Sunday, January 2, 2011

An Oblivion Mod

The first thing that I must point out is that this is NOT for you tl;dr idiots out there. This is, however, a true story about the strangest and probably most demented Oblivion mod I've ever come across. What makes that true is the fact that it's more than just a mod. It's something else. To this day I'm baffled as to what it "really" was, or how the hell most of it was even possible.

It all started about a year ago. After 2 years of playing the shit out of the main quest, guilds, Shivering Isles and Knights of the Nine, I finally started filling up on a bunch of mods that even looked slightly appealing to me. Anyways, one day I was browsing through Planet Elder Scrolls and one mod in particular caught my attention, as it had no screenshots and the description simply read: "HIGH LEVEL AND SKILLED ONLY, PLEASE!!" The file itself was a single .esp, only a byte large. I was clueless at to what it could be, which either unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) brought me to give it a whirl.

I downloaded it and opened up Windows Explorer, only to find to my surprise that it had also come with a .txt file. The .txt was named HELP, while the .esp was named him (please don't get confused though, it's not an intentional message saying help him, the names will be explained).

I opened up the .txt file. The only thing in it was a short yet strange message:

"killed him after he killed her, lost game disc, someone else to do it or curse"

I couldn't help but laugh after reading the lack of meaning and grammar in the note. I should have known it was probably just some 10 year old noob modder trying to make a pathetic quest. But I decided to proceed with placing it to my data, as it may have been a foreign uploader and maybe it would be some interesting mystery plot. I checked the .esp and started up the game.

Upon loading my character (A level 71 Imperial knight, named Joe for the hell of it), I immediately spawned in a pitch black cave with no music or typical ambience. Just dead silence. I luckily had a few torches on me, and light one to find that it was actually a cramped straight tunnel with no door behind me. I had no choice but to advance forward.

After about 10 seconds of running, I entered a large chamber with a single small wooden door at the opposite side. There was blood everywhere however, and not like the typical Oblivion decals as you see in the Arena. It looked so... real. It had to be one of the most disturbing things I've ever seen in a game. I was even able to see teeth scattered in some places, along with a few fingers and bones. All of them looked so much more realistic than Oblivion itself. It gave me the shivers, and I hesitated to open the door. But I had no other option. I activated the door...

I was now standing in what looked like a typical fort interior, except for the same blood and gore scattered everywhere. I only took about 5 steps when I suddenly heard a distant voice say: "Welcome... player..."

Now I was annoyed. I had always been a hardcore medieval roleplayer, and breaking the 4th wall like that was enough to make me quit. However, the escape button wasn't working at all. I decided I would attempt to bail out via coc cheating, but the console didn't work either. I couldn't quit, and I couldn't cheat.

I progressed forward without encountering any enemies, traps or containers. Just a straight featureless and very dark tunnel, with no music playing but I heard very faint screams of sort, like tortured souls from hell. I couldn't tell, but I ignored it and just kept looking for something to do in this already abnormal mod. I soon heard the voice again, this time considerably closer and louder:

"Fucking finally, I'm free!"

The screaming souls grew louder, and I started to hear the distant running of someone else coming from the opposite side of the dark hallway...

Soon, the person appeared: A horrifying-looking man, who was only in his underwear, and had 3 rotting gunshot wounds on his torso. His head had also obviously been cracked open, and was decaying as well. The most intimidating thing about him was that he looked just as real as anyone in real life. And he was gripping a machete, and seemed to be full of intense rage.

He charged at me screaming, and I held up my Steel shield. To my surprise though, he instead bent down slightly and started hacking away at my exposed legs. My health started to diminish very quickly, as the man was performing many unorthodox maneuvers to counter the game's combat.

I managed to heal on the couple health potions I had, and finally land a hit on him. He screamed in agony in a demonic sounding voice, as his model got a giant slice across his chest from where I struck, and then seemed to disintegrate that section of his body.

I decided that running and swinging my sword constantly was the best option to avoid his unusual offense, and according to the meter on my crosshair, finally chipped away half of his health. By now his entire body was burnt up, with his skull showing with glowing red eyes.

My armor was starting to break, and my health only had a small fraction remaining. The man was constantly hacking while screaming with insanity, I was lucky to actually deflect any of his attacks with the shield. I finally decided to quit my current strategy, which I knew would get me killed, and did a lunge attack (which at master level was a stab) which completely impaled the man.

Despite having my volume at a reasonable level, his scream was loud enough to hurt my ears as his body soon became engulfed in flames, and burst before he hit the ground. The level was filled with silence yet again, but then I saw that there was now an opening where the man came out of. I walked inside...

The room I entered was very dimly lit, with only a small wooden chair in the center and a straight jacket sitting at the corner. Resting in front of the chair however were somewhat old real newspapers, with the man in them. Apparently, he was insane and was held in an asylum for quite some time until deemed stable and released. Then, I found a photograph of a woman. This made me think back to the HELP note, and I quickly understood everything.

The insane man went to the (uploader)'s house and brutally murdered his wife. The husband quickly responded by shooting him 3 times, which resulted in the attacker busting his head on something behind him when he fell. The husband either contained the insane man's soul in the .esp somehow, or the man haunted it. Either way, since the husband's oblivion game was lost, he had to find someone who could finish the job and destroy his evil soul once and for all, or else allow him to kill even more in spirit form.

I have no idea whether this is true or some really fucked up story, but whatever it is I still have nightmares about that man. Screaming in rage...

(This ending isn't the good one. OP said tomorrow there will be a revised, BETTER ending.)

43 comments:

  1. okay but on the real, though, I just read what was there and I am legit freaked the fuck out
    I suspect it's only because it's 3am and I'm frightfully neurotic but w/e

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  2. This is what happens when you play too much

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  3. I've created something like this before, the trick is to use a seperate mod to put them there and to have the small file activate it XD

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  4. i'll know never to download 1kb files, you never know what's in them.

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  5. didn't realize the human soul was compressible enough to fit in 1 KB

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  6. @anon the human soul isn't worth much anyway.

    still I guess it's always a letdown that they just say "but the game was HYPER REALISTIC", as a way to scare you. a revised ending might save it though.

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  7. These video game stories would be a lot more believable if they weren't all written by 10-year-old noob writers.

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  8. Weird, last time I plugged into the Grid, my soul was nearly 4 gigs. Do you know what type of compression they used?

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  9. Meh, needs a Nightmare Retardant tag. Such weak descendants of the jvk.esp shouldn't even come to life.

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  10. shat a fucking brik wall O_O

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  11. Im kinda getting sick of all these video game stories. They all seem the same. Still nice story though. I think it seems a little fake though.

    (P.S. : I know lots of Creepypastas are fake but I mean if it was a bit more realistic I would be creeped out more...)

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  12. The whole "everything looked so realistic" thing creeped me out the first few times I read stories where it was done, but at this point it really is overused. Hopefully the good ending will make this story a bit better.

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  13. God damnit, no link. :\

    Oh well. Good read though.

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  14. ^ Too the ESP I mean.

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  15. SO FAKE!!!!

    Seriously...

    The beginning says it's a true story, like the first sentence in, and the last sentence of the story says he's not sure if it's true or not. So yeah... Make up your mind... ._.

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  16. @last Anonymous comment, did you really think it was a true story up until you heard it may not be? The human soul can't be accessed unless it is unrar'd. So fucking unrealistic.

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  17. Why the FUCK does every story have some spooky ghost demon thing with red eyes, red eyes havent been remotely creepy since the 90s

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  18. Souls. Put them on your keydrive ans sell it on ebay!

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  19. i believed until "ooooh and then there was a guy, and his wife , and another guy, and and and and he killed the guys wife like bam and and he killed the guy and trapped his soul in a memory stick"

    but other than bullshit ending nice one

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  20. This story made me LOL. Mainly because at the beginning it says the file was 1 kb and then he goes on how there were new textures and models (and so realistic! :P) and voices.... Dunno, maybe I'm just not in the mood (even though it's 3 AM), but this didn't scare me one bit.

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  21. >level 71
    >steel shield
    gtfo

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  22. Believed it until: "...it's more than just a mod." then facepalmed at the .txt message part

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  23. I couldn't finish it.

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  24. That's so stupid!!!
    Next thing you know someone else is gonna post up some random bullshit saying "ahhhhh! My game is haunted!"
    Come up with something we can actually believe you pathetic piece of shit!
    It's not a ghost its called hacking you fucking faggot!

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  25. This is bullshit.

    Let me say that again...THIS IS B U L L S H I T

    What is with this? It's just the usual haunted video game shit. I mean really?

    Who in the world would actually believe this shit?

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  26. I love haunted videogame stories even if they're fake. which most are. I feel that there has to be some level of believability for them to be good and keep a reader hooked and a little creeped out at the end. This story did not do this at all. I got through the first few chunks then skimmed the rest. Not believable in the slightest. Makes for a terrible story and a boring read.

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  27. All these stories are the same, they say "a ghost of a little kid haunted the cartridge, or a madman possessed the game." Come on, you can do better. And they all have something about the console not turning off or window not closing. Same with showing 'realistic' images on a pixel game.

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  28. >2011

    >hyper realistic images

    I seriously hope you guys don't do this.

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  29. This is actually pretty creepy when playing Morrowind's Sixth House mod with the music off. I thought I'd come back to this story (which I've read several months ago), to say kudos for writing something so good that it actually came back to haunt me quite some time later.

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  30. Level 71 and still using a steel shield? Level 15's don't use steel shields.

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  31. At everyone saying "OMG so fake" No, really? We all thought this story of a murderer's soul being trapped in a 1 byte Oblivion mod was completely true, until you so graciously pointed it out to us. Thank you, you've done the world a service.

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  32. the whole 'soul saved as data' premise reminds me of Shin Megami Tensei...speaking of which, why isn't there any MegaTen creepypasta!?!?

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  33. "Fucking finally, I'm free! It's time to conquer Earth!" "Alpha, Rita's escaped! Recruit a team of teenagers with attitude!"

    I don't want come across as completely negative here, because I feel the premise has some merit and it's cheering that the author knows the exposition bomb of an ending isn't what it needs to be. But the author would do well to remember that horror requires restraint and suggestion; you can't frighten your audience by assuring us that "the zombie-lookin' guy had red eyes an' a demonic voice an' I could see his skull an'... an'... an' he used the f-word."

    Come on, man. SUBTLETY. Maybe the killer is a normal-looking person walking around town like any other NPC, and only by paying careful attention do you realize that there's something off about him. Maybe you see him dragging another NPC's corpse somewhere, but he runs off when you approach. Maybe you quietly follow him out of town one night, and THEN you find he lives in a chamber smeared with blood and decorated with body parts.

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  34. Hyper-realism = Not scary anymore.

    It stopped being scary after Squidward's Suicide.

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  35. You all need to calm your tits. Protip, "OMFG SO FAKE" Is the most obvious thing you can say. The most believable creepypasta in the world is fake by it's very nature. Unless you all mean "It isn't believable enough" In which case I agree, and you need to go find a dictionary and learn big kid words to get your point across.

    MagFlare is right, subtlety is one of the best ways to scare people. The jvk.esp story (I think that's the title) Worked so well because the end was ambiguous as hell. We don't need to know what the man was. Leave it open ended, and we'll all draw the conclusion that's scariest to us.

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  36. To the anon on dec 13 Well done you have earned the right to be a anon lord CONGRATS!

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  37. Yowzers, If this was a real mod I'd so download it :D
    Nothing wrong with a little adrenaline running through the body from a good scare, I'd even get a Weeping Angels and Empty Child mod and put them in there just to make it creepier :)

    Shame it's not real though, would've mad a brilliant mod

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  38. so you'll post a link for the mod right?
    lol jk man, not a bad story, but the fact that it was a "haunted mod" kinda ruined it for me, wouldve been better if unkown.

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  39. Level 71 with a steel shield?? I'm level 24 with the "Tower of the Nine" shield (via Stonewall Shields in the Imperial City)

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  40. lvl 71? steel shield?? why no daedric?

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