Monsters of Morrowind

Post » Tue Nov 08, 2016 2:25 pm

Hello all!



I've been in and out of the scene for a bit here, but recently I got pulled back in harder than I have in quite a while.



After deciding that I wanted to start a new play through of Morrowind, I installed the game, then I started installing mods, then I remembered the ultimate vision I had for the hostile side of this world. I looked at my previous creature mods, and I realized how much of some of that I liked, and how much I hated. Because of this I decided to start mostly from scratch on this.



This time around I started thinking more about these creatures.


Where did they come from?


What scenarios does it make sense to see them?


Does it make sense that you can summon a bonelord?


Does it make even less sense that you can summon a bear or a wolf?



These are the questions I began to ask myself. I also through these questions started to notice things that I never had before. Summoning spells are extremely lopsided. All undead summon spells are relatively weak compared to their daedric counterparts. That made things difficult to plan out when I wanted to start working on various necromancer enemies.



As I dove into things deeper I basically scoured the entire UESP website. I looked at lore, other games, I even looked at ESO for inspiration on this. I made an excel sheet of what would ultimately be the summon spells that will be available in the game, and made sure that daedra and undead would be on equal footing. I'm currently at the point that I'm almost done with new creatures, and will be starting on fine tuning, and working on integrating everything in to the world in the appropriate places. Because of the fine tuning point I wanted to get some opinions here of what I have planned, and what I'll be working on. Also, in the near future I may be looking for testers to make sure the creatures all look right, move at appropriate speeds, etc.. while I'm working on integrating things into the world.



Here are my plans for summoning spells.



Removing spells:


Summon Fabricant


Summon Bear


Summon Wolf


Summon Shock Centurion



Daedra spells:


Lvl. 1 Summon Scamp


Lvl. 5 Summon Flame Atronach


Lvl. 9 Summon Hunger


Lvl. 10 Summon Frost Atronach


Lvl. 13 Summon Clannfear


Lvl. 15 Summon Storm Atronach


Lvl. 16 Summon Daedroth


Lvl. 20 Summon Dremora


Lvl. 22 Summon Winged Twilight


Lvl. 25 Summon Golden Saint



Undead spells:


Lvl. 1 Summon Ancestral Ghost (likely to change)


Lvl. 5 Summon Boneman


Lvl. 9 Summon Lesser Bonewalker


Lvl. 10 Summon Ancient Ghost (likely to change)


Lvl. 13 Summon Bonewalker


Lvl. 15 Summon Mistman


Lvl. 16 Summon Death Hound


Lvl. 20 Summon Greater Bonewalker


Lvl. 22 Summon Wrathman


Lvl. 25 Summon Keeper



As you can see a large number of undead summon spells will be changing, as well as the weird random spells that don't make a lot of logical sense have been converted to undead summons.



Thoughts? Concerns? I'd love to hear opinions.
















User avatar
Philip Lyon
 
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Post » Tue Nov 08, 2016 12:24 pm

You don't summon Wolfs and Bears. You call them. There's a difference. Better than removing them would be to make them appear somewhere off the screen and run towards the player. But that could be tricky to accomplish in Morrowind.



I love your idea to make more powerful undead summons though!

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Dezzeh
 
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Post » Tue Nov 08, 2016 12:23 pm

And again for the Shock Centurion, I think it's more of an assembly or maybe "inflatable shock centurion trick" thing which is limited by game mechanics.



Don't you summon the fabricant with the mazed band? If I am not mistaken, that artifact would just teleport them in from the Clockwork City.

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Emily Jones
 
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Post » Tue Nov 08, 2016 3:44 pm


You may be correct about the fabricant.


I'm looking at some adjustments to this anyways since I don't like the idea of summoning ghosts, and scamps would need to change since I don't have them being quite as week anymore. I'll keep working with that.



Question for anyone who has used anteres creature mods. His Medusa model gives an animation group note error. Looking in warnings.txt it doesn't seem to be anything too major. This is what I get from it.



Bad note string "Sound: AnCr_MedStinger" frame 292 in "NX9\NX9_Harvester.nif".

Does anyone know if this is a major problem? Is it just because I haven't added the sounds into the CS yet? Does it cause any issues in game?



Edit: Also, noticing what looks like 2 unused summon spells in the CS. Are those usable in some way?

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Jack Moves
 
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Post » Tue Nov 08, 2016 4:06 pm

IIRC yes

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Naomi Ward
 
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Post » Tue Nov 08, 2016 4:31 pm

The fabricant, centurion, bear, and wolf are not normal spells; they are special quest rewards. You're not supposed to learn these effects like you'd learn "summon winged twilight" or "summon skeleton".


Ultimately for any sort of mod dealing with spell effects I'd rather wait until OpenMW gives us a way to create and define new spell effects.
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Mark
 
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