, then i created a 'bump' map / displacement map for the texture, imported it into blender and applied it to a plane, then from that i 'baked' a normal map and imported it into OpenMW and that seems to work great too 
.Only thing i'm not sure about is the 'Normal Height' map's for parallax mapping as mentioned here: https://wiki.openmw.org/index.php?title=TextureModding
After just simply changing the suffix on the texture from _n.dds to _nh.dds i'm having trouble telling a difference between the two which leads me to suspect blender isn't baking the 'height' from my bump map into the normal map's alpha channel.
Is there a setting in blender when baking normal maps that i can change so it includes the height information in the normal map's alpha channel or does this need to be done manually in GIMP (or does it already do this and i can't see the parallax effect because my normal map isn't that great)
Attached are the diffuse (i think thats what it's called) map, the bump map and the resulting normal map from blender that i've put together for testing stuff on OpenMW: http://imgur.com/a/tCM7U