House Telvanni Faction Quest Design

[Adanorcil]

Words to avoid in this topic because they don't belong with Telvanni (subject to change):
- study
- library
- vote
- present/gift



The way I'd like to go about this is to start off by laying down the blueprint for where we want to go with this. Some of the phases will already be filled in, others are still open and I suggest all the people with access to this forum are free to make suggestions.

Before we go into that, though, I want to make sure that everyone thinking about this material is working with the same mindset. For that purpose I have written up a short document that details the way in which the House Telvanni works and its individual members think and work. Think of it as a style guide. You can consider this 'lore'. Not all of it is new; some of it is new information I made up. In some ways it may contradict what we were doing earlier, but it paints an accurate picture of how we should portray the Telvanni.

For now I'm going to let you all have a read. I think we should first come to some kind of conclusion with regard to the other discussion, but if people want to, I can finish up the quest blueprint text by tomorrow and post that too.



Telvanni Politics
The Telvanni know little in the way of an institutionalized political system. House politics are primarily centered on the preservation of a safe social distance and power balance between the House's various power figures. Above all else, the Telvanni lords have a very accurate idea of the power relations among themselves. Those relations are an intricate mix of property, personnel, age, magical prowess and anything else that may factor in deciding whether a fellow Telvanni is an easy target, an equal or a superior. As a result, personal disagreements are either resolved silently on the basis of an invisible hierarchy, or settled with violence.

The Telvanni Council
Though there is a Telvanni House Council, it is not an official organ. It adheres to few strict rules, fewer still that cannot be broken, should the need arise. There are no set procedures for being included in or excluded from the council. Membership is based purely on the amount of respect the councilmember in question garners from his peers. In recent history, the young Master Aryon famously claimed a seat when he a sent a Mouth to a council meeting where he was neither killed nor sent away. Attendance is not mandatory and failing to attend does not lessen a councillor's prestige. Some high-ranking Telvanni, such as Divayth Fyr, do not have representation in the council, but can still exert a strong influence if they choose to participate in the decision-making.

The Telvanni Council is based in Port Telvannis. The lords who choose to attend send their personal Mouth to the meeting. The Mouths have a peculiar relation to their respective lords, in which they speak and act as if possessed by them. Their patrons themselves, however, do not need to invest conscious thought in controlling their Mouth. Instead, the Mouth acts as a selective copy of the patron's mind so that the wizards can divert their attention to personal affairs, assured that their emissary will make the exact same decisions as they would. In this way, Archmagister Dral, who was not been seen in physical form for an eternity, is still represented on the council.

Telvanni ranks

As in all Houses, the vast majority of members have a very low rank and live their lives without ever changing that. They just live their lives in towns, farming, having businesses etc. Of course that's not the path the player will be taking.

Dunmer who are born into a House automatically get a certain status in it. Outlanders, however, can't just join like that. The Houses are important cultural institutions for the Dunmer, so joining by simply signing a paper won't suffice. In the case of the Telvanni, outlanders usually work as hirelings, doing 'dirty work' in the general interest of the House. Only after working like this for a while do some get a (rare) opportunity to join the House proper.

Higher ranks are given to those who have risen above expendability. They often provide magical services as enchanters, alchemists or spellwrights or fulfill administrative duties in the service of a particular lord. Telvanni lords often select Mouths from their midst. On a political scale, however, they are still rarely of any significance.

When one seeks access to the higher echelons of the House, titles can only be claimed. As long as the rising Telvanni's ambition is accepted by his peers, their claim will be acknowledged. If it meets with resistance, the claimant will be forced to back down for the time being or - if they do not desist - they will often be eliminated. The process is arduous and slow as only Telvanni can bear. Many enterprising Telvanni climb the ranks as the protégé of a more established lord. Self-made men are not unheard of among the Telvanni, but to do so is brash and generally very unsafe.

The top Telvanni consider each other rough equals, as long as nothing happens to significantly weaken or strengthen one individual. There is no official head of the House, though at any given time one Telvanni, who is known as the Archmagister, assumes that de facto position, often for countless centuries on end. The Archmagister's will is typically obeyed, if begrudgingly. Nonetheless, they often take care to exploit their powerful position as little as possible. Other Telvanni may lay claim to the title of Magister, which is tantamount to proclaiming oneself a more worthy candidate for the position of Archmagister. This event is rare and tends to create a social upheaval throughout the House.

[Adanorcil]

Even the last Great House quests in vanilla Morrowind gave the impression that the player was working for the House rather than being a valued member of it. In addition, the player's rising in the ranks of the House often seemed like a trivial matter that other members of the House cared little about. One would get the impression that it was entirely acceptable for the established house members (xenophobic, paranoid and violent) that a complete stranger joined their ranks in return for a couple of jobs well done. Aryon even promotes you to his own rank without batting an eye.

Some attempts were made to remedy this in the old Telvanni questline, but in this new version the emphasis shall most definitely be this: to make the Telvanni Telvanni, more weird, less formulaic and bloodless and most definitely a whole lot meaner. It should no longer be just a string of quests, but the story of the player's rise in the House. And if you want to go places among the Telvanni, you can only think of one person.

The following is what you can call a blueprint for the Telvanni questline. Except for a few ideas, it does not yet detail any specific quests or the full extent of branching. The idea is simply to describe the flow of the quests and various things the player will be doing in them before we get into the particular details.

House Telvanni Hireling
As said before, it is very odd how before the player could join the Telvanni simply by asking. This goes against the very idea of a House, which, to wit, should be like a big family. To remedy this (and to allow for a few more ranks outside the hard-coded ten), the TR Telvanni questline will be 'divided into' two factions. The player will have to attain the highest rank in a relatively short "House Telvanni Hireling" faction before being able to become a member of the actual "House Telvanni".

In a sense, this division was already present in the original faction, with the first two ranks being named 'hireling' and 'retainer'. Coincidentally, it also explains why you see a surprisingly high number of Bosmer, Redguard, and even Orcs in the faction listings: they are obviously mercenaries.

Outlanders and people not born into a House can work as House hireling on a job-to-job basis. They do work that is in the general interest of the House, however menial or dirty it may be. They do not normally concern themselves with magical or confidential matters and do not interact with significant House members directly. Rewards for successful missions are exclusively financial (or similar material rewards). Requirements (skills etc.) to start out as a retainer are generally low. You will be accepted as long as you can get the job done. The player's ranks in this faction (which I reckon should be three or so in number) reflect the degree to which the player is considered a reliable hireling. Orders are given by officials working for the Telvanni council.

Ranks (up for discussion)

• Hireling
• [some other synonym] Haplo Edit: Sycophant?
• Retainer

Examples of retainer work (each could comprise several quests):

• Securing the musk trade in north-eastern Morrowind. Limiting Imperial influence along the Musk Route wherever possible.
• Protecting Telvanni slavery in cosmopolitan areas of Morrowind. (Twin Lamps activity is very dangerous and thus rare in central Telvanni territory.) Capturing runaway slaves. Investigate rumors of Imperial abolitionist double-agents.
• Fighting back incursions of other houses in Telvanni territory. (Odirniran, Shishi.) Settling other inter-House conflicts.
• Anything slaves cannot be trusted with.

House Telvanni
After establishing themselves as a reliable and efficient agent of the House, the player will be rewarded with the honor of being sworn into the Telvanni proper. (This is not an official procedure, but it's the process by which most non-Telvanni manage to gain enough credibility to join.) The lowest rank for an outlander is Oathman (i.e. has just taken an oath). Native Telvanni by default start out as Kinsmen.

With official membership of House Telvanni the player is no longer required to do strong-arm work, but that does not yet mean they hold any power within the House. Many Telvanni -and members of other houses- live their lives without ever changing their lowly status.

Lowly Telvanni: working for just about anyone
A good method of gaining the least bit of credit in the House is to perform work for the Mouths on the council, who speak directly for (and like - see above) their masters. We may be able to recuperate (some of) the original mouth quests, but I suggest we make the quests for the Mouths added by TR a little more interesting than the original ones. For variety's sake we can certainly do better than "fetch me five x" or "go find object y". All in all, though, this would still be low-profile work and relatively straightforward. The player's status is not much more than that of a farmer or hunter. Any of the Mouths can raise the player's rank in the house on behalf of their master. (Who at this point obviously don't give a damn.) The whole of these quests should probably increase the player's status by two ranks or so.

Craftsman: working for pay
Somewhere along the ride, Telvanni members are obviously expected to develop some affinity with the magical arts. That is the only way you can be of use to someone. At this point, the player will be given a little more freedom, and will have the opportunity to offer his/her valuable skills as a craftsman to individual Telvanni lords. ("Craftsman" in Telvanni terms means enchanter, spellwright, alchemist etc.) Unfortunately enchanting, spellmaking and alchemy are poorly suited for the purpose of building quests. (The game cannot check for custom-made items, doing enchanting yourself is extremely difficult, spellmaking impossible.) Quests will therefore have to provide an alternative to that. The player will have to talk to individual lords or their representatives in their towers and ask if they require any services. NOTE: Dral is an exception to this. As everyone will tell you, he hasn't been in his tower for a long time and is not interested in any services you might provide. Piss off.

Instead of being given specific instructions, the player will have to provide assistance in a way that demands some resourcefulness. They will not be given any specific instructions, but instead will have to contribute in a way they figure out themselves. There should always be a couple of different options to fulfill the quest (some rewarded better than others) and the player will have to decide which solution they want to go with. The Telvanni lord may, for example, need an item that fits a certain description, while that description covers quite a few things. In that case, the items will usually be rather valuable and will therefore be rather complicated to procure. The quests should usually force the player to make a well-considered choice about which item to give. A few examples:

• Master/Mistress [X] wants to decode the entrapment keys the Mages Guild uses. Find an expensive item enchanted by the guild. Buy it, steal it, whatever. Bonus points if you manage to extract some useful information out of an enchanter.
• Find something to finish this potion. It should have effect [X]. [Let the player figure out a suitable ingredient, with a range of acceptable options.]
• Bring the Telvanni lord a good object to enchant, e.g. something Daedric or ebony. They will not ask where it came from.
• etc.

It doesn't necessarily have to involve items. Processes or knowledges could be much sought-after by the Telvanni lords too:

• Person [X] allegedly has devised a new bypass of the Hethel-Onsard Boundary. Try to learn it yourself, or failing that, steal their notes. You'll make a greater impression if you can apply the principles yourself.
  Figure out a way to raise the conductivity of low-grade creatia ducts. Ask around.
• The Telvanni lord is preparing a complicated summoning. Consult expert summoners for a way to protect the room from excessive daedron spillage.
  etc.

Being useful: working for the boss
If you provide decent work, some Telvanni might recognize your skill and resourcefulness. After rising in the ranks like this for a while, the player will gain some reputation and certain Telvanni lords may seek to permanently bind the PC in their service (to gather more power for themselves and to prevent others from claiming you first) in return for handsome payments. While this would probably be something all Telvanni lords would be interested in, I suggest we limit ourselves to giving the player two options, which we detail extensively. The player will serve the lord of his choice for a while.

I propose that of these two lords, one will be moderately 'progressive' (especially among the Telvanni this must be taken with very large grain of salt) and one should present the traditional House values. Vanilla, in its obsession with always pairing the player with the nice guy, suggests Aryon as a likely candidate for the moderate character. Naturally, the hardliner would be one of the mainland lords. For the sake of variety I think this could be a woman.

For a while, this lord will act as the player's patron in the House. This means that they expect the player to help them advance their own goals and power. (In House Telvanni, no big shot works for anyone's benefit but their own.) Aryon will consider you as a protege on grounds of your resourcefulness and ambition. Aryon's quests should involve making sure that the other Telvanni continue to accept this unorthodox upstart in their midst. The quests for him should be a string of 'don't mess with me' statements. The other lord is caustic and short-tempered and sees incompetence in just about everyone, including the player they just sent for. You will have to gain their favor by daring to respond to their stream of verbal abuse with an even sharper in-their-face insult.

[For comments on 'mouth' status, I will post a mirc conversation here soon.]

In return for your loyalty, the lords offer advice and support should the player seek to gain a significant status in the House. NOTE: They do not 'promote' the player. (In strict gameplay terms they do: their dialogue offers the option to claim a new title.) They only promise not to protest if the player claims a title that could get in their way and give advice on when might be a good moment to do so. In this way, the player will gain one or two ranks until they basically reach a level where they could begin to have some significance. The player has already worked for the House at large and for other Telvanni. Now follows the final stage and the ambition of all Telvanni: working for yourself.

Kind of a big deal: working yourself
At this point, anything you do in the Telvanni questline will be with the express intent of increasing your own power. Your patron, who recognizes that you have "what it takes" will give you a couple of nudges in the right direction. With regard to dialogue, your patron and you should probably converse more or less as equals, or at least with a mutual respect. The quests (because sadly, even though you're working for yourself, game mechanics still requires someone to introduce the quest) could for example be given by one of your advisors.

These quests will involve (among others) stealing/conquering/building yourself a stronghold, finding goons/personnel/craftsmen, bribing/blackmailing/killing opponents, finding objects of power, dodging potential attempts on your life, etc. At a certain point, you will also need to find yourself a Mouth to blast your way into the council. At the end of these quests, the player can proclaim themselves Master of House Telvanni and all other lords (the survivors) will -begrudgingly- accept this claim.

The player has now conquered a firm position as one of the major wizard lords of Morrowind. If they want to, they can choose to be recognized as Archmagister, which means all other Telvanni agree on your indisputable supreme badassness. Doing so, however, requires the player to accomplish a feat so stunning as to put their supremacy beyond any doubt. Naturally it will require the player to contact the enigmatic Dral. Finding a way into his pocket world will be the first obstacle, because you will basically have to force your way into a bit of existence that only Dral knows the entrance of. You will have to help Dral and make a huge contribution to his pocket world. It could for example allow him to build a far bigger and more complex world than the small, fragile and energy-hogging creation he has now. This will encourage Dral to retreat into his world entirely, allowing you to claim his title. Another option is to straightforwardly kill Dral, which should obviously be very difficult.

Titles

• Oathman (title held only by those not born into the House. i.e. those who were 'sworn' into the House)
• Kinsman (lowest possible title to be held by those born into the House, i.e. 'kin', but nothing more)
• [five more titles. I think it would be good to carry the -man theme a little further.]
• Master
• Magister
• Archmagister

[Sload]

In my understanding of the unified Telvanni questline, I imagined the seats of Tel Vos and Tel Aruhn as being those Telvanni who were illegitimately expanding into Temple lands, as we are told but not really shown in the original game. I also imagined moving Tel Oren to Vvardenfell at the south end of the Grazelands, adding a third encroaching tower. I imagined the two issues driving House Telvanni being this, the conflict with the Temple over their Vvardenfell expansion, and the conflict with the Empire over control of the musk. I did not envision territorial dispute along their southern border as relevant at all.

[Thrignar Fraxix]

Sounds like more and more is being added to the workload on the front of redesigning house telvanni. I don't mind as long as indoril can keep moving. (I view indoril quests as a higher priority, if you disagree tell me why)

I like this overall design. Killing dral should indeed be very difficult, especially if you try to do so in his own pocket realm. (what happens when you kill the creator of a pocket realm when you are in it with them.) I believe this could be the most awesome fight in the game if we wanted it to be.

[Haplo]

I don't think this will affect House Indoril that much, considering that Indoril is all on TR lands, it will be much quicker to do and easier to implement. That being said, I like everything Adanorcil said, and think some of those examples for quests would work very well as actual quests.

I feel like Sload's post describes a faction that is much more centrally organized and self-aware than the faction described in Adanorcil's post. But perhaps it's less of a "House Telvanni feels this way" and more of a "The Telvanni masters all share these feelings."

The bit about surviving attempts on your life reminds me of Dark Brotherhood attacks; these can easily be scripted to begin (or happen, I should I say) at a certain rank or point in the natural progression of the questline.

On Adanorcil's concern about that fact that, unfortunately, quests have to be initiated by an NPC (and the player not being able to work for himself in the purest sense), it may indeed mean "more work" or not it may not, but how about we simply have a group of Telvanni members of various ranks who are "setup" to ask somewhat... loaded questions via dialogue with the player once the player has reached a certain point to make it seem like the topic is actually the player asking for something to be done. (ex: Player clicks topic 'business' and the NPC responds, "Oh, you're interested in my bug musk? Certainly, sera. I can ship a crate to your tower every three days for only 50 Septims a shipment." or something like that)

I also like the idea of "asking around" to get information or knowledge, and needing to ask multiple people to get a complete picture. We'd have to be a little careful with journal entries with something like that, though.

I just hope our other factions can meet the same level of depth and quality.

EDIT: It might be worth looking at some of the content in the Rise of House Telvanni mod for some ideas on what else can be done as far as quest ideas or house expansion (not to say that we can't do it well enough on our own, but the mod is quite popular, and it wouldn't make sense to reinvent the wheel).

[Why]

On Sload's post, I think you're referring to what vanilla calls the "rogue Telvanni". While it's true that Aryon has taken Vos, in vanilla these rogue Telvanni (who have taken over velothi towers) are mainly at odds with the Duke of Vvardenfell (who has forbidden any new House expansions without his approval) and the other Great Houses (who obeyed the duke's edict of non-expansion and are pissed off that Telvanni is gaining ground). Think Baladas Dremnevanni (the guy you convince to join the council in vanilla) in Gnisis, but also the guys in Shishi (target of a Redoran quest), Odirniran (target of a Hlaalu quest), Mawia (target of a Temple quest, but only because the guy is a necromancer), Sulipund (target of the Mages Guild), and five more velothi towers. From the topic "Troubles for House Telvanni": "We've been lucky. We really pushed the Duke and the other Houses when we grabbed Tel Vos. And when he didn't put up much of a fight to protect the settlement charters, we sent out our losers and lunatics to stake new claims. Some will survive, some won't. But Hlaalu and Redoran have to respond. And in the end, the ones that survive give us more power and influence here on Vvardenfell."

I don't think directly building yet another tower in the Grazelands is a good idea. Besides, there's always Tel Mora one cell away from Vos.

Regarding Adanorcil's outline, I kinda like it. I'm not too keen on this "craftsman" phase. The idea is nice, however, as you pointed out it will be hard to do a normal way (with the player actually using his skills) and I fear it will be hard to implement in a convincing way that isn't lame. But you did give a couple of nice examples.

I'm sure we're creative enough that not every quest has to be initiated through NPC dialog. There are numerous ways one could go about starting quests, though it becomes a bit trickier when you want to present the player with choices right off the bat. In any case, it shouldn't pose too much of a problem.

edit: and about checking out RoHT for inspiration, well, I just did and [url=http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/jj158/bhlmods/Rise%20of%20House%20Telvanni/ZubadaiahinTelMora.jpg]this[/url] [url=http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/jj158/bhlmods/Rise%20of%20House%20Telvanni/MGBalmoraburning.jpg]is[/url] [url=http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/jj158/bhlmods/Rise%20of%20House%20Telvanni/SummoningChamber_active.jpg]what[/url] [url=http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/jj158/bhlmods/Rise%20of%20House%20Telvanni/TelaseroafterStoh-GeiExterior.jpg]I[/url] [url=http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/jj158/bhlmods/Rise%20of%20House%20Telvanni/Edwinnaandhershadow.jpg]found[/url]. Not to bash on other mods too much, but RoHT mainly focuses on murder (like killing every single member of the mages guild) and building towers with flashy visuals. It even adds a whole new Daedric realm previously unheard of. As far as I can see it contains no lore-compatible, remotely realistic storyline. I can see why it is popular, but I don't believe it's something TR should adopt.

[Thrignar Fraxix]

I don't think this will affect House Indoril that much, considering that Indoril is all on TR lands, it will be much quicker to do and easier to implement.

My worry is that people will assume that the telvanni quests are a higher priority. We have been itching to get them done for such a long time, but with these changes I feel they should move to the back of the line.

[Haplo]

edit: and about checking out RoHT for inspiration, well, I just did and [url=http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/jj158/bhlmods/Rise%20of%20House%20Telvanni/ZubadaiahinTelMora.jpg]this[/url] [url=http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/jj158/bhlmods/Rise%20of%20House%20Telvanni/MGBalmoraburning.jpg]is[/url] [url=http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/jj158/bhlmods/Rise%20of%20House%20Telvanni/SummoningChamber_active.jpg]what[/url] [url=http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/jj158/bhlmods/Rise%20of%20House%20Telvanni/TelaseroafterStoh-GeiExterior.jpg]I[/url] [url=http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/jj158/bhlmods/Rise%20of%20House%20Telvanni/Edwinnaandhershadow.jpg]found[/url]. Not to bash on other mods too much, but RoHT mainly focuses on murder (like killing every single member of the mages guild) and building towers with flashy visuals. It even adds a whole new Daedric realm previously unheard of. As far as I can see it contains no lore-compatible, remotely realistic storyline. I can see why it is popular, but I don't believe it's something TR should adopt.

In that case, disregard my suggestion. I didn't realize it was so anti-lore.

TF: I don't think we should consider it a "linear" order, rather just think about it as not opening claims until we want them to be open. This was all ulterior to my attempts at sweeping this side conversation under the rug that is this thread.

[Myzel]

I also kinda like this outline. A decent effort in the direction of actual interaction with the gameworld. Based on this outline, the nature of politics in this questline seems almost exclusively internal. The story focuses on the rise of the player character within the house and not on any external political conflicts. This is a good approach for the Telvanni, I think, and it doesn't mean we can't include external conflicts. I'm hoping there will be quests in which the player as a Telvanni has to deal with conflicts with the empire or temple.

Some suggestions though: Please pay attention to traveling and location when designing this questline. With our mainland added, the house is spread over a vast territory. You really don't want to send the player hiking back and forth across the entire land, like happened so often in the vanilla game. Ideally, the questline would let the player travel through the entire Telvanni territory but in a more streamlined (for lack of a better word) manner, without zigzagging and crisscrossing all over the map.

Also:

Person [X] allegedly has devised a new bypass of the Hethel-Onsard Boundary. Try to learn it yourself, or failing that, steal their notes. You'll make a greater impression if you can apply the principles yourself.
Figure out a way to raise the conductivity of low-grade creatia ducts. Ask around.

# Master/Mistress [X] wants to decode the entrapment keys the Mages Guild uses. Find an expensive item enchanted by the guild. Buy it, steal it, whatever. Bonus points if you manage to extract some useful information out of an enchanter.

The Telvanni lord is preparing a complicated summoning. Consult expert summoners for a way to protect the room from excessive daedron spillage.
etc.

Demanding resourcefulness and brain-use from a player is nice, but with the way quests are scripted isn't it very hard to make them dynamic enough? I'm saying this because I've played my fair share of 'dynamic' quests that didn't give me a 'do this and that' instruction, and most of the time I found them to be very frustrating. The solutions the scripters thought of just didn't seem all that obvious when translated into a scripted gameworld with limited possibilities. The thing is that as a player you don't just have to think of a logical solution, but you also have to figure out how the scripters might have chosen to implement such a solution into the game. Not to mention that maybe the player thinks of a solution which the scripter hasn't thought of, but is also very viable. Usually the player just ends up trying a lot or talking to everyone, hoping he stumbles over the answer. That or a walkthrough.

As long as you keep such quests simple and straightforward there shouldn't be a problem though.

[Adanorcil]

By and large I agree with everything said in this thread so far, which makes me very glad.

In my understanding of the unified Telvanni questline, I imagined the seats of Tel Vos and Tel Aruhn as being those Telvanni who were illegitimately expanding into Temple lands, as we are told but not really shown in the original game. I also imagined moving Tel Oren to Vvardenfell at the south end of the Grazelands, adding a third encroaching tower. I imagined the two issues driving House Telvanni being this, the conflict with the Temple over their Vvardenfell expansion, and the conflict with the Empire over control of the musk. I did not envision territorial dispute along their southern border as relevant at all.

All of these issues can be tied in easily, I think. (And to a large extent already are.) What I wanted to do with the 'hireling' faction is basically introduce some of these issues that can resurface later in quests pertaining to particular people.

I don't think I said anything about territorial disputes along the southern border, so that should be fine.

Haplo Edit: Sycophant?

I gave this one some thought as well, but I couldn't come up with much. The thing is that Telvanni wouldn't really bother to use euphemism, because they don't care about covering up dirty business. 'Mercenary' or 'agent' was the only other things I could come up with.

Sounds like more and more is being added to the workload on the front of redesigning house telvanni. I don't mind as long as indoril can keep moving. (I view indoril quests as a higher priority, if you disagree tell me why)

Tell him, Why.

Ok, lame jokes set aside: I don't think these could get in each other's way particularly, for the reasons that Haplo mentioned. In the end, I suppose it's always a bit of a lottery to see what people are interested in doing. Regardlessly just like this questline, Indoril needs to be planned, planned, planned, reconsidered and planned again. We can continue planning that one simultaneously if you like, but I reckon two things at once might somewhat lessen people's inspiration, to the detriment of either project.

what happens when you kill the creator of a pocket realm when you are in it with them

Bad shit, I suppose. Unless you imprint the whole place onto yourself. Dral, by the way, I got in the workshop. We're gonna have at least one floating magic-blob Telvanni.

The bit about surviving attempts on your life reminds me of Dark Brotherhood attacks; these can easily be scripted to begin (or happen, I should I say) at a certain rank or point in the natural progression of the questline.

We'd probably have to be careful with that, because we know how everyone hated those repeated attacks, but perhaps we can apply them with more moderation. (Or make them more interesting.)

On Adanorcil's concern about that fact that, unfortunately, quests have to be initiated by an NPC (and the player not being able to work for himself in the purest sense), it may indeed mean "more work" or not it may not, but how about we simply have a group of Telvanni members of various ranks who are "setup" to ask somewhat... loaded questions via dialogue with the player once the player has reached a certain point to make it seem like the topic is actually the player asking for something to be done. (ex: Player clicks topic 'business' and the NPC responds, "Oh, you're interested in my bug musk? Certainly, sera. I can ship a crate to your tower every three days for only 50 Septims a shipment." or something like that)

Yes, those would be other viable options for example. These, I think, we can probably figure out on a quest-by-quest basis.

EDIT: It might be worth looking at some of the content in the Rise of House Telvanni mod for some ideas on what else can be done as far as quest ideas or house expansion (not to say that we can't do it well enough on our own, but the mod is quite popular, and it wouldn't make sense to reinvent the wheel).

This sounded like a good idea for a short while. :p

Regarding Adanorcil's outline, I kinda like it. I'm not too keen on this "craftsman" phase. The idea is nice, however, as you pointed out it will be hard to do a normal way (with the player actually using his skills) and I fear it will be hard to implement in a convincing way that isn't lame. But you did give a couple of nice examples.

I share your concerns, for sure. It's probably the shakiest bit of the outline so far and it will require some thinking. However, I feel like some good material should be possible. The greatest hurdle in this case is obviously that Morrowind's engine is just patently incapable of checking for anything but particular objects, i.e. the 'Custom-made potions won't be acceptable, oh great alchemist" problem.

Some suggestions though: Please pay attention to traveling and location when designing this questline. With our mainland added, the house is spread over a vast territory. You really don't want to send the player hiking back and forth across the entire land, like happened so often in the vanilla game. Ideally, the questline would let the player travel through the entire Telvanni territory but in a more streamlined (for lack of a better word) manner, without zigzagging and crisscrossing all over the map.

Yes, of course. There needs to be a balance between criss-crossing and the "one quest per location" system. Either are far too formulaic.

Demanding resourcefulness and brain-use from a player is nice, but with the way quests are scripted isn't it very hard to make them dynamic enough? I'm saying this because I've played my fair share of 'dynamic' quests that didn't give me a 'do this and that' instruction, and most of the time I found them to be very frustrating. The solutions the scripters thought of just didn't seem all that obvious when translated into a scripted gameworld with limited possibilities. The thing is that as a player you don't just have to think of a logical solution, but you also have to figure out how the scripters might have chosen to implement such a solution into the game. Not to mention that maybe the player thinks of a solution which the scripter hasn't thought of, but is also very viable. Usually the player just ends up trying a lot or talking to everyone, hoping he stumbles over the answer. That or a walkthrough.

This is a very good question from the point of game design. The problem is obviously that narratively speaking you're dealing with infinitely many solutions, while game mechanics allow only as many as the programmers decided to make. In the end, you're not looking for a solution at all; you're simply looking for their solution. (Which I agree can be maddeningly frustrating.)

Firstly, what we need to do here is constantly ask ourselves questions: "Is this obvious?" "Is this too obvious?" "Is this not obvious enough?" Then adjust and provide more or less information.

Another key solution in my understanding would be to eliminate any sort of 'forcedness' by leaving the solution up to procedural generation. (On the condition, of course, that that is not obviously visible.) In the case of items, there never ought to be one particular item. In the case of information, the info you need should be available from all members of a particular description (e.g. Sage=1 or/and Telvanni=1), though perhaps some could provide better answers than others.


In the end, I think it's something that will be up to individual quest design again. Nonetheless, I'm glad you brought it up. I hate shoddy design (either randomness or player railroading) with a passion and I would like to avoid it at all costs. Hence, planning, planning etc.

Just for the record, I don't have a clue what the Hethel-Onsard Boundary is either. I made up those void-of-meaning references because a) it suggests the Telvanni are involved a lot more stuff than the usual drudge of alchemy-enchanting-sorcery. b) no one knows what it is, which fits Telvanni like a glove.







I'll be continuing this discussion after Christmas, but count me out for the next two days. Happy Christmas and a merry New Year, all. (I call it a troll holiday greeting.)

[immortal_pigs]

We'd probably have to be careful with that, because we know how everyone hated those repeated attacks, but perhaps we can apply them with more moderation. (Or make them more interesting.)

The player receives some present, like a book or amulet. Activating it will teleport the player to an ambush location, or summon some aggressive Daedra to attack the player. Also, perhaps it is possible to create a cursed ring or amulet, which cannot be removed, and does some pretty nasty permanent damage, maybe requiring the favor of a Telvanni ally to remove.

Outright assassination attempts in the style of Tribunal can be done as well, though they ought to be Morag Tong rather then DB.

Question: What about the Dust Adepts? (And the Telvanni library).

[Andres Indoril]

Outright assassination attempts in the style of Tribunal can be done as well, though they ought to be Morag Tong rather then DB.

Now, my monkeytruth-mix with lore on the side might be half-forgotten, but I believe the Morag Tong are not allowed to assassinate outlanders, which the player is.

[Why]

Now, my monkeytruth-mix with lore on the side might be half-forgotten, but I believe the Morag Tong are not allowed to assassinate outlanders, which the player is.

I suppose an outlander belonging to a native Great House would result in a gray area they'd be happy to work in though.

I share Myzel's concern for the enormity of the Telvanni lands. I'm not entirely sure what Adan has planned for the Sadrith Mora council house, but we could consider keeping it. That'd be where the vanilla mouths would physically be located, and the TR mouths would all be in Port Telvannis. Then chameleon'ed copies of the vanilla mouths would appear in Port Telvannis and similar images of the Port Telvannis mouths in Sadrith Mora. I absolutely hate what I'm going to say next, but I still think it's a good idea: kinda like the holograms the Jedi council uses for their meetings, but then in a magical Morrowind-Telvanni-esque fashion. ugh. Both the image of the mouth and the actual person would have the same dialogue, offer and conclude the same quest. Easy to make.

[Andres Indoril]

Or we could repurpose the Sadrith Mora council house to the Dust Adepts? If that doesn't work, then just a local administration of a kind, but not a direct council house. Even though I do not mind the Star-Wars approach.

[gro-Dhal]

If we're going the whole hog and changing mainland stuff, then why not have the SM and PT council houses be the same building, accessible through doors in different cities? The Parliament of Bugs existing entirely in a pocket realm would present certain advantages, and the exterior of the structure(s) looks weird and otherworldly anyway.

Quest related ideas:

What if, within his pocket realm, Dral has fragmented into different versions of himself that represent different things? His ambition, his paranoia, his wisdom. These elements are fighting for absolute control over his realm and are locked in stalemate. You can kill each of them off, side with the ambitious or paranoid identity (although the paranoid one will invariably betray you), or work with the wise identity to reconcile the three into one body.

You're required to betray your patron in order to advance to the highest ranks, because they're not in the business of creating competitors for themselves. Easier said than done, because all Telvanni who reach a high enough rank in their lord's service are cursed/implanted with a parasite that will kill or severely impede them if they make a move against their master. These things can be removed if you know the right people.

[immortal_pigs]

I had a different idea for Dral and his pocket realms, though it need not necessarily be Dral per se. I had a similar(ish) idea comparable to fragmentation but for a different Master then Dral.

For Dral the idea went like this;
Say, one could be cogniscent of all matter present in a realm, and one could be cogniscent of all governing principles of action in that realm, then one should be able to predict the future, as well as know of the past through reverse engineering.

What Dral's ultimate goal is, then, is to achieve full cogniscence of all matter on Tamriel, as well as a full understanding of every single law governing movement, change, action etc... In this way, he will be able to predict future (as from this reasoning it would follow a deterministic path), as well as understand the past, as the present could only have necessarily existed in the way it currently does if a certain exact set of actions had taken place beforehand.

Now, whether or not this goal is actually achievable doesn't matter. Because this would basically be tantamount to omniscience. Still, this is what Dral is aiming for.

He uses the pocket realms then to create miniature realms, in which he decides on all matter present, as well as all the governing forces that affect the matter. In this way he can test the extent to which he actually can predict the future on a small scale, an following this path increasing the scale to perhaps eventually lead to an exact physical copy of Tamriel in a pocket realm.

//

Another idea was to have a Telvanni Mistress with the ambition of mastering a wide range of magical skills. She has noted for herself the fact that it can take decades of training to achieve magical prowess, and that one must inevitably limit oneself to a very narrow set of expertise to do so. She has asked for herself why she must be limited to such an arbitrary limit of only being able to focus on one expertise at a time.

What if you could maintain a parallel focus? Be able to focus completely on two different disciplins at the exact same time. But why limit yourself to only two? So her end goal then, was to "split" her mind as many time as she could to be able to master as many disciplins she can at a time.

Currently, she is at about six fragmentations of the self. What she has done to achieve this, is essentially compartmentalize her mind into six separate, identical entities. These entities are capable of acting for themselves, while still being inextricably linked.

She sends these entities of self into different Daedra realms, as these allow her more freedom for training and the likes, allowing these imprints of the self to work at attaining mastery in whatever their chosen disciplin is.

Then, when she chooses to return to the physical realm, she does not fuse these fragmentations, but rather maintains these 6 compartmentalized copies in parallel, accessing whatever one is necessary at the time.

Of course, along the way, something goes wrong. Maybe a comparment of the self got stuck in daedra realm. Or maybe she got infected with some kind of "mind virus". Regardless, she's now gone batshit insane, while still incredibly powerful, therefore respected by her peers, but kept as far away from the "sane" Telvanni as need be.

I'm thinking this story would be fitting of Therana.

[Haplo]

I think the ideas of mind viruses or infecting all the counselors with mind control devices or splitting your soul into seven pieces and storing them in horcruxes have all been done before and belong in the movies that did them. They all sound very anti-Morrowind. The omniscience thing is stretching it a bit, though I do like Dral being split into three as suggested above.

EDIT: I also kind of like the idea of both doors leading to a pocket realm/council chamber.

[Thrignar Fraxix]

I like the idea about both doors leading to the same council chamber.

I don't like the idea of Dral splitting himself in his mind along those lines. Unless this was somehow an accidental fragmentation, why would anyone split themselves across such strange lines. (Did he perhaps intend to isolate and kill paranoia?) I believe it could work quite nicely if we chose the aspects carefully though.

I like the idea behind the idea about the parasites preventing betrayal, but I don't see it as possible. I am not sure if there is any feasible way of preventing betrayal, but perhaps the telvanni handle this by simply pointing their upwardly mobile apprentices at their enemies.

IP, your idea doesn't really work. There are forces beyond tamriel that act upon it. Even if he were to recreate all of nirn, you can't factor in the daedric princes.

I like the idea for your Therana back story, but I don't like the fact that it would be a redesign of a vanilla NPC that is largely superfluous to our overarching plans. There is no reason for us to do this, except perhaps as an afterthought. (meaning after we finish the house dres quest line)

[blackbird]

What will happen with all the vanilla Telvanni quests? Will they be kept or not?

[Thrignar Fraxix]

They will be kept and edited as little as possible

[Adanorcil]

We'd probably have to be careful with that, because we know how everyone hated those repeated attacks, but perhaps we can apply them with more moderation. (Or make them more interesting.)

The player receives some present, like a book or amulet. Activating it will teleport the player to an ambush location, or summon some aggressive Daedra to attack the player. Also, perhaps it is possible to create a cursed ring or amulet, which cannot be removed, and does some pretty nasty permanent damage, maybe requiring the favor of a Telvanni ally to remove.

Outright assassination attempts in the style of Tribunal can be done as well, though they ought to be Morag Tong rather then DB.

Question: What about the Dust Adepts? (And the Telvanni library).

I'm going to add 'present' to the list of terms the Telvanni do not use. The Telvanni do not give gifts and if they do, any member of the House is smart enough to not trust them. In addition, this would be a case of [url=http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StupidityIsTheOnlyOption]this TVTropes page[/url].

I am not a hundred percent on the area of operation for the Morag Tong, but that wouldn't matter much anyway. In this case, the Telvanni would simply use hired mercenaries. The MT are who you use for sensitive cases (e.g. other Houses, people the Duke might like, etc.) because they are 'official'. House infighting doesn't require anything like that.

Hardly anybody likes the Telvanni Library and it's an exceedingly bad idea from a style perspective. In absurdity it's roughly equivalent to the Colombian drug cartels handing out cocaine for charity.

I share Myzel's concern for the enormity of the Telvanni lands. I'm not entirely sure what Adan has planned for the Sadrith Mora council house, but we could consider keeping it. That'd be where the vanilla mouths would physically be located, and the TR mouths would all be in Port Telvannis. Then chameleon'ed copies of the vanilla mouths would appear in Port Telvannis and similar images of the Port Telvannis mouths in Sadrith Mora. I absolutely hate what I'm going to say next, but I still think it's a good idea: kinda like the holograms the Jedi council uses for their meetings, but then in a magical Morrowind-Telvanni-esque fashion. ugh. Both the image of the mouth and the actual person would have the same dialogue, offer and conclude the same quest. Easy to make.

My original intent was either to remove it or to repurpose it as a local administration, as Andres suggested. All in all, if people absolutely insist on keeping the Sadrith Mora council House, I feel gro-Dahl's solution so far is the most preferable. (Though it can go without being called a pocket dimension.) The problem with Why's suggestion is that it again reaffirms the exact distinction we've been trying to rub out with a transparent (get it :p) workaround.

The condition to making gro-Dahl's idea work would be to both emphasize and understate this absolutely weird principle of two-places-in-one. By emphasize I mean we need to make it clear that it is very much deliberate, lest it look like a bug to players. On the other hand, it also needs to be a very obvious thing to Telvanni, who when asked about it should react with a kind of straight-faced "Yeah, so?" In addition, the whole place indeed looks like a reality-abscess to begin with, which is good.

What if, within his pocket realm, Dral has fragmented into different versions of himself that represent different things? His ambition, his paranoia, his wisdom. These elements are fighting for absolute control over his realm and are locked in stalemate. You can kill each of them off, side with the ambitious or paranoid identity (although the paranoid one will invariably betray you), or work with the wise identity to reconcile the three into one body.

Like Haplo said, I think the idea of splitting himself into multiple facets is kind of done and a little tacky. Mostly, I feel it goes against the character, too. A cool, calculated and unknowable artificer such as Dral wouldn't have done something so experimental as to backfire on him entirely. It is important that the reason for his absence is entirely voluntary.

You're required to betray your patron in order to advance to the highest ranks, because they're not in the business of creating competitors for themselves. Easier said than done, because all Telvanni who reach a high enough rank in their lord's service are cursed/implanted with a parasite that will kill or severely impede them if they make a move against their master. These things can be removed if you know the right people.

While I like the idea of a 'safety procedure', I don't think it should be a virus or a parasite. (I reckon you were using this purely as a figure of speech anyway.) Also, this should not be 'common procedure', since then every ambitious Telvanni would be on the lookout for it, which would ruin the point. But it could certainly be a dirty trick someone plays.



IP: I'm going to respond to those quest ideas some other time, when we're getting into individual quests and not just ideas. This post, as usual, is getting rather long already.

[Why]

Hm, I've thought about it some more, and I don't like the idea of the Council House being accessible from both Port Telvannis ánd Sadrith Mora. Not because it's a bad idea - gro-Dhal's idea is in fact rather cool - but because people will just use it as a ferry between the two cities. Even without the Telvanni having a formal "council", the Council House providing public transport doesn't sound right for them either.

edit: teleport trinket idea is bad. Still, early access to Mark and Recall would make getting around easy enough. It's not like using the in-game travel methods is bad, and traveling should be easy once we add a Riverstrider to Sadrith Mora.

[immortal_pigs]

I propose that of these two lords, one will be moderately 'progressive' (especially among the Telvanni this must be taken with very large grain of salt) and one should present the traditional House values. Vanilla, in its obsession with always pairing the player with the nice guy, suggests Aryon as a likely candidate for the moderate character. Naturally, the hardliner would be one of the mainland lords. For the sake of variety I think this could be a woman.

Aryon's quests should involve making sure that the other Telvanni continue to accept this unorthodox upstart in their midst. The quests for him should be a string of 'don't mess with me' statements. The other lord is caustic and short-tempered and sees incompetence in just about everyone, including the player they just sent for. You will have to gain their favor by daring to respond to their stream of verbal abuse with an even sharper in-their-face insult.

I think the distinction between progressive and hardliner ought to be fleshed out a bit more if we're going to do this (what does "progressive" or "unorthodox" mean for the Telvanni). I don't see what is so progressive about Aryon, and sending "don't mess with me" messages seems more the traditional Telvanni method. Perhaps it would be better to drop the progressive vs. hardliner theme (as this is already similar to Indoril's warmonger vs. pacifist premiss) and go with personality driven questlines for this stage.

Aryon, then, would simply be an ambitious Telvanni who took a risk in staking a claim and must now prove he deserves it, which is a good premiss in itself.

Also for this stage we could give the player some kind of rival to deal with, for example removing Aryon's "other" protege, or dealing with a political climber from another camp.

...but I don't like the fact that it would be a redesign of a vanilla NPC that is largely superfluous to our overarching plans. There is no reason for us to do this, except perhaps as an afterthought. (meaning after we finish the house dres quest line)

If we are going to consolidate Vvardenfel Telvanni with the Mainland then we cannot just flesh out our mainland Masters but leave the vanilla ones untouched. The vanilla Masters aren't necessarily bad, but they could be made more interesting or at the least made more relevant to the overarching experience.

Personally, I would argue

Personally, I would argue for putting emphasis on the design of all the Masters (should be 11 total or so?) and other relevant players for the House questline if we can manage it, or at least make them more interesting then "guy who people steal from" and "guy with two daedra guards".

[Haplo]

Aryon is progressive in that is he is cool-headed and able to see more of the big picture than other councilors are usually able to. He's not so prone to killing you in a fit of rage because he feels threatened. He's progressive in that he's smart, and not just pushing boundaries of regular magic, but pushing the boundaries of what the Telvanni regularly push the boundaries of.

[Bloodthirsty Crustacean]

Hmm, lots to catch up on.

All of what Ada has said sounds pretty sensible. Looking at your ranks list though, I don't see why it's necessary to have more - all the ranks you name are the vanilla ones. If you just carefully control progression, then 10 ranks shouldn't be too few. Splitting the faction would also create some logistical issues (e.g. to expand the ranks of the main House faction beyond 10, you'd have to rename the existing ranks, which would require reassignment of ranks and factions to a vast quantity of existing NPCs (i.e. every existing Hireling, Retainer, Oathman, Kinsman, Lawman probably all the way up to Mouth)

I agree with Why that the 'Craftsman' phase, whilst conceptually sound for the Telvanni, is hard to implement. And also just not really that great gameplay. It's a glorified fetch quest, and the 'research' ones would be even worse. They should not constitute an entire phase of the faction. It would work if there was some payoff, e.g. if all the research was being done for one lord, who at the end of it all was able to give the PC access to some 'unique summoning chamber' or some other reward.

I think the Sadrith Mora Council House has to go. The only reasons to keep it I can see are either that 1) we want to do as little work as possible to change vanilla or 2) we're scared of creating conflicts. If either of these things are true, then there's really no point in going ahead with this at all. Like I said, you can't do half measures here, and as Ada said, it would just make clear the divide that the entire point of this exercise is to remove.

I don't like anything that sounds like it could have been in Shivering Isles (e.g. 'he split himself into multiple facets of his personality'). The Telvanni should be a distinctive brand of arcane, not just 'lunatic mages'.


In terms of moving on from here, I think the important next step is to get an overview of what exactly needs planning. Allocate vanilla quests for deletion and salvage, get specifics on questgivers and progression down, and then start planning the specifics.

[Haplo]

I agree with BC. And my post above is now edited.

[Adanorcil]

The alternative for the councilhall would be to script it so that you can only ever exit into the place you enter from, but that would be a) confusing b) probably frustrating. While I really like the idea of the council house as a bubble-reality, it would be hard to pull off right. So simply going with the straightforward option seems best.


BC: By default, Telvanni are never progressive. In case that wasn't clear, 'progressive' in this case simply served as a shorthand for saying that he is a relatively new member.

All of what Ada has said sounds pretty sensible. Looking at your ranks list though, I don't see why it's necessary to have more - all the ranks you name are the vanilla ones.

I named somevanilla titles because they felt reusable.

If you just carefully control progression, then 10 ranks shouldn't be too few. Splitting the faction would also create some logistical issues (e.g. to expand the ranks of the main House faction beyond 10, you'd have to rename the existing ranks, which would require reassignment of ranks and factions to a vast quantity of existing NPCs (i.e. every existing Hireling, Retainer, Oathman, Kinsman, Lawman probably all the way up to Mouth)

The idea of a split faction, frankly, was in no sense originally meant to fix the problem of the player gaining ranks too fast. Personally I've always completely shared your opinion that some good progression control would solve all that. However, some people seemed to worry that wouldn't be the case and I figured it wouldn't be a bad idea to show this would be a good remedy.

The idea, though, was entirely inspired by narrative factors, which I've explained in detail above. You bring up a good point with the title renaming, but thinking about the problem, I realized this actually shouldn't be a problem at all. The simple solution is that we don't retitle anyone at all (except Gothren, of course). We do not delete the vanilla faction at all. The distinction between the two factions can stay on the mechanical side of things, as long as it is entirely invisible on the outside.

This will work just fine, as long as we only *add* some titles to the TR faction to replace the ones we move to the retainer faction. This would mean the following:

Telvanni Retainer:

- Hireling [taken from original faction]
- Retainer [taken from original faction]
- Agent

Great House Telvanni (The TR Telvanni, but this is not visible except in the CS):

- Oathman
- Kinsman
- Lawman [replaces Hireling]
- [rank to replace Retainer]
- Mouth
- Spellwright
- Wizard
- Master
- Magister
- Archmagister


I will give some examples of possible faction/rank combinations, along the pattern of "I am %Name, %Rank of Great House Telvanni" to show off the effect:

Level 1 Telvanni guy in Sadrith Mora: "I am %Rank, Hireling of Great House Telvanni."

Level 1 Telvanni guy in Port Telvannis: "I am %Rank, Oathman of Great House Telvanni."


In other words: the distinction will not be visible. People on Vvardenfell will refer to themselves with a rank that also exists in the faction we have added. The only catch here is that in some cases, we'd have to make sure that if dialogue checks for an NPC's rank, it checks both for the vanilla Telvanni faction *OR* for the TR one. That is fine, as long as it's not visible.

Otherwise I agree with BC on all accounts.


(I hope that is clear enough.)

[Adanorcil]

Scratch that. In hindsight, it seems like a stupid idea. A far simpler solution suggests itself. We simply use the vanilla faction for all this. That way, we can alter the title names to whatever we want, but it also has the added advantage of keeping any vanilla scripts and dialogue that refer to the faction by that ID functional. (For example quests not directly related to the Telvanni that need to check for faction status.) Obviously we'd have to bug check that thoroughly, but I don't think it can cause any major hang-ups.

The result of this on the vanilla side is that we need to investigate some 80 npcs (original retainers and hirelings). Some of these will then obviously be moved to the retainer faction. (most obviously mercenary-looking types; in fact only one of these is a Dunmer to begin with).

Others naturally belong in the faction proper and thus don't have to be changed at all. Uupse Fyr, for example, clearly has blood ties to the House.

On the TR side of things, we would need to set the old TR faction npcs to the vanilla one or the new retainer faction. This is some annoying drudge labor, but I will gladly take it upon me to make all this work.

[Bloodthirsty Crustacean]

Still don't see the need for more than 10 ranks, though. Just switch everyone in TR_Telvanni to Telvanni and we should be fine. Careful progression control is by far a more elegant and less clumsy solution.

Having these two seperate factions doesn't do anything observable for the narrative (in both cases, the player progresses from being a Retainer to being a full House member with however much fanfare we choose to include via dialogue, which is where the visible parts of advancement and faction change occur), and just creates unobservable behind-the-scenes problems for us as modders.

[Sload]

Do you realize, BC, that the two factions will have different names?

[Bloodthirsty Crustacean]

I didn't realise that was a major element of the suggestion, no.

Personally I can't imagine the fact that at the bottom of the list on the 'player status' screen (which is the only place it appears) there are two factions listed rather than one would be of any significance to anyone - the important stuff is all done through dialogue on the Advancement topic. Again, for the most part it just creates hassle for modders.

But if you think having two listings is important, we could put up with the hassle if it's worth it, I guess.

(With regards to "I am %Name, %Rank of the %Faction" Background (the only other place faction names appear), any changes you desire to seperate retainers from full members would be far more easily achieved just by creating filtered responses, and make a lot more sense than the slightly odd "I am NPC, Hireling of the Great House Telvanni Hirelings")

[Myzel]

For what it's worth, I'm with BC on this one. The separation between 'hireling' and 'actual house member' can easily be made explicit in dialogue without having to split the faction into two.

And I personally think it will look ugly if the two factions will remain on the player status screen. It implies that even when the player has a high rank in the house, he still seems to hold 'retainer' rank in the hireling faction as well.
So there should be a way to remove a faction from the status screen completely. So that when a player goes from 'retainer' to 'oathman' the hireling faction is replaced by the proper house telvanni faction.

Hmm... wait... what's actually different here? The name of the faction? Is that distinction really so important that it's worth the hassle? We couldn't just have, you know, a hireling for 'House Telvanni' instead of a hireling for 'House Telvanni Hireling'?

[Why]

Considering everything above, I think careful rank progression and only using the vanilla faction is probably the best solution. While converting our existing NPCs, quests and dialogue will take more than just a couple of minutes I'd happily take that on along with my NPC claims since while it may take a day or two, it's all just copy-paste and drop-down menus and it feels good to have something brainless to do when I want to take a break from the more sophisticated NPCing.

[Adanorcil]

Just because BC keeps bringing it up: this really has nothing to do with the amount of ranks. The distinction between hireling and the other ranks is entirely narratively motivated. How many of you were ever hired into a family? How many of you ever signed a contract in order to join a circle of friends? Hell, how come people are expected to make a showcase for TR before calling themselves a member?

The key feature of our approach here is that the player does not see "Member of Great House Telvanni" in their faction list from the very beginning, because it doesn't make sense that way.

The second narrative motivation (which, by the way, is a less tacky word for lore) is that Great Houses are a lot like families (which is what they grew out of anyway). The Telvanni are like a big family in which everybody kinda hates each other and only meet up occasionally because they're still all fighting over grandma's heritage. With regard to the Hlaalu one needn't say more than that the mafia is often described as a family too. The Redoran attach a lot of importance to hierarchy and honor ties and even use family terms (House Cousin, House Father etc.). And like I said before, you can't just sign up to a family. Things like "Hireling" don't really belong in the faction ranks and the only reason Bethesda did was because they didn't have time to make a more elaborate version.

Imagine a suburban American whose plane crashes over the Amazon forest. The native tribes who save him from the wreckage don't understand his language, think he dresses weirdly, doesn't know anything about hunting and, frankly, smells kinda funny. Out of the blue this person steps up to the village chief and asks, "Hey guys, can I join your tribe, act like I share your values and traditions and reap all the benefits that come with that?" And the chief is all like "Yeah, sure, why not."

I think everyone understands why the above example is absurd. It would require time and interaction before anyone would even think about considering the American as 'one of their own'. This is what these quests represent. Unfortunately, the name of a faction cannot be changed through scripting or otherwise that would have been an option.

Since many seem afraid of the idea of making a faction for this, the other option would simply be to make a series of quests the player has to perform without a specific faction for them. The downside to this is that all those orcs and bosmer and redguards suddenly need to be members of the House proper and they're obviously not meant to be.

The only sound argument for this that I've heard so far is that the "Retainer faction" would remain in the player's faction list parallel to the actual House faction. For some bizarre reason, there appears to be no script command to remove the player from a faction.

[Bloodthirsty Crustacean]

Completely get all that; my point is coming from my position as a functional quester. It creates hassle and unnecessary work, for narrative payoff which the stats screen will play almost no part in. Everything you want can will and should be conveyed through dialogue, quests, etc.

One almost certain to be overlooked detail on a menu screen is not worth the faff, from a logistics point of view, and is also near-meaningless (it's an out-of-universe interface concern, far beyond the fourth wall) from a storytelling point of view. In terms of what that UI screen means, it's telling the player 'you have started on the quest line of Great House Telvanni' - this is hardly untrue, nor is it particularly confusing or problematic to your narrative.

I really don't see the need for too much discussion over this. Unless you genuinely believe the stats screen is of utmost importance to the presentation of this faction, I think we'd be better off moving on to planning the structure of quests, as I suggested back above.

[Sload]

I will assert from my personal recollection of playing Morrowind that I would not for a moment have overlooked this, though I certainly did not make the distinction when it was just that my rank was "Retainer" in the House.

[Haplo]

Why not compromise between the two extremes Adanorcil presents. Have the "Retainer" faction and let all the outlanders or whatever be a part of it. Separate IDs aside, it will have the same name as the actual House Telvanni faction. Simply keep the player out of it, and let him do quests without being part of the faction.

This way we have separate retainers, who would say that they're "retainers" (et cetera) of House Telvanni when asked. We can just follow along with this and have specific people say, when asked about joining House Telvanni, that the player, too, can have the opportunity to work for the Telvanni by performing quests. It can be kept up with via dialogue/journal entries, similar to the way we did the main quest w/ Therander Polle in Stirk. Once the player has done a high enough percentage of the total amount of "retaining" quests, the opportunity to join Telvanni proper appears.

[blackbird]

Is the house system more like a political party or some kind of big family or a some kind of clan?

If you think the player should be able to reach the top of House Telvanni, you could do it with one faction. The player/char won't be able to reach the 3th rank without the permission of a few councillors (at least one) and no mouths. He needs those councillors to advance. The player is nothing more but an oathman to those councillors. Most of the Telvanni are still xenopobic and aren't eager to promote an outlander. The big issue is why a councillor is willing to accpet the char and the answer is because they need the char for their schemes and the char won't fail them.
Once you find a new lord and perform a few quests, he will promote you further and accepts you as a real house member (beyond rank 3).
Anyone beyond rank 3 isn't a real house member and there is no need to create a second Telvanni faction.

[gro-Dhal]

Hm, I've thought about it some more, and I don't like the idea of the Council House being accessible from both Port Telvannis ánd Sadrith Mora. Not because it's a bad idea - gro-Dhal's idea is in fact rather cool - but because people will just use it as a ferry between the two cities. Even without the Telvanni having a formal "council", the Council House providing public transport doesn't sound right for them either.

That doesn't seem like a particularly big issue to me, but w/e.


As for the House membership stuff, i've always seen the five Great Houses as being more like semi-autonomous nation-states rather than strict family affairs (although presumably they started out that way). I also think it's unnecessary to overcomplicate things, as faction membership in-game is only a simplified representation of something that would be more complex IRL. I really think any distinctions we want to make would be best expressed through dialogue.

[Adanorcil]

Just for the record: I'm not going to let this discussion die, but I haven't had time to respond these past few days. I will continue with this tomorrow evening.

EDIT: There we go.


Next we are going to talk about some changes to the mainland. A few of these have to be discussed before we get into the quest design, because they weigh heavily on what we can do and how we can do it.

While I understand many of you are eager to get around to the straightforward design stage, I will not allow to us to fall into the trap of building a house on top of fires we haven't put out yet. If we do not rectify these things from the beginning we are either working with crippled foundations or condemning ourselves to way more frustration if we want to fix these things further down the road. Don't worry: most of these are pretty minor issues that really require immediate discussion, rather than immediate fixing. (Though the faster, the better, of course.)


Port Telvannis

The majority of people are somewhat dissatisfied with Port Telvannis' big-but-not-great look. Its design is simply somewhat underwhelming for what ought to be the weirdest Telvanni town (and with regard to 'weird', Telvanni have standards all their own). I am bringing this up here, because I think it may be a good time to consider redoing the city. Fortunately, I do not think a redesign would have any major effects on the quest design -dialogue is mostly abstract-, so the two could easily happen in parallel. We can't wait with the quests for the city to be done, but changing the city after the quests are done is also surely asking for problems.



Ranyon-Ruhn and Tel Mothriva

These two are more of a serious issue. (Tel) Vos was a Telvanni/Imperial/Velothi combo town. Somewhere long ago it was decided to copy this idea for Ranyon-Ruhn. Then it was copied again for Tel Mothriva. Duplicating this idea once was bad enough (as if we can't think of anything new on our own), but doing it twice is just plainly ridiculous. Not only did we imitate the idea of a consciously unique town, but we did it twice and with the same tilesets. Let's see what we can do about this.

First, let's take a look at the two towns separately.

Ranyon-Ruhn: Consists of a blocky and rather dull Velothi town arranged in a rectangle. Also: a temple town in the heart of Telvanni land. Tel Aranyon next door is perhaps the most uninspired Telvanni tower ever, consisting primarily out of the central tower shaft and varying amounts of nothing.

Tel Mothriva: A couple of Velothi houses, mixed in with High Fane meshes, which really shouldn't be here. The rest of the place consists of that huge and unsightly excuse for a model known as the Velothi 'monastery' mesh. It is a little overgrown with Telvanni roots.

The conclusion is that neither town is particularly interesting and both put TR's creativeness in a particularly bad light. Ideally, the best solution would be to simply change both into normal Telvanni towns. Certainly for Ranyon-Ruhn there is nothing preventing this.

Why suggested an alternative course of action for Tel Mothriva, in order to be able recuperate some of the old quest material that had already been made for that town. Instead of Velothi, we would use the stronghold tileset here. The idea is then simply that the place was a stronghold that had nominally belonged to the Temple for centuries, but had long since lost any sort of tactical purpose. The Telvanni took the Temple's long-standing indifference towards the place as an invitation. (Say, two hundred years ago.)



Imperial presence

I will quote someone else on this first:

The musk trade: The musk trade is the only possible explanation for the fact that there are probably more _Imp ints on Map 1 than any other, which really doesn't make any sense at all. Helnim, Firewatch, and Bal Oyra are all stopping points on the musk route, a perilous but lucrative trading route for Morrowind's second most valuable export. The Telvanni are all spacey and shit, but they still got to eat. Conflict with each other and the Imperials over control of the musk has great potential.

This is a firm idea on the basis of which I will make some suggestions to greatly improve our foundations with a minimum of effort.

Firewatch: This remains as is. It is the only real center of Imperial authority in north-east Morrowind. For understandable reasons, the musk caravans avoid this place as much as possible.

Bal Oyra: This is an oddly located Imperial settlement with an oddly Dunmer name. It sits in a great location and is involved in almost nothing quest-related, save for a few misc quests that could take place anywhere else. Given the location and name, Bal Oyra would be a fantastic place to turn into a musk plantation as the northernmost point of the musk route.

Helnim: This is where some thinking is in order. The Imperial part of Helnim (do I hear another combo town?) is very big and its size recalls Firewatch or Old Ebonheart. This should simply not be. The original idea here was that Helnim is a big Imperial settlement that Tel Narusa crept up on. We already play the "recently stolen town" at Tel Mothriva and either way Telvanni towns by default shouldn't be portrayed as recent. The Telvanni live by standards many times our own.

We can simply flip this idea around. Tel Narusa on the Inner Sea coast, has always been the traditional center of the musk trade. Seeing that Firewatch was often boycotted out of the lucrative musk trade, local officials decided to try and get a piece of the cake by establishing a presence on the Dunmer markets at Tel Narusa. Narusa (really he shouldn't be called the same as his town), did not manage to put a lot of resistance, due to recent health problems. (He is not mad, but more about that later.) Naturally, this means that Helnim should still be shrunk significantly, as its current palatial look is really uncalled for.


Cephorad Keep: In the shadow of Tel Muthada, this place is so [url=http://images.uesp.net//3/36/TR3-map-town-CephoradKeep.jpg]absurdly tiny[/url] as to be a parody of itself. I reckon this was once inspired by someone really wanting Llevari to hate Imperials and figuring this was only possible if said Imperials were within view distance in Morrowind's I-can't-see-six-feet-ahead-of-me fog. While we're at, can't we just remove this thing? It's embarrassing more than anything.