Holds Concept Art Kyne Mother Draugr Boss

Image information

Added on

Uploaded by

Galandil

About this image

Something I made back in autumn. Thought I'd try my hand on the Concept art by Adam Adamowicz. I am looking for a texture artist if anyone wants to help me with these :) I'm not very good at that so I would really appreciate the help.

This one is for a Draugr boss fight that I thought could be a unique encounter. With Holds not every Draugr tomb is dedicated to the Dragon Cult. Some are also simply burial sites, where Draugr are more recently buried, or un-affiliated with the cult. This one is for a boss that is simply known as the Kyne Mother, who is a sort of mythical priestess of yore who was defeated by the Dragon Cult early in Skyrim's history. I wanted her outfit to fit with the murials, and I want to have similar bosses for each of the cults. This is still very early though as I'm still missing the feather cape and textures, but slow and steady wins the race ;)

Do let me know what you think and do feel free to join our project discord channel!

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Our direction with Holds is to turn Skyrim into a proper dark-fantasy RPG, much like games like Dragon Age Origins, Witcher 3 and Kotor 2. The mod will feature content of a mature nature such as racism, blood and gore and other weighty themes. There will not be any sexual content in this mod.

The Quest Overhaul has a goal of adding dialogue to every single NPC added by Holds, which is just short of 2000 unique characters. All of which will have personalities, backstories, wants and secrets. These dialogue tree's will also be quite comprehensive. Every dialogue tree has conditions for the characters ranging from the players race, how much he likes or dislikes you, your gender, if you are a Thane in the given hold, if this character knows that your the Dragonborn or the leader of a guild(often triggered by wearing the guild leaders armor or being in the town where the guild has its guildhall), quest progression, political influence from the Thane quest-chain, how strong the character is in a given skill, and what civil war faction controls the city or won the civil war.

Dialogue will also include skill-check options and play a pivotal role in quests and world-building.


Holds will strive to be as lore compatible with Beyond Skyrim and other large projects as possible, and lore friendly with established Bethesda lore. We will add our own quest-chains and guilds, as well as overhaul the Vanilla Quests, Guilds and Main Quest. 

Our motto for the Quest Plugin is: Choices and Consequences. Holds will take a RPG route with every quest having an aim of a minimum of 2 different ways of the quest to end. Larger quests should have consequences that can be seen in the world when they are finished. 

Another aim we have with the quest plugin is to focus on more narrative heavy quests, rather then misc radiant quests. Though those will also be featured but are not the main focus.

The Holds Projects are developed by Galandil who is assisted by a writing staff. 
Compatibility patches are handled by SetteLisette.

Holds the City Overhaul 0.0.9: hhttps://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/74638
Do feel free to come and join us on our Project Discord: https://discord.gg/bsDQZDcgJy

5 comments

  1. BrendonofKells
    BrendonofKells
    • premium
    • 14 kudos
    A draugr mother? I'm not sure why no one else has thought of this idea before, it was only staring us in the face every time we went into a Nordic ruin. I like the concept art here, it matches the tomb inscriptions perfectly, makes me wonder what sort of religious officiating these females performed back in the day before they became walking corpses. That's an area of vanilla Skyrim that's never been explored, it'll be great to see where you go with this.
    1. Galandil
      Galandil
      • member
      • 329 kudos
      Happy to hear you liked it so far! Very early model though

      Its going to be fun yeah :) We're doing unique cults for each of the Nordic pantheon gods. The "Mother's of Kyne" which is the synonym the Nords know their priests of Kyne; will play an active role in the societies of Skyrim, alongside the other cults. They are more like wandering warrior-women then chapel-priests though. They offer advice, religious instruction in the Nordic ways, nurture and training to those they cross paths with.

      "The Head Mother" is a mythical person in nordic folk-stories who supposedly led or had a great influence in the Hawk Cult of Atmora. She came to Skyrim following the conquest and is said in some tales to have been centuries old. I've added a few tales about her and they are all contradictory to one another to make her story a bit of a puzzle, all of the tales agree though that she was defeated after taking up arms against the Dragon cult which at that time were positioning themselves as the dominant cult on the mainland. In the tales she was sealed away alive in the bowels of the earth. :) I thought perhaps her boss encounter could feel similar to the Valkyrie encounters in God of War 4- at least to the extent such a fight would be possible on the Skyrim engine. Will need to look into it, but that is the inspiration.

      I've worked on a few other draugr models for variations on Draugr types, dungeon types. That every Draugr tomb had the same armored draugr never made much sense to me, it gave the impression each and every nordic tomb was dedicated to the dragon cult, and that every draugr interred are thousands of years old.
    2. BrendonofKells
      BrendonofKells
      • premium
      • 14 kudos
      That sounds quite fascinating take on Nordic religion and history, the iterant religious teacher. I quite like stuff like that, that while lore compatible takes the story off the beaten path. It's a fine balance between just creating another bland, mass produced story/quest and going totally off the rails and creating  stories the neither make sense nor fit into the larger mythology. That's how myths are built, sorties that are built upon stories that are built upon further stories, but all of them mesh together and deepen each other, that's the essence of story telling. That story of how she went from an age old and respected religious leader to a leader of the anti dragon cult resistance to being made while alive into a cursed, undead creature is both engrossing and horrifying at the same time.
  2. steelfiredragon
    steelfiredragon
    • member
    • 37 kudos
    really looks like I might be reinstalling holds when this is released
    1. Galandil
      Galandil
      • member
      • 329 kudos
      Oh that's awesome to hear :)
      Going to be a while before we get everything done. Might be quite a few years. But we'll be releasing in bundles. So this bundle here will contain dialogue for the NPC's and generic non-vanilla quests and non-vanilla guilds. Plan was to have it out next year. But that's probably unlikely. Its a great deal of work and we'll be doing some work on the city overhaul as well for the release as the two are dependent on one another :)