The Dark Brotherhood
The Dark Brotherhood in The Elder Scrolls Online is one of Tamriel’s more persistent shadows: an order of assassins who pray to Sithis, whisper to the Night Mother and treat murder-for-hire as sacrament rather than crime. Built on a split from the older Morag Tong and governed by its own tenets and traditions, it turns up across Elder Scrolls games as a constant presence behind curtains and back rooms, and ESO’s take carries that thread into its own period.
ESO’s Dark Brotherhood DLC, released on 31 May 2016 for PC and Mac, adds the Gold Coast as its main stage. This strip of Cyrodiilic coastline, with Anvil and Kvatch at either end, is shown outside the Alliance War’s front lines, making it a convenient space for quieter conflicts and back-alley arrangements. The player is drawn into the Brotherhood after a contracted killing and an invitation in the now-familiar form of the black hand, then taken to the sanctuary tucked between those two cities to begin initiation in earnest.
From there, the story focuses on internal politics and external pressure in roughly equal measure. The sanctuary has its own hierarchy and tensions – Speakers, Silencers and rank-and-file assassins all with their own views on what the work should look like – and the Gold Coast hosts rival interests, from vigilantes to other parties who would rather see the Brotherhood extinguished than quietly tolerated. The main quests walk a line between showing how contracts are chosen and executed and exploring what it means for a group built on the worship of Sithis to adapt to new threats without abandoning its core.
Mechanically, the DLC introduces a dedicated Dark Brotherhood skill line under the Guild category. The most visible piece is the Blade of Woe, an execution move that appears as a prompt when you approach an unaware, eligible NPC from stealth; triggering it replaces your normal light attack with a cinematic kill, at the cost of whatever bounty and heat you pick up if you are seen. Supporting passives such as Spectral Assassin and Shadowy Supplier respectively increase your chances of remaining unseen and give you a daily contact who can supply poisons, potions and other crime-adjacent consumables from outlaws’ refuges and sanctuaries. Other passives adjust how guards and bounties respond, nudging the justice system to make room for frequent, targeted lawbreaking.
Day-to-day play in the Brotherhood leans on repeatable content as much as on the main story. Contract quests send you into existing towns and settlements across Tamriel to eliminate named targets – a merchant in Mournhold, a guild member in Windhelm and so on – with a Dark Brotherhood sigil over their heads marking them out. You can take and complete as many of these contracts as you like in a day, and they contribute to your standing with the Brotherhood while pushing you to learn patrol patterns, blind spots and escape routes in familiar spaces.
Sacraments, offered by Speaker Terenus, are more structured assassination missions set in instanced locations. Each has a primary target and optional objectives, such as using only Blade of Woe or poison, stealing an additional item or eliminating a secondary mark, all while avoiding detection more than a set number of times and escaping before an overseer arrives. Clearing these bonus conditions rewards better gear and materials themed around the Sithis’ Touch set and Dark Brotherhood style, and they sit somewhere between heist and puzzle in feel, especially once you start recognising layouts and refining your routes.
The Gold Coast itself reinforces the theme without turning every corner into a murder scene. Anvil’s harbour and Kvatch’s rebuilt, chapel-dotted skyline both nod back to The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, while their streets and surrounding countryside offer the usual mix of delves, world bosses and dailies that give the zone a life outside the Brotherhood’s concerns. The sanctuary under the hills between them, with its candles, blood markings and carved symbols of Sithis, serves as the quiet heart of the DLC – a place to pick up jobs, resupply and listen to fellow assassins argue and reminisce between contracts.
Taken together, ESO’s Dark Brotherhood content gives space to play as an unrepentant killer without pretending that choice is noble or clean. It invites you to lean into stealth, timing and planning, lets the justice system push back when you overreach in public, and leaves much of the moral framing to the player rather than to quest text. For those who have always been curious about what life looks like on the other side of Tamriel’s bounty boards, it adds a strand of play that feels appropriately sharp-edged and self-contained, while still fitting neatly into the wider sprawl of the game.
