Kayyyleb

Yup you need the Masque not the Rueful Axe. Also, you don't need to keep the Oghma Infinium in your inventory to make it work, simply acquiring an artifact is enough.

Power bash eats up as much stamina as a power attack with melee weapons. I personally never really found it useful. Regular bashing to stun/cancel attacks has served me well enough. This thread gives me a neat idea of starting a pure healer though. Heavy/light or no armor with block and obviously restoration with no offensive abilities (except anti-undead spells in restoration itself). You'd have to rely on followers heavily (probably needing Faendal/Lydia ASAP).

A Minas Tirith style city built into the mountains right where the Labyrinthian currently sits. With the small mountain pass and numerous underground tunnels it would be easy to resupply/reinforce/counterattack during a siege.

I thought I was the only person who noticed that. It made me cringe when I thought of how painful a death that would be. Slaughtering that camp of Forsworn felt like justice. It did, every Forsworn I kill feels like doing Skyrim a favour. Bandits at least have motivations beyond just killing for the sake of it, I can understand someone stealing just to eat though I won't think twice about killing bandits either, mainly because when faced with the options of ignoring me or attackng me, they always choose the stupid one. People can make the argument that The Forsworn shouldn't be judged solely by how the appear in the game, to that I argue the Forsworn were portrayed that way for a reason. They are portrayed as murdering savages because that's what they are, they may have been proud freedom fighters at some point, but they're way past that point now. Dealing with Hagravens, turning themselves into mindless killing machines (See Red Eagle and other Briarhearts) and attacking anyone they encounter on sight, regardless of who they are or if they can defend themselves. To me, the Forsworn are murdering scum who are well past the point of no return. I tend to lean towards chaotic good characters and rarely play evil ones, but no matter what kind of character I play I have never been able to come up with any good reason to sympathise with the Forsworn. Yes, they got screwed, there's a lot of terrible stories of how the natives of the Reach have suffered. What have the Forsworn done about that? They've made sure just as many innocent people have terrible stories of their own. Exactly. Ultimately it doesn't matter anymore if they were the rightful owners of the land and victims of the Nords. The savages they've devolved themselves into aren't entitled to anything. Moral ambiguity is a common theme in TES games but in this case the Forsworn are in the wrong no matter how you look at it.

I thought I was the only person who noticed that. It made me cringe when I thought of how painful a death that would be. Slaughtering that camp of Forsworn felt like justice.

player.setlevel # will set your character to the specified level but won't scale down perks or individual skills. It all has to be done manually and can be rather tedious. Unless there's an easier way that I don't know about.

Krii Lun Aus! Makes short work of...well pretty much everything in the game.

For practicality you have to get pretty far in the main story to finish dawnguard anyways since you need the elder scroll and there's only like 2 missions after you get it. As for lore-friendly, you can mix them up and it flows well enough since they don't really reference each other at all.

The only time Lydia dies in my game is when I accidentally shoot her when she's knocked out...and I'm playing on master difficulty. You can really easily set her to essential in the CK if you have problems with it though.

Except 2 women can get married and I have no idea what being American has to do with it.

I am a male and I play female characters in every game with a 3rd person view mode for the same reason many other people have mentioned which is I'd rather look at a female body for hours of ingame time as opposed to a male. The same is likely true for many female gamers who play male characters. My female characters in Skyrim are intentionally physically attractive to me but in realistic ways. Thus I prefer UNP over CBBE for example. Normal healthy women with normal proportions who wear real armor...not watermelon boobs and bikini armor.

You will take hits until your sneak is high enough to keep you hidden while you snipe your enemies so I'd go with light armor. I've never tried using clothing actually, but it seems somewhat clunky to me since you have to use alteration spells to armor yourself instead of being able to use your magicka on conjuring/healing.

It's called The Vale. It's half underground, half above ground, with a lot of Falmer villages and glowing flowers. There are some glowing animals as well. It's pretty cool, but many of the assets are recycled and modified. There's also a new worldspace called the Soul Cairn, but thankfully it's quite short, since the Soul Cairn is just boring. I rather liked the Vale. But I agree that the Soul Cairn was terribly boring...and all it adds are collection quests with no fast travel, no map indicators and hell...no map. Terrible. Wandering around for 5 hours getting attacked by skeletons every 30 seconds isn't my idea of fun.

I'll give it a shot. I'm pretty hardcore in favor of the Empire. Both sides of the war are insensitive and exploitative. But while the Empire does control Solitude which is the capital and a port city and thus the richest and Markarth with its silver mines don't forget that the Stormcloaks hold Riften which I would say is in a tie with Markarth for the 2nd wealthiest hold and Windhelm at 3rd. Whiterun is neutral (though Balgruuf leans Imperial) and the other holds are about evenly distributed. There is merit to the claim that the Imperials let the Forsworn ravage the Reach but honestly what do you expect them to do? They're recovering from a devastating war with the Thalmor and at war with the Stormcloaks leaving them spread thin in Skyrim and unable to deal with the additional threat until after the Civil War. You are correct that Tullius isn't the most understanding of Nordic culture but ultimately he'll be irrelevant after the war. He's a general there to represent the Legion and do his job which is win the war, he's not jarl or steward and won't be ruling Skyrim or any of the holds. Elisef is inexperienced to be sure and her thanes are self-interested. But her steward Falk is a good, honorable man and is molding her so I expect that in a few years Elisef will be much like him. The nords who follow Talos and the Empire do it because they understand that the ban is temporary. If the impending 2nd Great War with the Thalmor ends with an Imperial victory the White Gold Concordat will undeniably be revoked and free worship restored. The loyalist Nords understand that the real enemy isn't the Empire, it's the Thalmor and that Skyrim working together with Cyrodiil has a better chance of victory than either does on its own. There are good and bad jarls on both sides, it's unfair to only say the Empire-backed jarls are corrupt or exploitative and then one must realize that some jarls choose not to rule at all in which case it's their steward who really matters. Ulfric is loved by the Stormcloak Nords. Many see him as an imposter who killed the king to advance his own lust for power. Still others have no preference in who wins and only want the war to end one way or another. Ulfric cares only about Ulfric and the Nords. All the other races be damned and this is evident when you talk to the Argonians and Dunmer in Windhelm and the racist tendencies of many Stormcloaks or Ulfric sympathizers. Ulfric claiming to care about Skyrim's bleeding people and resources is a blatant lie. He himself is the single largest source of their suffering because the Civil War was instigated and is maintained by him. Ahhh the Thalmor dossier. The Thalmor explicitly engineered a situation in which Ulfric would be compelled to rebel against the Empire and wage a civil war. The Thalmor pulled his strings even though he may not realize it himself. The Thalmor want the civil war to continue for as long as possible so it will weaken both sides and prior to the Dragonborn's intervention that's exactly the course the war was going. Ultimately the Dragonborn throws a wrench in the Thalmors plans regardless of which side because he/she ends the war decisively for the chosen side within days/weeks instead of a prolonged war over years. However, which outcome hurts them more? The Empire winning and here's why. The Thalmor are playing a classical strategy of divide and conquer. If the Stormcloaks win, drive out the Legion and establish their own independent state they will hold animosity toward the Empire likely for generations and are unlikely to aid the Empire when the next war breaks out leaving the Empire alone and much easier for the Aldmeri Dominion to conquer. This now leaves half of Tamriel under Thalmor control and the 2 remaining provinces are isolated and the Dominion can simply sit back and gather strength to conquer them one by one as the loss of the Empire will break the ties holding the races of men united against the elves. United elves against divided men is easy pickings and exactly the Thalmor's plan. On the other hand, if the Empire wins the Stormcloaks will likely hold animosity and bitterness over the loss but as Rikke says in Windhelm, without a leader they will return home and settle back into their lives under the Empire. However since Skyrim remains an Imperial province when the war begins again the Empire now has 2 provinces from which to draw resources and manpower to fight the Dominion instead of standing alone which greatly improves their odds. The Thalmor don't need communication with Ulfric, they already spun him up and let him go. At this point they're just waiting for him to inadvertently follow through with their plan. Hammerfell thinks it won the battle but they set themselves up to ultimately lose the war. While Hammerfell did eventually fight the Dominion to a standstill they still lost a lot of ground and cannot feasibly hold off the Dominion's vastly superior numbers and resources indefinitely but under Ulfric Skyrim will be making the exact same mistake. Once again, divide and conquer is the Thalmor's game. The Redguards fell into their plan when they seceded. Now the Thalmor are setting their sights on Skyrim to do the same. Once they've cut off Cyrodiil's allies, they'll overwhelm her.

You'll want to upgrade your processor and graphics card. I know you said you aren't very tech-savvy but I'll post my specs if it gives you a reference point. I can run Skyrim on ultra high settings with minimal load times and only very rare and brief lag under high stress and this is with about 20 mods of various types installed: Processor: i7 2600k quadcore Sandy Bridge 3.5ghz Video card: Geforce GTX 560 Ti 1gb

Ahh the recipe was the trick. That and the armor had a bunch of junk "clothing" attributes for some reason that might've been causing the problem. At any rate I got it working, thanks!

Quick question for someone new to the creation kit: So I'm trying to edit General Tullius' Armor to benefit from a smithing perk (ie Steel Smithing or Advanced Armors) but can't figure out how to go about it and searching for guides has left me empty-handed so far. Simply put, I want to make it so smithing improvements on this armor piece will benefit from a 2x improvement perk in the smithing tree since by default no perks apply to this specific armor. I don't think it should be very complicated... Cheers.