Yo was that guy Tim McCracken? 👀

He mentioned in my chat with him that he was involved with a lot of the Yokuda and Daggerfall Covenant stuff. Rad dude.

Every dev I've spoken with about cribbed names and such in across Tamriel's early fiction have been massively embarrassed.

It was darn hard back then to tell if you've made up a thing yourself, or if you're just recalling something from the breadth of fiction you've interacted with in the past.

For sure! Stating the obvious but I'd also note that our digital tools for recognizing plagiarism have expanded *a lot* since 1990-something when that text was thrown together.

Naw the other stuff comes across as very amateur, so I think it wasn't taken from elsewhere -- but it's totally possible.

It does seem to source an incredible amount of ideas from Lord of the Rings canon, with the Great Goblin Lord and wars between Dwarves and Goblins, and such.

There was a good chunk of original material written by the same tester (mostly nonsensical barfs of text). He also made up a number of the Yoku character names.

If I were handling this situation I'd take only a flavorful inspiration from Musashi's works for the Yoku, but dispatch the prose itself.

Yup...

For background: a small cabal of non-staff beta testers for TES2 were asked to write some texts so the bookshelves could contain actual readable books. One tester submitted a stack of Redguard books, and unfortunately no one on the dev side caught that the material was actually plagiarized.

They never really got much play in the later lore, but generally these gods seem to be kind of Near Eastern in narrative aesthetic

Though Ted Peterson seemed to have recodified 'Baal' into 'Moloch Baal' before changing that into 'Molag Bal'. He also reintroduced 'Seth' as 'Sethiete' in a TES3 book

End rant

Extended family also allows for bonus characters to whom a protagonist has an existing connection with to pop up as needed.

It allows for cool story reveals about somebody's past, or to work through a problem a character is having on a personal level with folks they know and care about in some way.

It embodies the fact that *people* actually come from somewhere, and where someone comes from informs their views on the world and how they deal with situations.

Whether someone was the oldest or the youngest or somewhere in the middle of their family unit. Thems is some meaty details for character

I adore the nuance of a character who comes from an actual family. It gives that character stakes -- something to lose, people to connect to, people to be in personal conflict with, and people to let down.

There's nothing wrong with that, certainly people in the real world come from such backgrounds. But it's so overused as a background prompt for stories of all sorts, and it often results in boring blank slate protagonists that lack actual ties to the world at large.

For short-form or slice-of-life fiction, I totally get wanting to focus your story down to a core group of characters and not overscope it.

But far far too many stories have characters with dead parents and they're orphans with no ties but evil aunts and friends they make along the way.

💯💯💯

In addition, the globe from the game intro shows us a bunch of orbital bodies around Nirn as well!

Clearly pose #3 of pic #3 is classic Jagar Tharn

The film toyed with a number of standard dramatic tricks and tropes for hollywood. Maybe it works just by depicting things that haven't been put to screen honestly in years past; I can't think of another story I've experienced that has covered women's basic training

It's worth just checking out yo!

Thanks, I Hate It