Lore Inquiry: Senche

A certain aspect of the game has been bugging me since the first time I ran into a particular enemy type in ESO and my doubts and confusion has really only increased since then.

I don't know about anyone else, but I had always figured Senche to be sentient creatures, not beasts/animals. I had also thought that they were a subspecies/morphology of Khajiit. This of course would mean that they are “people” with thoughts and feelings and lives same as the more “common” Cathay and Suthay and that they would live beside the other races. Yet, ever since entering Grahtwood, D’ni has been slaughtering them left and right in order to complete quests and cross terrain. That is not to say that I have never seen peaceful Senche in game. On Khenarthi’s Roost there were a number of peaceful Senche that appeared to be treated like guard dogs or body guards though it was difficult to make that a distinction which they were. However, this did not sway me from my suspicions. Consistently, NPCs have referred to them as “wild animals” not sentient creatures or Khajiit. I will also add that in ESO we have not yet seen any other subspecies of Khajiit such as Pahmar or Dagi nor did we see them in the most recent Elder Scrolls games. This has led me to a suspicion that Zenimax/Bethesda is phasing out certain aspects of Khajiit lore.

This has been a lingering conundrum that I would like to understand. Elsweyr has for the most part not been released so it’s hard to say for certain what’s up but I still theorize. Here are my theories on what is going on with the Senche at least.

• Zenimax has decided to change lore for convenience, making senche essentially into animals. This leads to the implication that the entire moon cycle of birth and Khajiit subtypes may be wiped from lore (This being my primary fear since I really like Khajiit lore)

• Bandits run rampant across the countryside and are slaughtered by the hundreds, perhaps senche are also intelligent but choose the “bandit” lifestyle because of same innate wild trait

• So called “senche” seen in Valenwood are not actual senche but are called senche by the native Bosmer who don’t know any better

• My last theory is that senche were just misnamed in the rush to release the game (I doubt this because that’s a really easy fix but you never know)

Please share your thoughts on this, I’d love to hear what everyone else thinks.

It seems to me, from some of the quest and such that Senche is also used as a descriptor for a group of cats/khajiit. I know there was at least one quest where the quest giver refers to them as "His senche" referring to several members at the same time. Perhaps this is where the Senche you see are coming from, as much as anything else?

Also, this link, while not official from Zeni, seems to point towards Khajiit thinking leading to many of them becoming bandits or thieves because others see them as such and they don't see a reason to refute that assumption, or to do otherwise.

I have seen at least one quest and at least one lore book where senche refer to tigers. They mention senche-tigers.

Senche-Tiger NPC's in ESO are not the Senche-Tigers that you are thinking of. I believe they are miss-named by the developers, done so intentionally because we are not in Elsweyr lands, or this is a time before the Senche-Tiger Khajiit were as large as horses, red colored, and sentient.

Senche, in the actual lore, are Khajiit. They are just the more primal Khajiit. The different types of Khajiit are decided based on moon cycle. The problem you, and pretty much everyone devoted to lore, are having is that Zenimax and Bethesda have decided that to make the game work that an alternate lore line had to be established. If you notice Khajiit are not slaves, and are actually part of an alliance. Online takes place about 200 years before Morrowind. Khajiit don't become free until after Morrowind. But in this lore line Khajiit are free for a while. If you are following me you see the problem I, and many others, see. That the lore timelines are so fucked that they are two separate time lines. Best to think of Online not as an ElderScrolls game, but as a fan made MMO of it. That's just what I've done xD

This irritates me when original creators do not force or approve lore when allowing/making other dimensions for their story to be told. I know that the story/world I've been working on since forever, if it ever makes it to a book and say then a movie &/or game I will damn well insist they stick to what I have created as a creator or tell the producers to rack off LOL I am dreaming anyway so i can be as pedantic as I feel like :)

I think you have a good approach S'har, it is just a Fan-based MMO. Like my fan-fiction, it is subject to what I want to add to the lore or expand on it if I see it is needed/missing or in my opinion be improved, I often research first what I can, and if it is there I rarely change it entirely, I just usually add to it with the idea to embellish it with what is not there.

I have done this in Khai's story and his association with Dibella, and I have done this in Gwynyyth's story (Lotro) to explain her "in-game powers" but tried extremely hard to write as if I were Tolkien himself even adopting his style & voice (although it was extremely novice in its presentation). At least with the Starstrider Legacy in SWTOR I created, the open universe approach meant I could basically write my thing easily, while maintaining base lore parameters. However, that made researching Lore a headache also.

From all the lore concerning them that I have seen, I wouldn't expect Senche to be any more violent than the other subspecies of Khajiit. I can see how it would be an easy tweak for the developers to make though, Senche are one of the more beastly subspecies in their appearance and there is no lore that I know of saying that they aren't innately more violent in nature. However, I have seen no in-game accounting for this and seeing as Senche are described as being of equal intelligence to other Khajiit, I find the in-game situation hard to believe.

The argument that ESO occurs in a time before Senche are sentient is an interesting one but tough for me since it's hard to know if a race that is born in a completely different shape depending solely upon lunar cycle experiences evolution at all or divine manipulation or whatever xD

The development team completely changing the lore of the game to fit an MMO mold, while depressing and something I don't want to readily accept, sort of seems like the most likely theory. It always makes me really sad when game developers do away with more interesting and unique lore and content because it is more difficult to implement or isn't mainstream enough to ensure profit.

I personally just write what I feel like writing at the time.

It's convenient to think of the 'Seneche' as a non-Khajiit breed of tiger, or mislabled or possibly mis-identified. It's very strange they didn't include any other species of Khajiit, but looking back through the length of the games...

It appears that Khajiit change nearly every game. Skyrim to ESO is the exception, though Khajiit, here, have markedly changed in some instances (there's a much wider variety of facial features, and we the fans think in the Suthay/Cathay slider sometimes).

But not even the Suthay are really represented here; we only actually ever make Cathay. Not even Cathay-Raht are really possible; the height slider doesn't go up to 'Massive' levels.

Personally I think Khajiit lore, the moon cycles, and everything, was an invention of convenience to make the different types of Khaiit evident in the various Elder Scrolls games make sense. Now, I'm not saying that I do not like that they also fleshed it out very richly and put some time into the explination; Khajiit as a race are certainly unique and rewarding to play. However, if they included all the sub-species of Khajiit in ESO, we'd really have 6-9 races to choose from as Aldmeri Dominion instead of just 3. From a lore perspective it makes perfect sense, but from a game perspective it's unsound.

Am I saying that I don't WANT to see Suthay, or Seneche, or Seneche-Raht? Or Cathay-Raht? Yea. I'd love to see them, actually, especially better represented as NPCs. I'm sure this is a topic of discussion on the official forums, too.

For what it's worth, I liked the rendition of Khenarthi's Roost. I think that now we've got a pretty dedicated 'art director' and the Elder Scrolls canon is much less bound by animation and art limitations... it makes a sort of weird sense that we wouldn't see some of the earlier versions of khajiit. I'm not even 100% convinced that the Khajiit moon phases, at least certain ones of them, is even considered canonical anymore, though that may be just me being a little unobservant.

The feel that I get from the ESO lore - and bear in mind this is a 'feel', just my impression - is that the Seneche are as represented. Lore states that the cycles of the moon determine whether a Khajiit is born upright, or as a tiny cat, or in various stages, but it seems most common to get Cathay or Seneche. And it seems like the Seneche are about as cognizant as the average dog. I don't doubt they're still considered family members. But Khajiit, as a breed, in this 'timeline', don't seem to have the huge variety of subspecies that they do in lore. For instance, Khajiit are all born kittens and develop based on moon phases. So it's perfectly reasonable that Seneche could birth Cathay or vise-versa, and I'm sure that culturally it's acceptable or there's something there to make this absolutely normal for them. J'vani could have a brother or sister as a Seneche-tiger, and of course she'd love them as family, but perhaps not in the same way she'd love a Cathay brother or sister with whom she could speak and who she wouldn't have to clean up after or feed. I think that makes reasonable sense.

But, every game so far has restricted us to playing one type or another of Khajiit. So why should this really be any different? Technical limitations and such make this unsurprising.

I just discovered this link:

http://theskyrimblog.ning.com/group/lore/forum/topics/khajiit-part-1-religion

This link is interesting because the author of this blog has pulled from both in-game, and out-of-game sources to detail the various points of Khajiit lore.

Where he mentions seneche, he indicates that canonically they seem to be intelligent, but without the ability to reason, and this lends itself to the possibility of wild seneche being a nuisance when born or raised outside of a Khajiit clan/family. It also indicates that location of birth has a reasonable affect on the racial subspecies, alongside the phases of the moon (he lists that Cathay, and Cathay-raht are more typical of northern Elsweyr and Suthay more common in the southern).

Personally I like those references.

Further thoughts?