Aurbis

Preamble

As you can probably tell from the site's name, I'm a pretty big Elder Scrolls geek and lore nerd. TES games are far from perfect, and Bethesda (both Bethesda Game Studios and the parent company Bethesda Softworks) has it's own share of problems as well, but they still manage to fill this weird niche of open world, immersive, first person RPGs featuring hand-crafted world spaces and quests.

The games' lore also has this weird, love-it-or-hate-it "open source" quality, where the story writers used to collaborate with fans when the series was in it's infancy. Most of the lore is also presented as "in-universe", from the perspective of a multitude of unreliable narrators, many with their own biases. Add on top the infamous Michael Kirkbride who is responsible for some of the more wacky out there lore concepts that draw many an idea from things like Gnosticism, Hindu Buddhism and the writings of people such as Aleister Crowley, and the end result is a kind of canonity where the whole idea of "canon" is... Uncertain.
Kirkbride (or MK, as he's known in the community) is also a very polarizing figure, many people are fans of this metaphysical insanity and weirdness he brings into the Elder Scrolls universe, but perhaps equally many have a strong dislike for his stuff for being too weird, edgy and/or intellectually masturbatory. As for me, personally, I tend to like MK's stuff more than hate it. I can totally see why some people don't, though.

Apart from being kind of a niche sub-genre of RPGs with some wacky lore, the community and fandom around it is (most of the time) pretty nice. Lots of cool, creative people around, making cool art, music, mods, fan fiction, or just interesting discussion surrounding the games and the lore. The standard stuff, really. Also memes. There's some spicy memes in the Elder Scrolls community, for sure.

Useful links

Here's some useful links related to TES games. I'm not related to any of these projects, sites or subreddits in any way unless otherwise stated.

Information & Discussion

For general TES information and discussion about the games and it's lore.

UESP. The go-to wiki of all things Elder Scrolls.
The Imperial Library. TIL is the place where you can find every bit of in-universe text, from all the books (and their different versions) from all the games, to out of game texts like Q&As and old Bethesda Forum roleplays. An amazing resource for people interested in first-hand lore sources.
TESLore Subreddit, a great place for lore discussion. Not for the faint of heart, and always keep in mind that canonity being what it is, always take what people say with a grain of salt and check your sources. The more interesting discussion is usually about lore interpretation, after all.
Other notable subreddits include: Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim and the general ElderScrolls sub. For art, there's ImaginaryTamriel, and for spicy memes and circlejerk stuff, there's not better (worse?) place than TrueSTL. For modding related stuff, I recommend SkyrimMods and TES3Mods for Skyrim and Morrowind respectively.

Engine re-creations

Here's some of the more noteworthy engine re-creations for the main Elder Scrolls games that I'm aware of. There's a few more that aren't listed here, but they're either (seemingly) dead, or so far behind in development when compared to these, that I'm not going to list them here. If they ever reach feature parity of any of these, though, I'll gladly add them here.

OpenTESArena, not yet playable as of Feb 2021, but making very nice progress.
Daggerfall Unity. Completely playable, basically superior in every way to the DOS original. Tons of QoL stuff like modern resolutions, FoV slider, mouselook with click-to-attack, proper mod support, things like that. This is my 'go-to' way of playing Daggerfall nowadays.
OpenMW. Also my go-to for playing Morrowind. Not compatible with the latest MWSE Lua mods and stuff like that, but it does have some features from MCP as options, as well as having basically none of the bugs and engine limitations of the original. I've played OpenMW nightly (i.e. experimental) builds since 2016, never crashed even once and the performance is night and day compared to vanilla. Things like cell pre-loading in the background practically removes loading screens, making cell transitions instant. Just like the others on this list, OpenMW is not yet "complete" as it's still in (very) active development, but it's absolutely playable. I've sank hundreds of hours into it with heavy mods on top and had zero problems. That being said, some of the MWSE Lua mods do make me a bit jealous at times, but it's hard to go back to the "jank" of vanilla after playing OpenMW for so long. And OpenMW is planning on supporting all the Lua goodness eventually, but that's a ways off still.
- There's also a multiplayer fork based on OpenMW called TES3MP, but it's a separate project (for now, the plan is to merge later, last I heard). It's a bit behind on the main branch so it's missing some of the newer features of OpenMW, but the actual multiplayer portion works beautifully and is nothing like the various "multiplayer" mods/hacks of the past, as it's implemented on the engine-level so it's very solid. Fun with friends as a 'co-op experience', though there are a few public servers as well.

Sadly (but understandably) there's not yet any promising engine re-creations for Oblivion and Skyrim that I'm aware of. That being said, OpenMW as a project has ambitions of eventually supporting them both if possible, at least in some capacity. There's been some experimental stuff by cc9cii that looks promising, but it's still in the early stages.
Many people, myself included, do subscribe to this dream of OpenMW eventually becoming "OpenTES" and supporting all the 3D games under the same roof. But that's pretty far in the future, the OpenMW team and contributors are working hard on getting the engine (and editor) up to speed first, despite cc9cii's personal experiments. Or so I understand it, at any rate.

Modding

Most mods by far are hosted on the Nexus, under the respective games. There are other sites, of course, but Nexus should always be the go-to, unless you're looking for extremely niche, super old, and/or deleted/abandoned mods. For Morrowind some of the older stuff can be found on Morrowind Modding History, though many of them have been migrated to the Nexus as well, permissions allowing. Modding-OpenMW.com is also a great resource for links to mods and mod lists that have been verified to work on OpenMW, with additional installation instructions and notes and such, if deeded.

Notable modding projects - Morrowind

Currently under construction!

Tamriel Rebuilt
Project Tamriel

Notable modding projects - Skyrim