into the ruin, and we find that the ogres put the stone on a pedestal. Huh. Do they also worship Saint Alessia?

But yeah, it's just, get the stone back, bring it back to Bruma, and the church pays us in healing potions. Look, at that rate, just keep them. We are already embarrassed enough.

Stolen away!

This one instead is one of the most memorable quests. We are sent to save Lady Rogbut, daughter of Lord Rugdumph gro-Shurgak, an Orc noble and a personal friend of our boss from Cheydinhal, Burz gro-Khash. Lord Rugdumph has some of the funniest dialogue in the game.

Ah... you are from the Fighters Guild, I resume. Good show. I am Lord Rugdumph gro-Shurgak. Let us conversate on the Lady Rogbut. I fear that whilst out rock-picking, she was apprehensive. Stolen away! My suspension is that ogres have abjected her! Please search to the east of my sprawling abode. They have been known to vacate these premises. I am most gracious and truly woeful.

But Lady Rogbut was never in any danger. She was just hanging out with the ogres. She says, she could have gotten out from them at any time. Could have even axed them, if only her father still allowed her to keep an axe. Ah well. Let's go home.

When we return to Cheydinhal to report, Burz gro-Khash mentions that he should give a call on Lady Rogbut. Hey, if you're going to court her, gift her with an axe!

Lord Rugdumph also rewards us with a blade enchanted with Absorb Speechcraft and Silence. Oh, so you shut up your target, while it makes the wielder talk better and now the target must listen :D It's not actually useful but it's funny.

This mission is really only about talking with Lord Rugdumph, fighting three ogres, and escorting the Lady home, but that's because the meat of the quest is just inquiring either of them for all of their wonderful dialogue.

Trolls and wisps

We are sent to the village of Harlun's Watch, where we hear that people have been disappearing. Oh, like Aleswell? No, not like Aleswell… We arrive at night, and we go to the house of our client, Drarana Thelis, which has the door open but off limits. We enter anyway, and she yells at us for trespassing. But also begs us to help her. We also can't help but notice that the house that she's so upset about our trespassing is empty, except for copious amounts of cobwebs, a broken chair, and the most disgusting bed. What.

We talk to her, and despite screaming at us, she's so glad we're here. She says, people have been noticing strange lights in the distance. So she told them, oh, that's weird. Why don't you go check out the strange lights. And then they didn't return... And then the next night, there were strange lights... And so someone else went to check what happened to our friends and what are the strange lights... and they didn't come back either. So why don't YOU go check on the strange lights? Oh yeah, why don't we go follow the strange lights that show up at night at Swampy Cave (actual name)?

It was wisps. Inside the cave there are trolls that ate all the people. So people were going to look at the pretty lights, and then getting mauled by a troll. And all of them went that way. There's a whole pile of variously eaten corpses.

We go back to report, and Drarana says, Oh my. So sad. Thanks, here's your reward.

This all seems so suspicious, like she's some kind of fucked up witch that is done with the town for now and so called us to cover her tracks or something... Or maybe this was a Blackwood Company plot to get us in the cave with the trolls and the will-o-wisps... But no, it's really all there is about it. The fact that her house is empty means nothing. The way the other villagers seem to already know what happened before we've even investigated is an oversight. The fact that Drarana gets mad at us for arriving at her house is a bug. And her particularly flat voice acting is just how it is.

All these "clues" are actually meaningless. It's just a particularly underbaked quest…

The interrogation

After these quests, we're told that there's nothing more left to do, as contracts for the Fighters Guild are pretty much dried up. We mean, the last few ones weren't very glorious. One of them was even a personal friend of the local guild head asking for unnecessary assistance, just to keep up airs. But we're told on the downlow that Oreyn is looking for us…

Oreyn now spends night and day in his shack brooding over this Blackwood Company conspiracy. We know that all the strange deaths lately have involved the Blackwood Company, and Oreyn wants to put an end to it, even if he's no longer part of the Fighters Guild. He sends us to find Ajum-Kajin, a high-ranking leader of the newest branch of the Blackwood Company, with the goal of kidnapping him to Oreyn's shack and interrogating him for information about the conspiracy.

It wasn't easy to get to Ajum-Kajin. The Blackwood Company guards that protect him really aren't messing around. They are so well equipped that just going through this mission let us upgrade all of our equipment with the stuff we looted off their bodies and stole out of their cabinets, all the next level armor and even enchanted too! Of course the Blackwood Company mercenaries are carrying the best gear, since they've been getting all the contracts and earning so much money. They're like, player characters from another game.

But despite being so well-equipped, we do kill all the guards and confront Ajum-Kajin, who has no choice but to follow us to Oreyn's house. He makes no effort to resist - we suppose he's a manager, not a mercenary himself. Once Ajum-Kajin is positioned on the chair, Oreyn lets us take the lead in the interrogation, and we can either be a good cop or a bad cop.

If we want to be a good cop, and we have the skills, we can manipulate Ajum-Kajin enough that he will spill the beans. Depending on our Personality, this may be more or less difficult. Maybe we're so charismatic that he'll just tell us. Maybe we'll need to play the Speechcraft minigame, with heavy emphasis on the Coerce quadrant. Maybe we can offer him bribes in exchange for his secrets. Or maybe we can put a Charm spell on him... oh, very devious.

If we want to be a bad cop, we can punch him until he sings. This will probably only work if we use our fists, as it seems to depend on how many hits he takes, and hitting him with a weapon would kill him too fast. Maybe we could try hitting him and then healing him? Twisted...

Eventually, Ajum-Kajin tells us there are over a hundred members of the Blackwood Company now, and the leader is named Ri'Zakar, but he won't tell us any more secrets. He bursts into flame by equipping the magical cyanide.

...Afterwards, Oreyn rewards us with the Amulet of Interrogation. You could have given us that before that part of the mission, dude. Maybe it's only meant as something to remember the good times we had. What a great interrogation that was...

But is any of this even remotely legal or justified? Yes, there is a Conspiracy about the Blackwood Company, but two wrongs don't make a right, and we don't know what is going on yet. Yes, people have died, but we don't know exactly how or why. But our course of action is to bust into the Blackwood Company's base and just kill them all and rob all their stuff. In Cyrodiil, it's open season on crime, and we can legally hunt any bandits with even the slightest bounties, wanted dead or alive, or actually just dead, and we'd say that's already extremely morally dubious. But the Blackwood Company members don't have bounties and aren't bandits - they are regular citizens without any price on their heads, and on what grounds are we going in and executing them? For all we know, these underlings were hired last week and never did anything wrong. And think about how this looks from the outside: we're one of the last members of the disgraced Fighters Guild barging into the rival guild that's been wildly outdoing us and very popular with the public, and we're murdering all of the employees and stealing their stuff and kidnapping their manager and dragging him away to torture him. What the hell!

And Oreyn just sends us to do this and expects us to just come back to his shack with Ajum-Kajin in tow. If he's going for insane revenge, can't he at least get off his own butt and do it himself? How do you even go for insane revenge while sitting on your butt? Delegating your own insane revenge, man, Oreyn's been a manager for too long... To be honest, it would make more narrative sense if we were told Oreyn was looking for us, so we go to visit him at his house, and we arrive to see he's already kidnapped Ajum-Kajin all tied up in the chair, and we can be like WOW WHAT THE FUCK but then we're swept into the interrogation and everything that happens afterwards.

The infiltration and the Hist

Now that we know the name of their leader, it's time to go spy on the Blackwood Company in Leyawiin. Oreyn wants us to pose as a new recruit and find out what they're up to. We wondered how would we manage to go undercover like this, considering we've been named Champion of the Fighters Guild and we're not a no-name loser, but the recruiters don't seem to mind. We say that we ran out of jobs with the Fighters Guild, so we're switching to the Blackwood Company. We suppose it is only half a lie, as we are indeed out of any other jobs. And it must be a familiar story, since that's how the Blackwood Company has gotten most of their recruits, including Maglir before.

So, freshly accepted into the Blackwood Company, we are immediately sent on a mission. But before we go out, we are instructed to drink Hist sap. The secret of the Blackwood Company's strength is that they have smuggled a Hist tree past the border and into Cyrodiil, and are using its sap to boost their battle abilities. The Hist are a hivemind of sentient trees from Black Marsh. Some Argonians believe the Hist is their creator deity and so consider the trees to be sacred. Argonians from Black Marsh ritually drink the sap to commune with the Hist and to be granted powers and visions.

Our new co-workers all wait for us to drink our sap, and then we are off to a village to stop a goblin invasion. The goblins are acting strangely: they seem to be wandering around and don't actually act aggressive. Our colleagues attack, and only then the goblins strike back.

We're sent to check if any goblins have gotten into the houses. We go bust down the doors, and we do indeed find goblins inside. These goblins are also behaving strangely, but we got to clear the goblins out of the town, and so we kill them.

When we're done with this, we black out, and we awaken in Oreyn's house. He says Fighters Guild members found us passed out on the road, and brought us here. Even though Oreyn is expelled and we supposedly switched sides, our real friends know what's going on.

And it seems the Blackwood Company knew what was going on too. Now that we're sober, we go back to the village to investigate what happened. And there, we find a pile of bodies, not the defeated goblins, but all the residents of the village and all their sheep, dead. There were no goblins. While high on the Hist sap, we hallucinated the goblins. The Blackwood Company members were slaughtering the sheep, and we went into the houses and killed all of the people. It seems the Blackwood Company knew we were a spy, and knew how the Hist sap would affect us, and sent us on this "mission" to murder a whole village, and left us unconscious on the road in the hopes of getting one of the last notable members of the Fighters Guild carted off in disgrace to the Imperial Prison.

Also, we thought the name of this village sounded familiar. It's Water's Edge, which we previously visited to help Biene Amelion about her father's gambling debt. We helped her pay off her debts and then we came back and murdered her. The only living person we find in the town is her father, having just returned from his shakeup, to find his daughter and the whole town dead. Noooo.

This incident also explains how and why Blackwood Company has killed so many random innocent people, including Galtus Previa who we found dead in a cavern next to the broken Blackwood Company shield, and Viranus Donton and his whole team in the cave with the trolls.

We go back to Oreyn and cry on his shoulder as we tell him the truth.

Oreyn says that, to stop this from happening again, we need to destroy the smuggled Hist. At first, we are a bit worried by his conclusion. What the Blackwood Company did by taking the tree is horrible, yes. All the Hist are interconnected and bound to Black Marsh, so separating one from the others and its homeland is pretty barbaric. But also, the Hist they took is a sentient being; couldn't we just un-smuggle the Hist and put it back in Black Marsh where it was taken from?

But when we get into the Blackwood Company Hall's basement, we see that the Hist has been twisted into a horrible mechanical apparatus full of gears and pipes, on life support and forced to produce more and more sap. This poor Hist tree has been so mistreated and so full of despair, the sap it produced became toxic. Communing with this Hist only results in horrible hallucinations and the urge to murder everything in sight. So, perhaps it is true that there is no other way to save this poor Hist at this point.

Though, did we also have to murder every member of the Blackwood Company?

Having destroyed the poor Hist and killed all the higher-ups of the Blackwood Company, on our way out of their guild hall, we are confronted by… none other than Maglir. He rages at us for ruining his life, since with the complete destruction of the Blackwood Company, he no longer has a job, and how will he support his family now? He attacks us, and we cannot yield. The only way past him is to defeat him.

We are really sad that there is no way out of this confrontation. And we wonder if he took everything so poorly because he was still high on the Hist sap. He seemed to take the end of the Blackwood Company as a death sentence for him and his family, but if he had a calm view of it, we're sure he could have gotten another job somewhere else. We still would have vouched for him and taken him back in to the Fighters Guild. We would have helped him with a letter of recommendation to wherever he wanted to work. Was the corrupted Hist sap still making him feel like everything was life and death?

Was Maglir better with the Blackwood Company specifically because of the effects of the Hist sap? In the Fighters Guild, he always held back because he knew he needed to stay alive to continue supporting his family. When he was with the Blackwood Company, did the Hist sap make him so uninhibited that he forgot this concern?

In fact, he tried to attack us for revenge while yelling about how he needs to stay alive to support his family. He wouldn't accept a yield, which forced us to kill him, and now what about his family? We do suspect he was high to have such conflicting actions.

All in all, we can respect Maglir and his concerns. He was right to feel like the Fighters Guild was putting him in unfair positions, and his top duty is to his health and his family. He's not the Hero of Kvatch. He's just a guy trying to feed his family. We wish he could have lived through this experience and gotten a nice desk job instead of needing to keep being put in mortal peril to survive.

The aftermath

We go back to Chorrol, where we explain everything that happened to the master, Vilena Donton. She wasn't aware of all that's been going on with the Blackwood Company, because she's been mourning so much. In light of what happened, she decides to step down and instead names us the new guild master. She also recommends that we ask Oreyn to be our second-in-command, and yes, of course we do.

Me? Pah! I was just getting used to being retired. You can see how good my painting is getting. I'm an old man. I've done my time. Then again... someone has to keep you in line. Make sure you don't bring the Guild down around our ears. I'll do it... Guildmaster. Just come to me when you want to assign duties to the Guild. I'll make sure they get done.

During this conversation, behind Oreyn in his shack there will be a beautiful canvas with a magnificent self-portrait of him interrogating Ajum-Kajin. We've seen multiple wikis refer to this as a painting of us the player interrogating Ajum-Kajin, but of this we are certain: it's Modryn Oreyn. He has purple skin, a black mohawk, and red eyes. Of course it's him. The joke is that Oreyn never held Ajum-Kajin at swordpoint, he left the interrogation to us. But let him fantasize! Throughout the whole game, Oreyn has been carrying around a paintbrush on his person, and later, he still continues painting alongside his Fighters Guild duties. Good. It's important to have hobbies too.

Modryn Oreyn also gifts us with a heirloom of his family, the helm of his ancestor Bearclaw, an enchanted item returning from Morrowind. The Malacath quest in Morrowind is about wiping out the last of the Oreyn clan because Malacath considers Bearclaw to have been a false hero. It looks like the clan hadn't been wiped out after all, and that Modryn survived and moved to Cyrodiil at some point and returned in possession of the precious relic, and it also looks like Modryn believes in the stories about Bearclaw.

Anyway, now that we're top cat, we no longer go out on missions, but each in-game month we can give directions to Oreyn about the guild's priorities. Depending on that, the rewards that will be given to us in a special chest will change. And also we get to feel like we're doing something to lead the guild. But, like we've previously complained about the endings of the Mages Guild questline and the Dark Brotherhood questline, this isn't really much of a reward. We are boss now, but we don't get to do anything interesting anymore. And once again, this long questline ends with us becoming boss, which we don't like. Though, in the case of the Fighters Guild, it does make sense that Vilena steps down. She's been through a lot and she's in no shape to continue leading the Fighters Guild after both of her sons died in the span of a few weeks. As she says, it's time to make room for the new and fresh.

In conclusion

The Fighters Guild is a super long questline with a surprising variety of quests. We get the sense that, out of the four optional major questlines of Oblivion, the developers expected players to start with the Fighters Guild one. In that light, this questline does a good job at establishing the many and unusual things that we can expect out of the quests of Oblivion, especially considering that the theme of the Fighters Guild is of course combat; but not all quests are about going to a certain location and fighting certain enemies. Many of them also involve espionage and subterfuge. And, naturally, there is all the developing conspiracy with the Blackwood Company.

The positives

Oblivion did a good job establishing the goal of the Fighters Guild and what might someone hire the Fighters Guild for. They are called to help with actions that require some muscle, no matter how strange the request. Hire these people, and they'll help you with whatever it is, whether it's apprehending escaped convicts, escorting someone through a dangerous place, guarding a shop, or protecting your pets. We can't help but draw a parallel with Pokémon Ranger, since the Rangers in that game have a similar job description - complete with the entire thing of, we thought we were going to be more heroic and do some glamorous saving the world, but half the time, we're just rescuing a pet from a tree. And complete with the overarching storyline about a rival group attempting to take down our society.

The many varied missions are also used to drop clues about the developing plot. For example, the broken shield, which will never be referred to again - but that once we know what's going on, you can understand that it was a Blackwood Company shield, so that was a first hint of the presence of the Blackwood Company interfering with and killing members of the Fighters Guild. And Maglir's explanation that he was sent alone to do a mission that warranted a bigger team. And actually, in retrospect, the journal that he was supposed to retrieve - was it even planted there by the Blackwood Company and the whole mission was bullshit to try to get people killed?

Even the fact that we are able to join the Fighters Guild without any sort of interview process, and how the entire rest of the world all knows that the Fighters Guild is hiring, turns out to be actually absolutely relevant to the overarching plot. And then later we'll learn that of course the Fighters Guild is so desperately hiring, they just lost fifteen of their top-ranking members in the Azani Blackheart fuckup and the Blackwood Company is taking over. It's cool that even the rumors that are primarily meant to inform the player about things to do in the game also turn out to be relevant to the story of what is going on.

The negatives

Some of the quests are really nothingburger. The main conspiracy is memorable, some quests are memorable, but there's a lot of worthless padding. And we mean, it makes sense that there would be more standard contracts between the main plot events, but do they have to be so… nothing? Like, they managed to make the one with Lord Rugdumph be memorable while being a simple quest. Couldn't they have done something more about the will-o-wisp town, which even has the trappings of being more interesting maybe but isn't? And we thought that rescuing the Stone of Saint Alessia would be interesting and loreful, but it sucks. And even the entire situation with Maglir could have had so many more cool branches, but except for the one interaction between how we handled his first defaulting and his last, it's boring and linear.

Though, we know we're setting the bar high, because none of these quests that we consider boring are bad, really. Everything checks out, but they're just not interesting. They would be perfectly normal quests in other games of the time. But next to the average level of creativity of the quests of Oblivion, they're nothing.

We are also displeased about the ultimate resolution of the conflict with the Blackwood Company. Really, we just go in there and kill them all? One thing is to take down the sick Hist, which is already kinda gross and questionable and why does the default solution in video games so often wind up being mercy killing and death... But all the members too? Kill them all? What the fuck!

And we are so sad about how we ultimately must also kill Maglir. His story is definitely a tragedy, and sometimes there must be a story that is a tragedy, so we are not critiquing that. But our interactions with him seemed to call for more branches that do not exist, and ultimately he dies and that's it. What will happen to his off-screen family who were depending on him? Why can't we find them and help them afterward? It's not like his death is a full answer to all the questions his story raised. In fact, it only raises more questions.

Modryn Oreyn

Absolutely the star of this questline. He starts out nasty toward us. He says he's cleaned smarter things off the bottom of his boots. We're just yet another new recruit, joining in this non-illustrious time for the Fighters Guild. Oreyn is a veteran fighter, and he's really good at what he does. All anyone in town has to say about him is that he's quiet, they don't know him too well, but damn, can he fight beautifully. Yet lately, the Guild has been hiring pretty much anyone who walks in the door. Like Maglir, who defaults on every other contract because he's not really a fighter, just someone who needs a job. Like those three assholes in the tavern, who need to be babysat to make sure they don't just flip tables and destroy the last shred of respect the Guild has. And we're just another newbie who is more likely to be a problem than not. Of course Modryn Oreyn doesn't have much respect for us when he first meets us.

But as he sees the quality of our work, he gradually learns that he can trust us, and his attitude towards us changes, until, by the end, we are his most trusted friend. Enemies to friends and maybe even lovers.

You are a fine soldier, my friend. You've made me proud.

He's a problematic favorite, though :P As we've mentioned before, we can argue that Modryn Oreyn's managerial style may have been the cause of many of the issues that have been plaguing the Fighters Guild, beyond the situation with the Blackwood Company.

Modryn Oreyn wants work to be done well and has little patience for substandard work, but this leads him to treat newer members that haven't proven themselves to him as worthless and even disposable, which doesn't help anybody and only lowers the already tanked morale in and about the Fighters Guild. He carelessly sends newbie members on quests that are too difficult for them, expecting them to get on his level already, yet what he's factually doing is setting them up for failure, too impatient to let them grow at their pace. Treated like this, newbie members become despondent, like Maglir, or even aggressive, like the three guys at the tavern. They are being tossed all around Cyrodiil by a nasty manager that has no respect for them, after all.

Another managerial sin of the Fighters Guild is that none of the managers tell the underlings much of anything beyond insults, not even critical information about their missions. This doesn't only apply to Modryn Oreyn, to be fair, but since he's the de facto leader, surely his style rubs off on his direct reports. There are so many jobs we are assigned to where we are provided next to no information and wind up needing to do so much more than what was mentioned.

There was the job where we had been told we were to deliver a box, and instead we wound up as project manager, needing to make sure the other members used the right weapons and successfully defeated all the goblins without incurring any casualties. We don't think FedEx does all of that. For the job with Biene Amelion, we were told absolutely nothing except that she needed something. Something. Yeah, one would think so, considering she's hiring us. Surely our boss knew what was up, why didn't he tell us? And when we were sent to help with Maglir's second defaulted contract, Modryn Oreyn already knew what the contract was all about and could have informed us of it before sending us all the way to Bravil, halfway across Cyrodiil from Chorrol. In the worst case, for this already grievously late contract, we would have needed to go back and forth twice just to ask Oreyn, um, what was this all about actually? Sloppy, sloppy.

Figures we'd get a mission without any real direction.

So, we're not sure that the rapid decline of the Fighters Guild can be uniquely attributed to the underhanded tactics of the Blackwood Company. It sounds like the Fighters Guild was doing a fine job of ruining their own reputations all by themselves. Hiring indiscriminately, leaving even well-meaning recruits to flounder, having multiple PR incidents... it wasn't the Hist sap that made so many people dump the Fighters Guild and try hiring the new group instead.

And speaking of which, as we said, Modryn Oreyn's handling of the Blackwood Company conspiracy was questionable, and it was primarily a bloody revenge and only secondarily justice. And it can be also argued that his opinions towards the methods of the Blackwood Company may be tinted by his cultural prejudices as a Dunmer against Khajiits and Argonians.

We know we're blasting his ass, but we also want to point out the circumstances here. We get to meet Modryn Oreyn only after the failed Azani Blackheart mission. We think that some of the most pungent aspects of his personality reared up due to what happened. He was in command of that mission, and fifteen people died under his leadership, including the son of his direct boss, someone that he almost saw as a son himself. Oreyn seems to be taking it all pretty well, but that itself is probably a symptom that he's not doing so good. We can argue that his guilt about what happened is what most motivated his investigation into Azani Blackheart and the Blackwood Company, actually. Even after he's fired and none of this is in any way his concern anymore, all he can think about is unravelling the conspiracy and defeating the Blackwood Company.

Modryn's devotion to the Fighters Guild and its members, his pride for doing a good job, and his sense of honor are both his strengths and his weaknesses: they are what drives him to be so good, and also the sources of his personal failings. We love to see that in a character.

Out of the four major optional questlines in Oblivion, we can't pick our favorite. Maybe we would say that the Fighters Guild is the least interesting overall. But if it is the least interesting, then it sets the bar this high.

References

These pages on the UESP contain quotes and descriptions of events that were referenced in this article. Some things we wrote about might not be mentioned in the wiki, but we witnessed them directly in the game.

• Fighters Guild
• Azzan
• Burz gro-Khash
• Maglir
• Modryn Oreyn
• Viranus Donton
• Azani Blackheart (quest)
• Azani Blackheart (person)
• The Fugitives
• The Wandering Scholar
• Elante of Alinor
• Trolls of Forsaken Mine
• A Bloody Journal
• The Stone of St. Alessia
• The Noble's Daughter
• Lord Rugdumph gro-Shurgak
• Lady Rogbut gra-Shurgak
• Mystery at Harlun's Watch
• Drarana Thelis
• Information Gathering
• Ajum-Kajin
• Infiltration
• Lore: Hist
• The Hist
• Helm of Oreyn Bearclaw
• Morrowind: Malacath