The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Sentient Weapon v3.0 Mod

This mod lets you purchase a weapon with one of three different personalities. The weapon will talk and comment about your exploits as you use it.

The Sentient Weapon
a mod for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

by NarkyBark, aka Damon Psarris (narkymods@gmail.com)
other mods include Dread Knights for Morrowind, and Theurgist for Morrowind

Big thanks to the TES:CS forums crew for not only teaching me a new trick or
two, but to remind me of old ones (details list!) Thanks to the folks at mods
and SA for coming up with a few lines I could use.


**************************************************************
INSTALLING THE PLUGIN
**************************************************************
FIRST! If you are receiving this as a ZIP file, someone else screwed with my
archive and ruined it. Don't use it, download it from another source. I've
been finding these all over the net and it's sad. They're not my packages,
they're incomplete and they won't work properly!

OK then. Inside the Oblivion folder,

SentientWeapon.esp goes into the main Data folder.

There are three additional folders for Sound, Meshes and Textures. If you do
not have these folders already, place them in your Data folder.
If you do already have them, take the files from the compressed archive and
place them inside the respective folders EXACTLY as they are from the
compressed .rar archive. For example, the Meshes for this mod must be placed
in a hierarchy as follows:
Oblivion/Data/Meshes/Weapons/sentnt/ and inside that go the fifteen new .nif
files.

Place everything exactly like it is in the archived file, assuming the Data
folder is the base directory. The easiest thing to do would be to just copy
subfolders where needed- for the above example if you have
Oblivion/Data/Meshes/Weapons folders already, just copy the sentnt folder into
the Weapons folder. DO NOT RENAME ANY FILES OR ANY FOLDERS.

If you have a previous version of this mod installed, you may overwrite any
older part of it. See OTHER STUFF 4.

Once installed, select the plugin in your Data Files menu in the game.

If you need to remove the plugin, most items are in appropriately named
Sentient folders. The exception to this is NPC dialog; in those cases, all
dialogue from this mod starts with "zzy".


**************************************************************
DESCRIPTION
**************************************************************

A wandering weaponsmith gives you an offer- he'll make you a sentient weapon if
you can just get him all the materials. It promises to be powerful, but also
potentially comical as the weapon will audibly comment on your adventures as
you go.

You will get to choose between three different personalities:

Fred the Coward, who is an eternal pessimist. Sample:
http://www.clock.org/~psarris/levels/fred.mp3
Atkivir the Murderer, who delights in misery and killing. Sample:
http://www.clock.org/~psarris/levels/atkivir.mp3
Samson the (wanna be) Hero, who's just a regular guy and isn't terribly
special. Sample: http://www.clock.org/~psarris/levels/samson.mp3

Each personality also has mildly different combat abilities, but this is
especially true if you make a critical hit (which are fairly rare). A critical
hit from Fred might make the enemy run away, one from Atkivir deals heavy
damage, and one from Samson cripples their combat abilities.

You may also choose to take all three personalities- in which case they will go
back and forth over control of the weapon.

**************************************************************
SPOILERS - WHERE TO START
**************************************************************

---------------------------The aforementioned weaponsmith likes to wander the
main road from Bravil to Leyawiin...



**************************************************************
OTHER STUFF
**************************************************************

1. I made a conscious decision not to use quest markers in most of this quest,
especially since a lot of the tasks are "find" tasks and having markers would
ruin the fun! You will get one for the questgiver, and at another stage where
I thought it would be too frustrating to find things. Most of the weapon
miniquests have quest markers, however.

2. If there's a lot of interest, I can expand the voice sets for the weapons.
I'm leaving it where it is for now because I need to see how people's machines
handle it. I downsampled as much as I could without killing too much quality.
(Of course, since I wrote that, I added another 200+ voices! Every time I sit
down it's like I can think of another little thing to add...)

3. During the quest you may notice some NPC's do not have a voice to go along
with their text. This is because they are part of the main Oblivion world, and
I figured it would be best just to keep them silent instead of me trying to
match the original actor's voice. Silent is better than jarringly different.

4. If you have a previous version running of this mod, unfortunately I think
this time I would recommend you start it over. All of the scripting has
changed, and I've seen wonky things happen if you just continue from an older
version. To restart, simply load the game without the mod, save, then reload
with it, and everything will be reset. This does not harm weapon "levelling"-
that is always calculated according to your current level.


**************************************************************
THE WEAPONS
**************************************************************

You have the choice of single or double handed blade or blunt, as well as bows.
You will be given the option to pick a single weapon personality, or have it
randomly rotate between all three. Fred now gives you an extra defense,
Atkivir does more magical damage and Samson does magical damage more
frequently. When a weapon's miniquest is completed, they get more bonuses, and
these bonuses increase the more of the weapon's hated enemy you defeat. These
miniquests will start themselves after using the weapon for a period of time.
Once a quest is started, the weapon will not switch to another personality
(assuming you have the tri-weapon.) (Note that Atkivir's quest will cause your
infamy and bounty to go up...)

When you receive your weapon, you will also get a Talk to the Weapon spell.
Casting this gives you many options. You may increase or decrease the weapon's
chat frequency. You may toggle the weapon's health damaging ability, in case
you have companion NPC's. You may sacrifice mana regeneration to increase your
weapon's damage, proc frequency, or both. Note that if your mana ever runs out,
the weapon charge features will cancel out and it will go back to normal.

Weapons may occasionally frenzy. When this occurs, you have a short period
where every hit done by the weapon will have a special effect. You may also
notice this effect when hitting a weapon's hated enemy. The more of these
enemies you hurt or kill, the more powerful the weapon becomes, both in damage
and enchantments. It will take more than a few kills for this to occur, just
keep at it.

Weapons never need to be recharged, that's one of the benefits. Their magical
damage also scales with your level. The higher level you get, the more damage
they do per hit (this goes by pure character level, not by any skill.) Weapons
also have a slight chance of doing a critical hit, which may do great damage (or
in the case of Fred, may make them run away!)

***************************************
TROUBLESHOOTING
***************************************

A few people seem to have an issue where the questgiver won't say hello to you.
This was hopefully fixed in V3, where all dialog has been moved to specific
quest lines. This is an issue with greetings, and has to do with mod load
order.
In case it doesn't still work for you, there's an easy workaround. Hop into the
console and type "addtopic zzyweaponsmith". This will bypass the initial hello
and maybe one or two lines of dialogue, flavor stuff mostly, and get you
rolling. This is being addressed in the next version.

Do not rename the esp file! This will cause NPCs to lose their spoken
dialogue.

If you choose the tri-weapon, you will lose your hot key bind when the weapon
switches. Also, if you had repaired the weapon to 125%, it will revert to
100%.

The way it currently stands, if you use a companion mod, you really don't want
to hit them with your weapon. Trust me. Their health won't recover. You can
instead tell your weapon to turn off this special damage; once you do, you can
use it freely and all health delivered is curable.

To people who can't find the "creature"- make sure you've searched all the
corners, it likes to hide. And if you're using Adrenaline, it's possible it got
mobbed- look for the corpse.

If you ever find yourself with more than one sentient weapon in your
possession, you should get rid of one. Having two will really mess with most
of the scripting- a lot of it relies on you having only one. (I only know of
one rare circumstance where you can end up with two by mistake.) If you have
more than one, all bets are off.

***************************************
HINTS
***************************************

I've added a little hint section for the main quest. Are you stuck?
http://www.clock.org/~psarris/levels/help/sentient.htm

**************************************************************
VOICE ACTORS
**************************************************************

It's scarily all me (narkybark). I'm pretty satisfied with most of the voices
except for perhaps Samson, I couldn't capture the booming sound that I wanted
and so it seems a little flat. I even did SJ's voice, who knew? Griff sounds
a little dopey, but you'll see why I had to make his voice different from my
own, and heck he only has five lines :D


**************************************************************
VERSION HISTORY
**************************************************************

Version 1.0, released April 17, 2006.

Version 2.0, released April 28, 2006. Big update!
* Added 250+ more weapon voice lines!
* Added unsheathing effect, along with new voices for this. Removed yellow
glow effect.
* Added player ability gain when using weapon. This was in place before, but
did not announce itself, now it does.
* Increased the base value of all weapons, and also increased durability of
all weapons by 15-20%.
* Increased magical hit damage of all weapons. They now do 30% more damage on
a magic strike.
* Added new situational voices, and voices for weapon when not in use.
* Added a subtle change in original quest.
* Changed the "marble" part of the quest. It is no longer possible to lose
the marble. (I should've done it this way from the start, I knew that problem
might occur).
* Changed the wording for the marble hilt and the mithril bar quests.
* Added bows to the choice of weapons!
* Added the option to have all three personalities on a weapon! Each one will
have control for a period of time.
* Added weapon frenzy! Your weapon may get tired of it all and go berserk.
Tri-personality weapons can still do this, but less often.
* Removed two dialogue conflicts from previous version (they weren't altered
before, but marked as so needlessly).
* Greatly increased the chance of a weapon talking.

Version 2.1- Patch to fix reflecting bug issues. Update 3 invalidates this
patch and includes all fixes.

Version 3.0, released June 5, 2006. Barring any bugs, the final version.
* All quest dialogue has been moved to new directories. There should no longer
be potential conflicts with other mods.
* Added options to increase or decrease weapon chatter.
* I removed curses entirely. I kept getting some very strange bugs concerning
critters and NPCs using this ability against you, even when they're never been
hit and you don't even have a weapon in your inventory. In the end I decided
to simplify the whole thing, and remove them.
* In its place, you now have the option to raise weapon damage or proc
frequency by sacrificing mana regeneration.
* The player can no longer have magical damage reflected back to him. I kept
this as permanent health damage, so you don't want to hit companion NPC's with
it. You have the option of turning it off at any time.
* Minor bug fixes in the graveyard and elsewhere. Removed gold and mithril NPC
dialogue when quest is done. Lowered Atkivir's frenzy duration slightly.
Lowered base magical damage slightly, in return for increasing weapon power
after solving miniquest.
* Three new mini quests! One for each personality. They'll give you a task-
help them with a past problem and you can find out more about their lives.
There may be some rewards for helping them, as well...
* Completing a weapon task makes that weapon more powerful, and gives them a
hated enemy- the more of the specific foe you defeat, the more powerful your
weapon gets!

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