Beyond Skyrim: Elsweyr

Role: Narrative Designer & Quest Designer | Tools: Creation Kit, xEdit, Git, Notion

Team: 15+ Modders • Project: Total Conversion Mod

Highlight reel built from the April 2020 Developer Diary footage. Watch the full developer diary on YouTube.

Quest Lines

I designed and implemented 5 multi-stage questlines spanning Riverhold infiltration, Rimmen diplomacy, and Rim border conflicts.

Dialogue

I authored 30+ voiced scenes with stat gates, faction-aware persuasion checks, and Khajiiti dialect variants.

Systems

I built reusable Papyrus encounter scripts for Rim ambushes, moon-sugar seizures, and faction reputation tracking.

Overview

Elsweyr expands The Elder Scrolls V far south of Skyrim, covering Anequina's arid plateaus, Pellitine's Dominion-influenced jungles, and the Rim's insurgent mountain states. As a narrative designer and quest implementer, I craft questlines and dialogue that showcase the Greater Rim's factional tensions while maintaining Creation Kit best practices for a distributed volunteer team.

Project Context

The pre-release, The Greater Rim, focuses on Riverhold and Rimmen, two cities locked between Imperial pressure, Dominion politics, and Khajiiti autonomy.

In the Shadow of Empires

Fractured governance drives player choice. Anequina's unrest, Pellitine's wealth, and the Rim's ambition all demand conflicting loyalties.

Sugar and Blood

Khajiiti trade routes, moon-sugar politics, and Rim militarism let us tie economic stakes to character arcs and faction tensions.

Pre-Release Charter

Deliver a vertical slice that proves narrative depth with tightly scoped hubs, readable quest progression, and documentation.

My Responsibilities

Shape Greater Rim questlines that force players to pick sides between Riverhold’s Imperial sympathizers, Pellitine loyalists, and Rim separatists.
Author branching dialogue with Khajiiti dialect variants, stat gates, and faction-aware persuasion checks while keeping VO-ready pacing.
Prototype encounter scripting in Papyrus, handling Rim reputation globals, patrol packages, disguise checks, and sugar-contraband triggers.
Maintain quest documentation that mirrors CK stages, so level design, VO, and implementation teams can slot content without ambiguity.

Goal

Deliver Creation Kit quest content that spotlights Elsweyr's factional fractures: sugar trade routes, Rim militarism, and Dominion pressure. All while providing clean player-facing objectives and readable systemic states for QA.

Scope & Impact

Built 5 multi-stage questlines spanning Riverhold infiltration beats, Rimmen diplomacy, and Rim border skirmishes.
Wrote 30+ voiced scenes with layered fail conditions, disposition hooks, and culture-specific bark libraries.
Implemented reusable encounter scripts for Rim ambushes, moon-sugar seizures, and convoy escorts that other writers can extend.

Concept art of Anequina fur armor variants — I ground Rim militia dialogue, quest stakes, and how scarcity shows up in conversations.

Concept art of a bandit mine outpost in Elsweyr — I design infiltrations, worker barks, and faction pressure inside Elsweyr's rim-side conflicts using spaces like this.

Concept art of a canal barge scene in Elsweyr — I reference spaces like this when designing delivery routes, customs encounters, and moon-sugar disputes in original quests.

Selected Narrative Examples

Below are concrete examples of how I support Elsweyr’s narrative vision, documentation standards, and Creation Kit implementation on real content.

Unified Style Guide – Beyond Skyrim: I follow and help enforce the project-wide style guide when outlining quests, writing dialogue, and preparing internal docs, so every deliverable uses consistent structure, markup, and editorial voice across teams.
Millin Public Scene Dialogue: For the Khajiiti village of Millin, I authored layered public-space dialogue that balances character flavor, lore exposition, and systemic barks, organized in a format the implementation team can drop into scenes without rewriting.
Ra'dharo Sabosiss NPC Sheet: I built a full NPC package for Ra'dharo, including biography, daily schedule for the Creation Kit, and all dialogue lines, so designers and implementers have a single source of truth for behavior, VO, and quest hooks.

Implementation Discipline

I treat Creation Kit deliverables like live production code: every quest stage, reference alias, and script property is logged, versioned, and review-ready.

Leveraged xEdit to validate FormID hygiene and avoid cross-plugin bleed.
Coordinated with level and 3D art to align navmesh breaks, encounter triggers, and set dressing needs.
Wrote VO-ready scripts with conditional markup and pronunciation notes for Khajiiti dialects.

What I Learned

Working on a large-scale volunteer mod taught me to scope quests for maintainability across time zones and skill levels. I learned to write documentation that serves as both narrative design and implementation spec, structure Papyrus scripts for readability and reuse, and coordinate with level design and VO teams to keep narrative intent clear even when handoffs happen asynchronously. The project reinforced the importance of explicit state tracking and clean condition stacks in Creation Kit, skills that translate directly to production pipelines.