Things to know: The Tamriel Town Crier, Issue #10, was issued today, and make sure to read All Things Guar, where ZOS Esqoo of Dhalmora was kind enough to corroborate the connection between the banded guars of ESO fame and the fabled tiger guar of Morrowind lore (if you remember Lorebits from Lady Freyja).
UPDATE 04/22/2015 – The console beta starts tomorrow!!!!
Also, buy Tales of Tamriel, Vol. I: The Land, available now!
Real-world references?
You may have noticed that we don’t really do trivia on the UESP much. Sometimes there’s a note on a gamespace page, and very rarely a blurb about something in the Notes sections of lore pages. But by and large, most active contributors aren’t interested in maintaining that stuff, and it’s typically speculative assertions which just weaken the credibility of the pages overall. If you see something on a typical UESP page, we want you to be able to take it as fact, and that can be hard to do when you see a bunch of speculative trivia all over the place. It can be very hard to agree on these things, and we get enough grief over on the Easter Egg pages.
But now, we’re talking about making one big page for all real-world references in TES. The kind of stuff we don’t typically allow on the lore pages, like, say, similarities between Norse and Nordic culture. If you’re interested in such a project, keep track of the conversation here and maybe let us know what you think.
Catch-up
I’ve got a backlog of stuff I’ve forgotten to mention, and missed a whole lot of activity on the UESP recently I’ll try to catch up on. In the community, Lady Nerevar tabulated the total word count of in-game books in the TES series at just over one million. By comparison, the King James Bible reportedly comes in at about 788,000 words. On the forums, the user Alodar came up with an algorithm for exploring Daggerfall dungeons. Don’t know how well it works, but I thought it was a neat idea.
Obviously, the biggest news recently has been the Welcome Back Weekend. This was directly aimed at people like me, who played the beta but didn’t buy/subscribe to the game. It was fantastic to get my hands on ESO again, albeit not for as long as I would’ve liked. I was already pretty familiar with changes to the game, but the free weekend still helped me to come to some important conclusions.
First, while my laptop can technically run ESO, a toddler can technically stage a sit-in protest. I’ve waited this long, I can wait another month and a half for the console release so I can have the TES experience I want. And if they push back the console release again, I’ll just take up crack.
Second, rp-ing as a mentally ill beggar is a totally viable playstyle. When you first step into Daggerfall, it’s practically encouraged. I wandered around in raggedy clothing, sleeping behind buildings, threatening bards, stealing, killing anyone who shined the wrong color etc. I look forward to taking an Argonian beggar into Cyrodiil to see how that goes…
Third, I’ve picked my faction. I mean, I’ll play all the factions, but you can only have one main character, you know? And that’s gotta be the Daggerfall Covenant. I loved my time in Morrowind during the beta, and I imagine that the Aldmeri Dominion will have all the most brand-new interesting places, but the Daggerfall Covenant has a nice blend of both old and new. More importantly, it has something neither of the other factions ever will: Roy. Roy, whose unforgivable murder in a swamp must be solved. I didn’t know Roy in life, but he must have been a saint on Tamriel. Of all the dead bodies I came across and created during my time there, his was the only one anyone seemed to care about. He is survived by his dog Giblets, who my mentally ill beggar tried to eat, but that’s beside the point. Roy must be avenged. ROOOOY!!!
Transcription Errors
Unfortunately, not every so-called transcription error is evidence of a Dragon Break. And most of them are our fault. You see, oftentimes, books will get some grammar changes and other tweaks from game to game, and despite our best efforts, they haven’t always been transcribed 100% correctly due to reliance on bots (or, worse still, humans). This was especially true in the transition from Daggerfall to Morrowind.
Jeancey, Jimeee, and to a much lesser extent, myself and the rest of the internet, have been combing through these books to try and make sure all the pages are being transcluded properly to each namespace. I’ve seen errors fixed recently that go back to Oblivion and even before!
Salache, Boiche, Moriche
Most of the time, if there’s been a transcription error, it’s some small grammar tweak only wiki-gnomes would notice or care about. But occasionally, it’s something more significant. In the Daggerfall version of The Wild Elves, three names are given for the elven races: “Salache (or High), Boiche (or Wood), and Moriche (or Dark)”. In Morrowind and beyond, these were changed to Altmer, Bosmer, and Dunmer respectively, but no one here seemed to notice (or if they did notice, didn’t care to change it). Many thanks to the folks over at Classic Elder Scrolls for pointing this out. By the way, there’s a new episode of Classic Mark, Classic Elder Scrolls recording right now! Redguard’s a helluva drug.
Anyway, since the lore page was never updated, and all the new namespaces for the last eight years have been exhibiting the Daggerfall version of the text, we have been inadvertently introducing the Daggerfall text into the Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim namespaces. We have gotten better about checking these things over the years, so I doubt there are many examples like this left, if any. But Jeancey has been reviewing the library like crazy lately, and I’ll see about helping him out to make sure we can confirm every book appears properly in every namespace. Many apologies; it seems like something someone should’ve caught a long time ago.
Sooo, about the Daggerfall names … retcon, right? We can just forget about the Daggerfall names? Aside from the appearance of “saliache” in Oblivion’s The Adabal-a, nothing close to them has been mentioned in any game after Daggerfall (that I can find). That is, until ESO. Among other things, The Book of the Great Tree mentions the “Salache Elves”, and Aurbic Enigma 4: The Elden Tree mentions the “Boiche Elves”. Anyway, there’s still no mention of “Moriche” I can find …
