About This File
The Nymph Girls of Skyrim
This is a Custom Race and Follower Mod.
There are five custom races, the Nymph Races, with powerful abilities and drawbacks. There are also seven unique Nymph followers with custom abilities who are representatives of a Nymph Race.
Because of the limited length of file descriptions, the full post cannot be added here.
Please See this Blog Entry for more details on the main mod. For details on the update, see the blog post linked in the Version details section.
Table of Contents
I. Mod Description
II. Requirements and Recommendations
1. First is a series of five custom races, the Nymph Races, each possessing a variety of powerful abilities along with a set of one or more serious drawbacks. Each race has 4-6 hand built presets based on a carefully sculpted racial .trishape morph that allows the player to easily customize a character that resembles a beautiful Nymph, with a total of 24 presets. These Nymph Races are all unique and distinct from each other, but share a couple things in common.
- The first thing they have in common is a special power that hearkens back to the days of Daggerfall where magical creatures could only be hurt with magical weapons. This power, Magical Body, makes the Nymph nearly invulnerable to weapons that are made of iron or steel. While this may sound over-powered at first, you might be surprised to find out what happens when you expect to face enemies who cannot hurt you only to ignore the one enemy carrying an elven sword! Additionally, this power does not apply to any creature attacks, such as wolves, trolls, or dragons, and it does not apply to the weapons used by either Draugr or Falmer.
- It has been carefully mathematically modeled using Skyrim’s armor/damage resistance formula and it is essentially balanced to give you an incredible amount of strength early in the game that weakens and eventually disappears as your foes will not only grow past its protection, but will also start to use weapons that you are no longer protected from.
- The second thing all Nymph races share in common is a drawback, which comes in the form of an experience penalty, Whimsical Mind. Just like the early elder scrolls games when one could design a character with great starting advantages in exchange for an extra amount of experience required per level, the Nymph Races are much stronger than vanilla races, but they will take a lot more time to level-up their skills.
- Additionally, four of these races possess a unique extra power that is only active when they remain unclothed, a “Naked Power”, or Nymph Power. This is a flavor ability for the most part, it is a way to justify the compulsion towards nudity of the Nymph beyond the fact that they have no need for clothing, and a means to help this playstyle remain viable through all stages of the game.
- Quite simply, the magical essence of the Nymph is at its strongest when they do not have their bodies covered by any fabrics, metals, or animal skins. The races have been balanced so that this special power is not a significant factor in their relative strengths.
- Any Nymph will be quite effective even without this power, so if you do not like the idea of playing a naked female character, you certainly do not have to. Let me be very clear about this - you can easily play through the game without these "Naked Powers", and you should find the Nymph Races to be a powerful and unique racial choice no matter how you dress them.
- However, if you are interested in playing an authentic Nymph and willing to stay true to your Nymph nature, you will get a little something extra that will make this choice viable for most of the game.
- The fifth race, the Blended Nymph, does not have such a power, because they represent the race closest to a mortal human whilst still being a magical Nymph, and in return they are blessed with a talent for using and improving armor that no other Nymph race has.
- Every Nymph Race uses a different set of textures and every race has a different base headshape, derived from her blender-sculpted racial .trishape morph. Thus, a Wood Nymph looks quite different from either a Night Nymph or a Desert Nymph.
2. The second aspect of this mod is a set of seven very carefully designed, sculpted, and otherwise unique followers who are all representatives of one of the Nymph Races.
- Each follower possesses one or more special spells or abilities that is entirely unique, with hand crafted effects, gradients, and shaders, and a personality-driven approach that these powers were designed around.
- They also possess a series of perks that allow them to level with the player, functioning as though they have taken the same series of perks the player can as they level up and their skill becomes sufficient for it, and they are all designed to scale the power of their special abilities based on level without the use of outside mods.
- All of this is in addition to carefully designed custom classes and highly tuned combat styles that ensure each girl fights quite differently from the others and that her behavior reflects her personality.
- Three of these followers, along with the races they represent, utilize custom texture sets that were built using a variety of image compositing methods and are unique to this mod.
- All seven followers, and the races they represent, have a unique body normal map that gives them different levels of muscle tone and appearance.
- All seven possess a uniquely built mesh-mapped face normal generated and baked specifically for that girl’s head mesh. These normals are then layered with a transparent detail map of the underlying diffuse skin texture to allow light and shadow based on the texture and gives them a very lifelike appearance in almost any lighting.
- If you don’t know what any of the texture jargon means, that’s ok. Just know that a considerable amount of time, care, and effort went into customizing their personal appearances as well as their play-style, and they should stand up as unique individuals both by looks and by function.
- Each of the 24 total unique presets also has an NPC version that is fully functional as a vanilla-style follower. Some even have unique or special powers, though they do not possess the overall depth and design put into the seven unique Nymph followers, and are pre-placed all over the world, so go exploring!
- Or, if you're feeling lazy, through the use of console commands and an in-game reference guide, you can obtain them the easy way too.
Requirements
- LegendaryEdition or Dragonborn, Dawnguard, and Hearthfires
- Racecompatibility (the scripts in this mod may overwrite the default one, but they are identical)
-
XP32 Physics enabled SkeletonNO LONGER STRICTLY NECESSARY, BUT YOU SHOULD STILL HAVE IT ANYWAY -
HDT-HighheelsNO LONGER NECESSARY - Some kind of HDT-Physics: Either HDT-PE or HDT-SMP
- Either Racemenu or ECE
7. Relationship dialogue overhaul is now required.
Recommendations
- Any Follower management mod (EFF, AFT, etc.) I would highly recommend using a follower management mod that does not overwrite combat styles as I have tuned each follower with a unique combat style.
- A combat overhaul mod (Combat evolved, Ultimate combat, deadly combat)
- If you are going to be collecting a lot of new Nymph friends you will probably want to find a big house for them to live in...
- AlternateStart – Live another Life
- USLEEP
6. If you are interested in adding some "pirate themed" activites to skyrim, I recommend Pirates of Skyrim - The Northern Cardinal under the Black Flag.
Every Nymph found in this mod should be capable of becoming a member of your pirate crew, both the followers and world encounters!
KNOWN INCOMPATIBILITIES
- Any mod that changes the shape or texture of the default mouth mesh may result in an improperly sized mouth when switching to a nymph race during character creation.
A note on Installation options
DO NOT INSTALL THE SMP VERSION IF YOU ARE NOT USING SKINNED MESH PHYSICS.
YOU WILL HAVE GIANT WHITE SPHERES INSTEAD OF BREASTS.
There is an option for both HDT-PE or HDT-SMP, as well as bodyslide files for each. The SMP option uses a slightly modified version of the double-breast boned body made by pRz that is part of the "all in one skinned mesh physics pack." If you use SMP and have different configs than are included with this pack, you may need to change the mesh strings to get it to work with your configs, or you may need to add new configs. The body uses the string "Baseshape" rather than "UUNP" or "7BO", and the bones are named according to the "Baseshape" convention.
If you don't know what this means, you probably haven't edited your configs, so you don't need to worry about it.
Captain Nai'yari has three voice options to choose from. She will not work using Valerica's voice if you do not have Relationship Dialogue Overhaul installed.
Bug Fixes and General Improvements!
Honestly, there were so many bugs that I have fixed over the last several months that I haven't really kept track of them all.
The big ones for BUGS are
- Nymph races now use a specifically defined up-to-date XPMSE skeleton. This should eliminate any lingering issues that users have been having with deforming chests or feet. If you had your skeleton set up correctly before you won't notice any difference, but a lot of people have mods which overwrite the default one with an outdated version, and as a result had problems with the mesh parts that malform when used with an outdated skeleton. If you had the problem with "melting feet" or "collapsing breasts" this is why. It should now be 100% resolved.
- Nymph followers now correctly use racial powers that are granted through perks. Notably, Mystra and Kayellie get to benefit from their blended Nymph power, and they should be a fair bit tougher as a result.
- Synne's magic was not scaling correctly. Her "flames of sin" is supposed to have a very large scaling factor to it, and it wasn't set up correctly. Her magic is very powerful at higher levels now, as it is supposed to be.
- All of the mesh and texture paths that were mis-linked have been corrected. I manually went through every single creation kit entry and every single .nif file to make sure I didn't miss anything this time.
- Some of the textures I have made have normals that were baked inverted, so they look odd in certain lighting. Kayellie's sword is the most notable.
- I fixed the .trishape paths used by bodyslide generated race files. They were incorrectly pointing to the wrong trishapes, so you would be unable to use the in-game UUNP morph plugins. Every body mesh should now work correctly with morphs.
As far as IMPROVEMENTS
- I re-did every single custom face-normal map that I had previously made for the followers. I used a caged mesh method of baking instead of a strict UV match and I did a more sophisticated cleaning/layering technique in photoshop and I feel the results are a nice improvement.
- I tweaked several of the followers perk-sets and combat styles to add a few things they were missing. For example, Lykaea got a series of stealth perks.
- I changed the spell lists for the followers to avoid a bug that causes them to cast multiple spells at the start of combat for no reason. This often happens when a follower knows oakflesh and stoneflesh, as they will try to cast one and then the other one in sequence.
- Poxy has a better marble/stone texture now, and I tweaked her specular maps so that she doesn't have sweat or goosebumps anymore. Instead, her specular makes her look shinier, closer to polished stone.
- There are a lot of other minor things tweaks/improvements that were made to stuff like arborea's sandals. I changed out a bunch of the cubemaps too. Not really worth listing them all.
What's New in Version 1.91
Released
v1.91
Download/Install version 1.9 and then install this patch over it.
Bug fixes
- 1. Fixed a CTD that occured when entering indoor cells containing a Wild Beast Nymph
- 2. Fixed the skinning on arborea's leaf outfit so it should stay on her body correctly.
- 3. Fixed a weighting issue on Nai'Yari's outfit that caused her thighbands to stretch towards the opposite thigh
- 4. Fixed a bug that was causing several of the sandal variants to incorrectly use the calf slot.
Changes
- 1. Changed the textures on Arborea's leaf outfit to make it a little shiny and give it a better shade of green. Added a bodyslide set for this outfit.
- 2. Slightly changed some of the facegen tints for the wild Beast Nymphii
- 3. Changed the Summonable atronach used by one of the Wild Beast Nymph girls. Her Frost atronach is infused with unusual magic which gives it a unique appearance and the ability to block health regen. It is much better at killing trolls
- 4. Modified the Gem Sandal multi-layer parallax to improve the effect. These sandals are worn by both Arborea and a Blended Nymph pyromage girl.
v1.9
Install version 1.9 fresh.
- a whole lot of fixes, changes, improvements, and additions
- See this blog post for details
1.0d fixes
- Removal of unnecessary .esm master file dependencies, including hdthighheels.esm.
- Bodyslide files for hands/feet are added for every nymph race. Building these parts should correct hand/feet seams when building body shapes that are considerably different from 7BO
- Yulia's missing shoulder mesh is added.
Install with NMM or MO.
1.0c mesh fixes
Added a (correct) fix to resolve an issue some users were having with Yulia and Lykaea's outfits missing textures.