Monthly Modder: Adolon

Talented level designer Adolon discusses crafting new player experiences in our latest Monthly Modder interview, and lets us know what’s next for their adventure series.

There’s a lot of work that goes into creating new dungeons and adventures. Even before opening the Creation Kit, authors have a lot to consider. This month, Adolon talks in-depth about some of this initial planning, and where they draw their inspiration.

How do you start your mods? Do you tend to begin with the location, the story or the mechanics?

Story is the first step. I pin down the general conflict (vampires, Dwemer, draugr), the theme (cathedral, ruin, cave), and then the narrative bridging the two together (Falmer, Daedra, more Daedra). Because I label the mods in my color series as dungeons rather than quests, their stories need to be told through the environment and other scattered marginalia like books and letters. I leave a lot of the imagination up to the player.

Picking a location is next and is usually the most time-consuming part. There are some great tools available that let you see a bird’s-eye view of Skyrim’s countryside without ever launching the game or Creation Kit. I look for areas that are not as crowded and use the sparseness of map markers in a region as a guide. It’s not a perfect system. Sometimes I might find an awesome, uninhabited spot only to zero-in on it in the Creation Kit and find out that a random encounter or quest spawns there; deleting the encounter or moving the quest is out of the question. I want to leave as small a footprint as possible, so I go back to the satellite map and look again.

Mechanics come last. Once I get the story, the location, and a general idea on how to string together the levels, adding mechanics such as traps or encounters is the tail end of the process. This is sometimes completed days before I finalize the mod. I did not finish the Yellow King’s gaze traps until almost everything else was done.

What are some of your sources of inspiration?

My inspirations are mostly literature, but also music, architecture and other video games.

J. R. R. Tolkien famously said that a name comes first, then the story. With my latest mod, I knew it would be called Yellow King before I even knew what it was going to be about. Since the name the King in Yellow appears in many horror stories, the horror aspect was already a given. I wrote my own Nord legend that players can read in the mod titled “The Tragedy of the King in Yellow.” I styled it after Scandinavian legends like Beowulf, which Tolkien argued was a lament for the dead, rather than a heroic epic. I then rewrote the legend in the dragon language word for word because I could! I found an online repository of Norse kennings and used it to create the names of the legend’s characters and items. One way or another, most Nord names that appear in Yellow King mean gold in skaldic poetry. The Thalmor character names, on the other hand, come from Tolkien’s Sindarin and Quenya languages and mean yellow or gold. The king’s name, Hahdrim, is the word for mind in the dragon language because the mind is central to the story.

One of my favorite quests from The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is ‘A Brush with Death.’ In it, the player is transported inside a painting: all of the textures of the environment and the enemies are completely unique and look like oil paint. Yellow King began with the idea of entering into another world where the textures of recognizable things are different, and the player is left disoriented; everything is familiar yet unfamiliar. I have that quest to thank for Yellow King’s inspiration.

What do you enjoy most about modding?

Level design. It’s like playing with digital building blocks. Coupled with storytelling, I enjoy seeing people interact and experience a world that I have built. In Yellow King, it took me days to get the angle and width of the cave reveal to be just right. I wanted people to stop and be amazed at what they see.

I was put on this path all the way back when I got The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. I was surprised the first time I opened the disc case to see two CDs inside! The game came packaged with the Construction Set. I could tear apart the entire game if I so pleased. I remember building a house for myself in Balmora. I’ve enjoyed level design ever since.

Are you working on anything currently?

Each mod in my series is based on a color of the rainbow: Red Flame, Orange Moon, Yellow King. The next color, green, I am hard at work on. The mod will be called Green Sleeves. If you are familiar with the English folk song Greensleeves and know its lyrics, you might have a guess about the mod’s theme. I have all of the other colors outlined.

Any mods you’d like to recommend?

Death Consumes All (Xbox, Nexus) and Shezarrine - The Fate of Tamriel (XB1, Nexus) by Anbeegod. I was recruited shortly after I released Red Flame to help with level designing. An outdoor area called the Magickal Realm was made by me.

Undead FX (Xbox, PC, Nexus) by SeriousW00F. Especially for necromancers and vampire characters (my current playthrough), there is just something about the skin and sinew of a raised corpse slowly disintegrating away to reveal a skeleton underneath.

The entire mod series by ThirteenOranges (Bethesda.net, Steam). I like how the quests are short and sweet with nothing game breaking or over-the-top. They are so well done and seamless that I sometimes forget the quest my character is running is not from Skyrim proper.