UESP Forums

When doing one of the last East Empire Company quests, the one in which you kill Carnius Magius, I had to kill him. Upon his death I received the essential NPC death message, prompting me to load a previous save because with his death the game had become unwinnable:

With this character's death, the thread of prophecy is severed.
Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate,
or persist in the doomed world you have created.

How can it be? Has anyone experienced something like this before?

Strange, but do it anyway. By the time you are forced to kill him, he is of no further quest or info value, and iirc, he's trying to kill you. I don't think his role in the Bloodmoon prophecy hangs the quest if he dies. Keep that save, though, just in case I'm wrong.

The "essential character" message is relevant only to the of Morrowind and is completely irrelevant to any quests in the Bloodmoon expansion.

I have no idea why you're even seeing this message, since taking a look in the Construction Set reveals that Carnius Magius is NOT marked as "essential" in the original version of the game. If you're running with mods it's most likely that one of them has marked him as "essential" for some reason (perhaps he's "essential" to the mod, but using the built-in "essential" flag is a poor and misleading way of announcing it IMO).

Given that the NPC is totally irrelevant to Morrowind's Main Quest, you can probably safely ignore this message (especially if you've already completed the main Morrowind quest). (Although his death might break a mod, so you might want to keep that save around just in case, as Imbalance said.)

I'm running the unofficial patch (the purist one), the patched official plug-ins and a pair of mods I created that just set ebony, glass, stalhirm and some plants around the world to respawn (just that, I never even looked at the NPCs tab while making that mod)...

Anyway now I'm less worried. I went on with the main quest and other questlines and nothing bad happened.