The Elder Scrolls 6 in the Summerset Isles would be cool, or so recently unearthed Daggerfall-era dev D&D notes have convinced me

As someone who admittedly struggles to feel at home whenever I try to go back and play the older Elder Scrolls entries, I’m surprised how fun I’ve found reading through some notes from a D&D game some devs on the series played around the time of Daggerfall’s development. Said notes have just been made public following the recent death of Julian LeFay, a key figure in the early days of Bethesda, who hosted this freshly unearthed campaign and another more well-known one.

Scans of the notes have been published by the Elder Scrolls lore buffs at long-running wikis the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages and The Imperial Library. “The following documents were recovered from the estate of the late Julian LeFay with great care given to help preserve them by his family and the TES Community,” a librarian at the latter wrote. “With the permission of Julian’s family and Bethesda we wish to dedicate this page to Julian Lefay and his impact on The Elder Scrolls and the wider community.”

The lore buffs write added that both of these campaigns LeFay ran – dubbed Sumurset and Dwynnen respectively – “helped to shape much of the early lore as the history of Tamriel was being laid out”. The Dwynnen one appears to have been known of for a while, but the one set in Sumurset was only discovered via these newly published notes.

The UESP and TIL have been given permission to share something very special with you all. There’s been longstanding rumors about the original D&D games that helped influence The Elder Scrolls, with it even rumored that Arena started out as one.

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— uesp.net (@uesp.net) 10 January 2026 at 23:39

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While the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages folks plan to put up a post at some point this week delving deeper into what the notes mean, they’re well worth having a scroll through as is if, like me, you’ve spent a not insubstantial chunk of your life elder scrolling. Among the masses of character bios you’d expect from any D&D adventure, the hand-drawn maps were among the first things which caught my eye. There’s one of the isles of Auridon and Alinor with major cities labelled, and I was surprised how closely it mirrors more modern Elder Scrolls maps of the region, given major tweaks like Cyrodill no longer being full of jungle have been worked into the lore in the decades since LeFay’s campaign.

From a character perspective, the notes on Mages Guild founder Vanus Galerion are an intriguing read, with his role as one of the main player characters in this campaign seemingly having set a lot of his backstory in stone. There’s one page which simply lays out his origins, with a single handwritten note next to that blurb asking the eternal question: “How about a witch in the wood?” There’s also a list of Vanus’ mates and where they live, which I’m hopeful no-one hands to would-be mage blackmailers.

Beyond that, a bunch of descriptions of Altmer royals and barons have reminded me how much fun could be had messing with snooty High Elven toffs if a future single-player Elder Scroll was to be set there, as I have with Oblivion’s litany of potato-faced Imperial nobles. “Ill-natured and mean-spirited, absolutely everybody hates him,” reads the opening line about a baron called Alastor. “He, however, doesn’t care since he is very powerful.” What a guy. You can almost hear the Dark Brotherhood contract being written up.

Then, there’s Deryk. “This baron has a twin sister with whom he constantly wars for possession of the barony. For one hundred years they’ve fought, sometimes he reigns at the end and sometimes she. There is a rather lavish prison on the outskirts of the barony wherein the loser is usually held. For a period of twenty years they jointly ruled, but the result was disastrous.” There’s a quest you could solve by gently placing buckets over each of their heads so they can no longer detect they’re ruling alongside each other.

Even if you’re not thinking about the GTA-sized Turkey Bethesda have had in the oven for ages as you read them, the notes are a really nice way of helping folks remember LeFay’s contributions to the series, so it’s wonderful to see them being preserved for prosperity like this.