[WIP] Daughter of Coldharbour - by Trykz

[Trykz]

 

You awaken from the nightmare. The subsiding pain of the dream's ritual leaves you questioning reality.

It couldn't be real. No one could survive such savagery. Confused, you are unable to recall anything but the nightmare.....

in horrific detail.....

 

Now imagine......

 

having never taken an actual breath

having never had a heartbeat

having never actually been, and can never actually be.....

a human being

 

Learning that you are likely THE most powerful

creature of the night ever to exist.....

with the inherent ability to hover, and fly

 

What would you do with all that power?

 

More to come, so stay tuned!

 

Trykz

[Trykz]

So what is this?

 

Well, it's a little something I've had on the back burner since not long after Skyrim originally launched, and the first iteration of RaceCompatibility by expired6978 was released. I shelved it to take on Moonshadow Elves, which I saw at the time as a pretty supreme challenge due to it's popularity in TES: Oblivion.

 

Anyway, enough of the ancient history.....

 

this race, is what I've always felt Skyrim's vampires should have always been about. A powerful race of undead, virtually unmatched by any mere "humanoid" race. And given the known lore behind what it takes to become a Daughter of Coldharbour, the whole Dawnguard "vampire lord" thing just muddled things up even more. I never really understood the "start as a human, become a vampire, only to THEN become a powerful vampire lord".

 

I mean, what was the rationale for not affording players the ability to start as one of the races that were ALREADY created for players to "turn into". And truth be told, as far as I'm concerned, vampire lords are weak, and truly suck mechanically. Why create a winged race, only to essentially confine them to the ground? Then to top it off, make them ugly AF.....

 

A TON of wasted potential.

 

So let's compare some of what Bethesda did to what I've done:

 

Vampirism is NOT a "choice" the player should have 3 days in which to ponder over. You either want to play a vampire right from the start, or you don't. Nor should it be an "oops" thing, where you conveniently "forget" to use a cure potion, and "poof", you're a vampire 3 days later.

 

Don't get me started on the "I'm fully fed now, so I'm weak AF" mechanic. I didn't touch this though, as I left that to either Sacrosanct or Better Vampires to handle (that choice is yours, and this mod works with EITHER or BOTH).

 

You have to "grow" into your power. WTF? Why? You're an intensely feared undead creature of the night! Why should ANYONE fear you, if all they need to do it stab you to death before you can steal all their health to stay alive? Well, no more. Because NOW, you can absorb not only the health out of your victims, but their magicka and stamina as well, and then, when they have nothing else left to take, you can strip out their soul to fill a gem. I call it "soul burn".

 

I went with a full-blown vampire race, mostly because of the inherent issues that revolve around custom races that include a vampire variant race. Like something "misfiring" you into a vanilla race you never even chose or some stupid shit like that. There's likely to be no "misfiring" here, because there's no "non-vampire" race to "revert" to (I'm still testing to confirm this bit at the moment).

 

So yes. You will BEGIN AS and ALWAYS BE, a vampire while playing this race. There is no cure, because there is NOTHING "to" cure. As far as vampire lords go, you can choose to be one, or not. So be warned, as a vampire lord, you'll be a WEAKER version of yourself. Why? Because NONE of your racial abilities will be available to you while in that form. I'm currently working out a way to run this race through EITHER chain of the Dawnguard questline.

 

With that, I'm off to test more stuff. I'll be popping in from time to time throughout the weekend to update my findings......

 

Trykz

[Trykz]

As expected, accepting Harkon's weak ass "gift" allows this race to transform into a vampire lord, and to revert back to a Daughter of Coldharbour FLAWLESSLY. Even when using this custom transformation mod. To be honest, I was half expecting everything to blow up as soon as I hit the lesser power button ?

 

The initial transformation looked a bit weird as I somehow ended up with both the ugly vanilla transformation AND the custom transformation overlapped. But after reverting and re-transforming, it worked fine every time after that.

 

I haven't messed around with testing what happens if you somehow get the werewolf disease yet. I'm thinking I'll add beast form through the console tomorrow to see what happens ?

 

Trykz

[Trykz]

 

There's nothing quite like fighting a dragon on his turf......

 

In the air ?

 

The whole flight aspect of the mod seems to be working VERY well. After dozens of hours of

testing, I have experienced VERY minimal "glitching" inherent to flight mods overall.

I did however, for sanity's sake, add a no-fall-damage perk to the race. Which makes

sense I suppose. You're already dead. So why should you die from falling?

 

I didn't get a chance to see what happens if I try to add beast form. Mostly because

I spent the weekend fixing my blown-up game for updating like a dumbass in the

middle of building a mod ?

 

But hey, maybe I'll learn one day ?

 

Anyhoo.....

 

 

I'm looking at adding a few more unique abilities before I release this.

They have a few already, such as.....

 

nevermind. I don't wanna just blurt it out. But I WILL lay out a hint:

 

If you want/need to replenish your magicka, you might wanna pray

for rain, or break out your bathing suit ?

 

More to come.....

 

Trykz

[Trykz]

So looking through my huuuuuuge folder of miscellaneous assets, I came along this guy:

 

 

So I figured "What the hell? He'd make a great summon-able Aspect of Molag!"

So 20 minutes later, I summon him in the game, and this happened:

 

 

Spoiler

 

And upon closer inspection, I noticed that he was taking FULL advantage of SOS ?

 

Now I just have to figure out how to get him to remove the armor part, which

I've already made into a separate piece so he can have a nude body. It also

appears that his "junk" may be a little off. So I need to look into how SOS hooks

into his skeleton (werewolf) so I can make the necessary adjustments to

re-position it on a separate, custom pathed skeleton.

 

Trykz

[Trykz]

Okay.....

 

so Hellspawn didn't really work out so well, because he needs to use the werewolf race to function

with Sexlab, unless I do a bunch of scripting work to make his race valid. And I don't really want to add

more scripts for just a single actor. I also didn't want to modify the werewolf skeleton just for him, as

that would likely have a negative impact on normal werewolves using SOS.

 

So to keep things script free, but still give the race some unique abilities, I opted to create a new

perk, based on Durhneviir's, to create some pretty neat summon spells that can call forth a specific

group of a single race (x3 spells capable of summoning x3 mobs), as well as a group of mixed

undeads (drawn from the three other spells).

 

And to round it all off, if you cast the spell a second time, it gives you a total of six summoned

creatures to fight for you. Which is REALLY nice if you are using Sands of Time or other mods that

add groups of enemy spawns to the game.

 

These spells are completely optional if you feel they'd be too overpowered for your

current mod setup, as I built them on a separate esp which I can update without

making any changes to the base mod (Which is an esm).

 

I have a few more tests to run later today. If all goes well, I'll upload it later tonight.

 

Trykz

[Kaans99]

Looks pretty sweet, any idea when you might upload the file?

 

Disregard this, I just found the post in the download section. Also thank you for the new race!