The Player is in the Imperial Prison when the Emperor and his bodyguards need to go through his cell to escape from the Imperial City. The Emperors sons are asassinated. The Player goes to Kvatch where he finds the last heir of the Septim Bloodline. The emperor has been killed while escaping from the City. The Player must help the heir Martin Septim to save the world from the Oblivion Crisis. And joining the Blades, Save Kvatch from Oblivion, Save Bruma, and be the Champion Of Cyrodiil.
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When an Orc dies during the Tournament of Ten Bloods, Boethia sighs 'Alas, poor Orc. This was not your finest hour.' It's a straightforward pun on Hamlet's graveyard speech, 'Alas, poor Yorick,' dropped in without any fanfare for anyone who happened to study the play in school.
Ask Telaendril for rumours and she'll tell you that Gogron gro-Bolmog once had a pet rabbit as a kid and petted it so hard he accidentally crushed its skull. That's basically lifted from Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, where Lennie does much the same thing to a mouse and a puppy while dreaming of one day tending rabbits of his own.
During the tutorial, Uriel Septim recites a couple of slightly reworked lines from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, including 'death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.' Makes sense once you remember his voice actor was Patrick Stewart, a Royal Shakespeare Company member since the 1960s.
The quest Caught in the Hunt borrows its premise from Richard Connell's short story The Most Dangerous Game, where a hunter travelling abroad ends up becoming the prey on an isolated island instead of the one doing the hunting.
M'aiq the Liar's signature line, 'M'aiq knows much, tells some,' is a twist on a line from Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, where Mannie says of his best friend Mike, 'Mike knows much, doesn't tell all.' Fitting company for gaming's most unreliable Khajiit.
Take over Battlehorn Castle and dig into its unmarked quest, and you'll learn the previous lord, Lord Kain, was brought back from the dead by a scheming necromancer after being killed in battle. Swap a few names and that's basically the setup of the Legacy of Kain series, where a nobleman named Kain is resurrected by the necromancer Mortanius.
In combat you'll occasionally hear an NPC yell 'Jump on my sword while you can!' It's a straight lift from Minsc's battle cry in Baldur's Gate II - 'Jump on my sword while you can, evil, I won't be as gentle!' - a small nod from one RPG legend to another.
If Skingrad's castle looks oddly familiar, that's because it's a visual copy of Bran Castle in Romania, the real-world fortress popularly (if not entirely accurately) known as Dracula's Castle. Bethesda didn't exactly hide who they were borrowing the silhouette from.
Down by the docks in Anvil there's a statue in the water that's clearly scaled up from The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen harbour, easily the most photographed statue in Denmark. It's a small, quiet homage that most players sail straight past without noticing.
Push through Breaking the Siege of Kvatch into the Oblivion World and you'll find a burnt body near a pool of lava, positioned in a way that's an unmistakable riff on Anakin's fate in Revenge of the Sith after Obi-Wan famously 'had the high ground.' It's been in the game a while, and Bethesda has openly admitted it was intentional.
