This is my idea dump to help resolve various lore disrepancies between TR and the canon games, and other projects that make use of our lore, such as Beyond Skyrim.
1) Shad Astula (ESO) and Meralag (TR)
ESO lore: Shad Astula is an academy of mages. Once meant for the elites of Morrowind society and a place where all the Great Houses could study in peace. During the Second Era's Ebonheart Pact, Shad Astula opened its doors to the rest of the Pact (Argonians and Nords).
TR lore: Meralag is a gated community of Indoril.
Headcanon: After the Ebonheart Pact dissolved, Shad Astula became severely underfunded and eventually went under. It is now little more than a basement/ruin under Meralag, full of magical traps, tricks, and artifacts for an unwary adventurer to stumble upon. (Suggestion: create a fun dungeon involving plenty of puzzles and magical items!)
2) Kragenmoor (official games, Beyond Skyrim) and Kragen Mar (TR)
Official lore: "Kragenmoor" is what's referenced in some dialogue in TES3, as well as on maps in Arena and ESO.
Beyond Skyrim lore: "Kragenmoor" gained popularity after House Sadras took over from House Hlaalu. House Sadras incorporated Imperial religious beliefs as well as culture, and now Kragen Mar has fallen largely out of use by the Fourth Era.
Headcanon: Kragen Mar is the proper Dunmeri term from the town, which is often bastardized to "Kragenmoor" by non-native speakers.
3) Bleakrock (ESO, Beyond Skyrim) and Absolutely Nothing (TR)
ESO lore: Bleakrock is an island between Solstheim and the Skyrim coast line. It has Nordic tombs and outposts, though some Dunmer may have settled it in the Second Era.
Beyond Skyrim: Bleakrock remained a Nordic Reaver-controlled island until late Third Era, when the East Empire Company established a small ebony mining colony. After the Red Year, the Redoran took up residence, re-christenizing the island as Bal'Sehrma (literally Bleackrock in Dunmeris).
TR lore: It doesn't exist and never did.
Headcanon: Sometime during the Second Era (but after ESO), another of the Alliances invaded Bleakrock, and set off a magical catastrophe that would send it to the bottom of the ocean. Sotha Sil intervened to save Bleakrock from this invasion, transporting it instead out of space and time. After the Tribunal's fall, Bleakrock reappeared, albeit, probably with some Sotha Sil-esque changes that can be found in ruins or dungeons on Bal'Sehrma. Suggestion: add some ruins to the bottom of the sea in this area as an Easter Egg, and/or some legends surrounding Sotha Sil's doings. More ambitious suggestion: add a questline wherein bits and pieces of Bleakrock start reappearing as the Tribunal's power fades.
Alternative Headcanon (Beyond Skyrim favored): Bleakrock's destruction is something of a Dragon Break. In Beyond Skyrim, the timeline where Bleakrock was saved from disaster is preserved. In TES3, Bleakrock was destroyed. Sometimes these two timelines overlap and blur together. Suggestion: include NPCs confusedly speculating about Bleakrock's existence, as well as varying folktales talking about its destruction and rumored "reappearances" whenever the timelines converge.
4) Davon's Watch (ESO, Beyond Skyrim) and Ildrim (TR)
ESO lore: Davon's Watch is an Indoril town that was assaulted and at least partly destroyed by the Daggerfall Covenant during the Second Era.
Beyond Skyrim lore: Davon's Watch is a small (?) fishing village halfway between Ildrim and Id Vano
TR lore: Ildrim IS Davon's Watch, now a shack-town instead of an Indoril city. Over the development cycle, the name of this town changed to Darnim's Watch, then to Darnim, then to Ildrim.
Headcanon: Davon's Watch was almost destroyed by the Daggerfall Covenant in ESO's timeframe, and never quite regained its former glory, resulting in the town of shacks it is in TR. It was renamed to Darnim Watch after its destruction, and eventually to Ildrim, as the language shifted over the centuries. Suggestion: add a lore book regarding Davon's Watch's history to the game, as well as to the "Ildrim" dialogue topic.
2017-03-27 17:25
7 years 7 months ago
Hey! I'm Larrian, one of the Core Directors from Beyond Skyrim: Morrowind. I've been in contact with Kevaar a bit lately, and we've been discussing linking a lot of our lore. BS:Morrowind relies heavily on Tamriel Rebuilt's lore, partly out of respect for your project and for the sake of continuity.
Kevaar suggested I post my ideas for bridging the fairly small lore gap between our projects here. As we've included almost as much lore of yours that we could, Kevaar and I have been discussing your project using some of our lore content, in the form of nods, references and small locations here and there, as well as a couple more drastic things.
In order of most drastic to least, here are my proposals.
In Response to Kevaar's above post, in respect to the Shad Astula:
On the Shad Astula - we're basically doing the same thing, except we're including the University as an above-ground ruin instead. We will likely have a quest centred on rebuilding said University. If you wanted to include it, one alternative would be to have it as an above ground overgrown ruin situated in the valley just east of Meralag.
Conclusion:
Such collaboration will allow for three unique things, not really done in modding quite like this before.
- 1) It'll link our projects together. TR is a project we have a great deal of respect for, and we'd love to work more with you on this.
- 2) It will allow for a level of attention to detail not often seen. Imagine stumbling across an NPC in BS:Morrowind and realising 'Wow! This guy was in TR!' Or vise versa.
- 3) It will allow for consistency, and will allow the player to feel as though they're in the same Province, 230 years apart.
Regards!
Larrian
2016-01-19 19:35
5 days 11 hours ago
Great Arnesian Cliff-- can you link a map to where this cliff would be drawn? If it's where I think it is (dividing Black Marsh and Morrowind), then it'd be a perfect excuse for the "you cannot travel past this border" thing, but I'd have to defer to someone like Gnomey to get the heightmaps to reflect this.
Orsimer--I will direct you to this post-- http://tamriel-rebuilt.org/asset/malahk-orcs Long story short, there are a few gaps between P:C's landmass and ours, and one of the ideas was to fill these in with a Malahk settlement.
Older characters: These would be neat, and probably help us when it comes to placing NPCs or coming up with interior house claims in cities.
New Locations, ESO Locations, Renamed Locations -- I have a feeling this will have to be decided on a case by case basis. Most of ESO's things were crafted well after we finished our town maps, and their reception in terms of what they added to the lore has been decidedly lukewarm to chilly.
Shad Astula: As the exterirs of this region are finished, it'd be a bit of a pain to go back and add a sprawling above-ground ruin, hencce why I suggested a dungeon, as that just needs a door placed somewhere. I believe we talked about one of your towns being unearthed and/or buried in the Red Year, and this could have happened to Shad Astula as well.
Davon's Watch: Same story as far as changing exteriors, albeit I don't think we could use the Red Year excuse again. Here would be my head canon: the assault on Davon's Watch as we saw in ESO diminished it to a ruin with a few fishers hanging on. Over the centuries the citizens of this fishiing village migrated to Darnim/Ildrim (for the life of me I can't remember what the final name was) and Id Vano. With the Red Year, the fishing patterns changed yet again, and people returned to Davon's Watch. Suggestion: reference through dialogue that this area sees a lot of smalltime migration over the centuries as people follow fishing routes around. Perhaps add a small dungeon in the area in TR, though I don't know what tile set they'd make use of--perhaps the Mournhold sewers.
2014-03-16 17:45
1 year 10 months ago
More collab sounds cool,
That would be the easiest of all, do post about your characters. Probably not too many on the TR side -- I imagine most unique vampires currently in the mod are tied to some quest as hostile and assumed to be killed (maybe not this one), so that would leave the Dres councilors and the more prudent Telvanni magelords (at least a couple councilors were meant to die during the Tel questline). Aside from that a free choice of some of their retainers/ 'velothi tower' mages/ Altmer/ some Temple mystics/ hermits or ascetics...
This one must be somewhere already, guess it's one of the two lakes north/NE of Narsis?
For small things like fishing towns it could make as much sense for them to not be there, or be elsewhere, or be named after landmarks or caves or such (perhaps even more sense, the shacks in Morrowind don't look like they were built to last centuries). The end of the original MW plotline can also easily justify the building or re-building of monasteries.
ESO stuff:
I'm sure most here don't feel any pressure to include that :P nods sound harmless enough, entirely meaningless ones maybe not: ESO might have fans too, and I don't pretend to understand how such persons would think but if this is for their sake, consider that maybe they wouldn't be any more pleased to find their favorite ESO location placed somewhere else as a completely different entity than older fans are with ESO's no doubt well-meant nods to the original Morrowind game, in/appropriate as they are (to dispell any misunderstanding, they are not pleased, and quite vocal about it)
2016-01-19 19:35
5 days 11 hours ago
I went ahead and added my suggestions on what to do with Davon's Watch to the main post. In short, Second Era destruction + fishing routes, or another Indoril-suicide catastrophe, with the opportunity to poke fun at ourselves and how we also protested in the extreme when our "god figures" decided to add unwanted, er, "lore" to the world. XD
2014-01-08 21:55
2 days 18 hours ago
Ildrim is Davon's Watch.
The old Darnim Watch (from TES1: Arena) was renamed Darnim, which was later renamed Ildrim.
Lake Coronati is here. We have marked Ald Iuval on the map already, but apparently Ald Marak is missing. I would be in favour of adding an abandoned/hostile Chimer stronghold opposite to Ald Iuval that would be named Ald Marak. Regarding other towns mentioned in 2920, the town of Ald Erfoud is located in the Armun Ashlands and was renamed to Arvud (due to Erfoud being a town in Morocco).
2016-01-19 19:35
5 days 11 hours ago
Well, that's an easy headcanon resolved for Davon's Watch. I'll change that...
2015-09-28 20:13
2 years 6 months ago
Cheers. I'm sort of unofficially developing a placeholder Black Marsh mod (still busy writing up the official declaration), so I have a vested interest in some of this.
I'm hoping for more cross-project coordination, but as pointed out in about our lore there is a fundamental divide between TR and "modern" lore that you simply cannot bridge, you can only acknowledge it. I don't want to toss out 16 years of lore development in favor of Skyrim's bland derivativeness or the latest retcon Zenimax Online half-assed to create more sales.
Bleakrock plain and simply doesn't fit into the Morrowind map (unless you use Anthology Solstheim, which you should). No ifs and buts. There is no in-game justification you can use. TR shouldn't shift landmasses around just to accomodate ESO's desire to plop in massive islands where none were before. Obviously Anthology Solstheim fixes this, but there is no Bleakrock Island addon to it (I'm not going to make it), and trying to pretend that there's an island which doesn't fit into its allocated space is silly.
Whatever you are going to do with it, it will have to be part of another mod.
Not sure if this will come up, but why not? There are some really big problems we're going to have to acknowlege, like the Brotherhood of Seth and the very different nature of the Dark Brotherhood, but overall I'm in favor.
I don't see that. The western Black Marsh/Morrowind Border is dominated by the outliers of the red-rocked Shipal-Sharai (what the Velothi/Valos mountains evolve into in the far south), the outliers of the cursed Marshes of Mir that encroach from Cyrodiil, and uninhabited upland forest.
We do instead have the Arnesian Jungle Region (what the Argon Jungle got renamed to), centered around a drowned valley that contains the old Cantemiric Velothi settlements and is dominated by large root islands. That region does not exist anywhere else.
I'm going to have to update Rats here. THe current planning map is this, with both Lake Coronati and settlements.
Needs more details. Using your names for Black Marsh would be most welcome (we would disagree on political development and the Hist most likely, though), but we do have the settlements in the south and west mostly planned out.
Trying to accomodate ESO is a mistake IMO. TR was started in 2001 and we are far far older than ESO's, Skyrim's, or Oblivion's retcons. ESO's settlements are among these retcons, as well as its attempts to shit all over the Mages Guild and play up the Ebonheart Pact's Hogwarts. Since ESO has started retconning out Khajiit breeds, the Dreamsleeve, Telvanni towers, and Vvardenfell's wildlife, I don't feel like we should accomodate it at all. If (and this is a big if) we're going to add more settlements for the hell of it, I don't see why we couldn't use these names.
As pointed out, Ildrim is Davon's Watch, so it's already in TR. For the record, Id Vano is the Indoril player stronghold, so not a normal settlement.
Marahk-Bazhul would be what we have on our end (but that's mostly up to ThomasRuz, Roerich, and Gnomey. It exists in the blank space between Province: Cyrodiil and Tamriel Rebuilt, and we did create some lore for our Orcish Switzerland Confederation. Orc strongholds in Telvannis sounds really out there. I don't see that happening; we've had some tentative ideas to put more heretics into it, though.
Sure. Details please.
Ald Zeren for an abandoned Imperial fortification sounds really strange. I guess we'll have to see case by case.
2017-03-27 17:25
7 years 7 months ago
Yeah all of this makes a lot of sense. I think utilising the Asurna Argonian stuff would be awesome. If you need someone to help oversee that, I'd be more than happy to help. In fact I'd like to help with a BM project in general. On added locations, I think the only one of real note that should be added in your case is probably the small hamlet of Negkis, seeing as you're redoing Mournhold anyway, I think that would be a nice addition. This will play a fairly big role in our Indoril Quest-lines, so I think it'd be a nice little nod. In terms of ESO, I completely agree. Even Beyond Skyrim's Morrowind lore will never be 100% the same as yours, so not including most of these locations is I think fine. In terms of using names, I meant for currently unnamed dungeons that we've already named on our map. They're just normal Daedric or Velothi Ruin naming conventions :P
In terms of NPCs, I'll need to speak to Asurnasurpal on which ones you guys could include. One would probably be 'the Potter,' a redware potter who lives in Mournhold.
2017-03-31 11:03
7 years 7 months ago
Hi, I couldn't help but notice your discussion on Bleakrock Isle and I wanted a chance to pitch in. I don't expect to change any minds, I haven't even played ESO and reading this here was my first introduction to the island and so I've spent the day researching it and thinking.
From what I can see it's fairly easy to incorporate the isle in regards to it's canonical position as well as its' scale relative to Solstheim. From what I can tell the cells it takes up are free of anything vanilla and TR, though in a perfect world it would be 3x3 cells and scratch the tip of Baan Malur's North-Eastern most cell rather than be a 3x2 cell island.
ESO is unreasonably snowy from what I can tell and I picture the island having thawed out over the years since the online game and now is more along the lines of the West Gash Coast or even Sheogorad, a rocky island with sparse vegetation and perhaps a few pines. The village is long gone, though a pier, a lighthouse (Bal'Sehrma Lighthouse) and perhaps a shack replace it.
The North-East of the main island has an Ancestral Tomb where the Skyshroud Barrow once stood (perhaps a cave-in inside leads into what remains of the barrow, creating a unique mix of assets).
Evidence of the mine lays on the Western side, though perhaps it cannot be accessed.
The small Northern island retains its' cavern, though it would probably go by a different name at this point of time and may be filled with Reavers rather than the usual bandit fair of Vvardenfell.
The position of the island would probably also be a factor, albeit a small one, in the strained relationship between Redoran and Telvanni as it makes travel to the East difficult.
Even if ESO lore is dropped out the window, consolidation of official landmasses is always nice IMO.
2016-01-17 13:07
1 year 8 months ago
Solstheim is way too close to Baan Malur as it is, and Bleakrock (like Solstheim) is supposed to be an obscure and unimportant backwater; putting it on the doorstep of the Redoran capital just doesn't work with that image.
Frankly, Bleakrock seems to just be "Solstheim for ESO". We already have Solstheim, so why bother?
2017-03-31 11:03
7 years 7 months ago
Scale is the main issue there. I mean, Morrowind here is miniscule to how it was in Arena and how large it's technically meant to be, so fitting things in along those lines, especially when retroactively adding them in, is just going to leave you with a sore head.
Yeah, but that's ESO, not Morrowind. While I understand what you're getting at, the argument is redundant since you can just say "Why work on any concept or addition already done a certain way in official material?" about anything.
If Bleakrock was added, I bet it wouldn't be the ESO version.
Like I said, I'm not trying to change any minds and don't expect to. It would be cool to have an official island, albeit a retroactively added one, that's missing in TR. But honestly I just learned of the island's existence today and was just coming up with a concept of how I would go about putting it in.
2015-09-28 20:13
2 years 6 months ago
My position is the same it's always been:
Tamriel Rebuilt was started in 2001 and is technically older than Morrowind. It can't and shouldn't catch up to ESO's still on-going canon development, especially since ESO keeps invalidating Morrowind's setting as more pieces of it are developed.
That's not to say that nods aren't out (and Kevaar is doing some good work with making them happen), but plopping in an entire new island into a map which doesn't really support it, putting up with a mass-extinction of fauna on Vvardenfell, or the revised Telvanni construction roles is where I'm going to disagree.
However, I made two mods which move Solstheim to its canon position (north and east of where Bloodmoon placed it), because Solstheim's position in-game is largely due to the minimap constrains. Anyone who wants to add Bleakrock island is welcome to fire up the CS and place it in the hole that these mods created. it will fit a lot better there.
It just won't be part of TR, someone else will have to do it.
2016-10-09 23:10
6 days 23 hours ago
Wow, I'm pretty surprised that you're the one who made those mods. (But I'm not surprised that you went and moved Solstheim).
2015-09-28 20:13
2 years 6 months ago
I do try to put my money where my mouth is, and Solstheim's position had bugged me (and others) for ages. Took a month each time, and Anthology Tomb of the Snow Prince works better with OpenMW than with vanilla due to the multi-master reference problems that needed a specific fix.
That was also before I became lead dev, so I had actual free time then.
2016-01-19 19:35
5 days 11 hours ago
First draft of a lore book about Davon's Watch: http://tamriel-rebuilt.org/asset/conflicting-accounts-books-one-through Does poking fun at ESO give me some brownie points? Or just redeem me for using ESO lore at all?
2015-08-10 20:50
2 weeks 5 days ago
Just to pitch in on a few points:
I agree that Bleakrock seems to be ESO's way of including Solstheim without actually including all of Solstheim. It seems like a straight-up development compromise to me; they probably originally intended to include Solstheim, (though Solstheim as a starting zone seems really weird to me, it wouldn't be a first for ESO), but decided they couldn't do it justice while remaining within the deadline or whatever, and so just created a smaller island to serve the same purpose more economically.
Honestly, the decision itself doesn't bother me at all, as Solstheim's existence is every bit as arbitrary and arguably more ham-fisted. Games will always be full of compromises and conveniences, and I'm not aware of Bethesda ever saying their games represent how the world is supposed to be; quite the opposite. The games are an imperfect representation of a world that exists beyond them.
Vanilla Ebonheart is another such compromise: Bethesda originally planned to create all of Morrowind, but ended up limiting themselves to Vvardenfell. They still needed an Imperial seat of power, so they simply moved the mainland city of Ebonheart onto Vvardenfell. Tidy solution for them. Then we came along and decided we wanted to make the mainland, and had to contend with two Ebonhearts. Messy solution for us. If TR were a total conversion, I'd mercilessly cut Vvardenfell Ebonheart without hesitation. It's really an abberation in my eyes. But as TR is effectively an expansion, that was never really on the table, and we've found a way to make it work, as long as you don't think too hard. But the whole mess makes me rather reluctant to voluntarily, retroactively include another implementation compromise from another game into our project.
As far as Lake Coronati is concerned, Iuval and Marak are the remnants of former Redoran control of the region. They will probably be small, destitute Redoran outposts. I don't see us including Rivermoth, but it could easily have been built afterwards; perhaps during the Oblivion crisis, perhaps during the period of violence and instability that no-doubt followed, perhaps later. I'm not sure how much lore you've made for it.
As far as the Great Arnesian Cliff is concerned, it's not really great and not really Arnesian, but we do have a cliff in the far western Morrowind/Blackmarsh border:
I'm not sure if we'd use the name, if we name the cliffs at all, but 'Great Arnesian Cliffs' is an outlander name anyway, so clearly irrelevant.
I expect we're going to have pretty significant differences in regards to how we represent Argonian and Orsimer culture, but am by no means against sharing ideas when they suit what we're going for, and naturally vice versa. I'd actually imagine Orsimer and Argonian culture to be perhaps the most constantly shifting on Tamriel, so it wouldn't be inconceivable that they'd look quite different two centuries down the line, but I think we can spare ourselves the weaselly excuse.
As far as NPCs are concerned, I actually consider it a pretty foregone conclusion that the Dres councillors are not going to make it far into the fourth era, if at all. They did incredibly well making it through most of the third but have been running on borrowed time for millennia, quite literally. The Indoril are probably pretty doomed as well, as well as the more long-lived Hlaalu councillors. And if I had my way, Redoran would be gone in a blaze of glory. At the very least, I'd expect most of the Morrowind-era councillors to have died in battle or otherwise to make way for new blood. The future of the Telvanni councillors is far more difficult to predict; you could expect any one councillor either to have gotten killed, withdrawn into their own pocket realms or to have continued unperturbed as they were.
I'm quite open to including Beyond Skyrim NPCs, though, though that will likely need to be decided on a case-by-case basis. Oh, and be sure to include all of TES III's invisible children as invisible old people.
2016-01-23 11:05
6 years 4 months ago
that feel when still hope it become so
Aslo, what about arena fighters teams names from tes1?