Join the Order of the Black Worm

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, so 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", which I have made use of.

Also thanks to BowmoreLover for the "Lazy Voice Finder", it's so useful for finding voice clips.

And thanks to DanRuta for the "xVASynth v3 - SKVA Synth" and "xVASynth v3 - OBVA Synth", and aragonit for "XVASynth - AI Voice Imperial", for my optional AI voices.

Installation:

I have three .zip files; one called "Main", which contains the files you need for the mod, and a couple of optional ones called "AI Voices" and "Silence". All 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.