General:Shane Liesegang's Posts

Shane Liesegang's Posts
Medium/Format	Online Forum
Interviewee(s)	Shane Liesegang
Hosted By	TES Forum Twitter

These are a few notable comments from Shane Liesegang on The Elder Scrolls setting. Liesegang is known as SJML on the forums. These comments were originally archived by The Imperial Library.

2010

Is there like a definite guide or bible of the elder scrolls? (2010-12-16)

Kurt's brain.

2011

The origin of the Songs of Return. (2011-11-13)

Lady Nerevar: "...assuming that in-universe the text is transcribed from oral tradition (ala Beowulf and the like)."

You're right about the in-world authorship.

In the real world, I'm the one to blame for that particular set of books. :-)

2012

The plural of Oghma Infinium (2012-03-05)

For future reference, the proper plural is "Oghmas Infinium."

2014

Yellow King easter egg (2014-03-05)

Now that everyone's all interested in the Yellow King I thought I'd point out that we referenced it in a Skyrim DLC. (Link to Dragonborn:Black Book: The Sallow Regent (book))

John Skyrim (2014-10-13)

my continued attempts to introduce Jonathan P. Skyrim were constantly being rejected

Slight regrets on the tone of Skyrim's dialogue (2014-08-12)

(Insert jokes about the totally natural flow of Skyrim’s dialogue; clearly I am the greatest dialogue expert of all time.)

2015

Rule for writing books (2015-03-27)

Reminds me of the Elder Scrolls rule that every books is written from a specific in-universe perspective

2017

Black Book writing info (2017-03-15)

OH and I wrote a bunch of the black books for Dragonborn, too, but I think they all got clipped to the first page :(

Dialogue contributions (2017-03-31)

^{Parent tweet lost}

(I forget if I wrote that line or not, but I did write a decent chunk of Skyrim!M'aiq.)

Awkward pauses in video game dialogue, particularly for singing (2017-11-10)

My favorite thing is when a voiced game has a voiceline that's clearly meant to be interrupted by another but there's a clear delay between the two lines playing.

ah yes that ole chestnut, a classic, ubiquitous scene killer. “NOT MY FAULT,” she wailed ungraciously, hair wild

UGH what’s worse is seeing this in live performance (usually with inexperienced actors who can only hold to the text)

On Skyrim I wrote a scene that involved multiple characters singing something and it almost got laughed out of the room.

(There’s a reason the bards do the ole “play a chord then intone” thing.)

2018

Getting back into the Creation Kit years later (2018-11-29)

Tomorrow night I’m doing a brief talk on what goes in to making a video game — thus right now I’m refamiliarizing myself with the Skyrim Creation Kit. So many hours in this tool… Having a weird mixture of flashbacks and “wait why don’t I have that muscle memory anymore?”

Austin Grossman’s novel “YOU” does a great job explaining the odd combination of rickety crashy weirdness and immense power that most game tools have. Editors are STRANGE beasts almost everywhere I’ve worked. Shane Liesegang, SJ (شَيْن)

This is why so many AAA devs who go indie fall in love with Unity. It ain’t perfect, but shipping something to a broad audience means it’s got a TON more polish. It feels practically luxurious.

Also going to the creation kit wiki to follow the tutorial that I wrote myself is weird. Good job on documentation, pre-Jesuit Shane.

2019

Influence of Conan the Barbarian and other fantasy on his writing (2019-01-17)

Obviously. It's the only way the dagger would be able to send the evil serpent-men back into another dimension. https://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/king-tuts-dagger-came-from-space-discover-researchers

(My introduction to fantasy was not Lord of the Rings, not D&D, not Pratchett or LeGuin or Herbert, but the often silly and always wonderful Saturday morning cartoon of Conan the Adventurer, and I think that influence shows in my writing.)

(When we were casting Kodlak Whitemane for Skyrim, I saw Michael Donovan's name on the sample list and just immediately approved him without even listening.)

(He tried to say at one point, "You know, I played Conan for several seasons in the 90s" but couldn't finish because I was excitedly interrupting to say, "OH I KNOW.")

(So while my fellow designers were geeking out about Dwight Schultz, Claudia Christian, Max von Sydow, Christopher Plummer, Joan Allen, etc. [who are all VERY cool, of course!] I was the most excited about Donovan.)

(Of course Conan tried to sneak into Skyrim in other ways...)

Quoted tweet: Danger of listening to Conan soundtrack while writing dialogue: I almost let a "Crom" slip in there.

Inspiration for Kodlak's Journal (2019-06-14)

Game developers, can you name and describe an instance when you put something really personal about you or your life into a videogame?

Went home to clean out my childhood bedroom and found the baby book where my late mother had recorded her hopes and assessments of lil’ me. Bawled. Came back to Bethesda and wrote Kodlak’s Journal, the very last thing I added before Skyrim’s release.

In his journal, he also records his high hopes for the player character he was mentoring, but you can only find it during/after his funeral.

(More precisely, it was the last thing I added before text-lock, after which all the written things were off being translated. Things were still added after that, but had to use existing text and dialogue, so it was the last thing I WROTE for the base game.)

On the Giant club launch effect (2019-12-10)

Any bug that launches something into space cracks me up. It brings me so much joy.

The Skyrim giants launching the player into the sky was a bug, but was kept because (a) it didn't matter since the player was in the process of dying anyway so the game would just reload and (b) it was awesome.

2025

On the Black Books in Skyrim (2025-02-27)

hi Shane! I’ve recently learned that you wrote my favourite thing in Dragonborn - the text of Black Books! And apparently they were originally longer? Do you still have the original text for them somewhere? I’d be thrilled to read it!

Maybe, but definitely not with me currently; would be on a drive somewhere in my storage unit back in the US if indeed it is anywhere outside of a backup server at BGS.

I wouldn't get too excited anyway — they were never *much* longer. The plan was always for them to just have one page visible; the length of that page got shorter, though, hence the cuts. So it's not like there's a complete version of _Epistolary Acumen, for example.

also it's all Knowledge Mankind Was Not Meant to Know™ so I would tread lightly were I you 😜

I get that it’s not designed as a full lorebook, still a very intriguing idea with those. Thank you for writing them anyways!

that was a fun assignment. :) I was tickled and honored when they came to me for those. "Shane, we need something... a little weird." "I'm listening..."

You didn’t do the quests themselves? Do you remember which quests you did?

Dragonborn was a long time ago and (outside the Black Books and, like, the Rieklings) I don't remember as clearly what I did on that one, to be honest. Sorry!

Did you happen to write those way cool Snow Elf books from Dawnguard's Forgotten Vale? Those were some of my favorite bits of "ambient storytelling" playing through the game

(The Betrayed by Engwe Emeloth, Journal of Mirtil Angoth, Diary of Faire Agarwen, Touching the Sky by Parmion Saldor)

I was part of the overall story planning on Dawnguard, but my in-game implementation stuff on that was almost entirely Serana. I might have done some book writing, but don't remember. If you have links I can definitely tell my own writing and have like 75% of identifying one of the other QD's work.

(of course some of the books are done by LDs and there I only have like a 35% of identifying, alack)

The Betrayed

Journal of Mirtil Angoth

Diary of Faire Agarwen

Touching the Sky

All related to the Forgotten Vale Books quest

Forgotten Vale Books Quest

it's been SO long; sorry. and I was neck-deep in Serana stuff as we were building that one. It might actually have been a QD thing now that I think of it (especially if it piped through Urag) but was outside of my sphere.