Overview:

Have you ever been playing through the Mages Guild questline and thought, "I wonder what it would be like to join the Order of the Black Worm and become a necromancer working for the King of Worms?"

I thought this too, so I decided to have a go at making such a mod myself.


Notes:

This mod lets you join the Necromancer faction, the Order of the Black Worm, part way through the Mages Guild questline. It has around a dozen new quests, which mostly mirror the Mages Guild quests but with you helping the necromancers instead.

I designed the mod such that if you decide to stay loyal to the Mages Guild, the questline should be unaffected, as should the rest of the game. But if you do join the Order of the Black Worm, you leave the Mages Guild and all of its benefits, but the necromancers will provide you with equivalent benefits.

To start the questline, get all of the recommendations for the Arcane University, then when you are tasked with creating your very own Mage's Staff, you are given a choice (so don't be too trigger happy when you emerge into the Wellspring Grove; the hooded necromancer Noveni is your starting point into my questline).

Three Master Training quests are affected by my mod; Heavy Armor, Illusion and Mysticism. The last two have alterative ways to be completed, add by my mod, but the Heavy Armor quest does not, so if you want Heavy Armor training, complete that Master Training quest before doing a certain quest at Roxey Inn...

Note that my mod is not voiced, so most of the NPC dialogue will be silent, although I have attempted to re-use some lines of dialogue from the original game where possible to help with immersion, but a lot of it is silent and requires reading the subtitles. See my "Installation" section below for more detail.

Also note that I developed this with the Game of the Year edition of Oblivion, but I only ever loaded the Oblivion.esm into the Construction Set, should it shoudn't require any expansions (such as Shivering Isles), but obviously I've not been able to test that.


Additional Credits:

Thanks to HaravinX for the "Necromancer Quest Icon - Modders' Resource" (https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/53572), which I have made use of.


Installation:

I have two .zip files; one called "Main", which contains the files you need for the mod, and an optional one called "Silence". Both of my .zip files contain a Data folder, the contents of which should be dropped into the Data folder of your game's installition directory.

The optional "Silence" .zip just contains voice files that are all just 10 seconds of silence so that the un-voiced dialogue doesn't speed past giving you only a second to read it. If you use the "OBSE -Elys- Universal Silent Voice" mod (currently found here: https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/16622), or similar, then you don't need this "Silence" .zip and probably don't want a bunch of files of silence clogging up your hard drive, which is why I made it a separate optional download.


Uninstallation:

Just manually delete the files from my .zip(s). Specifically, that means the:
- \Data\JoinTheNecromancers.esp
- \Data\textures\menus\icons\quest\icon_necromancer.dds
- \Data\textures\menus\stats\misc_faction_icons\guild_miscellaneous_necro.dds
- (the same two files as above but found under \Data\textures\menus50 and \Data\textures\menus80)
- \Data\Sound\Voice\JoinTheNecromancers.esp (this is a directory, not a file, just delete the whole thing; it also contains the "Silence" files if you download that too)


Known Bugs:

I can't talk about bugs without SPOILERS so if you don't want spoilers then don't read below this point.

These are bugs that I am aware of but am unable to fix, largely because they are limitation of the Oblivion game engine or the scripting so it is impossible for anyone to fix. If I'm wrong about that, then tell me how to fix these issues I'd be keen to know how...

• The necromancy staves are basically a hack, based on the Sanguine Rose scripts, which are also a hack (thanks Bethesda). There are some odd issues, such as:
  

• As with the Sanguine Rose, it doesn't tell you how long the "spell" will last in the top right corner because it isn't a spell; the creature just "disappears" after 20 seconds.
• I made the summoned undead friendly to you, unlike Sanguine Rose creatures, by adding it to the "Undead" faction, which should be friendly to you as the Undead faction and the Necromancer faction are "friends"; however, this means if there are hostile creatures from a faction also friendly towards Undead who are fighting you (probably because you picked a fight with them), your summoned undead will not acknowledge them as a threat.
  

• During the quest "A Matter of Life and Death", you are supposed to use filled Black Soul Gems, but Oblivion's scripting (and OBSE) are incapable of detecting whether a soul gem is filled or not, so I have had no choice but to have my script accept any black soul gem, empty or filled. Worse, it seems that when a script removes a Black Soul Gem from your inventory, the game seems to favour empty ones over filled ones, even though my script is unable to tell the difference. Given that this is a limitation with Oblivion's scripting (and OBSE has it's own bug that prevents it from bypassing this), I will never be able to fix this. If you want to follow the quest as I had intended it to work, take exactly three black soul gems with you (either already filled or you can trap the souls of the Arkay clergy) and use those three for the quest (the reason I say take exactly three is to bypass the fact that it favours removing empty soul gems from you, so if you only have exactly three filled black soul gems on you at that point, then that cannot happen).
  

• Similarly, for my Master Training quest for Mysticism that you receive from my new Mysticism trainer, you are supposed to fill one of every soul gem, so a Petty Soul Gem with a petty soul in it, a Lesser Soul Gem with a lesser soul in it, etc, all the way up to grand and including a filled Black Soul Gem as well. However, because of the same limitations with Oblivion's scripting, it is impossible to tell from within the mod's scripts whether any given soul gem that didn't start off filled has been filled by you or not. So the quest will simply check to see if you have a soul gem of each size. Again, you can either complete it as I had intended using the "honour system" of filling those souls gems as per the quest's instructions before returning to hand in the quest, or just present empty soul gems and basically bypass the quest, because I have no way of stopping you thanks to Oblivion's scripting bugs.