In the setting of the Elder Scrolls games, the alien, volcanic island of Vvardenfell makes up the northern part of the province of Morrowind, in the northeastern corner of Tamriel. Vvardenfell is the setting for the third Elder Scrolls game, named Morrowind after the province, and this year I've been drawing it in the pixelated style of RuneScape.
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| Vvardenfell mapped in the style of RuneScape (full-size version) |
In the rest of this post I'll talk about how the map came about and describe some of the creative choices made along the way.
Beyond Skyrim
I made the map of Skyrim in the style of RuneScape in summer 2020 as a way to stay entertained at the height of the Covid lockdowns. After that, I experimented with some other ideas, including Stormwind from World of Warcraft and the Imperial City from Skyrim's predecessor Oblivion.
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| Imperial City, from The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, in the style of RuneScape |
Although I'm too young to have played Morrowind when it came out, Vvardenfell seemed very compelling as a place to depict in RuneScape's style. Morrowind and RuneScape are about the same age, and have a similar open-ended design philosophy. Moreover, Vvardenfell is an island of stark contrasts, including salt marshes in the southwest, barren islands in the east, rocky highlands in the northwest and an ash-covered wasteland in the centre, all of which seemed really cool to combine into one map.
The most important decision, and the hardest to change once the map was underway, was the scale. My first thought was to draw the Vvardenfell map at the same scale as the Skyrim map so that the two maps could connect if shown side-by-side. It would mean that, in theory, I could grow the map even further over time to eventually build up a complete map of the continent of Tamriel.
However, a few reasons pushed me towards developing a different scale for the Vvardenfell map:
- In-game, Skyrim and Vvardenfell are depicted at different scales. In the series lore, the province of Skyrim is more than twice as big as Vvardenfell, but the world is depicted at a larger scale in Morrowind so that the game's playable area is only slightly smaller than it is in Skyrim.
- My RuneScape-style mapmaking skills have improved a bit since I made the Skyrim map, and I developed a few tools to help speed up the mapmaking process. This meant I could be comfortable making a map which was a little bit larger than before.
- Joining the maps would have been a bit weird anyway, since Skyrim and Morrowind are set more than 200 years apart, with significant political and geographical changes in between (especially to Vvardenfell).
Because of this, I started fresh with the scale, resulting in a map which was bigger than the map for Skyrim but still manageable to draw. As for the Skyrim map, I scaled up the sizes of towns and cities compared to the surrounding areas.
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| My Excel plan for the Vvardenfell map. Each grid square represents one RuneScape "chunk", 192 by 192 pixels on the final map. |
Working smart, not hard
Although the Vvardenfell map is bigger than the Skyrim map, I had a few techniques and tools to speed up the process.
For the terrain base layer, rather than blend all the colours by hand like I did for the Skyrim map, I painted solid blocks of colour. Then I used Inkscape's Gaussian blur and pixelate effects to convert the terrain into RuneScape's style. This was not only faster, but also made it easier to go back and make changes if (for example) I wanted to tweak a region's colour palette.
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| Terrain blending |
Rather than place every rock and tree individually, I wrote a Python script to fill regions of the map with randomly-placed sprites, automatically aligned to the grid defined by the pixelated base terrain layer.
Another Python script was used to smooth the edges of mountains, making them conform to straight lines like they usually do on the RuneScape map. The effect is subtle but goes a long way towards giving the mountains the right feel.
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| Mountain smoothing |
"What a grand and intoxicating innocence ..."
In-game, Vvardenfell is surrounded by an infinite ocean, but community modding projects have set out to depict the mainland described in lore. Most notably, Tamriel Rebuilt is a project to bring the rest of the Morrowind province to the game, extending the playable area to six times what's shown in the retail game, while still staying faithful to Morrowind's game design philosophy.
I was very keen to include some of the content from Tamriel Rebuilt on the Vvardenfell map, especially the parts that fit inside Vvardenfell's bounding box. Although I did make progress on this, including getting some nice depictions of Althoa, Firewatch and Old Ebonheart, I did run into some stumbling blocks.
In particular, while Tamriel Rebuilt has been consistently releasing new regions, many areas are still unfinished or with significant overhauls planned. The Clambering Moor to the southwest of Vvardenfell is an example of the former, while Dagon Urul to the northeast is an example of the latter.
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| Althoa, northeast of Vvardenfell, from Tamriel Rebuilt |
Because of this, and because Old School RuneScape's player-designed island competition needed its entries (even joke entries like mine) submitted before 7 January, I decided to put these ambitions on hold and focus on Vvardenfell itself. Still, the outline of mainland Morrowind still appears on the map in pale grey (for this, I'm indebted to the Tamriel Rebuilt masterplan map overseen by Tiny Plesiosaur), and the Saros caldera is the "rekindled" version from Tamriel Rebuilt rather than the version from the Fort Firemoth DLC.
I'd still be very keen to come back and finish the Tamriel Rebuilt areas, either basing them off the extensive maps and concept art that are already available or waiting until those areas have been developed more fully.
Until then, thank you for reading this far, and I wish you wealth beyond measure. To finish off, here is Solstheim as it appears in Morrowind's Bloodmoon expansion.
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| Solstheim, from Bloodmoon, in the style of RuneScape |