How to enable Child Guard in Daggerfall

Daggerfall was an interesting old DOS roll playing game that came out in 1996. A friend gave it to me and it wasn't long I found the game was rated M.

When I first installed the game I noticed a mode for "Child Guard" in the installation settings. I decided to go back and give that a try to see if it would block out the content I didn't want to see in my game.

Turns out it worked pretty well, and I spent plenty of time dealing with the crashes back in the day.

Since then the game has been released on GOG and for free from Bethesda. Next a group made a stand alone version called DaggerfallSetup which fixes a lot of the bugs that plagued the original version and even makes some improvements. I was feeling nostalgic the other day so I decided to give this updated version a try.

I was first disappointed that they took out the install program so I was no longer able to enable the child guard mode in the game. I tried the GOG version and it was the same thing. After extensive Googling and searching the Wayback machine I did find posts referring to enabling it with Bethesda's free version, but it didn't include the patches and was a pain to set up.

But I decided, for the benefit of all, I'd install it, and figure out what it changes, then make a patch to enable child guard so others could still use it. But it turns out way simpler than that.

To Enable Child Guard in DaggerfallSetup or the GOG version:

1. Install the game.
2. Open the game folder, and go to the arena2 folder (eg: C:\Games\Daggerfall\arena2 )
3. Create a new text file, but rename it to "DAGGER.GRD" Do not keep the TXT extension at the end of the name.
4. You should be good to go!

Yup, that's all that the child guard mode does, is create a text file, and save the password in it. I've used it fine for a while now.

What Child Guard mode does:

• Removes nude NPCs and monsters
• Disables Daedra summoning (due to some nudity of the daedra)
• Changes bloody corpses to basic piles of bones
• Changes blood from hits to blue 'poofs'

What Child Guard mode doesn't do:

• It doesn't remove the gory dungeon decorations.
• It doesn't remove a partially nude dungeon prisoners (They're rare)
• It doesn't change the barely clothed female adventurers.
• It doesn't change the barely clothed members of certain temples.

It's pretty easy to avoid the temples though. Some day I hope to make a texture mod for the female adventurers, but don't hold your breath.
Well, I hope this helps somebody out there.