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Oblivion:Dark Brotherhood
The UESPWiki – Your source for The Elder Scrolls since 1995
The Dark Brotherhood is a guild of professional assassins with considerable influence and power. It is similar to Morrowind's Morag Tong, but despite a common misconception is a completely separate organization; also, the legality of this organization is much more limited than that of its older cousin. Entry is governed not by completing a given task, but by the Brotherhood observing you committing murder.
According to Lucien Lachance, the Dark Brotherhood has sanctuaries all over Cyrodiil, however only one of these is ever accessible to the player; the basement of an abandoned house in Cheydinhal. This particular sanctuary was founded more than 200 years ago.
The current head of the Cheydinhal "family" is Ocheeva, however new family members are given instructions by Vicente Valtieri. Ocheeva receives instructions from the Speaker, Lucien Lachance, who is also responsible for recruiting new members. Lucien in turn receives his instructions from the Listener. The absolute leader of the Dark Brotherhood is the Night Mother.
Ranks: Murderer, Slayer, Eliminator, Assassin, Executioner*, Silencer, Speaker, Listener
- * The rank of Executioner is not available to the player; the player's promotions skip straight from Assassin to Silencer. However, it is officially one of the possible ranks for a Dark Brotherhood member.
For more information about the history of the Dark Brotherhood, see Lore:Dark Brotherhood.
[edit] Joining
Murder someone! As you've most likely heard spoken by citizens anywhere in Cyrodiil or the Shivering Isles, the Dark Brotherhood recruits new members by locating murderers in their sleep. If you want to join and have yet to kill anyone, you must murder an innocent citizen. Upon killing a citizen, whether or not you were detected, a message will appear saying, "Your killing has been observed by forces unknown...." The next time you sleep in a "safe location," a message will appear saying, "The air grows chill and a shadow approaches...." You will then be woken by Lucien Lachance, a Speaker of the Dark Brotherhood. He will offer you membership and describe what you must do to be accepted.
Note that you cannot just personally see to an NPC's death; you must actually murder them in accordance with the game's crime engine. For example, if you have a poison or enchantment that does damage over time, and it's the poison or enchantment, not the initial attack, that does the final point of health damage, you will not trigger the questline.
If you do not wish to level up in the process of joining the Dark Brotherhood, the sleep needed to initiate the quest Through A Nightmare, Darkly will not cause you to level up, but once you cross into the dream world, you will be confronted by Lucien Lachance.
If you don't want to join the Dark Brotherhood, and have been given the offer to join due to something like the Origin of the Gray Prince, you can avoid joining in two ways:
- Forget the quest. It will remain forever in your quest log, but won't bother you.
- When Lucien comes around the first time, kill him after talking to him. He is fairly easy, and his murder removes the initiation quest. You can also loot his Black Hand hood & robes. Killing Lachance is also the only way to drop the Blade of Woe, short of following the Dark Brotherhood questline to completion. Since the quest is marked as "completed," the Blade is no longer considered by the game to be an essential inventory item. After you kill Lucien you will never be able to join the Dark Brotherhood.
[edit] Targets
Almost any non-essential NPC could be killed if you choose. Several quests involve killing NPCs, any of whom could be used as a target to gain entrance to the Dark Brotherhood. Also, after most quests are completed, people involved in the quest could become valid targets with no subsequent consequences. Here are some recommended NPCs who make perfect targets:
- Agronak gro-Malog: If you do the Origin of the Gray Prince quest, he will not attack you at the end of the Arena questline. Although killing him does not put any bounty on your head, it counts as a murder to initiate the Dark Brotherhood questline.
- Alga respawns, so if you kill her you won't lose a character. She can be most easily killed in Olav's Tap and Tack.
- Alval Uvani has a rather low responsibility, but since he does a lot of traveling (see the Dark Brotherhood mission A Matter of Honor for details) it's rather easy to dispose of him on the road without witnesses. The benefit of killing Alval is that you will have already completed one of the later Brotherhood missions.
- Arena foes: You can kill them after casting a fear/demoralize spell, which will not incur a bounty.
- Arnora Auria: After speaking to Jorundr about killing her, don't speak to her and kill her quickly. No bounty, you will finish a quest, and you will get noticed by the Dark Brotherhood.
- Caminalda: During the Anvil Recommendation quest, attacking Caminalda before she attacks you will not give you a bounty but her death will count as a murder.
- Camonna Tong Thug: Killing one of the two Camonna Tong thugs at Walker camp will give you no bounty, as they both have low responsibility. If you attack one of them before he attacked you, killing him is counted as a murder, and will allow you to join the Dark Brotherhood. They both respawn in a few days, as well.
- Umbra is normally killed during Clavicus Vile's quest. However, since you can initiate the quest at any level simply by killing her, this has the dual advantages of giving you a bounty-free murder and of allowing you to complete the main quest at level 1. This can be extremely difficult; see the quest page for details.
[edit] Advantages
- Access to the Cheydinhal Sanctuary is only available to members. In particular, this allows you to purchase from M'raaj-Dar who sells a number of unique magical items and spells. His spells do not follow standard formats, and some of them are cheaper in Magicka cost than any other comparable spell.
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- Note that if you are expelled from the brotherhood, access through the sanctuary's main door is prohibited. If you have earned the Sanctuary Well Key you can enter the Sanctuary that way, but members will attack you on sight and reject any attempt to yield to them.
- There is an opportunity to become a Vampire.
- You gain access to weightless Poisoned Apples. These may be purchased from M'raaj-Dar in the Cheydinhal Sanctuary, or you can "borrow" ten apples from a barrel in Lucien's Chamber in Fort Farragut (the barrel refills every three days). The apples in the barrel are available to any player, but you will normally only learn about them through the Dark Brotherhood. Poisoned Apples bypass poison resistances, so they provide a sure (but tricky) method to kill most people.
- You can receive numerous unique or leveled items, generally as bonuses for successfully completing quests.
- Once you have acquired the rank of Listener (by completing the final Dark Brotherhood quest, Honor Thy Mother), you can have one of the Dark Brotherhood Murderers follow you as a henchman. One of the Murderers is also a very convenient merchant, since she has very low Mercantile skill, buys stolen goods (unlike M'raaj-Dar), and has an extremely high disposition towards you. As Listener, you may also complete tasks to earn 200 gold per week.
[edit] Limitations
- As long as nobody sees you when you kill someone, you will not gain a Bounty or have any subsequent problems with the law. However, completing Dark Brotherhood quests automatically earns you Infamy points. As explained in detail on the article on Infamy, gaining infamy has several effects. One of the most notable is that if your Infamy exceeds your Fame you cannot use temple altars for healing. You may also have difficulty with the Knights of the Nine questline.
- The Dark Brotherhood is not as well accepted as the Morag Tong. The Morag Tong is a government-sanctioned guild of assassins in Morrowind. In Cyrodiil, even trying to contact the Dark Brotherhood is illegal, not to mention being a part of it. If you are caught in the act of a murder, you are on your own. Whichever way you want to handle your bounty, the Brotherhood will not endanger other agents by helping you — unlike the Thieves Guild, which will help its members pay off their bounties.
- The Five Tenets. If you break these rules you are exiled from the Dark Brotherhood and have to defeat the Wrath of Sithis to be reinstated. However, you only have two chances before you are dismissed permanently.
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- The only Tenets you have any chance of breaking in the game are the Fourth and Fifth, which prohibit you from stealing from or killing your fellow assassins. There is no way, through conversations or your character's actions, to break the first three Tenets.
- During the quest The Purification, you gain permanent immunity from the Tenets, and from that point on it is impossible to be expelled from the Brotherhood.
The abandoned house above the main safe haven of the Dark Brotherhood.
[edit] Dark Brotherhood Quests
The Dark Brotherhood questline is unusual in that in between each of the first ten actual quests there is a brief mini-quest that appears in your journal. The only purpose of the mini-quest is to instruct you to ask about your next contract. When you talk to Vicente or Ocheeva the mini-quest is considered complete. The names of the mini-quests are provided here, but they do not have their own quest pages and are generally not taken into account when describing the sequence of Dark Brotherhood quests.
[edit] Initiation Quest
- A Knife in the Dark: You must prove your worthiness to join the Brotherhood. Initiated by the unprovoked murder of any NPC.
[edit] Contract Quests
[edit] Black Hand Quests (Dead Drop Quests)
[edit] Lucien Lachance's Quest #2
[edit] Black Hand Quests
- Honor Thy Mother: Root out the traitor and end his trail of carnage.
- Whispers of Death: Relay the prayers of the vengeful to ensure their vengeance is fulfilled. (Never finishes, since you can perform your duties as Listener indefinitely)
[edit] Non-Contract Quests
[edit] Overall Killing Hints
- While doing the Dark Brotherhood Quests, you may use poisoned apples to kill NPCs silently and without a bounty. Ten respawn in a barrel with a very hard lock in Fort Farragut where Lucien Lachance is located. M'raaj-Dar also sells them; the poisoned apples have a base cost of 300 gold each.
- There is a great alternative to poisoned apples, though. While pickpocketing, you can only place things in an NPC's inventory that have 0 weight, such as Mages' hoods. You can first enchant them with a soul gem to do 'damage on self' then put it in your target's inventory. The best time to do this is while they are sleeping -- making sure to pickpocket any helmet they currently have. When they awaken, they will wear their new hood and it will kill them slowly, but much faster than waiting for them to eat a poisoned apple. Waiting for the mark to eat an apple could take a few days; using a burning, freezing or shocking hood takes health down as soon as they wake up. Alternatively, instead of taking their helmet with the risk of them catching you, you can wake them up by talking to them after putting the enchanted hood in their inventory. They will put the hood on when they go back to sleep. Also, if you put a string of "A" characters before the name of the hood, they will put it on when they wake up even if you didn't steal their other hat. This is because, unless an NPC is scripted to put on a specific form of headgear, they will just put on the first type that they come across in their inventory, which is conveniently in alphabetical order.
- If your character is good at alchemy, make some good poisons (e.g.Triple Damage Poisons) to apply to weapons. Attack whomever you want to kill to take them down in one strike.
This will be an assault so Charm a guard just long enough to talk or yield to him. The Charm spell will ensure he likes you so much that he pays the fine for you.
- If you have the Vile Lair plug-in and have purchased the upgrade for the "Garden of Venomgrowth" area, you will find three Chokeberry bushes. These berries, unfortunately, weigh 0.1 and therefore cannot be reverse-pickpocketed. You can, however, place them on tables and in containers for NPCs to eat.
- You can always cast a frenzy spell on your victims in cities. This way if you cannot get them alone or don't want to commit a crime, you can still kill them very quickly and with the help of the guards or anyone else that the victim attacks.
- Talking to the other Dark Brotherhood members about the contract can sometimes provide useful information (in particular, advice provided by the Argonian Teinaava is often more useful than what you might get from other members).
- When in a tight spot, use help! If one of your followers kills the target in a battle, you will not get the murder bounty, the follower will.
[edit] Members
This is a list of known Dark Brothers. The NPCs who do not have a rank icon are NPCs who are, for various reasons, not members of the standard Dark Brotherhood faction. In most cases they are members of Dark Brotherhood splinter factions (i.e., Dark Brotherhood Elite), and those factions do not have the same rank system as the standard Dark Brotherhood faction. In some cases they are NPCs who are identified during the game as members (primarily victims of the later quests, i.e. Broken Vows onwards).
*There are about a dozen small factions associated with the Dark Brotherhood besides the main one.
- See the Easter Eggs page for the significance of the name of the Black Hand.
- Occasionally, when entering the sanctuary one can find two or three members of the Dark Brotherhood fighting each other for no apparent reason. The fighting will only end when one of the fighters is killed. There is no punishment for looting the corpse.
- If you initiate the first Dark Brotherhood quest in the Shivering Isles, Lucien Lachance will be subject to the "I HAVE NO GREETING" glitch. The console command
setstage 000224EB 10 will allow you to continue the quest as normal.
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- If you hang around in the Sanctuary you may hear the other members have rather morbid, but amusing discussions about their own contracts.
- Even though Arkved may be an easy target to kill because he is always asleep, killing him will not get the Dark Brotherhood's attention.
- If you manage to lower the disposition of the other Dark Brotherhood members to less than 30, you'll receive different responses when you talk to them about a contract, most of them fairly cruel but also rather amusing.
- Some members of the Dark Brotherhood will attack on sight with a disposition of less than 30, and retaliation will cause suspension from the faction.
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