Devious Newcomer (Alt Start Quest) 1.0.6

Devious Newcomer

An Early-Game Devious Quest Mod

This is a story-driven quest mod well suited for low-level characters or even as an alternative start* to playing Skyrim.

You start after having been attacked and robbed of everything on the road to Riften. Three grizzled adventurers are surrounding you. What do they want from you? Can they provide help or are they perhaps members of the bandits who attacked you? They seem peaceful so far... maybe you should speak to them?

This mod was originally developed as a new part for my Ebonitium mod, but I thought it might work better and reach a wider audience as a standalone mod.

*) Only Skyrim Unbound Reborn is currently supported. I don't think I have the patience to figure out the other alt-start mods.

Features

• A storyline with several chapters with perhaps 2-3 hours of playtime.
• Development of this mod is complete; future updates will only happen for bugfixes as needed.
• Low-level character friendly objectives. No fighting. No sex scenes.
• Devious Devices (of course), including hobble dresses, but it's always consensual.
• Several points along the quest where you can end it early or take a break from having to wear devices.
• The story is for the most part centered in Riften and involves some new NPCs and some known NPCs.
• The ending of the story is at Whiterun, the place best suited for low level characters.
• Occasional references to Skyrim lore and vanilla quests.
• This mod is available both as unvoiced and with AI generated voices (xVASynth). The synth voices are, as usual, a bit hit or miss in terms of quality.

Starting the Mod

Currently, you have two options to start this quest:

If you are playing with Skyrim Unbound Reborn, you can use Unbound to automatically launch this quest at your playthrough's start. Simply select the Wilderness starting location "Robbed in the Rift" from the Unbound MCM's starting locations list.

Alternatively, you can start the mod from the console at any time* during your playthrough.*To do so, simply open the console and type this: StartQuest AR_DeviousAltStart This will teleport you the quest's starting position on the road to Dayspring canyon outside of Riften, and then you can just follow the objectives as usual.

While this is intended as an early-game quest, you can start it any time* you want during your playthrough. For role-playing purposes, the only presumptions the mod makes is that you were traveling to or from Riften by carriage and that you don't appear to know much about Skyrim yet (at least outwardly).

*) Note that items will be removed from your inventory when starting this quest (among them weapons, armor, gold). One of the quest's NPCs should hand them back to you at the end but I have not tested this yet. Keep this in mind and move the things you want to keep to a safe container if you want to start this quest later in your playthrough and not as an alt-start quest.

Note: do NOT use SetStage console commands to try and fast-forward through the quest. It will break the quest as most of its progression is triggered through dialogue or activator scripts.

Installation

Decide wether you want to use the voiced or the unvoiced version of the mod. Install only one of them with the mod manager of your choice.

Additionally, please install the patch (Devious Newcomer PATCH 250603.zip) to improve/correct some minor issues in the main mod. You can install the patch either as a new mod, or merge it with your existing installation of Devious Newcomer. Should be safe to install mid-playthrough if you haven't started the mod yet, otherwise the changes won't have any effect.

Optionally, if you are using Skyrim Unbound Reborn, you can also install the separate Unbound add-on which will make this quest available as an Unbound start scenario (see "Starting the Mod" directly above for details.

FaceGen Issues / "Gray Face Bug"

For some reason, there are issues with the mod's facegen that reportedly crashes some users' games. I don't know how to fix this, so you may want to resort to this mod as a workaround if the gray faces of the NPCs added by this mod bother you:

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/42441?tab=description

Requirements

The only hard requirement is Devious Devices (SE/NG) and all its requirements.

For the optional Skyrim Unbound add-on you'll obviously also need Skyrim Unbound Reborn installed, version 2.1.10 or newer: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/27962

Please let me know if you encounter and bugs, issues, or oddities!

Does this work in LE?

It should but you'll have to run the included textures through Cathedral Asset Optimizer to make them compatible.

If you want to use the Unbound add-on, make sure you download its LE version or the start scenario will not show up in your MCM.

Version History / Changelog:

CREDITS

This is a devious mod, so a big shout-out has to go to all the creators, managers, and contributors of Devious Devices: thank you so much for making so many wonderful things possible in this game of ours!

The synth voices were created with Dan Ruta's xVASynth.