Dark Brotherhood Blues

Has anyone mentioned how ineffective the Dark Brotherhood in Skyrim is? They’re a guild of assassins contracted to kill. Unlike your typical assassins, however, where they’d be contacted through an intermediary and then met is a secluded neutral area to discuss business, the Brotherhood has a bizarre and ritualistic means of summoning them. To call the Brotherhood, you need a rare book called the, “Nightmother,” a circle of candles, a flower, a dead body or skeleton, human flesh and a human heart. So essentially you need to kill someone, or have a spare dead body lying around before they’ll even consider killing someone for you. It kind of defeats the purpose of hiring someone to kill for you if you have to kill someone to do that. Plus you’ll need about eight feet of empty floor space, and it’s not like they show up in thirty minutes or less like a pizza. You have to wait days, weeks and even months before they’ll show, and you have to keep the candles burning and the body exactly where it lay. That’s a long time to keep a well-lit dead body hidden. Think about how hard it is to hide a birthday present around your house. Then imagine that if instead of a present, it’s a rotting corpse. You’re expected to pull a John Wayne Gacy in your own home. Hiring an assassin is supposed to remove suspicion from you, and nothing is more suspicious than a ritualistically laid-out corpse.

Did I mention once they’re summoned they’ll show up at your house, or come up to you in the street? There’s no arrangements for secret meeting places. They’ll just bust right into your house at any hour of the day, depending on when they decide to get there. Did I also mention they can choose not to show up at all? You can go through the whole ritual, wait months, and they might not show.

Plus, you have to pay them. A lot. Sometimes, up front. If you select how your target will meet their end, you’re expected to pay a bonus on top. There’s no set price on assassinations, either. Killing a street urchin could cost as much or more as killing a nobleman. Assuming you paid up front, and the target is never killed, there’s no way to get a refund, either. It’s not like anyone’s going to ask murderers for their money back anyway. All you have to go on is their word, which is the word of psychotic killers who worship the god of the Abyss.

They can also choose to turn around and kill you. There’s nothing keeping you safe throughout this entire procedure. They can kill you on principle, or for fun. For instance, say that their target begs them to kill you out of revenge right before they slit their throats. They might do it for free, just because they were persuaded by a dying man’s last words.

On the Brotherhood’s end of things, accepting a contract is even more complicated than summoning them. Once the ritual is performed, it passes through the magical talking mummy of a woman who killed her seven babies, who can only talk to one person, the, “Listener.” Then that information is passed on to the Guild leader, who can veto the contract. If either the Nightmother or Listener are missing, which is often the case, they can’t even accept new contract.