A possible location for Sotha Sil

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MinerMan60101's picture
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I was thinking, and it would be a good idea for the locations of the Tribunal to make an equilateral triangle. So far we know the locations of Vivec and Almalexia. So you can find the location of Sotha Sil with this information.

I photoshopped an image of the basemap with a equilateral triangle to give an approxamate representation of where i think it should be.

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I think it not be cool to place this very closed city close to so urban place.
I think be hidden south jungles will be much better.

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Do we actually know for certain that the Clockwork City is a physical location and not some sort of pocket realm?

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Yes, It was on concept bethesda map

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I think I read somewhere that TR was going to slap some ruins in the swamp and call it "Sotha Sil", an abandoned settlement of one of his monastic orders

Now, I'm pretty heavily influenced by Trainwiz, but I do subscribe to the idea that his Clockwork city is a Dyson Sphere only tangentially connected to Nirn, with only portals leading to the Mundus.

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I think it need physical ruins - only as enter portal to city. Something like that

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I'm not convinced that Sotha Sil needs to be built by TR.  For one, Trainwiz already did a peerless rendition of it for Sotha Sil Expanded.  If Sotha Sil were to be created, a slew of new assets would be needed, and the extensive amount of work needed to create those, build the city, populate it, and develop quests may just be more trouble than it's worthy. I'm also of the mind that it isn't a physical place in Morrowind.

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Ruins with a portal to Sotha Sil Expanded?

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That'd break the quest Trainwiz made.  His is a continuation of the ending to Tribunal.  

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Hm, true.

The ruins we put in could be a portion of it with Sotha Sil Expanded being another. Some of the writing about the Clockwork City gives me the feeling that it slowly turned into a massive underground network, not so much a city so much as slowly overtaking the workings of the world. Like an automaton, the outside looks human, but you peel away the skin and it's all a machine. Or a virus, Sotha Sil hacking into the Mundus code and turning it to his own design, the physical manifestation of which is all these gears and things just under the surface of Morrowind.

How to put that into ingame terms though? Hm.

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I actually said about ruins because TR gonna remade tribunal, and I think search for actual ruins to enter city will be good chance to made some tribunal quests outdide almalexia city and actually move player to explore mainland.
And big sotha sil style ruins under energy dome in jungles will be awesome, I think.

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Sotha Sil was not always the person he was when he died and my gut says that just like the other two Tribunes he would have had a seat of power on Nirn in his name. I would say even if he hadn't wanted it, he would have been expected to have one and that it would have been a very interesting place.

However, this is not to say the place he eventually resided is not in a pocket dimension (or similar structure) of his own devising. He could have simply torn his ultimate labs and residences from his city and put them into his pocket dimension or they could be lost underground.

The underground idea, regardless of whether he moved his more important labs and rooms to a pocket dimension, probably was true, seeing as he obviously had a certain liking for Dwemer practices and ideas. A lot of his city could have been built underground.  This also allows a possible TR interpretation to be lazy with external asset creation if need be, and allow the city to be all the more hidden.

However, above all of this, his city, and I do believe there was one (his seat of power expected of him by his followers, no-doubt), must lie in a place not walked by many people. Jungles are certainly this type of place. He was a mad scientist-wizard, and like the Dres and Telvanni probably didn't like outsiders trampling about his city.

Like Almalexia or Vivec (the cities), his city proper (the external portion, not the final resting place and probable lab portion of his city, wherever it ended up) was probably a sight to behold, with unique architecture (Dunmer + his own musings) and an even more unique local populace of worshippers and like-minded mad scientist-wizards and oddly dressed and mannered Ordinators.

I'm not sure, but I think the interior cultures of Morrowind that he probably most associated with were people like the Telvanni, Dwemer and Dres, and to a more managerial and cultish respect the Indoril. I don't think he had much use for Redoran or Hlaalu culture, and probably hated the interventions of the Empire, the Imperial Cult, the Guilds or Morag Tong and even for that matter the normal everyday Tribunal Temple members and their practices. But for the purposes of research, he was probably a big fan of Dwemer and Daedric places, artifacts, persons and research (mad scientist-wizard after all), and I'm sure he had more than a helping hand in establishing the Ghostfence and reengineering Dunmer ancestor worship to power it with souls from Necrom.

All that is to say, his city, Sotha Sil, was (or is) probably a fascinating place. A figurative gold-mine for adventuring and whatnot. The externally still existing parts of the city should exist somewhere to mark the fact that this Dunmer/Chimer was an important figure and a living deity for thousands of years before he disappeared (rather recently the game suggests).

But that city (or its ruins) shouldn't be easy to find. The suggestion that it still exists somewhere is questioned even in the game, but the difference is that when that city is mentioned, it's called the "Clockwork City", not "Sotha Sil". This leads me to my most important point- that the "Clockwork City" is to "Sotha Sil" as "Mournhold" is to "Almalexia". The most central seat of power to the grander city of Sotha Sil, and maybe no longer on the plane of Nirn. The requirement to ever connect the "Clockwork City" to "Sotha Sil" with any kind of door or teleportation is up to the discretion of the modders of TR, but I think whether the greater city of "Sotha Sil" existed at all is a no-brainer for a god worshipped for thousands of years when his brother and sister in god-hood both have their own. I'm sure he had a bigger head for such self-aggrandizement before he got old and silly.

***************************************

EDIT: A side thought- Expand the underground rivers where riverstriders are used in the Deshaan to encompass a deep underground lake and cliff system with huge interiors and high ceilings that extend under much of southern Morrowind.  Then a case could easily be made that Sotha Sil (the city) was tucked as a settlement in the side of a cliff in a glowing mushroom laden giant cavern system, and the way to find it was always hidden as a task for pilgramage and had been mostly lost since Sotha Sil "left".  The city of hidden dunmer mad scientist-wizards could still be lurking in the depths, lost in Telvannic madness and Dresrosian xenophobia.

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I don't really see Sotha Sil as either having been a mad scientist at any point or as having had a bigger head for self-aggrandizement. To me, he has always seemed like the idealist; he was the one most driven by ideology in betraying Nerevar, whereas for Vivec and Almalexia they were probably fuelled as much by emotion as anything else. He may have realized the weight of the betrayal sooner than the others -- perhaps even before doing the deed -- but had a vision for Morrowind and its people that Nerevar stood in the way of. In return, he felt he needed to devote every fiber of his being to seeing that vision through, so as to retroactively justify the unjustifyable. I think devotion would have made him more uncomfortable than anything else, and may have had a part in driving him to seclusion, which seems to have been what grated on Almalexia in particular, who fed on the devotion of the Dunmer to cover her grief.

As far as creating the ruins are concerned, as Biboran said as we'll be bypassing Tribunal, and by extension bypassing Sotha Sil Expanded. So if we want Sotha Sil to have any presence in the main quest, which he probably should at some level, we'll probably need to create our own interpretation of Sotha Sil. We could keep it close to how Tribunal had it, or maybe even make it smaller, or make it a bit larger, though naturally nowhere near the scale of Trainwiz's mod, which by all means could be seen as a more 'definitive' representation. Ours only needs to be utilitarian.

Edit: as for the location, I specifically don't want the Salt Washes to become more extensive or convoluted than they need to be. I think they should flow pretty directly to Lake Andaram, converging with neighbouring tributaries on the way, with only relatively small and occasional caves leading off to the sides. If we want any sort of exterior location for Sotha Sil, the Arnesian Jungle, which doesn't connect to the Salt Washes, probably remains the best bet, as per the Bethesda map. The jungle already swallowed the Cantemiric Velothi, so for Sotha Sil, who wanted the seclusion, it would probably seem like a pretty suitable location. Also no biggie if one of his experiments goes wrong. The proximity to hostile Argonians is less ideal, but perhaps if the 'city' were in the western reaches of the region it would be suitably far away from the zone of conflict.

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Alright, it sounds like you don't disagree with my central thesis that he "would" have had a city, still; just in a location apart from greater society.  It sounds like the unknown part is the extent of this "city".

  • What do you think of separating the "Clockwork City" and "Sotha Sil" like "Mournhold" is separated from "Almalexia"?  A core and an exterior, with the core possibly removed to a pocket dimension.
    • It would let you focus on a more original vision for "Sotha Sil" while catering to the Tribunal expansion's disconnection of the "Clockwork City" from the external world.  This would let you change less with "The Clockwork City" and be more creative with what "Sotha Sil" would be like.
    • Plus it would let you explain the lack of any other people in the "Clockwork City" and still let "Sotha Sil" be important in a different way, since people could be living or had been living there
    • The point of contention is whether people are still living in Sotha Sil and if so how they've lived there since dropping off the map without interference or acknowledgement by the rest of Dunmer society.  And also, why they'd still be living there, and what kind of people would live alongside Sotha Sil.
  • Lastly- Since you don't want to expand the riverways underground, would you be opposed to the rest of the idea of a large underground cavern separate from the Salt Washes, under the Arnesian Jungle instead.
    • It would let you avoid creating a lot of external meshes, and would help explain the lack of people stumbling across it, unless they're really looking for it, out in the middle of the jungle.
    • I think if you put it above ground, it pretty much eliminates the possibilty that people would still be living there unless you did another "hidden spider valley" kind of thing.
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Again, my approach is more utilitarian. I think we first need to figure out what purpose Sotha Sil needs to serve in our mod, both the individual and the location, before we worry about the most interesting and, lastly, viable way to implement it.
I don't think Sotha Sil needs to be an exterior location, or have an exterior location, but it could have. I do like the image of Sotha Sil emerging out of the thick vegetation of lower Arnesia, and at this point it's worth mentioning that I imagine an exterior Sotha Sil more as a teaming mass of cylinders, spheres and cogs striving upwards than as a pyramid.
What I do think is that our Sotha Sil doesn't need to make sense any more than Lie Rock does or needs to. The interior doesn't need to fit the exterior, nor the interior cells match up with each other logically. Perhaps the exterior of Sotha Sil is scattered across Morrowind in various nook and crannies, perhaps it's all in one place, perhaps it doesn't exist at all. Sotha Sil could have hallways that loop into themselves, and the Nerevarine has to create a new path to exit the loop.
I personally don't feel that we need to worry about Bethesda's Sotha Sil at all, as it will still exist in our mod, just closed off to a greater or lesser degree. I personally would rather not do the same thing twice and just do our own thing, but that's sure to be a point of contention.
There could be divisions in Sotha Sil's interior, just as I suggested for the exterior. Perhaps one exterior location links to the 'public' city -- whether now abandoned or not -- and another links to the private, and they link up to each other directly or indirectly. That said, I'm not sure if Sotha Sil should ever have contained a city in the traditional sense; if it had a 'public' area, I'd suggest something like a continuation of Necrom's basement, restricted to the priesthood. But even if we go with this fractured approach, I doubt our Sotha Sil should be anywhere near large enough to warrant splitting it into a distinct Clockwork City and Sotha Sil.

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I think it may be a good idea to know the location of the city but not necessarily build a physical ruin. I like the idea that Sotha Sil is still a physical place, but in a sense dislocated from the earth. I say: no ruins of any sort on the surface, but at least know the general placement of it.

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According to TES Online Clockwork City is well, smaller than Netch and you need to be magically shrunk to enter it.

As for having city called Sotha Sil. I like the idea that Seht doesn't have such place on Earth Nirn, so he stays mysterious and different from Ayem and Vehk.

But if you're going to actually create Sotha Sil as a city I have another location suggestion. Green is MinerMan60101 proposition, Orange is "Necrom triangle" location.

 

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I don't really care for ESO's interpretation. In c0da you get the feel that Sotha Sil and then Memory worked so long and hard that the entire planet was eventually replaced with clockwork just under the surface, and it sounds more thematically interesting, the world slowly being replaced by a machine...

EDIT: I apparently already said that in this thread. But...

I've always imagined it in the orange location. I think I recall lore about it being near Black Marsh in a swamp on the same latitude of Narsis, but I can't say off the top of my head where that lore comes from.

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Kevaar

I don't really care for ESO's interpretation. In c0da you get the feel that Sotha Sil and then Memory worked so long and hard that the entire planet was eventually replaced with clockwork just under the surface, and it sounds more thematically interesting, the world slowly being replaced by a machine...

I've always imagined it in the orange location. I think I recall lore about it being near Black Marsh in a swamp on the same latitude of Narsis, but I can't say off the top of my head where that lore comes from.

The first Pocket Guide's entry on Morrowind says that tales place Sotha Sil "hidden in the steaming swamps of southern Morrowind", though cautions that no reliable reports exist on its location or even if it exists outside stories. You may be thinking of the Morrowind concept map Biboran posted, which, in line with PGE1, places it close to the orange location (though more to the west), at roughly the same latitude as Tear.

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For what it's worth, my interpretation has always been attached to the clockwork city existing as a network underneath morrowind. The Pocket guide and 2920 report different locations, indicating that the city's location isn't common knowledge. Despite that, I like the idea of having a small external representation of Sotha Sil in the swamps and am on board with Gnomey's imagery for the exteriors. Minimally, to acheive the effect that the clockwork city is a sprawling underground, exits could be made within the interior that exit to different cities on the mainland.

I can't imagine Sotha Sil being a publically accessible city. I imagine it functioning like Tel Fyr, inaccessible without levitation and occupied by some magical/religious faction for which lore is developed. I like the idea of the Psijics occupying and researching it after hearing of Sotha Sil's death, but I am not sure whether this is compatable with what you guys have developed already.

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It doesn't need to even be a sprawling underground city to fit that lore – it could be the pocket dimension and have several, possibly defunct, entrances hidden across Mainland Morrowind. So perhaps you can enter with a spell as in Tribunal. But perhaps some ancient ritual could open the portal gate in the ruins in the Arnesian Jungle, while another ritual could open a portal in a ruins near Lake Andaram. Perhaps the Clockwork City is tiny like in ESO, but that doesn't proclude exterior portions of Sotha Sil being ruins in various parts of Morrowind. It just would require teleportation and the right event triggers to open up these portals. I like the idea of them all being defunct until some questline involving the interior workings of the Clockwork City is completed, and then they open up, like a variation of the Propylon Index quest in Vvardenfell. It could even be the equivalent concept for Mainland Morrowind, with a central travel-gate room of doors in the Clockwork City to provide the ease of transport once it's reactivated. This would be best with 4-7 different locations spread across Morrowind.

Just an idea.

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I think it could be interesting if there were multiple ruins of different age that could tell something of the progress of the character Sotha Sil. Several abandoned prototype Clockwork City complexes on the physical plane that he built and tried and then abandoned as they wouldn't perform to his satisfaction, until he realized that he had to put in a pocket plane for it to work flawlessly? Each Clockwork City built in a different manner in an attempt to find perfection, but failing. The ruins filled, obviously, with mechanical traps and contraptions, unfinished inventions and various books, plans, diaries, and the like of knowledge, which obviously would be of interest to the Temple, to the Mages Guild, to the Archaeological Society, and to any and all who desires a taste of the brilliance of a living god. Perhaps ruins also containing the remains and written accounts of the mortal retainers Sotha Sil had but for various reasons eventually left behind. It could show the development of a character that went from a powerful recluse who still was benevolent to his people, to a man balancing on the edge between madness and sanity ere sensations of the Heart grew too great, to the man that he appeared to be towards the end - someone who had seen the signs and portents and knew what the future held, and was abject.

In fact, it could, if done right, be made into a quite interesting quest where a high-level character that had advanced in all the guilds would have to balance the interests of all involved, and perhaps even decide whether the legacy of Sotha Sil should be preserved or destroyed.
 

A possibility would be if there were a Dissident Priest who would actually believe the protagonist when told that Almalexia and Sotha Sil is dead (it wouldn't really work to use Vivec himself since I assume quite many decided to end his existence), and then they tells the protagonist that while the lives of Almalexia and Vivec are well chronicled while Sotha Sil is shrouded in mystery, and that they've recently learned the location of a ruin that could contain information that could shed light on this elusive characters' life.

Then one ruin would lead to another, each one revealing a part of Sotha Sil's life, each one adding a piece to the puzzle (obviously, the puzzle could still be obscure and incomplete to keep some of the mystic aura of Sotha Sil), up until the last physical Clockwork City where he leaves behind his last loyal mortal retainers to abandon Nirn and step into another plane where only the perfection of the machinations existed, where finally his mind would be alone to create a city that would at last reflect his semi-divine mind.

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I'm not going to say a lot. But I vote for Sotha Sil is an abandoned city in the arnesian jungle. And clockwork city is in a different plane, and is where Sotha Sil stayed to not be troubled by what goes on in tamriel.

Not having a physical city is silly imo. Even if its in ruins, that works best I think.

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+1 to Arnesia, but no enteirly in ruins. Having the last remant of Sotha Sils living cult fighting against the encroaching jungle and mad fabricants while vainly trying to contact their lost god is too good a premise to pass up.

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That does sound pretty cool actually.

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One thing I do want to note is that TR isn't on a fixed schedule to get things done unlike Bethesda was. So the arguement of "It will delay the project and is not worth the trouble" is not a good arguement here. Technically we have all the time in the world to create Morrowind as the best it can be. Why would anyone want to start putting up time constraints for something like this? Just something that bugged me, and I do not wish to see people follow that idea when Sotha Sil could be something wonderful for the player to stumble upon.

End rant!

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