Tabletop Gaming in Tamriel II - Landscape

One of the reasons we play RPGs is to explore. Tamriel is a huge world, packed to the gills with strange sights. Skyrim, Oblivion, and Morrowind all allow you to explore cities and wilderness, dark burial grounds and high ruined citadels, land and sea. But you know what they don’t do? Let you travel from province to province.

(There are a few mods that let you do that, but they’re mostly still in development. Also, Solstheim doesn’t count.)

I wanted my players to feel free to travel throughout Tamriel, and not feel bound by pre-planned roads and shipping lanes while they do that. The best tool for this, or at least a decent one, is the hex map.

OBVLON and ShadowRim both came with hex maps, and my first impulse was to stitch them together, than slap a hex grid on a detailed map of Morrowind’s Vvardenfell and call it a day. The advantage of taking this route is that most of the work would already be done. The disadvantage is that it leaves out six provinces, plus Morrowind’s vast mainland territories. That’s far too limiting.

There are fan-made hex maps of the whole continent of Tamriel. Mr. Cranch has laid a 6 mile/24 mile hex grid over a base created by Lady Nerevar. It’s great for cities, province borders, and bodies of water, but doesn’t assign any terrain types. Terrain variation is one the easier ways to add depth and flavor to wilderness travel, and organize your random encounter tables.

Icarus Avery’s contribution not only solves that problem, but acknowledges the existence of the fabled jungles of Cyrodiil. Unfortunately, the only available version is very low resolution. Again, helpful, but not quite there.

It turned out an ideal map was not far away. Icarus Avery says she partly based her map on another by mkdir_not_war. This one is not only much higher resolution, it also shows two terrain features I am very interested in: the pass between Riften in Skyrim and Silgrad Tower in Morrowind, and the pass between Cyrodiil’s Cheydinhal and Morrowind’s Kragenmoor. There’s also a route between Riften and Cheydinhal thrown in free! With that setup, we have the perfect little corner for kicking off inter-provincial adventures.

Now that I had our hex map, I wanted to pack it tighter with more locations to explore. This was a far easier problem to solve. The Imperial Library, an excellent fan-made lore repository, has plenty of maps filled with minor locations that made it into one game but not another, or never even made an appearance outside of lore. It also includes detailed game maps of Vvardenfell and Cyrodiil, though not of Skyrim. I go here for that.

On top of all this, there’s also a project to recreate the rest of Tamriel as a Morrowind mod. The original version, Tamriel Rebuilt, focused only on mainland Morrowind. The much more ambitious plan to build the other eight provinces falls under Project Tamriel and its sub-projects. TES fans who started with Skyrim or Oblivion may be interested to learn that the scale of Morrowind’s in-game world is much closer to the vastness of the Tamriel that exists in lore. That means the PT Skyrim and Cyrodiil will be much bigger in these mods than in the games where they are the primary setting.

It also means these modders have prepared deliciously large, highly detailed maps of each province for me to plunder.

So armed, it was time to actually start putting pencil to paper. Autarch, the company that puts out the Adventure, Conqueror, King System (ACKS), has some excellent blank hex templates. They’re designed to zoom as far out as 24 miles per hex, and as far in as 55 feet per hex. I keep a supply of them printed and ready to hand for all my mapping needs.

The first step was taking the 6 mile hex template and mkdir_not_war ‘s map, and copying down the major reference points of our starting region. This covered an area roughly from Cheydinhal to Narsis in the southern part of the map, and from Fort Dawnguard to the crater formerly known as Vivec in the north. Events like the destruction of Vivex, by the way, are something I was constantly factoring in during map creation. Timeline matters, not just for the political aspects of the game, but sometimes for the shape of the land itself. In our case, I wanted the campaign set before the destruction of Vivec, so I had to deviate slightly from the model I was using.

Next I looked at all my other maps and began copying down interesting locations in light pencil all over my first draft. Since scale and lore do not remain consistent from map to map, I had to make my own decisions about where many places stood in relation to one another, and to the landmarks taken from my model hex map. Throughout this process, I was referencing UESP, The Imperial Library, and the Project Tamriel wiki for information about each location. I erased things, moved them, drew arrows to other potential spots, and generally made a mess. My mental picture of the region grew clearer and clearer, but the map itself became increasingly unreadable.

Having reduced my mind to order and my map to chaos, I took out a second 6 mile template and began copying my final decisions from the first draft. I used a nice, dark pen. This version was intended to be neat and readable, if not exactly an art piece.

Once things looked somewhat orderly, I began noting major cities and landmarks on a 24 mile hex template. This one is zoomed out enough to fit the entirety of the base map’s Tamriel into it. I’m in no hurry to flesh this map out, but it’s nice being able to reference the bigger picture.

That’s how I arrived at our game map. In my next post, I’ll explain how I decided where to place us on the timeline, and which versions of lore I would draw on.

Tabletop Gaming in Tamriel I - System

The world of The Elder Scrolls is ideal for a Dungeons & Dragons style game. It has lore deep enough to flesh out an entire campaign, and is self-contradictory enough to justify ignoring “canon” whenever you feel like it. So when I decided my weekly game was not enough, I chose to start a play-by-post in Tamriel. This series of posts will cover some of the major problems I ran into while setting up a tabletop campaign in TES’s world, and the solutions I found.

The first choice I had to make, and the one I’ll devote this post to, is what system to run. There are two well-known Elder Scrolls RPGs freely available on the internet: UESRPG and UESTRPG.

UESRPG is a percentile-based system that tries to replicate some of the actual mechanics of the games. It is a very cool project, and I admire the effort put into it. I’m looking for something more stripped-down, though. I enjoy being able to play without referencing the rules very often, and my tendency to homebrew things is better served by a less complex system. I’m also much less interested in replicating the mechanics of TES than I am in replicating its overall vibe and lore.

UESTRPG is based on 5e. That would make it much more approachable for my players, but 5e has the same sort of problems as UESRPG. I’m also on a bit of an OSR and indie game kick, so it would be nice to use a system that takes a fresher approach to gaming.

I ended up settling on Shadowdark. One reason I found this system attractive is that I already know it–but there are several other advantages. If 5e was your introduction to TTRPG’s, as it was for me and most of my players, Shadowdark’s mechanics should look and feel very familiar. And yet it is much, much simpler. You don’t need intimate knowledge of a dozen inter-related sub-systems or a degree in statistics just to throw together a new class. “Balance” may not be central to Shadowdark’s more OSR style of play, but it’s easier to achieve than in 5e.

But there's another major reason to choose Shadowdark for an Elder Scrolls campaign: there are resources for playing it in that setting.

OBVLON is, uh… “inspired by” Oblivion. Yeah, "inspired." Not at all a carbon copy with the serial numbers filed off. ShadowRim does the same thing for Skyrim.

Both of these have little, modular mini-systems for alchemy, smithing, and enchanting, and both include fairly well-keyed hex maps. The maps are “inspired by” the provinces of Cyrodiil and Skyrim respectively. They also use birth sign mechanics, though ShadowRim’s version is more robust and intended to replace the vanilla class system entirely. I was not quite satisfied enough with either of the supplements to adopt them wholesale, but they both have good things worth stealing.

When I came to my players with my proposal for this game, I told them I was planning to use Shadowdark, but that there would be a fairly heavy amount of house rules and homebrewed content. In future posts I plan to explore different facets of that. There will be crafting systems–Frankensteinian monsters I stitched together from parts of OBVLON and ShadowRim–and a classless character creation/advancement system–an abomination I made myself.

But I want to stick a pin in these mechanical issues for a while, and devote the next post to the land itself: how I stitched together a hex map of Tamriel.