Resonance: A Skyrim Tale

[Jubal]

So, there may be no posts in this subforum since 2014, but here I am reviving it eleven years later because Skyrim is still a game people are modding this long later.

I decided to make a Skyrim mod! I don't really know why I decided to make a Skyrim mod in late 2025, other than I was playing some Skyrim and it seemed a nice thing to tinker with. I'll provide updates as I go, but it's going OK so far.

The plan is to create a small story mod that focuses on a bard/historian who's investigating the ruins of Btharzel, which on the Skyrim map is the lone bridge at Deep Folk Crossing (I mean, I'm voicing the character so it was totally going to be something like that). The first working title was Songs of Deep Folk Crossing, but I think I'm now leaning towards the snappier single-word title Resonance. It's not a very complex story, but it will take the player through finding some more of the Btharzel ruins and decoding an ancient Dwemer songbook. I'm trying to keep it fairly lore-friendly.


So far, I've probably done about 2/3 of the interiors I need to create, though there's some noticeable work left to do on the ending section and especially its walking mesh. I've probably only done 1/4 of the scripting and dialogue lines, though I think I've worked out how to do a lot of the relevant scripts so the next sprint will be implementing those and recording a stack more dialogue.

One thing I'm really noticing about quest design in Skyrim is that there's kinda only so much you can do with it, especially if you're not introducing a ton of characters or heavily rewriting existing ones. More or less everything is basically a fetch quest or a linear dungeon crawl, sometimes with narrative stages. Escort quests are possible but rare and annoying: open world combat quests I guess are possible but oddly uncommon and potentially a pain to script well. I think there must be more to be done with nonlinear design, but a lot of that is hard to do as a mod: I don't want to roll in and do heavy rewrites of existing characters so the mod stays reasonably contained and doesn't conflict with other mods too badly, but that means that e.g. a quest stage I'd considered where you can go to different Dwemer experts for help had to be scrapped because I'd have had to find some way to splice in dialogues for Calcelmo, Sorine, and Arniel, and that would have potentially caused a lot of conflicts.