Systems
The living world
A simulation layer sitting on top of Morrowind, built to make the island behave like somewhere people actually live rather than a set of quest markers waiting for you.
People who talk for themselves
NPCs are not reading from a dialogue tree. They hold a conversation, they know who they are, where they live and who they are related to, and they remember people they have met before. Ask a stranger about the weather and you get an answer about the weather. Ask about the family that owns the plantation up the road and you may get rather more than you wanted.
The thing we care most about is whether they raise their own problems without being led. An NPC with something wrong in their life should bring it up the way a person would, somewhere in the middle of an ordinary conversation, not when you say the magic word.
Situations
A situation is a problem somebody has: a debt, a disappearance, a dispute over who owns what. They are not quests. Nobody hands you one, there is no marker, and most of them will resolve themselves eventually whether or not you ever hear about them.
You find out about a situation by talking to people. You resolve it by doing something about it. Once it is settled it stays settled, and the people involved know who settled it.
Territory and influence
Every settlement has a holder and a measure of how firmly they hold it. Around that sit three tracks: influence, pressure and crisis. Resolving a situation in a town moves influence there, in favour of whoever benefited.
Nothing changes hands quietly. A holder has to be displaced, and displacement needs both a lead in influence and a crisis to move through. The practical result is that the political map moves slowly and in response to things players actually did.
Roads, recorded by walking
The road network is not a file somebody authored. Roads get recorded by walking them, start to finish, and when a new road begins near an existing one the two join themselves up. Side roads come out as junctions off the main route.
This is how NPCs know how to get anywhere, and it is why directions from a local are worth having.
Consequences
Witnesses report what they saw, and bounties follow. People have families, and families notice when a member stops coming home. Kill the wrong person in front of the wrong witness and the consequence arrives later, at a time not of your choosing.
NPCs also keep their own hours. Streets empty at night on a schedule, and who is out and where depends on who they are.
What it is not
- It is not a replacement for Morrowind's own quests. The vanilla game is all still there, though all recontextualized through our system.
- It is not finished. Some of what is described here works better than the rest, and that changes week to week.