it's you ! you're the elder scroll ?!

Sheogorath and Jyggalag

What if Meridia fuckin partied

This made my brain go brr, therefore it’ll make your brain go brr too if you’re following me <3

Deadlands Citadel

Concept art for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

Art by R Todd Broadwater and Matt Carofano

Markarth fucken stresses me out so much.

• Some dude is selling human meat
• Chick gets murdered (or almost murdered if ur quick enough)
• a bunch of people are eating human meat (but not the same human meat that the one dude is selling)
• Daedric rapist is hanging out in one of the houses, and he lets you live there if you do what he says (I wouldn't recommend sleeping there)
• The guards glow red when you use "detect life" (which usually only enemies glow red)
• The stairs are confusing. (My follower fell down them, and a guard yelled at me for it.)
• Homeless guy wanted me to steal the statue of Dibella from the temple, and I had a statue of Diabella already, but the guy specifically wanted the temple one.
• There is a blacksmith set up in the middle of the walkway and it is an awkward fit.
• The homeless camp yells at you if you walk in there.
• Guy got me drunk and I woke up there once and I was more mad about waking up there than the getting me drunk part.
• Guards say "Safest hold" but for who?

We just got the new Cheeses of Tamriel expansion for Betrayal of the Second Era

Man I know that elder scrolls is a stupid series and all that but I really think they did concepts like orcs and dark elves mostly correct. More correct than a lot of franchises I’ve seen anyways.

I think dnd took until like this year to properly update drow and orcs or something? Like fantasy as a whole has a hard time shaking off this idea of evil races.

The elder scrolls approach to these guys from the beginning though has been that their cultures are just really different from the other cultures around them.

Like you can hang out in orc strongholds in Skyrim and spend the whole game around dark elves in Morrowind and they’re just regular people that have kind of extreme cultural norms. Dark elves are kind of rude to you when they first meet you but like in the way certain cultures are rude to outsiders at first until they get to know them. Orcs are rough around the edges but they’re smart and have a proud culture and if you can hold your own in a fight they’ll respect you.

And you see these people can blend pretty well into other societies. They join faiths their ancestors didn’t practice, they have jobs that people of their race wouldn’t stereotypically have, they have opinions about what other people assume about them, they have their own wrong assumptions about other cultures.

There’s this understanding somewhere in these games that people are shaped by their cultures but you also can’t predict how an individual will behave based on the culture that they came from. And I like that.

Listen, I love the elder scrolls. It is deep and wide and beautiful. It is also filled with cheese though.

TES worldbuilding does something I haven't really seen any other fantasy universe do, it foregoes a clear cut and thoroughly explained cosmology in favor of actually different religious interpretations of its universe. There's a basic outline to be gleamed from the overlap between the various theologies, but there's no definitive answer to a lot of questions.

Are Masser and Secunda normal moons? Are they holes in reality through which the light of Aetherius shines? Are they the sundered corpse of the demiurge? Are they normal moons but there's a secret third moon that only comes out during a double eclipse and *that* one is Lorkhan's body? They fought a war about this.

I think the fact that utter silliness and ridiculous notions can coexist with conplex ideological flaws and layers upon layers of behavioural patterns and anomalies makes of TES something far from simply realistic or simply stupid. It is the most realistic exploration of the paradoxes of our reality without directly quoting them. A potential vast source to learn, without the consequences of learning all of this in the real world.

told myself I'd draw all the counts of Oblivion to finally pinpoint Imperial fashion. Think I'm off to a strong start