2 - Krashing in Karthwasten

Un starts picking a trader's brain on how to make an honest coin around here...

...Interesting. A little bit of detective work, maybe. And profit for a lady with an eye for antiques. Thank you, Gog.

This honest skipper takes Man, Mer and Chicken (left) to harsher places still.

Ah, now this feels like home, like Vvardenfell. This exploited dock worker, outnumbered by Nords, Reachmen, Orc and Dunmer, lives in his very own Yoku Empire. Un makes sure to answer respectfully, calling him N'wah but in such a nice tone he thinks it means sir.

The very first Witchman Of The Reach. Six eyes? A devotee of Mephala? Un doesn't dare ask yet.

Her very special knack, the Beggar's Nose, doesn't tell her much today. What's that in the water...

Oh my.

This lil F'lah is much too adorable to butcher for meat and besides, Un is a House Dunmer, a city Dunmer and prefers her food to taste good.

The Harbor office is unremarkable but the clerk offers training, for a price. He also may be trying to sell her a house.

Exploring this place furhter might be fruitful, but there are locks and guards.

A handsome crate

 

The town proper lies to the south. When trying to climb the cliffs Un Ravel finds herself sunk in some kind of grey snow sludge. Peculiar.

The Road to Karthwasten

The corpse of a suburb

If things take a turn, maybe Un can camp in this ruined farming outskirt. This is a country mutilated by war and worse.

There is a caravaner outside the gate, always happy to talk as is their way. And we have the first crash of this mod when we ask him for specific places.

1 - Karthwasten Kabbage

A persistent ash-cough that only gets worse the farther they sail from Red Mountain. Gale and Frost and blue little men waiting at the shore where the reefs are. The Sea of Ghosts and Ghosts of the Sea and the effects of too much salted fish. Then the river boat, worse, and St. Delyn be thanked for what little privacy is effected by a sharp knife on one's hip and an encoded journal. 

Sera Unila Ravel awakes to a new kind of live and shakes the cold from her bones.

First, she has to go over her tools and instruments.

A fine negotiator. It doesn't quite compliment evening wear, but neither does traveling by river boat. 

Could be worse. It could be made of glass and filled with spiders for example.

The next tool, the face, could use a good inn and warm water and somebody killing the sun, please.

Next, the outfit, and this one won't do. The stains have names by now and it smells of regret. Un's first trip would be to the armorer, if, alas, if only she had more than 46 drakes left on her person. All the bribes and fees and disease potions have been eating at her purse.

Un Ravel enters the pier and immediately gets her feet stuck in a wooden structure. She medidates about life and meaning a little until the situation resolves.

The first step towards her goal must be to get the lay of the land. Talk to the kind of people that won't mind talking to a ragged Eastern Devil and figure out where the power and the problems are around here. The next goal is to find an inn and just enough money to bath and sleep there. 

If anybody asks, Un Ravel is here on an investigation for "eastern merchant interests". If pushed harder, she might drop Yngling Half-Troll's name, very casually, with the devotion to ambiguity of a Temple Lawyer.

Hammerfell... the world seems unbearable large and frighteningly small on the Karthwasten dock.

The heads of some kind of nature sprite or monster obviously. The aroma is questionable. Better not to hunt this one without a two-handed axe.

Un turns around, and smells a quest.

St. Delyn

CharGen and Zodiac

 So I did this yesterday and found the screenshots didn't work. Turns out after some trial and error MGE XE was in an exception error state because it hadn't generated Distant Lands (which I'm not using because how small it makes the world feel). Now this is fixed and a couple smaller errors also and at least I can turn on DisLands when I want to take landscape pictures.

I also activate the Take Notes mod and Bound to Balance. 

CREL puts us into Un Ravel's tidy tiny office as she prepares for her travails. 

Interesting that even MGE can't screenshot the face preview. I was showing off Un Ravel's pony tail.

The +10 Short Blade is very nice.

I hadn't decided on a Star-sign yet! The Lady would be an appropriate, very strong choice but Sera Un goes into an completely unknown landmass as a non-mystic. I need those detect effects. I find so much more shit when I play with Beggar's Nose, and it saves some pixelbitching. Also it's TES my hortators, we have to MANTLE the TOWER to CHIM.

In my mind this points towards Un Ravel being more of a detective than I thought, and maybe much more desperate.

btw that's the Yellow Book; Hlaalu confirmed???

Looking good! 50 weapon skill and 50 Agility should be enough to survive for a bit.

CREL optionally allows you to start with two "equipment sets". I think that's not too broken. I picked a knife and lockpicks. Money or nice clothes might be more agent-y, but the fun is in acquiring them. Also I'm a little paranoid about the hidden locks and traps options from the MCPatch. Better start with some probes.

And here we are. The next post is going to be mostly in character, I hope.

The Player Character

I'm going to start a new character for this and directly put them into Skyrim with CREL. No going back to Morrowind unless there are related quests.

First Ideas

I can't help it, I'm a contrarian. I want to play against type. Argonian Nerevarine, Altmer Dragonborn, a CoCyrodiil that doesn't look like a sack of potatoes beaten with a bat and left in a wet place for a week (impossible). So I decided to go to Skyrim as a Mer rogue-type. I suspect the Reach setting of SHotN is more conducive to a blood-guzzling barbarian which is what makes this fun.

 I've never actually played an Agent, and I never actually played a female Dunmer so I decided to try those out.

 Class

According to UESP:

I intend to stick to those Skills, almost entirely. In a wide open sandbox, roleplay also means limiting yourself. Scrolls and commercial potions are allowed of course. I will use on-use enchanted items only if they're artifacts or important to my character(rewards for interesting quests for example). It's going to be impossible (I think) to climb ranks in the Fighter and Mage Guilds with those Skills (but also I'm not sure if those guilds are in SHotN). The one killing skill is Short Blade. Given that I can Conjure, Bound Dagger is in play, but I feel it is OP on a new character so I may try another mod to balance it! Or limit myself to the Conjuration effects of Command and Turn which are more agent-like?

I think a cute roleplaying implication from those skills would be using Light Armor for the wilderness and dungeons and swanky clothes for the City.  Block doesn't fit my image of an agent at all unless there are small bucklers or parrying daggers in the game. Sneak will as always be frustrating in the beginning.

Race

I looked for lists of Morrowind faces and found this little tool. Combining a roguish but near-professional hair-do and one of the most expressive interesting faces I arrived at this dry beauty:

Head 3 and Hair 13 apparently

Between the white hair and the not-young face she appears rather old but that's fine with me. I could retexture the hair in dark red but nah it's cool.

Name

After some UESP reading I decided on Un Ravel, short for Sera Unila Ravel. The nickname is also a pun in Tamrielic but the way she pronounces it people need a while to catch on. She is in fact related to the Ravel ancestral crypt. If the name has a deeper meaning, and if it is on the side of Mephala or Sheogorath, remains to be seen.

Backstory, Personality, Tenets, and so on?

Will be revealed to the Reader and myself during this adventure!

Grasp fortune by the forelocks.

My modlist

I'm using morrowind.exe with MGE XE, Code Patch and MWSE naturally, MO2 for mod management and WryeMash Polemos for the tools. I'm using MO 2.4.4 because that was less of a hassle with my setup. 

In the MCPatch I activated options left and right! Worth noting are those that connect to thievery: Ownership tooltips, more effective pickpocketing, hidden locks and traps... and so on and so on.

This mod list is not specifically built for this Let's Play and more as an attempt to put as many landmasses into the game as possible. You may notice it contains very few graphics enhancements. For one that's my streak of Purism, but also I COCed to Karthwasten as a test and found the frame rate a little worrying, so I downgraded a little. Very little gameplay mods so as to enjoy Skyrim as intended. Multipatch with tes3cmd via WryeMash.

MOD LIST: NAME, NEXUS ID

DLC: Tribunal,-1
DLC: Bloodmoon,-1
Patch for Purists,45096
Unofficial Morrowind Official Plugins Patched,43931
OAAB_Data,49042
Tamriel Data (Vanilla),44537
SOV_Data,55322
Expansion Delay,47588
Cutting Room Floor,47307
Cutting Room Floor - Modular Patches,47307
Ultimate Icon Replacer,36948
Ultimate Icon Replacer Lefty v1dot1 FIXED,36948
Fresco Splash Screens,45680
Better Dialogue Font,36873
Battlespire Blue Star,43135
Animation Blending,53779
Subtle Magic Static,4468
Frescoed,21297
Weapon Sheathing 0,46069
Ancient Nordic armor (modders resource),43779
Familiar Faces by Caleb 2.1,50093
Better Clothes Complete + Darknut,47549
More Better Clothes Vol I - Vanilla,36406
Better Robes +TR -UFR,42773
Tamriel Rebuilt,42145
Skyrim Home Of The Nords,44921
Tomb of the Snow Prince ALL,46810
Near Vanilla Road Sign Replacer,44957
Province Cyrodiil,44922
Wyrmhaven,42933
Esroniet,47929
Lyithdonea - The Azurian Isles ALPHA,43749
Stros M'Kai in the Third Era,46247
The Doors of Oblivion 1,44398
The Doors of Oblivion 1.4 base,44398
Vanheim,42325
Vanheim Moved and Fixed +dependency,52527
Tel Nechim (moved version),43204
Landscape Overhaul for Lokken Mountain esp,48862
The Island - Aln'Baldrahn,43187
Unnamed Isle - TotSP,52957
Secret of Vilmuhn,52977
Slower Level Up and Increased Skill Training Costs,50262
The Minotaur's Ring,50135
Reachman Race,50154
Karthwasten House for Sale - Wheatfield Home,49566
Another Way to Skyrim,53049
In memory of my Mom,52510
Less Radioactive Books V2,54821
Jarl of Solstheim,47016
Better Robes - Better TR Patch,44875
Windhelm - City of the Kings,53753
CREL Complete 2024,54646
Multipatch SHoTN

 

 If you have recommendations or criticism, let me know!

source I think

Edit: the actual .esp list ordered with MLOX and some experimenting:

001 Morrowind.esm
002 Tribunal.esm
003 Bloodmoon.esm
004 Patch for Purists.esm
005 Tamriel_Data.esm
006 TR_Mainland.esm
007 Wyrmhaven.esm
008 Cyr_Main.esm
009 MD_Azurian Isles.esm
010 OAAB_Data.esm
011 SOV_Data.esm
012 SecretOfVilmuhn.esm
013 Sky_Main.esm
014 Solstheim Tomb of The Snow Prince.esm
015 TOTSP_Patch_for_Purists_4.0.2.esp
016 Patch for Purists - Book Typos.ESP
017 Patch for Purists - Semi-Purist Fixes.ESP
018 Better Clothes Complete.ESP
019 adamantiumarmor.esp
020 AreaEffectArrows.esp
021 bcsounds.esp
022 BT_Whitewolf_2_0_HOTV.esp
023 Clean Aln'Baldrahn.esp
024 Clean Aln'Baldrahn_OTR.esp
025 Cutting Room Floor - Blightstorm.esp
026 Cutting Room Floor - Characters.esp
027 Cutting Room Floor - Conjuration.esp
028 Cutting Room Floor - Containers.esp
029 Cutting Room Floor - Creatures.esp
030 Cutting Room Floor - Dagoth.esp
031 Cutting Room Floor - Diseases.esp
032 Cutting Room Floor - Extras.esp
033 Cutting Room Floor - Herders.esp
034 Cutting Room Floor - Heroes.esp
035 Cutting Room Floor - ItemsTR.esp
036 Cutting Room Floor - Jobs.esp
037 Cutting Room Floor - Keys.esp
038 Cutting Room Floor - MispersTR.esp
039 Cutting Room Floor - Neloth.esp
040 Cutting Room Floor - Orders.esp
041 Cutting Room Floor - Ordinators.esp
042 Cutting Room Floor - Prince.esp
043 Cutting Room Floor - Quests.esp
044 Cutting Room Floor - Redaynia.esp
045 Cutting Room Floor - Slaves.esp
046 Cutting Room Floor - Sounds.esp
047 Cutting Room Floor - Spells.esp
048 Cutting Room Floor - Taverns.esp
049 Cutting Room Floor - Underground.esp
050 Cutting Room Floor - Voices.esp
051 EBQ_Artifact.esp
052 entertainers.esp
053 Esroniet.esp
054 Expansion Delay.ESP
055 Karthwasten_WheatField_Home_1_2.esp
056 LeFemmArmor.esp
057 master_index.esp
058 Missing snow armor.esp
059 NearVanillaRoadSigns-AldRuhnPatch.esp
060 NearVanillaRoadSigns.esp
061 reachman_race.esp
062 Siege at Firemoth.esp
063 Skyrim_T_Fix.ESP
064 stros 9.15.18.ESP
065 Tel NechimM.esp
066 The Doors of Oblivion 1.4.esp
067 The Minotaurs Ring.esp
068 TOTSP TD Content Integration - Spiders.esp
069 TR_Factions.esp
070 TR_Firemoth_Vanilla_patch.esp
071 Better Robes.ESP
072 More Better Clothes.ESP
073 Unnamed_Isle.esp
074 Vanheim.v1.1.esp
075 Varil_Slower Skill Gain and DoubleTraining Costs x2.esp
076 Wyrmhaven - Grass.esp
077 MomMemorialMorrowind.ESP
078 Better Robes TR.esp
079 UMOPP_BetterArmorPatch.esp
080 Windhelm - city of kings.ESP
081 Shotn-Windhelm-Transport.ESP
082 Jarl of Solstheim - SHOTN Version.ESP
083 CREL_Complete_2024.esp
084 multipatch.esp

Let's Play The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind: Project Tamriel: Skyrim: Home of the Nords!

So I'm in on of my Morrowind phases again and I've been playing a lot of mods after finally finishing the expansions.

One I've been wanting to check out for a while is Skyrim:Home of the Nords, associated with the incredible Tamriel Rebuilt project. The SHotN Team reimagines the Province of Skyrim as it exists in the lore of Morrowind, not so much the mundane compromise we can see in TES5. I've been putting those landmass mods off for a while, to be entirely honest, because they're big. Hundreds of NPCs and quests big. Do I dare leave the ash-choked comfort of Vvardenfell and go west?

 

Yes, and I decided to make a whole thing out of it and post to this blog piece by piece: A travelogue of the Reach. With pictures! In-character, with plenty of commentary and maybe a couple literary tricks. I'm going in blind except for what I absorbed by osmosis, I will reload or cheat as little as possible, and buddy, will I roleplay.

I hope it will be entertaining to fellow Morrowind enjoyers, gratifying to any of the modders that may read it, and a useful exercise for myself.

 

The Hortator said, 'The edge of the world is made of swords.'

Vivec corrected him. 'They are the bottom row of the world's teeth.'

 -Sermon 17