Foreword

When the first edition of the Pocket Guide to the Empire was published, over four hundred years ago, it was to describe and delineate a new nation under the Emperor Tiber Septim. Ancient independent kingdoms had tumbled; the war-weary citizenry were frightened, believing wild rumors and fantastical stories about the people of neighboring provinces: the very notion of a single Tamrielic Empire, the first in nearly a thousand years, was strange and foreboding. The book was intended to inform, educate, and reassure the people of a new empire.

The Guide continued in circulation, being reprinted in its original form for over three hundred years, unchanged while the Empire continued to redefine itself. A vicious civil war between rival cousins for the Imperial throne, a catastrophic insurrection in the west by the Camoran Usurper, a disastrous invasion of Akavir, and endless cycles of revolts and reformations, all went unmentioned in the Guide. At last, recognizing the original's multitudinous anachronisms, a second edition of the Guide was commissioned in the 331st year of the Empire by the Empress Morihatha. The Imperial Geographic Society was once again called upon to update its descriptions, remove most of the propagandistic tone of the original, and to reiterate and modernize the claim that Tamriel was in fact a unified Empire.

Much has changed in the one hundred and twenty one years since the Second Edition, and much has remained the same.

News of change still proceeds by the imperfect machine of gossip throughout the farms, hamlets, and cities of Tamriel. Fact is exaggerated, warped, invented, and ignored in favor of superstition and old prejudices. Even the literate and well-traveled can be believe and spread false information, depending on where they have been and what they have read. The need for a truthful and encyclopedic work is necessary.