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 sever.

2023

On the process of writing lore for Betrayal of the Second Era (2023-09-05)

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 (2024-02-09)

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 (2024-02-22)

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 (2024-03-15)

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 (2024-03-28)

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 (2024-05-18)

The Gehenoth

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 (2024-09-27)

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 (2025-02-07)

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

Impromptu QnA on Discord (2025-04-04)

btw, i am actually doing some elder scrolls research rn, so i will leave discord up and answer questions if anybody has them (but please don't ask me rules questions, haha. shannon is better at answering those) even happy to respond if people want to know "why didn't we do X or Y instead of the way we did do it"

"doing research", aka playing some eso

that actually is what i am doing, haha whenever we start doing story content for a new province, i have to run around in that province and do quests and things so i can get the vibe of the place, who the big players are, etc

Did you have any hand in picking the list of cheeses for the pack?

Cheeses of Tamriel

yes (although they were all approved by bethesda). i don't know if it was mentioned on the stream but a lot of these cheeses have only ever been described in elder scrolls books, so anthony is the first artist to ever draw some of them for an official release, anyway

I hope we get a few more deepcuts in the future like the Stormhold Crystals

all up to what they let us do at bethesda but we definitely have some deep cut stuff we're going to propose

but i shouldn't breathe a word of what it might be, because we haven't gotten any of that approved yet. still in the development/story proposal stage

the quest stuff takes the longest to do. the classes and skill lines and things like that are already in internal testing

Since this is turning into an AMA... how much input did Bethesda have into the mechanics/rules of the game?

they had very little input into the base game mechanics in a direct sense, but a little more in an indirect sense. for example, they had a huge amount of say over the maps, including that we had to stay within the bounds of what is traversable in ESO (a fair requirement). and so something like that led to the way skyrim is split up in the game they weren't saying "well, mechanically, you have to do this." but our games' mechanics are really tied to theme, so sometimes if they had a theme note, the mechanics might need to change slightly but generally they were very trusting that we knew how to balance the product

Was Pale Fingers a Falmer leader or just a champion?

just a tough falmer guy. not a leader

I'm glad y'all brought about deslandra to life we needed a significant bosmer mage

aw, thanks. we wanted to make a villain who was not the normal kind of elder scrolls villain in terms of demographics. it feels like most main TES villains are male and usually belong to one of the more imperious races, like high elf or imperial, so we wanted to highlight somebody who felt different and had slightly more altruistic (if misguided) motivations

Did something change about her motivation over the course of development? Some earlier posts seem to imply she might have originally been intended to be part of the Worm Cult.

there was an earlier version of the story where she was working on her own plan from within the black worm cult. the final version of the game deemphasized this somewhat, although certainly she does work within the cult sometimes (that's why we have an anchorite deslandra unit)

Oh speaking of changed details! Is there any reason the Rat enemy was changed to "Skeever Pup" in the final game?

Artbook mockup that shows the original name of the "Skeever Pup" enemy to be "Rat"

regular size rats don't really attack you in ESO, so they requested that we change it to something more aggressive

I liked seeing xivilai moath back. I'm glad you addressed his nature as Mehrunes' son

I am a big Star Trek fan, and one of the best things about Star Trek now that there are almost 1000 episodes across various shows is that you can do an episode that's like, "oh, what about this weird thing that happened in some one-off episode years ago? What are the ramifications of that? How could you follow up on it?" Stuff like xivilai moath is a good chance to dig stuff up and make the game and the whole elder scrolls world feel more alive and integrated with its different chapters

It's a shame you didn't get your chance to include the Gehenoth

Maybe we'll ask again one day if we do more region specific enemies 🙂

Did you look at the Bestiary list on UESP in particular at all in your research?

yes we used UESP a LOT a lot a lot

i don't know how much i've mentioned of this lately but even though some of the team members are longtime elder scrolls heads, i was not. so i had to learn all of this stuff as i went. so i played a bunch of most of the games, and then i read a lot on uesp now i feel like i know it very well but it was a crash course for sure the nice thing about coming at it from the outside as well as the inside is that i think we found aspects of elder scrolls that are personally interesting and highlighted a lot of that. i think it makes aspects of BOTSE stick out as unique within that world

Whats the stance on the timeline? Are the events happening throughout the provinces like taking place concurrently but only one end game happens ever? Currently on UESP we've been treating it like all of the main story events must have "happened" but all the endgames are "what if" different accounts where there isn't a true ending

i think that's a valid take. the way we treat it in-house is that she is working on all of these projects simultaneously ... not that she is in multiple places at once, but that, say, while she's working on the you know what in morrowind, she's also trying to figure out how to gain access to you know where in cyrodiil, and then in your activities in the quests, you track her to one of those locations

it's kind of like the warp in the west at the end of daggerfall. they sort of all happened, in a way 😛

but i think you guys are taking a cool approach to be clear that's my perspective on it, i'm not trying to make any kind of claim on canonicity

Forgive me if this has been asked by the way- But are there any names, even if just an internal joke name or something of the sorts, you all use to refer to the adventuring party/player characters in Botse? UESP has a page dedicated to the various protagonists of each game, including spinoffs, so even a title or "template" name would do wonders for documentation aha

we didn't have one, but we saw that uesp started referring to it as "Hero of the Outer Watch," right? we thought that was neat!

A stamp of approval on a community name is just as good! Even if unofficially like this, nice to know the team liked that name !

Thanks for the answer

i can't speak to the way bethesda handles that stuff but to be honest, i have been very appreciative of the way people are interacting with the game and making it their own, and to see the way people are processing it and making it fit is more gratifying to us than issuing a "ruling," most of the time 🙂

but yeah, we thought that was a cool name!

Do you have a favorite region you worked on? Or even just an aspect that was especially fun to research?

salem's favorite region is morrowind. mine is probably valenwood. in terms of research... hmm. i really enjoyed coming up with things to do in the towns. i know some people think the towns could use more personality, but i think if you read the town write-ups and then look at what you can do in the town squares and city effects, i think we did a good job at matching them up and making them feel like their own little places i also liked finding the obscure stuff like the phone game stuff or the eye of argonia or things like that and putting them in

or like, one i don't think anyone has seen yet is there is a letter in the video game, that is the demands of the painted eye, which is this kind of terrorist group in ESO https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Online:Demands_of_the_Painted_Eye

and if you see in this letter, it mentions a character named Himandoril who is imprisoned in ESO and there is a quest in morrowind where deslandra frees himandoril, who is in prison for arson and she wants him to help augment the REDACTED THING with fire canisters so there is all sorts of stuff like that sprinkled throughout the game

Love tie-ins like that

there is one we're planning for this one that is maybe our silliest one ever but i'm so jazzed about it

I liked that your artist combined all the logos from the circle of champions teams to their general logo

Circle of Champions Logo

yeah, bethesda gave us the freedom to design new logos for the circle, eyes of the queen, and of course the outer watch. and they had a few guideline suggestions for outer watch and eyes, but then we had some freedom to do what we thought would be neat and i agree, our artists are great! those logos were actually done by chelzee lemm-thompson, who is one of our graphic designers

You also gave that faction a good backstory as they are not really expanded upon on eso

that was one of the most fun factions to write for because we were basically like "well, they're tamriel's closest thing to a professional sports league" and so most of the quests are exploring the ramifications of what that would mean

Were there any cheeses they considered but decided against doing?

Beetle cheese and mammoth cheese were bandied about but ultimately abandoned because we wanted all of the cheeses to be in wheel form, because it was funnier for them to all have the same profile

Favorite Elder Scrolls creature? Or minor race?

i like the wood orcs

oh, you know who i really like is the sload

i also would have loved to put in some of the really obscure races like the lilmothiit or the imga but those aren't featured in any TES games outside of lore so those are a truly tough sell

I love how the Minotaurs look in Betrayal

federico makes everything look great. he did all of our enemy art

I wish there were more cases in TES of being able to be friends with the minor cultures. Like Goblins, Minotaurs, Lamia and such

yeah. we wanted to do a bit of friendly interaction with some goblins but weren't able to get it in. we do have some (semi) friendly interaction with daedra though!

On the division of work (2025-04-11)

For the base game, we all contributed to various aspects, but the general breakdown was basically like this:
JC: Core game design concepts (particularly the character building aspects of the game) and providing feedback and direction on all the other aspects of the game as they were completed.
JW/Michael: Feedback and contribution on various important elements in the early stages of design (Michael also wrote the rulebook, which was a huge undertaking)
Logan: Most of the classes, items, delve cards, and skill lines
Salem and I: The quest/keyword system, encounters, basically anything you see in a gazetteer... and then most of the "development" stuff (ie, tweaking abilities and getting balance right and making sure everything was feeling good).
(re: story - I did a final writing pass on most of the stuff but Salem and I worked on the world-building and lore together and a lot of the jokes you love in the game are Salem's. We're both credited on writing for a reason!)

On if there are any plans to include M'aiq the Liar (2025-04-11)

Certainly has been discussed!