Articles tagged with: Tools

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind was my first real interaction with the saga. I saw Daggerfall but never played it. And in the case of Morrowind, I don't even remember if I finished even the lengthy tutorial, as you couldn't save until after completing it.

Anyway, advancing to the present (April 2025), I picked the game on a sale, and decided to see if I could improve its visuals and fix some bugs and annoyances. I was successful, so I want to document here what works for me (also for future reference).

• Morrowind Code Patch: Lots of fixes and QoL changes.
• Morrowind Graphics Extender XE (MGE XE): Improves almost everything, but specially the water and illumination will look amazing.
• Morrowind Enhanced Textures: Upscaled textures, but respecting the originals. Combined with MGE XE, looks as good as it can!
• How to fix the glitchy music bug: I faced this issue. It has an easy solution, but you will be surprised about how to solve it 😅
• How to save even at the start of the game: Open the console (~ key), type set CharGenState to -1 and press ENTER. This marks you as having finished creating the character, and finally shows the Save option in the main menu.
• Easier thievery: Open the console (~ key), type tfh and press ENTER. It displays ownership information of all items, so you can know if what you are going to pick is owned or not.

There are many cool mods, and even instaling the Code Patch alone will give you the option of activating some tiny quality of life tweaks. I like to keep the experience as near the "vanilla" one as possible, so for now I'm sticking with mostly fixes and graphical updates.

As an extra for the future, two insanely big mods are currently being developed as of 2025 (and they even share some resources!):

• Tamriel Rebuilt
• Project Tamriel

They are still halfway there, but being so vast, it seems that you can already explore and experience a lot of content. Maybe for the future, when I finish the main game and original expansions...

Posted on 2025-04-25

Lately I'm a bit bored of just playing games, I miss a bit doing something more creative. I also miss my miniatures. So when I learned about a new game, Talespire, that allowed you to setup and play "boardgame" scenarios as if you had real painted miniatures (with amazing graphics), I wanted to give it a try.

I learned about the game by a blog post, once it was already available at Steam (it's in Early Access), but researching for this post I found that it comes from a successful Kickstarter. Both sources are a good starting point, but check the Steam early access trailer to see why I fell in love with it:

You easily add tiles, walls, props (furniture, decoration) and entities (human-controllable miniatures, NPCs and monsters), save it (everything works online), and then can play, alone or with friends (no AI, though), in a turn-based fashion. It struck me both as how simple it appeared, and really is, you decide how far you want to go adding detail. But the visuals are incredible, it really looks as if you had real high-quality painted miniatures. The die roll realistically, music and sound effects help immerse, and special effects and "atmospheric controls" (time of day, weather, and other visual and lighting conditions) allow to create the perfect setting no matter if you are exploring dark sewers, a dungeon or a mountain on a sunny day.

I encourage anyone interested to read the terminology guide and the player's guide to properly understand what you can (and can't) do. For example, the combat system is as good as many normal computer RPGs, with 4 stats, combat resolution, initiative-based turns and other tweaks, but it is not Dungeons & Dragons. I find it a great balance between a not-totally-freeform game engine (like Vassal) and Baldur's Gate.

Oh, and remember what I mentioned before about the Kickstarter campaign? You should check it out as it hints of things to come later, like character editing (at minimum changing the colors), or a Cyberpunk/sci-fi setting which looks as amazing as the main medieval one (and exactly what I thought, "I'd love to have a Cyberpunk 2020 equivalent!").

This is an example screenshot I took exploring an amazing castle uphill I downloaded from the community:

This was my first experiment, a small tavern made in a few minutes just after finishing the (in-game) tutorials:

And my last screenshot is a work in progress of a bigger experiment, a HeroQuest board. Need to learn to play with tile sizes to see if I can keep corridors same size as the original, while having cool walls and room dispositions, but still I think end up quite similar:

Of course the game is meant to be played with other people, but for now, to me it is a great way to relax assembling maps. I can pick any map from an adventure, or even cool randomly generated maps. Having your friends purchase the game to be able to play the campaigns can be a handicap, but the game is cheap, way less than any boardgame these days.

Before I finish, I wanted to also share a few great resources for inspiration and maps:

• Tales Tavern: Official website, acting both as a hub of player-created content, news, and tutorials (see next point)
• Tales Tavern Training Grounds: An official list of resources
• TaleSpire reddit: All things related with the game, from news to newest creations by people.

Posted on 2021-05-01

I've had some busy weeks lately so there has been not much visible progress to show here. I haven't been able to paint because I reordered a bit the workspace and had to focus on assembling pending models* to make space, plus RealWorld (tm) tasks prevented me from hobbying too much.

I do have two books almost read so book reviews will come back soon, but meanwhile what I actually did was moving to this blog the list of space marine names I have for my Dark Angels. Currently has +130 names and I plan to keep adding new ones as I read books or find more appropiate names. As I mention in the page it has only the names I personally like and they are suited for Dark Angels, so is really subjective and narrowed.

I also wanted to buy some Forge World MKII and MKIII squads (I love those two old armour versions, especially the helmets), but the pound sadly is too high compared with the euro so it becomes way too expensive. I guess they will have to wait until those rumors of FW miniatures on physical GW stores become reality.

Let's hope I can at least finish painting soon my Imperial Knight :)

* I found a great deal at Ebay, getting a cheap full Skaven army from Warhammer Fantasy 8th ed (I wanted some skaven as I'd like to recover the old Advanced HeroQuest I have and play it), so I had lots of models to assemble. Plus some ork conversions that I will showcase once painted.

Posted on 2015-11-21

Many people do pilgrimages to Apple stores when they travel. Others like to go shopping at a famous place. As for me, I tend to have a sixth sense for finding gaming stores, comic stores and official Games Workshop Stores whenever I travel (inside and outside of Spain) and maybe buy a miniature or two to remind me in the future of that trip.

This is more related to chance, so, a few months ago I decided to build a map with the official GW stores and other RPG, boardgames and miniature stores so that if I travel to one of the countries I have data for, I can directly see where I can find stores.

It is not full as the data I gathered was mostly from Europe and USA, but I'll probably try to add Asia and Australia whenever I have time, but anyway it can be handy even at current incomplete state.

You can check the map here: //theelderthoughts.blogs.kartones.net/page/gw-stores-map. There's a button at the top left area to go fullscreen, and the map works in smartphones and tablets, although instead of moving the mouse over a point to see the name you must click/touch it.

Posted on 2015-03-01

Finally, and after so many years without playing a pen-and-paper RPG, this situation is coming to an end.

Some workmates and I are finishing preparations for some Call of Cthulhu roleplaying!

As some of us have not played in a long long time, and others are newcomers to RPGs, our master (keeper in the Cthulhu theme ;) has decided to start with basic rules and expand it as we progress.

To do so, we're using the following:

• GORE (Generic Old-school Role-playing Engine) as the basic ruleset, with some modifications and Cthulhu-specific tables.
• Call of Cthulhu Quickstart Rules, to provide Cthulhu settings and rules to the GORE system. It is a ultra-compact version of the standard roleplaying game.
• Byakhee + the Seet Back for Call of Cthulhu, for the character generation.

We know few more details... the game will be placed in 1922 in the north of Wisconsin.

Let's hope all goes well and we start having playing sessions each few weeks!

Posted on 2008-01-13