Rararyn Radarys encounters stray nix hounds along Balmora's eastern quay. The creatures must've swam up the canal to wander into Balmora's back alleys while pursuing cave rats (mind you Balmoran rats are verily the fattest on all Vvardenfell).

Digital painting. Made in Krita (5.1.5). Feel free to repost. Always looking for a commission to paint.

music was good back when it was about sorceresses

Since no real necromancer would stand around on a plaza proclaiming to everyone that he is indeed a necromancer (generally hinders a smooth enterprise), my headcanon is that Dedaenc is just a poser who tries to appear mysterious and edgy.

Breaking News

Tucker Carlson interviews Dagoth Ur

There's this Samsung ad that keeps playing on youtube and the voice actor who is sort of a salesman without a physical presence sounds a lot like Clavicus Vile did in Skyrim.

So I'm like.. "no thank you, I won't buy a Samsung, I don't feel safe right now".

I used to have insane headcanons about Archmagister Gothren and thought it was an outrage when he was aggressive rather than passive aggressive in TESO.

elder scrolls fans are insane in the way of who else would take a background quest character in an MMORPG and have an entire perception of him as a really in-depth character and then also craft in intricate detail the weird on-and-off again relationship he'd have with one of your OCs who is thoroughly unpredictable and devoted to a mad god that will almost certainly never acknowledge his worship whatsoever because it's funnier

MORROWIND CREATURES PT[1]

tamriel fails to make technological progress even over hundreds of years because every time they're on the verge of a breakthrough the daedra invade and wreck everything. dagon is just trying to protect people's jobs. he's a luddite

the jarls of haafingar and windhelm, the imperial military governor of skyrim, and the first emissary of the thalmor to skyrim all travel to the peace council at high hrothgar with their respective enormous entourages. it would be incredibly dangerous, not to mention logistically impossible, to send everyone up the seven thousand steps, so each leader makes the climb with only a few most trusted men and the rest just hang around ivarstead. this podunk town cannot support a sudden incursion half the size of their entire population. chaos reigns in the streets. stormcloaks and imperial soldiers brawl all over the place. a drunken justiciar has to be fished out of lake geir. the vilemyr inn is filled to capacity six times over and wilhelm is considering burning the place down out of stress. he wishes wyndelius was still here to scare everyone away

Morrowind follower AI.

I remembered something which ties in with this neatly. Endar Drenim is second in command in Tel Naga! It could pretty much all be Drenims playing the political games. I can sort of imagine how Neloth is vaguely aware of their plots and usually benefits from them but he promptly returns his attention to his experiments.

Neloth: Endar, can I use that girl in the cage for an experiment?

Endar: This is Miner Arobar's daughter.

Neloth: So?

Endar: She's a valuable hostage.

Neloth: So it's an ebony mine or what?

Endar: What?

So which Telvanni wants Dram Bero dead?

"You have already found Dram Bero? And he died by your own hand? Perhaps word of his death has not yet spread to our Telvanni client…"

I dislike how Dram is the target of a grandmaster writ and the only context you get is the offhand mention above that the person who wanted him dead was Telvanni.

I have a problem with this because it feels a bit random. It would be understandable if Dram was so secretive because he was hiding from, say, Orvas Dren and his people. But a Telvanni? What ranking Telvanni would have enough of a problem with Dram to want him dead?

I'll just go through the options as I see them. It may be possible that a lower ranking, random member could have been the client but for this thought experiment I will assume that in order to have a councilor killed by the grandmaster of the Morag Tong you need to be a bit of a big name yourself.

Ruled out: Aryon, Baladas, Dratha, Divayth Fyr, Gothren (he would probably have been up for it, but he is already dead at this point as you get the writs after Dagoth Ur is defeated).

Neloth - He seems to have liked power games back then, so he is a rather likely candidate. He kidnapped Miner Arobar's daughter in order to influence how he voted on the council so he likewise might have wanted Bero removed since he voted unfavourably. It makes sense. But it's a bit unsatisfying since you never really get to know more about Neloth's motives for messing with Great House politics.

Therana - You can't rule out anything with her. She is simultaneously the target of a writ, and the person who wants her dead is a Hlaalu:

"Mistress Therana is already dead? Our Hlaalu client will be pleased."

I think this could be an extension of the Odirniran dispute, since it's in the same general area. It must be quite attractive, as the climate seems decent and there are quite a few egg mines in the area. Therana's presence and the fact that she is mining for eggs herself stops Hlaalu from expanding in the area.

So like, it could have been the case that Dram and Therana both wanted the other dead at the same time as a part of a conflict related to this.

Galas Drenim - This is a bit of an obscure character, but at the same time very important. She represents House Telvanni on the grand council in Ebonheart. It's also not too far fetched to assume that she was somehow related to the local Telvanni lord Mavon Drenim in Vivec, who at this point has been honorably executed. If Dram had anything at all to do with that (for whatever reason) Galas could feel a need to retaliate. Sadly I can't find any context at all as to why Mavon Drenim was killed. There is not a lot to go on, but at least they live in roughly the same area and this makes it a bit more likely that there was a personal conflict going on.

Didn't it just say he drove them away from Vvardenfell? If they just flew off somewhere else it probably saved them from the eruption of Red Mountain and ended up preserving them instead.

jiub did not eradicate the cliff racers. he exaggerated to legitimize his claim to sainthood. a recurring theme of these games is that historical accounts are unreliable. mjoll the lioness talks about hunting cliff racers in the year 4E 201. take my hand

*the average day in the hlaalu council manor*

Orvas: I HATE YOU.

Dram: OH? WELL NEXT TIME DON’T STEAL MY MONOPOLY.

Vedam: Dram, give Orvas his 200$, you landed on his property.

Dram: NO. HES IN JAIL. I’m not gonna give money to a CRIMINAL.

Orvas: THATS NOT HOW YOU PLAY!!!

Crassius: Vedam, why is Orvas screaming.

Vedam: Shut up, Crassius, you’re not gonna talk after stealing my LAST RAILROAD.

Orvas: I WISH I WAS NEVER BORN

Morrow'Inktober : Days 13 to 18 - Dagoth Ur, Vemynal and the Heart of Lorkhan.

I love drawing Dagoth Ur so much! Although he looks more bashful than scary here, I kind of goofed it. Oh well. Also, I picked Vemynal as a Sixth House location, but it would be a lie to say that it's the most iconic- that honor belongs, as we all well know, to the random piles of chairs and middle school scribbles in Kogorhun.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 4

I got Morrowind for Xbox around 2005 and so played it completely unmodded and with pretty poor graphics. I was not a part of the fandom at this time because I simply lacked internet access at home. This also meant I couldn't really look up anything that I struggled with.

I remember that "the cube" was the reason I didn't finish the main quest until 2007, when I got a decent gaming computer and internet. I simply did not see the platform you need to levitate to in order to get to the room with the puzzle box.

Okay, so people who have only been in the TES fandom from Oblivion or Skyrim onward are really lucky, because I wouldn’t wish the jump from Morrowind to Oblivion on anyone. And I’m very glad the current gen of TES fan is a lot tamer because, hoo boy, I hate Oblivion for a reason and the entire reason is just the baggage it brought with it.

Picture this: I am a young teenager when I am introduced to Morrowind. I spend a lot of time on a forum called Planet Elder Scrolls. By and large, most of the people there are tired modders who’ve been doing it for ages in other games or people who lean more toward the “nerd” criteria than “gamer” criteria. Because this was an age when being a COOL MAINSTREAM GAMER(tm) was relatively… new, I guess? Halo really changed the landscape on that one.

So, it’s a quiet community of modders and nerds who mostly just post screenshots and cringe fic and everyone thinks their Nerevarine is the best and most coolest Nerevarine ever. The biggest argument we have is about mods being lore compliant and, even then, the consensus is “if I want to put my Altmer in assless chaps and a thong, he is GOING to be in assless chaps and a thong. Fuck you.”

This was the era of Westly and AlienSlof and Kikaimegami and we were JUST figuring out who TrainWiz was.

But, when I was sixteen years old, Oblivion was released and there was a… shift. A change we could sense. This was the era where COOL MAINSTREAM GAMING was in its infancy and I don’t think the previous TES fandom was prepared for what that brought to the doorstep. Because, suddenly, it went from “oh my god I can’t wait for Oblivion, look at how alive the world feels!!” to a quiet “we are going to burn this fandom to the ground and start anew.”

Now, I didn’t really go much on the Bethesda forums because they were big and the idea of talking to a dev was intimidating and maybe they handled it better. But PES was small and independent and suddenly there were GAMERBROS everywhere whose bread and butter consisted of starting shit and ignoring rules. Morrowind was ugly and stupid and they didn’t understand why we still played it, and they’d drop into topics about Morrowind and tell us so. Our characters were stupid and didn’t fit lore, but the front page was PLASTERED with meticulously modeled big titty anime demon girls from their Oblivion saves. Oblivion began the MASSIVE BOOB AND SEXY WALK movement, and we were helpless as our screenshot forum suddenly looked like a weird corner of pornhub.

Here’s some of the worst (funniest? Frustrating?) things I remember:

- AlienSlof was an admin for PES and a mod maker who, essentially, was all about making Hot Guy mods… and also horses, for some reason. She liked her dudes to be thotted up before it was cool, and she made her personal mods available publicly in case anyone else wanted their elf boy in a mesh crop top. She was, predictably, not scandalized by Hot Girl mods, though they didn’t appeal to her.

But then the Gamer Bros descended on her, angry that she would dare not make mods tailored for them, making homophobic comments, being general pricks. And it sucked because Slof was also an exhausted thirty-something whose response to this is “I don’t got time for this shit,” and she… delisted everything she ever made.

- There were some who tried to brave Morrowind and every last one of them seemed to completely miss the Dwemer Puzzle Box from the main quest. Morrowind General was flooded with “where box?? CUBE?!?! HELP MODS NO CUBE!!! CuBE?? plz wher box plz?” to the point that one of the mods angrily made an entire screenshot-riddled guide to how to walk into a room and look to your left.

- My last straw was a guy who decided Morrowind was too bland and boring and so his idea was to make a mod that would gut it entirely and rebuild it as some edgy Ashland post-apoc volcano hellscape. Part of his manifesto was changing the racial traits to make more sense, and one of the changes he made was to make Redguards immune to fire, which he specifically pointed out that he did in order to make them “more realistic.” We had to explain to him that melanin did not make you incapable of burning to death.

- Though I was also mad about the theft of Intellectual Property that suddenly sprang up. I had fics I wrote spread wide and far. :(

Unfortunately, a few years after I left, GameSpy (which hosted PES) shuttered. The site eventually redirected to The Nexus and now… well, it’s but a distant memory and so many of the old mods are probably gone, save for some hard drives. I know a lot of them were archived by Fliggerty, but now Fliggerty is also defunct and searching the Morrowind archive is a hassle.

But yeah. There you go. Oblivion was the bane of the TES fandom for a very long time and I’m glad to see we somehow recovered from that shit. Awesome!

I remember fondly the first time I heard a really strange noise in Skingrad and found it was a dead NPC that was stuck in the city wall and just kept going up and down and the limbs were all over the place Dhalsim style.

heard rumblings of an oblivion remake. i'm not sure if that's actually substantiated, but if it is it'll be interesting to see what they do with it. part of oblivion's charm, i think, it just how busted and of its time it is. it's got that 360 near-launch look to it, that 7th gen bloomy, saturated haze, like somebody at bethesda is spit-polishing your camera in real time to keep your focus off the fact that the engine is spewing black smoke. the score is lush and soft and sweeping. oblivion has, for lack of a better term, a kind of mucilaginous quality to it, i think, but i assume part of that is the positive memories i ascribe to it through nostalgia. oblivion is bright, and dense, but there's enough in it for you to stick your hands in and gouge out something interesting yourself. if you make it cleaner, better, if you wipe the vaseline off the lens, i wonder what's left? i can't argue that they shouldn't improve things like stability, or the ai, or increase the amount of voice actors from 2 to 3, but i hope the likelihood of a quest npc saying ᶠᵃʳᵉʷᵉˡˡᵎ and then pinging straight through the wall, never to be seen again and ruining a quest you'll do 80 hours from now, is at least there. i'm looking forward to it, in any case