Board Thread:Lore Discussion/@comment-7629073-20130402085627/@comment-6365350-20130529062407

Each character in the games is whoever you want it to be, you can make up your own lore for them and the entire series if you want to (e.g. Mehrunes Dagon is actually a Rhinoc in disguise) but when someone in-game contradicts that it may ruin your immersion a little.

The way I make up my lore is that I take everything that Bethesda gives me and I work around it, filling in the gaps. Bethesda doesn't go into too much detail with the main characters because if they did there would be nothing left to the players imagination. But at the same time if they said nothing they would have to keep the games in places where there is no chance that the heroes would be mentioned which for some (Hero of Kvatch, Neveranie) this is impossible.

They managed to do it quite well with the Hero of Kvatch by setting Skyrim 200 years later, this gave them a tonne of material and made it so that the Oblivion Crisis is now history so not many people are going to be walking around saying "Gee its a good thing that Khajiit/Nord/Redguard/Orc/Vampire/Women/Man/Arch-Mage/Daedric Prince Hero saved us all from the daedra with his/her Magic/Axe/Sword/Bow/Fists/Singing. Get what I mean?

I create my characters in a way that means they fit in nicely with what Bethesda has given me but at the same time I get to fully flesh them out. For example I think the idea that the Neveraine saved Vvardenfell and became Arch-Mage and became head of the fighters guild and became head of the houses, etc. is ridiculous. How could, or why would, one person do all this? So I make up my own lore that every faction is a different character.

For example. In Oblivion I have a seperate character as Arch-Mage, another for the Dark Brotherhood, and another for thieves guild and so on. In essence my player characters are simply heroes. They are different people each game and they get thier own cool destiny but they remain realistic. My Main Quest character in Oblivion for example goes like this(in a nutshell): Becomes hero of Kvatch, stops the oblivion crisis, then revives the Knights of the Nine and after that goes into Sheogoraths realm hoping to prevent any further people from exiting the portal insane and instead stops the graymarch and becomes the Daedric Prince himself, The End, finito, thats his destiny and he does no more. Meanwhile a different character becomes Arch-Mage and defeats Manimarco and Buys Frostcrag spire, while at the same time someone else becomes the Dark Brotherhood listener and becomes a vampire etc. etc.

This means I have all the quests and events that happen in that game completed but not with one super-god type hero that can do everything, it also means I can create cool interactions with them, for example if my Dark Brotherhood character becomes a vampire he then does not age, so what stops him from being listener during the events of Skyrim? Simple, he is defeated and killed by one of my other characters.

So in summary I don't believe that every protagonist is the same person becasue I create different ones every time, ones that fit in the lore given to me by Bethesda (so my game remains immersive) but at the same time I have lots of fun creating all these different heros (or villains) and thinking of how they would interact with each other.