I was wondering if anyone else was heavily into creating custom races and player characters for the Elder Scrolls games and Fallout 3 as well just while we're talking about the same game engine.  just to add another dimension to the game I always very accurately roleplayed the character and personality of all my player characters.

This is Niggle the Sylph who is a terrible little thief, but quite personable.  And yes those really are pyjama bottoms she's wearing. Niggle is only half the height and size of vanilla game races by the way.


This is Eiolynn the Maggot Queen.  An angry risen undead queen from an earlier age who hates everybody, drinks until she's stagger drunk and will fight anybody and anything without hesitation.  Amazingly I did somehow manage to complete the main quest with Queen Eiolynn.


Serena the Bretonnian warrior nun was about the most vanilla character I ever played.  She had some custom holy artifacts and spells to aid her though.


Zizzie was a Rad Mutant I played in Fallout 3.  She could kick butt, but got sick if she was away from any source of radiation for too long.


Jet was another Rad Mutant I played with a different set of custom mods.  Jet was an improvement over Zizzie, but not in a game breaking way.


Riz was completely vanillia, but she was a melee and hand to hand expert.



Play as a child mods held my interest for a while.  Tishla kicked butt for all her small size.  her favourite trick when being pursued was to drop mines behind her as she ran.


Ringworm was a stealthy little sniper. I didn't play her quite so much.

Whoa, this is really creative! Personally I'm a fan of Fallout: NV + 3 as well as Skyrim TES V but I'm not too keen with game-modding (besides just installing mods). But if I knew how I'd definitely try this too

I'm getting real obscure now o.O

My Daggerfall Character - No Magic, just katanas. I abused the advantages/disadvantges to get disadvantages in stuff i don't need (Magic and inability to use some weapon types i wasn't gonna use) and advantages in things i do (Athleticism, Adrenaline Rush, Expertise in Long Blade, Immunity to Magic). Really OP and perfect for dungeon crawling... If you have an item that casts Slowfall, that is... *chuckle*

I've started off playing Oblivion again with another custom character; - met Alana who is Undead........



I seem to have a habit of playing Undead characters, only this time she does actually have a sense of honor somewhere inside herself so she's much better behaved than Eiolynn my last UnDead character who would pick fights with anybody simply for the hell of it and often while drunk just to make herself completely objectionable.  Surprisingly Alana was once human which is really unusual for me as I usually play Elves or Fae characters.  I made her skin textures myself using images of leather as a basis and I'm very pleased with how they turned out.

Alana is wearing Tattoo Armor by the way which counts as light armor even though she's more skilled with heavy armor.  My intention was to increase her light armor skills this time around and the next training session will be about getting her to shoot straight with a bow.  In life she was a Knight which is a class I haven't played before in Oblivion.

I'm running an enhanced environment mod this time around that has much better representation of the seasons, the weather, phases of the moons & etc as I like having more depth to the game world.

I'm not well today so I was distracting myself with playing Oblivion.  I spent a lot of time getting Alana lost because my spacial awareness had gone all Woolworths.  Normally I don't need to check the maps to see where I am, but today I seemed to be doing it all the time.  The environment mods are great by the way with much more variety in the weather and a whole lot of different kinds of clouds to go with it.  Night and dark places are darker, - which could be why I was getting lost so much  , - but for all that I'm going to keep it that way because it's better.

When I custom build an Undead character I keep their agility low and their strength high and I don't change those values during level ups.  This gives them the ability to hit like a truck, but they are more likely to stagger or miss during melee fighting.  I like to properly roleplay my custom characters so this combination of strength vs agility works well and stops them from being overpowered.
The attributes I do level up are intelligence, willpower and endurance.  It goes without saying that their personality stat is always low as risen Undead tend not to be the life of the party if you take my meaning.

Playing Alana is interesting as she is a shield and single handed weapon specialist and she has retained a percentage of her training as a knight.  Sooooo combat is very much about blocking and striking which is an interesting challenge against say, an opponent like a Maurader warlord  armed with a two handed sword.  On the other hand Eiolynn never used a shield and she favoured two handed swords and her combat technique mostly consisted of wildly charging and hacking until everyone was dead.  And if her sword broke she would either pick up somebody else's dropped weapon and use it whatever it was or else she would finish the fight with her fists.  If anybody needed therapy and anger management classes Eiolynn certainly did! 

Alana uses magic, whereas Eiolynn hardly ever did and never increased her magic skills beyond the spells she started with.  Eiolynn lusted after gold to the exclusion of anything else and drank heavily whereas Alana is a much more sober individual. Talk about a contrast in roleplay!  Then that's what keeps me coming back to playing this game

Skeleton Guardians are tough sons of B's.  What you thought that just because we're both Undead we would be friends or something!

I forgot to mention that my custom Undead characters only use iron armor and shields and iron or steel weapons.  Don't ask me why I only designed these characters so how would I know (shrug).  It does make for some monumental scraps the more they level up though because opponents start being equipped with much better weapons and armor.  Another thing, Undead magic is mostly about using extreme cold and frost as a weapon and since Undead are immune to cold magic duels between two Undead creatures get boring very quickly. 

Of course the great thing about roleplay games is that you can live out your secret fantasies (Oops not so secret now  )

The location is a custom mod btw, - and no I didn't create it, - I wish I did have that kind of skill.

I've been doing a lot of modding work as a way to keep myself distracted from being not very well at the moment.  Quite a bit of blundering about and mistakes have been happening, but despite that I've been making solid progress.  While I was checking out Oblivion mods on-line I found this awful TG mod and once my annoyance simmered down a little I decided that I was going to make my own 'Two Spirit' mod without a single trace of nastiness in it.  At the moment I have a workable beta that is doing mostly what I want, - though I don't want to post any screenshots yet because the textures still need some tweaking.
After roleplaying angry Undead it's surprisingly normal playing my test Two Spirit character.  For a start she eats normal everyday food!  And she's pleasant and friendly so people like her!  While out shopping in the market District of the Imperial City she went into 'Divine Elegance' and purchased a nice dress for herself which is definitely something which most of my other custom characters wouldn't do.
My design sketch is that the Two Spirit people have a strong mysticism/spiritual thread to them, they are connected to nature and are experts in hand to hand combat. Not exactly like hermaphrodite Wood Elves because I've taken their abilities off to one side of expected Wood Elf abilities as I want to make them distinctly themselves and not a clone of something else.

Fighting Nifscope and Nifscope won 

I can't brain today I have the dumb 

This is Shanna and ze is my Two Spirit test character.  I decided not to make zir a member of yet another pink skinned human clone race and instead based zir face and body testures on snakeskin.  After some messing about I arrived at a mottled skin tone with the scales very fine and just visible without them dominating zir skin texture.  The Two Spirit people are supposed to be a woodland dwelling race so the skin colour and mottling is entirely appropriate.
Zir hair is actually not hair, but is feathers and I need to work on this texture a little more before I'm happy with it.  As to wot ze has in zir knickers that will remain a mystery as zir knickers are permanently attached, though they do have a certain bulge to them that is a cause for speculation.  Shanna has to wear skirts as anything trouser shaped in Oblivion won't fit zir.  Unfortunately I don't know enough about mesh editing and code scripting to make clothes especially for zir, but ze doesn't seem to mind wearing skirts.

The armour ze is wearing is wooden armour (not mine) and this is a deliberate part of the design spec for the Two Spirit race as they use cloth, wood, fur and leather, but avoid metal.  I didn't make Shanna's wooden bow as there was a cool mod with lovely organic bows and arrows available already so why reinvent the wheel.  Ze has a hardwood sword too and a wooden shield.  Two Spirit people are close to nature and are skilled mystics so I thought all this was appropriate.

I don't know if I would want to release this mod to the Oblivion player community as I'm sure most folk wouldn't get the point and would complain about my mod's unsexy nature.  Going by some of the 'adult' mods some folk have made as well as what I consider to be stupid scanty armour and clothing for females being made by modders I'm fairly certain that I will be keeping this one to myself.

Comments?

I'll have to post pictures later (I'm on a school computer), but I have three main characters that I love in games like these - Adena, my Skyrim Argonian, Rinonia, my Fallout New Vegas character, and Nyoqia, my World of Warcraft Blood Elf.

I adore games with custom characters - it kind of gives me a sense of immersion and that the game was made with me in mind, you know?

One day I should surprise myself and play either Morrowind or Oblivion with one of the game's vanilla races 
I agree about custom races cartowheel, - I like to be able to play a game with a character that is a fit for my mood or personality & etc at the time and most of the vanillia offerings don't really suit me.  Oh my memory has creaked into action and I must confess that I did play as a Bosmer/Wood Elf once in Morrowind, but after that it was all custom characters I'd created myself.

Roleplay is a major part of my gaming experience and by doing that a custom character that I've created might seem overpowered on paper, but in roleplaying their essential character and personality they don't actually have that much of an advantage.



I run a Bandit War mod with Oblivion which is basically four large gangs of bandits struggling for supremacy in the land so bandits are everywhere, in groups of more than two and are often well equipped.  I'd let that fact slip my mind so when Shanna Two Spirit stumbled upon three bandits at a crossroads when ze was only lightly armoured and armed with zir wooden sword and shield I seriously had my doubts that ze would survive.  BUT ze did! - proving that once again a not especially strong character with good speed and agility stats can successfully take down better armed and equipped opponents.  Shanna's wooden sword has good reach and durability, but its striking power is nothing to write home about.  It does have a small enchantment though that reduces Luck by two points with every strike, - which is a classic example of Two Spirit people's approach to defending themselves in general.

It wasn't a walk in the park though and the fight was well drawn out before Shanna won through with plenty of zir blood lost and bruises to go with it.  And being Two Spirit ze didn't loot any of the bandits' gear that was made of metal apart from a few gold coins.

Here's a picture of Shanna at home.  There are some great Treehouse mods available which saves me having to make one because they are always complicated to put together from scratch.


And finally here is a picture of Shana with zir clothes off.  Please bear in mind that while I'm happy with the face and body textures I still have work to do on the upper body mesh.


And finally a close up of Shanna Two Spirit's face and zir stats as at level 2.

Oh and just another thought there's this great mod in which a character can make their own leather and fur armour from skins and hides they collect while hunting.  I must install that one for my game with Shanna Two Spirit as the player character 

You know how it is you go away for a while and when you come back home you discover nobody has mowed the lawn


I decided against treehouses for Two Spirit people and decided they should have a village instead.  At the moment it's a very small village, but I'm working on that.  Interiors still to do and I have to edit away all those plants, but I think that's enough for today.

After a day spent being frustrated with crashes and other glitches while testing I've given up trying to play Oblivion on a dual core machine running Windows 8.1.  My weapon of choice now is a machine built up around a hot final generation socket 775 P4 processor with hyperthreading, 3Gb of RAM and a Nividia Quadro video card running Win XP.  And yes I know you can't activate XP anymore, but by editing the registry I seem to have got around that problem.
And surprise surprise Oblivion now runs perfectly.  Now perhaps I can finally get something done