Mod review: Project AHO, revisited

Along the same lines as the Carved Brink, revisited post I just put up, here’s one for Project AHO as well. Because as with Carved Brink, so too with AHO: I hadn’t planned on coming back to this mod, but I wound up revisiting it as part of playtesting Tuxborn. And as a result, I’ve become more kindly disposed to it.

So here’s a followup to my original review post, and the final thoughts post I put up when Kendeshel finished AHO in her run. A lot of what I have to say here is specific to running Project AHO in Tuxborn, but if you’re running a Skyrim load order that contains the same relevant mods (Legacy of the Dragonborn, Adamant, and/or the mentioned custom followers), then this commentary can apply to you too.

How I’ve played AHO since Kendeshel

As of this writing, I’ve completed Project AHO in my Tuxborn 1.0 run starring Alecto, and I’m about to complete it in my 1.2 run starring Kenna.

I went in with Alecto mostly to playtest, and to see how AHO behaved in Tuxborn specifically. There was a particular bit of behavior with means of changing character appearance that I wanted to test out against the face-changing machine on board the AHO. And I also wanted to see how the mod just looked in Tuxborn’s load order, since Tuxborn significantly overhauls Skyrim’s graphics.

Also, because Alecto is a Dunmer, I wanted to see if the whole scenario hit me any differently while playing a Dunmer vs. any other race of character.

With Kenna, I decided to go in and take a tack similar to how I ran it with Kendeshel: namely, making it a moral imperative to steal everything I could get my mitts on. Given that I intend to join the Thieves Guild with Kenna, and given that Tuxborn’s load order includes the Thieves Guild Requirements mod, stealing from slavers sounded to me like an excellent way to fulfill just about all of those requirements!

What AHO looks like in Tuxborn

In terms of environment, I didn’t notice a huge change in what things generally look like… aside from the general improvement of graphical quality that Tuxborn has compared to vanilla Skyrim.

As I went back to check my screenshots from Kendeshel’s run, though, I definitely noticed differences in character appearances. And by and large, I’m preferring how the characters look in Tuxborn.

Running the mod as Alecto

I can now confirm that yeah, running Project AHO as a Dunmer Dragonborn does actually hit a little differently. Assuming, at least, that you’re playing a Dunmer familiar enough with Morrowind customs that they’d be familiar with Dunmer slavery practices.

I’ll have more to say on this in detail when I get to that portion of Alecto’s playthrough posts. For now, I’ll say that while she certainly wasn’t happy about being enslaved, she at least understood it, since she comes from the same culture. And even if she’d really want to stab anybody with the temerity to force her into slavery, I feel like she’s savvy enough to not turn down a political alliance with a Great House of Morrowind, if it presents itself.

Which leads into the one main difference I had with her run vs. Kendeshel’s is, I went ahead and bought the house Hla Fang. Mostly because a) I wanted to see the inside of it, and b) I wanted to see if the Telvanni Hybrid Armor pieces inside of it were displayable Legacy of the Dragonborn artifacts. I think I’ll be assuming a headcanon here where Alecto bought herself a place in the town explicitly so she can keep an eye on it, and start leaning hard on the place to make them drop the whole slavery bullshit.

I found the house nice enough, I guess? But not enough to make me want to use it on a regular basis, or make me want to actually set foot in Sadrith Kegran following the conclusion of the mod.

And the armor pieces in the house, it turned out, were not displayable in the museum. Which disappointed me, not gonna lie! Also, they were a bit more tarnished in appearance than the displayable ones acquired off the AHO. So I handed those armor pieces off to Remiel.

Also, I was able to confirm that if you come into this mod with the appropriate perk on the Sneak tree active (Trespasser, since we’re running the Adamant mod in Tuxborn), it does make running the Dwemer ruin Bkhalzarf a lot easier. So I definitely recommend doing that.

Running the mod as Kenna

Kenna, by contrast, has zero fucks to give about the Dunmer culture. So since she’s rather light-fingered to begin with, I cheerfully started stealing everything I could find, starting with all the loose items in Shanath’s house.

And I started pickpocketing everybody I could, too. This didn’t go entirely well–I got caught more than once, which pissed off everybody in the immediate vicinity. Since I was still a low level character, this got me into the unsurprising loop of constantly dying over and over and over and over again.

So then I resulted to pickpocketing only with invisibility potions active, so that helped a lot. 🤣

Of course, I also pickpocketed Shanath in particular every single opportunity I had to do so. Bastard was surprisingly easy to pickpocket, since I caught him a couple of times while he was asleep, and a couple of times when he had his back to me and didn’t turn around until I actually talked to him. Not gonna lie, pickpocketing him was fun.

I’d already figured this out during Alecto’s run of the mod that having the Trespasser perk on the Sneak tree meant I wouldn’t trigger the bajillion pressure plate traps in Bkhalzarf. So I took advantage of that in Kenna’s run, too.

Behavior observed with custom followers

In both Alecto’s and Kenna’s runs, I have custom followers. And in both playthroughs, I saw that the custom followers absolutely followed me right into Sadrith Kegran, which was very immersion-breaking.

In Alecto’s run, that meant Katana following me in. In Kenna’s, that meant both Auri and Xelzaz. In both cases, I wound up having to dismiss all of them, since it made no narrative sense for them to be present while I was trapped in the settlement.

So my advice to Tuxborn players interested in running AHO is, dismiss any custom followers you have with you before you launch the mod. Since you have to go out of your way to launch it, you’ll have time to do so. Make up whatever in-character justification you need for why they don’t try to rescue you when you’re captured, or why they never find you in Sadrith Kegran.

Snippy

I still think Snippy is kind of over the top and too blatantly a riff on BB-8 from Star Wars to be comfortable for my immersion preferences. On the other hand, Snippy’s ability to charge soul gems, even soul gems filled with mis-sized souls, is really useful.

Where I am overall with this mod

I still have huge, and I mean huge, issues with how this storyline ends. I still take major issue with how you don’t get to push back on the slavery in Sadrith Kegran at all. And I do still feel that buying the house Hla Fang is not really morally defensible based on how the mod ends.

Because of this, I still don’t think I’ll play it again in a load order I build myself. But I’m now willing to do so in a Tuxborn run, since AHO is part of the Tuxborn load order. I won’t buy the house again, though.

And in general, whether or not the Dragonborn I’m playing is inclined to thievery, I am 300 percent down with robbing the hell out of the place. I recommend that as an approach if you’re playing Tuxborn, especially given that it’s a means to answer the requirements of the Thieves Guild Requirements mod!

I’ll say this, too: both AHO and Carved Brink are still visually stunning, and extremely generous with the loot. I do love me some loot, it’s true. So I have a fair degree of forgiveness for a mod’s issues, if it can at least satisfy my inner loot goblin, apparently!

Since Tuxborn’s load order also contains Legacy of the Dragonborn, it does involve a few items you can display in the museum, too. So Tuxborn players interested in filling as many displays as possible, you’ll definitely want to run it.

Mind you, the AHO can’t quite compete with the airship Dev Aveza. The AHO can only go to seven known locations on the game map, whereas the Dev Aveza can go anywhere there’s a fast travel marker. But the AHO does have some fun machines on board, and it also has a place where you can leave Snippy the Dwemer bot, if you pick him up as part of running the mod and don’t want him always following you around.

Recommendations for specific bits of the mod to run

Last but not least, here’s a list of the specific bits of the mod I’m willing to run now that I’ve done it a couple more times in Tuxborn. Players who find the mod’s overall story weak, but who may want to speed-run it enough to take advantage of its strong points, should consider the following things to focus on:

• Nab all the chess pieces in everybody’s houses and put them on the chessboard in the Council Hall. As I wrote in my original AHO review, the Strategist perk (which triples the number of summons you can have active at once) is one of the biggest things in AHO’s favor.
• Run the plot A Legacy of Ancestors, given to you by Erver Milo, which will give you the Time Break spell as a reward.
• Run the quest Forgotten Art, given to you by Merano Rendo, which will let you learn how to make Telvanni bows and arrows, if you’re able to smith Elven items. The Aetherium version of the bow is a displayable item in the LOTD museum, and both the standard and Aetherium versions of the weapon are very strong bows, especially in early to middle stages of your game. You’ll also get a Bone Dagger, which can be tempered with a dragon bone, so that’ll get you a very good dagger for your use as well.
• Run the quest Crack’n’Chirp if you want to get Snippy. You won’t be able to launch this until you get far enough in AHO’s main plot to find a seemingly random lever lying around in the Dwemer ruin, so keep an eye out for that lever.
• Since Tuxborn also includes Legacy of the Dragonborn, this does also mean you’ll have access to the Stash Supplies spell. You should decide whether you want to actually lean on this or not, while running AHO. It will definitely make certain things easier.

All other side quests in AHO I’d consider very, very optional. It depends on how thorough you want to be, and how you want to RP how your particular Dragonborn feels about the place.

Any questions, hit me up on the #txbn-general channel on the Aetherius Modding Discord server, where Tuxborn lives. Or drop me a comment here!