Pillow Madhouse (Wil quest)

[DestinedToDie]

Upon exploring the world the player will find a fort - built of pillows! Name? Fort Daylight or Fort Nitemoth?

Inside you will find its only occupant - Laalam Sovortis.

Greeting:

Are you real? I've been seeing things lately. Things that don't exist. Terrible monsters. This all started when I couldn't sleep anymore.

monsters:

Can't you hear them? How they growl and pound on the walls of this fortress? At first I only saw them in the corner of my eye. They would run away scared when I tried to so much as look at them. Now it is me who lives in fear of them. They want to get in and do who knows what. Makes me want to crawl under the blanket. Such horrid creatures can't be real! I know they aren't. Right? Please say they aren't...

blanket:

I used to have a blanket that made me really itchy. I would spend the entire night scratching myself all over. That's not a problem anymore. I already found the perfect blanket during my trip around Morrowind. Wish it were so with my pillow.

sleep:

My neighbours would make a ruckus at nights that kept me up. I moved out and now my only neighbours are monsters.

moved out:

I was forced to. Spent my entire fortune on pillows. I know it sounds crazy, but after my favourite pillow got chewed into pieces by a rat, I just couldn't find a pillow I could sleep on. Being so used to my pillow, any other felt off. On many occasions it felt like I was trying to sleep with my head on a brick...

Continue

So I traveled around Morrowind in search of the perfect extra-comfy pillow. Eventually my money ran out and I had to sell my house to cover for my debts. I became a homeless man and all I had left was pillows. I decided to move out of the noisy town and use the brickstone pillows to build my new home.

home:

You're welcome to stay. Eat some food. Drink fine wine. Use my bed, if you wish. Azura knows I don't have a use for it. Don't worry about the monsters. I will stay here and keep guard in case they barge in.

Should the player decide to take a nap in Laalam's bed, they will wake up in the same room to find Laalam gone. Or is it the same room? Actually, they are dreaming at this point and have been moved to a different interior that's almost identical to this one. Difference is, Pillow Monsters and minisize statues of Sheogorath are now present in its halls.

Though the pillow monsters don't do much damage, they have a lot of HP. I imagine them to use werewolf sound file growls in combat. Maybe make some of them small and fast, others big and slow? This creature would need modeling and animating. I think that if we want to, it's possible to half-ass it and just take atronach models, change their texture to white. They would have pillows in their inventory.

Now, the mini statues of Sheogorath. These aren't actually monsters, but I think an interesting idea on my part. Rescaled statics with a script that turns the lights in the room off. A new statue is then spawned closer to the player and the old one disabled - while the player is basically blind. So there would be light flickering, statue getting closer and closer. Until it reaches the player and sets the player's health to 0 at close distance.

This means we'll have seperate rooms for pillow monsters and Sheog statues. Maybe a combination of the two? Think it will be annoying to the player? At any rate, it should end with a boss encounter - a large scale pillow monster. Once dead, a large Sheogorath statue will appear. It's going to be inescapable. Once it gets you, you hear a laugh and wake up. It was a dream all along. An extra comfy pillow is added to your inventory.

Greeting:

Hey, I think the monsters have settled down for the moment. I don't hear them banging on the walls anymore. No idea why, but they had to get tired eventually.

pillow:

That pillow! Where did you get it? No, don't tell me. It looks comfortable and that's all that matters. I thank you, my friend. Here, have this invisible fluffy pillow armor. It's not very protective, but the lightest armor there is. That, and the monsters won't be able to tell that you're not one of them. Now, I will finally be able to get some sleep. Fare well, %PCName.

Goodbye

Laalam dies.

Extra ending: Make Laalam resurrect when you remove the pillow from his corpse? He'll be mad at you interrupting his sleep and attack.

Reward: Invisible fluffy pillow armor*.

*SPOILER ALERT - Invisible fluffy pillow armor is imaginary.

[DestinedToDie]

Edited some amazingness into the design.

[DestinedToDie]

Some concept art.

Pillow fort.

http://i.imgur.com/POBr4.jpg

Pillow monster.

http://www.esquire.com/cm/esquire/images/fc/Pierce%27s-pillow-monster.jpg

Pillow house.

http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll78/De_ressurect/ScreenShot25.jpg

Another pillow fort.

http://i58.photobucket.com/albums/g275/AverageAsian237/PillowFort-1.gif

Pillow bed.

http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll78/De_ressurect/ScreenShot26.jpg

[arvisrend]

I'd prefer the quest to be more consequentially about Sheogorath.

First, make the pillow fort a pillow tent (although Laalam will be calling it a fort). Place it in front of a Sheogorath shrine.

Laalam will tell you that he has not slept for months. That he has searched the horizon for some sleep and nothing has helped, but lately he came to suspect (a voice from his pillow told him?) that the answer lies in an enchanted pillow that is hidden in said shrine. Now he is camping in front of the shrine but the Golden Saint at the entrance is not letting him pass, claiming that he does not deserve his sleep. Sleepless, he is of course even less able to fight the Saint than he would normally be, so he asks you for help.

You kill the saint and escort Laalam into the shrine, hearing some hilarious lullaby from Sheogorath along the way (would WeirdSexy volunteer to voice Sheogorath?). He ascends to the altar and throws himself on the huge golden pillow lying atop it. The pillow eats him up (in the worst case, by messagebox -- not sure how to script something like that with the Morrowind engine). If you try to move away (activate) the pillow, Sheogorath shouts at you (who are you to deny Laalam his well-deserved sleep?) and summons a pillow atronach (which is precisely what the name suggests and hopefully not hard to make in nifskope from the existing atronach models).

I don't like any "it was all a dream" relativizations. Sheogorath plays these games straight.