Been working on a project for a Skyrim mod

Quest: Grave Danger

The concept of the mod is that I want to introduce a new fight mechanic into Skyrim. One of my friends, when he DM's his Pathfinder PnP RPG game, he has these fights, where some big bad epic guy is there, and he has tons of minions that never stop coming, in fact more spawn every turn. In these fights, we also have an objective, which is sometimes simply kill the bad guy, but often times it is more complex than that. For example, we once had a fight where we were riding in our caravan when these dragonmen attacked us. Our caravan driver drove our horses as fast as he could, but we came up to a ravine with a bridge, and the bridge was up. So during this fight, dragonmen kept coming, and we had to get across the ravine to let the bridge down, after which we could just raise it up and that would give us the time we need to get away. So this became an epic battle and I still remember it for being so singularly awesome, because it didn't stop there. In addition to this, the DM also put some treasure chests around, and this tempted us to no end. We knew we didn't need the treasure but we wanted it, and it was as if the DM was asking us "Hey you can get this treasure, but your gonna have to work for it."

Those are the kinds of moments I hope to capture by adding this mechanic, as well as just opening up possibilities for new kinds of fights. Currently, I've designed a quest for the mod that has you defend an alchemist from Draugr while he does an experiment. The story is kind of a cheap way to put the player in a situation similar to that DM's fights. You have to "fight waves of enemies" while "completing an objective(defending the alchemist)". I also am a huge fan of fights where you defend things, because you can have time before hand to set up some defenses and plan an attack. Spells like "fire rune" which is essentially a trap spell in Skyrim, don't often have the chance to shine as traps since, in Skyrim, you are often moving forward. I really wanted to add in some extra traps that you could set up as a reward for having high skills in any of the more rouge skill sets, as having swarms of enemies makes it hard to play a stealthy character, but more over I really wanted the player to have a few options for preparing defenses. I added an object that lets you summon a extra summon (with choices based on your conjuration skill) for this very reason.

First Fight

The second fight is really just a bread and butter "kill x amount of creatures to advance". I put it in because I wanted to have an example of a fight that ended based on the number of enemies killed, as opposed to the first fight which just lasts a certain amount of time. There is also a mechanic that sets the lower end of the stage on fire at certain intervals, and on other certain intervals, it fills the top of the stage with gas. This means that the player has to dance between fighting on the upper level and fighting on the lower level. (I also managed to get the enemies to leave the parts of the stage that were in danger, which was a trick in it's own.

Second Fight

The third fight (one I'm still working on) represents the third condition in which these waves can end, and it is by far the most exciting (to me) and that is by objective. In the third dungeon, the player has to explore a  labyrinth and find three orbs and then return them to their pedestals. Kind of drawing on some Zelda here. While the player is running through the labyrinth enemies are spawning and searching for the player so you really can't stand around for too long, and your bound to run into a group of them once in a while. In addition, I'll also be adding some traps, that the player will have to be careful not to step on, but they are also there to be useful for getting rid of large groups of enemies. Lastly, there are three loot rooms in the labyrinth, two of which have some story to them. One of them has an adventurer who went into the tomb before but locked himself in the loot room to get away from the draugr. He ended up starving to death (all of this is explained in a short journal) but he left behind his staff that he brought, a staff that casts "Clairvoyant" which is a spell that shows you the direction to quest objectives(think about it). The other story has a dead adventurer who was mapping out the labyrinth and he had managed to map it all out and find the location of the orbs before he died. This is pretty helpful to use with the local map, to tell what each floor looks like, but it's not overly helpful, I think, as the local map is confusing since, the way they designed Skyrim, it shows every level of the labyrinth superimposed on each other, but player's should be able to piece together where they are and where to go using this.

Third Fight WIP

Lastly, I had wanted to take some dungeon concepts from users of my mod and poll them. I liked the idea of creating a little bit of a close connection between myself and the player base but in the end I only got one idea submitted to me, and I really wanted to get a bunch, and have some energy going. I designed the fights, to be very polished with the idea that players might want to fight them multiple times since you can use a lot of different valid strategies to beat them and they have a difficulty slider "medium" and "hard". (my favorite way so far is to use a bow and a follower and let the follower tank, while you pick off enemies. The fights in this mod are on a very large scale so there are a lot of abilities that come into play that normally don't matter. For example, stamina and run speed actually matter quite a lot in these fights) I still have some ideas (Zombie survival mode) that I could put in but seeing as I can't get players to shoot me some ideas for fights, I think that once I complete my third dungeon, I'm going to work on a new project and call this mod "finished".

Anyways, that's what I have cooking on my current Skyrim mod. I of course, am also working on a few other projects, that I'll post about later, but I wanted to keep these thoughts about this mod in one place. I'll also be slapping a few images up here for the dungeons. Modding is hard work. It took me probably about 200-300 hours to make the first two fights, and I believe less than that many players actually played my mod. Anyways, I asked for feedback near the end of the mod, and I've gotten some so that should make me a better modder :3

Link to the mod: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/50020/?