Speaking on the FRVR Podcast last week, former Bethesda writer and designer Kurt Kuhlmann was asked about the concept of “Dragon Breaks”—time getting all weird on account of magic and stuff—in Elder Scrolls lore. The biggest Dragon Break as far as Elder Scrolls fans are concerned: “The Warp in the West,” the series’ post-facto determination that every ending of The Elder Scrolls Chapter 2: Daggerfall happened at the same time. On account of magic and stuff, you see.
Kurt Kuhlmann
“It came from the fact that there was this timeline that someone had made—this was from Daggerfall days—and there was this big gap in time. And I’m 100% convinced that, in reality, in our world, that was a typo. Someone just typed a date wrong in the timeline, skipped like 3,000 years or whatever by accident. It’s right between the end of one year and another. So the last date in this year, and then the first date [in the next], there’s this gap.
“And [TES writer Michael Kirkbride] thought that was awesome. So he wrote up the thing about the Dragon Break, and I think he was using that also because there was the issue of Daggerfall [having multiple endings].
“Normally, you don’t worry about that in a game. If you want to have a sequel refer to the past, you’re just going to have to pick one of those [endings] and move on, and just say in the sequel of the game, ‘What actually happened was this.’ The player could have done all these different things, but we can’t have that.
“Mike was like, ‘No, what we’re gonna do: What if all of them happened, and you got Numidium, and it was all crazy metaphysical stuff. So why not?’ Everyone sees all the different endings, and no one knows what really happened, and it’s this crazy metaphysical thing.”
I love this story: Simple serendipity, a workplace oopsie, accidentally setting in motion the continuity and story beats of a billion-dollar franchise. Kirkbride is memetically famous among Elder Scrolls fans as a boundary-pushing loremaster who added a lot of weird flavor to Morrowind, so his affinity for the timey-wimey, fucky-wucky potential of the Dragon Break absolutely scans.
As far as I can tell, it doesn’t seem like the series timeline Kuhlmann mentioned was ever publicly available—this must have been an internal lore bible sort of thing. While TES Arena and Daggerfall designer Ted Peterson would write the in-game book, “The Warp in the West,” for Oblivion, Kirkbride and Kuhlmann appear to have introduced the concept in Morrowind with the books “Where Were You When the Dragon Broke” and “Dragon Break Re-Examined” respectively.
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Kuhlmann noted in the podcast that he attempted to introduce more grounded, historiographic ambiguity with his treatment: What if the confusion was a matter of bias, transcription, and record-keeping, rather than metaphysical forces? Of course, Dragon Break Re-Examined also deliberately references events in Morrowind’s future as the past, implying the skeptical book itself is yet another example of timey-wimey shenanigans. An all-timer bit, for my money.
Elder Scrolls aside, the problem of preserving and representing RPG choice across multiple games in a series is something no studio has managed to fully “solve,” if such a thing is even possible. I’ve always appreciated Bethesda’s “fuck it, we ball” approach to the continuity with stuff like The Warp in the West. See also how Larian’s Divinity: Original Sin 2 almost completely contradicts the story of Divinity 2: Ego Draconis (sans Original Sin) from eight years prior. I love RPGs so much, man.
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