Samuel - Master of Dark Arts (Release)

[Selene310187]

He’s the protagonist of my short story Samuel’s Story, my first Skyrim character and now a follower. You can command him with a Quick Menu, turn off his idle chatter anytime, change his combat style on the fly giving him the appropriate weapons and much more. He comes with a modular custom outfit* which means you are able to toggle some of the equipment parts like the scarf or the harness via the Quick Menu. You can find him in the Bee and the Barb in Riften.

If you talk to him the first time, two items will be added to your inventory: the ingame manual "Samuel Follower Manual" and "Samuel's Flute" (an apparel item). The latter can be used to control Samuel remotely.

And, yes, I included his savegame, too

* If you want to use the outfit for yourself, you can either console it (all equipment parts have the term “Samuel’s Outfit” as part of their name) or use mods that let you add items from other mods to yourself like AddItemMenu - NG or Simple Mod Item Spawner.





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Samuel’s Quick Menu

There are two possibilities to make this menu appear. The first time it appears after you recruited him as your follower and talk to him again (this can be turned off on the second page of the quick menu). Alternatively, you can equip Samuel’s Flute to control him remotely. It’s an apparel item that is added to you automatically as soon as you talk to him the first time (you need to recruit him as your follower, too, to make remote version of the quick menu appear).

Overview of the actions and settings:

Quick menu - page 1
Talk, Wait/Follow, Favor, Inventory, Outfit, Combat

Quick menu - page 2
Quick Menu (while talking to the follower), Bow Removal, Custom Sandbox, Disable Dialogue, Disable Idle Chatter

„Samuel‘s Outfit“ menu
Full, Jacket, Scarf, Harness, Heart Stone, Hood, Crowned Hood, Custom Outfit

„Samuel‘s Combat Settings“ menu
Auto Combat Styles, Weap. Auto-Equip, Combat Spell, Friendly Hits, Healing


Auto Combat Styles

He’s a mage using destruction spells at default. It’s possible to change his combat style just by giving him the appropriate weapons. If you give him a sword, his combatstyle changes to spellsword. As soon as a shield is in his invenstory, his combat style changes to knight and so on.

Available combat styles and their conditions:

• Mage: no weapons/no shield in his inventory; his default combat style
• Spellsword: one-handed weapons including staffs
• Knight: shield
• Two-handed: two-handed swords, axes or hammers
• Missile: bows, crossbows
• Unarmed: no weapons/no shield in his inventory and his combat spell setting is set to "off"

Samuel’s Signature Spell

That’s Samuel's default combat spell. It does 25 points of damage to the target's health and there is a 33 % chance that one of the following additional effects is applied to the target:

• pushes the target away
• paralysis the target for 10 seconds
• depletes all magicka of the target for 10 seconds

If you find that the signature spell is too powerful, it's possible to replace it with one of the elemental spells (Firebolt, Ice Spike or Lightning Bolt) under the Combat settings in the Quick Menu.


Notes regarding Amazing Follower Tweaks

If you use Amazing Follower Tweaks, it overwrites some of his AI settings. But you can achieve something similar with AFT. Choose "Tweak options" in the dialogue options and go to Settings. Turn "NPC allow idle chatter" off and "NPC doesn't auto-relax" on.

If you used the follower without AFT and activated AFT at a later time, please wait until AFT is completely initialized. Then dismiss Samuel and recruit him again. This makes the Tweakoptions appear under the dialogue options.


Samuel as character

Like in the previous The Elder Scrolls game "Oblivion" my first character is a Breton. We experienced countless adventures, cleared every dungeon we could find, sold a ton of valuable items and earned a quite fortune, fought Alduin, met Serana, defied Miraak and finally won the duel with the Ebony Warrior. Samuel was always the good guy helping the people of Skyrim and never thought of joining the Dark Brotherhood or the Thieves Guild. Then he visited Solstheim and discovered his dark side which was always there but deep hidden in his subconscious. Everything changed when he met Neloth.

[Altbert]

Congratz on the release, Selene!

[Selene310187]

I playtested the new version 1.6 of Spectral Music Player with a couple of followers and Samuel was one of them (my character is the Argonian by the way ). His Signature Spell accidentally hit another magic user (the Khajiit) and both started to fight.

I searched the internet for solutions and found out that Amazing Follower Tweaks has as stand-alone add-on that "completely prevents magic based friendly fire between teammates". The file is called "AFT_NoFriendlySpellDamage" and can be found in the Optional Files section of AFT.

But it only covers default destruction spells and not his custom one. So I loaded the plugin into SSEEdit too see how the fix was made. There were several conditions added to the spells that prevent their effects from being applied to followers. After I added these conditions to Samuel's Signature spell and activated the AFT_NoFriendlySpellDamage plugin my magic users finally get along very well in combat. Edit: ... so I thought but more recent tests proved me wrong. That's why there's version 1.2 now.

Furthermore, I fixed Samuel's "ignore friendly hits" setting. Just to talk to him to initialize the bug fix. Edit: You need to set the "ignore friendly hits" setting to "don't ignore" and then to "ignore" which sets a global variable to the correct value. After that you can talk to Samuel to initialize the fix.

[Selene310187]

I added a “pacify” effect to Samuel’s combat spells: If another follower is hit with these spells, the follower in question won’t turn hostile towards Samuel anymore (but this time for real). If you played a previous version of the mod: the edited Signature Spell works without further action. But if you if you want that Samuel should use the custom versions of his other combat spells, you need to clean your savegame with ReSaver (please remove your items from his inventory, dismiss Samuel and make a back-up of your savegame before you do that). You can find instructions for savegame cleaning at the bottom of the included readme file.