LE third faction: (not stormcloak or imperial)

[paulhanna]

I am personally sick of having to decide from the very beginning of the game which side to join: imperial or stormcloak. as soon as you meet alduin, you have to escape with either ralof or hadvar.

what I hope someone will do (or has done already) is a mod which gives a third faction, right from the beginning.

maybe instead of running in the helgen keep with ralof or hadvar, you run your own way, find a dead imperial's sword and cut your own handcuffs off, and run through the gate or something.

 

but more to the main point of this mod:

instead of siding with those imperial milkdrinkers or stormcloak traitors, you find out that there's a third, secret, faction where a greedy bandit made his own mini army to take over skyrim. you decide to join him for the time being, being part of his army, and he eventually sends you at the end to attack solitude and windhelm. it is at this time that you betray him (if ya want, but that's the purpose of this mod) and kill the bandit leader and you become the new leader of the army. then you decide to either peacefully or forcibly take over skyrim. you can either choose to do the quest "season unending" and negotiate a true between the two other factions, with a third option for each decision where you gain territory from them, OR you can kill both sides, and force yourself to be the new jarl of windhelm and/or solitude, by killing ulfric and/or elisef.

 

of course, there will have to be some badass voice actors to impersonate ulfric, tullius, and elisef, but anyway:

 

you then control solitude and/or windhelm, force your army to recruit more, (maybe even take prisoners and force them to be slave soldiers) and also recruit your followers. eventually you conquer all of skyrim by having a fort battle with every hold (like in vanilla skyrim, only with your own faction instead of imperial or stormcloak banner, and you fight which ever side is currently holding that fort).

 

in the end, you are crowned king (or if you didn't betray your bandit king, he is the new king) of skyrim

now you force your army to attack other privinces, such as the thalmor of summerset, imperials of cyrodill and high rock, or remaining stormcloaks, or maybe all of them.

(of course, since you can't go to any of the other privinces, you just get messages that you were successful in the raid, or not, and you get your share of the loot)

 

you get richer (or maybe you lose men depending on how many and how well trained they are) with every province you conquer

 

anyway, thx for reading, hope someone makes a mod like this, thx In advance, and happy thanksgiving XD

[simtam]

It reminds me of this one :-)

 

This greedy bandit leader you are talking about is the one whose bandits occupy Helgen after it is destroyed by certain dragon. So if players choose to, for example, lock themselves up in a sturdy wine cellar in Helgen (full of juniper berry wine bottles, probably the house of Vilod!), the trap door to this cellar is pinned down by falling debris, and only after those bandits coming to Helgen remove the debris, the player character is released and can continue freely.

 

Except not that freely, because - remember that child and old miner from Helgen? They were intercepted by the merry folk, too. (of course! who else could show the player character the way to that cellar). So now the bandit leader keeps the child as his "guest" in order to prevent old miner and player character from betraying him. Because he also is surprised by the abandoning of Helgen, and need to gather quietly and quickly the rest of his band which is scattered around. Particularly, he let some thugs go grave-robbing in the Bleak Falls area.

 

The player and old miner are sent to told those guys to go to Helgen - and if the thugs already found what they were to find in that ancient barrow, the bandit leader request is: let the player and miner take that ancient slab of stone to the Riverwood inn, where it was requested by the very person who paid for the whole tomb-raiding operation (well, guess who! no common thief could know the real purpose of certain metalwork claw decorating a local store...). After this is done, the old miner takes some token from innkeeper to bandit leader and takes the child to his far family in the Ivarstead area (as he does in vanilla Skyrim), and player can witness how stone goes to the Whiterun court wizard, because, dragons.

 

But you know what happens when player arrives at Bleak Falls: the grave-robbing party is in trouble, their thief got caught by a giant spider; their desperate plan is to gather firewood because they believe spiders are afraid of fire... Failing to retrieve the stone will upset the bandit leader and he won't release the child.

It's possible also to try and rescue the child by breaking into Helgen Keep dungeons by going through the caves, like escaping from Helgen but in reverse. The old miner knows the way to cave enterance, or he knows someone who knows how to find it, or at least he heard it is somewhere there. After releasing the child, the old man thanks player for help and takes the child to someplace in Ivarstead region.

 

It's not a mod (yet?) - it's how I fill the missing pieces when GM-ing the beginning of Skyrim as a table-top rpg.

 

But if made into a mod, it may serve as a decent introduction to your third faction, establishing it at similar level, in terms of narrative structure, with other very important people of the Skyrim campaign.