I treat all of my characters as if they have a complete backstory, whether they have been to Coldharbour and the Wailing Prison, or not. That is not to say that I need to create backstories for my characters, though.

I think pretty much all of that is up to the player and how they want to create the parts of their character's story that aren't explicitly shown or explained in the game. I always appreciated that the (original) Wailing Prison game-starter left it completely ambiguous how my character ended up there, so I could give each character a "how I got sacrificed by a crazy cult" scenario that made sense for their previous lives.

So, for example, Ilsabet the stablemaster's daughter was forced to join a bandit crew that later sold her to the Worm Cult for some easy coin. Mir the experienced dungeon-delver got unwanted attention from the Worm Cult after she developed skills in necromancy for self-defense, and when she didn't want to play nice they decided to play even less nice. Hostawen the opportunistic traveling merchant got duped by a business deal that probably should have seemed too good to be true. And so on.

None of them were already super strong before they were sacrificed, beyond being able to take care of themselves in their respective ways of life. There may have been something about their souls, though, that made Mannimarco find them particularly enticing. They all remember their old lives, although in some cases the details of how they got dead are a little bit fuzzy. (That's largely because I made up a bunch of these backstories before I actually started playing the game, and I figured I'd keep it vague to avoid potential contradictions.)

That's just me, though. Someone could easily have their Vestige lose their memories along with their original body, and it could be an interesting aspect of their story to be trying to rediscover themselves along with adjusting to this new Vestige life. I don't think there's any explicit dialogue or other indication that the Vestige doesn't know who they are when Lyris finds them, but it could go either way. And of course people who have found their way to the Wailing Prison with the Hooded Figure's help might factor that into their characters' stories, in which case they might have already established themselves as successful adventurers in various other places in Tamriel.

So basically... you're pretty much free to tell the story you want in regard to the things you're asking about.

I started playing when the wailing prison was accessed via the mysterious benefactor, so for me at least my characters do retain memory of their former life - I can gain xp before going to the wailing prison and I still have that xp afterwards.

One thing I do always do though, is do the wailing prison as the first thing on any new character. Until you've done that and died and become a vestige with a body made of azure plasm there are 3 fundamental game mechanics that just don't make any sense: resurrection, attunement with skyshards and use of wayshrines. I have actually deleted a character and started it over because I forgot to do that and they died before having done the wailing prison quest. Permadeath for the non-vestige character!

Tbh. This is something I used to create some kind of back story for my character. I started this game long time ago, and main quest was the 1st big story I did (at that time it was the only large story on the game, as there was only base game, no DLCs).

Long story short, when my character lost his soul, he also lost his memory. But every skyshard collected gave him strength and some tiny portion of his memory back, till his soul was eventually fully recovered.

This was a good explanation why I was level 1 at the start and was asking everyone "what am I doing here ?" etc.

If the Vestige is killed after escaping the Wailing Prison they can reform their body from Azure Plasm in the same way they did after being sacrificed (or reclaim their existing body almost immediately by using Soul Magic). (In game mechanics the first one is respawning at a wayshrine, the second is using a soul gem to respawn where you are.) We know they keep all their memories when that happens, and it's apparently the same process - the only difference is having used skyshards to reattune themselves to Nirn the Vestige is able to appear there instead of back in Coldharbour. So I would assume they also kept their memories when they went through the process the first time.

We also know daedra do the same thing - that's why they can't be killed permanently, only banished to Oblivion - and they seem to keep all their memories, sometimes they even seek revenge on the person who killed/banished them.

Most of the Soul Shriven do lose their memories of their past life, along with their sanity. But that's a gradual process and I suspect due to a combination of being sacrificed, finding themselves in Coldharbour and then being enslaved and tortured indefinitely. Cadwell retained his memories, apparently due to already being mad when he died so he couldn't go any more mad (at least not in Coldharbour, if he ended up in the Shivering Isles I'm sure they could find a way) and somehow managed to escape being put to work or tortured. So I suspect it comes down to some combination of your sense of self, how you react to ending up in prison in Oblivion and what you do from that point on.

francesinhalover wrote: »

Why was vestige executed? Was the character strong prior to death?

As in all TES games who you are at the start of the game is left ambiguous. You see in the introduction that the Worm Cult has been rounding up as many people as they can get to sacrifice, there's mentions throughout the game of many people going missing and in some of the main story quests you can see the huge numbers of soul gems in Coldharbour.

So I don't think the player character was singled out due to being especially strong or having special abilities or anything, they were one of many sacrificed. In fact if the Worm Cult or Mannimarco had known The Vestige would be able to recover and fight back they probably wouldn't have done it, because for them it's very bad luck.

Before Morrowind was released and the starting point for new characters was changed I made up different reasons for how each of my characters got caught and sacrificed. For example my sorcerer is a rather naive scholar who heard about the Worm Cult and thought they were clearly misguided. He went to find the local chapter to explain to them that they were making a mistake and shouldn't follow a Daedric Prince or engage in necromancy. They...didn't listen.

By contrast my crafter simply got grabbed in a back alley on the way home from the pub. He was supposed to be retired from his career as a soldier at that point, but couldn't let something like that go so he set out to get them back, one thing lead to another and he ended up fighting Molag Bal. He also ensured it wouldn't happen again by moving into the pub.

After the changes to the main quest when Morrowind was released it might not be a complete coincidence:

I am always conflicted when the other soul shriven in the game in Coldharbour are mindless zombies and my vestige (which is actually soul shriven) acts like a normal person.

What I wanna know is… who’s doing all the fighting in Cyrodill? Are there millions of planes of existences where all Vestiges come from and join in this one cyrdoill to fight themselves?