Board Thread:Lore Discussion/@comment-97.81.240.58-20130603234626/@comment-24590102-20140327091041

Agreed. Nobody's going to toss the golden goose in the incinerator.

If they did, the open source crowd would take it over - whether in one name or another. And, as for running out of provinces, well Tamriel is a very small place on a very big Nirn - Bethesda could be churning out viable lore-compatible material for centuries to come because the current formula (i.e. open world with free modding access) works for the same reason that pencil and paper D&D was tremendously successful.

Oh, and the traditional TES prison start would fit very nicely into a Thalmor-dominated world. It might even be a medieval-style death-camp - e.g oubliette's, black pits (large incarcerate-and-forget dungeons), hulks (disease-ridden, derelict, unseaworthy ships used as prisons) and even penal colonies deep in barren country would fit the bill. One slump, mudslide or Nirn-quake - and hatches pop, walls and roofs collapse to the free air, hulks smashed by tsunami, a navigable fissure opens, plague wipes out the penal colony guards or the penal colonists revolt and bust open the prison to recruit fighting men, etc... Going beyond the escape and establishment of hideout or "safe harbour", the larger scale melodrama can emerge through a little truth telling to the right people. From here, an underground could be started and fanned into a full-blown revolution which builds from minor resistance raids staged out of, perhaps, Robin-Hood-styled bases - into targeted infrastructure strikes and, ultimately, a coup d'etat delivered as part of a widespread operation which, simultaneously, takes out major Thalmor command centres across Tamriel.

Of course, a resistance movement has the same problem of subversion that all other political movements suffer from and the key defocussing element which confuses who's right and who's wrong will tend to operate between factions emerging within the resistance who are using the resistance as a vehicle for their own agenda (which is why, revolutions so rarely succeed in changing anything bar the names of the dictators).

And, of course, Bethesda might go the other way and adopt a multi-start approach which has been successfully prototyped by the modding community.