• Overview
• Changes
• Versions
Rational Names 2 aims to provide "rational", i.e., descriptive, easily sorted and distinguished names for many of items in Oblivion. Spells are now given ranked names ("Flare I", "Flare II", "Flare III") as are potions, magic scrolls, staffs, soul gems, alchmemical apparatus, and standard enchanted weapons, rings and amulets. Books, notes and letters are also given better more descriptive and better sorting names ("Note, Brugo's Take...", "Handbill, Jerall View")
Rational Names 2 is a fairly major revision and extension of my earlier Rational Names, which was itself a combination/extension of DoofDilla's Recolored Potions, 0.31 Sorted, and Moho's Ranked Spells. Readmes for those mods are appended.
Note: I have not included DoofDilla's icons and textures. You'll have to get and install DoofDilla's potions recolored mod and do whatever ArchiveInvalidation and/or BSA file munging you need to do that on your own.
So, assuming that you've done that, just unzip this mod to your Oblivion\Data directory, and enable it in your loaded mods list. Note that the Rational Names esp replaces both DoofDilla's recolored potions esp and moho's ranked spells esp.
I would suggest that you place Rational Names fairly early in your load order (the default date should pretty much do this anyway). Unfortunately, this means that anything else that edits the same items will override Rational Names' naming scheme. However, you can use the the "Import Object Names" feature of Wrye Bash (available starting with version 0.30) to import the names from Rational Names.esp to any other mod. E.g., I use it to import the names to Unofficial Oblivion Patch and Oscurso's Overhaul.
Generally, the naming scheme is designed to group like items and clarify differences between similar items.
• Ranks:
• Magic items that come in ranked levels use a base name plus a roman numeral ranking.
• For enchanted weapons, the rank corresponds to the base weapon type, which also (usually) corresponds to rank of magic.
• Iron I
• Steel II
• Silver III
• Dwarven IV
• Elven V
• Glass VI
• Ebony VII
• Daedric VIII
• Potions:
• Remove "Potion/Poison of".
• For poisons, prepend "X".
• Sigil Stones
• Add descriptive names and roman numeral ranking.
• Staffs:
• Change "Staff of the XXX" to "Staff of YYY", changing XXX to YYY as necessary, so that it works without a definite article.
• Amulets/Rings
• Standard amulets start with "Amulet". Might be nice to change Necklaces, etc. too, but that may remove too much flavor.
• Standard rings start with "Ring". Could also change other rings, but that might be too awkward ("Gold Ring" to "Ring, Gold"?)
• Books
• Drop leading "A" and "The".
• Some long book names are shortened to better fit in inventory list.
• Journals start with "Journal,"
• Notes start with "Note,"
• Letters start with "Letter,"
• Letter and note names are then extended based on content of note, author and/or recipient.
• Handbills are now "Handbill, [name of shop]".
• Broadsheets are now "BHC, [article name]" (BHC for Black Horse Courier).
Synonyms are used for enhancements of and attacks on attributes.
Attribute Enhancement Attack Health Healing Wounding Magicka Charging Sundering Fatigue Resting Tiring Agility Grace Fumbling Endurance Fortitude Frailty Intelligence Acuity Idiocy Luck Fortune Doom Personality Amity Enmity Speed Alacrity Slowness Strength Might Debility Willpower Resolve Apathy
I've used new pseudo-prepositions to indicate the type of affect for weapons, jewelry, staffs and potions. The negative effects are used with negative versions of the attribute affected. Spells and scrolls are a bit more varied and use different terms to differentiate between touch and target.
Effect Prep Touch Target absorb ab tap steal fortify ad raise damage de bind clamp drain en blight
Actually, it's a bit more complicated then that, with skills, and primary and derived names having different terms. This may be tweaked in the future to make it simpler.
I've set the date of rational names to be fairly early, which means that just about all other mods will load after it. Again, you can use the "Import Object Names" function of Wrye Bash to import RN's names into any other mod. (E.g., Unofficial Oblivion Patch.)
The main thing left is armor, which I'm a bit reluctant to do because Bethsoft got very creative there. Other than that, there's lots of things that can be tweaked.
If you would like to make some systematic changes to your copy of Rational Names, I would suggest that you use Wrye Bash's Object Names export/import feature. I.e., export current set of names (to csv file). Then edit the csv file in your spreadsheet program. Then save and reimport it back into rational names.
• Added {{BASH:Names}} tag to description for use with Wrye Bash's Name Patcher feature.
• Changed weapon rank names to match material.
• Added arrows, amulets and necklaces.
• Changed from "no" to "de".
• Misc. tweaks.
• Add sigil stones.
• Fix a mispelling.
• Substantially revised naming scheme.
• DoofDilla: Potions Recolored
• Moho: Ranked Spells
• Wrye: Combination and extension.
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- Artistic resources (meshes, textures, sounds, etc.) included with this work may be included in unmodified form with modified versions of this work, so long as their authors are given credit proportional to their contribution to the final work. Note that artistic resources may not be modified, or extracted from this work, unless permission is given elsewhere.
This mod simply renames purchased spells according to their "type" and rank. So now, rather than having your 5 "X fire damage on Target" spells scattered all over your spellbook, they are now renamed such that they appear sequentially, e.g.:
• Flare
• Flare II
• Flare III
• Flare IV
• Flare V
In most cases the first rank of the spell was used as the "base" name, unless it was just a terrible name, or ambiguous, or using another name allowed more clarity. All the area-effect damage spells for instance were named after their "X Storm" rank, to help identify them easier.
Spells gotten via quests and such generally do not fit into the same pattern as purchased spells, so they have not been renamed.
I also considered making spell names more generic to make them even easier to find (e.g. Ghostwalk -> Invisibility), but seeing as this mod already loses some spell flavor, I figured I might as well keep the slightly oddball names in most cases.
When using the main tab of the spell book, ranks may sometimes be interrupted with something like: Dispel IV, Dispel Other, Dispel V, etc. due to the imperfect sorting of Roman numerals and similar names for different spell types. It doesn't bother me though, since I never use that tab :P
• 1.0 Initial Release
This mod replaces the default 3D Potion Textures and Interface Icons by colored ones. It will also sort your Potion list by adjusting the Potion Names if you wish (Sorted and Unsorted Version included). At the moment, the recolored 3D Potions are only available with the sorted Version.
• Red: Restore Health
• Yellow: Restore Fatigue
• Blue: Restore Magicka
• Purple: Fortify
• Black: Special
• Orange: Restore / Cure
• Green: Damage / Drain
• Cyan: Resist
• White: Vision Enhancing
• Gray: Buff's & Debuff's
• Different icons for weak/medium/strong potions (may it be size, form or color, i have yet to decide)
• Different "Glow" Amount for weak/medium/strong 3d potions
• 0.3.1 - 2006-05-06
• Added a slight glow to the 3d potions to make them glow a little bit in the dark (well, they are magical after all)
• Adjusted the diffuse color to make it work under all lightning conditions
• 0.3.0 - 2006-05-04
• 3d potions recolored (sorted version only at the moment)
• 0.2.1 - 0.2.9
• left out :) i think adding 3d potions as well deserves a major
• 0.2.1 - 2006-05-02
• Potion sorting added (sorted and unsorted version included)
• New colors added
• Colors slightly muted (this ain't the XBox version)
• Color-groups redone (should make more sense now), see Potion-Color-List further below
• 0.1 - 2006-05-01
• Initial Release. This is a 0.1 release, so expect bugs and abnormal behavior