OpenDawnstar — A Browser Reimplementation of The Elder Scrolls Travels: Dawnstar

The Assignment

Restore Your Good Name

Your posting to Dawnstar begins badly. Glacier tribes are raiding the far northern town, and Governor Cyril Vinticae has a problem he can't solve alone.

He needs you to find his four champions — Alhavara, Beatrice, Chung, and Delacroix — because one of them is almost certainly working with the tribes. You'll need to survive the dungeons ringing the town, choose your allies carefully, and gather enough power to face down whoever's been feeding the raiders their information.

Unlike most Elder Scrolls games, Dawnstar has exactly one quest. No side content, no distractions — just the raid, the four suspects, and the clock.

“Creatures and foes pressed around you but you emerged victorious. Weary, you seek Governor Vinticae to inform him Dawnstar is once again his.”

— from the original game's victory text

The World

One Camp. Four Directions. Thirty-Six Dungeons.

Dawnstar itself — camp, to the locals — sits at the center of everything. Four gates lead out in the four cardinal directions; each one opens onto a chain of nine connected dungeons, three zones of three, before the trail runs cold.

36Dungeons

4Zones, one per direction

4Real shops in camp

1Traitor, hidden among four

Camp is also the only truly safe ground — home to the four peddlers, the healer Eustacia, and, once the traitor is revealed, the site of the final battle: every enemy in the game converging at once, capped by the strongest monster in Dawnstar, the Gehenoth Thriceborn.

The Classes

Seven Ways to Survive the North

Every class below ships with its real starting stats, gear, and spells — pulled directly from the original game's own data files, not estimated.

Barbarian

Nord

45 HP30 MP170 FT

Hatchet · Padded Cloth

Battlemage

Breton

35 HP75 MP150 FT

Club · Padded Cloth

Damage · Heal Wound

Knight

Redguard

50 HP30 MP170 FT

Club · Worn Cuirass

Nightblade

Wood Elf

30 HP50 MP140 FT

Dagger · Padded Cloth

Paralyze

Rogue

Nord

50 HP30 MP170 FT

Broadsword · Worn Cuirass

Sorcerer

High Elf

30 HP75 MP140 FT

Dagger · Padded Cloth

Frenzy · Daedric Weapon · Damage

Spellsword

High Elf

35 HP62 MP150 FT

Broadsword · Worn Cuirass

Frenzy · Damage

Find the Traitor

Four Champions. One Lie.

Befriend them, threaten them, or win them over with gifts — every conversation moves you closer to a clue. Get enough goodwill and they'll train you in their specialty, too.

Alhavara

Teaches Light Armor, Long Blade, Restoration.

Beatrice

Teaches Alteration, Conjuration, Destruction.

Chung

Teaches Axe, Blunt Weapon, Heavy Armor.

Delacroix

Teaches Illusion, Short Blade, Speechcraft.

And in camp, always: Eustacia, the healer who patches you up between accusations and keeps track of every clue you've gathered.

About This Port

Rebuilt, Not Emulated

This isn't the original game running in an emulator — it's a ground-up rewrite in plain JavaScript, built by reverse-engineering the original 2003 .jar's binary data files byte by byte, then cross-checking every formula against an independent Python decompilation and UESP's own wiki pages.

Combat, dungeon generation, character progression, shops, spells, and the champion questline all use the real formulas traced from the original source — not approximations dressed up to look right. Where something genuinely couldn't be traced, it's documented as a substitution rather than passed off as authentic.

Read the full stage-by-stage development log →
Compare this port to the original hardware and emulator approach →

22+Development stages, each tested before shipping

43Original sprites extracted byte-exact

0Bytes unaccounted for in any parsed data file