The Big Time

Balmora. Capital of House Hlaalu in Vvardenfell. The first city that most people will see in Morrowind.

Atmospheric!

Most of my interactions here revolve around the most important person in the city, Caius Cosades Nalcarya of White Haven!

My new best friend.

Nalcarya is an alchemist with 3,000 gold on hand. She sells a complete set of master-level alchemy equipment, a grandmaster-level mortar and pestle, and, most importantly, infinitely restocking supplies of Alit Hide and Muck. The relevant formula here can be expressed as:

Alit Hide + Muck = Potion of Drain Intelligence

Morrowind doesn't have poisons in the same way that Oblivion and Skyrim would, so these potions are intrinsically worthless (unless you're exploiting the bug to refill your magicka by temporarily reducing your Intelligence to zero). Merchants, however, will gladly buy them from you. This allows you to kick off a positive feedback loop where, once your Alchemy skill hits about 30, you can sell these potions for more than the cost of the ingredients. You can then buy more ingredients, make more potions, increase your Alchemy skill, and (depending on your class) occasionally level up and increase your Intelligence. Repeat until every merchant in town is out of money.

Of course, this requires that you have a sufficient Alchemy skill to start the process. This being Morrowind, the best way to increase Alchemy is (of course) to make some potions. This prompted Gavis to take up a new hobby of breaking into people's closets, stealing all of their groceries, and converting them into Restore Fatigue potions. (Most of the items that Morrowind treats as "food" have the Restore Fatigue effect.) I leveled up a few times during this process and was visited by a Dark Brotherhood assassin, who kindly donated his armor to my cause.

Spiffy.

The Tribunal expansion breaks the intended Light Armor progression by introducing the Dark Brotherhood armor, which is the second-best light armor in the game (inferior only to Glass armor) and is available immediately, which is why I didn't bother buying armor in Seyda Neen. Glass armor is available at Ghostgate, but I'm in no hurry to get there. Once I exhausted Balmora's possibilities, it was time to head to Vivec.

Sunrise.

Exploring Morrowind's population centers led to my noticing something I hadn't before. Not only are there no children in Morrowind, but there are very few couples, either. Almost everyone lives alone. Not including children is an obvious thing to do: You really don't want to have child characters in a game where being able to kill absolutely anyone is a selling point. The lack of couples does seem strange, though. Creating a Morrowind NPC can't be very difficult, since there's no need to give them unique dialogue. Would it really have been that hard to add an additional person to each house?

The Oren family, one of the few couples in Morrowind. I suppose they could be brother and sister, though.

There's a few items in Vivec that are worth picking up. One of my mods added an enchanter to the Foreign Quarter Canalworks that sells some nice stuff, including the Belt of the Guar (Constant Effect Night Eye and Fortify Fatigue) and the Ring of Soul Lightning (Soul Trap + damage). I also grabbed a Merisian Club (Restore Fatigue) from the Temple and a Daedric Longsword from the St. Olms Underworks. Best of all, I got my hands on my first piece of endgame equipment: the Necromancer's Amulet. It's held by Arch-Mage Trebonius Artorius in the Vivec Guild of Mages. I managed to get in a sneak attack with a bow, which had the salutary effect of aggroing only Trebonius himself, while the other mages stood there and watched as I murdered the Arch-Mage. Although I did get a murder bounty, the Guild Guide was happy to teleport me back to Balmora so I could pop over to the South Wall Cornerclub and get that cleared up.

So much better than the Skyrim version.

Now that I have regenerating health, I think it's about time to make Morrowind my oyster. There's some nice stuff on the east coast that would look much better on me; we'll see if I'm ready.