Oblivion DLC - Orrery

This post is about the Orrery DLC for Oblivion.

Similar to the horse armour, you will receive a note after installing this plug-in. It’s from Bothiel at the Arcane University. She asks for help in recovering some Dwemer artifacts that were stolen by bandits. She needs these to repair the Imperial Orrery, an ancient Dwarven machine. Your quest is to go to a couple of bandit camps, kill the bandits and take the artifacts. Go to Bothiel to get a levelled amount of gold. After 24 hours the Orrery will be fixed, and you can visit it to get a Greater Power. These powers are based on the cycle of the moons, so return every now and then to see if you can get a better one. Watch out for the lag, though!

The bandit camps are all in the vanilla game, so if you’ve already found them then tracking down the bandits will be simple. But you probably won’t have, as they’re out in – very literally – the middle of nowhere. At the beginning of the quest you only know of one location – Camp Ales. Once you find and kill the ‘bandit carrier’ there (who is well equipped with enchanted gear and higher levels), you will find the first Dwemer artifact and a note which conveniently lists the locations of the rest of the parts. These camps all contain another bandit carrier.

All the Dwemer artifacts use the Dwarven Shield icon, and since they’re quest items you can’t drop them to look at them. At first I was disappointed at the lack of new textures, but then when I gained access to the repaired Orrery I was amazed. It looks awesome. Sadly, this comes at a price. The lag inside is terrible. It’s worth it to have a look at the shiny robot stuff, but after that I don’t go in there except when I have to. You can also have a good look at the parts you helped recover. One thing which annoys me about the plug-in is that during another quest which involved Bothiel she mentions that the Orrery is ‘in a state of disrepair’. This is in the original game, but it doesn’t make any sense once the Orrery is fixed. >.>

The Greater Powers you get aren’t that bad. Greater Powers are spells that you can use once a day, with no magicka cost. To get one from the Orrery you must activate the panel at the top of the stairs. You get a different Power depending on the cycle of the two moons, Masser and Secunda.  (Another annoying error – the panel moons don’t match the real ones.) All the powers drain one attribute while boosting another, for 60 seconds. I personally never use them, but I suppose they could come in handy. You can only have one Power from the Orrery at a time.

Screenshots (click to enlarge):

Bothiel.

The Imperial Orrery.

The Dwemer artifacts you need to retrieve.

The Orrery Console, which gives you the Greater Powers.

The next post will be about the Wizard’s Tower DLC.  Also, remember to read my Oblivion and Horse Armour posts if you haven’t yet.

-legoless