I remap radio listeners, Rob here today, joined by Duncan Fife to talk about a very

magisterial article that Duncan wrote for us this week called Who Cares About the lore

charting the evolution of world building in the Elder Scrolls and the fact that,

oddly enough, it doesn't. It's a universe without a coherent through line, a coherent timeline

of neat causal events. And that is by intentional design. And Duncan wrote a very fun article explaining why that is for such a major franchise in a space that is often very obsessed with canonicity and ironing out differences in continuity and explanation.

So Duncan, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for writing

the article. I guess to start us at the top, like, are you that big an Elder Scrolls person?

Or did you just find the fact that it's world building is such a shit show, uh, that, that, that, that appealed to you.

No, uh, I can tell you exactly the story about how I came to this subject. I played Marrowind,

which is the third Elder Scrolls game when it came out. I played oblivion. I played Skyrim.

Uh, I also played the fallout games that they

published and developed. The inspiration for this piece, lengthy story, as is the article,

there was a polygon piece published in 2019 by Alex James Kane.

It's the oral history of Marowind, which is what it sounds like.

And I read that at the time, revisited it a few years later, and there are people in that

oral history, which comprises interviews with about a dozen developers

passed and present from Bethesda, which makes the Elder Scrolls games, that

stuck with me and I found fascinating as personalities.

So there are two people in particular, both of whom feature in this piece that I did with you.

The first is a guy named Ken Ralston, who was hired by Bethesda in the late 90s after they had put out a bunch of games and two games in this

RPG series their own RPG series kind of like d dn.d inspired but first person

open world hack and slash

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