While undeniably a classic first-person RPG, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind never quite lived up to its name. Sure, you technically were in Morrowind, but the game limited you to the volcanic island of Vvardenfell, with the mainland frequently spoken of, but teasingly just out of reach.
Enter the Tamriel Rebuilt project, a colossal (and frequently covered) mega-mod decades in development, aiming to expand the game’s playable area to encompass the entirety of Morrowind, cities, quests, characters and all. This week, the dev team rolled out its ninth major expansion and biggest update yet—Grasping Fortune—adding a vast new area to explore and what may be one of the biggest, densest fantasy cities in any RPG: The fruits of seven years of effort dedicated to this region alone, which you can read more about in the patch notes here.
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The Grasping Fortune expansion extends the map directly south of Vvardenfell, all the way to the far borders of Morrowind, although the most interesting part of this region is the sprawling city of Narsis, seat of power for the decadent House Hlaalu. It’s a dense hub of trade and crime, with bustling docklands. Whether you decide to cosy up with the powers that be, or embed yourself in the Ja-Natta Syndicate’s criminal underworld, there’s a lot to do, with the Rebuilt team boasting 270 new quests in this region alone and 140 new dungeons.
The city isn’t just big enough to make hiking through it an intimidating prospect, it’s also deep, with over 200 of the buildings having fully explorable interiors and a sprawling sewer network running through its underbelly. The scope of this expansion cannot be overstated.
The Tamriel Rebuilt team proudly claim that there are a staggering 2,500+ unique NPCs spread across this new region, 1,100 of them in the city of Narsis alone. For comparison, the entirety of Vvardenfell in the original game contained only 2,824 characters spread across its significantly larger land-mass.
In short, there’s a whole game’s worth of new Morrowind to explore here, and this is just one of many regions added in the mod. This (now-outdated) interactive map should give you some idea of just how much more there is to see and do. For a deeper dive, don’t forget the Tamriel Rebuilt segment of the unofficial Elder Scrolls wiki, but you should be fine just exploring by yourself.
You can get hold of Tamriel Rebuilt over on its Morrowind Nexus page, although I highly recommend picking up OpenMW as well, a modern source port that—while not strictly required—is supported by Tamriel Rebuilt. Failing that, you’ll need the Morrowind Script Extender, a more vanilla option that enables much of the mod’s fancier features. Plus, keep an eye open for an upcoming interview with the team behind this absurd labor of love.
