Hello, thank you for submitting your showcase.

First of all, if this is your first time using the CS, this is a really good effort! The implementation is very robust, all of the scripts work as they should, and I haven’t managed to really break the intended progression of the quest during my testing. Well done!

The writing is also very good. You seem to have a firm grasp on the English language, and the dialogue style fits right in with Morrowind’s. I have almost no complaints about the dialogue. The quest progression is also structured very well - everyone who I would expect to have some dialogue about the quest has it and there’s a good number of alternative paths, that, again, Just Work. Again, you’ve done a really good job!

However, there’s three main things that we should fix/improve before I can recommend you for promotion, being:

1. Cleaning the file
2. The number of journal updates
3. Script formatting and some other script related issues

So let’s dive into them, shall we?

Your ESP dirties a number of vanilla objects that you’ve used to make Mathieu Luscne’s house.

First of all, I’m not sure if you’re already using it or not, but I highly recommend installing CSSE, which on its own helps to drastically reduce the number of dirty references that you create accidentally.

Second of all, a good practice is cleaning your file with tes3cmd, which will get rid of the vast majority of these accidental edits for you automatically. In your case, it solves the issue almost completely, except that the file also contains a new container with the id “rand” that, as far as I can see, isn’t used anywhere. That one you need to delete in the CS manually.

As an aside - I’m not going to ask you to change this since it doesn’t really matter for the quest review, but just FYI, during actual development, if you want to add a, let’s say, a house for your quest, this needs to be done as a separate claim that would be reviewed separately from your quest. You could do both, of course, but it has to be done separately and you would have to pass an interior development showcase first.

Morrowind is slightly different from the later Bethesda games in the way that its quests don’t include journal updates for every little thing that the player does. Arguably this sometimes means that Morrowind’s quests can be a little harder to keep track of, but it’s a design philosophy that we try to follow. As an added bonus, this means that your job is much easier since you don’t have as many journal stages to account for when filtering dialogue.

So here I’ll list the journal stages of your quest that I think should be cut or combined:

• 50 - I really like the detail that you can ask one of the slaves about the goblet. You definitely don’t need a journal update for it, though. The player can just access the information through the “engraved Dwemer goblet” topic.
• 55 - This one also should be cut since the vanilla game almost never gives you journal updates for when you find a quest item.
• 56 - Same principle. Cutting this journal update will probably require some redesign of the alternative route where you find the goblet before talking to Hrisskar. I think keeping the alternative route a bit more hidden (meaning, the relevant dialogue topic is unlocked, but there’s no journal update) is completely fine and a bit more Morrowindy.
• 60 + 62 + 64 - You should combine these three journal stages into one. The journal doesn’t really need to specify whether Mathieu gave you training or gold. It can just say “Mathieu rewarded me”.
• 110, 115 - You don’t need a journal update for killing quest NPCs that aren’t 100% required to complete the quest. If a valid route through the quest is killing Mathieu and taking the 100 gold from his body, the player can just do that naturally without being prodded by journal entries.

I’ll go through these one by one.

A general point, though, is that you don’t really need to indent the script lines between “begin” and “end” with the one tab as you’ve been doing. It doesn’t have any functional impact, but it just looks kinda weird 🙂

Another general point is formatting of brackets. You should always include a space at the start of the bracket and at the end. Meaning, instead of (DayTarget > DaysPassed) it should be ( DayTarget > DaysPassed )

TR_m0_q_Arvena

• Setting the TR_Map number should always be done at the end of script, not the beginning, but also, for Map 0 NPC you don’t need to declare the TR_Map variable at all.
• I’m not 100% sure what the timer is for? It doesn’t seem to be relevant to the quest?
• The three if checks for the journal stages should be combined into one block with elseif statements. Also you should check for GetDisabled first so you can skip checking the journal stage if the NPC is already disabled.
• StopScript does nothing for local scripts attached to NPCs. It only works for global scripts.

Fake edit: Okay, only after reviewing the other scripts in the file, I think I understand your intention here. Am I right that the intention is that you want to disable Arvena two days after certain things in the quest happen? In that case you should move that logic to a global script, and just give the NPC a generic map 0 NPC script.

TR_m0_q_Goblet

• Like I already mentioned in the previous section, you’ll need to remove the journal update here since you’ll be removing the journal stages.
• The first if GetJournalIndex block can be removed altogether.
• Try to use existing variable names as much as possible to avoid creating more bloat in the list of local variables for dialogue filtering. Not sure if setonce is already used in TR, but the standard variable name we use for usecases like this one is “doOnce”.

TR_m0_q_Hrisskar

• Same issue with TR_Map number applies here as well.
• StartScript TR_m0_q_Arvena does nothing since the script is also attached to the NPC already.

TR_m0_q_Mathieu_Luscne

• First two points from Hrisskar’s script apply here as well.
• After removing journal stages 110 and 115, Mathieu won’t need a special script.

TR_m0_q_Sale_Goblet

This script is fine, except for indentation and the bracket formatting as I mentioned at the beginning of this section.

Some other stuff I found during the review. Usually trivial, but for the sake of completeness, I’ll point it out for you to fix as well.

• After completing the Fargoth quest, Hrisskar mentions that he has more work for the player, but for the relevant topic (Mathieu Luscne’s debt) to appear, you need to exit the dialogue with him and talk to him again. That’s not intuitive. If you’re already editing vanilla dialogue, you might as well just include the new topic already.
• Northeast->northeast
• Journal 58 doesn’t mark the quest as completed even though it probably should.
• This doesn’t really matter since this quest won’t be merged because it edits Vvardenfell, but I think for compatibility, it’s probably not a good idea to block off Hrisskar’s dialogue with the forced goodbye greeting if you fail the quest by killing Mathieu.
• Fighter’s Guild -> Fighters Guild
• Hlaalu Guards in Balmora shouldn’t tell you to go to Eight Plates to sell the goblet. They are the Imperial authorities that Hasphat mentioned. If Hasphat tells you that you should hand it over to authorities, then there should be an option to actually do so. I realize this is yet another alternative route, so maybe just delete that comment from Hasphat.
• Sometimes you use double hyphens to mark a break in a sentence, sometimes you use two. The vanilla game isn’t 100% consistent in this either, but usually it uses double hyphens, which is also the TR standard.
• The dialogue line where you tell Hrisskar that you’ve killed Mathieu uses a Dead = 1 filter. For compatibility reasons, it’s always better to use Dead >= 1.
• The new container com_sack_03_msdebt should also follow TR’s naming scheme.

I think the list of issues here probably reads a bit more intimidating than it is in reality, and I’m confident that you’ll be able to pass the showcase soon :) If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask in our #showcase-shadowgate channel.