A long, long time ago in Cyrodil I made a custom companion mod of essentially a half human / half daedra creature, that followed you home after you sprung her from Oblivion. The only thing significant about the character was that she communicated primarily with hand signals, only when you could see her of course. She'd point at her eyes, hold up from one to four fingers (or a clenched fist to mean more than four), and then point to the nearest of the enemies. All without attracting unwanted attention to you. I also made her walk to your side instead of following behind you so she wasn't getting in the way of the 3rd person camera all the time ... In order to make the mod, I had to work out many issues concerning custom animations, especially synching animations between two or more characters. There were some bugs in the engine concerning transporting characters out when an Oblivion gate closed, but it more or less worked. So I'd like to see how much of that I could bring forward into Skyrim, and I'd be interested in working on expanding the College as well. But I'm wondering how anyone is doing any plot related mods without the CS ... naturally, I just used the one Bethesda so thoughtfully provided for Oblivion, but how are people doing .esp mods now? It may make more sense to just wait for the release but I'd like to get started with some smaller trial projects immediately if I could.
