[WiP]Hire your own useful Housecarls

[LukeH]

This is a mod in early stage I just started to work on. Exact mod name yet not decided.

The main feature will be to dismiss vanilla assigned housecarl and the ability to recruit your own...somehow similar with recruiting blades or stewards. I will also aim to give housecarls something useful to do.

The mod will try to be lore friendly, yet the lore for them is not sufficiently established in ES so real world premedieval lore will be the model. This means housecarls are bodyguards, warrior type, they won't do your groceries.

 

Candidates NPC

Enough candidates will be provided so you can have all the housecarls males or all females.

It will be done via factions mechanism, hopefully using vanilla entries so custom follower mods may provide housecarl candidates.

You'll be able to make additional candidates via console command (addtofaction) with less glitches then the similar method to make marriageable NPC as the whole system will be build considering that possibility.

 

Features

Dismiss and hire housecarls for each hold.

Sandbox AI enhancements for housecarls.

Monthly wage for housecarls. If you fail to visit them in a month a courier will look for you and if all that fails they will leave your service.

Tasks for housecarls via radiant quests. *Accepting suggestions on what they can do

Delegate your bounty missions to your housecarls.

 

Compatibility considerations

I will try not to touch any NPC directly, not even the vanilla housecarls. All will be done via aliases. So it should be compatible with any cosmetic housecarls enhancements.

All testing will be done with my current multiple followers and other enhancements mod so expect full compatibility.

Won't be compatible with housecarl AI mods as this mod will provide that. Load this after the other mod to gain other features from there like cosmetic changes

 

Planed releases

There is no ETA on this

Initial release won't require Hearthfire and will work for the five non addon holds with housecarls. It will include wage and maybe a radiant job or two.

After that it will require HF, will have support for all HF holds with housecarls and future support will be only on this one.

[LukeH]

Reserved

 

Please let me know if there's other mods providing housecarl hire function cause I could not find any.

Awaiting feedback on the idea and suggestions for housecarl radiant interactions.

[AnkhAscendant]

I very much like this idea. I have a fondness for collecting my favorite NPCs ^^; I'm not aware of any mods that do anything like this.

 

A couple of suggestions I'm not sure if you already had planned on:

-Making sure that the vanilla housecarls actually go somewhere when they're dismissed and have somewhere to live, instead of just disappearing or hanging around your house anyway. Even if that means they move into an inn or the guard barracks or something. I would always like to be able to get them back (and it's awfully contrived when people just appear and disappear based on whether or not you need them.)

 

Actually that the only real suggestion. Though I'd like to be able to recruit anyone who you have a relationship of 3 or more with (excepting Jarls and their people of course), I know that wouldn't really work because some have unique voices or shouldn't realistically leave their assigned areas (like Cicero, on both counts). Also the idea that if you marry your Housecarl they're no longer your housecarl, and you can't make your spouse your housecarl, because marrying your servant and expecting them to still be your servant is... iffy. ^^;

 

I sound like I'm being all demanding, but I'm not trying to, I just really like your idea. Especially the addition of wages and a reason to actually visit each house every month. We can always use more goldsinks and realism.

 

For radiant quests like them, were you thinking things like fetch-quests? Send them out to get something for you, like collect some alchemy ingredients? (They're gone for five days and returns with 15 Deathbells or Giant Toes or something.) I suppose that doesn't really suit their warrior role, unless you're having them go fight sabrecats for their eyes or something. Picking flowers may not be up their alley... thinking of things that you should have your pet warrior doing is not easy. send them out to kidnap NPCs you want to hold captive in your house? :P Although something that would be nice is to tell them to go to your house in another hold and bring back all of the items there in a certain category. Say you want all your armor in one house and alchemy in another and books in a third... Send your housecarl from Markarth to gather all of the weapons from Breezehome so that you can collect everything together. Of course, that's not really a 'quest', and it's a lot like doing your groceries. So I suppose I don't actually have any ideas for quests.

[LukeH]

@Ankh thanks for the input

The vanilla housecarls will certainly not disappear nor remain in the house. For start, at last in early stage of the mod, they'll go where they stay after you became thane but before you buy a home: from what I could see that's the Jarl's place.

Yeah, thinking of it, it may be a good thing to remove the NPC from housecarl position if you marry him/her, also if you recruit it for blades or steward, it could save me a lot of other troubles and I don't think it will break immersion or anything.

Still looking for jobs for housecarls. I call them "quests" even if they are not really that in the classical way but mostly because everything like this in CK is a quest object.