So, one of my first characters in the Tamriel world was an Alchemist. It was a custom class, one that focused on the Alchemy skill with a side helping of magicka and some minor skills in One-Handed.

To me, the Skyrim perk tree for Alchemy seemed weak. So I started up a little mod that tweaked the heck out of the Alchemy skills to increase the potency of created potions. Most mods out there that tweak magicka didn’t really seem to touch the Alchemy skill.

I won’t lie and pretend I had balance in mind as so many perk tweaking mods do (and then proceed to make life a living hell if you actually rely on those skills coughstealthrebalancedcough), especially for high levels in the skill. It just seems to me that if you’re a Master Alchemist (or Master Anything really) you should be able to make legendary items. Since it’s a perk tree, alchemy will be pretty much the same if you don’t invest in the perks, but the idea behind it is to make the potions more useful than 2 seconds of freaking invisibility, for example, especially when starting out with Alchemy perks, and by the end, being able to do amazing things with the ingredients. I got really tired of having a billion useless potions in my inventory that weren’t worth selling.

To that end, I restructured some of the default perks, combining the perks dealing with beneficial potions into one set of perks, and creating a new perk with the leftover.

Instead of making the healing potions super strong and the other beneficial potions somewhat strong, it makes everything a little bit stronger in general, but the overall boost to healing potions is slightly less than what it is in default. I thought it was a good sacrifice to make. Poisons get an extra boost as well.

The leftover perk went into a boost for skill-based potions, so your smithing potion should work just a little bit better.

I also added some high level perks to increase ingredient gathering, my thinking is that an experienced alchemist would know how to use more parts of the plant, and unless my memory is totally failing me, that had been one of the added effects of gaining Alchemy skill in Oblivion.

From Oblivion, I really missed the ability to create two potions at once, so I added that back into Skyrim, too, placing it at the higher end of the skill tree.

A truly exceptional Master Alchemist should be able to do these things, I’m reasoning out. You hear the stories of what Alchemists and Enchanters can do in lore, but you never get to do them yourself. Likewise, I feel if your enchanting skill is at 100 and you’ve got all the perks you should be able to reconstruct the Staff of Chaos.

The mod itself is in an alpha stage, as I am not quite sure if I tweaked the skill potions properly, but testing it out should prove interesting.

I figure it’s probably a good time to introduce the Kenzeft project. I call it that because I don’t quite have a final name for it, but it’s a culmination of several ideas I’ve had and wanted to implement in Oblivion, but never found the time due to college or other real life stuff. Skyrim has made it easier to create dynamic, interesting NPCs, and so I moved my ideas to Skyrim.

My original inspiration came from wanting to bring a new level of live to an NPC in Oblivion, sort of like Ruin-Tail’s Tale but on a higher level, where the character will interact with not just a personal questline, but also offer opinions and experiences on current quests. I have plans to include commentary on all the major quest lines and most of the base Skyrim quests. Right now, I’m flipflopping on whether or not I should make the mod dependent on Dawnguard or Dragonborn, or just have patches for them.

Well, starting from that, the ideas mounted up and the Kenzeft is a pretty large project already. Several new NPCs, a major questline, several smaller questlines, new locations, a new home for the player, and a few marriageable NPCs.

Of course, I’m trying to keep it all very lore-friendly, and I’ve been doing a lot of research into the lore, like just how old is the College of Winterhold? The answer was “Nobody really knows, but there’s some allusions Serana makes that gives it a sort-of ballpark figure.” It certainly pre-dates the First Allessian Empire and the Uprising since Serana also seems to pre-date it, as she seems surprised that there’s an empire at all.

My thought is, how the heck do I get a voice cast for all these NPCs? I mean, I could probably do one, maybe two, but I’m not a very good actor in the first place and my microphone is of the less-than-stellar quality. I have another person willing to do another several voices. That leaves about a dozen different roles to fill.

Now, as to what the Kenzeft Project is about… well, I sort of want to keep the specifics a secret just yet. But let’s just say that Divayth Fyr and Yagrum Bagarn play a somewhat minor role in it. And let me tell you, It’s been incredibly frustrating trying to find out if Divayth Fyr and Yagrum Bagarn survived the Red Year. If you’re even somewhat familiar with the lore you’ll probably understand why it’s frustrating. Sure, Marcurio in Skyrim mentions that they found “the last living Dwemer in Morrowind.” But it’s still kind of vague. That’s actually all I have to go on, and it seems to imply they are still alive for one reason or another, so that is how I’m going to proceed. It sort of makes sense in a way, if Divayth Fyr is about 4000 years old and an incredibly powerful wizard-lord of Telvanni, his town could very well have been spared much of the desolation. Either that, or he had prior warning, as mentioned elsewhere in the lore some few were warned, and moved his tower as Neloth did. In that case, Yagrum being alive is still a good bet.

All in all, I’m very excited about the project. Have a teaser screen cap of one of the new locations.