@Kenjoka

@gaggedgirl123

@CliftonJD

@WaxenFigure

You’re all fantastic people, and you have my undying gratitude.

The main questions were: what do I do once I’m in the cage (because there is no reason to read a mod description, which clearly stated how to get the auction started) and the still-popular “nothing happens when the auction begins,” which is always because Fuz-Ro Doh – Silent Voice is not installed  (or, in the current SS++ era, it may be installed but it is the wrong version. Damn Beth). Bigger issues (like a short-lived problem where John Randall* could only be talked to from the full cage, not through the bars leading to the platform) were fixed by Kana Red.

Since I had the basic framework working, I started to actively search for mods that would logically fit as slavery outcomes. One such mod that seemed to sort of have potential was called PetCollar, which was just contained a collar that you put on and your follower would treat you like a pet. That particular mod never went much further but it did help inspire a different mod author, @alexvkj, to try to recreate the Fallout New Vegas mod msex Veronica D/S. He named the result of his labors Play Submissive, which turned almost immediately into the original version of Submissive Lola. I contacted alexvkj and brought up the possibility to a connection to Simple Slavery.

I was afraid of the new MCM version of the mod at first because I wasn’t sure if I would be able to figure out how to work the code to add new scenarios but it turned out to be written in a very clear way and it only took some copying-and-pasting (and then changing quest names), so on October 10, 2015, version 3.71 pulled in @DocClox’s SLUTS (that’s a mod that turned the player into a ponygirl delivery service) and alexvkj ‘s Play Submissive (the precursor to Submissive Lola). Both were unique for SS because they both required the player to do something in-game that was not entirely immersive: both needed a book to be read to activate them - if the player had not read that book before going to auction, the mod would not start (this was fixed for Submissive Lola in SS version 3.93).

Further, Play Submissive had the same concept as Lola (which alexvkj created soon after – the original Submissive Lola was added with SS version 3.81) – a consensual slavery experience, where you ask your follower to enslave you. Which is still a weird concept to me, but who am I to judge kinks? I like to pretend I’m being sold at a slave auction. We’re all a little abnormal, here in LL. 😉

This led to a bit of a conundrum – how to connect the player to a master? Sanguine’s Debauchery was my only experience with a mod that had multiple possible masters but it was different because those masters were forced upon you. PS/SL did not have that function. My solution was to create a bunch of possible masters and put them in one place, transport the player there, and let them pick their own. I didn’t want them to clutter up the auction cell, so I chose Nightgate Inn.

Slaverun also made its grand entrance at this point @pchs kindly created a small quest for SS to send the player to.

This was accompanied by my first divided version of the mod because there was a hue and cry to remove Death Alternative as the primary way to get enslaved. My solution was to create two versions of SS – one that had DA interaction and one that did not. I quickly realized what a pain the ass it would be to have to update two different versions with every single change so I switched it to one mod and a patch that would, in theory, add the DA functionality. This was also before Defeat had a direct connection to sending the player to SS, so

However, I could not get the non-DA version to work because, no matter how much I tweaked it, it somehow always remembered it was once connected to DA. It was, once again, @Bane Master who came to my rescue. The funny part was, he just kind of tossed it as an aside while discussing something completely different:

There were some global bugs during this time, most notably one that started two auctions at once for some people for some reason that has been lost to the annals of time. The other big problem people had was with the multiple potential owners from both Sanguine’s Debauchery and Submissive Lola.

For SD, I decided there was no point having them scattered all over the place, especially since there were many reports of the player and/or owner being attacked by something the moment the connection was made. My solution, implemented in version 4.1 , was to move all of them to a spot near the Thalmor Embassy. What I failed to take into account is the horribly cold and snowy weather in that area and all the people who used Frostfall or other survival mods.

With Lola, all the potential masters were in Nightgate inn, although sometimes they moved en masse to the basement for some reason. Eventually I moved them to the auction hall itself.

Other, more minor changes happened during this time, including the door to the auction, which I installed backward, and the default outcome of being freed if no other outcomes had been picked in the MCM. I originally tried making a very simple farm slavery mod to use as the default outcome, but I am even worse at worldbuilding than I am at coding, so I gave up on that one.

I was also invited to a group meeting of mod-makers to discuss the integration of all the various slave mods. The big thing that came out of that was the introduction to most of us of a then-seldom-used function buried (as I recall) in ZAZ Framework called “dhlp,” which marked when a player was enslaved. We agreed as a group to add (and remove) this setting to the player, as applicable, so other mods had a way to tell if the player was already a slave.

Compared to the issues from earlier, this all amounted to maintenance work. New outcomes were being added (welcome Deviously Cursed Loot, Raven Beak Prison, Sexlab Stories, and Things in the Dark!) and bugs were getting stamped. All was going smoothly, with little suspicion that the next great evolution was about to slam into existence thanks to an innocent PM sent on November 26, 2016 to an author whose mod I thought would make a nice connection with SS.

*John Randle, whose name has been removed in SS++, was named after the primary antagonist of the Outlander series, which I was reading at the time.

He is reclusive but he was (and presumably still is) fantastic at coding. Also one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. And had the weirdest sleep schedule I’ve ever heard of, often staying up for 28 hours at a time.

He handed me a fix to the Wolfclub connection issue then, for good measure, found and fixed other connection issues that no one else had even noticed yet, turned around and fixed my bloated code to skip quests, *then* fixed my fade to black script. At this point, being in a situation where I was at work 16 hours a day and had no time to do any mod-making myself, I just handed the entire mod over to him to let him to as he pleased.

Between April 22 and May 6, and again throughout September, he made a bunch of improvements to the mod:

- voices for bidders and the other slaves

- removal of the stairs to the basement (and the filling of the hole left behind, unlike when I accidentally removed part of the floor and left it that way)

- fixing of the navmesh so the bidders could get to the benches better

- addition of sitting packages to get the bidders to actually sit still instead of constantly wandering

- removal of the extra room left over from the Temple of Mara so bidders would stop going in there (which caused them to be unable to be heard during auctions)

- removal of a reference to a hole in the ceiling that was leftover from the short stay at Sky Haven Temple (which actually ended up breaking the mod because the John Randall reference from Sky Haven was the one the game was using for the dialogue to start the auction, somehow. Kana reverted the mod back to 3.1 and, over the next six hours, re-did every single change he had made up to that point to find the culprit. Somewhere in the world is a duplicate John Randall.)

- unchecking mods in the MCM once they had been chosen

- bindings for the player’s arms (although, as I’m sure you’re aware, never did work quite right)

- custom meshes

- Created the Sanguine’s Debauchery master tree in the MCM, which picked an SD master at random then made them unavailable to be picked a second time (and here I gave myself credit for this two posts ago. For shame! Although, of course, we all should have known better)

- the cage as it currently looks, including the little stage on the front (as an aside, in case you wondered about the odd little bump in the cage design:

The mod *almost* took a very interesting turn at this point when @zaira contacted us to try to get a bigger integration between SS and Maria Eden. The idea would have been to stock the audience with ME owners and offer a truly integrated experience. Unfortunately, I was working so much during those days, I didn’t have time to do more than read Kana’s updates and Kana’s CK turned on him (it was his fault – he mentioned how, although Skyrim crashed a lot, the CK was always stable for him. Never test the Law of Irony!) and he couldn’t keep it open for more than an hour or so at a time. Alas, Zaira’s vision was never able to be implemented. I’m sorry, Zaira!

To take a break from the more difficult things, I did some simpler things, such as adding a few more slaves to the auction cell. I decided to be clever by giving them names of actual historical (or fictional but still famous) slaves, such as an orc named Kunta Kinte (the main character in the 1970s miniseries Roots staring Levar Burton as Kunte, who was forced into the Anglicized name Toby in a scene still seared into my brain forty years later). (Oops, I just dated myself. I mean, um, hello, fellow Millennials! I’m young just like you!) This was noticed right away but it wasn’t until five years later and the advent of the current incarnation of the mod that I learned that many people felt the names to be in poor taste. Ah, well.

But that’s not the biggest thing on everyone’s minds at the time. At this point, the clamoring for an MCM, a basic staple of Skyrim mods by this point, had grown to a cacophony. By which I mean a couple people wondered if I was going to make one. Here’s the thing: I had already tried to make one several weeks before. I downloaded the template and read the instructions and tried to follow them but they made no sense to me and I could not get it to work, so I quietly set it aside without telling anyone. My basic plan was simple and, presumably, obvious – I waited for someone else to make it. That person turned out to be @vpoteryaev, who introduced it as “little adjustments”:

As with Bane Master’s fix, I added this as a patch for a while before I had time to incorporate it, but when I did finally have time, I decided that such a momentous step forward justified another major version change. Welcome to Simple Slavery Version 3.0!

Except 3.0 had an issue that I did not document, so I don’t remember what it was, and was only released publicly for about two minutes before being replaced.

So, welcome to Version 3.01!

This exciting development was met with an immediate and heartfelt reaction from the users:

Erm…welcome to version 3.02?

I suppose it does help to put the actual updated mod in the upload file instead of a copy of the previous version. I am a jenius.

I had confirmation that the MCM was working properly three days later by getting bug reports about the connection to Wolfclub:

So yay to MCM now working, boo to yet another connection problem. Fortunately for me, a new central figure in Simple Slavery’s history had recently made himself known via PM: the mighty @Kana Red.

*I assume you realize by now that by “simple,” I mean someone else wrote it for me.

Yay! One problem solved! But that still left the big one.

The “falling through the floor to oblivion” (not to be confused with falling through the floor to Oblivion, which would be an interesting twist – is there a way to make the CK send you to a completely different game? Hmm…) (also not to be confused with the aforementioned hilarity ensuing from the floor in the auction house getting replaced by a hole that the bidders kept falling through) problem began to blossom into a potentially-mod-ending issue. I tried everything I could think of and tried every suggestion everyone in the support thread suggested, no matter how illogical they sounded:

These ideas included

-          Setting the point of entry into the auction cell a foot above the floor so the player was suspended a little in the air at first, thereby hopefully falling only to the floor, not beneath it

-          Temporarily sending the player to a completely different world cell first and then immediately warping them to the auction

-          Other things I failed to document and have long since been forgotten

It took thirty-two days from the point the bug was first reported until the heroic @Bane Master took the time to painstakingly track it down:

He didn’t actually say what the fix entailed other than “The whole bug thing seems horribly timing and sequencing specific,” so I never really knew (and still don’t) what, exactly, caused it. I just thanked him profusely and stuck his code in and moved on. Well, I didn’t actually stick his code in at first – I added it as a patch. It wasn’t until seven days later, on March 15, that it was incorporated fully into version 2.74, an update that also included connections to more mods:

With 14 different outcomes now available (including each Sanguine’s Debauchery outcome individually), I was beginning to really feel my oats and posted the following goals:

Let’s go over this list together and see how well I managed to accomplish the items therein. Lessee…

-          Add checks to see if a previous (SD) master is alive. This actually did get done, as I recall. Check 1 for me!

-          add checks for race and vampirism and other things, so different reactions and prices can occur – nnnnnoooo…

-          the crazy prices if the player happens to be known as dragonborn or alduin's killer – not so much

-          and then there are other things to think about, such as what happens if you are part of the thieves' or assassins' guilds – yeah, not that either.

On second thought, let’s forget about that list.

I also learned how to randomize things in Papyrus, so auction messages, bidding scenes, and the slavery outcomes themselves no longer had to go in a set order.

Content Consumer also brought in more slave banners which I am placing here for posterity’s sake:

I thought they were hilarious and decided to stick them on random walls around Skyrim. Just be glad I didn’t follow any of our original ideas!

But not all was fun and games. The first major bug reared its ugly head just one day later.:

Falling through the floor for infinity upon reaching the market. This issue plagued the mod for weeks. Every time I thought I (or, more often, someone else) had it figured out, it would come roaring back.

February of 2015 also marked the first time I got this issue reported:

The ol’ “I got sent to the auction and then nothing happens” error, one that continues to pop up on the support thread to this very day.

Lessee, this was on February 5. Let’s see how long it took to find the answer.

Only three days! And it was CC who figured it out. I take back all the undeserved things I said about him. Which are none of them.

Another bug that took a while to fix popped up the very same day and was reported by the very same person:

Ah, yes. The “everything is black when I get to SoT” bug. This one was my fault – I got code dyslexia when I added the fade out/fade in portion and ended up fading out when I meant to fade in, leaving poor SoT with a blinded player.

At this point I had Death Alternative set to send people to the auction only after being defeated by bandits. I figured that was most logical – I mean, a wolf wouldn’t be sending you to an auction, now would it? It also gave people opportunities to use some of the other available outcomes from DA. The mod worked reasonably well as long as you had Sanguine’s Debauchery (which I just assumed everyone had). It was the default choice if none of the other mods were available.

The thing to remember about the mod at this point was there was not yet an MCM, so the way it worked was this: every outcome had its own quest assigned to it, including separate quests for each of the SD owners (it was up to its current six by this point). The game would roll a random number, that number would correspond to a quest, the mod would check if that quest existed. If it did, that mod would start. If not, it would roll again until it found something. Not too shabby, if I do say so myself, although it led to a lot of checks that could have been made one time at the beginning.

The other thing that make it clunky was that the auction scenes had varied timing – some had more words than others and therefore took a little longer to finish. I added a “wait” command before each auction to keep the game from doing the next thing on its list until the scenes were finished but some of the auctions were longer than the wait and the player got sent out while the auctioneer was still talking. Rude!

I also finally got around to dealing with another issue – what to do with all the newly enslaved character’s gear? I investigated the usual “transfer it to a box” setup but I didn’t want to do that for a few reasons:

1 – They were only going to be in the cage for a short amount of time (unless the player just liked RPing hanging out in cells), so it didn’t seem worth it to stick everything in a box just to take it right back out again.

2 – Other mods that did the box thing always always had complaints about the way it worked in their support threads.

3 – I had no good way to give all the stuff to the mod that picked up the player after the auction. It would likely require the mod-maker to add special stuff to their own mod to take the handoff. I wanted the transition to be as easy as possible to attract as many mod-makers as possible to allow their mods to be added.

4 – The most important one – I tried to do it and couldn’t get it to work. This, in case you haven’t noticed, is the overarching theme to all my mod-making decisions.

With all of these issues, I chose the easiest thing I could think of – just a simple player.unequipall(). It wasn't until later that I got around to trying to add ZAZ cuffs that would keep the player from opening their inventory. One step at a time!

One other thing my “unequipall()” solution did not take into consideration was anything having to do with Devious Devices, which is an issue I steadfastly ignored all the way up until I handed the thing over to Lozeak, who finally added DD compatibility in SS+. If you want to know why I refused to add DD compatibility myself, I’ll ask you to look back to number 4, above. If you want to know why I didn’t reach out to the wonderful @Kimy to ask for help with that…I have no good answer. I am just an idiot.

The “fall through the floor” issue made me consider moving the auction yet again. After all, if removing Alduin’s Wall removed half the mountain, maybe other parts were unstable? CC came up with a great suggestion that I nearly went with:

CC’s thoughts on where to put the new auction spawned a lot of interesting places and a line about him doing a survey, which I turned into an Easter Egg. There’s an NPC with some form of his name floating around somewhere.

We thought we had the solution to the "falling through the floor" bug when @Kenjoka pointed out that setting Death Alternative to "Ragdoll and Bleedout" appeared to fix it. This was a surprise because Sanguine's Debauchery had had an issue that was solved only by removing the "ragdoll" portion of that particular setting. Still, it seemed to work for some people. It was not the permanent solution, alas.

In mid February, Captured Dreams almost joined the party. I hadn’t even considered it until someone brought it up because I thought it was just a store that sold bondage stuff. I had no idea it involved quests of any sort. But there were some difficulties getting it to connect properly so it was put on hold. 

In the meantime, the @zaira allowed me to connect to Maria Eden, another of my all-time favorite game experiences. On February 20th, @pchs' Wolfclub joined the party. The mod was growing by leaps and bounds!

I celebrated by moving the auction to its current home, a copied version of the Temple of Mara in Riften. It just looked nicer than the other options, the kind of place I could picture rich hoity-toity people gathering. A gentrified slave buying experience. While editing the room, I accidently removed part of the floor, which made for fun viewing because the navmesh remained, so people would walk partway across the opening and then abruptly fall into the cellar.

I probably should have fixed it immediately but the hole actually made it through a couple of minor upgrades, mostly for my own amusement.

The first flaw was that there was still no way to get the player to get sent to the auction. At this point, the mod required the player to walk to the slave market and talk to the slavers to start the process. Not very immersive, to say the least.

The second flaw was that any mod that connected to Simple Slavery would need to be a dependency because I didn’t know how to check if a mod existed in a player’s load order. You want this mod? Well, you need all of these outcome mods, whether you want them or not!

Fortunately, @Slaves of Tamriel was (and still is) much better at this than I and handed me this lovely code snippet that checks for a quest before it tries to call it:

This was in the time before ModEvents were prevalent in nearly everything, so hooking onto quests was the only sure way to connect. Well, that I knew of, anyway. With this in my pocket, I could connect to any mod in existence as long as I had a quest name and, as a bonus, I could check to make sure the quest (and therefore the mod itself) existed in the player’s load order before trying to call it. Goodbye dependencies, hello freedom! A fair portion of the current SS connections still use this method. Unless @HexBolt8 replaced them.

The first flaw (yeah, I should have put the flaws and their fixes in the same order, but this seemed the bigger flaw, so it felt like it should be mentioned first but the other one was fixed first, so…) was fixed thanks to the connection to Death Alternative. Fortunately, @BralorMarr, the author of DA himself, was extraordinarily helpful. And by “helpful,” I mean that I wrote the code the way I understood it, then he deleted a good portion of it and handed me back the working version. One of my prized…well, not possessions, but moments in mod-making was discovering the nice thing he said about my mod in DA’s mod description (right there on Nexus! It’s still there, hiding from the Nexus moderators):

Aawww! He called it “ingenious!” That’s so sweet!

With the onset of Death Alternative, I finally had the full slave auction experience: capture, transport to a holding cage (thanks, blackouts!), auction, slavery outcome. There was still a ton to do, but with the initial framework in place, I officially moved the mod to version 1.0 in early January 2015.

The next thing on my list, even before adding Sanguine’s Debauchery, was to move the auction yet again. I was originally going to keep it outdoors but people pointed out that wolves kept spawning and attacking everyone, which often led to the hilarious scene of slaves opening the cages and joining in the attack but was otherwise a major inconvenience. The bigger reason to move it indoors was…well, keeping it outside would have become waaaay too much work.

See, there were all these NPCs hanging around the auction block. All the time. Twenty-four hours a day. That was not natural, but in order to make it not happen, I would have to figure out how to set schedules for each and every one of them, to find them places to go during the night, to get them to come back in the mornings. Fuck all that, frankly. Much easier to move the entire thing indoors to a place without windows so no matter what time you showed up, there was no way to know what time it was. I mean, aside from the game clock, but who really looks at that, anyway?

With the decision to move it indoors came the obvious question: where? @Content Consumer* and I discussed it in the support thread. My first thought was Skyhaven Temple, which was large and had a dais. I even copied it and tried fiddling with it which is when I discovered that removing Alduin’s Wall deletes a large chunk of the building itself. Who knew? But this discovery led to a completely unexpected situation: CC suggested covering up the resulting hole and provided this for the job:

If this looks remotely familiar to you, it’s because you have seen its descendants in the game. That’s right, Content Consumer created all the original slave market advertisements. They’ve all been replaced at this point, but his were first.

Anyway. Skyhaven (or a copy of it) became the first indoor slave market. I moved the cages there, tossed CC’s sign over the pit that had been Alduin’s Wall, then set up my auction NPCs.

With a nice indoor spot ready, I moved on to Sanguine’s Debauchery. Thanks to Skyrimll (now @DeepBlueFrog), adding it was super easy- he was more than happy to help connect the two. I decided to start with two NPCs for masters, both of them male because lesbian sex does nothing for me (selfish of me, yeah?), and place them at random spots around Skyrim.

With the advent of a second slavery mod and a total of three outcomes, I had to decide how to make things work. The original plan was random choices but I hadn’t looked into how to do randoms yet so, instead, I set the scenarios up in a specific order. At first it began with Slaves of Tamriel, then moved through the SD masters, but that idea had a flaw of its own – SoT still did not have a way to end the scenario, so you would essentially be stuck in that mine forever unless you consoled your way out (which still wouldn’t remove the myriad of scripted effects placed on you) and would therefore never get to the SD outcomes.

Then I thought about removing SoT altogether until it had an end, but it was just too fantastic of an experience to skip, so I settled on putting it third in line behind the two SD outcomes and suggesting the players save right beforehand, play it until they were bored, then revert to the save and pretend they just escaped. Once all three outcomes were resolved (the last by cheating), it would then be incumbent upon the player to go into Death Alternative and uncheck SS as a possible outcome.

Clunky, but it worked, and it was enough in my mind to warrant the upgrade to version 2.0.

*This was soon after I met (the first time I heard from him was when he whined a little earlier in the support thread about the SD masters, even though SD was not yet connected and therefore there weren’t even any SD masters made yet. He’s like that. What a jerk) the force of nature that is Content Consumer. I’ve never met a more enthusiastic online personality. Once he’s on a topic, he won’t stop until he has exhausted all possible avenues of thought on the subject. He is, in short, hilarious.

1 – Dialogue trees are easy to make.

I mean, look at this:

It’s just a flowchart. A flowchart created on a platform that seems to be designed specifically to make it hard to make flowcharts, that is not expandable to an entire screen, and whose boxes stack on top of each other every time you shut down so you have to spend the first ten minutes of your mod-making time untangling them:

But still – just a flowchart.

2 – Quests are easy to make.

Each quest is separated by stages. You start in one, you do whatever is involved in that stage, it moves to the next.

3 – You can incorporate scripts directly into dialogue in order to move quests from one stage to another (or do any other scripting thing).

Most important, the code for these scripts is already written in the tutorials, so you don’t even have to memorize them. Just copy, paste, and change the quest stage to whichever you want it to move to.

There you have it: JFraser’s 1-2-3 method of mod making: Make dialogue, attach a script to the end of the dialogue to move things to the next stage, repeat. Look at any of my mods and you will see this in action. You can’t move from one semester to the next in College Days without talking to Mhoram. You can’t even begin one of the quests in Escape the Cell without talking to someone. Dibella’s markings are put on you via dialogue in Divines Guide You (that’s actually my favorite thing I’ve done via making mods. I think the effect is fantastic). And, of course, you need to speak to the guard outside the cage to begin the auction in Simple Slavery.

Alas, this system failed me when it came to the rest of Simple Slavery. It’s all fine and good to talk to the guard to start the auction but then what? The issue I was having with Simple Slavery that caused me torture to the point where I gave up on it was the auction, which was the heart and soul of the mod. The entire reason for its existence. I could get an NPC to talk, but only to me. The only way I could think to get this entire thing to work would be to prompt the auctioneer to his next phrase by saying something to him every single time, but that would not be even a little immersive. I tried everything I could think of, given what I knew at the time, all to no avail, which was when I hung up my keyboard. So to speak.

To my surprise, the community once again responded with kindness after I announced the death of the mod, thanking me for making the attempt and encouraging me to try smaller things. Maybe I could grow from them and get back to this some day.

And that is what I did. I started with an idea of a small alternate start mod that would tell a story of a child of a farmer whose home was raided by bandits and you would have to scrape your way to freedom and eventual success. This germ of an idea eventually became Escape the Cell, which was much easier to make because it involved small scenarios that relied almost entirely on dialogue/quest stage scripting.

During the summer and fall of 2014 I worked on EtC and College Days: Winterhold (never did get around to College Days: Bards College, where you become a bard, but I’m thinking about it again) and learned a lot more about making mods and new ways to incorporate slightly more complex scripts.

And then, on October 23^rd, I was replying to a post in the SS support thread, where people were tossing out ideas about how the mod could be picked up as a sort of community project, and I had a flash of inspiration.

One month later, it became official:

Two things sparked the revival. The first was something so stupidly simple, I’m still kicking myself for not realizing it much sooner: scenes.

The CK has a system to make scenes, where characters talk or move or do other things in a preordained order. I had basically been trying to find a way to make scenes except without the scene function, which was what I found to be impossible.

I knew they existed. Hell, you see scenes play out in the game all the damn time. I even made a scene in Escape the Cell when you overhear slavers talking about you as you are attempting to…well, escape the cell.

But it didn’t connect in my brain that they were the solution to the auction until that moment. Scenes work very much like dialogue and can have scripts connect to them in much the same way. You just have to use aliases instead of the actual characters, for whatever CK reason.

The other game-changer was a mod called Slaves of Tamriel which is still, to this day six years later, the most immersive game playing experience I’ve ever had. . Much like Simple Slavery, it began as a giant multi-tiered concept that became vastly scaled down. In this case, it was because the author (also called @Slaves of Tamriel) wanted to finish one outcome before moving on to the next, but the one outcome kept getting more and more complex. I compare us, but he managed far more with his mod than I ever have. The atmosphere in that mine feels absolutely soul-draining.

SoT changed Simple Slavery on a fundamental level. Here was a mod that already had everything I could have hoped for in a slavery outcome. Well, except a way to end it (which has since been rectified by Slaves of Tamriel plus plus ). But I didn’t know that at the time. I PMd him and we talked about how we might be able to connect the two, which turned out to be as simple as him adding a quest that put the player at the entrance to the mine and me starting that quest at the end of the auction.

Just like that, I had a working mod with an auction and an outcome and a new business model, summed up on December 10, 2014:

This solved all sorts of problems for me. Well, it solved one problem, but it was the biggest problem of them all: my mod-making limitations.

This time around, I recognized those limitations and stuck with simple things that I knew I could do. So, for instance, instead of trying to get someone to drag the player to the auction block, I decided to use blackout-and-moves. Dialogue led to a script that blacked out the screen (a technique that the fantastic @DocClox taught me), a quick MoveTo to a preset X-marker, and, just like that, the player was moved without trying to get the flaky follow function to work.

Using other mods meant that I didn’t have to build complex quests with animations that I could never get to work. If you look deep into SS, you will find my attempts to do so. There is a cell that was meant to be a “pre-auction” room, where the player would be tortured and broken before being sent to the auction. I couldn’t even get the guy to whip me. Later I added another cell that was meant to be a farm where you would be sent as the “default” slave experience instead of being set free. Turns out outdoor world spaces are really hard to make. Neither of these ideas came to fruition because I just couldn’t figure out how to make them work.

So I stuck with what I could do, and that was just enough. The mod was (very very) bare bones, but, at least and at last, its primary purpose had been realized: it was now possible to be auctioned off as a slave to an actual slavery experience.

Anyway: the dead of winter, 2014. I had stumbled upon LoversLab  just under a year previous in the same way everyone probably does – by Googling some version of “Skyrim” and “sex.” And I found the motherlode. I also found the reason that I still, after all these years, have never got around to finishing the main storyline.

I downloaded a bunch of mods and started the game in excitement, then bitterly spent the better part of the next three days learning the meanings of words like “BOSS” (this was pre-LOOT) and “FNIS” and “mod manager.” Seriously, if it hadn’t been for the promise of sweet sweet semi-realistic sex in a video game, I probably would have dumped Skyrim altogether.

I finally got a stable (ha!) game running and began to play in earnest. By which I mean I kept finding new mods I wanted to try so I kept starting over. Things were going along swimmingly for a while, but over time I came across the same glaring omission in the LoversLab experience – there were rape mods and slavery mods, there were rape mods that turned into slavery mods. What there wasn’t, was a place for the player to get auctioned into slavery.

I went through the usual channels to try to cajole some of the modders (I’m sorry – mod-makers, since “modder” has somehow come to mean “one who uses mods” instead of the more logical “one who makes mods”) into make an auction mod. And by “usual” I, of course, mean that I mentioned it in the support threads of their mods. “What we need is an auction mod,” I’d say. Hint hint. It seemed like such an obvious and natural thing to make! C’mon, Skyrimll, this is right up your alley!

But they didn’t take the bludgeoning hint, so I decided to try to make it myself. I had some coding experience. Not a lot, but I was writing stupid Basica programs in 1983 on our TRS-80 and I had gone through a few years of college trying to become a programmer. I could do this!

I cracked open the Creation Kit (hereafter the CK) for the first time and set myself to the first task: making a cage.

This sounds simple and, once you’ve done it once, it becomes simpler, but finding your way around Skyrim inside the CK is very confusing. It’s a mess of “world spaces,” each with its own giant list of locations, most of them called “Wilderness” with some numbers attached. The hardest part about placing things in the world is finding your way back to them once you’ve placed them.

Of course, that begged the first question: where to put this auction? I didn’t want to mess up any cities or run into other mods, so I figured it would be best to put in somewhere in the wilderness in a place where no one else was likely to place anything. I settled on a bit of land between Riften and the gates to Morrowind, in the general area of the Dawnstar tunnel entrance. I found a cage in the game assets and put it in place. Then discovered that the cages don’t automatically come with doors, so I went back to the assets and found the right sized door and added it. Much to my relieved satisfaction, placing the door on the front of the cage made it automatically work. Yay!

Now most people would have tried to make, you know, an actual mod before posting his work for the public to see. I, for whatever reason, decided that the cage was quite enough for now, so on February 5, 2014, I published my first mod.

I wrote out my mission statement as the mod description. The original is long since lost to history but the general concept behind Simple Slavery was this:

The entire slavery experience in one package, from beginning to end.
 

Thus it was just, simply, slavery. Pretty clever, right? Here’s how it was supposed to work: You get defeated in battle and get enslaved by someone via Sanguine’s Debauchery. After some time, a caravan would come by and purchase you from your SD master and you would end up in the auction. There would be a crowd around the auctioneer, none of whom had any actual relation to any of the randomly picked quests, all of which were to be part of the mod itself.

Which one you ended up with would be chosen at random, then you would move to the slavery quest and do…whatever happened in that quest. I was still working out those details at the time. I made big promises, including saying things like, “Tired of getting captured by random bandits only to spend your imprisonment walking between the nearest ore node and the road?”

See? Simple. All you would need was SD+ to send you there and you would be set.

Now here’s where my true love of this site really began. What kind of idiot posts a cage in the trees, calls it a mod, and posts it in a public place without any actual content? Looking at it objectively, I don’t know how I didn’t get derided from the start. Instead, people were very friendly and excited. As @gaggedgirl123 put it,

 I even got my very first bug tester: @konker420 downloaded the mod, found the cage, and reported his success.

I also got my first person who failed to read the mod description which explicitly stated “All there is right now is a cage in the woods near Riften.” Which led to the very first time I had someone else (thanks @carnifex!) help troubleshoot one of my support threads.

Emboldened by this unexpected support (the truth is that I had uploaded it for the sole purpose of having it handy to download to my laptop. I hadn’t expected people to actually start to pay attention to it), I added two people to the cage.

@carniflex then introduced me to my first bugs, including something I had never heard of but which is well known among the mod-making community: the infamous grey-faced bug.

The fix for the grey-faced bug is to target the character in the CK and press CTRL+F4. @dabonzors22 brought up the fix and then none other than SD+ mod-maker Skyrimll (now @DeepBlueFrog) explained how and where to package the resulting meshes and textures, then told me I could reach out to him in order to get SD+ to play nicely with my mod. He had regretted that statement ever since. This was the beginning of my friendship with DBF (which continues to this day).

Now let’s take a moment to share a hearty laugh:

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Ahem.

Looking through the original mod’s support thread, I see that @xaz offered to help. Why didn’t I take him up on that? Jesus. I am an idiot. He did introduce me to Death Alternative, though, which became one of the cornerstones of the mod.

As a side note, I still don’t understand why people dislike Death Alternative. Just four easy adjustments and it is steady and reliable. I’ve never had a problem with it.

Anyway, soon I realized that it was weird and silly to have the auction in the woods. The most logical place for something as seedy as a slave market seemed to be Riften. There was some debate. Whiterun is much more central but it didn’t really seem to fit the vibe. Solitude has that lovely stage but then I’d be competing with Roggvir’s beheading and that was a hassle I didn’t want to go near. So I picked the back lot, as it had a handy boarded up door that I could pretend was the way to the interior auction holding cells, and that part of Riften just seemed useless and unused.

I moved the cage and the slaves there and made an auctioneer, then a few people standing around watching. Then I tried to make some dialogue and discovered the next big thing that every mod-maker (who uses dialogue) quickly learns: dialogue won’t work until you build an “SEQ” file. Why this was never fixed by Beth is beyond me, but fortunately for us all, someone begged the genius who made the XEdit series to add it to TES5Edit, and he did. So if you’re making a mod that includes dialogue, make sure you remember to refresh your SEQ every single time (and save it in its own folder in the “common” folder) or your dialogue won’t make it into the game.

It was at this point, on version 0.05, that I hit my first major delay – I had to actually start going through the tutorials to learn how to make things actually happen. To see how far things didn’t go, where was my stated intention as of February 25, 2014:

“At this point my plan (if I can ever get the scripting to work) is to have the head slaver (John Randall) show up when you have been captured with SD. At first, though, you will become enslaved just by being in Randall's vicinity, since he will force a conversation with you that will lead to you getting hit on the head and waking up naked in the slave cage by Riften. I'm currently going through the tutorials (damn real life, interfering with my time!) trying to figure out how to insert the OnHit event to make this work.”

Spoiler alert: I never was able to make that work. In fact, just over a month after this optimistic statement, the mod officially ended. I went up against the CK and was utterly defeated.

I tried to make it sound like I just didn't have time but the ugly truth was that I could do simple things but I could not, it turned out, do the sort of complexities that would be required for a full on auction/enslavement experience. The dream was over.