Mod review: The Wheel of Time

Disclaimer: this review is based on an incomplete playthrough of the Wheel of Time Skyrim crossover mod. I made it about 3/4ths of the way through the mod’s quest line before I bailed on that playthrough (which was Nona’s). To be fair, I didn’t bail on the playthrough because of this mod in particular, let’s just get that on record.

But since I’m not going back to Nona’s playthrough, and therefore not going to finish this mod with her, I’ll go ahead and post my thoughts on the parts of this mod I did play.

TL;DR version: this mod, while well done in several ways, is ultimately not for me.

Core concept

As you might expect from the title (The Wheel of Time – Fully Voiced Follower and Quests), this mod brings content from the Wheel of Time books by Robert Jordan into Skyrim. This includes a follower, Aviendha, as well as a plotline that has you interacting with her and several other characters from the books. Ultimately, you are tasked with confronting the Dark One in a final battle.

Stuff I liked

Look, sound, and feel of the mod

Overall, from a technical standpoint, the mod is very well put together. The voice acting is good, and the various locations added by the mod are smoothly connected to the Skyrim worldspace without any problems that I saw. They’re also put into places that are remote enough to make it plausible that random Skyrim citizens aren’t going to stumble across them by accident.

Attire worn by various characters also looked good, distinctive enough from standard Skyrim clothes and armor that I did kind of wish I could get access to some of that stuff. (And apparently, the default outfit worn by Aviendha is a standalone mod, Practical Pirate Outfit, which the Wheel of Time mod credits on its page as a thing it’s using. So I may keep that in mind for a later playthrough.)

Mod did not pull its punches where necessary

I’m not going to say who because spoilers, but credit where credit is due, I was legit surprised that the mod killed off more than one significant character. So that was legit neat.

Stuff I’m ambivalent about

I’m putting a lot of narrative quibbles into this category, because while they didn’t appeal to me personally, I could also see some ways to make them work.

Creatures added by the mod

At several points during the mod’s main plot, I ran into creatures called trollocs. These are creatures from the Wheel of Time books, so okay sure, I’d expect them to show up as hostile creatures in this mod’s plot. And I didn’t have any issue with what they looked like or how they fought; they were entertaining to fight.

The part I’m ambivalent about, though, is that they were showing up in some of the places the mod sent me to, for no particular apparent reason, and only in those places. Which ties into my bigger issue with this mod, as I’ll outline in the next section.

No sign of any worldbuilding to explain the world crossover

I want to stress at this point that I am going to be way more picky about narrative than the average player, because not only am I a lifelong reader, I am also a writer. So yes, I care a lot about narrative cohesion.

And if the core idea of a mod is going to be “do a crossover mod that brings in characters and plot points from an entirely different world”, and you don’t give me any kind of explanation whatsoever as to how this crossover is happening, I’m going to side-eye your narrative hard.

This is a core issue I’m ambivalent about with this mod. There is no explanation given whatsoever as to how this crossover is happening, whether the society of Skyrim in particular and Tamriel in general should have the slightest clue about who any of these people are, and how the Aes Sedai knew anything about Skyrim to begin with in general and the coming of the Dragonborn in particular. Or why I, the Dragonborn, a citizen of an entirely other world, am apparently the person they need to take on the Dark One.

Let me also stress: I don’t object to the concept of a crossover per se. But if you’re going to set up a crossover story like this, my personal preferences for narrative cohesion need a lot more than what this mod actually offers.

For example, in the first conversation the player has with Moraine, you learn the following things from her:

The land of Skyrim has always interested her
She is one of the Aes Sedai, the “servants of all”, who go around the land helping people
The Aes Sedai channel the “One Power”, which comes from the “True Source”, the driving force of creation that the Creator made to turn the Wheel of Time
The True Source cannot be used up
She’s sent Aviendha to Skyrim to, apparently, help keep me safe
She and the Aes Sedai have been looking for the Dragonborn for twenty years

All of this is kinda fine as an introductory conversation, just because it gives a brief overview of core concepts out of the Wheel of Time books. Which is nice and all if your goal is to try to get the player up to speed, if they’re not actually familiar with those books.

But here’s the thing: it doesn’t do enough. Moraine gives the player no context whatsoever as to how any of this ties into Skyrim, whether the Aes Sedai are from somewhere else in Tamriel, whether they’re even on some other continent like Akavir, or if they’re even from some other plane in Mundus or Oblivion or something.

It’s not clear to me how the mod is trying to play this, whether they’re being deliberately vague on details to leave it open for the player to interpret it how they want to, or what. And at least in terms of the worldbuilding under the hood, okay sure fine, I could see a scenario where these people could be handwaved as “they live somewhere else on Nirn entirely, and nobody in Skyrim has ever heard of them, and they have their own religious beliefs and such”. That they have portal magic isn’t even all that weird in the Elder Scrolls universe, because Elder Scrolls mages portal all over the place all the goddamn time.

Hell, there’s even a hook into the lore where the Wheel of Time world could be another plane of Mundus. People in the Elder Scrolls universe understand the idea of planes of Oblivion, or at least educated persons do, since the concept of the Daedric Princes having their own planes of Oblivion is well-documented in the lore. And the Mundus lore page on UESP even says straight up that some sources interpret Mundus as being broader than just the world of Nirn itself, and possibly including other planes.

Now, granted, this is a real big question to try to stuff into direct dialogue with the Dragonborn. But I really wish I’d encountered at least something in the narrative that touched on the mod’s intentions, somehow. It wouldn’t even have had to be a conversation with Aviendha, the character you’re most likely to interact with. But a side conversation with Moraine could do it, or with an appropriate scholarly NPC once the player finds the White Tower.

Or put in a book discoverable by the player which documents how the Aes Sedai became aware of Nirn, and the major cultures there, and how certain other parties getting their mitts on this knowledge could be a problem. That way you wouldn’t even have to record a conversation about it, just put a book object together with appropriate text!

None of this is stuff that the mod seems to want to tell the player. And if the mod’s goal is simply to go “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool to have Wheel of Time stuff show up in Skyrim,” then okay yes fine, it does appear to be doing that well enough.

But for me as a player, if you’re going to go to the trouble of making a mod that brings stuff from an entirely different source into the Elder Scrolls, it’s not satisfying to just have that stuff show up in an Elder Scrolls setting without more narrative work to make it make sense. I should think that the Aes Sedai, if they discovered some entire other world, would be asking some very hard questions!

How do their beliefs in their Creator tie in at all to how the people of Tamriel worship the Divines?
Is their Creator the same entity the people of Tamriel call Lorkhan?
Is the Dark One a Daedric Prince? (I could see strong arguments for the Dark One being an avatar of, oh, say, Molag Bal. Or Mehrunes Dagon. Or Boethiah.)

The mod doesn’t even have to outright answer these questions, I feel. But I would have liked to see some of the characters, in-character, asking them.

Aviendha’s arrival in Skyrim is narratively shaky

The opening bits of this mod go like this:

Aviendha drops out of a portal near Riverwood
After you take her as a follower and go about your business for a bit, she asks you to take her back to the bridge
Moraine shows up, at which point Aviendha goes “why am I here?”

This right here made me mentally slam on the brakes. Aviendha’s only asking after she’s sent to Skyrim why she was sent in the first place? Moraine didn’t see fit to tell her this beforehand?

I strongly suspect that it was done this way so you could actually see Aviendha asking this question on camera. But it still makes for a very awkward narrative flow. And it doesn’t speak well of Aviendha that she just cheerfully let Moraine chuck her off through a portal to some foreign land without even asking a question or two about what the purpose of her visit is.

And for that matter, it even contradicts the initial meeting with Aviendha. Because in that initial meeting, I even learned from Aviendha directly that she was looking for the “car’a’carn”. Which suggests that Aviendha did at least have an opening clue or two about what was going on.

If the intention was for Aviendha to have clued in only at that point that her goal was in fact me, that still strikes me as narratively shaky. Moraine’s conversation with me at that same point indicated she knew damn well I was Dragonborn. So I would have liked that second encounter at the bridge a lot better if Aviendha more presented herself as “OMG you’re the Dragonborn, you are the car’a’carn I’m seeking, we have to go back to the bridge so I can try to call Moraine, she needs to know I was successful”.

Stuff I didn’t like

The mod frequently assumes the player character is male

This is hands down my biggest complaint about this mod. And even if I were a Wheel of Time fan, this all by itself would kill my ability to enjoy it, as a female player who almost always plays female characters.

Right out of the gate, this mod made it clear that it was expecting the Dragonborn to be a man. Here’s a thing Moraine said to me in the first conversation I had with her at the bridge at Riverwood:

As the Wheel of Time turns, places wear many names. Men wear many names, many faces. Different faces, but always the same man. The car’a’carn, The Dragon Reborn, or simply Dragonborn. The man is always the same.

And, well, NO. I get the idea here–that the mod’s trying to establish that the core mythic figure of any world is essentially the same being. But it’s severely off-putting to see this put in such a blatantly gendered way.

This was only the first time I saw the mod clearly assuming I was playing a man, too. Another NPC I encountered later kept calling me “Great Lord” to my face. And notes I found as part of the mod’s content kept referring to me as “him”.

Before anybody protests “but English has always used male referents to encompass everybody! It’s gender neutral language”, no, no it bloody well is not. I am, I assure you, old enough to remember when it was considered the norm, but that didn’t mean it was actually okay.

Skyrim itself gender-checks the Dragonborn. It goes to the trouble of having different voice lines to account for different pronouns, and putting in the right pronouns in notes and letters that refer to the character. As far as I’m concerned, any reasonably well-written mod should do the same.

And if you don’t want to go to the trouble of recording multiple versions of the same line, then dammit, rewrite the line.

Here, here’s how I would rewrite Moraine’s line to make it actually gender-neutral:

As the Wheel of Time turns, places wear many names. Heroes wear many names, many faces. Different faces, but always the same soul. The car’a’carn, The Dragon Reborn, or simply Dragonborn. The soul of the hero is always the same.

There. Same core idea, with just a few words tweaked to allow for the Dragonborn being male, or female, or even non-binary.

And I really, really wish this mod had done that. It would have made a much better starting impression on me if it had.

For that NPC who kept calling me “Great Lord”, why not call me Dragonborn? Or Dovahkiin? We have two gender-neutral terms right there that the mod could have used, if they didn’t want to record two different versions of that NPC’s lines. Other NPCs in the mod were calling me Dragonborn, even. So it wouldn’t have been much of a narrative stretch for this NPC to do the same.

Now, to be absolutely fair, I did see that later parts of this mod did use the correct gender for me. So this isn’t a problem across the entire mod. But that, in a way, just makes the parts where it is a problem more frustrating. Because if they can use the correct gender for me in some parts of the mod, why not all of the mod?

Aviendha knows way too much about Whiterun too quickly

As soon as Aviendha shows up in Skyrim, and as soon as you take her as a follower, she immediately starts firing off random conversational chatter about Whiterun. I noticed very quickly that she had lines about Balgruuf being a good leader, and as soon as we actually set foot in Whiterun, she was super friendly with Ysolda and Adrianne.

This made zero sense.

Because if Aviendha’s only just now setting foot in Skyrim, how the hell is she going to have any past knowledge of Whiterun? How should she have the slightest idea that Balgruuf is a good leader? And how does she go straight from “brand new arrival to Skyrim” to “best buds with Ysolda and Adrianne”?

The obvious answers to this are “compression of time” and “off-camera encounters with those NPCs”. But that argument only works to a point. I had literally just gotten Aviendha as a follower when she started talking about what a good leader Balgruuf is. She had had absolutely no time whatsoever to learn anything about Whiterun, its leader, or its people.

I would have liked her firing these lines off a lot better if they’d been delayed until after she’d been hanging out with me for a while, and in fact had been in Whiterun often enough. Something simple along the lines of the counter that fires off in Windhelm before you get the Blood on the Ice plot! You could do a counter that does something like, oh, say, “Aviendha has five visits of more than a few hours in Whiterun before she starts having commentary about Whiterun and its people, and starts making friends with its citizens”.

This argues also that the mod’s leaning in the direction of “the people in it already knew about Skyrim”. But again, this is not actually clear.

Aviendha tries way too goddamned hard to hook you up with Ysolda

Speaking of stuff Aviendha did way too damned quickly, it was only a couple of sessions after having her as a follower where she ambushed me with a conversation that really rubbed me the wrong way: trying to hook me up with Ysolda.

Here are the various issues I had with this as a conversational topic.

One: see above commentary re: Aviendha having not nearly enough time to become familiar with Whiterun and its people. So when the hell did she get so versed on Ysolda’s romantic inclinations?

Two: Ysolda gave absolutely no indication on camera of being romantically interested in me, which was to be expected–I was not, after all, wearing an Amulet of Mara! And that’s how these things usually work in Skyrim. But this mod didn’t do anything to make Ysolda act interested in me, either, as far as I could tell.

I did have additional dialogue options with Ysolda in the Tuxborn modpack. But even with those, Ysolda showed zero sign of being interested in me–in fact, she’d explicitly been acting like she was crushing on Mikael the bard. I had noticed a flirt option I could have taken with her, but I did not do so. Because it wasn’t appropriate for Nona to do so.

So is the mod wanting me to believe that Aviendha and Ysolda got so close that Ysolda opened up to her about being romantically interested in me, but didn’t want to ask me about it, directly? That seems diametrically opposed to everything Skyrim establishes about how romance and courtship works in Skyrim. I mean shit, if Ysolda was interested, what’s stopping her from putting on an Amulet of Mara and making a point of showing it in my presence?

Three: what in the world made Aviendha think that this was an appropriate conversational topic to bring up with the Dragonborn in a public shop? (She hit me with this at the Riverwood Trader.) Or, for that matter, at all?

In my playthrough, this character had already been made to realize that getting naked in a player home space was just not a thing that people did in Skyrim–especially given that the space in question wasn’t even one that I’d actually properly taken over. So unless Aviendha’s supposed to be very socially oblivious (I don’t know the original character, so I dunno?), she should have been at least somewhat aware that maybe she might want to broach the topic of romantic attachments with a bit more discretion, when in a land she’s unfamiliar with. JUST SAYING.

Four: the way Aviendha’s entire pitch about Ysolda as a romantic partner just screamed “male gaze” to me. It focused entirely on her physical attributes, and didn’t have any hint of lauding her as a person. Nothing about her personality, her wit, her intelligence, her loyalty. It certainly didn’t come across to me as the way a woman would pitch a second woman as a love interest to a third woman.

Granted, it was written very poetically. But it still boiled down to “Ysolda is super hot, so you should totally hook up with her.”

Ugh. No thank you.

And I say this as someone who even explicitly likes Ysolda as an NPC. In Tuxborn in particular, Ysolda’s appearance is overhauled in a way that I think is even cuter than her normal vanilla appearance.

Five: last but not least, what really pissed me off about this the most is how snotty Aviendha got about my shooting down talking about getting involved with Ysolda at all, and how the conversation made Aviendha come across as assuming something had happened which absolutely did not happen. I.e., Ysolda “baring her heart” to me.

No such thing happened on camera, and it’s really not appealing to me as a player for an NPC to force me into a situation where I have to RP as if it did.

But more importantly, Aviendha was really bitchy at me about it:

When this land begins to break you, it will be a fitting punishment for your treatment of Ysolda.

What the actual fuck is this? She’s acting like I was deliberately cruel to Ysolda, and no I absolutely was not.

“Aviendha pitches Ysolda to me as a love interest and I shoot that topic down because that is so not a conversation I want to have with her” does not in any way, shape, or form equal “I mistreated Ysolda”.

Aviendha is horribly rude to bring up the topic to begin with. She has no business making assumptions that the Dragonborn is interested in women. See previous commentary re: the mod assuming I’m playing a man. And even if I were playing a man in this playthrough, for all Aviendha knows, I might be interested in men! She just assumes that I’d be interested in women.

For that matter, it’s really presumptuous of her to think the Dragonborn is interested in a romantic attachment at all. In the majority of my playthroughs, sure, yes, fine, I’ve eventually had my Dragonborn marry somebody. But each time, it’s always been what seemed most fitting for that character after I’ve played them for a while. It is not a thing I’d try to settle six sessions into a playthrough, which is when Aviendha hit me with this conversation.

At least twice now, though, I haven’t married any character at all! Once was Harrowhark, who never had a chance to marry anybody because her playthrough imploded–but for most of her playthrough, she was a frigging vampire, so not exactly romantically encouraging. And in the case of Elessir, he didn’t marry anybody because the person he was actually attracted to, Serana, is not available as a marriage option in the game.

The point here being, sometimes it’s appropriate RP-wise to never get romantically involved in Skyrim. Maybe you as a player just don’t want to do that at all because it doesn’t interest you. Or, maybe your playthrough goes in such a way that you never feel like anybody available as an option actually fits your character as you’re playing them!

So it’s really not cool to have Aviendha get in your face about somebody else entirely, and basically demand that you pair off with her.

Especially given that she bit my head off because I didn’t actually want to discuss my romantic plans with a follower I literally just met two sessions prior.

Fuck that noise.

That, right there, is what made me decide I didn’t want to have Aviendha as a follower. I tried a couple times after that to give her a chance, but that conversation threw a shadow over all later interactions I had with her. So I left her in the Bannered Mare. She likes Ysolda so much, she can marry Ysolda herself.

A couple of the lines in conversation between Aviendha and Adrianne

The conversations put in between Aviendha and people she likes in Whiterun were mostly fine… except for a couple that she had with Adrianne.

In one conversation, Aviendha asked Adrianne if she has Aiel blood, and Adrianne tells her yes. And… what? See all my previous commentary above about how the mod is really not clear about how it’s handling the whole crossover between worlds thing. How would Adrianne have the slightest idea who the Aiel are?

And this implies that the mod’s intention is to assume that either a) the Wheel of Time cultures are occupying the same physical world as those of Nirn, or b) there is regular contact between them, enough that even random citizens intermingle enough that there could be children that are of both worlds.

Either of these would, I feel, require way more worldbuilding setup than the mod provided.

The other conversation that made me frown was one in which I overheard Adrianne yelping about “Aah I’m on fire,” or something to that effect. Aviendha stepped in and was coming across as all “you’re fine, calm down.”

That seemed really out of character for Adrianne. Who is, after all, an ambitious and talented smith, gifted enough that Warmaiden’s has rep all over Skyrim. (C.f., Gunmar in the Dawnguard being all “It’s no Warmaiden’s, but I’ve got a decent supply” if you buy something from him.) She’s not going to do something stupid like set herself on fire by accident. And even if she manages to have an ember from the forge hit her, shit, that’s what wearing protective gear is for. And Adrianne would know that.

Really, the core of my disgruntlement here comes from Adrianne being voiced by Claudia Christian. And I just don’t like the idea of any character voiced by her acting incompetently! She covers the “FemaleCommander” voice type in Skyrim, and for me as a player, that basically means “women who are authoritative and competent”.

Of the characters Christian voices, about the only character you can argue is not as competent as you’d think is Laila Law-Giver–who is clearly not the real power in Riften. But Adrianne? No. She knows her shit. So do Rayya and Iona, the housecarls Christian voices. And Legate Rikke. And Aela the Huntress.

So having a conversation where Adrianne sets herself on fire and freaks out, and Aviendha tells her to calm down, just makes her come across as silly. And I really didn’t care for that.

The encounter where Aviendha is kidnapped strains my suspension of disbelief

In the post In Which Nona Finds More Friends But Not the Horn of Jurgen Windcaller, I wrote about the encounter where Berylla Sedai ambushed me right in front of Bits and Pieces, and kidnapped Aviendha.

Everything I said in that post still applies. To that commentary, I’ll add here that Aviendha’s kidnapping ultimately didn’t seem to have much impact on the mod’s overall plot. It didn’t even seem to have much of a point. Because after all, if Berylla Sedai was able to port straight into Solitude and nab Aviendha, and paralyze me in the process, why not nab me? Because if her goal was to try to lure me into a remote area so the Darkfriends could kill me, it seems to me that she could have saved a step or three by just taking me directly.

Not a fan of Moraine talking about keeping me safe

At one point partway through the mod, once I discovered the White Tower, Moraine threw a line about keeping me safe in the tower. At which point I was all, uh, no? Thanks but no thanks? Lady, who the hell are you that you think it’s your job to keep the Dragonborn anywhere? You may or may not have noticed, but Alduin’s gonna eat the world if I don’t do something about it, so kinda busy here, yo.

Later stretches of the plot started losing me

Tying back into my previous problem with the mod not really doing anything to explain how much the people of Skyrim should know about the people in the mod, there’s a queen figure introduced by the mod, who has a daughter who’s supposed to succeed her (and who is referred to as the Daughter-Heir). Last thing I did in the mod before bailing on Nona’s playthrough was rescuing this young woman, who’d gone out wandering the land with her brother.

And I can’t help but wonder about the queen, and how exactly she’s supposed to be interpreted by a citizen of Tamriel. Who is this woman and why should the player care about her authority? Should the player be treating her as essentially a jarl?

Yet again, a detail over which I had a lot of questions, for which the mod did not provide answers.

All in all

Ultimately, while I feel this mod is well-done from a technical standpoint, its content doesn’t work for me. As I noted above, while I don’t object to the idea of a Skyrim/Wheel of Time crossover per se, I don’t feel like the mod did enough to shore up this as a narrative concept for my personal preferences. Players less concerned with narrative cohesion than me may have a better time with that, and also, players who are actually fans of the Wheel of Time books.

And I’ll give the mod some props: it has an interesting enough concept that even though I have major narrative issues with it, as you’ve seen, I had enough to ponder here for this to be a pretty long post. And if a mod can do that for me, I do appreciate that. And I think perhaps I’d get more out of this mod if it weren’t trying to operate in the context of Skyrim. If it were an adventure in an actual Wheel of Time game, for example.

Still though, I will not be revisiting this mod in my current Tuxborn playthrough.