Rathunas 20151024-Beta-UPDATE

Rathunas is a lovely, and fairly large, town along the extreme western edge of Cyrodiil, well north of Anvil, northwest of Skingrad, and almost due west of Kvatch. It lies just on the boundary of the large area modified by the Unique Landscapes: Brena River Ravine mod, and in fact that mod is a prerequisite for Rathunas. As you can see from the screenshot, Rathunas has as many homes and businesses as some of the walled cities in the vanilla game, but it is an open-layout town with no walls or gates.

Rathunas is a mining town, founded by adventurers (now retired) who cleaned the bandits out of Infested Mine and returned it to productivity. It's a peaceful and prosperous community, with charming shops and a nearby priory devoted to Kynareth, plus sheep farms, gardens, a carpentry shop, taverns, and an inn.

The quiet of Rathunas is suddenly disturbed one day, and therein lies a quest that will lead the heroic player character to a major, multilevel dungeon on an adventure to restore peace and safety to the town. The story is lore-friendly and detailed, and there are multiple ways to complete many of the quest objectives. To ensure your character is sufficiently powerful, the Rathunas quest line is triggered by the player reaching a certain point in the Oblivion main quest (or by a special NPC dialog option if you are not doing the main quest), but the Rathunas mod does not modify any vanilla quest in any way.

Want to see more? Watch the Teaser Trailer and Cinematic Trailer on YouTube, but know this: There is a lot more to the dungeon than what we will show you in the videos! After all these years, our team wants to give you some brand-new surprises in Cyrodiil, so we're not going to spoil that by giving away the best dungeon features in the trailer videos!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tj52qR-rcM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2cHMsYihlU

We've worked hard to make the town, and the quest, lore-friendly and immersive. The dungeon is huge, but every single room has a purpose and a back-story, if the player cares to investigate dialog and in-game clues. You can play this as hack-and-slash, because a great deal of the NPC dialogs are optional, but this is really meant for the roleplay enthusiast who wants to think and strategize and interact with NPCs. There is a reason why this dungeon was built, why its denizens are doing what they are doing, and all of this ties into the back-story lore of the vanilla quest that triggers it.

The dungeon contains hundreds of custom resources from modders' libraries, plus over one hundred custom tiles and set-pieces of my own creation. There are scripted traps, portals, gateways, puzzles, enchantments, potions, and animated objects, and some of the dungeon levels are full-custom meshes (that is, they are not tiled at all). You won't survive this dungeon by assuming it is just like the vanilla dungeons you've already explored! When you complete the quest line (yes, it's several interlocking quests), you earn the eternal gratitude of the town and a reward commensurate with the scope of the adventure.

Four years in development, the Rathunas mod features over 100 voice-acted NPCs with a total of more than 3300 total lines of dialog, performed by 35 voice actors.

Rathunas is being cinematically scored by a collaborative team of professional composers (you can hear samples of their work in the video trailers!). The current BETA release has temporary music in the interior spaces of the town, for testing purposes, but as of this release the final music scores are not yet completed. Two levels of the dungeon have a portion of their final music tracks included in this release.

PREREQUISITES SUMMARY:

(More details are in the README.txt file)

• Latest official patched version of Oblivion
  
• OBSE version 21 or later
  
• COBL
  
• Unique Landscapes - Brena River Ravine
  

Strongly recommended but not required:

• Sound Commands
  
• Enhanced Music and Controls
  

Wrye Bash is strongly recommended for installing the beta version. We plan to offer OMOD support later, but it is not available in this early release.

BETA NOTES:

This BETA release is fully playable. We are seeking player feedback on game balance and difficulty level. If you download, please track this file so you will be notified of updates (especially the music, which will be added as tracks are completed by the composers).

The README.txt file is extensive and detailed. Before you install, please save yourself a lot of grief by taking a few minutes to read it. :-)

This mod has been extensively tested by members of our team, but please do be aware that this is still a BETA release, not production status. It has a number of known bugs and a few incomplete features, and the main purpose of the beta release cycle is to find and fix other bugs.

The two documentation files Rathunas-BUGLIST.txt and Rathunas-ISSUES.txt provide a list (unfortunately, with a few minor spoilers) of known problems. "Bugs" are problems that we expect to fix before production release. "Issues" are things we would like to fix, but in some cases they may be game-engine limitations that we are not sure we can overcome.

We are still fine-tuning the game balance of battles. If you have constructive feedback on the battle difficulty, please comment (avoid spoilers if you can!). Tell us what general type of character you are playing (magic, stealth, or combat), your character's level, and where you have the difficulty slider for the game set. It is particularly useful if you can compare the difficulty of a Rathunas battle to those of other dungeons your character has explored at his or her current level. Just saying "The battle with ___ is too hard/too easy" doesn't help much, because we need a framework for comparison.

If you find a bug that stalls one of the Rathunas quests, don't give up hope! Contact me (Syscrusher) by private message on TES Nexus or TES Alliance. I can provide console workarounds for almost any situation.

PERMISSIONS: Please see the "Perms" link above for permissions and credits. Do NOT upload this mod to other sites without permission.