About ten or twenty hours of playing later (if you aren't particularly adventurous and just stick to questlines and local exploration) you get to see "them" and their towers, as well as accumulate the knowledge to connect "them" and their towers with House Telvanni.
The kicker? Apart from stupid hat the guy who fell from the sky wore Telvanni robe.
He wasn't random lolmage who hasn't thought his experiment through.
He was probably a low to mid ranked Telvanni retainer who accidentally killed himself while trying to prove his worth to sceptical members of the house.
Oh. My. God. Do you realize you just blew my mind?
It sounds like the most obvious thing now that you mention it, and yet I never ever considered it.
Because it *is* an obvious thing, except most of us, especially RPG crowd, are hopelessly conditioned to see stuff in video games as tokens, not actual things.
How a character, location person, garment, weapon or piece of armour looks like is usually just for the sake of identification and setting the mood or looking cool. It means nothing. It does nothing. It isn't supposed to make any sense. Just because it is meaningless to the engine, we are conditioned to see it as something akin to an icon in GUI and just parse out anything that isn't explicitly presented as text or, preferably, as numbers in stat screen.
Well surfuckingprise - MW shits all over our expectations here, at least when it comes to fluff, not the mechanics.
Want more mind blownage?
Ever seen those robes?
They are pretty much Temple exclusive. Ever dismissed the squigglies on those yellow strands as just cool looking gibberish? They can be read and actually mean something - 'Faith is only law' (lower) and 'Learn by serving' (upper) respectively.
Colouring of Temple/Indoril armour and garb - blue and yellow? Ok, this is mere conjecture on my part, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was an explicit reference to the gold of the old Temple (chimers golden skin tone) and blue of new one (dunmer blueish ash colouration).
Trioliths (tribunal altars) having triangular cross-section? Trinity of Dunmer living gods (Almsivi).
Those flags hanging from bridges in Vivec? They tend to quote dunmer religious texts.
Red stone brooch on Morag Tong shirt?
Says "I am your death" if you look closely. In daedric glyphs.
Ashlander garbs? Some are tribe-specific and reflect the lifestyle of the wearers rather closely. Ahemmusa common clothes tend to be insulated with bundles of plant fibres laced together (grazelands). Erabenimsun (ashlands) tend to be made of animal skins.
Moreso, outcast ashlanders, despite not being part of any of four major tribes will generally wear the same type of garb as their immediate non-outcast neighbours.
Commoner clothes? At least two shirts (one for Redoran, one for Hlaalu) and one robe (Hlaalu) display house heraldry, in addition to specific colour patterns.
House clothes tend to follow more relaxed rules in general, possibly reflecting either trade (especially clothes worn by common people) or active interest in fashion (as seen in wardrobes of some nobles), but the pattern is still obvious.
Glass weapon to analogous iron/steel weapon weight ratio? Decent approximate of density ratio between RL glass and iron.
Coded messages looking like gibberish?
Sottilde's Code Book said:
SSF ZAFL
DVWDTQDVFQE TYLSE
BSQ FOF
TZSFHK TOY PCJEK NSZUVWBSR
EAL DVFQE GX
SWSHL LCLQS
XKH ZQG
LGSBFY GXS PAXWC RSXINOFSP
IDV AWD
FGEF PAXWC
BOK DWKB
SUGZD PCJEK
Nope, actual ciphertext that can be broken if you know a bit about cryptography. This one here uses Vigenère cipher with key being "SKOOMA". It's additionally obfuscated but lists locations of Camonna Tong hideouts and amount of contraband stored in each.
Additionally, in case of sealed letters, you can attempt to reseal them via security skill roll.
Then you have stuff like inferring location of Mordrin Hanin's tomb from Hanin's Wake and the paper map, or location of Mudan Outpost by following barely identifable remains of a road on the seafloor near Ebonheart.
Several dialogues also have small dialogue trees with various stat checks, too bad they are rendered irrelevant by the power of ADMIREBRIBEBRIBEDONE - damn you NWN, damn you to hell!
JarlFrank , and I'm not even a history, clothing, or culture sperg. My forte is natural sciences, especially biology. It's just that I am generally obsessed with non-arbitrary patterns and details that can be linked to some context.