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.