Morrowind Madhouse

Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind

Morrowind was released at the end of spring in 2002. It was love at first sight when I saw the review on Toonami. Morrowind is an action RPG set in a very alien – but very believ­able – world full of mystery, intrigue, politics, and lore. I’ve never encount­ered a game so engrossing.

Even more than the world, I love the gameplay. You begin with nothing, can do nothing, no one likes you, and any­thing could end your pa­thet­ic exist­ance. Yet with per­sever­ance you can flip the whole world over, topple demi-gods; earn fame, fortune, and the love of the people.

Morrowind caters to all players regard­less of where they fall between rolep­laying and power­gaming. It’s allowed me to tackle the game from many angles over the years and mostly why I con­tinue to crawl back to it to this day. I no longer have all of the save games from the past so I could not include screenshots for everyone.

Vagabond

I once made a Dark Elf with the limit­ation of (almost no) trading. He took care of col­lect­ing his own ingred­iants, re­pair­ing his armor, etc. This was the start of creat­ing classes in the Con­struct­ion Set to preserve them if I ever want to make use of any again.

Pacifist

For this character – whose name I can’t even recall – I created my biggest mod ever: a way to pacify diseased and blighted creatures (unaf­flicted ones were passive), there were now cursed creatures as well that were even stronger than blighted ones (intro­ducing the unused curse/remove curse spells), and all hostile mobs scale with you (as Oblivion added later).

All those scripts caused the game to crash. A lot. And it was very chal­lenging. I loved it. What I didn’t love, however, were the bugs in my script­ing. Somehow I didn’t properly stop the scripts from running more than once on a creature, so while I was doing the main quest at the Urshilaku tribe, a clann­fear in the daedric ruins next to it kept getting buffed every time I entered the area. It zoomed at the speed of light once I got close enough and in­stant­ly killed me with one swipe. Strength and all other stats were in the thou­sands, and I had to go through each script for every creature to correct the error.

Wanders‑Far and Only‑Stands‑There

In the trad­ition of creating mods specif­ically for char­acters is Wanders‑Far’s com­panion, Only‑Stands‑There. This run was a lot of fun. I wanted to play with the re­strict­ion of fast travel, and also have a com­panion.

This was also when I only wanted to use mods made by myself. I think I spent more time script­ing her than I got to play! She could follow you or wait, switch between range and melee, and could heal you. When she got hurt it’d tell you how much health she had left too. Oh, and she could jump over obsta­cles and properly levi­tate up and down.

Wanders‑Far only joined one faction: the Temple. Weird, I know, but the pilgrimages took him far and wide. I remember very vividly going through the West Gash region to do the two at Gnisis. It was the first time I really explored that part of the map instead of only fast travel­ing to Gnisis, and it was my favorite area for a decade after­wards as a result.

Albino Elf Race

Although I originally bought the game for Xbox, when I heard about modding I really wanted to try it out. I forget how much later it was, but when I got the game for PC I dove into it immediately.

One of my first abomin­ations was a retex­tured elf race. They had powerful magical capa­bilities but were 100% weak to normal weapons. With the expan­sions came a diffi­culty slider which I also cranked to the max. The result was abso­lutely brutal: slowly chipping-away at enemies’ health while con­stantly getting one-shotted.

This was also my first run through Trib­unal and I will never forget those hours I spent trying to defeat Gaenor.

Xbox Characters

After I ran through the game with my first character I went back and tried most of the other races and skills. The excep­tions are Redguards, Khajiit, and Imperials; I remember creating each one, but only playing a few minutes each.

I learned of the jail “exploit” while playing my Dark Elf which I used to level him to 104 before getting bored with it. Fit­tingly, he was my first Telvanni character.

I also had an orc that found a cool robe in the Red Mountain. He decided to wear it over his armor and I really liked the look of his Indoril pauld­rons on top of it.

Axel the Nord

When I first got the game I had a hard time deciding on a char­acter after reading through the manual. Nords caught my eye because they had so many resist­ances. I also saw each race had bonuses to certain skills, so I made all of those his major/minor skills. The first thing I did in the game was jump off the light­house and increased my acrobatics to 6. Ah, memories~~.

I didn’t do much more than the main quest and Fighters Guild in my first play­through. I remember joining House Hlaalu as because they had Balmora and my “home” never left that city. I don’t know if I got far with them, but I remember somehow getting the strong­hold started. Might’ve been a later char­acter though.

I have so many memories of discov­ering the diff­erent parts of Vvarden­fall that are begin­ning to fade with time. Sometimes I wish I could go back and see it all again for the first time. I still like to page through the manual and look over the paper map of the game.