[ashvampire]

Everything I've written in chronological order (you can also go onto my archive and search the 'my work' tag). Some of it is older and may one day be rewritten.

First Council/Tribunal:

A lesson in healing

Alandro and Nerevar attempt to sail

Nerevar and Boethiah

Nerevar delivers a bounty

A Party

Informants

Almalexia visits Nerevar's Tomb

Nerevarine/Morrowind:

Ane Teria

A disturbing dream

Vivec and the Nerevarine meet

[ashvampire]

you came up in conversation today, a friend and i were chatting about how good your writing is, how flavourful and detailed and interesting (and very well written!) your fics are. thanks for sharing them. i hope your'e still writing now and again, and hope you're well :)

thank you so much!! surreal to think people are talking about my writing!

i am still writing! most has been fanfic (different franchise) but i have been focusing more on some original projects lately.

thank you again ❤ i hope you are well too, anon

[theendingofthewordsisalmsivi]

There's plenty of criticism to be had about morrowind's guild questlines but one of the most impressive parts of them is the indirect storytelling. The imperial guilds are all horribly corrupt, but this isn't necessarily enunciated so much as just, presented without commentary.

The mages guild steward in Balmora is sending you to execute gang hits on competition and personal vendettas on past colleagues. The steward in Ald-Ruhn is paying you to steal from the guild and shake down less respected stewards (read: racialized). There's two argonians in the whole guild, and one is stuck in a Telvanni dominated backwater with limited resources and no backing for his genuinely admirable research. The guildmaster is an idiot who was promoted out of Cyrodiil out of convenience to get him out of his superior's hair.

The fighters guild is similarly fucked up, because Eydis Fire-Eye and Sjoring Hard-Heart are in the pocket of the Camonna Tong and are having you do extortions, racketeering, and straight up gang hits on thieves guild members or their associates, random civilian business owners, and great house agents. The former guildmaster is acting as a double agent against the corrupt current guildmaster to help you usurp his authority once you prove you're honorable enough not to do extra-judicial murder for the man.

And like this is obviously The Point to some degree, the imperial guilds are corrupt and incompetent because they're disconnected from the heart of the empire and are left too much to their own devices in a nation that is fraught with conflicting political forces with heavy amounts of money being traded between large numbers of hands. But this isn't like, a direct line of dialogue that someone just says to you. If this were a weaker written game someone would just lay out the Moral Of The Story. To some extent it makes the whole of the game stronger that you're shown the corruption and inefficiency and allowed to conclude personally that oh shit the empire is really not a stabilizing force in this region and a lot of what it imports is graft and vice while purporting to bring peace and culture and democracy wait sorry this is Cyrodiil not the United States.

In your last conversation with Caius Cosades during the main quest he says he thinks the empire is going to crumble soon. When Uriel Septim dies all hell is gonna break loose. Thinking about it from his perspective as a buried deep imperial agent, if this is the sort of system he has to work under day in and day out on the underbelly of Vvardenfell society, I can't say I'd disagree with him.

[shag0hod]

waiter waiter!!! more npcs to get attached to please !!!

[deadgenerations]

no one actually tells you this but Morrowind is not about adventure, it is about political intrigue and being used and using others for your own ends. There are (almost) no Quests in morrowind besides the main quest, all the rest are just Jobs. They are work that you do for money, power and illiquid capital (cool artifacts of power which you can use to get more money and power). You don't join the fighters guild to save them from being werewolves, you join them for the steady income and the ability to rise in the ranks, access to specialist services only available to members, and to make connections with other employers. Being an adventurer means you are a professional, not a hero!

Even the main quest, which is nominally quite magical and loaded with theology and myth, while still being a grand and epic Quest in the way nearly nothing else in Morrowind is, is itself about politics and intrigue. In the end, the affairs of the devil and the god kings and even the incarnate saviour of the dunmer are the story of tawdry political machinations writ large, made epic only by their scale. Even with all the esotericism and opaque theologies and competing mythohistories, and theres a lot of that, no one makes it out of the muck of the real. Everyone in morrowind, even the grandest villain, are People with opinions and motivations. No one is purely sympathetic nor purely unsympathetic, there are very few Good Guys you can join and very few purely evil villains to smite.

And this is what sets it apart from almost any other RPG, even others who are also going for the professional angle like the Witcher. This is what the modders at TR and PT have been creating with the expanded Morrowind mainland and other provinces. Morrowind (the game) is a Place, in the way that "Star Trek is a place". This is not to say that it is 'better' than these other games, but it is doing something different, something that you just don't get in most video games. And on top of that, thanks to Tamriel Rebuilt and Project Tamriel, it's gamespace is now about as expansive as an MMO, it's almost impossible to run out of new things to do in new ways in new places.

[nerevar-near-and-far]

"No one makes it out of the muck of The Real" goes so hard

[theminttu]

A collection of scenery paintings from Morrowind I’ve done over the years. Vvardenfell will always be my home :’)

[boethiah]

not keeping up with the rumours but i feel like a morrowind remaster could never truly work becaause the things that make morrwind so captivating are the things that any modern game company would remaster out. morrowind is hostile and confusing and difficult. morrowind offers you no quest markers, only vague directions and landmarks. morrowind offers you no answers, only contradictory accounts of its lore to puzzle out. morrowind forces you to meet it on its term and above all it feels like a place that was not made for you and does not particularly want you there and this is what makes it so engrossing. the render distance is ten feet

[what-even-is-thiss]

Man I know that elder scrolls is a stupid series and all that but I really think they did concepts like orcs and dark elves mostly correct. More correct than a lot of franchises I’ve seen anyways.

[what-even-is-thiss]

I think dnd took until like this year to properly update drow and orcs or something? Like fantasy as a whole has a hard time shaking off this idea of evil races.

The elder scrolls approach to these guys from the beginning though has been that their cultures are just really different from the other cultures around them.

Like you can hang out in orc strongholds in Skyrim and spend the whole game around dark elves in Morrowind and they’re just regular people that have kind of extreme cultural norms. Dark elves are kind of rude to you when they first meet you but like in the way certain cultures are rude to outsiders at first until they get to know them. Orcs are rough around the edges but they’re smart and have a proud culture and if you can hold your own in a fight they’ll respect you.

And you see these people can blend pretty well into other societies. They join faiths their ancestors didn’t practice, they have jobs that people of their race wouldn’t stereotypically have, they have opinions about what other people assume about them, they have their own wrong assumptions about other cultures.

There’s this understanding somewhere in these games that people are shaped by their cultures but you also can’t predict how an individual will behave based on the culture that they came from. And I like that.

[what-even-is-thiss]

Listen, I love the elder scrolls. It is deep and wide and beautiful. It is also filled with cheese though.

[catbotphoebe]

TES worldbuilding does something I haven't really seen any other fantasy universe do, it foregoes a clear cut and thoroughly explained cosmology in favor of actually different religious interpretations of its universe. There's a basic outline to be gleamed from the overlap between the various theologies, but there's no definitive answer to a lot of questions.

Are Masser and Secunda normal moons? Are they holes in reality through which the light of Aetherius shines? Are they the sundered corpse of the demiurge? Are they normal moons but there's a secret third moon that only comes out during a double eclipse and *that* one is Lorkhan's body? They fought a war about this.

[rubyandice]

I think the fact that utter silliness and ridiculous notions can coexist with conplex ideological flaws and layers upon layers of behavioural patterns and anomalies makes of TES something far from simply realistic or simply stupid. It is the most realistic exploration of the paradoxes of our reality without directly quoting them. A potential vast source to learn, without the consequences of learning all of this in the real world.

[ashvampire]

In case of disaster, I've put (almost) all my TES fanfics on AO3. All the pre First Council stuff is here.

I'll put up the Nerevarine stuff later today.

[ashvampire]

In case of disaster, I've put (almost) all my TES fanfics on AO3. All the pre First Council stuff is here.

I'll put up the Nerevarine stuff later today.

[ashvampire]

if tumblr does go down for good i will put my TES fanfiction in a bottle and throw it in the sea to be read by anyone who finds it

[mazurah]

When we say Dunmer have grey skin:

“Dark Elves are the dark-skinned, red-eyed Elven peoples of Morrowind. The ‘dark’ part may come from their dark grey skin, but it also fits their gloomy dispositions. Folks call them ‘Dark Elf’ in the West, but they call themselves the ‘Dunmer.'”   — Dialogue from Morrowind

There’s more diversity in skin tone than people think.

I’m just gonna start at the beginning and go through the games to show what I mean. This is both an artist resource and evidence that it’s perfectly fine to create Dunmer characters with skin tones other than “grey.”

Here’s the Dunmer from Arena:

You couldn’t choose any other skin tone, so the color palette of midtone, shadow, and highlight looks like this:

Daggerfall’s Dunmer:

Still no option to change skin color so our palette is still really simple:

Battlespire’s Dunmer:

(Thank the gods the male Dunmer is wearing pants.)

Still only one skin tone, but the male Dunmer seems to have slightly lighter skin than the female Dunmer, so here’s our palettes:

Redguard’s Dunmer:

It’s a terrible picture, but it’s the only one I could find. Here’s his palette:

Morrowind’s Dunmer:

There’s still no option to change skin color, but it looks like the male Dunmer has slightly darker skin than the female Dunmer. Here’s the palettes:

I couldn’t find any good pictures of Dunmer from Shadowkey, but here’s the female and male Dunmer profile pictures:

Their skin tone is close enough to have the same color palette:

Now we’re at Oblivion, which is where things get nuts. Oblivion was the first TES game which allowed you to choose your own skin tone. Unfortunately, the slider system was so messed up, that you could eventually get any skin tone with any race. I once accidentally made my Redguard character bright, fire-truck red. Somehow. Skin tones are literally infinite.

My solution for figuring out canon Oblivion skin tones was to look at all the Dunmer NPCs and figure out their skin tones. I used every NPC for which I could find a good screenshot, which ended up being almost every single Dunmer NPC. Their individual palettes are in the bottom right corner of their pictures.

As you can see, the range of skin tones is extensive. Very few of them could be described as simply “grey.” Just to illustrate my point, I took the mid-tone for each NPC and sorted them all by hue. Here’s the results:

That’s basically a desaturated rainbow. @cliff–racer has a headcanon I really like which explains the sudden wide variety of Dunmer skin tones in Cyrodiil as the result of mixed races. Cyrodiil would be the place with the greatest opportunity for mixed race children, so it makes sense.

Moving on to Skyrim:

Skyrim has five skin tones, but they’re all very similar. Here’s the mid-tones in order by lightness:

After the wide variety available in Oblivion, Skyrim’s selection is kind of disappointing. Even if they didn’t want to give us purple and green and blue Dunmer, at the very least they could have gone darker. I always end up choosing the fourth or fifth option simply because all the other ones look whitewashed.

Elder Scrolls Online was kind enough to provide its own color palette:

Here’s what they look like on my buddy Tel here:

The top row seems to have a slightly tan undertone, and the bottom row has a slightly blue-green undertone.

The depiction of Dunmer skin color in The Elder Scrolls: Legends is nearly as varied as it is in Oblivion. There’s many pictures where skin color is just a flat grey, or where the art is so stylized, or the lighting is so intense that skin color isn’t discernible, but here’s a selection of closeups of Dunmer cards in which skin color is more easily seen:

And here’s some I wasn’t even sure were originally drawn to be Dunmer even though it says “Dark Elf” on the card:

Here’s the mid-tones for the Legends Dunmer sorted by hue:

Just look at that desaturated rainbow!

The changing of the color of the Dunmer’s skin is a major piece of cultural lore. It’s part of what changed them, as a people, from the Chimer into the Dunmer. Azura cursed them to have grey skin and red eyes after Almsivi broke their promise to Nerevar and used Kagrenac’s tools to become living gods. Almsivi reframed the transformation to become a point of pride, and their skin color became a religious symbol.

“Velothi, your skin has become the pregnant darkness. My brooding has brought this on. Remember that Boethiah asked you to become the color of bruise. How else to show yourselves people of the exodus into the vital: pain?” — Vivec speaking in the 36 Lessons of Vivec, Sermon 32

“The color of bruise” is a significant phrase, because bruises aren’t just grey. Bruises are purple and blue and brown and green. Make your Dunmer colorful! It’s part of their cultural heritage! 

All images are either my own screenshots or taken from @uesp‘s website.

[sundereds]

When an outlander enters a tomb or burial chamber, they always expect it to be quiet. But entering a tomb without the endless whispers of the departed - the scratching of a rat and the growling of bonewalkers or summoned daedra - was a bad sign to any Dunmer. It either meant the tomb was empty, or that the tomb had been silenced by outlaws or necromancers who had no right to be there. But deep beneath Necrom, in tunnels that seem to go on forever, it should never be quiet. Yet the tomb was filled with utter silence.

The dead spoke to her as Almalexia walked through the dimly lit tunnels. Their whispers were so entangled with each other that to pick out what each spirit is saying is something only the most experienced of priests and priestesses have achieved – and they would spend hours – if not days – in the depths of Necrom, listening to the dead’s endless muttering. And if they were lucky, they might decipher the words of only one spirit. And it will always be of the ones that shout loudest.

Almalexia entered the burial chamber she sought, the creaky wooden door swinging shut behind her. She travelled down a narrow and unlit passage, using a summoned ball of light to guide her way. The walls looked wet, and felt icy whenever one of Almalexia’s bare arms brushed passed the cold stone. As she entered the chamber itself, the cold became oppressing. Her breath fogged in front of her, and she shuddered. Above her, outside of the catacombs, the evening was humid – an opposite to the frigid tomb. It was known for tombs and burial chambers to be cold, but this had a sense of foreboding to it.

Keep reading

[ashvampire]

cw; violence, death

At twilight, a number of councillors, merchants and guards had been summoned deep beneath Kogoruhn, into one of its many halls. They were given no explanation as to why, just that it was important and vital that they came.

It was a spacious hall, lit by mage-lights which drifted idly above. They only lit the entrance of the hall, the rest of it was shrouded in darkness.

They entered the hall one by one. Some recognised each other as they came in, and a sense of dread began to hang in the air. They remained silent, not daring to talk. There were guards in and outside of the hall, watching them all closely. As more people came in, the greater that dread grew.

Once all were inside, the doors were closed and then locked by guards. They began to speak then, demanding to know why they’d been brought there. As they raised their voices and searched for answers, the guards suddenly moved. They wrestled and held them down, binding their wrists and putting magicka-restricting enchantments on them.

Once all of them were bound, the mage-lights moved, revealing the rest of the room.

Someone laid on the floor ahead, beaten bloody and unconscious. His truths had spilled like his blood, and he had purposefully been left lying there, where the others could see him. So they knew that they had been caught; that their secrets were now known.

Dagoth Voryn stood in front of them all, holding his hands behind his back to hide their trembling. He kept his face expressionless, a mask he’d learnt to wear in his adolescents. He couldn’t quite keep the fear and guilt out of his eyes, but he held his head high and tried to make himself look confident.

The guards stood behind the captives, making sure no one tried to escape. Each one had been chosen by Voryn. They were the ones he trusted the most; some he had grown up knowing, others had connections to his uncle. He had few he could trust, and he wasn’t even certain the guards he had chosen wouldn’t betray him. There was only one he trusted not to tattle, though he was not a guard, nor of House Dagoth, but a stranger from the mainland. An outsider. He stood next to Voryn, his chitin boots slick with red.

“You know why you’re here,” Voryn said, forcing himself to speak loud and clear, keeping the tremble out of his voice. He didn’t look at any of the captives before him in the eye. He knew some of them; some he’d even known since he was a child.

“You would betray the empire?!” one of them yelled, both fear and anger in her voice. Voryn dared to look at her; she was a Chimer woman, someone Voryn remembered attending numerous council meetings. He now knew her as an informant of the Nordic Empire.

“You betrayed your own people!” the mer beside Voryn growled, pointing his dagger at her.

The woman gave a look of disbelief. “What choice did I have?! We can’t win against the Nords!” She looked to Voryn pleadingly. “Don’t do this, serjo! They’ll destroy House Dagoth! Surely you realise this?!”

Voryn’s nails dug into the palms of his hands. He was well aware of what would come. He knew he wasn’t ready for war. In truth, he wanted to bury his head in the sand, as his father and brother had done before him. But House Dagoth was already starting to crumble, all of its wealth being handed over to the empire, and surrounded by enemies inland and out at sea. It was easier to hide, and pretend that everything was fine. To look away when villages were overrun by Dwemer or pirates, and as his council was slowly replaced by informants of the empire.

It was the outsider by Voryn’s side that had convinced him to look. Not only look, but do something. He had whispered promises of glory and power in his ears, his breath smelling of skooma and his hands pressed against Voryn’s chest. Somewhere in that fervour, Voryn had agreed to all this.

He shook himself out of his thoughts, and looked to the outsider, searching for approval. Their eyes met, and there was an unspoken understanding between them.

“Nerevar;” Voryn said with hesitance, and gestured to the people before him.

The outsider nodded, an eagerness in his eyes that Voryn chose to ignore. He started with the one already on the floor, flipping him over onto his back and slitting his throat with one fast motion. Then he turned, and some of the captives tried to flee. They were held in place by the guards, none succeeding in breaking free.

Voryn forced himself to watch as Nerevar stalked towards them, his glass dagger gleaming in the pale mage-light. He went to the woman who’d spoken first, standing in front of her in silence. The woman didn’t speak or move, her betrayal turned to fear. Voryn felt his tremors grow worse, and his mask was slipping. He wanted to tell Nerevar to stop, but his jaw seemed locked in place. Even his eyes refused to move, even though he wanted desperately to look away.

Nerevar lunged, plunging the dagger into the woman’s stomach and cutting upwards. There was screaming, and gagging. Nerevar stabbed his blade between her rips, and the woman shuddered and slumped, taking a few raspy breaths before she went silent.

The others died in a similar manner, and Voryn was still frozen where he was, watching each death with wide eyes. After the last one took their final breath, Voryn dismissed the guards, trying to muster his confidence again. He failed, his voice trembling as he told them to leave.

Nerevar cleaned his dagger on one of the dead’s robes, and then approached Voryn. There were specks of blood on his face.

“I hate you,” Voryn said under his breath. “I knew most of those people.” Nerevar walked right up to him, so close they could feel each other’s breath.

“I hate you,” Nerevar replied, eyes narrowed. “You’re the one who made me kill them.”

Voryn’s hands seemed to move on their own accord, cupping Nerevar’s face. He leaned forwards and gently kissed him on the forehead. “I’ll need you to kill for me again, if we are to fight this war,” he whispered. He tasted blood.

“Only if you do the same for me.”

[lambasi]

Sotha Sil by Michael Kirkbride (source)

[ashvampire]

'the heart of lorkhan'

'the eye of magnus'

what next? the toes of zenithar?

[alandrosul]

skyrim is a bad tes game bc it doesn’t have a stupid big city in it like vivec or the imperial city. needs a stupid big city to get lost in