Poison Song Teaser | Tamriel Rebuilt

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Tamriel Rebuilt (TR) is a mod for TES III: Morrowind which aims to complete the original scope of the game by bringing you the mainland of the Morrowind province that was cut from the original game. The mod is released in an episodic fashion, each new expansion bringing to life a fully realized portion of the mainland complete with unique landscapes, cities, and dungeons, all fully decked out with creatures, NPCs and innumerable quests. By now, players can download and experience almost triple the playable area of the original game with over 900 new quests.

Grasping Fortune, our biggest and most ambitious expansion to date, is now done and dusted. So, we at Tamriel Rebuilt have in recent months turned most of our attention towards the next upcoming expansion – Poison Song . Long-time followers will know that this, for the first time, means a joinable House Indoril . In the following article, we aim to dive a little deeper than that and give you a teaser into everything that the expansion will cover.

The areas of Morrowind to be newly released or overhauled in the Poison Song expansion.

Background

The sub-project that became Poison Song got started already in mid-2021, at a time when we were well into development of the experimental Embers of Empire expansion. Embers of Empire was an almost heretical experiment at remaking a large old portion of our mod, namely the western seaboard of the Telvanni peninsula and settlements like Firewatch and Helnim (which dated, in parts, back to 2002-2003). Only a few years prior to that, “redo” had been a dirty word in the TR community. Our team, which was significantly smaller at the time, felt it would draw much-needed resources away from developing new lands in the House-Hlaalu-ruled southwestern Morrowind, which has remained our main focus for a few years.

At the gates of new Firewatch, released in 2022 as part of the Embers of Empire expansion.

But volunteer developers come in different stripes – while some love the race towards the completion of the entire province, others find it much more motivating to make sure that what is already released is in top-notch condition. So, in 2020, as our team grew on the backs of the successful Old Ebonheart and Aanthirin expansions, we started Embers of Empire as an experiment in a targeted overhaul that would sate the latter type of developer. Built in parallel to the main-line Dominions of Dust expansion, Embers turned out to be a huge success, revamping one of the oldest and most poorly aged parts of the mod into an area we remain truly proud of.

It was only natural that we wanted to replicate that success – so we turned to the next item in our triage list, being the Sundered Scar region just east of Old Ebonheart.

What is striking about the Scar as it stands today, is that it was developed explicitly as “filler land” – i.e. it had very few points of interest and reasons for visiting. The area was largely made by 2003, at a time when Morrowind’s continued popularity was by no means a given, and when completing the mod as fast as possible seemed paramount. The world-space was crafted using Bitter Coast assets, with a largely flat landscape, and with minimal dungeon entrances. Though the level design was improved somewhat by the time the area was first released to players in 2012, the region still suffers from that original neglect and is seldom played through, especially since it hosts barely a couple of quests.

In succession: a view in old Sundered Scar; Gnomey’s original sketch of a new Sundered Scar; be-a-stranger’s sketch of the new Sundered Scar looking toward Red Mountain.

By 2021, however, we had largely reconceptualized the Sundered Scar as a blasted, sulphurous wasteland based on scrapped Bethesda plans for a “Great Scathes” region, serving as something of an extension of the volcanic Molag Amur region on Vvardenfell to its north. Lore-wise, the area was to be House Mora’s ancient demesne, left vacant and decaying following Nerevar’s death, never reclaimed by another Indoril lord out of respect for the dead Hortator.

A brand-new palette of environmental assets was created for the purpose and the overhaul of the Sundered Scar landscape was opened in mid-2021, to be slowly chipped away at on the background, as our main effort continued to be directed at southwestern Morrowind.

Gorne

The first bit of Poison Song worldspace to be finalized was, curiously enough, not in the Sundered Scar proper at all, but rather the island of Gorne. But we already feature Gorne in the mod, you say? Well, yes – we do have an island named Gorne in the Padomaic Ocean just east of Morrowind’s coastline, relatively close to where later TES titles place it. However, we have for many years favoured a different reading of the TES III book Poison Song, where the idea of the island originates, which instead places it in the Inner Sea close to...