User blog comment:Flamedude22/Return of the Dwemer (Kinda...)/@comment-3217145-20130405003806

I've been thinking about the realm in which it could take place, and this is what I've come up with.

+Moonshadow (Azura)+ Azura supported the Chimer, who the Dwemer started fighting when the latter discovered the Heart of Lorkhan and tried using it as a power source. During the war, the Dwemer could have been on the cusp of developing some weapon to decisively end the war (like, I don't know...a giant robot? *nudge nudge*). At the last moment, Azura intervened and poofed them to her realm to prevent them from destroying her people.

(Alternately, the Dwemer chose her plane because of Azura's Star and the promise of great power sources, and/or to mess with her for helping their enemy)

Moonshadow is supposedly so beautiful that it makes mortals go half-blind. They could expand on this, such that prolonged exposure causes mortals to go mad, due to constantly seeing things they can't comprehend. They would keep running and fighting against Azura, but their machines would lose complexity thanks to their blindness, and start getting weird due to madness.

When the player arrives, they are nearly blinded. Someone (maybe part of the Dwemer resistance) snags them and brings them underground, where the darkness keeps them from fully seeing the beauty of the realm. The player works underground for a while, helping the Dwemer complete a visor or something that allows them to see above ground. When they emerge in the surface, they can choose to help Azura to crush the resistance, and be rewarded with soul-gem-related artifacts and some cool magic. They are also allied with the crazy Dwemer, and can walk around Moonshadow without having to shield their eyes. If they help the Dwemer, they get nifty robotic objects (like grenades, A GUN???, armor with adjustable enchantments, etc). The Dwemer take over Moonshadow and pretend to be Azura when dealing with mortals. The realm turns more grey an uninteresting, but shielding isn't needed.

(Btw, "Moonshadow" keeps with the two-words-as-one theme if used as the DLC title)

+Coldharbor (Molag Bal)+ Haven't given this a ton of thought, I just really want to go to Coldharbor. I think it would be doable too, since they'd be able to use the same height map and other stuff from the base game, just replace major landmarks (like cities/towers) with ruined or altered versions, and maybe flip the map on its east/west axis.

+Quagmire (Vaermina)+ This realm is cool because it's all about nightmares. There could be some mechanic that forces the player to sleep occasionally (they can only recover HP by sleeping, they have to go to sleep to switch between "awake" and "asleep" versions of the world to solve puzzles, there are evil plants with sleeping gas, etc), and whenever the player falls asleep, they experience some kind of nightmare. There could be different conditions to enhance the "fear" aspect. Like, you have to reach an exit while chased by monsters and running through acid; a similar situation, except the exit closes and you have to kill the monsters while standing in acid; sometimes death is permanent, and sometimes you're put in impossible situations and wake up perfectly fine when you die; you're standing under some spikes, and trying to run in any direction just moves you closer, so you panic looking for the secret way to escape but find none and eventually get mashed; and so on. I tend to feel like too much of a god at high levels, so a DLC that focuses on making you feel vulnerable and panicked would be awesome.

That's all for my ideas right now...any thoughts?