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There is now a new roadmap for 2021 ... don't read this unless you're really bored. I don't plan to start any of this stuff until later in the year. Not sure when, it could be as late as June/July, or it could be a lot sooner. Here's the rough order/priority I'm looking at: new deals; new games; follower archetypes/quirks - things like alcoholic follower, sex-mad follower, greedy follower, etc.; ability for the follower to set (radiant) quest objectives for looting opportunities; (radiant) quests to find devious devices that you can wear to please the follower; a way to "pay" followers that doesn't involve cash - though I have no idea what that is yet. minor slavery extensions New deals: New games: Additional Possibilities

Originally posted this in the DF forum, but it's not really about DF - I've updated it to be a standalone post. In terms of the "boss follower" fantasy, this is my wish list for the vaguely possible. I see the relationship with the follower structured into stages like this: PC leader Equal partners Follower as leader Indentured service Hardcore enslavement A ladder you can move up and down, depending on factors that ultimately the player configures how they like. Follower as leader is something I'd really like to have. Here are some ideas for how that stage might work: The follower chooses target locations to explore, PC guides them there. The follower doesn't control your gold, but does control your income. There are troublesome living expenses. In the mode I could implement (not saying there aren't others), the PC isn't actively fighting, they are a packhorse and healer. On leaving a city, the follower records all the items the PC carries: those are the PC's stuff; her things that the follower knows she owns. Anything else you come by belongs to the follower. The follower gives you an outfit (you can customise what it looks like, as with whore armor) to adventure in. It has a big carry capacity buff, a health bonus, and a magical protection effect. It isn't armor. If you are unarmed (known healing spells are allowed) you get a speed boost from the outfit too. If you do not wear it, the DF gets annoyed and reduces your cut of the loot substantially. The follower handles the combat and the PC is just support. The follower says things like: "Just run on ahead and check for traps. I'll be right behind you." or "Scout ahead for me and run back if you find anything." The follower fights, and you loot the corpses. They scan your inventory periodically and records any new items seen. You can consume potions, but you will be billed for them - they aren't yours. You can wear armor you pick up, but see notes on the outfit. The goal is to loot as much valuable stuff as you can, but if you drop anything that you picked up, its value comes out of your cut. (Used/dropped item values have a configurable scale). If you can grab a potion and use it before the follower scans you, well that's your win. Good luck. Possibly, everything you pick up is tagged stolen. Probably an option. If you are knocked down in combat, you will enter a perma-bleedout until the follower comes back to "rescue" you... Because you're a follower. She might give you a potion (you'll be charged for it), or heal you. Otherwise you can't get any health back until you're standing again. Rescues will always have some deduction attached. If the follower goes down (whether you are standing or not), then you get a popup. You can choose to surrender through your defeat mod of choice, or accept DF defeat, in which case you go to SS or get an enslavement directly. Back in town, the follower removes all items they own, and also takes the adventuring outfit the provided back. They will give a (you can configure it) slooty outfit for you to wear in town; it's completely optional, but you may well not have anything else on you. If they are unhappy with you, they might give a locking rubber suit instead The follower totals the value of looted items and calculates your percentage. Configurable, and maybe level adjustable, but probably a low amount, like 5 or 10% of the total. It will be lower still if you didn't wear the proper outfit. Then any deductions are made: Outfit rental. Anything you consumed or dropped. Any help you had to ask for (can you remove this device?) Any food or drink you asked the follower for. Rescues. You get what's left, or if there's nothing left, your debt increases. When the follower takes items, totals up and gives you back anything she was "holding" for you, then you're in "rest" mode. The follower no longer follows. She goes to her home. You have to find her again to go adventuring. This doesn't make you free of the follower. If you adventure without her, there are consequences... You have punitive living expenses. Inns priced like Realistic Inn Rental (200 gold for a night at the Winking Skeever, but only 50 for the Sleeping Giant). You will have a quest to eat and drink certain items. Get them however you want. If you don't get them, you get a willpower-fatigue penalty. Consumable items will have a target cost. They might be hard to find. With Skooma Whore, instead of getting the items, you can consume skooma. The more you use this feature, the more skooma will be needed to satisfy in future. Food/drink items will be chosen to help satisfy any needs mod needs. You will have a quest to sleep in a nice bed. If you sleep in a crappy bed you fail the quest end ... you guessed it ... get a willpower-fatigue penalty. You can replace this with skooma too. If you can complete the eat/drink/sleep quests, you can opt to do them again instead of adventuring. In this case you can get willpower-fatigue reductions, or with enough carousing, bonus skill points. You're totally free to just to this with skooma ... I'm sure there would be no problems as a result If you can earn enough money, the follower may allow you to become a partner. If you get too deep in debt, then the follower will allow you to become her indentured servant. In that case you can't quit, and you must live with the follower. You won't get to control your gold any more, the follower will hold it, and ... but I don't have time to discuss that mode now. You can guess how it might be though. Definitely a maid outfit. Slavery is getting close. If you leave the current hold without the follower, the follower will be annoyed, and will demand a large fee (you can take as debt) to work with you again. You can't get rid of the follower though. There's no option to part ways once they are leader. You asked to work for them, and they assume you will do it until they want to stop. While in this deal, no other follower will join you, and all major vendors will refuse to buy items from you "You couldn't have got those yourself. I'm not buying stolen goods." (There will be some vendors you can sell to, but they will be few and dispersed, khajit for example). You can ask the follower to hire others, but they will reduce your cut. You can ask the follower to get rid of them, but it's up to her. You can ask to stay with the follower instead of using an inn. The follower will charge you rent. You will get a bed and a chest to use. The bed will meet requirements for the sleep quest. The follower will say "Put anything you like in that chest. Trust me. I won't steal any of it, and it will be safe here." This is largely true. However, if the follower is angered, all bets are off. The follower will not feed you. Instead they will expect you to cook for them. There will be a shopping quest. Fail to cook and there will be a financial penalty. You'll still have your own eat and drink quests too. Go adventuring by yourself and find all your stuff is gone. "I didn't think you were coming back so I threw that useless clutter out of my house." You can still take deals, but debt mechanics are completely different - follower is paying you, if you collect enough stuff. Punishment with debt is more worrying because you have less ability to clear it. You're only getting 5 or 10% of a loot haul, and you have to rely on flaky Skyrim NPC AI to fight (the follower will be buffed in this scenario, so shouldn't be stupidly unfair) though you can heal them to help, if you can afford to buy the spell. (The follower will sell it to you for debt). The buy price of regular clothes should probably be highly inflated, so if you buy some you'll feel the expense. (Could be a quest to buy nice clothes). So there are some ideas. But I don't know if I'll do that sort of thing... It's on my mind. Speaking of how the follower takes over the NPC interactions sometimes... Some, commonly used settings, such as hiring a room at an inn, or trading in a shop could be constructed as scenes. The follower and the vendor would run the scene - the PC would watch. What scenes fired would be determined by prior interactions with the follower. A lot of actions would be implicit. If the follower wants to go to an inn, they already know what they want to do there. Once you're in rest mode, the follower might be walking around Whiterun on a patrol path, playing various appropriate scenes as they bump into people. At Belethors: "I have a consignment for you Belethor." "Let me see what you have." "Ah. Some of these items are pretty badly damaged." "Sorry about that. My ditzy assistant sometimes picks up junk. I won't charge you for that stuff." At the temple with Danica: "Good to see you <followername>. The temple needs the help of people like you so we can care for the wounded." "Yes. I know there isn't much I can do, but take this gold." "Thankyou so much." "Not a problem." "I hope you can show that selfish follower of yours some good behavior. She just comes in here, prays and walks out again." "That girl isn't so smart, you need to make allowances for her. It's not her fault." In Dragonsreach with Irileth: "I hope you had a successful trip. Did you clear out some of those bandits?" "I did. You won't have to worry about <place> for a while." "How's that follower you hired to carry your bags working out?" "She can't manage much, but little by little I'm teaching her to do more and work harder." "Ah... Young people now expect everything to be handed to them on a silver platter." "I know what you mean. Too many of them are good for nothing but drinking skooma and whoring." Other situations might begin with the follower handing off: "Go and book a room for me." or "Go and get us both ales." Sometimes the "BWitch" type approach can work. I use it myself, but it really just amounts to seeing "Your follower speaks for you," before the dialog comes up. There would, of course, be ways to leave service, up until you're indentured. To leave indenture you have to earn your way out. If you're fully enslaved, there's no concept of a debt. Rather than a buy-out mechanic, I think it should be time and quest based. So to leave enslavement, you have to stay a slave for a minimum period, or complete a leave slavery quest. The quest would be the choice of a couple of conditions at each stage, with maybe five to seven stages. I have some ideas for stages - fetch quests, visit quests, set collecting quests, stuff with sex, etc. SL Sex Slaves (Mia's Lair) had some mechanisms that might be inspirational - though they weren't for leaving slavery. I can imagine that repeated slavery occurrences might start to require exit quests with long-term consequences, like the potion from Volkar in SLSS or the DF weird potion.

The plan has not changed much; it's been a quite consistent set of items: This should be in 2.07: Fix disparate small bugs. Fix follower frameworks. Tweak willpower/resistance/debt-gain mechanics to encourage taking deals and make a reasonable spread of willpower values more likely. Willpower fatigue accumulates if not enough deals. Pay off deals to remove fatigue. Make donations to remove fatigue. Deals kept after min duration reduce costs by percentage. A new game that can occur with no device requirements, only if no deals for long enough. Fix soft-dep issues that break compatibility with mods like RDO. This will be after Xmas: Fix the scanner. Fix LDC. New loot/cash handling features. (Keys and gold particularly). Follower can sell loot for you. New deals and games: Skooma deal (Skooma Whore users only) Milk deal (MME users only) Spanking deal (STA users only) An offer sex deal Exclusivity deal Pony deal Skooma games 1 and 2 (SW users only) EC+ game And that's roughly the order. I adjust the order as things turn out to be quick or easy, but it's roughly that. If you have a deal idea that got brought up earlier, then feel free to report it with a one or two line summary (don't describe the whole deal again), so I can give a clear answer whether I think it's worth adding to the list (some deals may be good ideas, but too time consuming). Also, as a result of random discussion, the following ideas seem likely to go somewhere: A mode where follower takes all or most of the loot. A mode where the follower sets the "direction" by means of a radiant quest (you can still ignore, but will be punished). A mode where cash debt is disabled (but you can't dismiss the follower) and where a (time-limited) quest is required to clear it. Deal(s) where the follower requires you to perform some daily action or perform fetch quests, with disposition stat determining if you are achieving your goals or failing. Followers getting into player home chests to pay debts or enforce punishments.

So I am really struggling for time. It sucks that I found this site so late. Captured Dreams: very good at making you feel like a worthless thing. So of course I hate it, I want to be made to feel valuable! There is a relationship slave quest part at the end but I think I have to get through more unpleasantness to get there and I am unsure how much freedom I will be given - and I cannot ask as the forum is closed. (You can still read it but it is huge). Maybe pause for now, especially since one of the missions sounds like it's very unpleasant, and one sounds very long given my character is level 1 with no fast travel points to help. Devious Followers is still alive - maybe try it again though it's still focused on slowly manipulating PC into slavery. Shout Like a Virgin: lots of fun, but a lot of sex - with Standing Stones, Word Walls... and non-consensual, of course. Playing through Laura's Bondage Shop again, ah, consent! Sweet consensual content. Such a shame it is only bondage but much much better than nothing. Slaverun - it's like those nasty photos and videos that occasionally circulate - you know its awful and will gross you out but still you sort of want to look, to know. Fortunately it's apparently a long mod, and the enslavement part tipped me off - really not my thing. Currently using Bwitch, Devious Training and Devious Lore to play a bondage loving mage. Hopefully I have stopped all rape triggers, but we will see! Pet Collar is what I am going to try with regard to being owned, I looked at XDFF but I am using EFF and they don't mix apparently. (XDFF - part of Deviously Cursed Loot, extended by another mod to add rules. Not sure how consensual the dialogue is but the idea and the rules look good. Maybe I could finish CD, try relationship slave, then leave - but she's got the taste for it so use XDFF? Look at how extendable it is - can I add punishment where owner disappears and leaves me in non-removable plain clothes with a magic draining effect? Maybe as a punishment for being careless and getting defeated? People here sure like rape, lol.

Devious Followers has been a staple in my load order for quite some time now. It's a great mod that does - mechanically speaking - a great many of worthwhile things to the game. It adds a gold sink into a game where gold is often otherwise way too abundant. It adds a sense of progression of time to the game and an aspect of time management with the recurring (and increasing) debt - which plays exceptionally well with survival mods, which require you to spend time on sleep and tending to your needs. In my playthroughs, the devious follower is also the main, reliable way for my character to remove particularly difficult Devious Devices, especially when said character is away from the cities and deep in some long-forgotten dungeon. And that's all without even mentioning the actual kink factor of the mod, which is one of the few that manage to set a constant and progressive corruption/lewdification curve into the game. The steepness and tone of said curve can be argued about, but the groundwork and the idea is there, and when you mess with the settings a bit, it can work quite well. The fact that the writing is quite decent is also a strong factor. It manages to do all of those things while at the same time being surprisingly simple. It simply expands on the vanilla follower system by adding recurring payments and lewd consequences if the player doesn't meet them. Of course there's more to the mod than that, but that's the base premise of it. From a gameplay design perspective, I may even dare to say that it's my favourite mod on this website. At the same time... It's not really very good. Putting all the bugginess aside, since that's one of the things that can (and will, thanks to our dear @ponzipyramid finding some time to start a rewrite of the mod) be fixed, the main problem of Devious Followers is that it... well, tries to expand on the vanilla follower system. And the vanilla follower system is pretty crap, especially once Devious Followers forces a companion onto you. For some issues that followers tend to run into, that I can think of at the time of writing this post: They mess up stealth sections and get hurt by traps They don't work with a number of quest mods (or are recommended to be left behind) They block doors They either suck at combat or are overpowered in it They get stuck in combat... or bleedout... or both They stand and watch with blank expressions as the player character is getting raped While at the same time messing up defeat mods And messing even harder slavery and prison mods They generally make a number of (mostly non-consensual) scenarios set by other mods feel weird without some head-canon forced by the player (DF) They force-greet you in the middle of an important scene you were trying to pay attention to. They are sworn to carry your burdens And so on, and so forth... I personally find Skyrim gameplay to be much more enjoyable without having a follower stumbling about by my side. At the same time, I really want that Devious Followers experience, and all those benefits that I listed before. So what can we do to fix it? Well, the first answer that comes to mind is "make the followers better!" If you've been in the modding scene for even a while, you likely know that that's an impossible ask. Sure, we've had 'fixes' for stealth and traps that make followers be ignored by those, and there's mods that allow you to tweak damage and statistics to make them a little more balanced with the world, but those are all bandaid fixes as well. A lot of the follower issues come from the way Bethesda's engine (poorly) handles NPC AI, and likely cannot be fixed without some mastermind modder rewriting the entire thing from scratch. Not to mention, a number of those are just narrative issues, so unless every modder from now on makes the extra effort and accounts for the player having a follower in their writing, these problems will no doubt still persist. So no, fixing the followers does not really seem feasible. But what alternatives do we have? Removing the follower aspect altogether? Indeed, my second option, and one that I've been toying with for a while, was to make a spin on the Devious Followers idea, and turn the NPC into more of a... 'sugar daddy' kind of character - someone persistent to whichever major city you are currently in, who helps you with your devices, potentially supplies you with adventuring equipment, maybe gives you a way to satiate your survival needs. The issue with this idea is that in the end it strays away too much from what Devious Followers is - that being a follower mod, and doesn't end up fulfilling the same design goals. Sure, you can implement a lot of the gold/time management aspects, the kinky corruption curve, and perhaps even have the benefactor send someone to, at some cost, rescue the player character from peril, should they need that, but ultimately, not having the Devious Follower follow the player really takes away a lot from the concept. Besides, what if the player character just decides not to visit anymore? There's valid reasons why they would have to be away for some period of time and/or not be able to come back. I do think that the "lewd benefactor" idea has a lot of merit still - just perhaps in a different mod, supplementing rather than replacing Devious Followers. So, we're at a bit of a conundrum. The follower aspect of the Devious Followers is core to how a mod like that needs to work. At the same time, Skyrim followers are crap - crap that's near-impossible to get un-crapped. So is there no way out? What if I told you there's a third, secret option? And it involves me talking about the other great game that I've wasted way too many hours into already? The obligatory Baldur's Gate 3 section Baldur's Gate 3 is easily one of the best game to come out this past year, and has, by many, been declared to be one of the, if not the best game of all time (or at least the past few decades). While I have my own thoughts on that debate, there's no doubt that there's a lot that BG3 does really well. But while a lot of the praise focuses on the story, the writing, and the freedom of choice, I want to bring attention to a different thing, one that does a lot of heavy lifting from the back rows - the party camp system. The party camp system is nothing novel to the CRPG genre - Dragon Age: Origins was perhaps the most famous in its use, and it's been used in many games that came after, and likely a number that came before as well. The idea is simple - your party has a limited size, but the recruitable companions are many, therefore you need a space to "store" them when you're not traveling with them. The party camp is a little more than that - it's a hub world, a place to swap your companions, have story events and interactions happen, and also regenerate, and reorganize your party's equipment and resources. It plays a major role in the player's experience of the game, no matter at which point, or in which physical location they are. And here we come to the crux of my deliberations - aside from just your party members, the party camp is often also home to some NPC characters who do not join you in active adventuring - "camp followers" if you will. Sandal in Dragon Age will be happy to yell ENCHANTMENT at you, Withers in BG3 will resurrect your fallen comrades and speak to you in beautiful Shakespearean. Do you see where I'm going with this? Followers who do not have to actively join the player in the adventure, who are still going to be often interacted with by the player as they go back to their camp as a part of the 'daily' routine. We still have our cake, and it was damn tasty when we ate it. Camp followers in Skyrim In case that wasn't actually clear, what I'm proposing is to introduce the party camp idea into Skyrim, and have a Devious Follower concept that would occupy the spot of this "camp follower" NPC trope. A character that will help the player with their restraints, maybe procure them some basic gear if they're defeated, and fulfil Sexlab Survival's requirement of not being able to leave a major city alone (for those of us who still use that mod). Alternatively, if we want to stay more true to the original mod, the party camp can serve as a way to "stow away" the mandatory Devious Follower when they're too obtrusive to the actual gameplay (for example when playing a quest mod that doesn't support followers), while still keeping them around and having their mechanics affect the player in the same way they do when they're an active follower. The issues with this approach are obvious. Skyrim does not have a party camp. Moreso, even if it had one, Skyrim does not have resources or anything that would motivate the player to return to their party camp. Unlike the games mentioned before, the Bethesda ones don't really have a gameplay loop that involves regularly returning to a hub space, and when you are forced to return to one, it's usually just to sell your gear and pick up some new quests. Neither of those really work too well with the idea of a party camp. I think these issues are solvable though. Temryuu, the creator of Dynamic Campsites, has made the first step by creating a base system of an almost-always accessible party camp that you and your followers can rest in (and with some really well-made environments too), and an appropriately-set survival mod setup, or the incentive of hub-space services that wouldn't be accessible otherwise (such as removing Devious Devices while you're stuck in the depths of Blackreach) can partially solve the issue of having the player regularly return to their camp. Making it a mandatory part of the core gameplay loop would probably require some more effort, but I do think it can be done. And it could open the door for some interesting possibilities, both in SFW and NSFW modding. I personally like the party camp as a setting - a safe, intimate and remote space, where some boundaries can perhaps be pushed, and some actions are easier to explain narratively. In that manner it also adds another step or layer to the potential player corruption curve. Having the player agree to be bound or naked in a public space or wilderness could be hard to justify, but in their personal camp, where it's just them and a few trusted followers? Afterword It's hard for me to say how good this idea actually is. It seems like a relatively large undertaking to try and solve an issue that I'm not even confident many people find as problematic as I do. I personally (obviously) like it. I like the idea of a party camp and of camp events, and I think, even outside of the NSFW context, that they would be a good way to replace what most people tend to use force-greets for - having a follower talk with you about their backstory works better when you're in a safe, rest-focused space, rather than inside a dungeon or in the middle of a shopping spree. That being said, having the Devious Follower relegated to a role of a camp follower may go against the idea of the follower being the better, stronger, more dominant character between them and the player - if all they do is sit at your camp, what even is it that you're actually paying them for? If you read this far - thank you - and please let me know what your own personal approach to both Devious Followers and my musings is. I'm curious if it's something more people find frustrating, or if it's just a case of an old man (me) shouting at clouds, as well as if you have any thoughts of your own on introducing a system like that into Skyrim. While you're at it, send @ponzipyramid and take a look through their creations - they're likely the main force in modernizing the NSFW Skyrim modding portfolio, and bless them for that. I do hope that you're having a great night/day/indiscriminate moment in time. Peace!

I think I've, finally, settled on a configuration for Devious Followers-centered Skyrim that works pretty much as I want it to (as I laid out previously). The relevant settings being: Trade and Barter: fBarterMax 8.00, fBarterMin 2.00 Scarcity: 2x loot rarity .esp SexLab Survival: 50g toll, non level-based Devious Followers Continued: 500/50 base/level-based debt, 50% interest, 1000/1000 deal agreement/removal Perseids Inns and Taverns: 50% of default rental I was on the right track before - using Trade and Barter to tune down the prices vendors were willing to give was the key. Offloading loot in town does kind of feel a bit unsastifying now as I get basically peanuts for most items sold, but it's probably the least unsatisfying compromise. To balance Skyrim's loot economy to my liking, it seems like one of three things must be true: recurring resource sinks must be tuned very high, the amount of loot must be severely reduced, or vendors must pay a lot less for loot. But the payoff in the kind of game environment it creates is so worth it. For the first time in... maybe ever, I don't feel like I have to vigorously DM my own Skyrim playthrough just to not completely break the immersion. With a few small exceptions (no carriages), I'm finding myself actually trying my best and using all available (in-universe) tools to solve problems the game throws at me. It's also had positive effects on the Devious Followers side of things. When I took my first deal on the road to Markarth after realizing I didn't have enough daylight to reduce my 2K debt before the day's interest kicked in, it genuinely felt like a defeat. Speaking of DF. I've been running with Belrand (spellsword merc at the Winking Skeever) as my Devious Follower this playthrough. He fits the role surprisingly well. My original intent was to hire him to clear Ahtar's mission, then replace him with Ahtar as a long-term follower, but I ended up deciding to stick with Belrand. He is kinda charming in an old-man kind of way and he has that balding, lanky hairstyle that fits the "creepy uncle" trope to a tee. That plus him being an old mercenary hanging out in a bar suggest a certain kind of dynamic that is quite different from the one my other characters had with Sven. In my mind my hedge mage character initially latched on to him as a sort of father figure, though (of course) the wily old merc had other designs on his hapless ingénue. I also envision him as a bit of a drunk, which is a good excuse to handwave all the random times the follower AI will shit itself. Belrand stuck somewhere not helping out in this bandit fight? Oh, he's just shitfaced again. And with follower needs turned on in iNeed he just goes through all the booze I offload to him super quick, and he complains when he's out of drinks, which would normally be a little annoying but is a fortuitous bit of mechanical storytelling in this case. (As an unrelated aside, I've been moving away from the original pure healslut character concept and going into Destruction magic, and goddamn. Having some offensive capability bypasses so much frustration related to the follower AI being dumb as bricks sometimes. Follower inexplicably ignoring an enemy archer taking potshots at him? That's okay, I can deal with them myself.)

Been playing a healslut run with a modlist built around Devious Followers Continued. Generally, the idea is to play support for a follower who does all the actual fighting while I deal with all the “boring” stuff like looting, gear upgrades, selling stuff, getting leads for bounties, setting up camp. In combat I'm a healstick cowering behind my follower buffing his health while he goes on the attack with a melee weapon. I've played almost 150 hours over four playthroughs, and there have consistently been two frustrating issues that keep cropping up: Firstly, the sex-upon-defeat system. In theory, I'd like a setup where I can be raped while my tank is preoccupied with other enemies; maybe he comes back in time to split open the skull of my would-be rapist, maybe he doesn't get back until the deed's been done. The idea being to add an element of vulnerability and peril to fights, but not fatal peril, because I want to play through my mistakes instead of getting a scot-free redo. In practice what I've seen happen is that I get attacked, which (I think) puts the attackers into a non-hostile faction, then the follower AI goes "cool, no more hostiles, coast is clear" and proceeds to stand around while I get assaulted. D'oh. Or, I manage to struggle and throw my attacker off, in which case everyone just kinda sheepishly shrugs and ignores one another for a bit, which is also immersion-breaking. I haven't tried a SexLab game that is solo (I got into SexLab modding explicitly to play healslut with a Devious Follower), but I strongly suspect these defeat sex mechanics just don't work that well with a follower, and especially not with a Devious Follower. I'm sure there's a combination of mods and settings somewhere in the labyrinth that works, but if there is I haven't found it. As a result I've been slowing paring back on my use of this system - at this point I use Death Alternative and nothing else. I miss the threat of rape on failure, but it is more functional. The second big issue is more one with base Skyrim itself rather than any mod: followers are terrible. The game is very clearly designed around having a combat-competent player character, and to be fair, when you're cleaving through masses of bandits yourself your incompetent follower isn't really a glaring issue. They help a little, but you deal the majority of the DPS. I don't think I noticed this when I first played through Skyrim. But of course as a passive healslut, you need your follower to be the killing machine that is usually the player. There are a couple of related problems as I've noticed that makes this hard: follower AI is just bad. Give them a bow and they will prefer to plink away at the enemy with the bow, even if (a) the enemy is getting close and winding up a melee power attack and (b) there are multiple archers. They also don't seem to have any situational awareness - I've often seen them completely ignore charging enemies at the start of combat, only responding when the enemy gets a hit in. Finally, the AI also has trouble with obstacles like tables, chairs and occasionally stairs. Interior tiles like the "bandit fort" one seem to cause the most problems. followers don't scale well. I'm not even talking about how they tend to level slower, though this also appears to be true. Even if you use a mod to make them level together with you, the game's enemy scaling assumes you're going to fight smarter and better when you're leveled up, so it throws tougher and more dangerous enemies against you. So take the snow troll on the way up to High Hrothgar at around lvl 12 for instance. As a player what I would do against this tough enemy is to get quick hits in then retreat out of melee range, especially when the troll telegraphs its attacks; maybe kite it a little as I drink potions or fire off a spell. It's I think what the game expects you to do. The follower of course does none of that, even with a follower framework that ostensibly improves the AI. He goes right up in the troll's face and proceeds to just facetank it and exchange blows, with the predictable outcome that he gets pounded down into the ground in record time. The result is that the follower becomes more and more useless and prone to going down in a couple of hits as the game goes on, which puts a big dent in the fantasy, which, to me at least, requires a powerful dom full of unstoppable brute strength and killing power. Otherwise what is left is the squalid reality of a small man gaslighting and emotionally abusing a partner. Which is probably more realistic as far as how real-world versions of DF relationships go, but... that's not a fun fantasy. I have been exploring partial solutions, a follower framework mainly. Been tinkering with the settings in Nether's Follower Framework, and I think I've found a setting that works okay. Regular legendary difficulty (x3 damage output for everyone but the player) and an additional x5 follower-specific damage output. It's unclear to me if that means the follower is putting out five times normal damage, or fifteen, but hey, it works, at least.

First, some context: I've mentioned this on several occasions, but I raised it again recently, in the context of a discussion about Skyrim economics: This triggered a long response by @HexBolt8 that you can find here: https://www.loverslab.com/topic/130527-devious-followers-continued/?do=findComment&comment=2936344 I'll summarize that as: Which in this case refers to a class of loot object. It's got pros and cons vs an existing item like soul gems. I won't dig into HexBolt's "rare trinkets" idea here, because while it's an interesting idea, it seems more interesting as an augmentation to other mechanics rather than a true paradigm shift in follower payment. As a concept it's just not visceral enough. It doesn't immediately resonate. It's not a strong basis for a relationship. What bothers me is that ... it just feels manufactured ... and that's true of soul gems and the other objects too. @Darkwing241 also made an interesting response, which got closer to my thinking, but addressed the issue more generally: https://www.loverslab.com/topic/99955-sexlab-survival/?do=findComment&comment=2936294 To clarify: What I'm looking for is something that makes sense for a follower you are already connected to, such as a housecarl, or a spouse, a "something" that would justify them treating you like a slave if you don't deliver it. i.e. It's not for a new mod, it's a feature for Devious Followers, and it has to work with most of the existing dialogs. That doesn't mean no dialog changes. I think some dialogs would swap based on the payment 'mode', but it would be too tiresome to make all of them conditional. There would also likely be additions specific to the mode, and some little tweaks in some mechanics - such as device removal. I think the best thing would be something you do, not something you have. The key is to then make that 'thing you do' appropriate enough, interesting enough, time-consuming enough, and yet also troublesome enough, that it is lore-friendly, immersive, and good-gameplay. I'll list those points again, and number them: appropriate (it just makes sense lore and RP wise) - feels like the basis for a strong relationship immersive - feels like an event, not just a mechanic interesting - sufficient complexity time-consuming - usually easy to adjust troublesome - some effort required on the player's part, some risk of failure gameplay - choices have consequences, some risk of failure The obvious first try candidate for this is sex. It's appropriate and immersive, but it's not very interesting, and generally not troublesome or delivering any gameplay, without building a complex system around prostitution, addiction, etc. The follower could expect sex with others, or just with the follower. Their reaction to non-delivery could then be treated as either frustration that you aren't satisfying them, or a natural outcome of them acting like a pimp and treating you like a whore. The core problem with sex is that it would require a lot of new mechanics to make it work well. There is no existing prostitution mod that does the job appropriately in this context. Most of those mods lack any satisfying gameplay, or any real risk, and are just easy ways to get money if you don't mind watching SexLab scenes over and over again. Only ME ever went beyond this, and it's not compatible with anything else and had many bugs besides. It also has some 'logic' problems. Why would a housecarl do this? Why would a spouse who locks you in a chastity belt also whore you out? It feels a bit awkward. You can make up answers but they won't suit everyone. So, sex is a "maybe", but not really a great solution without a lot of extra work that would block delivering the DF feature. The spouse scenario I keep coming back to is my "running joke" vegetable stall. It's more like a grimly realistic alternate start than a solution for DF. Nevertheless, the idea of a spouse follower (or even housecarl) seeing the PC as merely a support character (regardless of the actuality) and acting accordingly is really a common story-basis for DF scenarios. It's not the only story, but it's one story you can use to rationalize what's happening in DF. In this setting, the follower demanding cash seems strange. If we turn on gold control, it makes sense that they no longer demand cash but simply control it. That still leaves a very loot oriented game, which can be boring, and doesn't quite fit with spouse followers. What could a spouse reasonably expect, either item or action? One possibility is the opposite of sex. The PC just needs not to have sex with others. This is appropriate, immersive, but not interesting, time-consuming, or necessarily good gameplay. Maybe too easy if wearing a belt, and as the only involuntary sex mod that isn't a straight-out rape mod is HH, it's pretty limiting. Suffice to say, there's something there, but it would need a lot more work to make it viable. Another possibility is that the spouse makes arbitrary and variable demands: a mixture of radiant quests and Submissive Lola type demands for items. This is probably achievable. It's pretty close to what @Darkwing241 suggested, and very, very close to what Sex Slaves - Mia's Lair - Dominant Andrew does. Andrew has a plotline and progression mixed into his radiant quests, but it really is the same thing. What Andrew does is perfect for a possessive spouse. The downside of this mix-and-match approach is that it isn't an obvious replacement for cash. There is no easy way to create an exchange rate between these different actions and cash, though you could assign values to each one. As this fits in with the radiant quest mechanics I was thinking of for enslavement, there's some efficiency there, on the downside, it makes the normal non-enslaved experience more like being enslaved, which reduces the variety of experience. I suppose it may be possible to have similar mechanics yet still make it different enough. This could be adopted with slightly different dialogs for a bossy housecarl, or other "involved" follower who isn't asking for money, but is making demands. Maybe mixing in something like the soul-gem mechanic, and "ancient trinkets" as well could help vary it. It's getting pretty nebulous as an idea. I was looking for a simple answer, and I guess there isn't one? The only "obvious" action is sex, and the drawbacks with that approach are already noted. It comes back to a handful of simple questions: What would be interesting for your housecarl to demand you do? Why would your housecarl think it's OK to try and enslave you? What would be interesting for your spouse to demand you do or give them? Why would your spouse think it's necessary/useful to enslave you?

Finally committed to setting up a brand new Skyrim setup after some years. My old computer died in 2021 and took my entire load order, custom tweaks and all, with it. And then the AE modpocalypse kerfuffle happened and I went and got really into Final Fantasy XIV for a while. What really gave me the final push to dive back in was playing Dragon's Dogma 2. That game is severely flawed in many fundamental ways, but the support healer playstyle is actually viable in that game and it tickled a part of my subby backbrain that had lain dormant for a while and made me go "I wonder how Skyrim/Devious Followers is doing, I should call her". It's been a fun homecoming. Not just on the lewd side, but on the non-lewd side as well. The Skyrim mod community appears to have weathered a second sundering and coalesced around the new "AE" version, more or less. Having a new rig that didn't have mediocre specs a decade ago has broadened my horizons, too. On the LL end, it's been interesting to see myself basically speedrun over the same ground I tread before in terms of rediscovering my mod preferences. It's been long enough that I've forgotten most of the institutional knowledge, but at the end of the day my preferences are the exact same. Lots of strange moments of deja vu like "I have no memory of this place... but I've been here before". Thought I'd make a record for future me of the "cornerstone" mods I use for a DF-style game: Devious Followers Continued SE (of course) Basically unchanged since I stopped playing. There is a Redux version that looks promising with a bunch of modernizations, but the page went down and I think is still waiting to be picked up. The old Lupine version works well though. The core idea and implementation of the mod remain really solid and is generally the mod I build my lewd load order around. I really love the slow fall. There's always a period in the beginning where almost no lewd stuff is happening, but that early period is crucial because it gives you an emotional context for the "status quo" so that it feels so much more powerful when that idyllic status quo is subverted later. I go light on the other lewd mods when I play a DF game. They tend to be unneeded distractions when the main meal is the slow-bubbling tension that is your shifting relationship with your devious follower. Basically all you need is Devious Followers, plus maybe a mod that does cursed chests, for those unpredictable spikes of debt that can kickstart the DF debt spiral. The default settings mostly work. I went with the Hard exponent curve, which seems to work well in always threatening to put you on the back foot. I wanted initially to grab Torvar as my DF (drunk junior Companion who just joined to fight), and I also considered Erik the Slayer in Rorikstead, but in the end I gravitated towards Belrand again. The wily old sellsword trope is a natural fit for this kind of story. Plus he has a pretty good XVASynth voice set, on top of an unusual amount of vanilla lines. ----- Deviously Enchanted Chests I find what tends to work here is setting it so keys only drop when you have devices on you, and then also tune the key drops to lower rates, because they drop from even sources like gathering nodes. This just works if all you want is cursed loot with no extra frills. The other alternative I tried I found very intrusive and terminally bloated. It's that old-fashioned style of mod that has such severe scope creep that it's essentially an idiosyncratic grab bag of the creator's fetishes and reaches its tendrils into far-reaching parts of the game it has no business touching. (I'm a little grumpy about it.) ----- SM Essential Player SE Similarly a lightweight mod that does mostly one thing - make the player essential. No need for baroque defeat mods with a billion finicky options that are impossible to parse and troubleshoot, since combat failure is already punished heavily by Devious Followers. You do want the player to be essential, because otherwise the game lets you off the hook by automatically reloading to a save before when you fucked up. Remain in this bad timeline and suffer the consequences of your own incompetence. ----- Dynamic Timescale SE I use this to increase the timescale in the wilderness and reduce it in cities and interiors. I use 36-6-3 for non-combat timescale in wilderness, cities and interiors respectively (with 3-3-3 for combat). I find this works in making the province feel bigger, and long-distance travel is a major, risky undertaking. In my current DF playthrough when I made the trip from Whiterun to Ivarstead lots of things went wrong in the interim and around Hilgrund's Tomb. I had to make a decision to either turn back to Whiterun to convert my loot to gold I can pay my debt with, or push on to Ivarstead and risk the merchant there having only a small purse. A genuinely interesting dilemma that I had to think hard about, and it came about organically. (Of course at the time I forgot that Ivarstead had no general merchant at all...) It was a tough decision because with the wilderness timescale set so high, the journey takes about two in-game days, and those days aren't free - my DF needs his fair share, too. It synergizes with DF in a pretty perfect way. ----- Living Takes Time / Time Flies SE I used LTT this time, but I think I used mostly the latter before. Both work. The main purpose is to make it so you can't just do a bunch of crafting and instantly gain a bunch of gold. With every potion crafted taking time now, it's a risky tradeoff - alchemy and enchanting can still be incredibly lucrative later on but early on you really have to budget some time and buffer pay to level them. I set crafting potions to take about 15 mins. ----- Immersive Spell Learning - DESTified Makes learning spells take time as well. It's pretty elegantly implemented for maximum compatibility - when you first get a spell tome, you get a popup to make notes, which destroys the tome but doesn't teach you the spell yet. You then have to spend a certain amount of hours modified by your skill at that discipline studying the notes before the spell unlocks. For normal playthroughs I'd usually go for x1.5 to x2.5 time to study since I like the idea of learning spells taking special effort, but for DF the default x1 is more sensible. In the context of DF, I feel it adds some interesting tension to the DF experience as it's yet another time sink that has to be weighed against going out there and getting loot to pay debt. Do I want to go do that dungeon now, or can I afford to let debt accumulate a bit so that I can learn this new spell that might save me from paying for a bunch of follower bleedouts when shit hits the fan? ----- House rules: - no reloading except to fix bugs. The devious follower will attempt to get away with some blatantly unfair bullshit, and it's important to let him get away with it. It's easy to cheese by savescumming, but you shouldn't. It should feel majorly unfair - that's the appeal at the core of DF, I think. You can see the exploitative dynamic you're trapped in and feel yourself losing ground, but you're still forced to play your devious follower's games. - no fast travel. This is a big one. Fast travel tends to make the map feel small, and points in between quest and vendor hubs tend to fade away into "flyover country". In exchange I bump my carryweight up significantly with "player.modav carryweight". - do not loot armor or clothing, unless enchanted. I think this started out as a roleplay thing (didn't want to strip dead bodies naked), but I find that cutting dungeon loot proceeds by half does help with not completely outpacing the devious follower's debt demands. A house rule I'm no longer that keen on: - no attacking enemies directly, support your tank like a good little healslut. I love the idea of being a weak pathetic healer cowering behind a tank doing all the murder. But the problem is that follower AI in this game is staggeringly incompetent on a basic level if you remove player aggression from the equation. It's annoying to see Devious Followers artfully build up an image of the DF being highly intelligent and in control through dialogue and mechanics only for that illusion to shatter when you see the devious follower repeatedly take arrows to the face in combat because he cannot wrap his tiny brain around the concept of stairs. ----- I have a slightly different set for lewd-flavored Skyrim that isn't centered on Devious Followers, but I'm still figuring that one out. Anyway. I don't know how to wrap this up. I like this game, It's a blast. Thanks for coming to my ted talk The end of the prologue. Driven to desperation by mounting debt imposed by a devious follower, Sister Daena, stranded in Skyrim, makes a deal. The fall begins here. "That mouth was not made for prayer, slut. Get to work."

Sister Miriam’s journal 03-05 Hearthfire 4E201 Chapter IV: “Saving Saadia” [[ previously on Miri and the Wolf | start from the beginning ]] At the gate of Whiterun one evening, Miri hears two Redguard men in strange garb -the Alik’r, they call themselves - describe to Hasteinn a Redguard woman of middle age, with a scar on her cheek. There’s a bounty out for her, they explain. There are not that many Redguard women in Whiterun. In fact, only one matches their description. Saadia, the barmaid at the Bannered Mare. As soon as they enter the Bannered Mare, Miri makes a beeline to Saadia to warn her. She finds Saadia in her room above the kitchen, having dinner. The Redguard woman, to Miri’s surprise, pulls a dagger on her, and it takes some reassurance to convince her that Miri means to help. There’s one of their number languishing in the dungeons, she says. He’d know where their ringleader is. Hasteinn is sitting at the foot of the stairs when Miri comes back down. “That’s her, isn’t it? The Redguard woman those desert warriors were looking for.” Hasteinn is of a mind to turn her in for an easy reward, and all efforts to convince him otherwise fails. Even if he wanted to help the woman, he points out, they don’t know where the leader of the Alik’r is. We’ll see about that last bit, Miri thinks to herself. She waits for Hasteinn to start his nightly binge, and slips out the back door of the inn. +++ There is indeed a captured Alik’r in the dungeon under Dragonsreach. As he’s been abandoned by his brothers, he wants to cut a deal. Post his bail, and he’ll tell her where his former leader Kematu is. His fine, the guard says, is a hundred septims. Miri’s heart sinks. She doesn’t have that much gold, having just paid Hasteinn his daily fee. She could probably get it in a day of adventuring, but… she needs that information tonight, before her companion has a chance to turn Saadia in to the Alik’r. She tries to persuade the guard to let the captive go, appealing first to his common decency, then his sense of duty, to no avail. But the guard eyes the collar on her neck with naked interest. “Why don’t you use that pretty mouth of yours for sucking instead of talking?” “W-what?” “Your sweet mouth, around my cock.” He makes an obscene gesture on his crotch. “That man’s a criminal under the jarl’s law. If you want me to let him out on the streets, you better make it worth my while.” Miri feels blood rising to her face. “Not a chance in Oblivion, you pig!” She storms out of the dungeon, his boorish laughter nipping at her heels. Outside, Miri screams into her sleeve in frustration. If she goes back empty-handed, she’ll never convince Hasteinn to help Saadia rather than turn her in. There in the cold night air, Miri makes up her mind. The guard smirks when he sees her stepping back into the dungeon. She knows what she’s here to do, and so does he. “On your knees, then,” he says, loosening his tunic. “Here?” Miri glances nervously at the door. “What if someone comes in?” “It’s quiet this time of night. We’ll have our privacy… probably.” On that less than reassuring note, Miri falls to her knees. The guard tugs at the waiststring of her robe, and it falls open, exposing her breasts. Miri gasps. That was not part of the deal, she wants to protest, but her words desert her when he frees his swollen manhood from his tunic, confronting her like an angry snake, demanding her attention. And so Miri attends to it, covering the guard’s shaft with worshipful kisses. Its sweaty, powerfully masculine musk and the sheer taboo of the situation is intoxicating, and she soon forgets about her own body, wantonly exposed to his gaze. “Put it in your mouth,” he says hoarsely, a command, and Miri obeys, marveling at the silken hardness of it as she takes the head of his manhood between her lips. The guard groans in pleasure as she suckles hungrily on his manhood, though he doesn’t take charge as Miri expects. He is content to let her debase herself on her own volition, pleasuring him with her hands and mouth. She remembers all the times on the road Brother Nestor had availed himself of whores at various taverns they’d stopped at, and tries to emulate their movements from memory. It’s not till after the guard tenses and fills her mouth with his seed, that she belatedly wonders if this makes her a whore as well. The notion is a bitter load to swallow. The thought of a man’s seed sliding down her gullet almost makes her retch. Worse is the rush of warmth she feels, when the guard pats her on the head and calls her a “good little cocksucker”. As she cleans the evidence of the guard’s ardor from her chin and covers herself up again, shame and self-doubt wars with a seedy thrill at the threshold she has just crossed. Already, she’s feeling more like a woman of the world, even though she is still technically a maiden. “Yes… I heard your silver tongue at work from here.” The Redguard is less grateful than Miri would have liked when she tells him his fine’s been paid, but he keeps up his end of the bargain, telling her where Kematu is holed up - a hidden cave called Swindler’s Den, out in the wilds of Whiterun Hold. Miri does not wait around for his release. She has what she came here for, and she mislikes the way the former Alik’r is leering at her. The guard gives her butt a hearty squeeze as she passes him. She is always welcome here, he says. She avoids his gaze as she leaves, the taste of his seed still on her lips. +++ Back at the Bannered Mare, Hasteinn is nowhere to be found. He’s upstairs, above the kitchen, Mikael says with a sly look in his eyes. In Saadia’s room, he means. Miri soon finds out what, or rather who, exactly Hasteinn is doing up here. Saadia doesn’t make the same noises Uthgerd did, but Hasteinn moves with enough vigor for the both of them, pumping his hips so hard against hers that the room is filled with the obscene sound of flesh slapping against flesh. Mindful of being caught peeping like last time, Miri doesn’t stay to watch. Hasteinn is in good spirits when he comes back down the stairs for some more ale. “Just who I wanted to see,” he says when he sees Miri. “I’ve changed my mind, about the Redguard woman. I think we should help her.” Miri should be feeling relief that she didn’t have to convince him. But for some reason she feels resentful instead. +++ They set out for Swindler’s Den in the morning. It’s not marked on any map, but Hasteinn knows exactly where it is. Used to be called Liar’s Den in his day, he says. The bandits at Swindler’s Den are no match for the new-minted thane. With his battleaxe of office, he makes short, savage work of the lot, exterminating them with contemptuous ease. As they cleave through the bandits, Miri can’t shake the feeling that they’re being watched. They push deeper into the cave, until they reach a waterlogged tunnel, with its end obscured by a waterfall. “Halt,” a voice says as they emerge from under the waterfall, their torches doused by the water. As Miri’s eyes adjust to the low light, she sees a man - no, a few men - in Alik’r garb, standing atop a ledge. One of them, the one who speaks, is clearly the ringleader. Kematu. They have no wish to fight today, he says. They only want the woman, and they’d like Hasteinn’s help, in exchange for sharing a handsome portion of the bounty. “What did she do?” Miri blurts out. The Alik’r leader’s eyes dart to Miri. She sold the city of Taneth out to the Dominion during the war, he answers coldly. She must stand trial for her crimes. Hasteinn is unfazed by this new information. “I say she’s innocent of the charge. If you think she’s guilty, we’ll fight, and let the Gods decide the truth of it.” “Hasteinn…” Miri whispers, putting a hand on his shoulder. Including Kematu, Miri counts five of them on the ledge. Surely he recognizes the odds, but his blood is up. “Listen to your pocket priestess, Nord. There are six of us and two of you. I think the Divines likely to judge our claim the fairer.” “One of me,” he rumbles. “And yet I say you have about a dozen too few.” Unexpectedly, Kematu bursts out laughing, and to Miri’s astonishment, so too does Hasteinn, and the deadly tension that had filled the cave to the brim only a moment ago seems to drain away in an instant as howls of laughter reverberate through the small chamber. Hasteinn nods up at Kematu, warrior to warrior. “Have my gold ready. I’ll get you your woman.” Miri is still shaking from the adrenaline as they emerge into the sun. What just happened in there? Does he really mean to give Saadia over to these people? Hasteinn is sullen and uncommunicative all the way back to Whiterun. Outside the Bannered Mare, he turns to Miri, but the only thing he says to her is- “Don’t do anything stupid.” +++ After a night of tossing and turning, Miri wakes during the hour of the wolf, and sneaks over to Saadia’s room, where she wakes her and tells her that the Alik’r are coming for her. Hasteinn is nowhere to be seen, so Miri agrees to accompany her to the stables. Outside the walls, at the stables, they are shocked to find Kematu waiting. He had been anticipating this, it seems. Before either woman can do anything, Kematu’s hand flashes with magic, and Saadia, stunned, falls over. Miri is frozen in terror. Without the protection of Hasteinn, she realizes suddenly, she is completely and frighteningly vulnerable. In the dark, Kematu’s expression is hard to make out as he starts towards Miri. “Where is your Nord, priestess?” Behind him, something glints as it moves. The blade of a heavy battleaxe misses Kematu by a hair, and splinters a wooden beam behind him. It’s Hasteinn! Miri backs away now, instinctively putting herself between Saadia and the men. In the instant it takes for Hasteinn to dislodge his axe from the beam, Kematu’s scimitars are out. “Nord! What is this?” “Your death,” the Wolf growls. Kematu nods, understanding. Each fighter takes their stance, circling one another, waiting for an opening. It’s over in the blink of an eye. Kematu’s scimitars lash out like vipers, but Hasteinn is just as fast, ducking both swipes. On the ground, he grabs a handful of damp dirt and flings it at the Alik’r, who is momentarily stunned by the unexpected move. In the brief opening, Hasteinn does a full-body pirouette, and brings the full weight of the Axe of Whiterun down on the Redguard’s exposed neck in a wide arc. The blow lands with great violence, cleaving him from shoulder to ribcage. The Wolf, victorious, looks down at his adversary’s broken body as blood drains out of it, and deliberately, he spits on the body. “Miri,” he says without looking up. “Loot.” Miri does. There is a fat purse on his person, though not half as fat as the portion of the bounty he promised. +++ Back at the Bannered Mare, after she downs a goblet of wine, and then another, Saadia is peeved but relieved. “You could have told me of your plan,” she complains. But she pays her promised reward, eyeing Hasteinn warily. Miri feels somewhat chastened by the experience. If Hasteinn had not been there at the stables, who knows what would have happened to Miri. But how had he known that she would try to go behind his back? Afterwards, getting ready to leave to pursue another bounty, Miri broaches the subject. “It’s adorable that you think you can keep secrets from me.” Miri flushes, recalling the deal she made, on her knees in the dungeon under Dragonsreach. He is bluffing, Miri decides. He must be. “Fine, don’t tell me.” She gasps in surprise when Hasteinn hooks a finger into the ring on her collar and pulls at it, forcing her to face him. “Next time you decide to keep secrets from me, I might not be so timely in coming to your rescue.” Miri squirms, uncomfortably aware of how powerless she is in the moment. With a supreme force of will, she makes herself maintain eye contact. “Is that a threat?” He releases her, and snorts. “Take it how you like. Let’s go. We have a bounty to collect.” +++

Sister Miriam’s journal 24 Last Seed - 02 Hearthfire 4E201 Chapter III: “The Last Days of Summer” [[ previously on Miri and the Wolf | start from the beginning ]] The next few days are the headiest days of Miri’s young life. Hasteinn picks bounties from the bounty board or from Hulda, and they head out to one bandit hideout or the other. In spite of its wealth or because of it, Whiterun is absolutely infested with bandits. Almost by accident, or so it seems to Miri, the pair settle into a rhythm. Hasteinn does the fighting, with Miri supporting him from the back. Sometimes, her restoration magic makes the difference in the fight. Most times, it isn’t close enough to matter. And after, it falls to her to rifle through the belongings of the dead for any portable wealth. At the end of the day, back in town, Miri pays the sellsword his daily fee. Some days she comes up short, but she’s always able to make good on the debt by the next day. His daily pay usually leaves little for herself, but Miri doesn’t mind that too much. Hasteinn can have all the gold he wants (though she doesn’t say this to him, for obvious reasons). She’s in this for the adventure. She spends her downtime reading books they find in their adventures, and studying spell tomes. Oakflesh. Aura of Might. Clairvoyance. She’s learning more in a week than she did in a year, cloistered in the abbey. She even tries her hand at music, playing a flute she found at Valtheim Keep, but only once. Not everyone has the talent for music, alas. Hasteinn spends his nights drinking heavily. Most nights, he staggers in drunk and collapses onto the bed they share, snoring. Despite Mikael’s sly insinuations, they really do just share a bed, and nothing more, though there is a part of Miri that finds the innuendo exciting, in a seedy sort of way. Sometimes, she wonders what it would be like to have Hasteinn as a lover. She thinks back to the tryst she peeked on earlier in the week, and imagines herself in Uthgerd’s place. Hasteinn, on his part, remains steadfastly indifferent. He has not yet mentioned the incident from last week, though it is surely (surely!) on his mind. If he has any romantic designs however, he keeps them to himself. +++ It’s not all smooth sailing, of course. When looting a bandit fort one day, she accidentally springs another magical trap. She pleads with Hasteinn for help, but as expected, the blackguard won’t do it for free. Miri knows he won’t budge on this, so she merely nods, hands over the septims… and asks nicely. Only this time, Hasteinn lets out a bark of laughter as the yoke unlocks and falls aparts. Miri’s hands fly to her throat when she realizes there is still an iron ring, intact around her neck. Fumbling around, her fingers run over a smaller iron ring welded to the front. It’s a slave collar, she realizes with dismay. Hasteinn only shrugs when she protests. “It’s not part of the yoke, technically. I’d have to use another key.” Miri tugs at the iron collar, uncomfortable. “I’m not a slave. Please, can you remove this for me?” “I can. My terms, you know.” Miri does. She considers whether to pay another fee to unlock the collar. It’s humiliating, but it’s not really impeding her movement. Besides, she’s out of coin. She decides to put up with the collar for now. Hasteinn seems to approve. “It’s a good look on you,” he says. There is a hungry, intent look in his eyes, as if he’s seeing Miri in a whole new light. Miri feels her face flush. Is that desire in his gaze? Miri can’t decide if it’s a good thing. On the road, Miri occasionally tries to pick the lock of the collar, but to no avail. The only thing she gets out of it is fatigue, frustration and the mocking laughter of Hasteinn. The collar feels like crude iron, but there is potent magic in it. Every time Miri tries to cover it up with her cowl, the iron seems to warm uncomfortably, as if it wants to be seen. She gives up on covering it after the third attempt. Back in civilization, Miri soon discovers that the collar attracts attention, and not the good kind. Even the people who are polite enough not to comment on it get a hooded look in their eyes. But all that simply falls away when Miri and Hasteinn are on the road and adventuring. It surprises Miri how quickly she gets used to the feel of iron around her neck. Sometimes, she forgets it’s even there. One night, falling into bed after another long day of adventuring, Miri notes with a jolt that it is the month of Hearthfire now. With everything that’s been going on, she had missed the end of summer altogether. Looking back, she realizes that she hadn’t prayed nor thought about her old life for over a week. +++ The next morning, returning to Dragonsreach, Hasteinn and Miri chance upon the Dunmer captain of the Whiterun guard, who reports that a dragon is attacking one of their forward watchtowers! Hasteinn immediately volunteers to tag along and help. He doesn’t ask Miri, but she would have said yes regardless. When the dragon comes, Miri is not much use. She tries her best to provide healing and succor to the fighting men, but she can’t help but flinch and duck whenever the dragon flies by above. It doesn’t matter. Hasteinn fights enough for the two of them - he is a tempest, landing a flurry of blows at the dragon’s head whenever arrows force it to land. It is he who lands the final blow on the beast, driving the point of his sword into the dragon’s eye. Something remarkable happens upon the dragon’s death. As the dragon lets out its last breath like a sigh, it starts to disintegrate before their eyes, as its life force appears to flow from it to Hasteinn. Some of the guards call him “Dragonborn”. Their Dunmer captain seems initially skeptical, but a powerful shout - no, a Shout - from Hasteinn that knocks her off her feet dispels all doubt, though the show of force does little to win her favor. Back in Dragonsreach, upon hearing Hasteinn’s account of the events at the watchtower, the jarl names him a thane of Whiterun, and bequeaths upon him a wicked two-handed battle-axe as his weapon of office. Miri is happy on Hasteinn’s behalf, but underneath, she feels a stirring of unease. What if being thane means his sword is no longer for hire? The thought brings a knot to her throat. Truth be told, Miri wouldn’t know what to do without him. In the couple of weeks or so that they’ve been traveling together, she had come to rely on the Nord. It’s not just his fighting prowess, though it is considerable. As a native Nord Hasteinn is also her guide in this strange land, putting locations to place names and providing invaluable local context. And of course, he’s a friend... perhaps Miri’s only friend in, all of Skyrim. When Hasteinn tells her, later, that he will be upping his daily fee going forward, Miri agrees, perhaps a little too quickly. “You understand. As thane, I have a certain lifestyle to maintain.” “I know,” Miri says, turning away to hide the giddy grin of relief spreading uncontrollably over her face. “You need your fair share too.” +++

Sister Miriam’s journal 22-23 Last Seed 4E201 Chapter II: “Bleak Falls Barrow” Miri wakes at the hour of the wolf, excited at the prospect of exploring an ancient Nord barrow. She’s somewhat surprised to find Hasteinn already awake and fully kitted, sitting in a chair propped up against the door. “Just making sure you don’t run off and cheat me of my fee, like other adventurers.” His naked distrust barely dents her good humor. He considers Miri an adventurer! She is thrilled to realize that she is an adventurer now, more or less. Miri and Hasteinn set out for Bleak Falls Barrow at the break of dawn. They encounter brigands on the approach to the barrow, but yet again, the sellsword proves to be an unstoppable force of nature in combat. He makes short work of the brigands, with only minimal assistance from Miri. The inside of the barrow is no different. Draugr, giant spiders or duplicitous rogues alike, Hasteinn cleaves through them with ease. The Wolf in his element. The barrow is rich with undisturbed loot. Ancient burial urns, dusty chests, even mummified remains. Miri was worried that Hasteinn would object to what could be construed as grave-robbing, but he laughs it off. “They’re nothing to me. Loot as much as you want, I don’t care, as long as I get paid.” Hasteinn himself shows little interest in rooting around for treasure. He is getting paid for his time, after all. But Miri soon discovers another reason for his circumspection. Something is triggered when Miri lifts the lid of an ornate chest. With a blinding flash of magical energy, she is knocked on her ass, and suddenly she feels cold iron around her neck and wrists. Hasteinn seems unalarmed - in fact he seems rather amused by her predicament. “Magical traps,” Hasteinn explains with a grin. “To deter grave-robbers, like you.” “This is ridiculous. Can you help me with this device?” “Yes,” came the laconic reply. Miri wants to scream at him. “Well… would you?” “Sure, for a fee. As you know, my services aren’t free. I’ll add it to your debt.” Miri is staggered by her companion’s brazen profiteering. But she has no choice but to acquiesce. “Fine,” she hisses. “Just get this thing off me.” “Ask me nicely,” he says. Miri is so exasperated by his smugness that she starts to tear up a little, to her great chagrin. But she does what she’s told. “Good girl.” Hasteinn produces a key of strange design. As he reaches a hand behind her to sweep aside her hair, his thumb caresses the back of her bare neck. Miri’s breath catches in her throat, but the moment passes as he sticks the key into the lock on the back of the device. With a turn of the key, the device falls apart, useless, but so too does the key. Miri is mortified by the whole strange interlude. But even so, flaring in the pit of her stomach is a secret warmth that she doesn’t quite know what to make of. With the yoke no longer around her neck and restraining her hands, they delve deeper into the barrow. The draugr in these depths are tougher - older, says Hasteinn, and closer to whatever magic animates them - but they all fall under the fury of Hasteinn’s lupine assault - aided, of course, by Miri’s magic. The wall inscribed with the old dragon tongue transfixes priestess and sellsword both. There is an undercurrent of... Power here that Miri struggles to understand. Hasteinn, too, is pensive. Their reverie is interrupted by a draugr rising from its grave, a terrible great-axe dripping with frost clutched in its hands. It shouts with bone-rending ferocity and rains frozen blows on Hasteinn’s shield, but Hasteinn’s methodical counterattacks drive it into a corner, where it is finally slain. Miri helps too, sustaining Hasteinn with her healing magic while taking cover behind him. After, Hasteinn even admits, if a bit brusquely, that he could not have done it without her help. It’s the smallest thing, but that little concession makes Miri unreasonably giddy, though it may have just been the adrenaline of the battle. +++ They return to Whiterun after stopping at Riverwood to return the claw to Lucan Valerius, who is none the wiser about the claw's true purpose. His reward, plus the rest of the haul from the barrow, is enough to cover Hasteinn’s back pay. In Whiterun, flush with coin and success, Hasteinn celebrates by getting well and truly drunk. Miri wouldn’t have minded a celebratory drink or two with him, but the brute ignores her entirely, eyeing instead the scowling woman in full plate in the corner. Miri leaves him to his revelry, and nurses an ale while talking to Hulda, the innkeeper. Her hands are always moving, doing this thing and that at the counter, but she is no less interesting a gossip for that. Miri finds herself drawn deep into conversation with her. By the time her drink is finished, she has lost Hasteinn. She finds her sellsword by the ragged grunting coming from the back of the inn. There, on a bed of rough straw, Hasteinn and the surly Nord warrior woman from before are naked and entwined in a savage struggle… only neither seem to be in pain, and their grunting and moaning seem to emanate rather from… pleasure. Miri is reminded of a book she once saw Brother Nestor reading - “The Beast With Two Backs”. Brother Nestor had hurriedly put it away when she approached, but she’d snuck a glance at it, later, when the brother was in his cups. The beast was no mythical creature at all, but two people, entwined in passion, with descriptions that were at once florid and unspeakably coarse. Entranced by the sight, Miri realizes dimly that she is grinding her hips against the doorframe, in imitation of the Nordwoman. “You, by the door,” the Nordwoman barks, suddenly. “Join in, or get out.” Hasteinn’s head snaps towards the door. He makes full eye contact with Miri for a brief eternity, and for an instant Miri is frozen, a rabbit caught in the sightline of a predator. Then Hasteinn jerks and tenses, gripping the Nord woman by the hips. Miri turns and bolts, almost stumbling over her own feet and falling on her ass in her haste. Her dreams that night are filled with beasts - spiders, dead things… and especially the two-backed kind, writhing and tumbling over a bed of rough straw. +++

In the deepdream, a girl doesn't remember who she is. For a moment she senses an infinite vista of possibility, but they soon collapse into clarity: Miriam from Colovia, in the snow. The death rattle of a fat man with dried wine on his lips and skin the pallor of death. A wolf in iron, circling. Sister Miriam’s journal 21 Last Seed 4E201 Chapter I: “Ends and Beginnings” Brother Nestor died on the morning of the third day, breathing his last under the furs beside the embers of Angi’s fire from the night before. Despite Miri’s best efforts, she had been unable to save him. The injuries he’d sustained on the brutal passage through the Jeralls went beyond anything her rudimentary healing spells could mend. But for Miri, he was the last of the party of pilgrims that had entered the mountains at the beginning of Last Seed. Terrentius, Caelor, Sister Juliana, and the rest had perished in the crossing, swept into a deep ravine by a sudden avalanche. With Angi’s help Sister Miriam of Castor Abbey stacked a sorry cairn for Brother Nestor among the snow, along with a bottle of the Colovian red he loved so much. When it was done Miri asked the Nord woman if she would take Miri to Helgen. Angi had been helpful and more than accommodating in taking in the remnants of their sorry party, but this request she flatly refused. There were bandits in the foothills, she warned. And beyond, Imperials. It was hard to say which group she named with more disdain. It was only after that that Miri turned to the man known as Hasteinn “the Wolf”. A hardened Nord sellsword with flowing golden hair and an air of menacing competence about him, he had come with the party of pilgrims as a caravan guard. Miri didn’t know him that well, despite having spent more than two weeks on the road together. Brother Nestor had kept a wide berth, and advised her to do the same. But Brother Nestor was gone now, and there was no one left to turn to but the Wolf. He’d snorted when Miri asked him to take her to Helgen. When she reminded him that he had been contracted to escort the party all the way to Whiterun, he replied that he had a contract with "that toad" Terrentius… and Terrentius was dead and gone with the rest of them. In the end Miri had to bite her tongue and promise to pay him for his trouble. In truth, she didn’t have all the coin she promised him. But all she had to do was reach Helgen. Hadvar would cover the rest, surely. In truth, she did not know if Hadvar would. They had been friends… acquaintances back when Hadvar commanded the legionary quad attached to the convent. But that was more than a year past, before he was transferred back to his native Skyrim. The priestess-in-training shakes the doubt out of her mind. That’s a bridge she’ll cross when she gets to it. +++ The novice sets off for Helgen, under the Wolf’s protection. Angi seems reluctant to see them go; she offers to teach them archery. Miri turns her down, but thanks her profusely and bids her a heartfelt farewell. There are bandits, like Angi says. But even surrounded on all sides, Hasteinn is an artist who paints in red, weaving and bashing, his axe biting this way, then that way in a savage, fluid flurry. Miri tries to support him from behind with some healing, but it is Hasteinn’s fight. Afterwards, he tosses his crude war axe aside, in favor of one of the bandits' steel sword. "Now that's a proper weapon," he says. The walls of Helgen come into view sometime after noon… but something is terribly wrong. Helgen is burning, and with a giant roar, a dragon! bursts into the sky. By the time Miri dares to look again, the terrible beast is gone. Helgen is a burnt-out husk. All over the fort, they find corpses… most charred beyond recognition by dragonfire, but one particular corpse has intact legionary tags, still clutched in his hands. Miri’s heart sinks when she makes out the name on the tags: Hadvar of Riverwood. Out of force of habit, she performs the rites and says the words for Hadvar and the rest of the unfortunate souls, but the presence of the Divine is absent. It isn’t long before Hasteinn confronts Miri. They are at Helgen - where is his pay, stupid girl? Reluctantly, Miri has to admit that she does not have the septims to pay him. Miri is surprised to see that the look that passes into his eyes then is calculating rather than furious. But perhaps the Wolf is simply restraining his anger. Hasteinn suggests (in a tone that brook little disagreement) heading for the nearest town, which he says is Riverwood. At Riverwood the town blacksmith, who turns out to be Hadvar’s uncle, tells them to head to Whiterun and tell the jarl about Helgen and the dragon. She steps into the village shop to sell off the precious few books that survived the passage through the Jeralls. It barely fetches any coin. She makes a half-hearted attempt to pay what she can, but the Nord sellsword rejects it contemptuously. “You have nothing,” he says, bluntly. “This is not enough.” It’s not a total loss, however. The shopkeeper there has lost a precious totem, some sort of claw. Hasteinn is eager to pursue this lead, but Miri is insistent - they should go on first to Whiterun, to warn the jarl. Hasteinn agrees, but warns that he expects to be paid for his time; this is getting added to Miri’s tab, along with any interest accrued. Miri does not try to push her luck by arguing the matter. They help fell a frenzied giant on the outskirts of Whiterun. The other fighters, the “Companions”, speak directly to Hasteinn. Miri might as well have been invisible for all the mind they pay her. Miri is slightly peeved by this, but she is too awestruck to protest. First a dragon, and now a giant! In Whiterun, the jarl is suitably grateful, and gifts Hasteinn a fine suit of steel-forged armor. Even though they only came here on Miri’s insistence in the first place, Hasteinn has no problem taking credit for the gallant act. Miri is mistaken if she thought the armor would count towards clearing her debt. Later, over a roaring fire at the Bannered Mare, they agree to go to Bleak Falls Barrow on the morrow. Well, really it is Hasteinn insisting in no uncertain terms that they go to the barrow. But Miri, too, is eager. She is intrigued by what the wizard had said about dragonstones and ancient Nord language. It is far too late in the day to venture out again, so they rent a room at the inn. Miri says a prayer to Arkay before bed, but again only silence answers. She wonders if Arkay has abandoned her. Or perhaps it is her that has abandoned Arkay. She had been training to be a priestess of Arkay for most of her life, but not by choice. Truth be told she never would have been a good priestess of Arkay - too eager for adventure, too prone to flights of fancy, or so the abbess had said, despairing. Perhaps the events of the past few days had been a sign that there was another path she was meant to follow. The thought should be a sobering one… but in truth it fills Miri with boundless anticipation. +++