Location Taken: Banff, Alberta
Time Taken: June 2010

You know what this photo reminds me of? The game Skyrim.

It might be the northern climate and magnificent mountains. But it’s more likely related to the fact that I just started playing that game again. There was a lovely sale on Steam and I was able to pick up all the expansions for a nice low price. So, well, I have to play through them now. It’s only right and proper.

But first, I had to mod. Skyrim’s got a lovely modding community, and in the two and a half years since the game came out, all sorts of fabulous things have been created. And well, I just couldn’t resist.

It did mean I spent much of the day waiting for files to download and install, but it’s so worth it. The game’s all prettified and extra bug fixes are in place and hundreds more NPCs are wandering the world (complete with full voice acting!) and I have an extra two questlines that are essentially fan-made expansions to play with and-

Right, all sorts of fun things. I mean, just in what I did play, rather than start out on a cart heading to a near-fatal encounter with a dragon to kick off everything, I came to my senses in a necromancer’s cave, shaking off an enthrallment cast on me by said necromancer, who was a wee bit distracted by a visiting Argonian vampire hunter attacking her. After the necromancer was dead, well, I got to talking with the Argonian, and he was willing to follow along with me and help me out.

So yeah, powerful follower willing to kill things for me acquired right from the start. All thanks to two mods intersecting, one which gave me an alternate start (chosen because I’ve seen the official starting scenes far too many times already) and another that adds in lots of interesting NPCs, one of which happens to visit the cave I started in. It’s going to be fascinating finding all the ways things have changed. That NPC mod alone is full of awesomeness.

I mean, how often do you bump into random crazy people shacking up in a shack, claiming that they’re a time traveler, that elves live on the moon, the sun, and everywhere else, and that the rebel leader in the civil war that’s going on is secretly Tiber Septum, the first emperor and one of the gods, who’s also really a shape-shifting vampire?

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