Close enough, welcome back Morrowind

The original Xbox console dropped during my preteen years and became a shrine to idle entertainment installed within the bedrooms and smelly dens I haunted with my friends. It was obtrusive, both in size and color scheme, a plastic cinderblock that demanded your attention. We poured hundreds of hours into Halo and San Andreas together, but my rapt attention was saved for The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. 

My best friend’s older brother owned the official strategy guide, which I would read like a holy text on the ragged couch where I watched his Dunmer thief flee yet another cliff racer. It wasn’t a particularly evocative book. Bethesda had worked with game journalist Peter Olafson to effectively print a GameFAQs walkthrough. It was filled with grainy black-and-white screenshots from the game, sparse quest walkthroughs, and annotated maps. Still, my imagination was fixated on what I perceived as a wholly unique world of ash, mushrooms and insectoid fauna.

Echoes of that wonder come back to me as I read The Electrum Archive. Created by Emiel Boven of Cult of the Lizard King, this science fantasy tabletop RPG both understands Morrowind’s essential worldbuilding blocks and uses them to construct something novel. Its rugged world is host to at least three ancient civilizations, each living in the carcass of its predecessor and wearing their bones as crowns. Precious and arcane ink powers the economy and spellcraft—the latter by inhaling it through specialized vaporizers. It is weird, alien, and hostile, but it is also home to a vibrant culture that maintains tenuous truce with nature—and each other.