I have been doing a little experimenting on creating a mod that will improve Unarmed Combat in Morrowind. In the vanilla game Unarmed does Fatigue damage, thus knocking enemies out. Of course you cannot enchant your fists either. I wanted something to make a Monk style character more viable.

What I did was take a dagger and replaced its mesh with that of a ring. So it looks like a bare fist when you equip it. But it works off the Short Blade skill, and has the dagger stabbing animation. That is close enough to an uppercut. Given how... less than stellar... the rest of animations are in this game, I do not see it as a bad thing.

Since it is really a weapon, it can even be enchanted. I am thinking of creating several versions to simulate mystical martial arts effects. Shock will be the first, but Fire and Frost seem obvious. Absorb Health too (maybe call that The Way Of The Vampire?).

My first stab at this was to simply take a dagger and remove the mesh altogether. But it caused an instant CTD. So apparently the game does not like that. That is why I went the route of using the mesh for a ring instead.

So this means that some day the Stormcrow will walk the fields of Vvardenfell.

Clever! Sounds like a fun project for the Storm Monk.

This sounds neat. I still play Morrowind on Xbox but rarely talk about it. Eventually I want to switch to PC of course, so this mod could definitely work with one character idea I have.

Can you alter the “weapon” to actually use the unarmed skill?

Probably, but then I suspect it would change to the default unarmed behavior of doing fatigue damage instead of real damage. I don't know.

I checked with the Oblivion version, and Unarmed is not even an option to choose from in the weapon record. Since I am concentrating on Oblivion (and playing Morroblivion instead of Morrowind), that is what I am really concerned with.

Hmm, I just feel like that should be fairly easy to tweak. Strange.