EBM WIP: 23 books + 4 spell tomes

News Update:

3-10-12

Despite being quite overbooked I found time to keep on writing for EBM. So far 23 books are written for the mod and 4 spell tomes have been completed as well.

EBM categories

The books can be sorted in several categories:

• General lore - more casual books expanding the lore slightly
• Scholarship - books with a scholar's point of view over a topic (magic most of the time)
• Religious - books with a faithful's point of view over religion
• Comical lore - more funny or entertaining books

General lore

• A Dish Better Served Cold
• Children of Shame
• Sakin the Smith (5-tome series)
• Telvanni Sweets
• The male witches (5-tome series)

Scholarship

• Anatomy of the Dremora
• Another Book of Daedra
• Beyond your dreams
• Interview with the Dremora
• Wild but not savage elves

Religious

• The Book of Q'amsha

Comical lore

• Dunmer tactics of guerilla
• Giant Mudcrab
• Khajiit's fleas
• Red Riding Hood

Spell tomes

For now there are 4 of them, all in the school of Destruction:

• Flames
• Sparks
• Frostbite
• Fire Rune

The Frost and Lightning Runes should come quickly as most of the text is shared. They should also feature their respective Rune staves, like the Fire staff above, as illustrations -- as the staff is also explained. Since the Daedric letters really made no sense at all I went for a slightly humorous explanation.

Also note that the Mysticism spelled that were dispatched to the other schools will be explained as Mysticism spells with an addendum saying the spell now belongs to another school. Otherwise, how could I explain that Detect Life is an Alteration spell though it has no effect on the material world, doesn't alter it in any way? Et caetera, et caetera.

The list of spell books is long and it will take time to write them all but I hope they can be appreciated XD.

[up: a few screenshots of the readable Fire Rune spell tome!]

In conclusion

So this is what you can expect for the first release of EBM. The spell tomes will require the additional Readable Spell Tomes esp to be read so you can choose to activate it or not, or activate it and deactivate it, as you wish!

You can also expect illustrations for the diaries of Sakin. Other books may get more illustrations as time comes. I also wish to try a little trick to reduce the weight of png images while preserving a nice transparency (if the compression is too high the transparent element get an ugly white outline). I'll just downscale the images and set a higher resolution in the code (while preserving a same ratio) and see if how much the distortion shows up.