Oblivion is famed for its Radiant AI, the gloriously ambitious ant farm that grants all of its friendly NPCs a charming form of scheduled life. In the course of a typical day you’ll find them waking in their own beds, tilling in the fields, breaking off for lunch, and in the case of the deeply paranoid wood elf Glarthir, sneaking round the back of the local church in the middle of the night to plot killings.
But what many players never suspected is that their enemies were living their own lives too. In particular, the goblins: the first truly intelligent opponents you come across in the sewers of the Imperial City, and an invaluable source of door-opening tools in those early hours when your lockpicks seem to snap like reeds.
As it turns out, during all of our days and months engaging in guild antics, delving into dungeons and circumventing the main plotline, the greenskins were engaged in their own activities: goblin wars. These skirmishes play out between seven different tribes scattered across Cyrodiil, and on that fateful day you’re first pumped out of the sewer system like so much excrement, there are already two disputes ongoing – between the Sharp Tooth and the White Skin goblins just outside Skingrad, and between the Bloody Hand and Rock Biters on the Yellow Road. If there’s a recipe for disaster in the goblin community, it’s picking a cave too close to your nearest neighbours.
Why care about the geography? Because there’s a chance you can get caught up in the goblin wars, or even deliberately get involved. The precipitating event for an intraspecies kerfuffle is always the theft of a totem: the spark-firing stick you’ll often find guarded by a shaman, the spiritual head of a given goblin tribe. If a tribe loses their holy staff, they’ll send out a war party to recover it. And if that operation leads them into another tribe’s mineshaft, then there’ll be plenty of casualties, and no sleep for anybody. As a player, you can break in and steal a totem yourself – either to plonk it outside the cave of its proper owner and end hostilities, or plant it somewhere else and let chaos ensue.