Nephilim: The Next Iteration (Development Thread)

[JetSteele]

​If a Moderator sees this can you move this to the Skyrim Special Edition forums, I started this topic before SSE launched (and the SSE forums didn't exist) but since it's been released, to prevent any confusion can we move this over to the proper forum?

Development Thread

Jesus, its been a hell of a ride for this mod. I remember when this project first begun and I knew absolutely nothing about modding, lets cut to the chase of this thread though.

 

The mod itself is being reconstructed from scratch with a whole slew of changes and improvements. From those who know the mod, its a race mod where the player gets to become half angel. The mod itself started off as a disease based transformation (similar to vampirism) and then it became a race mod that you select through the race menu.

 

Reason I changed it was because I kept getting requests to make custom races compatible and the scripting became way complicated for me (at the skill level I was at).

 

The mod is getting one final facelift for SE (third times the charm aye? :tongue:) which is creating a hybrid between the original mod idea and the new concepts that I learned over time and implemented in the later iterations of this mod. However this new mod won't be released as 'Nephilim', on the contrary I've decided to release the mod under a new banner entirely. The decision was a long and thought out one but considering that the mod is being reconstructed with new ideas and locations and its being turned into a quest based mod, I feel like I have enough here to rebrand the mod (also I'm releasing all my SE ported mods in one pack).

 

>>Quest

As I mentioned above the mod will be quest based and to get Angelic powers and the transformation the player will need to undergo several rituals. The quest line will begin once the player finds a journal written by Savos Aren, discovering the entrance to Gleyma Maeshowe or picking up the Skull key located inside of the Dwemer Museum; though to unlock the Skull key box the player needs access to the Arch-Mage key.

 

As the player continues through the quest line it will interweave itself into 2 other quest lines from the base game (the quests won't be edited so no mod incompatibilities will occur):

- The Main Quest (for the Grigori path ONLY)

- The Mages Guild Quest

 

I don't want to force players to do quests they don't want to but I felt that it was necessary for the ritual to encompass those 2 quest lines. The ritual site itself will be held in a new Atherial Plane called the Alicante Valley.

 

The specific quest line details will be released at a later date...

 

>>Lore

The lore behind this new mod will also be expanded upon and differ from what the original mod was, reason being is that you won't be becoming a Nephilim (though the Nephilim lore will remain intact); however you will be working your way to transforming into a full blown angelic like character.

 

This is done by first transforming into an Otherworldly Entity, then at a later point choosing which type of awakening you would like to become and finally transforming fully into a Pneuma Awoken (an angelic like character).

 

>>Death Sequence

As for the death aspect of the mod...in the Nephilim mod it is said that the player underwent a procedure that gave them immortality/longevity which is the lore behind the death sequence.

 

In the new mod because you are a mortal which becomes Pneuma Awoken you must do a subsequent smaller ritual to unlock this feature.

 

>>Other Info

Any race will be compatible with the ritual, including custom races.

 

I don't have a release date as of yet as its still early development however I'll keep you guys posted on progress and how everything is coming along.

[JetSteele]

 

 

>>Ritual Completely Scripted!

The ritual site itself looks ordinary without the items added to the platform. Once the correct item is added then the seal will begin to glow as shown in the image provided. If you try to activate the 'Orb of Anu' before breaking all the seals then the Orb remains dormant.

 

After all the seals are broken by placing each item on the corresponding pedestal then when you activate the Orb it will open up, the player will begin floating and a light will descend upon the player beginning the ritual. After a couple seconds the player will blackout and wake up in a room that is completely pitch black (no walls, no floors...just empty darkness).

 

This symbolizes the player inside of his own mind. There will be one table in the room with The Mortal Cup on it, the player drinks from the cup and then everything goes black once more. When the player comes to once again he/she will be floating at the exact spot they were and after a second or two they will be flung backwards unto the ground and the Orb will close signalling the end of the ritual.

 

Once the player is a Daemon the Orb will act as the upgrade system for them, so the player would pray to the Orb, it will open and grant the player a new power of their choosing if they fulfill the necessary requirements.

 

Note that to use the orb all the seals must always be broken, however you don't need to keep the items there forever. So you can take the Staff of Magnus away and bring it back to its pedestal whenever you want to use the Orb, its not locked there forever once the ritual begins. Same goes for any of the items.

 

The player will have the main quest line for the mod as well as side quests to track each of the seals. Therefore objectives like the Ultra Dragon Priest mask I'll have a quest pointing to all the dragon priests and later to where you need to bring everything...this way the player won't have to track down all the masks on their own.

 

Not everything will be handed to the player on a silver platter...some puzzles the player will have to figure out on his own. Quest objective markers will only be given to the player if the character itself learns of the locations. Meaning that there will be no hand holding and the marker system won't be utilized as 'an all seeing God that knows where the player needs to go' system.

 

Once the mod releases I will be giving a 2 week period where I won't be answering any questions relating to the quest line except where the start of it is. After that period I'll write a walkthrough for the quest line. Though in the mod there will be everything you need to understand and complete the quest line, it won't be impossibly difficult.

 

That is all the info for now, I'll make another post once the quest line is completed to give you guys an idea on what will go down; though I won't give out answers to puzzles or any details that are too revealing.

[evegrey21]

I can't wait for it :D

[skyquest32]

When do you think you will have this? Also my suggestion is not to make it technically a custom race but to use a proxy, unless you can cause it to mod many other scripts in the game without error primary dawn guard, which is the most vital thing for any incompatibly you may have. I have never seen a custom race despite any patch work right with dawnguard, and better vampires which might as well be hardcoded into the game as part of the dawnguard dlc as all use it. Yet if you disallow vamp/wolf which makes sense here, you cant play major game content if you wont be a vampire hunter and many refuse.

Edited August 26, 2016 by skyquest32

[JetSteele]

I don't have a timeframe just yet as I also need to wait for SSE to release since I want to release both versions at the same time, and I need to see how compatible both mods are in the CK (I'm not completely convinced that it'll be an easy transfer but that's a conversation for another time). Vampirism and Lycanthropy will both be available in the new mod but any compatibilities that I might make in the future would be made post release of the base mod.

[TheLordofNyrin]

this sounds pretty neat. will you be expanding the sovngarde worldspace to add the new features? I did some exploring in there once I had flight and the original playspace takes up only 10% of the full landmass that is sovngarde so there is plenty of room to add new stuff in the mountains.

Also, i feel like at some point with your character running around and trying to become a daemon, terrorizing mortals with your angelic powers and generally making yourself known as a nephilim, shouldn't there be some level of consequence for that? In your lore there was a reason the nephilim were so deep into hiding. Id like to see if you cause to much of a ruckus, angels might start to come after you. If you added this, id fully expect it to be a hard fight and they would come in groups like small raiding parties of 2-6 and be comparable to taking on that many ancient or legendary dragons at once. It would be a neat immersion part of the mod and for those who wouldnt want it they could turn it off in the MCM menu or set how many come after you/how hard they are.

[JetSteele]

There will be an expansion built into Sovngarde that would consist of cells, the worldspace itself I'm still debating on how much to expand upon it since their are some mods that edit the space but since there isn't any big overhaul types for Sovngarde that I know of I might use the worldspace for the mod...still deciding on that aspect. If I do expand upon Sovngarde enough I may even make a world map for the area...though that is undecided as of yet so we will see how things progress and go from there.

 

You guessed correctly, there will be consequences to using your powers. The bigger powers will have Angels tracking you faster while the smaller abilities will be harder to track. After the Angels have tracked you down they will attack you to try to take you out which is where the risk element of utilizing Angelic Powers will come into play.

 

The lore elements of the original Nephilim mod will transfer into a more practical setup for the new mod (the Angels tracking you is just one example of this). The lore is also expanded upon since I'm introducing Daemons into the mix now.

[skyquest32]

There will be an expansion built into Sovngarde that would consist of cells, the worldspace itself I'm still debating on how much to expand upon it since their are some mods that edit the space but since there isn't any big overhaul types for Sovngarde that I know of I might use the worldspace for the mod...still deciding on that aspect. If I do expand upon Sovngarde enough I may even make a world map for the area...though that is undecided as of yet so we will see how things progress and go from there.

 

You guessed correctly, there will be consequences to using your powers. The bigger powers will have Angels tracking you faster while the smaller abilities will be harder to track. After the Angels have tracked you down they will attack you to try to take you out which is where the risk element of utilizing Angelic Powers will come into play.

 

The lore elements of the original Nephilim mod will transfer into a more practical setup for the new mod (the Angels tracking you is just one example of this). The lore is also expanded upon since I'm introducing Daemons into the mix now.

Just read the book of Enoch, it details all that in semi symbolic form from christian Apocrypha. Ignore the part about the flood and the bias as well as them being giants, that is metaphorical. Also see the ancient Babylonian religious text and interpretations to learn of these gods for research. The black earth Chronicles is a good place to start as a jumping off point. The author did have a lot of theories crazy ideas but he got more of it right than most do, in my opinion anyway. He references much historical data in any case. Its not as romantic as the apocrypha though for visionary fiction and poetry inspiration. No offense to anyone intended here by the way.

Edited August 31, 2016 by skyquest32

[TheLordofNyrin]

an expansion to the sovngarde world with a map would be freakin awesome but wouldn't that take a lot of time? skyrim only uses about 10% of the full island it devoted to it. When i first got flight i decided to look around the whole area and its far bigger than most think. If i may also give a suggestion, could the enclave's sovngarde enterance if your keeping it be moved to somewhere below shor's hall down by the endless ocean? Editing the landscape of sovngarde allows for a lot of new possibilities.

 

With if the angels start hunting you how would you throw them off? simply killing their raiding group is not the right answer as they will just send more later on with possibly even greater numbers or with higher ranking angels. I would suspect that running away might actually be the better option than fighting them if they didn't detect you outright when they got close by, and id expect the enclave wouldn't be too happy if you came running to them with a legion of angels chasing after you, i.e. they wouldn't even let you in or come back for now. So you would actually have to lay low for a while, stay out of towns, avoid people in general and wait for the heat to cool off. the mod crime decay comes to mind when i say that, but a similar concept. not that much of an issue if you plan to be spending a lot of time in dungeons or caves where there's no one around.

 

With the way the lore is going, it doesn't look possible to join the ranks of angels since they are hunting you and your kind. still would be kind of neat - new faction mods are always fun.

[TheLordofNyrin]

After doing some digging into angelic lore I have come across two definitions for what we generally call angels: the Angelus – or natural angels such as the ones in your lore and the Angelos – or those who ascended to angelhood. The two are similar in every way but with two very large exceptions:

 

Angelus are naturally created as angels and are completely immortal – they are also the servants of god and cannot disobey him. They also cannot transition in ranks without first being told so. This also means when they are given and order they follow it without question. Angelus are naturally super powerful, way more than any mortal can ever be but have no free will of their own.

 

Angelos however are free willed beings who became angels, meaning that God cannot command them and have them obey without a second thought. Angelos are also not naturally as powerful as Angelus but because they do not need direct permission from God to ascend and can do it on their own. They can become as powerful as the Angelus or even more powerful as they continue to ascend.

 

You can see the problem here. In your lore the angels or in this case, the Angelus, were told to execute all of the Nephilim because they had the ability to ascend into Angelos; which the gods cannot control or restrict ascension from. If you added this feature, I would suspect that almost all knowledge of the Angelos would have been utterly destroyed through all of Nirn but could be rediscovered – perhaps through the all-knowing power of the Elder Scrolls or through Hermeous Mora if you’re a daemon. This is also why even the few Nephilim that remain confuse the Angelus for simply “Angels” as they do not even know about the second type – none of them ever managed to ascend to Angelus before the purge was started. So this would have to be something that the player would stumble upon and if the player became an Angelos they could continue to progress even further into angelic powers.

 

As for joining the angel faction – I don’t know about that; Even if they did let you join, it would be because they can’t stop you – not because they wanted you to.

Edited September 1, 2016 by TheLordofNyrin