Surely I could just state the purpose of this article in a single paragraph, but that would be out of character for me. Instead, I’ll give some loosely related story explaining how I even came to stop hating Oblivion in the first place. Mixed in that you will find a rough set of hints regarding finding Garman gro-Marad’s house and house key.

If you don’t care about that, then you can skip directly to the last 2 paragraphs to find directions to easily purchase lock picks, and some tips that should help improve your lock picking skills.

Up until yesterday I couldn’t stand the game Elder Scrolls: Oblivion for the PS3. I hadn’t yet passed this extremely slow paced tutorial at the beginning that couldn’t keep my interest, so I’d written the game off as stupid and put it in back in my game collection at the bottom of the pile so I’d never have to see it again.

Fast forward two months to memorial day and my cousin Jake came over to play a bit of Wii. While we were playing Wii Sports he mentioned that he owns Oblivion for 360 and for PS3 and that the game was amazing. I told him my experience with the game and he agreed that the tutorial put him off at first too. At any rate he quickly got me through the tutorial and then left me to my own devices to tinker around and see how well the game suited me. To my utter surprise I became addicted!

Through trial and error I am slowly becoming better at the game, and during my quests I kept picking up lockpicks that I figured were useless. When I’d hit a lock that needed picked I’d simply mess around with it or auto attempt until I figured out what was actually going on.

During my most recent quest (collect the 5 grand soul gems so some stupid old witch will cure my vampirism) I got sidetracked into onto the Bloated Float where there was another quest where I had to rescue the crew from 4 thieves. During this quest I picked the pocket of the Float’s bouncer Garman gro-Marad, which gave me the key to his house.

This intrigued me quite a bit, so I set off into Imperial City to find his house. Indeed I had found it, it was located in Imperial City, Temple District. It was the first house across from the wall Northwest from the city entrance directly in front of the entrance to the Temple of the One.

Moving along, I got into his house and found a huge series of locks ranging from easy to hard, but only had a few lockpicks left on hand – all of which I’d broken whilst in his house. So out I went to find more lock picks, and after a long bout of wandering I ran across a shifty character by the name of Shady Sam who is located directly against the wall just north of the Chestnut Handy Stables (if that’s unclear then just travel to said stables and hug the wall until you find this guy.)

This fellow is able to sell you up to 100 picks a day or so, which gave me just enough picks to figure out that picking locks is mind numbingly simple.

What’s the secret? Next time you try picking a lock, try doing it with your eyes closed. When the tumbler is moving at the slower speed it makes a distinctively different chinking sound to when it’s moving fast. Better yet, the tumblers aren’t actually random. Listen to them a few times and you’ll notice there’s a pattern. Each one will do something like fast,fast,fast,slow,fast,fast,fast,slow etc. This makes picking locks and finding lock picks a very simple process.

Hope those tips are useful to somebody, they sure could’ve saved me a world of time.

Enjoy!