As good as the Dark Brotherhood questline is, sometimes you want something a bit different. Maybe you want to roleplay a totally good character, so you either avoid murders, get a mod to ignore or increase the murder count, or just kill Lucien Lachance if he ever shows up. But what do you get? You don’t really get any reward and you lose out on some of the exclusive items the Brotherhood quests offer, like Cruelty’s Heart or the Deceiver’s Finery. To remedy this, and give the player something to do after killing Lucien, I made this mod.
Currently, this mod is very basic (and also a bit of a lie in name). With limited modding knowledge, I doubt I'll expand it to anything more complicated, but as it stands now, it is complete.
You don’t technically destroy the Brotherhood, but you do kill the whole Cheydinhal Sanctuary. You also get the exclusive bonuses that you couldn’t get otherwise from ignoring the guild.
 
What you do
After you kill Lucien, your Blade of Woe unlocks its true power, and you’re led to the sanctuary via a note on his person. Be careful though, because after killing him, you’ll have to fight the Wrath of Sithis (so you can get the unique dagger). Once you go to the sanctuary, you can kill everyone there and loot M’raaj-Dar’s unique items from a new chest in the training room. You’re then led to Fort Farragut to pick up the bonus items, and you can then talk to the count of Cheydinhal for a reward of 2000 gold and 20 fame. And that’s about it. It’s short and sweet, not too inspired, but hey, at least you get a reward for killing a chapter of the Dark Brotherhood.
It should be noted that if you progress in the Dark Brotherhood quest as normal with this mod installed, the only new addition is the chest of wares in the sanctuary, so you can steal them early, or get them after the Purification. There hopefully shouldn't be any weird conflicts.
 
What you don't do
You won’t end up killing any of the other brotherhood members you normally would in the questline, so there will still be some surviving members. Only the Cheydinhal chapter will be fully destroyed. However, Ungolim will be marked unessential, so you can kill him if you'd like, though in game you won't know he's the Listener. Alval Uvani is also still killable.
 
How it works
This mod uses its own custom quest and scripts to ensure maximum compatibility. However, it does edit the “fail” stage of A Knife in a Dark to give the true Blade of Woe and spawn a Wrath of Sithis. If any mod modifies A Knife in the Dark, you just won’t receive the weapon or fight the Wrath of Sithis.
It also adds items to Lucien as well as chests in the Sanctuary and Fort. I’m not experienced with changing areas, but it may be incompatible if another mod edits those specific areas.
The scripts shouldn't lead to any conflicts in theory, but if you run into issues let me know. You SHOULD be able to run this mod even if you play through the Brotherhood normally. The only benefit, however, is that you can steal M’raaj-Dar’s stock early, or during Purification, if you didn't buy them
All rewards you receive should be leveled just like if you obtained them from the quests. This is to keep it in line with the vanilla experience and not give the player a bunch of useful high-level gear at the cost of murdering a beggar and killing a few NPCs. If you don’t like it, there’s plenty of mods that allow leveled items to be increased to the next stage.
The note to Ocheeva won’t appear unless you start this quest, and the bonus chest won’t appear unless you read the note. It’s a bit cheap and possibly unrealistic in the mod itself, but this is so you can’t just go straight to the chest whenever you want, and you can’t find it when you’re progressing in the questline normally. You can at least pretend the note was sent after you killed Lucien, and the chest was there because Lucien didn't have time to distribute the items.
 
What you still can't obtain
You can’t receive the Night Mother’s Blessing or Shadowmere, since the blessing wouldn’t be bestowed on someone who killed a whole sanctuary, and Shadowmere is Lucien’s horse and likely lost. I won’t be adding the Night Mother’s Blessing, ever. I also don't think it's worth adding Shadowmere.
 
Known Bugs/Issues
The members in the sanctuary don’t currently aggro on the player immediately, they just ask you to leave, but will defend themselves. However, it's a bit awkward since they'll just sit there and let you get a free hit in. Except for the orc, he'll go swinging it seems.
You can technically pickpocket Lucien’s orders off of him early and read them, though they don’t actually activate the quest unless you finished a Knife in the Dark by killing him. That also means if you kill him before starting that quest, it’ll bug mine.
Though technically not a bonus item, I still put the Boots of Bloody Bounding in the bonus chest. You can just pretend Teinaava got them as a bonus on one of his contracts and is just giving them to you if you help him.
The quest marker goes right to the chest, which leads you to the secret entrance. I'm sure I can fix it, but it works for now, and it's simpler.
The main file of this mod is incompatible with Better Dark Brotherhood Sanctuary or similar mods. The note will still show up properly, but the chest in the training room will be unreachable normally since the cells are merged in BDBS. I uploaded an optional file you can use instead of the main that moves the chest to the left of the training room entrance.
 
It should also be noted that the code and scripts are not the most efficient, but they seem to work so far.
 
Overall, the mod is assumed stable and gives you what I described. Hopefully, it serves good characters well and gives you a good reward besides the satisfaction of killing Lucien.
I'm open to any advice or suggestions, but I make no promises on actually implementing them. You're also welcome to modify this and make it better as long as you give me credit.