New blorbo from today's one-shot. Name's Varen Frostkiss, and he's a snow elf storm sorcerer / tempest cleric. Surprisingly one of my more light-hearted muses, and will happily be the camp therapist.

An alternative ESO Planemeld, that isn’t such a cliché:

Learning that Tharn was originally intended to be ESO's big bad makes the whole MQ make much more sense, I think.

Tharn is a loyal Empire man to the core, and he's sick of all these itinerant Emperors gutting his beloved State. For better or worse, the Emperor must be imbued with Divine right, or the throne is inherently unstable (in his opinion). The chaos of the interregnum as a whole reflects this. Tharn believes in the Dragon, but sometimes needs must, and so he looks for a way to push the god's hand in divinely selecting a new favorite for the throne.

Mannimarco at this point is just a lobbyist in a cold war with Vanus over the public opinion of his favorite subject. Tharn meets him through a shared interest in magical studies. Mostly Daedric conjuration, but a bit of the old necromancy as well. His ideas for its use as troop support are especially interesting. He also seems to have an unusually keen insight into the nature of the Dragon. Mannimarco posits that Akatosh might be forced to pick a new fav if Nirn is somehow existentially threatened. Tharn doesn’t like this, but he's desperate, so they make a deal to engineer a threat so big that the Dragon can't possibly ignore it.

In return, Mannimarco will be hailed as a savior of the realm for his role in "discovering and aiding" the Dragonborn Emperor, and will receive a permanent appointment to the Elder Council: Something that would assure necromancers get a say in the laws of the land, thus solidifying his cult of personality and allowing him his longed-for ascension via hero-worship. Tharn doesn’t necessarily have to believe in this either. It only matters that Mannimarco does. Being a diplomat, Tharn would be familiar with elven beliefs.

The player would start the game the same, with Lyris helping us escape, and with Caldwell finding us a hole in the barrier to crawl out of, and with Varen using his knowledge of prophecy to be in the right place at the right time. In this version, an out of control cult of Molag Bal are the ones who sacrifice us, Mannimarco having pretended to ally with them in order to enact his plan.**

We would then continue fighting for one of the Alliances. All the faction quests would go as normal, but with only the other Alliances and Cyrodiil as enemies, not the Worm Cult. Or maybe the Worm Cult in some key places, since Mannimarco is now in charge of keeping Bal busy while they figure out how to undo this mess they caused. Meanwhile, we would slowly be uncovering the conspiracy, culminating in us re-sealing the liminal barrier in much the same way we do now, with Tharn’s and maybe even Mannimarco's help. As part of the reveal, moth priest Varen tells us that an Emperor is already preordained, so they'll just have to suck it up until the dude is born. Nice try, y'all.

Even the Coldharbour invasion can go as-is, given that we need to be inside Bal's plane to reseal the barrier. Vanus gets dragged into helping due to his greater influence outside of Cyrodiil, which doesn’t have the resources to mount an invasion of Coldharbour while still fending off attack from the three big babies/Alliance leaders. Vanus was supposed to get them to agree to a temporary truce, but our quest with him reveals how well that works out. His snafu with the teleport can go as is, and all/most of the Coldharbour quests can be pretty much the same.

Naturally, the public knows nothing of this, and just assumes that Bal randomly decided to invade all by himself. It wouldn’t be the first time, after all.

PS: It occurs to me that Tharn's actions in Elseweyr might be how his original MQ mission was supposed to go. The Elseweyr MQ was awesome btw. A few holes and clichés here and there, but overall very cool, and politically plausible too.

** Mannimarco could still kill us I think. That cut scene is way too good to just throw away. It would also be a good opportunity for some dialouge where we can choose to give him shit for it later, even as he helps us fix it.