General:ESO Summerfall Event Special Livestream

The Elder Scrolls Online – Summerfall Event Special Livestream
Medium/Format	Online Livestream
Date	September 21, 2018
Interviewee(s)	Lawrence Shick
Interviewer(s)	Gina Bruno, Jessica Folsom
Hosted By	YouTube [1]

This transcription focuses on the Lore aspects of the video. Non-lore content has been excluded. This is essentially an extension of the ESO Live Summerset Story and Lore.

Dusk Keep

(Starting from 7:59) Lawrence: So here we are. We are at the first spot of the Pathfinder achievement on this south-easternmost corner of Summerset Isle. This is Dusk Keep. A lot of the places we're gonna be visiting are ruins, and we'll be talking about why they're ruined and what they used to be. This is kind of a 'gonna be place', because Dusk here, which is called this because if you spin around you can see the cliffs behind us when the sun gets to the west then goes in a shadow, but Dusk is currently the site of this mysterious tower, which it has not been revealed who built it or why, but it's it's pretty darn cool. It's on its own a bridge out here in the province. Now later in Tamriel's history, not that much later, during the Second Aldmeri Dominion this place is going to be a port, is going to be found in here and then later in the Third Era this is going to be an actual town and city, but right now it's just this mysterious keep that has got some sort of magical containment on it and it's not been revealed who or what is inside and why it was built.

Jessica: So mysterious, I want to visit it.

Lawrence: So yep. Sorry, you can't, haha. Maybe someday we will reveal all, but right now it's a secret. There's some cool books around here, that tell you something. [Omitted filler content] This is also the most difficult of the locations on the achievement to to actually reach physically, which is why we started here.

Gina and Lawrence: So yeah we are all way the heck down here.

Lawrence: And you have to, like way down around past the Sil-Var-Woad Abyssal Geyser and if you're really careful, you can do it on the mount back the whole way without actually having a swim, but it takes a little work. It's kind of fun, really. So this is where we are. Any questions about Dusk? There's nothing really to say, but….

[Omitted filler content]

Lawrence: We've got some thematically, seasonally appropriate Hollowjack critters here and and mounts and stuff going on. We're gonna be telling you more about Hollowjack as we get into the Witches Festival season. We'll be revealing Lord Hollowjack as a minor Daedric Lord with his own Demiplane of Detritus.

[Omitted filler content]

Cey-Tarn and Alinor Docks

Lawrence: So next we're going to go, we're gonna jump from the soon-to-be place to sort of the most mundane place on the list, the Alinor Docks all the way over on the west coast, so we're going to jump not there but to the Cey-Tarn Keep Wayshrine, that one, because that's the closest location of the Alinor Docks. The Alinor Docks are actually closer to the Cey-Tarn Keep than they are to Alinor, they are way down slope from the capital city, but you know, you build a port where you can not where you want to.

[Omitted filler content]

Lawrence:Now you may wander why, even though it starts with a c and follows with an e it's the Cey-Tarn Keep instead of this Cey-Tarn and that's because in elvish, there are no soft C's, so anytime you see a name that starts with Ce or Ci it's a hard, it's a K sound. Same with G.

Gina: It's so good we had Laurence here today to tell us this.

Lawrence: Well I got to tell you something while we're jumping to a wayshrine. So yeah, now we're going downhill.

[Omitted filler content]

We are heading north, up the road just a bit, actually more like west but no it's north from here, that's right there's that long breakwater up there that we don't really use, the docks are just up to the north of it, so head up for the masts of the ships, the great ships. So the Alinor Docks, this as I said is of the places that we're going to visit on our guided tour, this is the most mundane of them, this is a utilitarian place just for getting cargo and goods and passengers on and off of ships and it's if it looks a little bit like it's somewhat unused, you want to go left here and go out on the docks and to see the pretty boats. That's because it didn't get much use until quite recently when Queen Ayrenn lifted the embargo. If you were a merchant with maritime mercantile interests coming to Summerset Isles pretty much you were always going to go to Shimmerene port and if you were doing naval stuff you were gonna go to Sunhold, so the Alinor port didn't get used much until recently. It's primarily used for coastal shipping around Summerset's cargo and getting stuff in and out of Alinor and for diplomatic visits to Alinor, but you can see there's a couple of ships here now. You'll see that there are some a bunch of non-High Elves bringing in cargo and the High Elves in fact will remark upon the unusual nature of this and you know some of them will approve and some of them don't approve.

Gina: We were saying this before we started the stream I am a very frequent map opener, so apologies if we just keep on doing this non-stop.

[Omitted filler content]

Lillandril

Lawrence: We're going north now, because the next place we're gonna go on our tour is the Cathedral of Webs, which is up there and so we're gonna jump to the Lillandril Wayshrine, just across the bay there over to the city of the mages and from there we're gonna make our way up to the Cathedral of Webs.

[Omitted filler content]

So now we're on the Lillandril docks. It's that's just for serving the town, it's not a big port city like Shimmerene or Sunhold or even Alinor for that matter. I say you just have some utilitarian docks, before putting in small package ships and such like, bringing the Sapiarch things from all across Tamriel.

[Omitted filler content]

We're gonna go west up that trail there. East I mean east the other way across the bridge and then we're gonna be taking the first major left here, up after we get through this archway. Isn't that scenic?

Jessica: Yeah that's pretty. Very pretty.

Lawrence: So now we're leaving Lillandril, which is which is quite busy with the Sapiarchs in the Mages College and such like and we're heading up toward the the sunken and abandoned town of Corgrad and the the library on the heights above it to the west which is now goes by the name of the Cathedral of Webs and those of you who've been there will know why that is.

Gina: It sounds like a place I don't want to be in.

Lawrence: It's yeah, it's got the creepy crawlies all over it, so yeah you're taking a left here and then going another sharp right and then up the hill.

[Omitted filler content]

Lawrence:This place used to be part of the whole Sapiarch College complex that was extended over from from Lillandril back in the middle of the 1st Era.

[Omitted filler content]

Why Summerset Architecture is in Ruins

Lawrence:This was a place that you know, you may be wondering as you're going around Summerset, why the hell is so much this place ruined. Isn't this supposed to be the center of civilization of Tamriel? Well it's like this: we in Elder Scrolls Online, we are in the middle of the 2nd Era and we are in between the great empires of the 1st Era and 3rd Era, our period is called the Interregnum and it's really kind of the low ebb of civilization in Tamriel and so a lot of places that used to be populous are now relatively abandoned or even completely abandoned and that applies even to Summerset Isles, which, you know a thousand to fifteen hundred years ago was probably three to four times the population of what it is currently and at that time this place was not called the Cathedral of Webs. It had a name, something having to do with being a library or archive and was actively used by both the Sapiarchs and it kept the governmental archives as well, but as the civilization contracted with the the end of the 1st Era this place was abandoned along with the town of Corgrad just to the east which used to be where are the folks who worked here lived and so now it is a haunted ruin and and very scenic, because you know, when the elves let a place go to ruination they they do it in a way that's aesthetically pleasing, they they just kind of let it crumble in ways that suit their sense of the way things ought.

[Omitted filler content]

Lawrence: All right, okay, well, you know run a bit up to the north tour around this place a little bit more here yes you can see off north into the Sea of Pearls and now you're looking east toward the ruins of Corgrad, another sunken ruined place that's now full of things that want to eat your face, but once upon a time it was it was another thriving part of the Summerset Island. All right so the next place we're gonna go is another ruin called the Ald Mora ruins and that's down down over there

[Omitted filler content]

Lawrence: We're not going to Ebon Stadmont, we are gonna pick up the road once our pals catch up to us, maybe we're gonna head to the southeast.

[Omitted filler content]

Lawrence:We're headed to the Ald Mora Ruins. Yeah so this there's a couple of common Aldmeri elvish words there, Ald and Mora. Of course when you're talking about the elves, when you talk about their language, words, and their speech you say elvish. When you're talking about their culture and their artifacts you say elven, so just so you know that. That's it. That's a dumb distinction that we absolutely you absolutely must adhere to, otherwise where I have dumb distinctions, right? And I would have no job. So we're going to Ald Mora. Ald means old, ancient, elderly, and Mora means forest. So it's in at the edge of where the forest used to be. You're gonna hang a left here, yeah it's showing up on your right on your compass now.

[Omitted filler content]

Lawrence:Okay, so here we are now. These are some of the oldest ruins on the island as a matter of fact. There's not a lot going on in them, but it's Aldmeri that precedes the Altmeri ruins, it goes way back. We're not even entirely sure what this structure was, now it's just got like a couple of couple of bandit fireplaces and there's obviously, there's some barrels and stuff, some smugglers been using this place hiding out. It's scenic in that it is so ancient, it's these big old stone blocks all falling off each other. Now if you haven't been around this part of the island before, I want to tip you off. Can you go out to the road there that's just that we just came down?

Jessica: Yeah.

Lawrence: yeah and then turn right and just go up to the north a little bit yeah there's a guy sitting there by the side of the road just up to this okay this guy here if you haven't talked to this guy you want to talk to this guy because he is going to give you the the winery murder mystery question which is so much fun so if you haven't done that quest you know when we're done here come back and look this guy up and you know get the hoof prints off his face dust him off and he'll tell you about the murder up at the winery and then you get to go up and hoist a few and figure out whodoneit so that's a that's a fine fine thing.

so here we are yeah the old ruins like I said Old Forest as you're looking up there into the into the forest what's left of it used to come all the way down here which is what this the Ald Mora ruins used to be in the middle of it now it's just kind of off the the edge of it so these things change over time and time water time that's okay Wow

okay now from here from here we're gonna kind of work on our way clockwise around the island but we're gonna jump to the Eldbur ruins way shrine next because that's got the most convenient one for where we're going the police we're going after that has to got a waste right at all so we're gonna go to the elder ruins first

[Omitted filler content]

Lawrence:So this is the first of our three Psijiic ruins that we're going to be going to the Psijiics of course now are on Artaeum and don't have a presence on Summerset island anymore but that wasn't true 2,000 years ago at the height of their influence in Tamriel they had several active locations on Summerset Island and they were sending advisors out to governors and rulers and monarchs all across the continent to give them nonpartisan advice about how to how to rule well and so they were quite there used to be a whole lot more Psijiics than there are now just like there used to be a whole lot more elves on Summerset. So this place across the bridge now known as the Eldbur Ruins, this was one of these centers of Psijiic magical inquiry in fact it used to be known as the Monastery for Mystic Inquiry and there used to be lots of civic monks here doing all sorts of interesting experiments. Now if you if play through the the tutorial for Summerset you already know this place because you come here at the beginning to talk to Oriandra and she will tell you that you know there's this there's these folks inside there who are trapped and you need to help them to get out but if you I think you can you can go in there even now have you if you haven't been in there just to sort of go in and look around when you're not going through the tutorial it's still worth a visit. let's go in there now

because it's all like creepy and an abandoned and stuff and the reason I love creepy the reason is that this is a place where the experiments of the normally cautious Psijiics went too far in fact this is one of the reasons why they're so cautious now because when this was the monastery for mystical inquiry they were studying the eleven forces as they as they defined the magical forces that hold together the universe they categorized them as the eleven mystical forces and and they studied them here in this place which is also full of you know a bunch of a bunch of weirdos now.

[Omitted filler content]

Lawrence: what they did here what the monks did was they were investigating the eleven forces and they some of them had a theory that maybe there were really only nine forces and three of these forces were actually the same and you could map them onto each other and then it would you could get more efficient magical transportation via teleportation and so they tried that out and it was a disaster there was a huge magical explosion and lots of monks were turned into thin films of glowing cells and so they shut the place down and it's been basically abandoned ever since except when you know evil super villains need to have a lair to which to conduct their horrible plots and schemes.

[Omitted filler content]

Gina:Someone in chat was asking if you write lore books for ESO, but you helped write the art books, right?

Lawrence: I do. I write a whole bunch of the lore books for ESO. The books that come with the art books, that come in the collector's editions I read all those or pulled them together.

[Omitted filler content]

Lawrence: Gryphon Aerie is a hilltop up north of the Direnni Acropolis, where the Gryphon just like to hang out.

[Omitted filler content]

Griffins are now an endangered species.

[Omitted filler content]

This is also an area in which you'll find the welwa, another endangered species, only that they're not as endangered as they used to be. You can read some of the lore books and there might even be a side quest involved with this. The welwa were a species that inhabited Summerset Island when the Aldmeri first came here, back in the Merethic Era, and they were one of the savage creatures that they actually exterminated from the islands - in order to civilize it and and make their farmstead safe from predators and suchlike. The only reason why they're back now is because one of the Sapiarchs decided that it would be a good idea to sort of "re-Merethic-ise" the Summerset Island and bring back its ecological richness, and bring these predators in here, since places like this northern wilderness area are not as inhabited as they used to be, so this Sapiarch actually imported some welwas from Craglorn and that's why they are now back again in Summerset Island after not having been here for thousands of years.

[Omitted filler content]

On Alaxon'ald and the Eastern Pass

The Eastern Pass, west of Sil-Var-Woad. It is called the Eastern Pass because it goes east from a Sunhold.

[Ommited filler content]

Alaxon'ald, this obscure little scenic location in the eastern pass, this is a place we chose not for its inherent historical or magical value, but because it's just scenic, nice place to come by yourself to meditate and look past and think about the history of Tamriel. There's a few alchemical ingredients squirreled away around here. It's just a cute little scenic spot.

[Ommited filler content]

Sil-Var-Woad, Sacred Numbers, and Psijic Ruins

From Sil-Var-Woad we're gonna go north, to the Garden of the Sacred Numbers.

This road through the pass through the mountains that that goes from a Sil-Var-Woad to Sunhold is looking a little unused, but that's just because 90 percent of the traffic that goes to Sunhold is by coast and maritime, because it's a major port.

Now down here is Sil-Var-Woad, which if you look at this. This is a location that actually have appeared all the way back in Elder Scrolls I, in Arena. Now, the locations on the Arena maps were basically drawn up by Imperials, so they Imperialize a lot of the names of the places out in what they considered to be the provinces. Which is why on the Arena map, Sil-Var-Woad appears as Silver Wood, because that's what it sounded like to the Imperials. And so they just made it into Silver Wood.

[Omitted filler content]

We are heading up to the Garden of the Sacred Numbers, which is up on a little hill top here north-west of Sil-Var-Woad.

[Omitted filler content]

you can get up toward the hilltop but the only real way to get up on top of it is from the south there it's directly ahead of us and that's the that's the stairway that leads up to the top of it. And this is another one of these little places that is sort of artistically ruined. Obviously somebody is still keeping it up, you know. They're taking care of the fruit trees this little orchard, but it's laid out in a way that makes numerological sense to the High Elves, for whom the numbers have certain mystical properties. There's a book up here that

[Omitted filler content]

This is a place that has been let go into a sort of artistically pleasant ruination and now it's getting you know, ruined in other ways.

[Omitted filler content]

We're heading to the north to the Keep of the Eleven Forces which is just northwest of here.

[Omitted filler content]

This is a place that is sometimes miss a misread or mispronounced as the Keep of the Elven Forces, but it's not, it's the Eleven Forces, and this is the second Psijic ruin on our tour that we're visiting. This is the largest one. This used to be the center of the Psijic Order on Summerset Isle when they were present here in numbers and in social force.

[Omitted filler content]

There's a keep here that is still Psijic-ly sealed. So we don't know what's in there, but obviously it's something important or it wouldn't be sealed in for thousands of years. Now if you turn around and go behind toward the ^(?) this is the Forum of Eleven Columns, and it has eleven columns starting with the three here. And then there are four up each side, and then there's actually a twelfth up ahead but we don't talk about that one because that's the unspoken column. So we have eleven columns each representing one of the Eleven Forces, and some of the Eleven Forces are revealed in some of the books and some of the questing that you that you learn in the Psijic quest lines. But not all of them have been spoken of in a long time because that's a mystery too dangerous for mortals to mess with, as shown by the ruination of the Eldbur Ruins, the former Monastery of Mystic Inquiry. Oh and the disaster that was the Hyperagonal Collapse Incident, which I forgot to give the exact name of before but that's what it was. And it looked a lot like this really just before the incident occurred it looked. It was like guys were doing this stuff and then all of a sudden they were just a sheen of shiny paste on the ground so. But we're not gonna go that far okay, instead what we're gonna do. Now here's the problem, alright. The final place on our tour is on the island of Artaeum, and we're gonna get to it through a portal that is in the base here of the Keep of the Eleven Forces, but I think you have to have at least started done a couple of quests into the main questline. Some what some of you friends might have to go do a little a little work before you're able to go and collect the final achievements but everybody else just pile on down the stairs because we're going through the portal to Artauem.

Artaeum

[Omitted filler content]

So after you've gone through the portal … You're gonna take a hard left on the island of our tab because you're going to the Coliseum of the Old Ways

[Omitted filler content]

So the Colosseum of the Old Ways is now a place where the Psijics are like testing out various Atronach strengths against each other to and you can do some PvP wizard fighting stuff there it's fun, but it didn't always wasn't always a Coliseum. We're gonna jump to a friend on Artaeum.

[Omitted filler content]

Artaum is the island of the Psijic Order and it's literally out of this world. The Psijics have taken it somewhere else and they ain't saying and they ain't tellin where it is exactly. But since you're special and they think that you are able to help them and are worthy of joining them, they give you permission to go to Artaum.

[Omitted filler content]

And here we are. That's the Ceporah Tower right in front of us. (Schick reminds us that because it's in elvish, the name is pronounced with a hard K sound)

[Omitted filler content]

We're gonna turn around and we're gonna go … up along a coast but it's scenic as can be.

[Omitted filler content]

We're going up past the Traitor's Ruins where the evil Mannimarco had his lair when he was a Psijic before he became a renegade. And here we are, look at that. The … Colosseum of the old ways … now this this place wasn't originally built for to be a place for combat because the Psijics are really more about experimentation and such. The original name of this place was the Exemplarium of the Old Ways, because they tested out made examples of skills and spells here.

[Concludes Pathfinder tour of Summerset Isle]