General:Ryan Howard's Posts

Ryan Howard's Posts
Medium/Format	Online Forum
Interviewee(s)	Ryan Howard
Hosted By	Discord

These are a few notable comments from Ryan Howard, a writer and development director on Betrayal of the Second Era, about the The Elder Scrolls setting and the development of the tabletop. These posts were made publically on the official Chip Theory Games Discord.

2023

On the process of writing lore for Betrayal of the Second Era (2023-9-5)

Salem and I are doing the lore for BOTSE. It involves playing the games (mostly ESO, but I've logged some hours in several of the other titles, and Salem has put in plenty of Skyrim and Oblivion hours for fun over the years), and doing a lot of research into various databases. Whenever I start working in a new region, one of the things I do is go to that region in ESO and play it for a while, taking informal notes on what is interesting to me personally so we can incorporate it via quests, overland encounters, etc. The game is large enough that not everything will be able to be incorporated into what we're doing, so we tend to highlight whatever interests us the most, or things that feel like they haven't been covered as much as other game elements. Salem and I both come up with the flavor ideas (and the mechanical ideas based on them), and then I will usually take the finishing pass on the final flavor text. It's a good partnership because I have a lot of experience in writing and salem has a lot of experience in elder scrolls, and we both take different approaches to the material. Then, it all has to pass through bethesda for approval, of course

2024

On the biomes of the playmats (2024-2-9)

well the idea we're kind of going for is that you can use whichever one for whatever "vibe" you're going for, so for example, you could use the snow mat in skyrim, but if you were going to be in the wrothgar region of high rock, you could use it there, too. whatever you feel like. that being said, we're trying to hit most of the iconic biomes of Tamriel as we continue to make expansions, so the valenwood mat has a forest side, which one might typically associate with valenwood, as well as a side with giant mushrooms, which one would usually associate with morrowind
most of the feedback we've gotten is that besides the world/time period of ESO, which is when the game is set, it seems like the two other games people have the most associations with are morrowind and skyrim, so we wanted to make sure those places were well served right away
oblivion obviously important to a lot of people too, but cyrodiil doesn't really have a super iconic biome. it's mostly grassland/rolling/hills/normal sized forests (albeit more wartorn in the ESO time period), so our "regular" clash mat should serve that pretty well

On why only Western Black Marsh is included in Betrayal (2024-2-22)

it is Western Black Marsh. We're sticking with things that have been put in ESO. Trying to keep as up to date as possible (there's a fair amount of stuff from the Necrom expansion that came out last year in the Morrowind quests/encounters), but if you can't get there in ESO, you can't get there in BOTSE

can't say with certainty what the future holds for the game but I would be surprised if we returned to do "other parts" of provinces we've already tackled (for example, this is not a promise but i think it's doubtful we'll add west weald in at a later date because we've already done cyrodiil). it's difficult to explain without having seen the game but we have a pretty rigorous system of quests set up that all kind of map to each other, so if you start to add in additional quests, that kind of has to be a closed system in a lot of senses

plus there's the fact that with the exception of cyrodiil, all of the current provinces take up anywhere from two to five "zones" in ESO, so for us to even think about going back to a region where we've already made a map, we'd have to have multiple new zones of content

On the UESP (2024-3-15)

when writing the game, we frequently used the unofficial elder scrolls wiki (UESP) to help us do research
it's a good lore resource
but ALSO
once the game is out, if anyone wants to edit the wiki in their free time to include our game in the materials, that would be super cool!
it makes our game feel more part of the overall TES lore
(i may create an account myself to make edits)

On how Skyrim's map is handled in Betrayal (2024-3-28)

re: Skyrim. One thing you'll notice about all the maps is that they don't necessarily map to the exact confines of what the "typical" understanding of an ESO province is. Out of all of the regions we've done so far, only high rock and valenwood map exactly to the "typically understood" borders of those provinces (by which i mean, if you look up "map of tamriel," those two regions basically look as described). There are two reasons for that. One is that some of the political borders of the provinces differ slightly depending on the situation with the three banners war (for example, part of what is normally considered to be in cyrodiil is considered in the second era to be part of black marsh, more or less, so we included it in the black marsh province). the other reason is that we're not allowed to include locations in the game that are not currently featured in ESO (although the ESO team was gracious enough to give us a preview document for their Necrom expansion so we could include more of the telvanni peninsula in the morrowind province).

Skyrim is a weird case where both of these issues apply, but especially the second issue. The province is politically divided between east and west, in that western skyrim is its own independent kingdom that is north of the reach and eastern skyrim is part of the ebonheart pact. but ALSO, more pressingly, there is a large chunk of the middle of skyrim that is not present in ESO at this time, and given that skyrim is such a horizontally oriented province to begin with, it would have been hard to portray it on our square map. There is also the matter of Blackreach, which is the huge cavern system under Skyrim that ESO has as its own zone and ZOS were very interested in us including. As @Ghillie / Josh W said, Skyrim is also the region that Elder Scrolls players are most familiar with, so if we we tried to stuff both halves of the map plus Blackreach on one map side, not only would that look and play weird, we would also probably have to chop some locations that folks were familiar with. So, what we decided to do instead was split the region into one map and have four of the province's quests play on one side of the map and five play on the other side. Blackreach is accessible through both sides, but you interact with it primarily through the Greymoor Keep dungeon (a vampiric castle that is found underground), as well as the underground town of Dusktown (which is only on the Western Skyrim side) we'll probably have to figure out a similar issue with Hammerfell when we do that expansion, as the middle chunk of that province is also blocked out in ESO (at least for now)

On the most obscure things included in the game (2024-5-18)

there's at least one quest that has stuff from one of the phone games in there it's actually the quest we recommend people play first i will say, it is definitely to my sadness that there were a few other little things like that we weren't able to get in. Salem and I really wanted to use the gehenoth, which is the boss monster from another one of the phone games, but we couldn't get that one across the approvals finish line but look at this guy. he's so dope!

(Picture of the Gehenoth)

oh, another obscure thing we have in there is xivilai moath, who is a daedric lord who is one of the primary antagonists of the battlespire game. he makes a VERY brief appearance in ESO, so he's kind of a blank slate deep cut we could play with

On the possibility of including the Systres Archipelago in Betrayal (2024-9-27)

we have to get approval from bethesda on all of our plans, but i know right now we're definitely considering the systres for inclusion in the summerset expansion. high isle was a big recent expansion for ESO, so there's lots of stuff there for us to play with

but i don't think we'd have a whole region set in the systres, though. it would be part of a larger thing

2025

On Lore from Betrayal of the Second Era being added to UESP (2025-2-7)

no idea if anyone on the discord is one of the people who have been making edits to the unofficial elder scrolls pages to include BOTSE stuff in the lore, but if you are, a genuine thank you from salem and myself. very nice to have the things we wrote get folded into the larger lore of the game as acknowledged by the community

ngl, it's a genuine trip to go to a website i have spent SO much time on for various work purposes and going to an entry that has "Deslandra's Experiments" now listed as a subsection: https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Stormhold_Crystal