I ain't dead. But I did have a crappy couple of weeks at work- I swear, my job would be so much easier if it wasn't for a few very specific co-workers who're inveterate shit-stirrers- that left me without a whole lot of energy or enthusiasm for modding. This stuff takes a lot more real work than my actual job, most of the time. I did at least get in some playtime, partially to decompress but also to finally level up my current testing character, and got some fun kill-cam shots out of it.

Unfortunately this character is pretty much dead.

I first installed Project AHO right after it came out. Big Dwemer-themed quest? Yeah, that's gonna catch my interest. Even if I wasn't entirely happy about how much stuff it added to the worldspace around various Dwemer ruins. But all these characters I've made while working on the Collection have been pretty short-lived for one reason or another, and I wasn't getting a lot of actual gameplay in while I was building all the new parts, so I never managed to get my last character on the old computer up to AHO's level 15 starting point before I got the new box in. So it ended up in my load order for the new build... and then I spent more weeks not actually playing the game much and just building quick testing characters reusing the chargen data from the old computer. This character was put together from scratch with the specific intent of finally getting someone leveled up enough to try AHO out, and I eventually managed to slaughter enough bandits with her to hit level 15 and trigger it.

And it started with everything I don't want to see in a quest.

It begins with a forced conversation the instant you enter an exterior cell after hitting the level, which is always annoying, and follows that with a straight-up abduction, regardless of circumstances. Lydia really ain't doing her job if she's just going to let her Thane get shanghaied right outside of the city, y'know. And it apparently doesn't account for follower framework mods, since even after it kicked her out of my service iAFT still popped her down in the middle of the scripted opening scene... where the player's getting sold at auction. So man, she REALLY ain't doing her job. 

The whole player slavery angle is pretty well glossed over in the mod's description, and I honestly wouldn't have bothered with it at all if I had realized that was how it started. I know there's plenty of people who're into the theme, given how many mods centered around it there are here on LL, but I personally find it... what's the best way to put this... Insufferably boring. My preferred playstyle could best be described as 'high-speed assault'. Just rushing in and tearing everything apart. Getting ripped out of the middle of the rest of my questlines, losing all my carefully-wrought gear (including my cyborg body, which just raises more questions), getting locked in a combat-disabling spell and having to run around doing nothing but frickin' fetch quests for some indeterminate amount of time before it'll let me get to the stuff that actually interested me? Yeah, how 'bout no. And then said fetch quest dead-ended at a marker telling me to search something that the quest then repeatedly insisted was empty, and yeah, that was enough of that. 

So I reverted back to a save from before the thing started and axed it the fuck out, which was its own whole damn process since it required me to re-run DynDOLOD thanks to all that afore-mentioned extra crap in the worldspace, only to find that pulling it had somehow broken both Lydia's follow package and iAFT in general. Lydia had ended up getting teleported after me, as mentioned, so I used iAFT's 'dismiss but stay here' command to get her to hang back while I begrudgingly tried out AHO's opening area to keep it from being completely silly. But after I reverted to the earlier save and pulled AHO, she'd just continually wander off as if she'd been dismissed. Her dialog commands were still in the 'following' state, though, and trying to actually dismiss her got the right verbal responses, but no change to her behavior or dialog commands. Using a save cleaner to clear out all the scripts AHO left behind didn't help, and even going back to earlier saves just saw the same thing happening. And locking her up with Display Model and trying to make followers out of other random NPCs saw mixed results, with it very rarely working properly (pretty much only on my Subject 12-16 NPC that I had just gotten around to rebuilding, actually) and more often resulting in pretty much the same kind of reaction; I'd get the message that the NPC was registered to an iAFT slot, but their actual follow behavior and dialog commands wouldn't change. And it kept doing the same kind of crap on every one of my existing saves, even the initial test characters. Reinstalling iAFT didn't fix anything. Gave EFF and FLP a try as replacements, but even with them Lydia was still broken and I'm honestly not keen on their comparatively heavy-handed approaches to the behavior modifications. 

So at the end of it I had to burn this character just the same as all too many others. Re-reinstalled iAFT, started a whole new game without any scrap of AHO left in it, built a whole new character, rebuilt all my frickin' mod settings... And iAFT was still giving me these mod conflict warnings until I moved it down to the very ass-end of my load order. Since then it seems to be working fine, but I also haven't gotten enough playtime in with the character to pick up Lydia yet and see if she's un-broken. If she's still messed up over this crap, I will be very irked.

On the upside, the new character turned out pretty cute.

But on a whim I went with an Altmer, a race I very seldom play (one of the great disappointments in Skyrim is that it never gives you a chance to burn the fucking Thalmor to the ground), and that led to it's own issues. Fixing those is a large part of why I haven't actually done much with her yet, but I'll tell you more about that later.