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.

I'll Meet You at the Council Club

Mixing Drinks

For my fourth Morrowind mod, the second in the Traveller's Guide to Dining series, I decided to stay within the town of Ald'ruhn and give some personality to the Ald'ruhn Council Club, which is a small tavern with a bar and a few tables. The Council Club gives the impression of being a place for intimate meetings over drinks between friends or acquaintances, or conspirers (the proprietor is a member of the Thieves Guild). In the plain vanilla game, the club is populated with a few generic characters and there is nothing of interest to do. The player can't even buy a drink at the bar.

I decided that the Dunmer proprietor, Darvam Hlaren, should sell a variety of drinks, both local and imported, that he could provide because of his connections and distribution network. I spent a lot of time researching types of alcohol and designing various alcoholic beverages based on in-game ingredients and their effects. I took existing bottle models, recolored the textures using GIMP to make each bottle different, and even added images I found on the web to some of them to make them interesting. A few of the drink names already existed in The Elder Scrolls lore, the rest I made up based either on bits of Elven language from the Imperial Library dictionary, on the names of deities, or on the color or ingredients.

Waiter, There's a Rat in My Pot

Cooking up a New Menu

After the success and fun of working on my second Morrowind mod, What's on the Menu?, I decided I wanted to create a menu for each dining establishment in the game, which was around 29 pubs, taverns, and inns. My plan was to develop a unique menu for each one, creating dishes that used local ingredients and reflected the personality of each place. The entire series would be called Traveller's Guide to Dining.

My favorite place was The Rat in the Pot in Ald'ruhn. It had the atmosphere of a pub and was the local headquarters of the Thieves Guild. I did some research online, looking at the menus of pub-type restaurants to get a feel for the kinds of food that might be offered.  The first menu I created contained five items — two appetizers and three flatpies (a.k.a. pizzas). I used a curvy typeface called Radaern that I liked because the lower-case d was reminiscent of a little rat body with a tail sticking up. The corner art was a free image that I found on the web.

I didn't have any expectation that I'd be able to draw a decent rat in a pot, so I went into the Construction Set and tried to make a composite image from the in-game pot and rat objects. The low-resolution meshes and textures and the dark dull gray/brown color looked awful, so I poked about on the web and found a decent looking gray rat and black pot that I combined into the image on the menu.

Morrowind Alchemy

A Budding Alchemist

In the spring of 2010, I was replaying Morrowind from the beginning. After joining the Mages Guild in Balmora, I did several quests for Ajira, a Khajiit novice alchemist. Her first task was to bring her samples of mushrooms; her third task was to bring her samples of flowers; and her fifth task was to recover the reports she had written that were stolen by a fellow student. The rewards for doing these tasks were several different kinds of potions. It occurred to me that after wandering around in the wilds looking for various plants based on their described characteristics and then reading the reports that Ajira wrote about her experiments with them, that my character should have improved in alchemy skill. Wasn't that the point of going through these types of exercises?

This thought led to the creation of my first mod. I ran The Elder Scrolls Construction Set (TES CS) and poked around until I found the two reports. It was a simple matter to change one attribute on each report to cause each one to give a skill point when read. Thinking that other players might like this mod, I decided to upload it to Planet Elder Scrolls. I gave the mod a simple and obvious name — Ajira's Alchemy Reports. It was a big hit and that was all the encouragement I needed when I got an idea for another mod.

Back Story

Greetings and welcome to my blog, which is about my life in relation to art and computers. As a child in the 1960s, I had fun with creative toys and games. As a teenager in the 1970s, I fell in love with computers and have enjoyed both working and playing on them ever since. Read on for some background.

The High School Years

When I was in high school, I had trouble deciding where to concentrate my efforts for a foundation that would take me into a job in the real world. I had always been on the creative side, but math, logic, and solving puzzles were my strong points. My first inclination was to become a commercial artist, so I took art classes. Even though I enjoyed all the drawing and craft exercises, I eventually decided I didn't have the innate talent that would carry me in that field. Rethinking my options, it occurred to me that being an accountant might be interesting and more in line with my skills, so I took bookkeeping, typing, and keypunching classes. Strangely enough, the keypunching class is what started me on the road to my first career — computer software engineer. (Well, that and being a die-hard classic Star Trek fan and devoted Spock-lover.)