Marandus Rebuilt | Download
Quest writing for The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
Marandus Rebuilt is a mod I made for The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind that adds additional content to an in-game dungeon, Marandus.
Marandus is one of many ancient strongholds across the island of Vvardenfell, isolated and abandoned for centuries. However, Marandus has recently been occupied by renegades from Great House Redoran, a political power in Morrowind.
In the vanilla game, there was little background to the place other than the Redoran renegades, who would be hostile to the player character unless they had enough of a reputation with House Redoran. I wanted to tie in other content in the game and allow players more avenues to engage with the garrison in Marandus.
The original version of this mod was made for a 2021 modjam, and only included level design and character adjustments. After revisiting the mod in 2026, I added more features that I had originally wanted, including some new dock assets and quests.
My intention with the narrative design of this mod was to allow different player characters to engage with the stronghold and its inhabitants in meaningful ways. The NPCs in the mod react to the player's affinity and attire, offering an occasion for role-playing.
A view of Marandus' new docks, a bespoke stronghold-themed tileset made by me for the mod. Assets from OAAB were also used in the set dressing of the mod.
I wanted to give an opportunity for player characters from the rival Great House Hlaalu to gain access to Marandus by disguising as the same late Redoran scout you do in an existing quest. In my mod, players could reuse this disguise to impersonate a Redoran scout and gain access to Marandus, along with a quest to snoop around and report back to your Hlaalu superiors. As a quality of life improvement, I retextured part of the helmet used for the disguise so players would know it was a quest item and if their player character had already recieved the helmet, they knew which helm to resue to access new content in this mod.
As part of my writing, I wanted to expand the continuity of the person you disguise yourself as (In the original quest, the character is called Felsen Sethandus if your player character was male, and Relmerea Saram if female).
This desire for continuity was the basis for some of my new quests. For Redoran player characters, I added a seperate quest to find out what happened to Felsen/Relmerea and recover their report, demonstrating their reputation as you delve into a dangerous dungeon to find them. The body (which never existed in the base game) was modelled after dialogue descriptions of the character, helping players recognise them while looking for them.
The Hlaalu quest brings it further by letting you ride the reputation of Felsen/Relmerea while disguised as them in Marandus, with there being several minor quests available as the quest givers mistake you for Felsen/Relmerea. These quests range from pest control in the stronghold or helping raise morale by giving advice to the garrison. The more of these quests you find out about, the more thourough your report is and the more rewards you recieve from your Hlaalu superiors, though appropriately you aren't rewarded for helping the garrison.
In these small quests, I wanted players to understand how loved and trusted Felsen/Relmerea was, and also how your Hlaalu superiors had no qualms in you puppeteering their memory to get intel. I curated the quest rewards reflect this, with one being a bundle of native-craft arrows as Felsen/Relmerea was a renown marksman (and also showing how the Redoran had to trade with the local nomads to survive in the ashen wastes around Marandus). Another quest reward was a helmet, a cheeky gotcha I left for players who might have forgotten that their existing disguise would be compromised if they tried it on.
The quest also demonstrates the danger House Hlaalu doesn't mind putting you in; if do mess up your disguise your cover is blown and you are left in the middle of a hornet's nest of dangerous and hardened Redoran soldiers.
An in-editor view my of Felsen Sethandus, Relmerea Saram, and retextured helmet. The heads were chosen from Tamriel_Data, based on existing descriptions of the character. Only one of these two will appear in regular gameplay as a corpse depending on the PC's gender.
Another new quest your player character can take up as a member of House Hlaalu is to help the resident champion of Marandus. The champion is a disgraced Redoran warrior who will recognise you as an outsider and send you on a quest to vouch for him.
This quest was a lot more character- and culture-focused than the others I made, with the central conflict being the champion's anguish over being exiled from his house, and House Redoran's values of loyalty. While the renegade garrison in Marandus keeps him around for his combat prowess, he is still treated as a traitor serving his penance.
The player character can help him by collecting accounts of his honourable deeds done in exile, before culminating in a ritual duel to the death to pay back their blood debt and restore their name in death. The quest was to demonstrate how strict the honour code of the Redoran is, and how the weight of exile would make a penitent transgressor in this culture eager to make ammends, even if it means they must die.
Marandus felt like the best place to tell this story as it shows Redoran on the frontier, the isolated stronghold being a place where you would find people like the champion, wandering the ashen wastes of Vvardenfell.
The penitent champion Dathus Selvilo in his room in Marandus. The armour is edited from RuffinVangarr's Redoran Exile Armor mod.
In short, I felt like my work in Marandus Rebuilt was succesful in supplementing existing in-game content and lore. I wanted to avoid adding content that didn't feel congruent with the game's writing style or format, and I think Marandus Rebuilt hit a nice balance between new content and following the game's design conventions. I made elegant connections to previously unrelated Redoran content to elevate a previously inconsequencial location.
Thomas West MMXXI - MMXXVI