2017-05-28 Meeting Summary

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Atrayonis
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Proposed Agenda

  • Ebon Tower NPCs.
  • Faction Merge, what scope and how soon?
  • Nav Andaram, concept needed
  • Region template meetings for Ascadian Bluffs
  • Handbook needs butter by the fish
  • External updates: Wiki, Nexus (Tamriel_Data needs images)
  • Roles/Responsibilities (you know what this is about, leads)

 

Summary

Foul Murder

The questline needs to have some problems cleaned up, as brought up by 6+.

It progresses too fast from having one ringlet to summoning Peakstar. Instead, an intrepid player would just talk to the Ashlanders they’re familiar with.

 

Several possible options:

  • The Ashlanders themselves don’t know all that much about the ringlets,
  • Simine does not want to have more Ashlander blood shed, so she discourages it.,
  • The Ashkhans are not willing to part with their ringlets, and killing them could be an insta-fail condition for the questline.

Erendal’s objections, based on the heresy, were questioned. There is assumed to be no difference between the Ashlander teachings (which have been legitimized by Vivec and the Progress of Truth) and whatever Alaundro Sul could tell them.

Finally, the mural is suggested to not add anything to the questline and should be cut. The cutscene of the Red Moment would suffice.

There is also a clear dismissal of the idea that the mural just keeps popping up, with questions as to why it hasn’t been moved to the Clockwork city if it can be controlled. It was alternatively suggested that the Tribunal painted it to remember the crime they committed, or to remember the crime they didn’t commit but people accused them of. The Nerevar Bonewalker paining it has moved from being a joke into a serious proposal.

All discussion points were inconclusive and divisive, with most of the involved leads not being around, and no reworking of the questline has been decided on.
 

Old Ebonheart

The discussion about Ebonheart NPCing (raised by Parker here) kinda petered out as the people who could discuss it for the most part weren’t around.

Several points were reiterated though:

  1. The quarantine was attempted and failed, the Legion NPCs should either be grimly aware of their lack of power projection, or fiercly blame everyone else,
  2. A topic that is going to be raised by P:C is that the province Legion heads are (after the Simulacrum) only paying lip service to the central government and have silently gone rogue,
  3. The Count of OE (installed by the Emperor) would rule the city and the Proconsul (installed by the Curia/the Elder Council) would take care of the day-to-day bureocracy. The Count would be trying to extend their influence (throwaway lines in dialogue might be enough) as they are feeling inadequate next to the powerful Counts in Cyrodiil, as Imperial titles in Morrowind are largely meaningless. The topic of Proconsulship should be discussed later on.
  4. The Lord General and entourage looks good to go.
  5. The Duke of Deshaan has been slightly tweaked to the name of Phyrios Hlaalu Matimus, a Dunmer born from an Imperial father and Dunmer mother in Cheydinhal. He might have a distant relation to Helseth, which is why some people thought the poor fool would fit in better with the natives.

Faction Merge

Generally, everything about the merge has been written down by Rot in his forum thread. Keeping the quests and faction membership merged into Mainland and Preview, and the questline changes to a new ESP (TR_Integration.esp?) seems to be the best choice.

 

Three factions were further discussed:

  1. The EEC can be implemented continent-wide as is, future questers will need to keep the Bloodmoon progression in mind and not tie their quests to faction rank.
  2. The Blades are in a bit of an awkward place. Merging the TR faction with the vanilla one doesn’t pose a problem, but turning them into an empire-wide faction might run into problems with P:C’s inevitable Blade questline. There’s also the idea to split the Blades into two factions: one for the spies (the vanilla faction) and one for the openly-serving members (Order of the Blades, Open Blades or similar perhaps).
  3. Every faction currently uses <x> Guild, without province indicator. This is in contrast to the same factions in Skyrim and Cyrodiil. It might be prudent in the future to rename the vanilla factions to use Morrowind <x> Guild (not an ID change, displayed name only), to be kept in the Integration.esp. Alternatively, the PT mods should redo their dialogue to use <x> Guild without the province quantifier. This will need to be discussed in the future, as per our Cross-Project Coordination policies.
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Parker
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The old plan was for the Proconsul to live in Narsis, to be close to Cyrodiil and mingle with the Hlaalu. I think we should still go with this, since the Ebon Tower is getting a bit crowded with Imperial bigwigs.

I think the Curia's main people in OE would be the Ministers. Parandil, the Minister of the Treasury, could also be the head of the Census & Excise Office in Morrowind, to help cut down on having too many characters.

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Every faction currently uses <x> Guild, without province indicator. This is in contrast to the same factions in Skyrim and Cyrodiil. It might be prudent in the future to rename the vanilla factions to use Morrowind <x> Guild (not an ID change, displayed name only), to be kept in the Integration.esp. Alternatively, the PT mods should redo their dialogue to use <x> Guild without the province quantifier. This will need to be discussed in the future, as per our Cross-Project Coordination policies.

EDIT: my comment and the discussion itself were both irrelevant,
just did that testing I was talking about earlier and it turns out that indeed, if a faction has been edited within the game (happens when its reaction to another faction changes) its data becomes frozen in the save from that point on. That means it's effectively impossible to make a reliable edit to faction data, name or otherwise. Any increases to faction rank requirements should be manually distributed, in dialogue -- edit again: sadly, the function that returns faction reputation is broken, which makes that a lot more complicated.

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Maybe the MCP can help with that? Would be best to report it. In the long run, problems such as these might be solved by OpenMW. At least, it seems unlikely that they would copy broken functionalities.

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Rats
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I'm sorry that I couldn't attend the meeting; I probably would've been of use when discussing OE.

The Ebon Tower plans look good, though I have to agree with Parker that we should keep the Imperial Proconsul in Narsis. I am assuming that the Count of Old Ebonheart would reside in the main tower?

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Atrayonis
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Apparently we called the legion commander Lord Marshal in the Quarantine book. Either that title should stick or we need to update the book for the next Tamriel_Data release.

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Rats
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Other Legion higher-ups in Morrowind are called Generals, so it felt somewhat natural to call the one above them Lord General.

Lord General is also the title given to Symmachus in The Uprising in Almalexia (which, admittedly, is written by me), and it felt right to give the current Legion head the same title. I always imagined that Symmachus was the previous leader of the Imperial Legion in Morrowind--those Dark Elves sure live long.

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We intend to continue the Ebon Tower discussion next week, Rats. It would be great if you could make it.

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Right, the book is going to need an edit then. Easily done, I'll take care of it this week.

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Few things to the Foul Murder quest (I am not officially back, but writing this during a downtime, so forgive confusing brevity)

1) The cutscene may not even be possible with our current skillset. The mural is. For this reason alone, I want to keep it in, in case we have to cut the cutscene down to something like a slice of dialogue or similar.

2) As far as why the mural keeps cropping up, my personal headcanon is that it was actually painted by the Tribunal, as a kind of record of what really happened, and a clue to their guilt, as Vivec put into the 36 Sermons. As someone else said, having it be done by the Dissident Priests, Alandro Sul, or some other anti-Tribunal faction is redundant to other entities already in the main quest, while how the Tribunal have managed their guilt has not been explored. For that reason I'm unsure if the bonewalker should have done it--why interesting in theory, it seems like it's just be a rehash thematically of the Tribunal being vicious liars, unless I'm missing something. I would want to add a counter-balance to that, perhaps exploring the theme of forgiveness--whether Alandro Sul finally forgiving the Tribunal, or perhaps Nerevar himself--and whether the player would push the Temple to similarly forgiving, or just adding more fuel to the fire

3) I agree with the leadup to Peakstar being a bit too fast. I was debating on just how to lengthen that part, beyond making the Ashlanders who know being more difficult to find. Another problem to solve is why these four ringlets out of all the others? What is so special about these four? Or is it simply understood that these were the only ones out of hundreds that the player could actually get access to.

4) I'm not sure I understand the point about the heresy. Do you mean the (V)erendes Ordinator guy?