Part follower and part quest mod, Mythos adds two new, fully-realised companions to the world of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, each with their own quests and reactivity to the world at large.

It's no secret that Skyrim's modding community has a tonne of follower mods of varying quality. Unfortunately, very few of them ever try to do something interesting, diverse or use a voice type other than FemaleYoungEager.

Inspired by classic role-playing games such as Baldur's Gate, Planescape Torment, Dragon Age: Origins, Knights of the Old Republic, Divinity and more, Mythos is an attempt to rectify that. To add characters that not only will tell a good story of their own, but elevate the whole experience of your playthrough as, at last, you travel with equals, instead of braindead pack mules or caricatures.

Getting to know them is something that's earned and will span your journey from High Hrothgar to the depths of Apocrypha. If you're tired of the same lazy, one-dimensional characters designed to either titillate or carry useless junk, or you're just looking for something to breathe new life into your next playthrough, you've come to the right place.

It's party time.

The rain is unending as a burst of lightning from overhead cracks against a dead tree, splitting the
desiccated wood in two. In the downpour, you see a figure illuminated by the storm,
her face twisted into a snarl, and oblivious to the rain that has soaked through to her very bones.

At her side, a large wolf trails in her every step as the warrior moves forward with clear purpose,
mighty greatsword in hand. It is a good day to die. May the gods bear witness.

Karna is a Norse Berserker who knows little of the outside world... nor does she care to. Raised under the watchful eyes of the old gods, she is deeply spiritual and reveres the Old Ways that Tamriel has forgotten since the arrival of the Northmen so long ago.

She does not talk much and couldn't care less about social conventions or courtesy, preferring to live and die for the thrill of blood and battle, but also must learn of this new world to survive it.

To begin, head to the Sleeping Giant Inn in Riverwood and then the trees by the shore, directly south of the Lady Stone.

You step in from the dirty street and catch yourself as your eyes take in the sight before you.
The manor is the very epitome of decadence as heady aromas, incense and the smell
of a thousand cooked meats drift lazily through a sea of velvet and silk curtains.

Who could afford - or require - such luxury is quickly answered as, further inside, you see a Dremora
lounging on some cushions. He absentmindedly chews on some grapes from a silver goblet nearby
and regards you with a smile.

“Well, well... to what do I owe this pleasure?”

Bacchus is a Dremora from the Planes of Oblivion and yet unlike them in pretty much every way. A hedonistic, wisecracking playboy, he revels in a life of decadence and his charms are often as likely to get him into trouble as they are in bed.

Like many of his Kyn, he possesses a fair degree of skill in matters of the arcane, although if you were to ask him about fighting and what have you, he would prefer to just go savour some Aldmeri wine instead. Or a foot massage.

To begin, head to Riften and look around the docks or Bee and Barb.

Manual
1. Download the archive and extract it to a location of your choice.
2. Go to /Data/ in your Skyrim directory - NOT the parent folder where SKSE is.
3. Copy all the files from the archive you extracted earlier - making sure to preserve file/folder structure - and paste them inside the Data folder.
4. Check that the Mythos.esp plugin is ticked, otherwise it won't work when you run the game and nothing new will appear.
5. To uninstall, just delete those same files.

Mod Manager
Same as usual. Install/uninstall is automated and the mod is nowhere near big enough to cause issues with the installer you're using.


Mythos is a “lite” quest mod, essentially using new content and characters to fill out the world, rather than a massive overhaul that stamps over the top of vanilla content.

However, it is possible that you will run into issues while playing. Before you make a bug report, please make sure that is a problem resulting DIRECTLY FROM THIS MOD. I will never be able to support every possible variation of players' load orders, but have done my best to be as clean as possible while developing it to avoid conflicts.

I'll be supporting the mod for as long as necessary, with hotfixes and larger patches when required, but I can't help you with how it works alongside other mods and Mythos is provided as-is. Now that's out of the way, let's get into the specifics.

Where it goes on the load order doesn't really matter. You can use LOOT or put it further up to allow any texture/cosmetic overhauls to overwrite the vanilla assets Mythos uses, but for most players, it shouldn't be a big deal.

In terms of locations, you may run into small conflicts, but I tried to keep the NPCs clear of any major areas where new assets might conflict. The new quests make a number of edits to some cells, both interior and worldspace, but these shouldn't be significant enough to break the mod.

Any mods that drastically change the layout, e.g. tavern or city overhauls, may cause some headaches, such as deleting a chair one of the new NPCs is meant to sit on. Mythos makes mostly inconsequential edits to a few popular locations, but major quest moments were chosen to be in spots that were out of the way where it's unlikely other mods will conflict.

Landscape overhauls - like grass mods - might also cover quest content where there was empty ground in vanilla. Again, this is not a problem caused by the mod. It won't break progression or anything, just be prepared to do more searching than intended.

As for gameplay elements, there's no custom, script-heavy boss battles or anything like that so this shouldn't break gameplay overhauls that you might be using. Same goes for perks, magic, abilities, etc.

Please be aware, however, that difficulty overhauls, even if the mod uses Bethesda's scaling system, may cause some unintended results, like fights being too hard or too easy. This, again, depends on your load order.

Mythos uses a CUSTOM FRAMEWORK follower system to get around the limitations of vanilla. DO NOT try to use AFT, EFF, UFO and the like on them - you WILL break things!

Potential Issues:

1. Performance is terrible, the mod is unoptimised.

In the overwhelming majority of cases, this occurs because you have a tonne of mods installed and/or you're running the game on hardware that just can't cope with everything the engine's trying to do. Every script, every texture, every object reference that's added to the pile just makes things more demanding to render or process.

This likely has nothing to do with the mod, but your particular load order. If you have a billion mods installed, particularly large quest/DLC-sized mods or script-heavy overhauls that are constantly running in the background, then it might be time to trim some of that down. The Creation Engine is a bit of a mess, so adding mods on top of that will just make things worse.

Again, I will not be supporting load orders... only this particular mod. It has been developed and tested on a clean, vanilla install. Script count has been optimised where possible.

2. Message boxes are cut-off and I can't read all of it.

If you're running the game on a smaller resolution, such as a laptop, or using a fancy monitor with 21:9 which the game wasn't really designed for, you may run into this issue. Unfortunately, the scaling of message boxes appears to be hardcoded by the engine.

I developed and tested the mod at 1080p on 16:9 and had no issues with message boxes. There's nothing I can do to fix this, but at most, you're missing a bit of flavour text.

3. Blood textures don't all appear/not at all.

Annoying issue with vanilla that I can't do anything about. Sometimes the blood decals will load in, sometimes they won't. This may be fixed if you're using a texture mod like EBT.

4. Bacchus is out of reach and I can't speak with him at a particular moment.

This is a limitation of the package radius for followers, which the vanilla and custom frameworks use by default. I can't really do anything about this, but you can get around it by hovering your mouse over him and holding down E or whatever you have set to the Activate key.

This will enable the command state for followers. Just click on the ground in front of you and he'll walk over to be close enough for conversation.

5. It's too dark/bright, I can't see anything.

This is because of the ENB/Reshade/SweetFX preset you're using, along with any lighting mods like ELFX, which might not be compatible with each other. Mod authors can't design content with wildly different lighting setups in mind, so this is a problem on your end.

Mythos also uses the built-in fade to black effect at times and this has, apparently, had some issues with ENB presets where it doesn't work properly.

As I haven't actually played Skyrim in many years and don't know every single mod in existence, there shouldn't be any major issues but if you do encounter a conflict, just try and work around it. If you installed the mod manually, first check that it was installed properly and the file/folder structure was preserved. Always install requirements and read the description thoroughly.

Disclaimer

Much like Citizens, Mythos does not shy away from dealing with some serious subject matters. I believe that everything in the mod has been handled in a mature and respectful way, but should you find any content in the mod uncomfortable, please exit it at your discretion.

I would like to stress that there is a world of difference between writing a character or giving the player an option in dialogue and condoning those views or actions myself. This is a work of fiction and should be taken as such.

Thanks for checking out Mythos and I hope you enjoy playing it. Now, I should probably get some sleep for a change...