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ansu-gurleht · 4 months ago

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okay, so here’s my little analysis of the mage’s guild faction in morrowind. it’s pretty cool tbh! but you really have to dig a little to find the interesting parts tbh. so hopefully i can shed some light here on those parts.

most likely your introduction to the mage’s guild in morrowind will be at the balmora guildhall. i’m not actually sure if you can start anywhere else? like if any of the other halls have quests doable by an associate. anyways.

you’ll sign up for the guild with ranis athrys, but she’ll immediately say “rank up scrub” and tell you to go get your duties from ajira, an apprentice with the guild. so you go downstairs and talk to her. she’s an alchemist, and her first quest is appropriate: find these four mushrooms that grow in the bitter coast region.

i think this is a fun way to introduce the player to the guild. i don’t think ajira intended this (her goals seemed to be firmly aligned with advancement in the guild), but it teaches you several qualities useful not just to budding mages but to players of the elder scrolls iii: morrowind: exploration, discovery, and identification of usefulness. a mage must explore and know the world, discover its secrets, and identify which secrets are even worth knowing. i shouldn’t have to explain how these concepts are also useful to any morrowind player. also, the mushrooms you are told to find specimens of are all located near the beginning of the game in seyda neen; you don’t have to wander far to find all four. in fact, you may have already collected them all; i always do, but that’s because i know what to look for already lol.

anyways, you go back and turn in the mushrooms, and ajira introduces you to another facet of mage life: rivalry. she has a bet with the enchanter galbedir that she’ll reach journeyman rank before galbedir. as part of that bet, she wants you to sabotage galbedir’s research by swapping out one of her real soul gems with a fake one. now, we obviously don’t know the entire history of this rivalry, but it actually seems like, based on this quest, that ajira is the one who initiated the more underhanded aspects of it, the sabotage and whatnot. i’d always remembered it as galbedir being the more dastardly one, but i suppose not. anyways, yadayadayada, you do the thing and galbedir is none the wiser. (i’m not giving full beat-by-beat on these quests unless it’s relevant to my analysis.)

after that, ajira wants you to collect some flowers, too. teaches the same lessons as before, and is again in an accessible place: the road between seyda neen and balmora. you may have already collected all these, too. come back to ajira, give her the flowers, and she’ll send you off to buy her a ceramic bowl. this quest is actually just an excuse to get you out of the mage’s guildhall so the cell can be prepared for the next quest. if you leave the guildhall without taking the ceramic bowl quest, and then come back, you won’t even get the ceramic bowl quest. it’s just pure filler.

anyways, galbedir has retaliated. stolen and hidden ajira’s reports on those mushrooms and flowers that you gathered somewhere in the guildhall. you can ask around for where they are, and i believe if you get galbedir’s disposition high enough she’ll confess to their whereabouts as well. this actually ties into BOTH of the themes of these early ajira quests: exploration AND rivalry.

after that quest, ajira only has quests for you once you’re of warlock rank, and at this point you’re probably only a journeyman. so she tells you that ranis athrys, the lady who signed you up upstairs, probably has duties for you. but ajira also says that she doesn’t like ranis (we’ll soon find out why) and recommends you go see edwinna elbert in ald’ruhn for duties instead. we’ll get to edwinna later; i think most players are more likely to get their duties from ranis anyway, since she’s closer.

so ranis is actually a really interesting character! let me give you the rundown of what her quests have you do, and then i’ll explain a bit more about them.

first, she has you recruit a telvanni, named llarar bereloth, from the tower sulipund in molag amur, into the guild. ranis says if he won’t, then kill him. at the same time, since she’s nearby, ranis has you collect dues from manwe, a mage’s guild researcher in the cave punabi very close to sulipund. ranis says if you can’t get the money from her, kill her. next, she has you go to an argonian in balmora who is offering restoration training unsanctioned by the guild. ranis says if you can’t get him to go away/stop offering training, kill him. next, she has you escort itermerel to the inn in pelagiad, and find a way to retrieve his notes from him. ranis says to kill him for the notes, if necessary. next, she has you kill a supposed necromancer in maar gan named tashpi ashibael – she doesn’t even offer an alternative way to solve the problem, this time, she just wants you to kill tashpi. (it’s notable that the one with tashpi isn’t even in ranis’ JURISDICTION, being in maar gan – that would fall under the ald’ruhn guild.)

notice a theme here? ranis is VERY open to just killing people to get her way – or even just because they made her mad (as in tashpi’s case – she’s not really a necromancer, she just said no when ranis asked her to join the guild). you might get the impression, since these quests are so early on, that that’s just how the morrowind mage’s guild operates. but once you move on from ranis, you will only ONCE be expected to kill somebody, and in that case you’re attacked on sight anyway. so what’s ranis’ deal?

if you ask llathyno hlaalu, a priestess in the balmora tribunal temple, about “latest rumors,” she’ll tell you that ranis has something against non-guild wizards, and suspects it’s because her parents were killed by the last archmagister of house telvanni, the one before gothren.

fun aside: ranis is possibly VERY old. gothren is spoken of as having been archmagister for a very long time, and was a magister already in 2e582. the archmagister in 2e582, nelos otheri, could then, be the one who had ranis’ parents murdered. but it’s also possible there was an archmagister or two in between nelos and gothren. it’s not really clear, and it’s possible when the eso writers were working on the vvardenfell telvanni stuff they didn’t even take into account this one throwaway line about ranis. but it means that ranis could be at least like. what, 600ish? that’s pretty old even for a dunmer, i’m pretty sure.

i think that it’s most likely that ranis is herself ex-telvanni, which would explain why that archmagister would’ve known them/killed them. it also explains her methods of “kill first ask questions later” – that’s a very telvanni approach.

now, ranis’ last quest is to catch a telvanni spy she suspects has infiltrated the mage’s guild. you can ask around at the various guildhalls and find out there’s a fairly obvious spy right under archmage trebonius’ nose, BUT. there is another approach to this. if you don’t kill itermerel or tashpi (itermerel will just give you his notes if you ask after you finish escorting him, and tashpi can be convinced to just leave vvardenfell and you can tell ranis you killed her anyway), then a new option opens up: you can claim that ranis is the telvanni spy. trebonius will kick her out of the guild and she’ll get her comeuppance. there’s probably an argument to be made that she IS actually a telvanni spy, so it’s not like a total lie, i guess.

that wraps up balmora! i won’t talk about ajira’s later warlock quests, bc they’re not super interesting. just “here’s an artifact i heard about. go to this cave and kill this person and take it from them and cool now you have an artifact”. so let’s move on next to ald’ruhn!

so in the ald’ruhn guildhall, you’re getting your duties from edwinna elbert. the main theme of her quests is the study of the dwemer. she has you bring her a copy of “chronicles of nchuleft,” steal a copy of “chimarvidium” from the vivec guildhall, return the copy of “chimarvidium” later, bring her a dwemer tube, check on an expedition to nchuleftingth, and get some old dwemer documents from mzuleft and bethamez. the only super notable thing about her quests is that, again, she’s having you steal something for the guild. which like, coming off of ranis’ quests is nothing. and at least she has you secretly return it later. so it comes off more like wily mage antics rather than like. literal crimes.

next is wolverine hall in sadrith mora, led by skink-in-tree’s-shade. edwinna’s second quest actually takes you here, to get a potion from skink. anyways, he’s a cool dude. the most respectable mage’s guild quest-giver, since he never asks you to break any laws or do anything shady. it’s said that even the local telvanni respect him as a powerful mage, even though his abolitionist tendencies tend to ruffle some feathers. his quests aren’t as tightly themed as the others, but he has a couple quests where he has you fetch rare books about vampires for him. otherwise, he has you do some other things, like kill a (confirmed) necromancer, arrange for him to meet with an ashlander wise woman, and capture the soul of an ash ghoul.

his first quest is a little interesting. he wants you to escort the scholar tenyeminwe to the docks in sadrith mora; evidently she got into some kind of spat with some telvanni and is afraid for her safety. but nothing happens as you escort her. you make it all the way to the docks with no issue. this kind of indicates to me that 1) the telvanni don’t give as much of a shit (or pretend not to give as much of a shit) about the mage’s guild as the guild thinks they do,* and 2) skink might be a liiiiiiittle paranoid.

here’s a bit of a silly theory i’ve come up with about skink: i think he might be a vampire seeking a cure.

hear me out. yes, the quests about the rare books could just indicate it’s a topic of scholarly interest to him. but what if it’s more personal than that? the second book he has you get, galur rithari’s papers, tells the story of a buoyant armiger who became a vampire and later found a cure. what if he seeks out a wise woman to see if they know of a cure in their old ways? what if he sought out the soul of an ash ghoul as part of a potential cure?

i know it’s a bit far-fetched and there’s no concrete evidence. just a fun little headcanon.

anyways, there’s only one other quest giver of note: the archmage trebonius himself. everyone in the guild seems to regard him as kind of a moron. he’s evidently a rather accomplished battlemage, but he’s not a very competent leader. he only has one quest (at least until you finish the main quest): discover what happened to the dwemer. he clearly gives it to you as an impossible task so you’ll leave him alone. but it’s not impossible: there are three books (the hanging gardens of wasten coridale, the egg of time, and the divine metaphysics) written in dwemeris that can reveal to you the mystery – if only you could read dwemeris. thankfully, there is exactly one person in all of vvardenfell who can read dwemeris: yagrum bagarn, the last living dwarf. he’ll translate the books for you and even offer theories as to what they mean. you can then go back to trebonius to finish the quest, although it’s obvious he is surprised you were able to accomplish this and also doesn’t really care anyways.

i think there’s an interesting question about trebonius: is he really as much of a fool as he seems to be? or is it a farce, a way to make people underestimate him? he very much is an accomplished battlemage, as you discover when you fight him to become archmage yourself. he can be quite a tricky fight. he had to have become so powerful SOMEHOW, right? mages rarely do so without study and some degree of intelligence and competence. it’s definitely POSSIBLE he’s smarter than he lets on, but it’s hard to say. not a lot of proof there. plus, it’s possible much of his difficulty in the fight comes from his powerful enchanted staff and amulet.

speaking of the amulet, he wears the necromancer’s amulet, one of the best amulets in the game. the name is evocative; is trebonius an undercover necromancer? is that a potential reason for his projected stupidity? oh, no, they’ll never expect the idiot of being a necromancer, he can barely cast fireball, much less lead a guild. something to ponder!

and that’s about all there is to say about it! i think it’s a wonderful faction with a lot of cool quests and stories, even if some of them are somewhat buried in subtext. hopefully this little analysis proves interesting!

*- back to this point about the telvanni. the telvanni obviously DO see the mage’s guild as somewhat of a threat to their magical hegemony on vvardenfell, judging by the house telvanni quest “mage’s guild monopoly,” where you have to convince some redoran councilors to block the guild’s monopoly over magical services on the island. but it seems like the telvanni are taking care of business pretty well, and the mage’s guild isn’t posing that much of a threat.

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