Only a few days ago, the cliff racer-eyed Morrowind fanatic that is Joshua Wolens spied that Tamriel Rebuilt, a colossal mod that aims to put the entire Morrowind province into Bethesda's third Elder Scrolls game, appeared to be packing its silt strider for another major release.
Faster than a wizard imbued with Icarian flight, the modders made the news official—Tamriel Rebuilt is about to get a whole lot bigger, with a massive new update coming next week.
As Joshua rightly deduced, the update is called "Grasping Fortune", and it expands the mod's existing map by about a fifth. Thus far, Tamriel Rebuilt has expanded Morrowind out from the base game's northerly island of Vvardenfell to the central mainland and all the way up its northeastern peninsula. Grasping Fortune fills out everything directly south of the centre, extending Morrowind to its border with the Imperial heartland Cyrodiil.
Newly added locations include the city of Narsis, the second largest city in Morrowind and the powerbase of House Hlaalu (which, if you haven't played vanilla Morrowind for a while, you encounter fairly early in Vvardenfell's town of Balmora.) In a blog post about the Grasping Fortune update, the mod team describes Narsis as being "a bit of a holy grail" for Tamriel Rebuilt, initially designed more than 20 years ago and having been rebuilt three times.




Among the city's highlights are house Hlaalu's impressively detailed measurehall, the market quarter's grand bazaar, and a casino operated by the notorious Camonna Tong. It is truly humongous. The map of the sewers alone looks like it'd take several hours to explore.
Narsis is surrounded by an arid desert known as Shipal-Shin, which outside of Narsis has only one other town—Shipal Sharai. Otherwise, it's mainly inhabited by caravaners, ranchers and the odd Imperial fort. But the update also adds another region, the Coronati Basin, which features multiple towns and comprises mainly "thick mushroom mangroves" thereby making it the first place I want to go.
This all amounts to 140 dungeons to explore and 270 new quests. There's a short trailer showing some of the new areas in motion above. It mainly focuses on the desert region, which is not the most eye-catching part of the update. Presumably Tamriel Rebuilt is saving the glitzier locations for the release itself, which will happen on May 1.
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Rick has been fascinated by PC gaming since he was seven years old, when he used to sneak into his dad's home office for covert sessions of Doom. He grew up on a diet of similarly unsuitable games, with favourites including Quake, Thief, Half-Life and Deus Ex. Between 2013 and 2022, Rick was games editor of Custom PC magazine and associated website bit-tech.net. But he's always kept one foot in freelance games journalism, writing for publications like Edge, Eurogamer, the Guardian and, naturally, PC Gamer. While he'll play anything that can be controlled with a keyboard and mouse, he has a particular passion for first-person shooters and immersive sims.
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