Tes4Mod:The Ayleid Steps

The Ayleid Steps



Description
As long as anyone can remember, hundreds of ancient Ayleid stones sit in Cyrodill's wilderness and in Ayleid structures such as ruins and wells. What almost nobody knows however, is what these so-called Steps are supposed to do. Doing the intro Quest, you find out that this network of stones is in fact a teleporting system. Each time you want to teleport, you have to energize the Step with a Welkynd stone.

You can teleport directly into Ayleid ruins, to Ayleid wells, and to lots of locations that the Ayleids once considered important. But you have to prepare yourself: many Steps are defective and will refuse to work, or beam you to random locations. You can land in someone's basement, in government buildings, in caves in the middle of a bunch of goblins, and in very remote and unusual places. Or you can discover about 80 new dungeons, hitherto unknown to man, where lots of treasure and enemies await you. There are two new homes to be found, too - a small one on completing the introduction quest (not very pretty, but it has a bedroll, a private Stepstone (no doors) and many safe containers), and a large one at the end of the final quest, situated in an Ayleid ruin in a private domain.

To start the intro quest you have to try to activate one Stepstone and read a book on the topic. There are no quest markers in your compass during the intro quest - you have to examine, read and think a bit, and search a lot. When you can actually use the Steps, the quest is not over before you find a certain location mentioned in the clues. But after that, you can imagine your own neverending quest: try to map the Network, search for those VERY hard to find lost ruins, and of course hunt for Welkynd stones. 

After you have used a certain amount of Steps you will notice that many vanilla NPCs start to teleport through Cyrodiil, and then an epic storyline unfolds in 11 quests. You will learn why the Ayleids built the Steps, where they went after doing so, and what the hero of the opening quest really went through before he died.

To have them blend into the vanilla game these quests are time-driven. To start them, you cannot do much else than explore the Steps and pay attention. Certain events have to develop in faraway locations, dictating the progress of the quest line. Between two quests you often have to wait 4 days. Some of the quests themselves can take a week to complete, so that completion of the entire questline may take 6 to 10 (game)weeks.

The purpose of the quests is to tell the Stepstones story. Part of it is developing while you play but somewhere far away, another part is history. You'll often find yourself involved as an onlooker who performs tasks without fully comprehending what is going on. The NPCs have their own agendas. Although there is plenty to do for you the story is not player-centered, so there are very few alternatives, choices or multiple questlines.

This plugin intends to offer a reason to keep on exploring and adventuring for experienced characters, i.e. those that have completed all default game quests and have attained a level over 20. However, it can be played well by low level characters, except for the final quest in which you face some powerful enemies. Playing the Ayleid Steps with FCOM, or OOO and MMM, or other overhaul mods is highly recommended!


Patches/Addons
TAS is compatible with all UL and Better Cities mods through a script.
A patch for All Natural Real Lights is available here.
A patch for Ayleid Respawn is available here.
Includes compatibility with Oblivion XP.


Notes