Origin Stories Part III: The Elder Scrolls: Arena

I just finished The Elder Scrolls: Chapter I: Arena earlier in the week after I don't know how many hours.  The point of the game is to traverse across the continent of Tamriel to find eight pieces of a staff that was broken in order to defeat a battlemage masquerading as the current Emperor, Uriel Septim VII.  Think the first The Legend of Zelda set in Tolkien's Middle Earth.  There you go.

As previously stated, fast traveling between towns is a must since walking 1 km in-game will take about two hours in real time.  A lot of cities are 100+km apart (or at least the ones that you need to get to) and that's just in the same province.  I had previously gone into my method of playing the game, but that was before I seriously began collecting the pieces of the Staff of Chaos.  By about the fourth piece, I changed my tactic quite a bit as ransacking random dungeons became tedious and there was no long a point to collecting gold as I already had upwards of 200,000 at any given time.

But that's not the point of today's post.  Today, I wanted to nerd-out about the story and the lore behind the games in the Elder Scrolls series and anyone who has been reading knows that I like (have to) create origin and backstories for characters and why they're doing what it is that they're doing.  So I'm going to be doing that again.

The Elder Scrolls: Chapter I: Arena begins with your character being thrown into the dungeons underneath the Imperial Palace in Cyrodiil (then unnamed beyond "Imperial Province) and the year is 3E 389.  I figured that my female Bosmer (Wood Elf) Silandra was some kind of assistant/handmaiden to whomever the delegant from whichever city state she hailed from in Valenwood at the Imperial Court was before Jagar Tharn impersonated Uriel Septim VII and imprisoned everyone else.  That's when the game of TES: Arena takes over.  It was a simple backstory that didn't require too much thought or planning.  

I didn't have anything else for Silandra before she became a handmaiden to the court delegate.  It wasn't important, at least to me, so I went with it without any further additions.

Then the gears started moving again once I began my search for the final piece of the Staff of Chaos which turned out was located in [SPOILER] Red Mountain in Vvardenfell, Morrowind, or also known as Dagoth-Ur.  Yes, the same as that Dagoth Ur, but without the hyphen.  So here is what happened, at least in my Elder Scrolls universe:

Dagoth Ur's body/spirit was resting/building strength in the heart of Red Mountain, but still not at his full strength.  When the person later to be known as the Eternal Champion entered Red Mountain (passing under the Ghostfence and avoiding Vivec's Ordinators) and claimed the last piece of the Staff of Chaos, it emitted a surge of power that gave Dagoth Ur a renewed source of energy that allowed him to spread the blight disease beyond the Ghostfence surrounding the base of Red Mountain. 

In my game time, this happened around 3E 394 Rains Hand, (Lore time span in 389-399) and it would still be another 33 years before the events in Morrowind would take place.  It would be interesting to note that in 3E 400, members of the Sixth House would use the tunnel found/created by the Eternal Champion to re-establish themselves outside of Red Mountain in their former stronghold of Kogorhun, north of Red Mountain.   Additionally, the power from the reformed staff allowed would Dagoth Ur to reclaim Sunder and Keening (two Dwemer artifacts) when Almalexia and Sotha Sil re-entered Red Mountain to strengthen the Ghostfence in 3E 417.  This ultimately leads to Almalexia and Sotha Sil withdrawing from "public life," leading to the "downfall" of the Tribunal. [/SPOILER]

I'm sure there is more that I could integrate from the official lore of the series, but I am not entirely that knowledgable and I haven't completed all of the expansions for Morrowind (Tribunal & Bloodmoon).  And thinking about this now, once I finish with Oblivion, I'll probably go through Skyrim again with all of this completed backstory in mind but at the moment, I'm not sure how I will work in my character and the events in Daggerfall, but that might just have to be something that develops as I play the game.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Caught By Your Divine Spell

Monthly Update: October 2014

Madd MS Paint Skilz Yo!

It's that time of the month again, and I'm pretty sure I've used that opening before. . . but you know what?  Neither do I.

This is going to be a hectic month.  First off, Conklederp and I are getting married on Saturday (11th) so some of the posts early in the month might be sporadic, depending on how much I am able to get accomplished ahead of time.  We are presently (at the time of posting) preparing to make our way to Nor*Cal tomorrow, with our goal being ultimately in the south (by California standards) and we'll be back about the middle of the month.  Goodtimes shall be had by all and yes, "goodtimes" is a legitimate word.

I spent a good amount of time during September playing both The Elder Scrolls: The Arena and Path of Exile.  It would seem that the Diablo type of play that is PoE is more enticing and engaging than what I found with DOTA 2, which makes me a little sad that I'm not as interested as I was hoping to be with the free-to-play MOBA, but I think solo game playing is too ingrained in my system.  I did play a session of PoE with Chreekat for an hour or so a few weeks back and since then I haven't seen him on Steam playing PoE, so I'm hoping that I didn't tarnish the 37 hours he's put into the game, but it looks like he was on yesterday.  I on the other hand, have only quested for a paltry 26 hours.  Oh the humanity!

And this just in, I am a Steam Stalking Creeper, but no, I still haven't played Minecraft in any of its many iterations.  Line me up to be stoned.  Again.

What the hell!  While writing today's post, music from Dead Island: Riptide (composed by Pawel Blaszczak) has come up a couple of times and it's a lot better than it has a right to be.  Now I've never played Dead Island: Riptide, yet anyway and I'll get to it eventually, but this soundtrack (acquired through the Humble Deep Silver Bundle) is really good.  I'm tempted to even say that it's "beautiful," but. . . you know what?  No buts.  The track that just played, "Let it be Haven," was indeed a beautiful simple piano piece.  There I said it.  Cue the onslaught of hate.  Maybe, but probably not.

Let's briefly take a look at October.  I restarted schooling a couple days ago so I'll be trying to get ahead for the first couple of weeks seeing as how doing school work during a honeymoon so video gaming and said activities will not be as prevalent as normal, at least for the first half of the month.  Game-wise though, October will probably be fairly similar to September with PoE, Arena and I might even delve into Fallen Earth, which I just spotted as being an open world free-to-play post-apocalyptic adventure game.  If I'm able to find time that is.  Although in the next week, I'll be hoping to play another round of Mansions of Madness with our friends so I'll have more tales to tell upon our return.

So have a happy October and I'll see y'all when I'm around.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Instrumental

Monthly Update: September 2014

Happy September everyone.  Bloody hell this year is flying by, or maybe it just feels like that for me as I'm getting hitched next month.  Yes, I am looking forward to the wedding and I am very excited for it, so don't go ahead thinking that I am one of those "ball and chain" types.  

On other fronts, the Summer Reading BINGO is progressing nicely.  I am currently trudging through Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian on audiobook and I say "trudging" in the most sincere form of the verb.  I am not 100% sure where the story is going which is understandable for me as I am finding out that unless I am paying full attention to the story, I'll end up tuning out for a bit and come back when I realize I don't know what is happening.  So it's now article writing, game playing, reddit browsing for me while listening to the disparaging tone of Mr. McCarthy's prose, but instead it's sitting quietly awaiting the next description of the happy-g0-lucky times of mid-late 19th century Texas.  But yes, I am enjoying the book.

In paper form, I am reading Robert J. Sawyer's Flashforward which received a season of TV viewers on ABC back in 2009.  If you're not familiar with the story, a mysterious event happens that causes the population of the world to lose consciousness for just over two minutes and during those two minutes, people experience their lives 21 years in the future.  In turn, those who are not alive 21 years in the future experience nothing.  What I'm finding interesting is after the event, the beginning of each chapter (so far) begins with newspaper-type snippets about the worlds reaction to the event and while some are mundane such as reporting on the death of a news anchor or a continued car pileup due to the event, others are more intriguing, "After a record number of applications were filed in the last 24 hours, the United States Patents office has closed until further notice, pending a decision from Congress on the patenting of inventions gleaned from the visions."

Flashforward is not a long book, coming in at only 317 pages and it did not spawn additional books in this world so I feel that by the end, I will still have plenty of questions, such as, "Why don't I own the TV series on DVD yet!?"

Moving into the realms of video games (finally!), I have started again playing The Elder Scrolls: Arena thanks to a link posted by "Roger" in my Daggerfailed article from last year.  The links are to downloadable copies of Arena and Daggerfall but have all of the DOS commands prewritten so all I have to do is open the application and the game starts up without having to type all of the DOS commands that prevented me from being able to play Daggerfall.  In Arena, I also learned how to open up the world map (Shift+M) and fast travel to other locations as travelling from one city to the next closest would take about 3 days (0n average).  Apparently being able to fast travel in a flat world without any form of topography (trees don't count) has made the game infinitely better.  I will most likely put out a Second Impressions in the coming weeks, now if I could only master swinging a sword with the mouse.

So PAX Prime happened this last weekend.  I might have said something about absolutely not missing PAX again, but due to the general lack of funds due to a false criminal identification (#PeopleWithIncrediblyCommonNamesProblems).  The only presentation I was able to catch was a talk that Hironobu Sakaguchi gave about the "Past, Present and Future of RPGs," but it looks like that presentation was not archived/saved on PAX's Twitch channel.  Ah well.  It was, I felt, more of a retrospective on Hironobu Sakaguchi's career at Square(soft/Enix) and a brief look at a mobile game in development (Terra Battle) at his current studio, Mistwalker.

In semi-PAX related video game news, Gauntlet was showcased this last weekend and it seemed like the remake of the 1985 Atari game received some favorable press.  What surprised me the most about the game was that it is rated M.  Personally, I've never viewed Gauntlet as an M-rated franchise.  From the gameplay footage though, it looks like they're taking a Diablo approach to dispatching enemies as well as what happens to their entrails.  I feel like I can be an old fuddy-duddy about this because the decision doesn't affect me either way.  When I was a kid (mid/late 80's) I loved playing Gauntlet, but having the M-rating is going to limit the demographic that will be able to play this game, which essentially is a massive dungeon crawl with an annoying life timer.  I don't feel like the game needed to go for an M-rating, but that's just me.

Oh damn, I almost forgot.  Last week Nintendo unveiled their New 3DS, which coincidentally is the name of the system: "New 3DS" and "New 3DS LL" for the larger version that we've seen with the 3DS XL and DS lite XL; although that might just be a Japanese thing.  There are some much needed improvements to the system such as an added C-button type joystick to the right side of the system, improved 3D effect that causes less blurring, improved battery life, a micro SD card slot and two more shoulder/trigger buttons.  What they need to improve on is the life expectancy of the hinges, but that's just me being paranoid that the hinges on my 3DS are on the verge of breaking as they did with my DS lite.

So, welcome to September!

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Close Your Eyes and Believe