The Unfinished Tale of Hlormar Wine-Sot, and Systemic Antics

Recently, I started playing Morrowind.

In the last couple weeks many people have got on-board the Oblivion train, and I found myself wanting to join in on the experience… just without actually wanting to play Oblivion. This is partially due to the BDS boycott of Microsoft, but also because I’ve just never personally cared for Oblivion outside of the sheer, memeable goofiness of it (which I reckon might still be better experienced in the original than the remaster). Morrowind, on the other hand, I already owned. I knew of the OpenMW engine and the various vanilla friendly mods that help bring it make playable at a modern standard without overhauling it away from its original form. Moreover, it has always seemed the strangest and most compelling game of the series. Why not give it a go now?

The context for the story I’m about to tell you is that I’m playing a wood elf witch hunter and at the time was about 4 hours into the game. I’d explored a small but decent chunk of the map, helped a few NPCs and advanced a couple of bigger quests, but I have a problem: I am very bad at killing things. My build is such that I am meant to be good at conjuration magic alongside archery and blunt weapons, but at the time I didn't have access to any of those weapons, nor spells, nor the money to afford either. The best weapon / spell I had was a magical dagger I could summon at will, but because I have functionally 0 points invested in daggers, most of my attacks just don’t hit enemies. I might be able to kill a small worm or bird by just standing next to them and stabbing the air for a while, but against any actual threat? I die basically immediately. But by mostly just running through the enviroment faster than anything can hit me, and utilizing loading screens to escape more bothersome enemies, nothing thus far had managed to truly pose a threat to me making progress.

Cut to me ambling along the road outside of the town of Caldera when I meet Hlormar Wine-Sot. Hlormar is naked (bar underwear), and he says that’s because of a witch, one who used magic to knock him out last night and steal all his possessions (clothes included). Having the vague sense of where the witch might be, he asks me to help him find her and get his stuff back. This is the kind of small, standard quest RPGs are full of, and it seemed like Hlormar would accompany me and help fight any enemies that came our way. So I agreed to help him, hoping for some easy rewards.

After a bit of exploring, we find the witch in question, Sosia Caristiana. Against my expectations, she wasn’t immediately aggro’d towards us, nor in any sort of enemy encampment base. Instead she’s just chilling on the side of the road, in similar fashion to how I found Hlormar. Talking to her about the situation, she gives you a very different version of events: “I took Hlormar on as a travelling companion for protection only for the road to Caldera. He was getting entirely too friendly for his own good, to the point where I actually had to cast a sleep spell on him. Just to teach him a lesson in manners, I stripped him and left him by the road.” She says Hlormar can have his stuff back in three days, just by meeting her back at the Mages Guild in Caldera.

And… this all sounds pretty reasonable. Hlormar didn’t exactly give off great vibes, calling on the player to “find her and extract her entrails”. So I go back to Hlormar and tell him about Sosia’s offer, and he gets very standoff-ish with me. He asked whose “side” I was on. I said Sosia’s. And then he started punching me in the face.

This is where my problems begin. For one, Sosia doesn’t care to fight Hlormar with me, so I am fully on my own in this combat scenario. At first this seems fine, because Hlormar’s attacks don’t initially do regular damage, instead targeting my stamina. What I did not know prior to fighting Hlormar though is that when you run out of stamina via an enemy attack, you just fall to the ground for approx. 15 seconds and can’t do anything. And when I’m fully on the ground is when Hlormar starts doing actual health-based damage. It’s still not alot, Hlormar has to knock me down like 3 times in a row for him to kill me, but boy howdy is he good at knocking me out. This is in part because when the player character does stand back up, you still have functionally 0 stamina, allowing Hrolmar to very easily just knock me down again. And if I try to run away, well, running in Morrowind drains stamina, so all he has to do is get close enough to hit me again and I’ll fall back to the floor. And Hlormar is very capable of catching up to me because Hlormar has a higher athletics skill than me, which determines run speed. Add onto this what I said before, that I basically cannot hit anything, Hlormar included, and one might describe this scenario as “pretty fucking bad”.

After dying enough times to properly realize all of this (imagine me doing alot of quicksaving / quickloading throughout this whole ordeal), I realized the only way I was getting out of this was escpaing Hlormar, or getting something else to kill him for me. Without any easy loading zones to slip through, my initial hope was instead to get enough distance between me and him for him to just despawn or at least lose track of me. Now, while just running allowed him to gain on me, I soon realized that if I both ran and jumped constantly, I would move slightly faster. Thus, I began bounding across the hills, specifically looking for big, weird objects to get behind or onto to slow his advance. While this all kinda worked in terms of gaining and maintaining distance, none of it put him off, and inevitably he always seemed to catch back up and resume beating me to death.

Next, I wondered if getting something else to aggro him might help distract him, so I bounded into a big pit that I hoped would be full of monsters. Unfortunately, the wildlife in Morrowind can actually be kind of chill sometimes, so the monsters we did come across didn’t really seem to care about us. However, we are now both stuck in a giant pit with no easy escape routes, and thus I’m resigned to just keep bouncing my way through the labyrinthine crevices that make up this area, hoping to find some other opportunity. Eventually I see the town of Ald’ruhn in the distance. I assume that there will be guards there, and that of course they will definitely step in to protect me once they see Hlormar land a punch on me. I arrive, find the nearest guard, and let Hlormar land a punch on me, and watch as the guards idle next to my now prone body as Hlormar beats me to death.

In the next life, I interact with the nearest door to load into a building and try to wait a few in-game hours, hoping Hlormar would leave or despawn while I’m in another area from him. But it’s illegal to wait inside of the building for too long, so that doesn’t work, and when I emerge Hlormar is standing directly in front of the door, in prime position to continually beat me to death everytime I try to leave. After enough tries though, I manage to do some very quick jumps and dodges to maneuver around him, getting onto the roof of a building he can’t find his way onto. And by pulling him near one side of the building, only to leap over the other side and run to the nearby Silt-strider, I was able to fast-travel my way south to Balmora, far away from Hlormar’s punches. I was finally safe… for now.

See, one of the benefits of playing with things like OpenMW is being able to absolutely crank certain settings far beyond their original values. My “actor draw” setting is quite literally off the in-game scale, alongside my view distance. The result is that I’ve not yet seen an NPC “pop” in, as they seem to be loaded far before they would otherwise naturally come into view. But what was at first a cool technical overhaul that allowed for a naturalistic and immersive play experience… well now it’s a problem.

Hlormar Wine-Sot will likely load in when I am within some unknowable range of the town of Ald’ruhn, or his original spawning location. When he does load in, he will most likely start running straight for me (he does not need line of sight to know where I am), and by the time I see him, it will be too late to run away and try to unload him. And if he reaches me, he will punch me in the face until I fall to the floor, and then he will continue beating me till I’m dead. For the foreseeable future, my playthrough of Morrowind will need to contend with the ever-present threat of Hlormar Wine-Sot, a naked, angry nord without any worldly possessions, who could come at me from essentially any angle unannounced, and whose only goal in this world in to beat my ass.

I tell the tale of Hlormar in part because I want to tell everybody about Hlormar. It’s just such a juicy, weird, funny, deeply gamey story. But I also keep rotating it in my head because when I realized what was happening, what I had gotten myself into, I became obsessed with living out the consequences of my actions. That this scenario, as dire and nearly unrecoverable as it was, is also the kind of systemically driven, emergent problem that I don’t just love to solve, but that I love to be unable to solve.

The reality is that, while Hlormar is probably the “best story” to emerge from my playthrough of Morrowind, in terms of it being fun to tell and to read / hear, it’s not the only good story I've had. I’ve helped a lady make a religious pilgrimage, only to find out that two large, T-Rex like creatures consider the sought-after religious site their home, at which point they ate me alive. I’ve swam across a river totally blind, because it was filled with carniverous fish that would try to eat me, and the only way I found to avoid them was to use boots of “blinding speed” to swim too fast for them to catch me. I have done many, many, slapstick-style raids, stealing everything I can hold while an army of enemies runs after me, only for them to be eternally locked behind a loading door. And, as mentionned, I’ve spent multiple combat encounters spanning multiple real-world minutes each to fight enemies like “worm” and “rat”, just stabbing the air with a magical dagger while having my toes nipped at, praying that one of my attacks would land.

Some of these stories are results of the vintage of Morrowind as both a set of systems and an overall piece of game design. Bethesda presumably hadn’t yet figured out a system to easily track NPC actions / intentions from across loading zones, and the notion that making a CRPG also essentially required implementing D&D style combat, misses included, was very common. So too was the notion that a player could simply reload a save if something was too difficult, and so allowing players to put themselves into genuine, game-ending danger was fine, even part of the genre. Add onto this the mountain of weird technical adjustments I’ve made, from an entire new engine with massively increased draw distance, to a bevy of “Vanilla friendly” mods where I would be lying if I claimed I knew what they did. The result is a game where I don’t know what to expect, nor can I even tell what is intended behaviour, and that’s incredibly exciting to me as a player. Morrowind, both as a game and as a world, feels genuinely wild, untamed and unknown. The notion of being a stranger in a strange land has never felt quite so apt.

What Morrowind, or at least this version of Morrowind, allows for is what I’m calling “Systemic Antics”. What I mean by a “Systemic Antics” is that every “story” I’ve discussed so far was not an intentional / planned narrative / mechanical moment, but rather an almost emergent hijink or prank enabled by the systems of the game. A funny / interesting thing did not “happen”, so much as funny / interesting things are constantly able to happen, and sometimes I just happened to trigger them. I.e, it’s narratively intended that Hlormar will try to beat my ass if I don't take his side in his questline, but that he does so in such a specific, dangerous, comical way to my current character is a kind of “Systemic Antic”. That I can, by running a stupidly far way away, use a giant insect bus to fast-travel outside of his loaded range and thus escape the encounter is a “Systemic Antic”. That Hlormar will continue to try and track me down in the future when he spawns back in, becoming a sort of acciddent, emergent hunter / nemesis to my player, is a “Systemic Antic”. These antics arn’t just enabled or controlled by the systems of the game, but emerge from the systems of the game and revel in them.

I think the best way to think of the above “Systemic Antics” is like a good back and forth between a DM and player group, where each side “one’s up” or subverts the others intentions in ways totally allowed by the game systems or narrative set-up, yet that still shock / surprise the other party. In this same way, it’s also worth considering that these systemic antics require buy-in not just from the game (in that its systems need to be set-up to work in this way), but also from the player, in that I needed to be open to engaging with the game in this way. I very easily could have reloaded a save just prior to aggro-ing Hlormar and avoided the questline till I felt equipped to handle it. I even could have restarted my whole game to get a better character build that more easily allowed me to engage with the game systems in a traditional way. Would this be more fun? I certainly don’t think so. But when I think back on my early attempts to play Morrowind at a younger age, and my chafing against my inability to hit enemies, it certainly reveals that I had to “mature” into being willing to play with a game in this way.

Morrowind is hardly the only game to have systemic antics, nor are RPGs always pro-systemic antics. Immersive Sims are probably the true home of the systemic antic, which games like Skin Deep, Mosa Lina or Hitman seem deeply hooked into. But tracking where a systemic antic emerges, or even what counts as one, is pretty tricky. Narrative-heavy or puzzle games might try to push back on having systemic antics to preserve the core, intended experience, but look at any speedrun of a game and you will probably catch plenty of systemic antics. Systemic antics are a form of both player and game expression, but given this almost winking relationship between the two, they also tend to poke the edges of the game in strange and revealing ways. What kinds of systemic antics are appropriate for a given game is going to need to be addressed on a case-by-case basis. But if you are like me, and you consider games at their core to be a kind of dialogue between game and player, then there may be no better proof of this conversation than the systemic antic. So in general, where you want to talk to or guide the player, it’s best to keep the number of systemic antics down by smoothing out the edges of your systems, accounting for edge-cases and odd interactions. But if you want to allow the player not just to come up with their own solutions, but their own problems, and via that combination, their own stories? Then leave the edges of your system rough, and let the systemic antics flourish.