A review about followers available in Tuxborn

Here’s a thing I’ve discovered while playing the Tuxborn modpack for Skyrim: it includes a lot of fun followers, and I’m a trifle sad that I can’t run all of them at once! In Nona’s playthrough, I’ve been experimenting with what it’s like to have a large group of followers. We’re talking 7-8 here, which is a huge difference from what Skyrim normally allows you: i.e., a single humanoid follower, and a single animal/pet one.

Part of this is accomplished by some followers being compatible with Nether’s Follower Framework, which I’m also trying out for the first time in this run. But a bunch of the followers also have their own custom AI packages! And I’ve been running into a lot of crash behavior that I suspect may be caused by trying to run too many followers with their own custom packages at once.

So while I’m actually enjoying a large group of followers more than I thought I would, I’ve regretfully sliced my party in half. Which brings me down to just four active followers, which is still more than I’m used to! We’ll see if this improves performance.

Followers that made the cut

Lydia

Lydia gets to stay on my team because Tuxborn includes the Improved Follower Dialogue mod for her, which gives her a lot more character development as well as a personal side quest. So far I’m enjoying the hell out of it! Lyds has always been my favorite housecarl, and I’m delighted to see this expansion of her as a character.

Also, this mod even lets Lydia react to the Legacy of the Dragonborn museum. I love it. <3

Auri

I’d already been meaning to try Auri prior to this playthrough, and so far she does not disappoint. 😀 I am ridiculously amused by how she observes the Green Pact–and how this includes all the ramifications of that. Including how Green Pact followers eat their enemies after a battle. So Auri throws around a lot of cannibalism jokes. LOL.

Remiel

I had also already had Remiel on my radar. And she is awesome, I love her to bits even though I haven’t gotten very far with her personal quest yet. I love that she is even more enthusiastic about the museum than Lydia is, to the point that she actively approached Latoria in my run to ask for a member ring. And she had a bunch of lines with me about wanting to be useful to the Explorers Society, like everybody else in the group. <3

I have set Remiel up to live at my Safehouse, just on the strength of that alone.

Nessa

At first glance, Nessa doesn’t seem like the best match as a follower for Nona as I’m currently running her. Nessa is an unrepentant thief, and so far I am not planning to have Nona join the Guild. (In no small part because this modified Lydia would frown very hard on that.)

Also, so far Nessa’s personal quest seems buggy as hell. I’ve played a couple of stages of it, and both times, I had to look up info on the mod page for her and/or in Reddit threads, to figure out how to work around the buggy behavior.

But that said, Nessa’s personal quest is also very interesting, in no small part because it involves the Psijic Order, and I really want to see where this story is going. So for now, Nessa is staying in my active follower group.

Followers that didn’t make the cut

Lucien

I’ve already run Lucien in previous playthroughs, and I adore him to bits. But in this playthrough, I wanted to focus on followers I hadn’t already tried! I picked up Lucien in this run mostly because I do adore him. But not quite enough to keep him around if having a large group is impacting my game’s stability.

Sorry, Lucien! I may swing back to you if I’m able to cut the group size down further!

Gorr

Gorr is one of the many characters included in the Interesting NPCs mod, which provides exactly what it says on the tin: a whole bunch of new NPCs with various levels of interesting detail about them. Some of them are around to just provide fun conversational color. Others can actually be followers, and Gorr is one of these.

He’s struck me so far as a very basic kind of character: a former arena fighter whose simple pleasures in life are eating food and bashing heads. In some ways, I can respect that! 😉 But he’s not interesting enough to me to keep him around as an active follower.

So I set him up as my steward at Goldenhills Plantation. Dude likes his food, I figured he’d appreciate being in charge of a place that actually produces food. And periodically bashing the heads of bandits stupid enough to try to attack the place.

Gore

Not to be confused with Gorr, this guy is a standalone custom follower. And he is definitely interesting, with a whole lot of custom dialogue, reactions to current events, and such. But I think I’d actually prefer to run him as a single follower rather than as part of a group. He’s so well portrayed, and has so many reactions that fire off if you interact with him, that I feel like I’m missing out on stuff just by forgetting to stop every so often and actually talk to him.

Depending on how things go with the current active group, and depending on whether I have any reason to finally dismiss any of them as followers, I may swing back around and pick up Gore again. But for now I think I may need to revisit him in a later playthrough where I can give him more direct attention.

Eris

I really like the concept of Eris: a mysterious blind mage who, in D&D alignment terms, is True Neutral. Like Gore, she has a lot of interesting reactions to current events that can fire off if you take the time to stop and talk to her. But so far in this playthrough, I’ve found that having a large group means I don’t actually remember to take that time.

And Eris is more understated than the other followers, too. So I don’t even know yet if she has a personal quest line. I’m interested enough in her to revisit her later in a different playthrough, though.

Aviendha

I picked up Aviendha very early in Nona’s playthrough, partly because I needed extra followers to take on Mirmulnir at the Western Watchtower, and Aviendha was very easy to get.

But that said, she’s also a character directly ported into Skyrim out of the Wheel of Time books. And her mod includes an entire set of other Wheel of Time characters and a plot involving them.

Since I have never actually read the WoT series, I do not have any particular investment in seeing those characters in the context of Skyrim. And from what I’ve seen so far running parts of the mod’s plotline, I am in fact finding it actively distracting. Because there’s no particular attempt made to explain why all these people from an entirely different world are now suddenly showing up in Skyrim, or why the big bad called “the Dark One” has any fucks to give about the Dragonborn and Tamriel. So it’s really bugging my sense of narrative cohesion.

Also, it’s pissing me off that the mod keeps misgendering Nona. I’ve had one of its NPCs repeatedly call me “Great Lord” to my face, and I’ve seen multiple notes that keep using male pronouns to refer to me.

Aviendha herself, to be fair, has not misgendered me to my face. But she does have some weird interactions that rubbed me the wrong way, such as taking off all her clothes the very first time I set foot in a player house space, and also trying very, very hard to set me up with Ysolda in Whiterun. She kept talking about Ysolda’s various pleasing physical attributes–and in ways that came across very hard to me as male-gaze-y, and not the kind of dialogue you’d write if you were having a female character trying to get another female character interested in a third female character.

In short, goddammit mod, I am not playing a male Dragonborn. STOP ASSUMING EVERY SKYRIM PLAYER IS PLAYING A DUDE.

And while I do rather like that Aviendha seems to love Whiterun and in particular certain characters in it (such as Ysolda), she also pivoted straight to dialogue along those lines the instant I took her on as a follower, just shortly after she came out of the portal that sent her to Tamriel. This also bugged my sense of narrative cohesion.

Because how the hell is an Aiel spear-maiden from the world of the Wheel of Time going to know the first thing about the world of Tamriel? How does she know what kind of a leader Jarl Balgruuf is? And why would Adrianne have the slightest idea what Aviendha is talking about when Aviendha asks her if she has Aiel blood?

So yeah, not going to pick Aviendha up as a follower again in this run, unless I specifically need to do so to finish off the mod’s associated plot. We’ll see how that goes.

People who have actually read the Wheel of Time books, and/or who favor playing male characters more often than I do, and/or who are less bothered by the lack of narrative cohesion of a Wheel of Time/Skyrim crossover mod, may enjoy Aviendha a lot more as a follower than I am so far.

Other followers included in Tuxborn

There’s at least one other follower included in Tuxborn that had been already on my radar: Xelzaz. I haven’t actually found him yet in this run, but given how I’ve already seen my game struggling to remain stable with a large group of followers, it seems unlikely I’ll be able to pick him up this time through. I am still definitely actively interested in running him, though!

And I’ve only barely scratched the surface of all the characters provided by Interesting NPCs. So that is definitely going to have to go into future playthroughs, so I can further explore that set of characters.

All in all

For now, I think I’ve found the core set of followers that will see me through the next major legs of Nona’s run. As of this writing, she’s level 31, and I’ve just run Diplomatic Immunity in the game’s main quest. But I have plenty more to do, and it’ll be fun to see the core set of Lydia, Nessa, Auri, and Remiel react to everything that’s going on!