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SPOILER INFO
As concerns the mod The Forgotten City, this article is a major spoiler. However, it's almost impossible to play this mod right without spoilers. If you don't believe me, just go ahead and try.
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I felt I had to write more about the mod The Forgotten City. I entered it first as Deflorator (meaning, in my previous game) and I was far from impressed because it took me to semi-dark utterly joyless ruins with a horror movie atmosphere that was depressing and repulsive and didn't contain absolutely anything to get me intrigued. Add to it the letters that read themselves with voice when opened, without an option to interrupt it, let alone turn it off, and it is no wonder that I used a spell from another mod to teleport out of there. It occurred at the point where The Forgotten City mod had told me to kill a ghost and get a key from him, to open a door to something I couldn't care less about.
However, I remembered that during my short stay in The Forgotten Ruins, I had found it strange that the ghost thing had been marked "optional" in my journal. Reluctant to admit that The Forgotten City mod had been as utterly pointless as it had seemed to be, I wondered if there had been a real objective I had somehow failed to find. So I read some articles. Turned out that "optional" thing was actually the one and only thing I needed to do at that point. Why the author had chosen to mark it "optional" is still a mystery to me. But that's not the point. Reading those articles, I couldn't help learning that the mod would not remain like that to the end. I would end up traveling into the past and finding myself in an actual city which I would have to try and save from destruction. However, it sounded too weird to make me care, and with the mod's beginning being the definition of uninviting, I wasn't exactly eager to find out whether or not the rest would be any better.
* * *
Many game-hours later (still in Deflorator's game, not my current game), I found myself curious about The Forgotten City once again. I so wanted to have been mistaken and the mod to be interesting after all. It certainly helped that I was running out of interesting activities. So, after I had rounded things up in Solstheim and done some more stuff in increasingly boring Skyrim proper, I decided to give The Forgotten City another try.
I went back to The Forgotten Ruins, and met that shameless liar Cassia again. She acted as if nothing was wrong. She was like: oh, it's so great you found a way out, but will you go back there and find my brother? Actually, I had found her brother, dead, but for some reason the mod forced me to tell her that I wasn't sure it was him, although I was sure, and it was him. But I went along with that nonsense just to be able to move on with the quest.
I agreed to jump into the well again. First, however, I fucked Cassia in the ass, right in front of my girls. Not only did she raise no objections, she actually performed a flawless act of enjoying the fuck, the sneaky slut. (Just in case some of you need to be reminded – anything concerning sex is of course the workings of SexLab Framework and Defeat, and has nothing to do with The Forgotten City mod.)
Then I jumped in. FYI, I eventually found out that I had done the right thing taking the mod author's advice and leaving my followers behind. Not only is there nothing for them to do, there are one or two deadly places you will go where you can protect only one person, that is yourself.
(If you are using iNeed, please keep in mind that there is severe shortage of drink in The Forgotten City. Non-alcoholic drinks seem to be non-existent, and the water in the lake is not accepted by the mod. So make sure you bring a lot of drinking water or something.)
I went into the citadel again, ascended the stairs and met the ghost. One shot and it was dead. Then I used the key to enter Lakehouse. The time travel was nothing complicated – just go through a strange door.
I found myself in a town where the buildings were located like in the aforementioned ruins, except that there was daylight and there were proper houses and living people instead of burnt corpses.
* * *
I am not going to tell you everything that happened in the mod. I will only bring out some points that are important to know.
After having walked around a bit, I was overjoyed to find myself in a place that was far more interesting that Skyrim proper, more interesting than Solstheim, and I even daresay more interesting than Falskaar. Apart from the physical beauty and the believability of the people, it was a delight beyond words to see how things were connected. Skyrim quests usually require no thinking. All you have to do is to kill (almost) everyone at a certain location and, occasionally, to have a superhuman ability (or superhuman patience) to find hidden things. In The Forgotten Ruins, you do real detective work. You get a piece of information from one source and another one from another, find one or another person acting in a suspicious manner, and form several hypotheses as to what is wrong and what you need to do. You might end up thinking really hard as to where to get some more information from, in order to figure out which one of your hypotheses is actually right. The one-dimensional bunglers at Bethesda ought to learn from the author of The Forgotten City how to write proper quests that are actually entertaining and make sense.
By the way, I wonder what made the reviewers describe this mod as "dark". The Forgotten City mod is nowhere near as sinister as the Skyrim main quest, the college quest, the Dawnguard quest and the Dragonborn quest.
(And do I need to tell you that after playing through The Forgotten City, Skyrim proper seems even more dull and pointless than before?)
I was also delighted to find that the Dwarves Law was not, as I had suspected at first, something arbitrary and weird which the author had made up just to have something evil to fight against. Dwarves Law means simply that when anyone in the town kills or steals, all the people in the town will be executed. Strangely enough, that mass extermination is not triggered by the bandits attacking the townspeople and your killing the bandits. The same goes for G-assault, which is weird because it, although added by another mod, still counts as assault in Skyrim proper. But as soon as you steal something, an ethereal voice says "Many shall pay for the crime of one" and the destruction begins. In other words, Dwarves Law may be excessively harsh, but it is certainly plausible.
* * *
However, no words can adequately express the disappointment I felt when I found out that the mod is badly rigged against the player. It just won't let you spend time in that delightful town and enjoy figuring it all out. Let me explain.
I had, I think, explored all the clues that were relatively easy to find, run up against walls in a few places, and then called it a day in the real world. During the pause, I did dome thinking and figured out a few more things to explore that would possibly help me move forward with my quest. Greatly pleased with my ability to get ahead without needing to read forum articles, I resumed the game. I was indeed lucky to find an excellent lead. Following it up, I suddenly heard that doomsday voice announcing the destruction. What did I do, I thought? I was just walking in a cave and exploring it. How in heaven's name did I break Drarwes Law? I reloaded a previous save and tried a different idea I had come up with. Again, while I was just walking around and looking at things, I suddenly heard the doomsday voice again and saw the massacre begin.
It occurred to me that it might have been not my fault. Maybe someone else had committed a crime. But how to find out who it had been? I was completely clueless and turned to online articles for help. I saw vague hints suggesting that there seemed to be a time limit to my investigation. If I understood it correctly, it's like this – after a certain time, someone would commit a crime (as to who, there was no information), thus violating Dwarves Law and triggering the genocide. You could, however, get more time by going to the Lakehouse, where Metellus would send you to the future (that is, the correct time of your game) and you could travel to the past again, finding the town as you first saw it, and could continue your investigation – meaning, start from the scratch as the townsfolk were concerned, but using the knowledge and items you had previously found, and building up on that. (Example: it looks like you can't go on with your investigation without an item a certain individual has, but he won't give it to you. So you kill him and take that item, triggering the massacre, and run quickly into the Lakehouse and do the time travel again, ending up in the beginning, but now you already have that item in your inventory. Judging by forum articles, that is actually what you are supposed to do.)
Apparently that repeated time travel can be done as many times as you want to, thus giving you unlimited time to gather all the data you need. There is one rather obvious problem, though – your time travel will always bring you to the moment of your first arrival, meaning each time you will have to go and introduce yourself to the jarl like the first time, and all the people will talk to you like they had never seen you before. As you may have noticed from my earlier writings, I am extremely allergic to repetitiveness. For instance, I have never been able to play any of the Fallout games the second time. After my third serious Skyrim game, I find it hard to imagine that there will never be a fourth one. I simply can't stand going to the exact same places trying to pretend I don't already know them inside out, hearing the exact same words from people and trying to imagine I haven't heard it all before. So this repeated returning-as-if-for-the-first-time thing is completely unacceptable to me. Does the author seriously expect me to go through a number of conversations, verbatim, possibly three, four, five times? Not gonna happen.
That is why I did some more reading to find out if repeated time travel is really the only way to get through The Forgotten City quest. To the best of my knowledge, it is. Also, I was disappointed to find out that the mod is screwed in one more way. You see, your primary goal is to get back from the past into your own time. As it turned out, there are several ways of achieving that goal. The catch is that only one of them saves the town's population from being killed. Other solutions allow you to get back into your time all right, but the town still ends up destroyed. Obviously, that kind of a "solution" is unacceptable, because then you could have just as well never gone to Forgotten City in the first place.
* * *
So, firstly – the quest requires you to go through annoying repetitions, and secondly – there is only one right way to solve the quest, the other paths opened to you being pitfalls. Most importantly, while you play, it is by no means evident which choices are the right ones. You have an overwhelming chance to guess wrong and fail to save the town. This is what I meant when I said that the mod is almost impossible to play right without spoilers.
Such having-to-guess-right thing would be all right if The Forgotten City were a standalone game. But as it is a part of Skyrim, it would make no sense to reload and play through it several times until you've found the one and only right solution. When you play the mod as a part of your Skyrim game, and when you are a proper Skyrim player, not one who keeps reloading until things finally go his way, you will with great probability fail to save the town. Sadly, even in the unlikely event that you succeed guessing the right solution, you will find yourself utterly disappointed because it's over almost as soon as it has started. Thanks to The Forgotten City, I can now imagine how a horny woman must feel when the man ejaculates after two minutes.
What was the author thinking? Why would anyone go through the colossal work of creating all those buildings and all those people and that awesomely brilliant web of details and hints and clues, only to force his players to rush through it like a tourist on a one-week around-the-world trip? When I saw the town, I was looking forward to spending a lot of time in it. Maybe not as much as I had done in Falskaar, but I never expected The Forgotten City to go off half-cocked like it did.
Imagine being informed that you have won 1,000,000 euros in a lottery, and only when you go to collect your prize, you are told that 99% of it is taken by the government as tax, so you will only receive 10,000 euros. It's still a lot of money, but after having expected a million and walked around imagining all the things you were going to do with it, you can't help feeling terribly disappointed, and indeed betrayed. That is how The Forgotten City made me feel.
* * *
That was about the mod in general. Now I'd like to take the opportunity to comment on some details that rubbed me the wrong way.
One was the conversation with that Arbiter creature. He said he "knew" that I was a brazen thief, compulsively stealing without restraint or remorse. (His words.) The mod acted as if it was actually true. Your objection in the dialogue choices is labeled "Lie". That is a rotten insult for which the mod author deserves several punches in his face. I never stole anything in my game except when it was inevitable to move a quest on, or to punish an NPC for unacceptable behavior. In fact I am rather puzzled and disgusted by the Skyrim developers' idea that stealing is a normal way of making a living and that the word "thief" carries no derogatory meaning. I can't stress enough how I detest the mod author's arrogantly making assumptions the truthfulness of which he can't possibly know.
It is also illogical how the Arbiter, when finally persuaded to repeal the Dwarves Law, says he has come to the realization that the humankind is not ready for peace and order. That is ridiculous. Peace and order are totally possible. It is not the surveillance that is wrong. It is wrong to kill everyone when one person breaks the law. Law and order means punishing the offender in an appropriate way, not indiscriminately destroying all the people around him in an act of infantile rage.
* * *
While the system of clues is, as I already said, most ingenious and utterly fascinating, the crucial events that complete the quest make barely any sense at all.
Those events are centered around Ulrin's missing wife Maisi. Before I got struck by the mod author's Premature Completion Syndrome, I had come to the suspicion that Maisi was not dead at all. I had come across some clues suggesting that Jarl Metellus might be keeping her imprisoned and using her for some terrible experiments. I gathered as much from various people's mentioning a ghost in the citadel wailing with a woman's voice, and the citadel cook Asanshi's statement that Metellus demanded double food rations. Further, there were hints at Metellus's doing some experiments of unknown kind, and his private population registry mentioned how one or another citizen had or lacked "potential". Then there was the gate upstairs that could not be opened without a key. Finally, Maisi had suddenly disappeared at night. Her amulet was found in the tunnels, but what reason could she possibly have had for going there?
Having read the reviews suggesting how "dark" this mod was, I actually dreaded the moment I would find out what kind of experiments it was Metellus was doing, because I rather liked the guy. I was quite sure it would turn out to be something utterly abhorrent. Now, I happened to complete the quest without ever finding Maisi. However, I was too curious to simply leave it at that. So I saved my game in order to go on with it later, loaded an earlier save and went through that gate in the citadel. Sure enough, there was a room with Maisi chained to a wall. Turned out Metellus wasn't doing anything gory with her. He was merely using her as a sex slave. Well, probably whipping her or something, because I found her in deadly fear, but there were no signs of anything necromantic or such. Considering the blood-chilling things we are used to encountering in Skyrim, the case of Metellus and Maisi is rather timid. I am happy with that. I am grateful to the author for not making Metellus a complete monster. I still find the guy really cool, far superior to any other man in the town.
What I'm saying is that the story of Maisi as such is perfectly all right. What I'm getting at is the crime that had broken the Dwarves Law and triggered the massacre in my playthrough. I was never told what it was, so I read the articles I was able to find. The most popular guess seemed to be that Ulrin killed the jarl after finding out that Maisi was being held captive by the latter. However, I haven't seen the slightest attempt of explanation as to how he found out. Look at the facts. Ulrin has been in depression for weeks, getting drunk night after night. Now he has been given (by you) apparent proof that his wife met her death in the tunnels. He has no information that Metellus had anything to do with it. He doesn't say or do anything suggesting that he has any suspicions about Metellus. Yet, he suddenly rushes into the palace and kills him? That is nonsense.
Whatever. Maybe it was someone else who broke the law. After all, Gulvar seemed to have difficulties controlling his anger; then there was Marius who was acting in a suspicious manner; and Rykas who was outright insane might have snapped any moment (even though the mod author ludicrously tries to suggest afterwards that Rykas is actually a nice guy). But never mind that. There is not enough information to determine who committed that crime. What is a fact established with certainty, though, is that after the Dwarves Law was repealed, it was Ulrin who killed Metellus, and the exact same arguments apply – how the hell did he find out, or, for that matter, what had moved him to stop drowning his brain in the bottle and start playing detective all of a sudden? I can't think of anything.
Even if we imagine that he found some evidence the mod author chose not to tell us about (a proper writer doesn't pull rabbits out of hats like that, but let's just assume, for the argument's sake, that it is the case), we are expected to believe that Ulrin went into the palace, DRAGGED Metellus outside (that's what I was told – he didn't just quickly stab him when his back was turned) and Sato and Domitus failed to do anything about it! That is bullshit.
Worse than that, it was physically impossible for Ulrin to get his hands on Harubal's hidden key, so the only way for him to actually find Maisi was to force Metellus to hand over his key. That would have been before he dragged him outside and killed him. It is crystal clear that it can't have happened.
What does this sum up to? On the one hand, I am sad that Metellus, a man after my own heart, ended up killed. On the other hand, I was grateful beyond words to see that my fears that he would turn up a repulsive maniac were unfounded. And mind you, the mod author staged his defeat in an obviously impossible way, it's not a real defeat.
As to Maisi herself, there is something the mod leaves completely hanging in the air: how did she end up in that room in the first place? All we're ever told are her words that the jarl "tricked" her there. Now, how do you TRICK a faithful wife into your quarters at night? Next thing she'll tell us she expected to be employed as a babysitter.
Apparently, she was not exactly a model wife. Even the letter she left behind looks in hindsight like an attempt to appease her conscience and to make her (unsatisfactory but still dear in a way) husband feel less bad. Her behavior suggests she loved the jarl. That's why she trusted him blindly – because she wanted to trust him. That's what women do. She found herself badly betrayed and ended up hating her as much as he had loved him. (Don't forget that she insisted on killing him, not caring about causing the death of a number of her completely innocent co-citizens. That's how infinitely betrayed she felt, having expected to become the town's First Lady.) After Metellus was killed, she chose to leave with her husband because she couldn't own up to any of it. She couldn't walk around among the people she knew, constantly worrying that maybe they can somehow guess that she went to Metellus of her own free will.
Added much later: Wait, how come raping and imprisoning a woman, and whipping her without her consent didn't violate the Dwarves Law and trigger a massacre?
The final thing that is somewhat strange is Gulvar becoming the new jarl. I mean, look at him. He is so beta. I wouldn't trust him to be able to wear the jarl's circlet on his head without dropping it every ten paces, let alone handle the town administration to (more or less) everyone's satisfaction. For that matter, he admits himself that he's not the jarl type. Who else, you may ask. We can safely presume that Domitus was too much hated to be even considered. Hjormund, Vitus, Marius and Ulrin left the town, Vernon is hardly more qualified as Gulvar, and Rykas is most certainly not the kind of man whom people would have looked up to and said: how about you will be our new leader. But there is Habiq, a prudent, level-headed person. Admittedly, not a born politician, but surely more capable of handling the town government than Gulvar with his angers and insecurities. And, mind you, not all that keen to remain a shopkeeper. (As to his wife having a child, that would fully occupy a man's time only in the world of Hollywood, not in the world of Skyrim. On the contrary, for their child's future's sake, his wife would have urged him to grab any opportunity to rise up in the town hierarchy.)
* * *
To conclude with something positive – apart from the physical beauty of the town and the admirably ingenious beginning of the quest, I can't praise the women of this mod enough. Just like Falskaar, The Forgotten City has female NPCs that actually act like believable women. I think it is even better than Falskaar in this respect.
* * *
The bottom line:
The Forgotten City is good, but it could have easily been ten times better.
Being shown to the Citadel after my arrival.
Lovely Gaia paying for a big favor.
The Citadel kitchen.
On Metellus's balcony with that nymphomaniac Rastasia after the liberation.
[originally published 2017-11-21]Added in 2021:
In my most recent game (as Laura), I never entered The Forgotten City. Having played through the quest once, I feel no desire whatsoever to do it again and try to pretend I don't already know all about it. Were I playing a man, I would still go, just to fuck the women. As a woman, I don't even have that reason.
