Skyrim’s darkest secret is so grim even Bethesda didn’t want us to find it

It seems one rather unassuming little settlement in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is hiding an extremely dark secret– a secret that Bethesda opted to cut from the game entirely.

Over in a thread on the r/Skyrim subreddit, fans discussed which NPCs in the game have the darkest backstories.

However, one user rocked up to the thread with something a little juicier than just a single NPC.

“The entirety of Rorikstead. The full secret of that little town is pretty much cut content so you can't actually get to the bottom of it, but there's hints all over the place about it not being a quaint little farming town,” commented one user.

“I'm not going to go into the full details, but walk through it and ask yourself why there's only one (childless at that) woman, and two kids whose mother died in childbirth. Then poke through the houses and ask yourself why a small town of farmers has a need for soul gems and books on Daedra worship.”

Avowed is definitely a game for Skyrim fans.

Turns out, the whole mystery of Rorikstead has been bugging the Skyrim community ever since the game first dropped, and many expected that the area would be revisited at some point in future DLC.

That obviously never happened however, but several commenters online seem to believe that there’s data left on the cutting room floor for Skyrim that explains Rorikstead’s backstory.

I did a little digging (by which I mean to the tcrf.net page for the game and searched for any mention of the settlement), but nothing came up. Commenters also stated that the Cutting Room Floor mod for Skyrim added the content back in, but, again, couldn’t find any evidence of that.

Unfortunately, while the theory definitely seems plausible and there is contextual evidence to back it up, I think it’s just another example of a quest that Bethesda simply didn’t have enough time to finish before shipping the game.