How much of our lore is uniquely Elder Scrolls and how much of it is a rip-off?

Zombocalypse · October 19

Here's an example...

Orcs in all fantasy settings are all rip-offs from Tolkien's works. But Orcs being a subcategory of elves. Now that is an Elder Scrolls original.

I guess my favorite original ESO concept is the Vestige himself being an empty husk of a creature who happens to be the protagonist. Also, some of the creatures in this universe are absolutely alien. Like the netches. But then you got warring nations which sooo 2000-D&D.

Benzux · October 19

As a wise man once said, welcome to the Elder Scrolls! Our Orcs are elves and our Dwarves are elves! (heck, even our cat-people were once elves)

The Elder Scrolls series definitely started out as more generic and heavily influenced by other fantasy of the time, but has over the years developed into something unique. I don't think it's fair to call anything a "rip-off", it's more so "here's a fantasy universe utilizing pretty standard fantasy things that have existed for decades".

To answer the question of the title directly, the majority of it is what I would definitely call "uniquely Elder Scrolls".

For some of my favourite bits of lore that I find fascinating and pretty unique, I can't say I've come across any other fantasy worlds where one of the major races arose from bioengineering performed by sentient hivemind trees from another world (or even possibly a previous Kalpa, depending on how you want to interpret things), and that said trees can continue to perform bioengineering on individuals when the need arises. I also like that the sun is literally just a hole.

Zombocalypse · October 19

Benzux wrote: »

As a wise man once said, welcome to the Elder Scrolls! Our Orcs are elves and our Dwarves are elves! (heck, even our cat-people were once elves)

The Elder Scrolls series definitely started out as more generic and heavily influenced by other fantasy of the time, but has over the years developed into something unique. I don't think it's fair to call anything a "rip-off", it's more so "here's a fantasy universe utilizing pretty standard fantasy things that have existed for decades".

To answer the question of the title directly, the majority of it is what I would definitely call "uniquely Elder Scrolls".

For some of my favourite bits of lore that I find fascinating and pretty unique, I can't say I've come across any other fantasy worlds where one of the major races arose from bioengineering performed by sentient hivemind trees from another world (or even possibly a previous Kalpa, depending on how you want to interpret things), and that said trees can continue to perform bioengineering on individuals when the need arises. I also like that the sun is literally just a hole.

Favorite bits of lore, huh? Well, I guess my favorite bit of lore are Orcs having a gorilla-harem-like society in their tribes.

I mean bro, having that kind of visceral motivation will force you to become the strongest tribesman.

Also, I sometimes just wanna say screw the arcane and let me just discover some still-alive dwemer and pay them lots of gold in exchange for them to build me a dwemer castle fully fortified with defenses and robot soldiers that I can control with some device. Let's see any puny necromancer trying to fight off my ballista-wielding army.

I like... Orc culture, dwemer technology, and then just give me years of Thu'um training with the Greybeards and I'll attempt a conquest of Tamriel.

prof-dracko · October 20

All media can be reduced to basic tropes, it's not fair to say that anything is stolen from anywhere. Tolkien himself stole most of his elf and dwarf lore from Norse mythology.

That said, the fact that the sun is a hole in the fabric of reality and not and actual celestial body, which also still exist anyway, is amazing lore writing.