How Developers Secretly Defied Todd Howard's No Humor Rule—and Made Morrowind Hilarious

Morrowind was meant to be the straight-faced fantasy epic: lore for days, myths on myths, big exploratory vibes. And then one of its writers slipped a joke past the goalie. That joke became a franchise legend. This is how The Elder Scrolls got its sense of humor while the studio was pretending it didn’t have one.

The no-jokes rule, and the loophole

According to Mark Nelson, who wrote and designed quests on The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, Todd Howard kept a pretty blunt rule at Bethesda back then: no humor. Howard was directing Morrowind, and the mandate was clear — immersive, serious fantasy first.

But Nelson says that in practice, the policy turned into something closer to: humor has no place in the game if Todd notices it. And because this was the early 2000s and oversight wasn’t exactly airtight, a few things slipped through that would never make it past a modern pipeline.

Because no one was paying attention we could just put anything into the game

- Mark Nelson

Nelson shared all this in a recent chat with Tom Evans on the Filmdeg Miniatures YouTube channel. It is very inside-baseball, and very funny considering how much of Bethesda’s identity later included a wink and a nudge.

The joke that got through

The best example is The Lusty Argonian Maid — a tiny in-game play that is both cheeky and, for its day, a little risky. Nelson says if Howard had clocked it during development, it probably would have been cut. Instead, it shipped, became a running gag across Elder Scrolls games, and turned into one of the series’ most enduring bits of humor.

Did the rule actually help Bethesda?

On paper, banning jokes sounds counter-productive. And yes, Bethesda’s later games did lean quirkier. But there’s an argument — and Nelson’s story backs it up — that the early tension helped shape the studio’s voice in a good way. When the bar for tone is serious, any joke that survives has to be earned, which makes the few that land feel sharper than the filler gags you get in a lot of games. That discipline also reinforced Bethesda’s serious-fantasy vibe, the thing that helped the studio cement its place in the genre and feel, for lack of a better word, authentic.

• Raised standards meant writers had to earn every laugh, so the rare jokes hit harder.
• Staying dead-serious gave Elder Scrolls a clear identity that helped it dominate the fantasy RPG conversation.
• Constraints forced clever workarounds, which gave the early games an X factor players latched onto.
• As the studio loosened up later, that foundation let it add quirks without losing credibility.
• That no-jokes edict is basically baked into Bethesda’s origin story now.

So yeah, the rule was real, the loophole was realer, and one smuggled play about an Argonian housekeeper might be the funniest accident in Elder Scrolls history.