The Elder Scrolls Online has just dropped a new trailer for the Necrom expansion ahead of its June 5 launch, giving us a further look at Apocrypha and a new expanse of Morrowind. There are spiralling tendrils made of books, luscious mushroom mountains, and swamps filled with spider-like demons. But at the core of it is Hermaeus Mora asking us to change the future.
Hermaeus Mora offers you a fraction of his immense power "If you help avert the fate I have foreseen." The camera then pans to a small portal in front of him, leading to a Morrowind city under siege by Daedra. We then get more shots of player parties fending off monsters and delving into Apocrypha to fight Lovecraftian horrors before returning to the city, now occupied by the enemy.
The camera pans up from the burning city, where Daedra herd the citizens as prisoners, into the night sky. Here, we see a looming figure with giant horns and red eyes, likely another Daedric Prince. As for which one, we'll have to wait to find out. But given the lack of floating eyeballs and gooey tentacles, it's clearly not Hermaeus Mora.
While it paints a picture of Hermaeus Mora helping us to avert disaster, even making us grow more powerful in the process, if there's one thing I've learned from The Elder Scrolls, it's not to trust Daedra. Especially not one who ensnares people with the promise of knowledge just to leave them in an endless library full of monsters for eternity. We saw what trusting him leads to in Skyrim - backstabbing. Septimus Signus expected the heart of a God inside a Dwemer cube, enlisting us to open it for him, only to discover a special, completely unrelated book.
Aside from gods likely tricking us, or at least hiding crucial details, the trailer gives us at a look at how ESO is expanding on Skyrim's Apocrypha. It's not just the vast endless swamp we found in the Dragonborn DLC, as there are giant rocky cliffsides floating in the sky with ruins of Hermaeus Mora's temples suspended in the air. We even get to see too-many-legged, slightly humanoid, and very mouthy monsters. Nightmare fuel.
And if you recognise the voice narrating the trailer, that's because it's the same Hermaeus Mora as in Skyrim. Wes Johnson is reprising the role, and you may know him elsewhere as Sheogorath, Molag Bal, Oblivion's arena announcer, and Boethiah in Morrowind. He didn't come back for the same roles in ESO, but made his debut in the MMO with the Markarth DLC as Ard Caddach, paving the way for his return as the Lovecraftian tentacle monster.