Mod Interrupted

The Plot Thickens

After releasing TGD03 The Lizard's Head, I immediately began working on the next Morrowind mod I wanted to do in my Traveller's Guide to Dining series. I turned my attention to the Plot and Plaster tavern in Tel Aruhn, which had always intrigued me because of its name. First I looked up the various meanings of both plot and plaster to see which kinds of story ideas they would engender. Plot can mean plan, scheme, conspiracy, intrigue, scenario, story, design, or tract of land. Plaster as a verb can mean spread or smear; as a noun can mean a thick gooey material or something to make a molded structure with; or in slang can mean to get drunk (plastered). I eventually came up with a story along the conspiracy and intrigue line that would be weird and Lovecraftian and would be revealed to the player throughout a multi-part quest.

Tel Aruhn is a small island, the home of Telvanni Archmagister Gothren and his entourage, and populated with many local shopkeepers and fishermen. I decided to involve quite a few of the existing characters in my story. To give each one a different character, I came up with personality types: gossip, skeptic, scholar, spiritualist, and weirdo. I also created two new characters, one to serve as a local travel guide, the other to be the waiter in the tavern. I wrote quite a bit of dialogue for at least a dozen characters, making each personality unique and defining their relationships to each other.

Night of the Lizard

Boring Inn

For my fifth Morrowind mod I decided to do a treatment of The Lizard's Head in Vivec. In the plain vanilla version of the game, this inn is pretty blah. There are five characters in the place, but only one of them has anything particularly interesting to say. You'd think with a name like The Lizard's Head, and the fact that there's a mounted Argonian head hidden away in the storage room, there would be an intriguing back story. But there wasn't, so I made one up.

After considering various ideas and coming up with a story that involved several new characters and some complicated interactions, I eventually simplified the concept to disturbances at the inn seemingly associated with the Argonian head in the storage room. So as not to spoil the mod for anyone who hasn't played it, I won't go into detail here. I'll just say that the player can find out what's causing the disturbances, get some back story that explains something that happened in the past, and do a small quest to resolve the situation in a satisfactory manner.