Also on the nexus is a retex from the useless hound into the flaming familiar. I grabbed it for my conjurer. Awesome times.

Having never played an Elder Scrolls game before, I've bypassed all the hype about the creation kit and started making mods myself. Anyone else doing this?

 

CONSTANT VIGILANCE! :awesome

 

Oh thank fuck, this is miraculous. Thank you for finding this.

 

Actually found a more awesome one. Make dog companions into wolf companions Quiets the barking, and gets rid of that ugly ass dog skin.
Now if they'd finish working on the STFU Zombies mod I'd make a summoner, lol.

 

I didn't think anyone had done it yet, but apparently they have.

http://skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=6176

Faction wars. Random attacks on villages, werewolves vs Spriggans, bandits, etc. Looks awesome. I'll install it if I ever finish my playthrough. Wish I had the legit version so I could track my hours played, was using Xfire, but I have to keep fucking with their .ini files rewriting what it's looking for each day when they update =(

Edit: From the Dog Skin/Quieter Bark mod I linked above, my new bad ass Vigilance using the Husky skin.

 

I realize this is from a while back but I was rereading through the thread and a thought popped into my head.

The original Ysmir, the Dragon of the North (not to be confused with Talos, who is often called the same thing), is said to be one of the Shezzarines- avatars of the Cyrodilic god Shezzar, the Nordic god Shor, or in his more popular Aldmeri name, Lorkhan. Other notable figures in TES history that are said to be of the Shezzarine include the legendary Pelinal Whitestrake.

Anyway, Lorkhan is the Lost Divine, the et'Ada (Original Spirit) that convinced/connived some of the others to pitch in and create Mundus, the mortal plane. The Aedra was either struck down or stepped down from divinity after the Eight Divines gave their bodies to create Nirn, and he's been hated by the elves since, as he's continually championed the cause of the Mannish races.

Anyway, the idea struck me that it would be an interesting idea to explore the notion that you, the Dragonborn, are an Avatar of Shor, that is, a Shezarrine to champion mankind's cause against the invading Aldmeri Dominion?

Just a thought. Carry on.

 

The only thing that Shezzarine makes me think of is a potential Dragonborn Renegade, and two sequels, which would be crazy awesome.

So, by now I'm sure many of you are already using mods. Which ones do you use? Some of you already recced some good mods, like SkyUI and CBBE. I've picked up SkyUI and it is absolutely essential for any PC player. Categorized Favourites is also great - if you're not willing to muck around in the ini, look in the thread linked in the description and you can find some good configurations for a lot of characters.

Midas Magic is a touch overpowered at present, but still a great mod for mages. Balanced Magic works well for mages too, but, again, gives you a touch too much strength - dual-casting fireball on an ancient skeletal dragon at level 35 with 80 Destruction and a few perks kills it in one shot, whereas my pretty experienced warrior had a good fight on his hands when he faced it.

I was using Tytanis, but it's now basically gone to crap. There's way too much content without any effort to keep it contained, clean and usable, making the whole world a giant hodgepodge of stuff that keeps breaking with every update.

Deadly Dragons is great for making dragon fights harder and more rewarding, ensuring that dragons are the terrifying force they are supposed to be.

CBBE and associated mods are... well, not for everybody, I suppose. But they definitely make the gameworld more fun to look at (even if some of the armor replacements have Lydia and Ysolda looking more like hookers than anything).

XCE goes a great way towards cleaning up facial structures and looks, and really makes the people of Skyrim more people-like.

 

In the latest news, my first wife Camilla Valerius died. And if anyone asks, it was at the hands of a pair of giants and a Blood Dragon. She definitely didn't take a Daedric Arrow to the head by her newly betrothed husband when his touchpad freezed up as he aimed at the Giant. The only crime I'm guilty of is loving my wife.

What's that you ask? If I loved my wife so much, why did I loot her of all her valuables and then telekinetically dump her in the river to flow downstream to Riverwood, for all of her friends and loves ones to see her pale, bloated corpse?

Fuck you that's why.

I've been considering whether or not we're an Avatar of Talos himself instead of Lorkhan. Is Lorkhan still "Divinity"-esque or was he subsumed into Talos? I'm not quite sure how it worked...

 

Alright, since Lutris brought up all the et'Ada Lorefag stuff, it's time to put on my Kirkbride hat.

Ysmir is a part of the oversoul that makes Talos. Talos obtained godhood by mantling Shezzar,and you, as Dragonborn, are definitely a Shezzarine. If the Skyrim writers were still paying attention to all this lore shit that's been slipping in forever, the game would have featured you as the avatar of Shor and the destroyer of the Elves. The elves are trying to destroy Talos to destroy the world - so Talos hits back with an avatar. Ysmir the Underking - roughly one third of the God Talos - had a thing for killing Mer gods. His goal, before Hjati - Tiber - killed him was to attack Morrowind and take on Vivec.

Also, the idea of a fic dealing with the implications of a Shezzarine Dragonborn and what holding that particular mantle means was something I mentioned to Lutris back in November.

 

This video is called Skyrim in Halo Reach. Its pretty funny.

 

Gentlemen, we have achieved apotheosis.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=WCP9Jn2Q0cQ

 

As an Elder Scroll noob, this makes no sense to me. Who is Shezzar/Lorkhan/Shor currently? Is he a Divine? A part of Talos? Is he dead or alive?

 

Elder Scrolls Wikia.

UESP.

EDIT: Regarding his current status:

With a part of Talos being Ysmir the Dragon of the North (the Underking is more a blend between him and the battlemage Zurin Arctus), a 'echo' of Lorkhan to borrow the article's words, it can be said that Talos has taken on the power and legacy of Lorkhan. It's all metaphysical wibbly wobbly timey wimey, but that's the gist of it.

 

Lorkhan is the creator of the world, the Doom Drum of the Mer and the father of Men.

If you're going to get anywhere with the Elder Scrolls universe, you have to stop trying to apply titles like "divine" or "alive" to things.

 

*Has read the wiki*

All right, so Lorkhan is the guy behind Nirn, having tricked the Aedra into doing it. Because of the creation of Nirn, many Aedra lost their immortality and other gifts, either becoming both mer and man, or just mer and man came from nothing (the article has both possibilites in it, so I'm a tad confused).

Because of this, the Mer hate Lorkhan for causing the fall, despite the fact that if he hadn't, the need for procreation would have never resulted, and they would have never come into being. Meanwhile the races of man love Lorkhan for being indirectly behind their existence.

Because of this dichotomy between the two groups, Lorkhan is a major stickling point. Am I good so far?

Now, all the races of Nirn worship Aedra (with the exception of the Dunmer), with Imperials/Nords/Breton + Bosmer worshiping the Nine Divines (who are Lorkhan + 8 Aedra who helped in the creation), the Altmer worship Aedra who stood against the creation or survived it, the Khajit worship a mix of Aedra and Daedra, and the Redguards are a bunch of weird fucks from a different continent than the Imperials/Nords/Bretons, who are descended from the Nede. They worship a mix of ancestors + gods.

Also, Akatosh is universal. Because he's a pimp like that.

Now, Tiber Septim was a complete boss and ascended to the Eight Divines, becoming the Ninth to replace Lorkhan. The Thalmor/Altmer opposed this because it meant a human (the bastard/accident creation of Lorkhan) had ascended to the ranks of the Aedra, which they didn't like because they're a bunch of racists, which lead to the Great War that eventually saw his worship banned. Ultimately, the Thalmor plot to unmake Lorkhan's creation.

Have I missed anything?

Also, Talos means Stormcrown in Nord apparently, so your naming by the Greybeards is two out of three thirds of the Ninth Divine. That's less cool and more symbolism and slightly fucked up. All this symbolism and Shezzarine and shit is getting in the middle of my badass name.

 

Mer are the descendents of what are basically Aedra - aedra meaning 'Our Ancestors,' more or less. Basically, the Mer are pissed off that they aren't immortal gods anymore.

Kind of, but it's more than that. Lorkhan is only really an issue for the Mer - the human races don't tend to give that much of a shit. The Nords are a bit of an exception, but even then Shor doesn't come close to being their most important god.

This is all kind of irrelevant, but the Nine Divines are The Eight and Talos. Before Tiber Septim became Talos and achieved CHIM, there were just Eight. Lorkhan was never one of them.

Yeah, being an awesome Time Dragon/Anti-Lorkhan will do that.

Kind of. What you have to acknowledge is that Mer really were gods once, and they hate the existence they're trapped in. The fact that a thing which has no business being divine - a being entirely of this damned material world - mantled the Traitor God and ascended to godhood is just kicking them while they're down.

You're basically the second coming of a god, you just don't know it.

Also, just ignore all of this lore stuff in writing your story: 99% of your audience wouldn't pick up on it, and those of us who would probably wouldn't give a fuck. The cosmology of the TES universe is convoluted enough that no one would give a fuck if you just looked at it in the ultra-simplified sense most people do.

 

Fiat knows his stuff better than me, but I know enough to get by. Anyway, as I said in my post just above the quoted post, TES lore is super wibbly wobbly especially when it comes to the Divines, the Aedric beings, creation stories and religion.

This is doubly true because, while we know that the Eight Divines (well, Nine) are real beings, different cultures (read: race) in Nirn have different interpretation of them and all are, to some or all extent, true. The ancient Aldmer and their descendants the Altmer and Bosmer call Akatosh, the first of the gods to take form in the Original Place and the oldest and arguably most powerful of the Nine, by the name Auri-El. Supposedly, most of the Altmer and Bosmer can trace their lineage to Auri-El himself.

In fact, it's this fact that has the elves (in the case of TESV:Skyrim, the Thalmor and the Aldmeri Dominion) so mad with Lorkhan, even setting aside his history of championing Man against the Mer countless times throughout history.

By their reckoning, Lorkhan tricked Auri-El (also written as Auriel) during a moment of weakness into helping him create Mundus, the mortal plane. The creation of Nirn required the beings that would become the Eight Divines to give up their 'bodies' and surrender their power, Akatosh (Auriel) chief among them. This resulted in the severing of Akatosh from "eternity", and since the elves believe that they were once a single existence, connected to Eternity, they believe that the act of Creation that Lorkhan brought about both brought their patron god to his knees, as well as undoing their semi-divine origins.

There are a lot of fans and lorefags that believe that the elves seek to regain this sort-of-divine level of metaphysical existence, and that requires the destruction of Lorkhan/Talos, involving the Towers and a bunch of coolshit.

Anyway, back to my main point. All interpretations of the divine are valid, because they are just that- interpretations. All of them are true, yet some aspects are more true than others looking at certain events in history. Yet, other aspects are more prevalent during other periods, and it's clear that the gods themselves are subject to change by the beliefs and faiths of mortal beings.

TL;DR, wibbly wobbly timey wimey.

 

But if the Aedra had never been forcibly descended by Lorkhan, they would never have had kids, and therefore the Mer would have never come into being.

Noted.

But you just said Shor was one of the gods of the Nords.

Were they all gods before descending into Mer and then into the various sub-species, or are they the descendants of the fallen gods? Like is there some really old crotchty fuck who goes "Back in my day, we were gods! Fucking Lorkhan!"

That's the thing that's bugging me though. Am I an echo of Lorkhan? A divinely chosen champion of Talos? Talos himself descending to the earth to kick Thalmor ass?

It's part religious lore, part historical lore, part gameplay and story seperation that's bugging me.

 

You're thinking of things too literally. Refer to my post above.

He is. The Nordic gods are NOT the Eight Divines, although there is some overlap. The Nordic pantheon consists of: Akatosh, Alduin, Orkey, Dibella, Herma-Mora, Jhunal, Kyne, Shor, Mauloch, Mara, Stuhn, Ysmir, and Tsun.

The Cyrodilic Pantheon (The Eight/Nine Divines), which is the religion of the Empire, consists of: Akatosh, Arkay (Orkey to the Nords), Dibella, Julianos (Jhunal to the Nords), Kynareth (Kyne), Mara, Stendarr, Talos, and Zenithar, with other beings such as Shezarr (Shor in Skyrim, also known as Lorkhan, Sheor.

The main difference between the traditional Nordic pantheon and The Eight/Nine Divines is that while Akatosh presides over the Divines, Shor leads the Nordic pantheon. Even in the Fourth Age, when TESV:Skyrim takes place and the Empire's influence is prevalent in all aspects of life including faith, the influence of the traditional Nordic pantheon can be seen. An example that comes to mind off the top of my head is the first scene in Skyrim, when you're being carted to your execution with Ralof, Ulfric, and that horse thief from Rorikstead.

The horse thief prays to the Divines as would any citizen of the Empire, using their Cyrodilic names- but he also prays to Shor in the same breath.

Wibbly wobbly timey wimey. Think of Nirn's mythical history as both historical fact and mythological fantasy, complicated by the fact that magic exists and so do the gods, at least in the framework of the lore. Besides, all of the creation stories happened thousands upon thousands upon thousands of years ago.

Refer to the Ehlnofey. That should fix your confusion. UESP.

You are Dragonborn. You're whatever the fuck you want to be. In the end, it's all in how you choose to interpret the lore that's given to you both in and out of the game.

This is the best part of the entire fandom for me. There's so much wiggle room- and his unclear nature is actually a good thing since it's all chronicled in-game as historical account or the written works of some historian or researcher, or scribed onto some wall somewhere. All the information we have (well, most of it) came from lore that was INSIDE THE GAME. The sheer breadth and scope and variety of sources within the games point to a vast world with a history just as long and vast.

Also you spelt "separation" wrong.

 

Shor as head of the Nord gods is both true and not quite the largest difference between the two pantheons; the biggest difference is that the Nord aspect of Akatosh is Alduin.