Random Event Writers Needed!

So hang on.. These random events weren't in Morrowind. So this project is ADDING content in terms of questing too?

I though this was just going to convert morrowind into skyrim and just rework the landscape and that stuff, not add new RANDOM ENCOUNTERS.

What the shalk is this?

So by random events, do you mean the chance occurrences you might come across when traveling (like the three revelers or the farmer taking the cow to the giants from Skyrim) or new radiant quests? Not really sure from the description.

The chance occurrences you might come across when traveling.

Might be wrong but i think an example would be the scavenger with some pieces of imperial and stormcloak armors with 2 body left of the ground, but might be wrong

Is this the kind of stuff that's acceptable?    

Lost Netch Herder

Wandering the desolate wasteland that is Vvardenfell's ashlands the player will encounter a Netch Herder. The dunmer will be clad in a regular farmer's attire, with a small herd of a few netches following behind him. He was attacked by an angry kaoguti, scaring off some netches while he was taking them to his plantation. He has lost all sense of direction after searching for his netch hours upon hours and just wishes to get himself and what remains of his netch home.   He greets the player and if the player asks, he explains his situation. He then asks the player directions to Balmora, which the player can answer with the directions North, East, West, South and can also say they do not know where Balmora is. No matter what the player answers the Netch Herder will thank the player and continue down the road. He might also give the player something small, like an ingredient or a couple gold pieces and continue down the winding road.   The player will not know does he make it or not.

Will be nice to meet some relatives (real NPCs) of deceased in Dunmer Ancestral Tombs.
Off course they should commit about your crime and they should be allied with Tombs' undead.

Sign me up! Random events always make the game a little more interesting.

The netch herder bit is alright, but these would ideally be atmospheric things that can be repeated without becoming stale.  Instead of him being lost, and 30 others also becoming lost in the same way asking the same thing, he could be like the 'hunters' in Skyrim, just leading his netch to new pastures or whatever.  That's something you'd expect to see as part of everyday life, and adds to the setting.  Like the cattle sacrifices.

Smerk, I sent you some ideas on Skype but in case you don't get on Skype often I'll echo the scenarios here.

Random encounter ideas:  Order of Inquisition Ordinators escorting a 'heretic' to the moon prison.  Along roads and in towns using the Skyrim prisoner set-up.  All actors despawn upon reaching Vivec City.

Dres slavers chasing escaped slaves.  Encounter slave first, telling the player not to tell the slavers where he is, slavers to follow.  Similar to the 'chased by bandits' event already in Skyrim.  No reward one way or the other, but if the player has gotten the 'Twin Lamps' status the player might tell the way to a safe house and remark with their common phrase 'the twin lamps light the path to freedom'.

Slave ship in major harbors handled like Khajiiti merchants in Skyrim.  Most days the spot in the harbor is empty, every so often a slave ship is there with Dres slavers on deck talking about looking forward to a few days on shore, warning the player to stay off the ship.  Several Argonian slaves are in the hold; a guard watching over them attacks the character if found below deck.  Guards handle it as a tresspassing crime and the player is forced to pay a fine.

In fact, the last one could be repeated for many types of ships to keep the harbors dynamic.  Ships with trade goods coming to and from the East Empire Company, fishing boats unloading the day's catch, smuggler ships loaded with unsavory characters and contraband.

This sounds like an awesome idea! Especially in a game about exploration and discovery like Morrowind.

I got an idea while reading these forums, I don't know if it's acceptable (because it isn't really lore friendly), but you never know.

While the Nerevarine is traveling the roads (either because of wanderlust and lack of money), he hears music in the distance. He then sees a man dressed in brown robes playing a lute walking toward him. The Nerevarine greets him, and the strange traveler smiles and says what a beautiful day it is. He then says he is a member of the Hallowed Minstrels, and order of priests of Dibella who travel the world spreading music to all places grim. He then offers to give him Dibella's blessings, hands him a potion of restore fatigue (to give him energy to travel) and leaves. This could be repeated over and over, but it could simply be a jolly old bard if you feel we shouldn't be adding lore to the TES universe.

The dinamic harbours is a great idea

Wasn't this already kind of covered by the "Scenes" thread?

Anyways I submitted one there a while ago which I think fits a lot better here so if you could read it and critique that'd be great.

Low end mage guild members out collecting mushrooms and flowers. Bitching about it the whole time.

New pilgrims wandering lost, trying to find that last shrine.

Other adventurers.

Somebody foolish enough to think you would make a good slave.

*Snippity Snappity* Moving into a proper Word Doc +Dialogue*

Quite interesting, adding the random event system to Skywind. I had an Idea but I'm not sure whether it is any good.

An inadequate mage that you encounter almost everywhere in morrowind trying spells that  never work or work against him. Like:

-Trying to calm a creature but resulting in making it angry, followed by him running away from said enraged creature. The player can either help him by killing the creature or just ignore him (Then they will both despawn later.) If the player helps him, the mage will thank him (reluctantly) and act as if nothing had happened. I am unsure whether such a thing could be done, but if the player helps him two or three times, the mage gives the player a potion that doesn't do what says it does. Nothing deadly, more like: a stamina potion that makes your running/walking speed fluctuate. 10% the normal speed for 3 seconds, 50% for 2, 90% for 9, 130% for 5 seconds than returns to normal. (I think you can do that with Papyrus...) or a Potion of Clear Thought, which makes you high (psychedelic effects on the screen etc.)

-At times you find him facing a daedra summoning ritual circle, chanting and waving his arms etc. but only manages to summon rabbit familiars or kwama familiars or rat familiars (small and harmless rats)

-Very rarely you find him on the ground face down locked in the paralysis animation that you get in skyrim but not Havoked. When asked, he will say that he is flying. When pointed out that he is firmly touching the ground, he claims that he is most assuredly flying and he just hadn't adjusted the height correctly. Further asked, he complains that the players presence is ruining his concetration.

This is mostly a humorous kind of encounter and you might not find it all that fitting to Morrowind, but it would be rather dull if all encounters were dead serious in my opinion. Thanks all the same!

What if while you were wandering along some road you came across a Morag Tong assassin and the corpse of the poor s'wit he was hired to kill. When you approach he shows you his writ and asks you to go on your way citing "official guild business". Or perhaps when you enter a city you find a similar situation but this time he is surrounded by guards making sure his paperwork is in order.

What if much like how is Skyrim, Thalmor can be encountered taking a stormcloak prisoner back to northwatch keep, the player could encounter a pair of ordinators escorting an accused heretic back to The Ministry of Truth. The player would be told to move along by the ordinators (unless a member of the temple in which case they would receive a more friendly greeting). If the player did not leave, they would be accused of being a heretic and attacked (if the player survived, they could free the heretic). 

Hello all! I should probably formally introduce myself as I am working on random encounters with Smerk. The point of adding random encounters into Skywind is to breath life into the world. There is a lot of 'empty' space in Skywind, and it cannot all be populated with handcrafted quests. Random encounters are a way to fill the world with a variety of new situations. While some random elements can be recycled from Skyrim, we want to add more that will make sense in the land of Morrowind. 

A few of you have commented on the possibility of Ordinators escorting a heretic prisioner. Since this is similar to the Thalmor escorting Talos worshippers, lets see if we can't expand upon the idea a bit. What if in addition to the escorts, the player could run across a situation where the Ordinators are right about the execute the heretic out in the open? This creates a much more pressing situation where the player must choose to react within a certain amount of time.

@Smitehammer - All great ideas! I'm especially fond of the harbor ideas

@Entreri - While I like the idea of a "random gift giver" we need to make sure we're lore friendly. With a little bit of research and some tweaks, I'm sure this can be included into the Skywind lore.

@SSBB64 - A four ideas are great! I especially like the grumpy mages. I would love to see these ideas expanded with little snips of dialog.

@Glovenator - You've got totally the right idea. I especially like the idea of the seducer and the trailer. I can imagine the goosebumps I would feel if I randomly turned around and a dark figure was following me. The stolen property idea was used in Skyrim. We could consider re-using it but I personally was not a huge fan of that encounter.

@Adhoral - I like the idea of the helpless mage. What if you came upon him be attacked by his own atronach? If you save him you get a reward.

Everyone who is submitting try and include some example dialog. I am no writer and It makes our jobs much easier if we have text to work with. I'll be monitoring this thread daily, but also feel free to start a chat with me or PM me. I'm happy to discuss ideas or answer any questions.

Referring to this "http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Random_Encounters_(Skyrim)" page I was able to try to match the proposed encounters to Skyrim's already existing random encounters for the sake of keeping the necessary scripting to a minimum -- at least I think that's about how it works.

- "Lost Netch Herder": can be translated from the "A Farmer's Painted Cow" event  

Smitehammer's suggestions:  

- "Order of Inquisition Ordinators escort": can be translated from the "Thalmor and Captured Prisoner" event

- "Dres slavers chasing escaped slaves": can be translated from the "Hey! You there! Take this!" event

Entreri's "strange traveler": can be translated from the "Drinking Companions" event.  

Glovenator's suggestions:

- "Mis-Conjure": Combination of the "The Aspiring Mage" and "Atronach Mis-summoned" events.

- "Outcast": almost exactly the "Dog vs Wolves" event.

- "Adolescents": Children probably will not be part of the core package.

- "Tolls": very similar to "Imperial Impersonators" event.  

...well you get the idea. Being able to copy paste most of these events allows for more variation within the same amount of time as opposed to scripting from scratch(probably?) so even though these will be simple events, they'll become stale less quickly because of the sheer amount of different events, agree?  

And please do excuse me for any grammatical errors, I'm not a native English speaker/writer.  

@Zlycher: If you guys are done with the basics and know what events you are going to use, send me a pm and I'll start writing dialogue for the actors.

5 Radiant quests and 5 Random encounters.

Okay here it is, Dunmer ashlands patrol is hunting in there territory when attacked by ascended sleepers, This event could replace imperial/stormcloak attacks and the event would only appear in the ashlands.

I can't write to save my life. Still doesn't stop my brain from throwing up ideas all over the lawn. I'll put them here in case anyone's interested :)

To summarise:

Pilgrims by the bushel! Pilgrims by the pound!

Hey I'm not sure if this is what you are looking for so I only wrote a couple of quests. I can lob out a few more if you want. I tried to give the player more scope to be evil in my attempts but I dunno how they panned out.

Thanks for the continued submissions guys! Like Smerk has said, we want these submissions in excel or word doc format. Bosch has posted an excellent submission right above me. Look at how he formatted his post when writing you own.

@ElcorJim - Instead of starting out with a bunch of variations, why don't you work on your best/favorite pilgrim idea and describe that in detail. If we want to explore variations of the pilgrim topic, we can discuss that after one solid example has been implemented.

@Bosch - Excellent submission! The layout of your document is good and you have some great dialog to go along with your ideas. I like the "barks" at the end. Not every encounter needs them but it's a good option to have.

@Mazeek - I'm only going to address your random encounter submissions and leave the rest to Smerk. 3 and 4 are the best because they are involved but take a small amount of time to complete. The others seem to be more along the lines of radiant quests as they pull your focus from what you were currently doing and onto a new quest.

I want to elaborate a little more on these encounters so everyone will get a better idea on how to detail them. In Skyrim, there are encounters that forced upon you (like when a thief runs up to you and gives you an item to hold) or those that rely upon your powers observation (like when two mages are fighting somewhere close to you). Regardless of the encounter, there is something that draws your focus into the encounter to a degree where you have to decide if you want to participate or not. When creating these encounters make sure there is some sort of hook that will pull the person in. 

[Edit] I've taken a couple of sentences out of my original post because they weren't communicating my thoughts correctly. 

Thanks for the kind words, to be honest it's not my first rodeo, I've written a scripts in the past for mods.

Anyway I'm a huge Elder Scrolls geek and love what you guys are doing and I'd love to help out. I hope I'm not out of line here but it might be an idea to create a template to help focus the creativity. That way you can have a standard way of presenting ideas. It dosen't even have to be as complicated as all that box stuff I did just a couple of headers like.

Quest name-

Location-

Characters-

Action-

It might be easier if there is a slightly more rigid format and accept submissions that way. Again apologies if this was out of line, it's not my intention to come across as preachy here I just wanted to offer my two cents. I'll fire out a few more quests. Writing these is pretty fun.

Right. So I might have put a little too much time into this, and I am not even sure what I've created is doable. I wanted to create some random encounters that were different, from what you normally would encounter. Probs to anyone who writes dialogue, it is harder than it seems :P 

I basically used your formatting Bosch. If anyone wants to use mine feel free to do so.

EDIT: I am wondering if the quests might be too specific/uncommon to be random encounters?

@Mace - Thanks for the detail you've put into your submission. I really appreciate the extra effort. I like the guar encounter but I think it could bear a little tweaking. The potion choices really don't provide any hints as to which one is the correct choice. Maybe instead the encounter could depend on a certain spell? The apprentice would ask "Can you cast X spell on my master to revert him?" If you have the spell you can choose to help him, otherwise you're out of luck. Just what came off the top of my brain, let me know what you think.

The cannibal encounter is cool. Not much more to say about it. I like that it doesn't divert your attention too much from whatever the player is doing. The encounter can be resolved quickly and the player will be on their way!

The one with the potion was simply to make the event more random, and to give it a certain "replayability". Pretty sure I just made that word up. I guess the dialogue could also contain hints as to which is the right potion. I just liked the possibility of 3 different outcomes, and the randomness of it. To be honest I don't mind if you adapt the ideas, and making it dependent on a specific scroll is most certainly an option :) 

If I suddenly get creative I'll post more! It'll be quicker now that I have the template. 

@Mace - I actually find "calm down, give him the black one" to be a hint in its own way. I find that its more confident and absolutely sure then the other option's despite them having the words "clearly" and "definitely". It's very straight forward. Of course people may have different opinions so maybe the dialogue options can be influenced by your alchemy or speech skill, like a true RPG would handle dialogue. With of course the option just to get it right on chance without any true knowledge. I do love how its completely random and in my opinion quite fun and the exact thing I love to see in RPG's,considering each choice has a completely different outcome. I can possibly see certain player's saving the game beforehand so that they can reload the game upon the chance of failure, so maybe there should be a option to back out even after you have accepted the stranger's request (people do have second thoughts). Really great writing by the way, I love both of the encounters and hope you consider making more.

Here's an idea I had since I always used to try and free the slaves in Morrowind, but they would never go anywhere. In fact, I think they just kinda stood there. This could possibly make for a small guild-like quest line to end slavery in Morrowind altogether (or is there a quest like that already?) or could just be you trying to fight injustice and occasionally getting a cool reward. For instance, instead of standing there, they could offer to lead you on a small quest/adventure, offer some other reward or just run away. More details below...

Hi there! Since the idle banter forum is mostly complete, I thought I could write some serious random events. 

EDIT: SO SORRY I POSTED THIS TWICE! If it can be removed, please do it.

comment deleted

Hi everyone! I got interested in Skywind recently and now I want to help you, guys, as much as I can.) Here is my idea of a radiant event: player meets on his way a group of skooma smugglers who need one more sword to be sure in deal's safety. I attach a document with a more detailed description, and I can write the NPC-s' phrases, if necessary. Hope that would help.

Another idea: in random points of the world player can see a strange guy who seems to be expecting the local soils. While talking to him you know that this man is an inspector of the East Empire Trading Company looking for new layers of minerals, such as ebonit. He seems to be quite friendly, but if you decide to kill him or say wrong things about Empire he'll fight back. (I suppose his stats are the same as stats of an Empire officer) On his corpse you can loot 100 coins and a potion of Cure DIsease Elixir. Player can meet such guys for several times in different parts of Vvardenfell scavenging around in search for minerals.

Interesting idea, although I believe the term is prospector rather than inspector.

Okay, I'll correct it. And what about the first idea with smugglers? Isn't it too complicated to realise?

Corrected version:

There is a legend about the "Stone Fire Men" who brought the light of justice to the land. Though the Bal Molagmer were thieves, they stole only from the unjust and gave to those in need. They vanished early in the Third Era, and have not been seen since. Special gloves were used by the Bal Molagmer to carry their burning stones from the Red Mountain. To rekindle the fires of the Bal Molagmer
 

my idea is to either have a hold up situation on the road sides and maybe some of the bal molagmer carrying the stones from red mountain sorry for the lack of details but if any one else would like to go more indepth with this then they can

Will there be Maiq the Liar encounters? :)

Is it a separately developed thing?

One idea that may be a bit difficult to implement as a random encounter worthy of repetition and is more likely to be fit as a one-time only quest situation.

The idea is to have a Moraq Tong executioner and Dark Brotherhood assassin clash over an unsuspecting target. That is a coincidence, but of the kind that is likely to happen. 

How big is the 'radius' of the random encounter?

The thing is, honestly, I would actually love to write a full quest myself on that idea. It is not a faction quest, but it may open up some insight into joining the Moraq Tong or finding out some info on DB (as far as they are not joinable). It would happen after the Tribunal DB assassin attack on the player. 

But as I see you don't accept new quests yet, so am not sure what to do with that. 

This has been touched upon, but it always bothered me that I spent so much time freeing slaves, but never saw them trying to escape Vvardenfell to Skyrim, Cyrodiil or Argonia. I feel like we should sometimes see small groups of freed slaves sneaking around in the forest (not along the roads, as that would seem stupid to them), trying to get a port so they could be smuggled to mainland Morrowind and then eventually escape. Perhaps, there should be guides (not really coyotes, but like the underground railroad) that can either help them hide or betray to slave traders along the roads. Just a thought. I can think about this some more and come up with some type of flow chart and dialog if you like the idea.

I don't think that it is necessary to associate a quest with this; it would just be something you randomly see at night. I think that abolishing slavery in all of Morrowind would be not be lore-friendly (the king abolished it later, I believe), but small groups trying to escape that you randomly meet, would be just the thing to flesh out the world. Perhaps there could be encounters in which you happen to become involved. Perhaps you can choose to alert a passing caravan of slave traders, or you can distract them while the escaping slaves pass. However, the Nerevarine doesn't have to become involved every time.

How about mass robbery schemes.  Bandits using sandstorms to attack villages and steal their goods.

Here is an idea 

What about a conflict betwean Great House members like House Redoran and House Talvani on the roads fighting to death like in skyrim with the rebels and the impirials

Also

We can add peaple who were robed and by talking to them they will mark the bandit hideout on the map or runaway slaves who will atack on sight.

I still have a lot of ideas and if you need me for the stories send me a PM

What about this:

The player wanders around the ash wastes, and a woman cries for help next to a broken carriage or something like that, and when you approach her, 2 bandits come out of their hiding places (like crouched behind something) and start attacking you, then the woman, who setted you up, runs away or attacks you. Got this idea from Red Dead Redemption.

Here I have the quest script. I will write  the following quest soon.