Wreak havoc on your foes indiscriminately and without a timer. Cruise over Tamriel’s landscape at your discretion. Enjoy the feeling of the rushing wind at your back as a dragon, entirely under your command, follows you from Tamriel to Solstheim. Also, he has a cool voice.

Odahviing is one of my favourite fictional dragons, if not my favourite entirely. This is my love letter to him – what I really wanted out of a fantasy epic: my own dragon companion. He promises to serve us, after all, and how is he going to do that if he circles endlessly around a mountaintop?

I would like to note that this is my first mod ever. I have no experience in scripting or using the Creation Kit prior to this, and I’ve had to rely heavily on the resources available to me online. I will list all tools and inspiration I take from accordingly.

This mod was previously uploaded under the name Odahviing -- Serving at Last and then hidden for some time. The reason was simply that I wanted to reupload it under a different name once I felt I could upkeep motivation to work on it, as well as organise things better. Thank you to those who reached out to me. It will be here to stay now. :)

Features

After the completion of the main quest, Odahviing will become available to enlist as a follower.
Spell tomes are located in his inventory. You must take these before you exit dialogue, otherwise you’ll have a hard time getting back down to talk to you again.

→ Odahviing, down! is an aimed spell used to ask him to land for you. You must make sure the spell hits him, which can be tricky at times.
→ Odahviing, up! is an aimed spell used to ask him to take to the air again. There is also a dialogue option he has to give this same effect if he is grounded, but if you don’t want to walk up to him, this works just as well.
→ Summon Odahviing is what it says on the tin. Summon him to your location at any time. This spell will circumnavigate the issue of him being unable to accompany you to Solstheim. Why let Miraak have all the dragon fun?
→ Ride Odahviing will put the tamed dragon effect on him and allow you to ride him. You do not need the Bend Will shout unlocked for this, and it will not work on any dragon that isn’t Odahviing. 

He possesses all the standard follower features. Check his inventory, make him a flying pack mule, make him wait somewhere, etc. When he is in wait mode, there will be a quest activated so that you can find him if you somehow lose him. It’s easier than you’d think. He also has a dialogue to explain why he would serve you in the first place, just for fun.

In cities, Odahviing will follow you around and land on nearby buildings. He also has two lines of dialogue he will say to ease the townspeople of his presence.

Known Issues

If you need to report an issue, please give me a detailed description on how to replicate your glitch, or how you got it in the first place.
I'm inexperienced! I need as much information as I can get so that I can learn.

→ After battle, there are times Odahviing will refuse to let you peek into his inventory. I haven't figured out how to fix this yet, but refreshing him via console or other means should do the trick. This applies to most, if not all, dialogue issues.

→ In Dragonsreach, if Odahviing is in the scripted spot from the main quest in which he gets captured, he will get captured again... and then released again. I don't believe there's a way for me to fix this without breaking the main quest. It's pretty funny.

→ Odahviing is angry and scatterbrained. I've found that, at times, he will wander off to kill a wolf minding its own business instead of killing the Thalmor mages wrecking me with fireballs. I believe this is the nature of Skyrim dragons, but I might lower his attack range in the future if he keeps picking fights with forest animals.

→ After using Ride Odahviing, he may leave you after a certain amount of time, as expected of a Bend Will'd dragon. Don't worry, he'll come back to you. Waiting a couple hours will usually speed the process up.


DRAGON ANIMATION REPLACE by yousukeve - makes the dragons, in my opinion, look much nicer in terms of stance.
INTUITIVE DRAGON RIDE CONTROL by staalo18 - wonderful & smooth dragon riding mod, works very well with Odahviing! Highly recommend!
IMMERSIVE DRAGONS by rougeshot - bigger dragon wings, more impressive looking dragons.
REAL-TIME DRAGON FAST TRAVEL by jason712 - basically a necessity! Makes fast travel much more fun when you're riding a dragon over the land.
RUSTIC DRAGONS by Gamwich - keeps the essence of the vanilla look very well and looks gorgeous!
INIGO by Smartbluecat - Inigo actually says a couple lines while Odahviing is in your party. I'm not sure where it comes from, maybe just the presence of a friendly dragon? Either way, it's cool for immersion!

Feel free to suggest mods to link here if you feel they work well with this one.

For credits,

JOSPEH RUSSELL for his wonderful follower tutorial!
SPIDERAKIRAC for their wonderful dragon follower tutorial!

Planned Things!

→ MORE DIALOGUE! I'd love to make Odahviing comment on certain things, and have NPCs comment when he is in your party. Immersion stuff! This will require some voice splicing skills on my end, and possibly some help from the synth voices, so it's not a guarantee, but is definitely something I'd like to do. Furthermore, I'm also interested in adding a sandbox dialogue to Odahviing so that you can tell him to chill out in a certain area instead of dismissing him back to the mountain.

→ DAMAGE TWEAKS! At some point, I want to tinker with Odahviing and make him overall more powerful. However, I want to do this in a way that feels worthy of a dragon but not extremely overpowered. For now, I'd recommend you use the console to set him to scale with your player level + 20/30 levels above, or something like that.

→ DRAGON RESOUNDS! I would love to redesign the dragon sounds into something of my own image, and will be working on that where I can.

→ DURNEHVIIR & SAHROTAAR FOLLOWERS! I'd absolutely love to add in these guys as potential followers in the future, uploaded separately to Odahviing. They are trickier to work with than he is, but let it be known I'm interested in forming a dragon army by the time I'm done modding. I also have an idea for a completely custom dragon follower, but the chances of that happening are a tad bit lower because I would want to make custom dialogue. :)

→ PAARTHURNAX FOLLOWER! The reason I am separating this one is because I'm not 100% sure if I want to do it. It will be more difficult due to the fact Paarthurnax has far few follower-friendly voice lines as compared to Odahviing, but it is something I would be willing to power through if people would like to see it. Just let me know if you're interested; if not, he'll be on the backlog for quite some time.

I'm a dragon fanatic through and through! You can expect all of my mods to revolve around them, typically in friendly relations; I'll leave the combat mods to more experienced authors!