The Elder Scrolls: Why Does Every Game Start With A Prisoner?
Why do we start every single Elder Scrolls in a prison? Game development is part of it — starting completely fresh is perfect from both a role play and gameplay perspective. However, there’s plenty of in-game lore regarding the Scrolls themselves, reincarnation, and mythical, destined figures that explain the prisoner's role. It’s a lot to take in, so let's dive into this slightly confusing bit of Elder Scrolls mythos.
“The true contents of an Elder Scroll are malleable, hazy, uncertain. Only by the Hero’s action does it become true. The Hero is literally the scribe of the next Elder Scroll,” as writer Michael Kirkbride puts it. If you’ve played any of the games’ main stories, you’ll know what an important role the Scrolls play. They tell of great events in the past and future, often helping to frame and guide the present. However, something that might not be immediately clear is their fluid nature. They change. That’s partly why they’re not so easy to read, blinding the ill-prepared and resulting in entire schools of scholars opening. The Scrolls aren't just magical books from ancient civilizations, depicting what will come and documenting what went.
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They’re ever-changing, and there’s a reason why. It’s all about the Hero’s own agency — the capital ‘H’ is on purpose. There are ‘heroes’ and Heroes, the former of which can be anybody who does something heroic while the latter is a proper noun to describe the legends of the Scrolls. The Hero can decide to forgo their role. They aren’t destined to do what the Scrolls say. They can disregard their journey like a player deciding they don’t want to do the main quest. For the Hero to have agency and free will of this
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