Good news everyone! I found a fantastic interview with Leomon Tuttle, where he goes into lots of deep ideas. To start with, almost all of TES's lore is given from an in-universe perspective, and the bias that comes with it.
Written in Uncertainty recently had the pleasure of having an interview with ESO Loremaster Leamon Tuttle, and we chatted about the lore in ESO, the character of Sotha Sil and the Tribunal, how Antiquities was developed, the joy of Nietzsche and a whole bunch of other stuff. Thanks to Leamon for...
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A: But how does that perspective, which is incredibly broad, how does that perspective inform how you write about Tamriel? or Nirn, just keep it in broader?
LT: I mean, well, with respect to Elder Scrolls, generally, or specifically, it’s tremendously important because everything that the player gets is through the lens of one of those characters, right? There’s nobody outside of the game saying “it’s XYZ, and that’s just how it is!” or whatever. So you have to have a really solid understanding of how people in that universe think because that’s how you’re getting the information. So it kind of feeds on itself. It’s like you have to know the lore in order for the people in the game, who know the lore to explain the lore. It’s like this weird kind of cyclical thing. But yeah, and just thinking about needing to be able to think about it in that sort of a way.
Following directly from this, this brings about how the Monomyth is the story that everyone is adjacent to, even if there are different interpretations of how it all happened.
A: And what’s that mean for how you think about the process of making lore? This is possibly getting a bit of ahead of ourselves from the questions, but I just thought this was too good a segue to ignore. When you say, “think about what they’re thinking about and how they’re thinking about it”; so one character in the lore says they’re seeing a circle and one character in the lore says they’re seeing a square, right? Is there a cylinder behind that? Is there some sort of… I’m trying to describe, describe something visually…
LT: Are you talking about like, sort of a pan Tamriel, like shared narrative kind of thing?
A: Yeah.
LT: So I mean, there’s, there’s things like the Monomyth that kind of sets the table, it’s sort of the [story] that everybody kind of is adjacent to. You may not necessarily be on the same page with with how it all is laid out, but there is, there’s a kind of a shared basis of basic cosmological ideas that everything kind of taps into. So in that way, even if you’re looking at things, and you’re looking at them in a completely different way. You know, I think that when cultures are able to understand each other, even when those those differences are pretty, pretty big, you know?
With the antiquities system, the team sought to blend gameplay and lore, as well as to show people things that they loved from places & eras ESO hasn't really visited (such as the Alessian Era), as well as showing them something new all together. Some things they'd want to keep a mystery, but they'd always be happy seeing people get excited about certain lore they put in the game.
A: Yeah, yeah. And just thinking about how that truth gets presented, the antiquities system is an absolutely fantastic way of doing that, merging lore and gameplay in a way that we haven’t really seen before in the games. When you were trying to conceptualize the types of lore that you could develop for that, what was the thought processes, and.. I don’t really want to say the word limit. But that’s kind of what I’m getting at.
LT: So we wanted to do two things. We wanted to expand on the stuff that people are really passionate about, and they know a lot about, right, like the Alessian stuff. And the things that people have been have been asking to see for a very long time, but hadn’t actually seen yet. So there was that. And then there was also there’s, let’s show people things that they have never seen before that there isn’t a whole lot of underlying lore behind. And so you’ve got the kind of familiar and the unfamiliar. And you have a lot of people worked on it, Andrew Young actually created most of the the list of the things that we should be looking at.
And, you know, he kind of batted around, saying, oh, this can be this, this can be cool. And this can be cool. And we hope to keep adding to it. So, there’s going to be more and more cool things that you can throw in your house or wear or whatever.
Yeah, so, I mean, in terms of in terms of limits, there are definitely things that we want to keep a mystery as much as possible. So we had, bouncing ideas around and were like “ooh, it could be this!” and then we’re like “no we can’t do that, we can’t do that.” But yeah, I’m happy with the list of things that we put out. I think people really dig them. I remember going on to Twitter, the day after it all came out and everybody was losing their minds like, “Oh my god, did you see the Alessia statue!?” or whatever, and it was really cool, really rewarding. Everybody is really happy.
With TES, they seek to combine the great cosmic issues with the everyday mundane issues (the secrets of the Universe, who are bricks made, etc). Thus, with the in-universe opinions on the antiquities, there are a varying number of opinions on different artifacts.
A: One of the things that fascinated me is that it’s a different type of lore, that’s being put through than things like, well, for this podcast. We’re often framed around the big questions, the “deep stuff” in inverted commas, right? These big, cosmic mysteries and so on. It feels like Antiquities is almost going entirely the opposite direction, going into the day to day details of life, and the kind of day to day “ceremonial” and the way that people’s lives are lived in a way that we haven’t really seen that much before, in how the lore has been presented.
LT: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right. I was a history major history and philosophy major when I was in college. And I mean, history is all about, you get the big themes, but it’s also all about the mundane stuff, right? It’s because that’s your window into that world, right? So we do it with the “stealies”, too, in terms of just stuff that you find around the house, when you’re robbing somebody blind, whatever they can do to get a look into Tamrielic life. But personally, I really like getting to the kind of like, nitty gritty, hard, specific stuff about like, is the statue of Boethra, or it’s a statue of so and so. And it’s like, that’s cool. But what is it made of? How did they – who made it? What is it? Those are the kinds of questions that I think are really interesting, because not only do they give you a better sense of what’s going on in the world, but they also make things more real, because you’ve got to think about that stuff.
I think it’s sometimes it’s, you want to get into these huge things, and then you’ve got to have that strong foundation at the bottom, or it doesn’t feel real.
A: That’s something that I found that several fantasy universes will kind of skip out. There’ll be creation myths and the big cosmologies, and there’ll be dragons, but at the end of the day, how do they make bricks?
LT: Right. Exactly. And I think there’s two schools of thought. Both are tremendously flawed, like, one of them is, as a writer, “I’m going to focus strictly on these huge themes, and it’s going to be unbelievable, it’s gonna blow your mind!” And then, like you said, there’s no, there’s no floor to that. Or you can do like me sometimes and get so caught up in how do you make bricks, then spend hours looking at brickmaking. And then it’s like, was that was that really relevant? Did we need to know everything about making bricks? I think they inform each other. I think you need both to make a compelling universe, for sure.
There are multiple universities across Tamriel.
A: Are there any other universities on Tamriel, now that I think about it, because I saw the University of Gwylim getting associated with this, and it seems to have its fingers in a lot of pies, all originally developed off the back of one text that talks about the movements of men across Cyrodiil, if I remember correctly, but it seems to be the only real, what I would call academic institution as such on Tamriel. Am I missing some somewhere?
LT: I mean, there’s, you’ve got the College the Sapiarchs, so there are there are other universities. I think that that the the Gwylim guys have universal appeal, which is why everybody’s invited in a way that some of the other universities are a little bit more, you know, at arm’s length.
Leoman Tuttle says that the 36 Lessons of Vivec had an influence on him when writing The Truth In Sequence, although he wasn't just trying to replicate that again. Instead, he presented a series of texts similar to the 36 Lessons, with big cosmological issues within.
A: Then in the 36 Lessons you have “Anu and his double, which Love knows never happened” so I can’t help but see some similarities in there.
LT: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I would be lying if I said the 36 Lessons had no influence on me. Like I was just doing my own thing. If anything 36 Lessons are so brilliant, that I think if I had said “I’m gonna do 36 Lessons again!”, it would have been a mess. I think that would be a ridiculous attempt. So it’s it’s definitely it’s own thing and we wanted to present you know, big, crazy heady, cosmological issues in it and so I think it’s evocative in ways that are similar to the 36 Lessons, I guess. There’s a lot of you know, kind of like Zen koans and you know, weird stuff going on in there.
So yeah, there’s there’s definitely similarities, but yeah, I definitely did. not go in trying to try to do 36 Lessons: part two, because that would just be a mess. I love I love Love, love, love, love that book series. So, yeah, it’s,
On Argonians, Tuttle says they are his favourite race as they're totally alien in physiology, culture & faith to all the other peoples of Tamriel, and that they'd consider the very idea of revolution to be an illusion (in relation to Dagon, who's spheres include revolution). He also says that Shadowscales are interesting due to their relationship with Sithis.
A: Because you’ve mentioned before, Argonians are your favorite races in all Tamriel? Or maybe the favorite race? Is there a reason for that?
LT: Uh, yeah, there’s a lot of reasons I like that. They’re weird. They’re alien. They have a completely different faith system, a completely different cultural organization, different physiology. They’re just completely other than everybody else on the continent. And I think there’s something really fascinating about that. And then we’re given an opportunity to develop some of the specifics of how that society works. When you take a society and you take the idea of time out of it, like what happens? Everything about the Argonians that we’ve developed, it all comes from that central idea that time is is far less relevant than most people think it is. And you combine that with their relationship with the Hist and you get a really interesting culture. That’s very, very different, and I like different things.
A: Yes. I’d almost say it’s maybe not time, but progress. I was talking with, in the latest Selectives Lorecast that we recorded yesterday, we were going through Mehrunes Dagon, and one of his big things is revolution, I was curious as to what the difference was between what Dagon does and what the Hist have done in relation to Sithis with the Argonians, this idea of there’s no progress, but there’s constant change.
LT: Yeah, exactly. I think Argonians would baulk at the idea of revolution, because that implies that there’s something to revolt against. And for the Argonians, that entire idea is an illusion, there’s nothing, there’s no thing that you’re rising up against. That’s the kind of folly that makes all these other people build these giant castles for no reason, because they’re all gonna fall down. And there’s that time just goes, and you just go with it, and whatever happens happens, and change is inevitable, there’s nothing they can do to really change it, to get in the way of it or to rebel against it, or to do any of that. You just have to flow with it. Sithis is a kind of an avatar of change, I think that’s how they make that connection.
I think Shadowscales are interesting in terms of their relationship with Sithis, but yeah, they just the idea of, not not so much. I don’t know, I feel like “revolutionary” implies that there’s these discrete moments in time, where you have to change course, so you have to do something. And it’s just that’s not at all the case. It’s that all that is an illusion, the only thing that you can maybe say, there was a revolution in history was, the period of transition between the stone building parts of their history, and then the current parts of their history. We don’t know how long that took or why it took place. But I think that that the idea that there’s these giant stone things that last a really long time, I think that’s kind of antithetical to the basics of their whole system
There is no single monolithic Argonian culture, and the Argonians are all divided into different tribes and groups.
A: Yeah: And we’ve got, I think, at least two distinct Argonian subcultures existing in Oblivion in various ways, because we’ve got the ones in Coldharbour and the one and the ones in Clavicus Vile’s realm at the moment, I don’t think they… no, they won’t have broken away and formed Umbriel yet. So there’s definitely all sorts of bits we can dig into with the Argonains since, and again, you’ve been very, very careful to say that all these creation myths are “for one tribe and not otherwise attested”.
LT: Exactly. Yeah, cuz that’s one thing Lawrence, made very clear too, before he left is that the idea that there’s this monolithic culture that all Argonians ascribe to is ridiculous, that just doesn’t work. The only kind of Pan-Argonian idea, I think, is just this idea of change and just having to having to go with it in whatever way seems appropriate. And also this idea of radical forgiveness, which is, if you have a society that’s full of all these tribes with disparate ideas about what you should do, and it hasn’t just collapsed in on itself in constant perpetual war, there must be something there. Which kind of keeps the peace or whatever. And I think the idea of the virtue of forgetfulness, I think is something that that is cool, because people get so caught up in holding on to things and saying things can’t change. And if you just say, no, it’s okay to let that go, let it pass, you know. I think that there’s something profoundly healthy about that. I think the Argonians are kind of the only culture that have figured that out because everybody else gets so stuck. I think.
Certain Argonian factions in the most recent era (the 4th Era) seem to have moved away from the ideals of the older argonians, and in the case of the An-Xileel, are moving more towards conquest of huge swaths of Tamriel. Whichever the reason is, it's either due to the Hist, or a collective ignoring of the Hist.
A: – they seem to be more accepting of outsiders. At the very least I don’t know about acceptance of change as such. Because they’re caught, they’re relatively hidebound to tradition, still. You’ve still got the Silvenar, the Green Lady and that structure. But because everything is perchance with the Bosmer and so on that, again, they they’re edging towards that.
And I think, actually, in the more modern Tamrielic history the Argonians are possibly swinging away from that idea a bit.
LT: Oh, with the An-Xileel and stuff?
A: Yeah
LT: That’s one of those interesting things is trying to try to figure out how that works. How do you how do you go from this… and it’s kind of talked about a little bit in the Blackwater War books, is how do you have this kind of culture that very rapidly, can become very scary. I mean, you have the whole Argonian slave narrative. We definitely wanted to get away from that during Murkmire, we wanted to present Argonian culture separate from that whole part, which has, unfortunately become one of the central pillars of how they identified Argonians was this like, so… But then you think about, once the whole An-Xileel stuff happens, and conquering huge swaths of Tamriel or whatever, you’re like, “Well, shit, where did that come from?” They had it in them, right? Like, I mean the idea that they charged into Oblivion and pushed all the Oblivion Gates closed and stuff. I always thought that was really cool. But yeah, how do you go from fun, pastoral kind of lay in the mud, everything’s cool and groovy, to we’re gonna become this incredibly warlike people, and I think that some of it has got to do with the Hist, right? I mean, either the Hist thought that that needed to happen for whatever reason. Or maybe there was a concerted effort to ignore what the Hist was saying? I don’t know. But it’s really interesting. It’s a very interesting period in Argonian history. I’m really interested to see where that goes if we keep moving forward in the timeline.
The duality (or what seems to be duality but may be much more complext) conflict between Padomay and Anu is brought up in a very interesting way, with Tuttle saying these forces may be bigger than what we think they are.
A: Yeah, I think that’s, that’s pretty much everything I kind of wanted to run through. It feels like we’ve just gone through it out of a break a bit of a breakneck pace. Is there anything else you wanted to go through?
LT: Yeah, well, no, I mean, if we had the whole thing about, in your podcast, I thought it was really interesting that the whole thing about the contrast between kind of the Padomaic values of the Chimer and Velothi stuff versus the Anuic stuff, in Clockwork City so I’m happy to talk about that too, because I thought that I think it’s really interesting.
A: Okay, just to pick up all that whole Anuic-Padomaic thread then. But I think that’s always the time that it’s all it’s always a term that I don’t like the Anuic versus Padomaic side of things. Because in my opinion, Anu doesn’t act Anuic, and Padomay doesn’t act Padomaic
LT: [laughs] In what way?
A: In the Anuad, Anu is desperate to get back to how things were, he wants to recreate Nir, as close as he can, or what Nir created, which was the Twelve Worlds. And so he’s not wanting things to be static, he’s trying to go backwards. Whereas Padomay, he doesn’t particularly want change, Padomay just wants Nir for himself. Being Padomaic is being selfish, in my opinion, if we’re going to go with what Padomay actually did, as opposed to actually wanting change. I don’t know, I’m just not happy with Anuic and Padomaic as descriptive of stasis and change.
LT: I know they’re meant to be cosmic forces, right? It’s tough. I mean, all those dualisms, just by virtue of the fact that the dualisms, 99 times out of 100, it’s BS, right? It’s sloppy thinking, it’s basically saying, “I’m going to take this incredibly complex world or these incredibly complex concepts, I’m going to distill them down to these two opposite things, and then that’s how the world works”. I think it’s always more complicated than that. It has to be. I think it makes complete sense that Anu and Padomay might be behaving oddly, because I think they’re they’re bigger than what we say they are. But I think that stasis and change are important concepts, even if they don’t necessarily correspond with how those forces work in practice, I feel like that there’s two competing ideas [that] really inform a lot of the cultures for sure. So yeah, I think it’s one of those useful binaries that isn’t necessarily true.
Sotha Sil comes from a 'Padomaic tradition' with the Chimer/Dunmer, but eventually came to live by a more Anuic philosophy (although thinking over it, the Clockwork City is Padomaic as well in a way, as it's always changing and being upgraded and changing the world of Tamriel/Nirn/Mundus to reach Tamriel Final). Thus did Sotha Sil bring about his theory that there is no Padomay. Leoman Tuttle also says he had a really hard time getting the idea of Clockwork City to work in a Padomaic context.
A: Yeah, it’s, it’s a useful tool.
LT: Right. Exactly. So with with Sotha Sil, he comes from a quote-unquote Padomaic tradition, because he was a Chimer right, that was their bag. And I think there’s a specific rejection of Azura at one point, where he’s basically like, “we’re done with that, we’re gonna be the gods that you guys can’t be or won’t be” or whatever. I think that in and of itself means turning their back on those forces., I don’t know, I think that that pushes him… I think Sotha Sil’s story, for me, personally, is I’ve always had a hard time reconciling the idea of Clockwork City or the idea of order, or kind of a unified purpose, or any of that stuff. I had a really hard time getting that to work in a Padomaic context. It’s tough. I don’t know how you do that. And, like, I mean, the idea of a clock, right, just like a clock is when I was thinking about it, I was like, that’s a really cool thought experiment for Anu and Padomay, generally, because it’s this thing that always goes in circles, and it doesn’t move of its own accord, but there are things that are always moving in it. There’s change built into the system constantly, but it’s like change that doesn’t change. It’s change that’s reliable, or that just kind of keeps going in circles. And I think there’s there’s something really fascinating about that.
A: It’s a paradox machine.
LT: Yeah, exactly. So that I think that idea gets into most of this stuff with Sotha Sil is this weird kind of paradoxical binding of change and stasis and trying to try to make some sort of coherent whole out of those ideas. Tamriel Final, for me, at least, is the idea of taking a mess and turning it into something that’s whole and perfect and works exactly the right way. And, and I mean, I said that I thought about Republic a lot when I was reading some of the stuff. And I mean, the idea of Republic is a tremendously Anuic enterprise, right? I mean, you can’t have utopia, because if utopia changes is not utopia anymore, right? Like, because it’s already… you can’t get better than that. So I think that just just when you talk about clocks, when you talk about perfect order and things winding and working in the right way, I think that you can’t talk about that without a degree of Anuic language. And I think that, the idea is that you can bind those ideas together if you can pull in a very Anuic idea, but still preserve the idea of change, the necessity of change. you get a cool outlook.
Leoman Tuttle describes Almalexia as someone many people come down hard upon, and he feels bad for her as she's acting like trying to make things better for everyone and cares about what's going on and doing the best for people.
A: Sotha Sil feels to be of that similar mould, a kind of that kind of white villain, if you like.
LT: Yeah, I was surprised by… I mean, I’m not surprised that people like him, because he’s a cool character, but I am sort of surprised that people think he’s such a great guy. You could make an argument that he’s preferable to the other two, kind of, but he’s… I don’t know. I think that he’s tremendously flawed. And I think that some of the things that he does, are not great. Not at all, and it’s always surprised me that people I mean, people come down so hard on Almalexia.
A: Yes
LT: Like, so hard. I feel so bad for her because she’s she’s busting her ass for so long, trying to make everything cool for everybody, and actually acting like someone who actually cares about what’s going on and trying to do the best for people and stuff. And, and then….
The interviewer picks up on this terminology ("
acts like someone who actually cares"), and asks more about that, to which Tuttle brings up how Sotha Sil was ready to let people die in pursuit of what he sees as the greater good, and even though he feels bad about it, he still performs these actions (which is why Tuttle loves the Tribunal, as they're flawed).
A: You said she was acting like she cares.
LT: Yeah, I guess. I don’t know. I’m very keen on Almalexia, I think she gets a bad rap. But I think, if you really think about what Sotha Sil was up to or think about the way that he lives? I think it’s less… I mean, he’s absolutely prepared to let people die in pursuit of what he sees as the good. And I mean, the jury’s out, right. Is what he thinks is the good actually the good? I don’t know. I mean, I can’t see that far into the future. I mean, you know, what happened, the Clockwork City, and what happens with the Dunmer might become instrumental to something at some point. But this washing his hands of all the various crimes that he needs to commit in order to do that. I mean, he’s, he feels bad about it, but he’s still doing it. So I think Almalexia gets a really bad rap, and I think he gets off a little too easy. That being said, I love both of them. That’s part of the reason I love the tribunal so much is because they are so thoroughly flawed.
When asked what a series of texts like The 36 Lessons or The Truth in Sequence would be like for Almalexia, Tuttle says he believes it would be something more for the common people (as she is the guardian of the common people), and she provides a foundation for people to build on. He says that Almalexia is incapable of telling the truth in a way that Sotha Sil & Vivec can, as the truth is scary (such as how you could be infiltrated by Daedric forces at any time).
A: Yeah. I’d almost say I’d like to see what Almalexia’s long form books would be but I think we more or less already have them. We have like the homilies and all the little fables and stuff that get attributed to her. She’s more cultural, if I can put it that way, And she’s trying to get under the skin of your average Joe in a way that Sotha Sil and Vivec don’t really try to.
LT: Exactly yeah, I think she’s of the hoi polloi, right. Like, yes, it’s kind of trying to… and I think there’s value to that, right? I mean, you can’t… as much as I love the 36 Lessons, you’re not going to hand that to some Dunmer kid and say, hey, this is everything you need to know about the world. She’s there to actually provide a foundation for people to build on. The only thing with her is, I think that she’s fundamentally incapable of telling the truth in a way that Sotha Sil and Vivec can. I think partially because the truth is really scary, and also because when you tell if you’re if you’ve appointed yourself to be the guardian of the common people and you live in this incredibly horrifying existence that could be infiltrated by Daedric forces anytime or whatever. you’re not you don’t want to… again, you don’t want to hand that to some Dunmer kid and say “yeah” [laughs]. So, I think that she’s not as she’s not as truthful. But I think that she’s still working her ass off and and really, you know, doing the work. She’s putting in the work in a way that the other two don’t. So I’m very keen on Almalexia, everybody give Almalexia, give her a break!