I've wanted to review this pasta for years now. It's one of the most memorable video game creepypastas I've ever read, and I've read a lot of them.
No content warnings this time. This is a strange and unsettling tale, but it's not quite outright horror.
“jvk1166z.esp”
Plot Summary
This story deals with a mod for the game The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Familiarity with the game isn't really necessary to follow this tale, and I personally have never played Morrowind, but I'll give you a little background information. Morrowind was released in 2002 and is considered a classic of the western RPG genre; as such, it still boasts a solid fan following and modding community. The player character is a newly released convict, and the main plot of the game involves trying to save the land from a "blight" of some sort. The world of the game is quite complicated and very weird, and there are a ton of sidequests in addition to the quests that advance the main plot.
Our narrator opens their tale by saying that the mod in question, under the filename jvk1166z.esp, generated minor buzz when it was first posted online. JVK, as I'll be referring to it from here on out, wasn't posted on any major Morrowind boards, but rather on a few small forums and RP groups, as well as being sent to a handful of players via email or direct message. It initially appeared to be a virus, as attempting to load the game with the mod active would completely corrupt your Morrowind install along with your save files. As such, initial posts about JVK just told people not to download it, and it was more or less forgotten about.
A year or so later, though, one user of a mod board received a message advising him to try running JVK through the DOSbox emulator. Sure enough, this method works — sort of. The quick save and quick load features are the only ways of saving and loading your game in JVK, and both the options menu and console are disabled. The narrator tries out JVK at this point and thus is able to speak about the next part from experience.
When starting a new game in JVK, the first thing one notices is that an alert pops up saying that "the prophecy has been severed" — this is apparently how the game lets you know that a plot-important NPC has died, preventing you from advancing the main quest. Indeed, every single NPC with an important role in the main plot is dead in JVK, with the exception of a character called Yagrum Bagarn, the last of the Dwemer race (dark elves). This means the world of JVK is doomed from the get-go, as there is no way to prevent the blight I mentioned earlier from spreading. The player character is also slowly losing health throughout JVK, and the health loss picks up speed when they're idle. If your player character succumbs to this, you'll catch a glimpse of the apparent culprit, who was nicknamed "the Assassin" by JVK players for reasons that are sort of obvious. The Assassin is dressed head to toe in black, untextured armor, making him look like a hole in the shape of a man. For some reason, he scuttles about on all fours like some sort of demented spider.
Apart from these changes, JVK's other obvious difference from Morrowind as it was originally released is that, at random intervals during the in-game night, every NPC in the game will head outside to look up at the stars. If talked to during this time, all they'll say is "Watch the sky."
One JVK player eventually found another significant change in the mod: an entirely new character, named Tieras. He's one of the Dunmer people and all his lines are fully voice acted, sounding more or less exactly like the default male Dunmer voice. Tieras wears a robe designed to look like the night sky. When talked to, he sends players on a quest to a dungeon called "The Citadel," which despite its name descends straight down into the earth. It's also fiendishly hard, and the narrator gives up after making it through the first three areas. Some JVK players manage to get further, though.
Past the area the narrator gave up in is an area where all the surfaces, including enemy textures, are black, and there are loud machinery noises. Thanks to the limited visibility and the high levels of the enemies, it's incredibly tough to make it through this part of the game, but if you're successful you can make it down to a room that JVK players nicknamed the "Portrait Room." The Portrait Room features picture frames on the walls, and the pictures in the frames are always randomly chosen photos from the player's hard drive (of course, some players had a laugh at this, taking screenshots of the Portrait Room with framed porn images on the walls). In the Portrait Room is a locked door, and, with no way of opening it, players would head back out of the dungeon to report back to Tieras. His only response at this point is "Watch the sky," which is now the only thing any NPC in the game will say to you. One player, a friend of the narrator's, reports that at this point the in-game night sky has changed to a depiction of a real-life night sky, and that it moves the way the night sky does in real life, albeit much faster.
Everything from here on out is what the narrator heard from their friend about his experience playing the JVK mod. According to this friend, based on the arrangement of the constellations and planets, the in-game sky after leaving the Citadel starts off around February 2005, and in the course of one in-game night the sky shifts by about two IRL months, with movement being paused during the in-game day. The friend is convinced that the door in the Portrait Room will open based on some unknown celestial event. Dying, loading a saved game, or reentering the Citadel causes you to start over, so the only way to test this theory would be to leave the game running — and, thanks to the slow but steady health depletion, that means actively playing around the clock.
First, the friend tried playing for a solid 24 hours, but discovered right around the 24-hour mark that the Assassin starts screaming at you once you've been playing for that long. Thinking that this was perhaps indicating that something had changed, he headed back to the door in the Citadel, but it was still locked, and now he'd lost his progress with the sky thanks to reentering the Citadel. After that, he got the idea that maybe he needed to wait until the sky had advanced by three years, since the message advising people to try running JVK in DOSbox was sent in February 2008. This went well at first, and he even found the Assassin's screaming to be helpful as it reminded him to move his character (naturally, he was multitasking to pass the time), but three days in the game world suddenly began getting dark to the point where he had trouble seeing anything, and he saw shadowy figures running around in the distance. When he tried the door, it was still locked.
Meanwhile, on the board where JVK is being discussed, one player claims to be seeing the Assassin in his regular install of Morrowind, although the claims are unsubstantiated. The narrator's friend begins behaving irately on the board and is banned from it, so his progress reports are emailed directly to the narrator instead.
The friend reports more strange happenings as he continues to let the sky advance. When the sky hits 2011, NPCs start abandoning their towns and villages and moving into caves. The advancement is faster now as it's always night, and NPCs seem to be bleeding from their eyes, although with the dim lighting this is only noticeable up close and barely noticeable even then. He claims the planets aren't moving as they should be, and that if this keeps up he won't be able to accurately gauge the month and year from the sky anymore. He's also having disturbing nightmares about the Assassin, and it seems like the game is really psychologically affecting him, which isn't surprising given that he's been playing nonstop for days. After a nightmare about the Assassin, he thinks he's woken up, but in actuality continues to dream about JVK. In his dream, an NPC speaks to him and tells him that no one else has gotten this far and that the door will open up soon. He wakes, emails the narrator, and says he's going back to the Citadel to check on the door, and that he hears tapping on his window and wonders if he's still dreaming. The narrator hasn't heard from him since.
Narrator ends the story by saying that they deleted their copy of JVK back when they couldn't clear the dungeons in the Citadel, but that if anyone has a copy they'd like to play it again and try and see some of what their friend reported for themself.
Closing Thoughts
I have trouble explaining to others why I'm fond of this story. I've never played Morrowind, have only a basic familiarity with the game via secondhand knowledge, and it would be easy to say that this story doesn't amount to anything as there's little in the way of outright horror and the ending is very ambiguous. That's why I like it, though.
The mod described in this story is bizarre and unsettling; it takes place in an inherently doomed game world, the new quest takes you through a difficult dungeon and then leaves you at an apparent dead end, and the longer you play it the weirder it gets. Even getting the mod to work is tough, and once you've managed to get your modded copy of the game working you have to have a ton of skill and patience to make it to the point in the mod where a storyline seems to be building, meaning that very few people managed to do so. Our narrator's friend descends into unreliable narrator territory as the story continues; not only are we basing all knowledge of the mod off one guy's unsubstantiated account of playing through it, but he's been playing for days on end without breaks and has clearly become so fixated that he's losing his grip on reality. It makes perfect sense, but, at the same time, the suggestion that maybe this mod is sinister isn't easy to dismiss. We simply don't know enough about JVK to figure out what its creator intended, but what we do know makes it clear that forcing the player to stay engaged with the game for days or even weeks without a break in order to progress is inherent in its design.
As I said in the opening of this post, this isn't quite a horror story. If you read creepypasta looking for pure unadulterated terror, this isn't a good source of that. If your taste tends more towards the strange and ambiguous stuff, though, I'd recommend giving this one a read.