#This is a more detailed version of my other falmer post

[jag-rat]

Merethic Era Falmer (snow elves)

I was thinking of doing a mini project about Merethic Tamriel and a documentation of the people that were living there in a sort of semi-historic way.

Of course most of it would probably not be entirely lore accurate and there will be a lot of headcanoning but it's fun regardless. So enjoy the first addition to this series.

Falmer: The falmer during the Merethic era were the tallest mer race on Nirn growing on average between 6 - 7 feet. They were also the hairiest and bulkiest on average due to the cold climate. Their culture and practices during this time were very similar to modern day nordic ones due to the cultural overlap and assimilation on the atmorans end when they first arrived to Skyrim.

They valued strength and honour. Their original gods are long lost now however historians speculate the modern nordic gods could share traits with the Falmer's old gods.

In the early Merethic era the snow elves invaded and seized what is currently the Summerset isles. This is how it is assumed Auri-El (An Altmeri/Aldmeri God) was introduced to Skyrim and later would become the primary god in the snow elven pantheon.

Furs, beards, and long hair was the norm in terms of falmer fashion for a long time due to the extreme weather however the shorter hair and beardless look though impractical in such weather was popularised in later years. Again influenced by the fashion trends on the much warmer summerset isles.

Generally speaking when the Falmer weren't invading distant lands or declaring wars with other clans they were a prospering civilisation and in the early days were much like the nords not particularly interested in magic. This was partly due to the fact Skyrim has large iron deposits meaning smithing and weaponry were the most practical but that didn't mean there was no magic at all.

Healers generally could manipulate the weave and tell or even change the future. But when Auri-el was popularised magic become a much larger part of the Falmers lives being combined and assimilated into what they already had. For example enchanting among smiths and manipulation of elements specific to Skyrim (Ice magic mostly).

These changes didn't come fast of course, the falmer were quite stubborn. But over time a cultural shift did happen going from axe-wielding barbarians (As the Aldmer called them) to a slightly more tame society that we know a little bit today.

This didn't come without its challenges however as while the falmer were changing the Atmorans living there were not and in fact had taken on a lot of the cultural aspects or even gods of the traditional falmer. This inevitably was the beginning of the end as tensions got higher with these cultural and religious differences it ended the only way it could, in a war. And well, you know the rest.

Currently the ancestors of the Merethic snow elves thrive in cave systems below ground. While the nords toil above ground, the nords frost resistance of course being a product of falmer and atmoran ancestors. Regardless both societies still hold the values the early Snow elves held. Strength and Honour.

[gayboysero]

Mansplain Skyrim lore to me. Give me the deets. The Tea.

ohhhhhhhh my god

okay in my defense its been a while since ive actively Read the Wiki (which i used to do for fun) but here are some of my favorite fax and details

if the imperials actually cared, they would crush the stormcloak rebellion. one of general tullius’s dialogue lines is that he can’t get the bulk of cyrodil’s upper ranks to take the skyrim civil war seriously. he struggles to get enough troops to keep the war at a standstill. if ulfric stormcloak succeeded in taking solitude and becoming high king, the full might of the cyrodillic empire and the aldmeri dominion would be unleashed on skyrim. i’m not saying it would be a total victory, the stormcloak have a knowledge of the region and support within skyrim (and maybe an alliance with morrowind or black marsh who are not part of the empire, although i dont see why argonians and dark elves would want to work with modern nords). however, i dont think even the nords could stand up to both the empire and the dominion.

there are a number of great houses in morrowind that are constantly vying for political power. my fave is indoril, house of the nerevarine, for personal (oc) reasons. however, indoril has been unpopular since the collapse of the tribunal, who they were hugely connected to. then the red year fucked up most of vvardenfell (sparing mournhold, the capitol of house indoril), and argonians invaded and sacked mournhold and its surrounding cities. they’re doing better though! they’ve rebuilt mournhold in some capacity and will likely regain their influence in time

another dunmer house got shit on so badly they’re no longer considered one of the Greats. house hlaalu was really close with the empire, working and trading with them n all that. then during the oblivion crisis, most of the empire’s soldiers were called back to cyrodil to defend the capitol, leaving morrowind defenseless against the daedra. house redoran stepped up and defended the country both from the daedra and then the invading argonians. hlaalu was hated for its connection to the empire and taken off of morrowind’s council

that being said, houses hlaalu and dres were the first to try to outlaw slavery in morrowind and were hated by the more traditional dunmer houses, including indoril (not pog)

the akaviri are/were a humanoid race of (fantasy) japanese people originiating from akavir, far east of morrowind. sky haven temple was originally an akaviri outpost from the time they tried to invade skyrim. they had katanas! very cool people. anyways they’re all extinct now, having been literally or figuratively “eaten” by a serpentlike race called the tsaesci (say ess ee) who are also native to akavir. (there are also monkey people and tiger people on akavir. the whole content seems to be fantasy version of east asia, given both its very very far east geography and also everything else about it.)

there are a race of maormer (sea elves) south of the summerset isles. they’re ruled by a deathless wizard and no one knows much about them. im p sure they havent been seen since the 3rd era (skrim takes place in the 4th)

i feel like this is pretty well known, but the wood elves have an agreement with Yffre, the god of forest they live in (valenwood), to not kill or eat any plants. they’re basically antivegans. because of this, they often engage in cannibalism when fighting each other or outsiders.

the dwemer, tamriels dwarves/deep folk/etc were not actually short! they were named that by the giants native to skyrim, who are taller than everyone. dwemer were actually elf-height, probably equal to modern elves. one of the theories ive read about the disappearance of the dwemer is that the heart of lorkhan, which is the magical artifact they were trying to f with, acted as a big ol’ soul stone and gobbled them all up. sad if true!

jflskdfj theres this one book in skyrim, i think its called “ALDUIN IS REAL AND HE ENT AKATOSH” where some nordic farmer who couldnt write too good basically defended the case that alduin existed. (written before alduin came back). you can read it here

the nords are colonizerssss okay? fuck them. they came from a continent called atmora, north of tamriel and even harsher than skyrim. they settled in saarthol and were mostly minding their business when the snow elves. okay so the snow elves did do a massacare on them. which was uncool. so then the nords (then atmorans) responded by doing a near-genocide on the snow elves. all in all it was kind of a shitty situation. also to be fair to the nords, they probably didn’t count on the dwemer using their ~magic mushrooms~ to systematically devolve the snow elves into the race of creatures now known as the falmer. but still im not a huge nord fan lol

this is also probably common knowledge i think but the type of khajiit you encounter in most games is only one form a khajiit can have. depending on the positions of the moons at a khajiit’s birth, they can take up to 16 shapes, from the typical humonoid we’re familiar with to giant sabrecat like beasts to normal looking housecats. regardless of shape, all khajiit can communicate with each other (somehow). this is why house cats aren’t seen in skyrim; im pretty sure the only “housecats” in tamriel are actually just khajiit

i don’t remember the creation story of tamriel that well, but i know that the stars in the sky were created when the aedra (godlike beings) left the mortal plane and literally tore through the sky. the moons were created by two of the bigger more important gods, but i don’t remember who.

pretty much every story about the daedric prince molag bal comes with a huge trigger warning. just in general. he created vampires and no i willn’t tell you how. don’t worry about it, its not a fun story

the ~crazy~ daedric prince sheogorath (prince of madness, chaos, disorder) was actually once the prince of order and logic, and was called jygglag. he was so powerful that the other daedric princes cursed him to be a madman to keep him from getting in their way. once an era he turns back to his true self, but only for a short time.

im sorry this post is so long

[tesbloodline]

Meri and Marcurio

I’ve been hyperfocused on Tamrela and Lucien for a while (mainly because 1) I just got Oblivion, and 2) I’m a huge romantic sap and that’s the only pair I ship in anything), and I decided the best way to kick myself back onto the Skyrim track would be to talk about these dorks. I kinda wanted to talk about them anyway - I have thoughts to share. This post is super long, sorry, I had a lot to say.

First off, Meri and Marcurio are not the next Tamrela and Lucien - they do not, and never will, have a romantic relationship. If anything, they’re more like Tamrela and Martin. There are several reasons that Meri and Marcurio will never have a romantic relationship, including but not limited to:

The already-present age gap (Meri being developmentally ~14, while I headcanon Marcurio as ~25) is only going to get wider as time passes; for every “year” that Meri ages, ~13.5 chronological years pass on Nirn.

Meri isn’t a mortal (despite the whole weird thing where she’s technically 100% mortal and 100% Daedric at the same time), and her mindset reflects that. While Tamrela’s time as a mortal can pull and influence her actions and opinions as Sheogorath, Meri doesn’t have that safety net to fall back on - she will always be more prone to react like a Daedra. This makes any sort of romance with a mortal extremely ill-advised.

Meri has a very negative view of romance (and especially marriage), due to watching her mother suffer Lucien’s loss for two hundred years (discussed in-depth in this post). If she thought there was even a chance she might fall in love with anyone (but especially a mortal), she would immediately cut them out of her life - as much as it would kill her to lose Marcurio, she would do it. (Yes, it’s incredibly hypocritical of her to try to prevent one type of love when she’s just as vulnerable to hurt and loss through her obsession with family and her love for her friends, but the trauma that warned her away was based on romantic love, and she’s a still a child - she hasn’t quite made that connection yet.)

Meri’s friendship with Marcurio is a cornerstone of her understanding of interpersonal relationships, and if that relationship were to change it would destabilize the entire web. Remember, Marcurio was her first friend - her entire concept of friendship is based on her relationship with him.

But I didn’t write this post just to talk about how they’ll never be a couple - I had a few points I wanted to make. With the romance element thoroughly addressed, let’s move to my second point: why Marcurio is frightened of Meri’s friendship.

And make no mistake - it’s subtly written (maybe so subtle it’s impossible to find), but Marcurio is terrified of Meri’s affection for him. In a few of Meri’s journal entries, there are lines like “ … I think Sparky is scared of me now. I don’t like it.” and “he’s been… kind of skittish around me since the Shimmermist disaster”, which point towards Marcurio’s fear of Meri, if not pinpoint her affection as the cause. That detail comes from his interview, where he says “... I have no issue with it [dying]. I am afraid of the number of things Meri would kill before she calmed down, though” (#7). And his fear is immediately validated when Meri replies with a snort and the line “Forget calming down, Sparky; if you actually died at this point, I think I would just tear Nirn in half and be done with it.” She flat out tells him that his death will be the direct cause of the end of the world, at the hands of its savior no less. She hasn’t said it, but he definitely understands that the main reason she started dealing with Alduin at all was for his sake. He was the first thing that convinced her Nirn might be worth saving, and that’s a terrifying reality.

Now, the Shimmermist Disaster, which both of the above quotes from Meri’s journal refer to (thoroughly described in the source post of the first quote), was an event right after Lydia joined the party; Marcurio was captured by bandits and taken to Shimmermist Cave, where they were immediately attacked by the Falmer living there and the bandits were killed. (Technically, this was my explanation for Marcurio glitching out and disappearing for a while.) Meri is absolutely furious, and when she sees that Marcurio has been hurt, she completely loses it and flies into a rage, killing everything in the entire cave without so much as acknowledging a wound she receives. This is how she describes it in her journal:

I completely lost it, Mama. I don’t even clearly remember what happened after that, I was just so angry. He’s mine, how dare they take him, how dare they touch him, how dare they almost take him away from me forever! I killed them all. The bandits were already dead, like I said, but all the Falmer, all the Chaurus, the spiders, even a Dwarven Centurion. Anything that might have possibly been responsible for a single mark on him. Every living thing in that cave that wasn’t me and wasn’t him. I didn’t feel a single wound I got in the whole mad rush. I didn’t think until they were all dead.

She’s so possessive of him that she slaughtered dozens of Falmer, half a dozen Chaurus, four or five Frostbite Spiders, and a Dwarven Centurion because they hurt him - he almost died, but she would have reacted the same way to a broken arm or a stab wound or a few scrapes and bruises - maybe even just because they took him from her. And make no mistake, possessive is the right word at this point. Remember, she grew up in the Shivering Isles, as the daughter of Sheogorath no less. To love something was to own it, to be protective was to be possessive. Her murderous rampage would have been seen as proof of her love, not a cause for concern. It’s not a healthy mindset, but it’s where she’s coming from.

Even as she begins to shift towards a mortal understanding of friendship, thanks to Marcurio’s less-than-positive reaction to her murder spree, the intensity of her devotion does not fade. This relationship calls to mind a few passages from various chapters of “Finishing the Hat” by @theoriginalcarnivorousmuffin - actually, these lines are what finally kicked me into writing this post. (My references will point to the AO3 version for my own sanity).

“Love… It isn’t like what they say, Obito, not for me, and likely not for you either,” Lee said finally and in her eyes, he could see an inhuman something, the god, peering through her face as if it was nothing more than a mask, “It is a powerful, haunting, and terrifying thing at its heart. There is nothing I would not do for Namikaze Minato, and that… That says more than enough.” (Chapter 10)

“Minato, deep down, I think he is afraid of the level of… devotion I have for him,” she was staring out the window, her face turned from his but he could imagine the pensive and serious look on her face as she spoke, “This is fair, I love him as a god would, I remade a world in his image, and that’s an intimidating thing. I’ve told you this before but you… You loved Rin the same way, faced the same reaction from her, but then yesterday and the day before that… Somewhere along the way you must have started to feel that way about me, and I knew you had never flinched over everything I’ve done for you or anything I would do.” (Chapter 11)

Eru Lee, the three-AUs-deep central character of this universe, is Death - an exquisitely other, inhuman being that is nonetheless trying to be human. Despite her best efforts, her otherness shines through; she is an impossible girl, and because of her vast power her love is a dangerous, terrifying thing.

Meri is much the same way, though she is generally less disruptive to reality. While there is mortal in her, she is at her core a Daedric Prince - though she’s still developing her sphere, she is specifically the Prince of Devotion, Family, Youth, and the Crushing Deep. While the last three are a bit irrelevant here, I hope you can see the importance of the first. Like Lee, Meri is something greater than human living among mortals, and even once her love loses its possessive undertones the depth of it is enough to surpass mortal understanding - and that’s a terrifying reality to face.

Now that I’ve thoroughly discussed the friendship aspect of Meri and Marcurio’s relationship (I swear that was not supposed to be that long), let’s talk about the “minion” aspect. In her journal, Meri’s first nickname for Marcurio is Minion, because that’s what she sees him as - a hired minion whose only job is to keep her company because she doesn’t like to be on her own. This name only shifts to the more-familiar Sparky when they got caught up in their first serious battle and he hit her with chain lightning just as often as the enemy.

Even as they become friends, Meri still considers Marcurio her minion first - her most favored minion, to be sure, but still a minion. Which, let’s be honest; she paid him to come with her, and she has yet to see any indication that her wallet isn’t the entire reason he’s still following her around. By the time she comes out of the Forgotten City, he’s pretty much committed to following her around, minimizing the trouble she gets into, and translating Meri-to-Normal People and Normal People-to-Meri because he likes her company and he’s starting to see that she’s a good kid from a different culture; the problem is that Meri is completely incapable of recognizing that - she’s not good at understanding people, thanks to her background, so unless Marcurio literally tells her he’s not just staying for the money, or she runs out of gold and he doesn’t leave, she’s going to think he’s just a minion following her for the gold.

(Oh look, a short section. It’s about time.)

The last section I want to talk about in this post (I know, more) is far, far down the timeline from anything that exists on this blog right now. About a century after the Last Dragonborn saved Nirn from Alduin the World Eater, right after Marcurio’s death. At this point, they are very, very good friends - they have been best friends for almost a century, and Marcurio is not about to abandon her now, even unintentionally. Instead, he becomes the first mortal - deceased or otherwise - to inhabit Meri’s plane of Oblivion, the Abyssal Caverns. From that point on, he (and his descendants) remain as the historians and most faithful followers of the Lady of Change.

In the Abyssal Caverns, Marcurio fills a role somewhat similar to Haskill’s job in the Shivering Isles. He basically makes sure the place runs smoothly and tries to patch up anything that Meri breaks - although considering Meri’s status as the Lady of Change, it’s less about “put things back how they were” and more “take this non-functional thing and make it functional again”.

Okay! I think that’s all I wanted to say! Sorry the post is so stupidly long, I didn’t realize I had so much I wanted to say.

[markteare]

Skyrim: Creature Remixes

In games as large and expansive as Skyrim there is always a demand for more content. For each part a of development great consideration is given to how we can create the maximum amount of content from the production pass on the game. What I try to add on top of that is (hopefully) clever reuse of existing assets to solve specific problems or just squeeze out more value for the player from what we already have. One key example of this from my work is character “remixing.”

The origin of the character remixes came from my first job in the industry as a character modeller. As I was adding FX to creatures I was noticing some wasteful practices in the art and set about optimizing them. This was not a critique of the art it was all beautiful I just had fresh eyes and was able to see ways to improve the efficiency without compromising the in game result. I would run mesh reductions and re-skin heavy meshes and mirror textures. After any optimization I would create a side by side in game for the original artist to review to make sure quality was maintained. While the super high quality of the character art was not always necessary for the in game model I found that extra quality made the creatures hold up better during the various remixing techniques.

Frost Giant

The Frost Giant was the first time I attempted to use the technique of blending two creatures together to create a third. I had the idea of blending 2 or more and then baking the textures down using the same re-baking technique I used to mirror the dragons.

I found this old creature Karstaag as a guide. I then built a similar looking creature on the giant rig using the giant and the troll models by Jonah Lobe. For this workflow I worked entirely with the low poly in max but Jonah was not sold on the final quality. He helped my spruce up the final version a bit and pushed me to look for ways to pull more details from the source meshes in the future.

I re-projected the multiple texture sheets down into one and then polished them by unifying the color scheme and paining out seams and baking errors in the normal map.

Feral and Vampire Falmer

For the Dawnguard DLC we were going to focus on the falmer. As they usually had very distinctive clothing and armor I made some naked “feral” variants to use in some dark dungeons we were creating.

For the final boss fight Daryl Brigner and I designed for the Falmer Valley area we needed waves on enemies so I made a frozen vampire version as well by adjusting their coloring and teeth.

Flaming Thrall

Designer Phil Nelson came to me one day with an idea he had mocked up for a flaming thrall. A spell you learned to summon a dog that chases your enemies and explodes. I took the wolf mesh and made a scrolling fire version with a particle fire trail. The beauty of being able to handle the meshwork, rigging, and FX work myself made me a one stop shop for requests like this. If Phil had gone through the normal channels to request his thrall he probably would not have been able to get it because it would theoretically require 3 different peoples time to get done. I was able to hand him something back we shipped with later the same day.

Labyrinthian Spectral Draugr

Another level designer Joel Burgess had a dungeon he was trying to make extra special and he wanted some unique enemies to populate it.Based on what was happening in the dungeon we decided on some ghost draugrs and their spectral hounds. I had no time to slot in his request as we were pushing hard to finish the game so I made it my fun bonus project to work on at the end of my day. Even at 2 in the morning sometimes I would pull them out once I hit my scheduled goals for the day and chip away at their look and spectral weapons.

In the end I delivered him 4 new creatures and 3 new weapons he could use to add a special flavor to his dungeon. My initial shortcut of color remapping the normal maps as the diffuse maps would later come back to haunt me as in the final shipped version of the game normal maps were processed down to a format that could not be remapped and I had to go and fix every asset I had made. The final result was not a nice looking as my first pass but that is the reality of game development.

Naaslaarum and Voslaarum

While riffing on ideas for the Falmer Valley with DLC lead Jeff Browne I had the idea to use a furniture setup to allow dragons to punch in and out of a frozen lake. Using our expertise in ambushes and FX we are fairly confident we could pull it off without any issues. For these unique dragon I wanted to create unique models.

When I initially touched the dragon meshes to optimize them I also played with some ideas to get more dramatic variants from the base meshes without a full remodel. In the end our variants that were in the base game ended up being mainly texture swaps for time considerations. I felt with some creative thinking you could break the repetition and similarity that exists in texture variant models. I used a combination of UV sliding, mesh tweaking, add on meshes, and texture re-baking to try and visually break my dragon from the base game dragons. Character artist Ben Carnow added some texture polish to the final result.

Corrupted Shades

One of my favorite examples of creatively tackling a task that came my way. The task was for necromancer magic effects for the final boss in a dungeon. I went to the designer and got some more information on the dungeon and then pitched this alternate backstory: the necromancer is ripping souls from dead bodies from the civil war and making these enemies and then actually becomes one himself for the fight. I felt this added way more excitement for the player than a human with different magic at the end and I could do it in the same amount of time.

I kit-bashed together a few variants of skeleton and soldier armor and painted them all black in the low poly meshes using vertex color. I created black smoke fx and red glows to cement the look. I did the same for the necromancer but skinned it to the dragon priest rig.

In order to sell the idea the dungeon was filled with desecrated corpses of soldiers I build cheap blackened physics corpses and set them up in the editor as containers to allow the player to loot them.

In all of these cases there was one goal in pushing form more and unique creatures in the game: player value. If I can take items we have lying around and give the player a whole new creature that would have otherwise taken too long to create than I feel I have been successful at adding some. I was never really sure weather or not I had achieved it (other than the lack of Kotaku posts about the handful of shitty add on creature in Skyrim) until I was writing this post and discovered actual fan art dedicated to the creatures I had added using these techniques:)

Twin dragons art:

https://amnis406.deviantart.com/art/Twin-Dragons-375467352

Corrupted shade art:

https://edwarddelandreart.deviantart.com/art/Corrupted-Shades-538688974

As a special bonus the work I added has found its way into other Elder Scrolls titles:)