LE Rebuilding the Mages Guild (CoW add-on)

[Tank0123]

Edit: I know it's tl;dr. If you have anything that adds on to the College of Winterhold, post it below, and forget reading my little essay (or read it, whatever).

 

I know I'm not the only one who was disappointed with the length of the College of Winterhold questline. When I first arrived and began that first lesson, I excitedly thought, "Wow! They actually teach you magic!" Similarly, Under Saarthal seemed to be a pleasant idea, as I naively thought to myself: "Wow! We even get to explore the lore of the Elder Scrolls! Archaeology AND magic -- holy mackeral!"

 

It all fell apart after that.

 

Sure, the storyline is good, but it has very little build up to you being the Arch-mage. You're not training, or learning; it's just, "Oh look, Psijics! I'm (of course) the chosen one! Let's get this artifact and kill the bad guy and -- Oh, I'm Arch-mage."

 

OK, ranting aside, it was short. But this is not a request to change the main storyline -- merely to add-on to the functionality of Arch-mage.

 

For one, the College itself is small. There's literally 4 students including yourself, and about 7 teachers (more teachers than students. That's just sad). Part of the mod could either be just straight up adding on to the College (more students, more buildings, etc) from the start, or making improvements over time. You don't even have to change any exteriors-- this is a college of MAGIC, after all, and interiors could warped and expanded greatly. While more teachers would be nice, I kind of just want to embellish a little with wandering students. Kind of like in Oblivion's Arcane University, where you'd have students going about to lectures (which you could sit in on, something I found fascinating), or going off to train in one of the halls. Use your imagination -- nothing too fancy, the NPCs don't even have to personalized or named. Although that is preferable and probably easy to do (relatively).

 

Secondly, even as Arch-mage, there's just nothing to do. You literally just get some radiant quests to go collect this or kill that. There's nothing in the way of actually being an Arch-mage and, you know, managing the College.

 

Some things I've though about include improving the College by adding new classes, rooms, features, etc, as well as a quest to help expand the College's influence across the land. Much of the quest would involve you, as Arch-Mage, investing in guild halls in each of the major holds. First, though, to be consistent with the lore, you'd have to do things for the Holds for them to earn your trust; as every Skyrim mage probably knows, magic is looked down upon, feared, and downright hated in Skyrim. Your job would be to help dispel the myths surrounding magic and mages, showing it's benefits as well as that the College is not a threat, but a friend. Sure, many people likely wouldn't be convinced, but the point is to get those minor guild halls up and running -- earning peoples' trust back to the days of the original Mages Guild will take time.

 

Perhaps, as part of the quest(s), you would perform archaeology as seen in Under Saarthal, exploring the lore a bit more. As you can tell, this mod will be very lore-heavy, and I want to explore the things that aren't really touched on in vanilla Skyrim.

 

Another facet of the quest could involve competing with the Synod, or College of Whispers, or even facing the threat of the Thalmor once more -- but that can wait. For now, lets focus on getting the College back to looking like an actual College of Magic, and adding functionality to being Arch-mage.

Edited December 28, 2012 by Tank0123