Oh wow I don't think I've ever gotten that one from him. Also, what an excellent line.

Also also, I am sooooo sorry, aaaaaa I was on auto-pilot doing writs ajfkdlsa

hey, y'know elder scrolls online's racist whitewashing of vampire player characters with darker skintones that's been going on for four entire years unchanged now?

i might have found a temporary solution.

i was aiming for eventually working up the endeavors to get the deadlands excoriated skin, since the root of the white-powdered-donut vampire look is the fact it's an opaque skin applied to everyone... so I thought "okay i need a 'skin' cosmetic that shows a lot of the characters' actual skintone", and that one was the closest i could get to not covering up my char's face.

however

i also just recently got the maormer fish scale skin...

HOMYGOSH I CAN SEE HER AGAIN

It's just a temp solution however, since the scales don't match what i want from her look, and the facial ones cover up the scar i gave her ;n;

but for now? paired with some vampire-adjacent eyes?

it'll do.

god this game makes the fuckin worst aesthetic decisions you have to fight tooth and nail to find workarounds for jeebusfuckingfdjsaklf;sa

Wrothgar's Main Quest

When you look for people's overall opinions on the main quest in Wrothgar, you'll inevitably get the response that it was one of eso's stronger questlines; better written, not about a world-ending threat and so more down-to-earth and relatable, better characters, on and on. Then you go to play the main quest...

Wrothgar has the same problems as the rest of elder scrolls online. While it doesn't suffer the skeletal, bare-minimum, idiotic, did-you-just-use-chatgpt-to-produce-this? lack of writing skill more recent dlcs suffer from, Wrothgar still carries the root attitudes present all throughout eso that drag everything else down:

Spoilers for orsinium down below

spore savant face markings, not meant for dunmer...

I have been OBSESSED with the spore savant face markings for months now, trying to get all components of the antiquity to finally unlock them, and after realizing (almost too late) that the infinite archive has the piece i'd been missing, i finally got ahold of my beloved mushroom makeup.

However,

I wanted this mushroom makeup for my dunmer... This is what she normally looks like (in this with the 'eyes of the scamp' contacts).

As you can see, she has dark dunmeri skin in warm medium greys. The spore savant face markings, which in lore are dunmer markings made for dunmer mushroom-mages, are NOT designed for characters with dark skin.

OBSERVE:

"What's the problem" You may be thinking. Well let's just spell it out for you, rather than getting a close look there at the weird light outlines, by showing how these markings look on my altmer:

looks fine.

ALSO, all the people who were putting up previews of what the spore savant head markings looked like only showed them on white humans and altmer (whose darkest skin tones are still unfortunately extremely light like my boy up there). For example, uesp shows a beautiful image of these markings having gorgeous orange and deep browns in them on their character. Am I blaming any of these preview people for only showing the markings on one single skintone? NO. Besides, 'eso.mmo-fashion' was the only place I could find that used to show these things on multiple species but that site no longer updates.

So why do these markings look like nice face art on light skin, but festering open sores on my dark-skinned dunmer? Because of transparency! Zos has been making a lot of body art items transparent, which looks nice on light skin, but horrendous (if it shows up at all) on dark skin. For this one in particular, as my sister pointed out "It's like they did the opposite of what you're supposed to do and made the lighter orange solid and the brown transparent".

It really feels as though zos went out of their way to make these markings look ugly on dark skin.

which is eXTRA wild considering they're markings BY elves with darker skin, FOR elves with darker skin.

the "chroma" out of space

Eso deciding to make apocrypha aesthetically varied by adding an area which isn't drenched in greens is fine; adding aesthetic variety to a daedric prince's realm is a great idea.

But then someone decided to name this new vibrant area "The Chroma Incognito". Ohhh 'the hidden/unknown colour'? interesting interesting, what does this mean? Are we going to find out what's so special about this lil area? Why 'hidden/unknown colour'? How does that relate to hermaeus mora's sphere of hoarding information?

Skipping the nothingness the game gives you for in-universe answers to these questions (you can get them by reading uesp's page on this area), and instead looking at what could influence the writers' decisions... I find myself remembering all the advertising for that chapter mentioning lovecraft. Zos really wanted everyone to know how influenced by hp lovecraft this chapter was going to be, and you can see it in soooooo many of the names and titles chosen (the tagline for the chapter story was "shadow over morrowind", y'know, like the story "shadow over innsmouth"?). Which brings us back to the "Chroma Incognito"...

It's the colour out of space. That area of apocrypha is referencing the story (and eponymous creature in it) "The Color Out of Space", by hp lovecraft. This is a problem if you've actually read the story: the chroma incognito, apocrypha, not even the entire chapter itself ha ve anything to do with the plot or themes in "The Color Out of Space" story. Hell, nothing in the chapter even comes close to working like how the 'colour out of space' monster itself works.

This little quirk is a pattern that continues with the rest of the lovecraft-influenced aspects in the necrom chapter: the supposed lovecraft influence starts AND stops at second-hand knowledge of names, like the writers haven't actually read any of the works they're supposedly pulling from. Like they're actually referring to a memeified version overheard by a friend of a friend.

"The Color Out of Space" story deals with things like slowly encroaching dread, radiation poisoning, wrongness, decay, environmental destruction, something that should not be appearing suddenly and having no control over the horror it slowly is wreaking on your life, the horror of not knowing/not having control, how dependent we are on our environment, corruption in every sense of the word, etc etc. Is any of this in any of the various bits and bobs that reference the story/creature in Necrom? Nope.

Honestly if you wanted an area that really referenced the colour out of space, it would be a brittle grey area devoid of life or energy or colour. (hmm, kinda like the greymarch...)

kaleen, do you not see my tusks

Continuing my forever-battles against eso's mmorpg lack of rpg, i just did the betnikh main quest as an orc. To the surprise of no one, no one on this goddamn orc island knows you're an orc.

Your orc is constantly getting orcsplained at by other orcs about how orcs behave, ranted at by humans complaining about orcs (not you, because the game doesn't see you as an orc), and when it comes time for your orc to prevent a future of continued human-perpetuated anti-orc crimes, your human pirate captain and her human girlsquad throw out their single remaining braincell to declare that you, an orc, have betrayed them and their human allies. They are surprised your orc said no to orc death-slavery.

Expecting any rpg in this mmorpg is folly, but somehow eso continues to disappoint.

eso: "yess the three tribunal line up with the anticipation daedra quite well; vivec is constantly writing self insert smut fiction so he's oBVIOUSLY a perfect match with lolth- I MEAN mephala, the sexy spider lady of evil sex and backstabbing sexily".

meanwhile: mephala is the webspinner, overseeing how the smallest action snowballs and causes disastrous effects down the line.... Like how sotha sil is obsessed with, by eso's own writing, cause and effect and (like mephala) says he can see the far-off consequences of the smallest action.

sotha sil is a mephala! it's sotha sil, not vivec! vivec is an azura!

ALSO, MEPHALA IS NOT LOLTH, ESO!

it's so disgusting that there aren't any sidequests in necrom (the city).

there's the main quest, daylies, a quest in the mages guild that just informs you of the zone's trial, and some courier outside the city who rolled his ankle.

no actual side quests.

nothing.

in the entire CITY of necrom. the city that acts as the main hub of the entire dlc. the city that's been hyped up as the place people all over morrowind and beyond send their dead.

nothing.

eso when are we getting the shroomtender robes?

eso bringing back the stolen fanart to profit from it

apparently this december 7th, 2023, zenimax is bringing back the ragebound crown crates. this is the crate that features the real-dollar-costing body art cosmetic lifted from a fan's art.

originally, the body art was labelled as relating to almalexia, despite the stolen artwork clearly depicting sotha sil. the item itself was renamed later after sotha sil at a MUCH later date.

is this decision to bring back ragebound crates (unprecedentedly quick, considering they JUST came out earlier this year) an attempt to re-market the STOLEN art under this new name? Probably.

will the item instead be taken out because holy fucking shit it was snatched from a fan artist who was 'compensated' with a goddamn non-speaking non-questing npc hanging around the barren outskirts of the newest dlc? Probably not.

either way. don't buy it. don't waste your money and time.

every time zenimax comes out with something new for elder scrolls online --be it cosmetics, furnishings, chapters, anything and everything-- it should always be met with:

"Okay, who did you steal this from this time?"

we really have to get into the habit of asking this.

necrom furnishings not where they're supposed to be

so... is there a reason that the archival light diffusers were for sale from a furnisher NOT in the necrom dlc?

i don't even remember what furnisher i was looking at when i saw them there, might have been the murkmire one or the clockwork city one.... but there they were: misplaced goddamn furnishing items.

i only just remembered this because i saw on the eso forums someone was looking for a (different) furnishing antiquity and couldn't find it in the achievement necrom store (where it's supposed to be).

so here's a headsup for fellow furnishing hunters!

so, apparently there are random npcs out in the world for the witches festival event this year! I came across a priest and she got into a conversation about fear, and then asked me 'oh what do you fear most? skelemans, vamps, or woofas?' so... because i didn't have the option to choose what i actually fear, i just picked one...

and then there was a disembodied cackling while my character got a visual effect on them. i go to the active effects page and get this:

"Hollowjack Haunted: Hollowjack has learned of your fear of werewolves".

i have no idea what this means. Will i be bombarded by doggos unexpectedly in the next 23 hrs? Will werewolf enemies be tougher for me? I tried looking this up but no one's said anything about it yet unfortunately.

necrom thoughts

like yeah sure i'm super happy to hear wes johnson's performance in almost anything, especially elderscrolls related, and hermaeus mora is my fav daedric prince, but that doesn't make up for the nothingness in the writing. A good actor can only get you so far!