#or most of the bosmer

[transmairon]

Kinda wished they had kept the old voice for him. Because while the Skyrim dunmer voice actor fits most of the dunmer npcs much more than the old Oblivion elf voice, Aldos's singing doesn't have the same "omf" anymore.

Another highly memorable NPC who received a new voice actor was Aldos Othran, giving us a new rendition of the "Cliff Racer Song".

[dawns-beauty]

you know what: Argonians should live longer lives than humans. Like, let them get 200 years in there.

Orcs, even though 'cursed', are still Mer: let's say 150 years for them.

Bretons, the "Man-Mer"? 130.

Khajiit, one potential split from elves with already wild biology? 120.

[dynamite124]

I want to see more diversity in teeth! Sharp, broken, crooked, missing or gaped, ect! You're beautiful the way you are!

[falmerbrook]

Artfight attack of Naërion for Insecte_Subtil

[pyre-of-pages]

Skyrim OC Intoduction: Elur Karstlaurel

(Please excuse the picture quality.)

Race: Bosmer

Gender: Female (Cis)

Age: 26 (upon first entering Skyrim)

Birth Date / Birthplace: 4th Era, Year 175 / Bravil, Cyrodiil

Main Skills: Destruction Magic, Archery, Enchanting

Secondary Skills: One-Handed (prefers daggers as a side weapon), Stealth, Alchemy

Appearance:

White hair.

Monochrome white eyes (no, she's not blind -- she's one of those Bosmer that have solid-colored eyes).

Tan skin w/ scattered body freckles/sun damage.

Deep facial scar (knife slash).

Clanmarking of Karstlaurel in the form of a blue facial tattoo.

Further Character Info:

Faction

The way I RP my characters is I give them one "main" faction that they identify with the most, regardless of whatever other guilds they may associate with over the course of the story.

Elur's Main Faction: College of Winterhold

Main Occupation: Arch-Mage of the College of Winterhold. Because most of the College's funds are spent keeping it alive, Elur makes her personal living by creating unique enchanted items she will then sell to store owners.

Clanmarking / Bosmer Headcanons

I headcanon that Valenwood / Green Pact Bosmer operate on a maternal clan family system. Clans follow the mother's line. Traditionally, members of a clan are marked with a unique facial tattoo so others can tell at a glance which family they come from. This helps to identify potential allies when traveling to different cities/provinces. However, the Aldmeri Dominion has gradually been snuffing out this "uncivilized" practice -- among many, many other aspects of traditional Bosmeri culture.

It's possible for Bosmer to have solid-colored eyes of any color (black, gold, green, brown, etc.). It's simply a phenotype the race has -- but it is more common among Green Pact Bosmer, so the Pact possibly has an impact on who carries that trait.

Backstory

Elur was born the year the Great War ended, in Bravil, to two former Green Pact Bosmer. Her parents never told her anything about their former lives in Valenwood, and that was for good reason. Eventually, Elur would learn that her parents were once Thalmor sympathizers -- soldiers recruited from Valenwood who were a part of the siege of Bravil during the Great War. Her mother, an archer. Her father, a battle mage. Both, maimed for life in the battle and left for dead in the city by the Aldmeri army -- because "Elven Supremacy" apparently means some elves are more supreme than others.

Elur grew up learning next to nothing about her race or her culture -- being raised in the slums of Bravil by two parents unfit to work in a city unwilling to give former Thalmor soldiers their trust. Unable to return home to Valenwood, her parents chose instead to raise Elur in the culture of Cyrodil in the hopes she would be more at home there than they were.

Months after being orphaned, Elur was left homeless after the Bravil drug riots. Thirteen years of drifting later, Elur decided to head to Skyrim -- recalling being told that she had ancient family ties to the province.

Ice-Blooded

On her father's side, Elur has ancient Falmer ancestry. According to him, little drops of Falmer blood still tend to pop up in their family line -- and both she and he himself had those traits: pale hair and eyes, alongside a natural talent to understand magic in-depth. He claimed that family members who showed Falmer traits were often called the "ice-bloods" among the clan.

Elur was forbidden by her mother from looking into learning magic while she was young, but once she entered Skyrim it wasn't long until Elur discovered her natural ability to understand the mechanics of magic.

Story

Elur's story will be posted in a series of short fics on Ao3. I'd rather not attempt one long, novel-length story and would rather focus on plot-relevant moments of her story in 1-4 chapter chunks. Easy reading for those who may want to skip around her story, I suppose, and easier writing for me.

The Ice-Blooded Dragon (Short Story Series) by Pyre_Of_Pages

[umbracirrus]

My new OC Sylaneth-!! My half-Bosmer, half-Nord vampire lady <3

Close up of her face under the read more :3

[leemarkies]

every time a skyrim modder gives a dunmer npc pale skin, normal eyes, and a smooth rounded face an angel dies

[tanlorin]

posts some of my other sims... including mr al-cybiades and my other two tes elves

[transmairon]

On the one hand, my Bosmer player character not being as tiny and short as all the other Bosmer men in Oblivion really annoys me. On the other hand, it accidentally supports my headcanon about my Bosmer OC being a trans man.

[tiktaaliker]

some of my guys paired with images i had saved on my phone. ft. Rasputin, Gazer, Living Handsome, and Lucky Shot

[bethrnoora]

I think we need to get even weirder with the tes elves. I think bosmer should be prone to corruptive horn growths similar to shope papilloma virus in rabbits

[silusvesuius]

my spawn 🏆

[unsettlingcreature]

he's so short that sometimes i have to jump to reach quest markers

[getvalentined]

Thinking a lot recently about the constant comparison of Oblivion to Skyrim, particularly claims that Oblivion is superior in every way strictly by virtue of quest length and the greater grandiosity of the organizations in Oblivion, and I think there's been a fundamental misunderstanding of what's actually going on with Tamriel during the time period of Skyrim. Even though it's like...one of the core concepts of the main storyline.

Putting most of this under a cut for length, but I just...I think people misunderstand what's going on here. This is not a "One Game Good Other Game Bad" post, it's an analysis of a major, key difference in story basis between the two that I think gets lost in the (frankly asinine) argument about which is superior.

See, everything in Skyrim sucks. Every organization you can align yourself with is falling apart. Literally every single one.

That's the point.

To summarize:

The Companions (equivalent to the Fighters' Guild) are about a dozen strong, literally cursed, and their most beloved leader gets murdered very early in the storyline.

The College of Winterhold (equivalent to the Mages' Guild, not to the Arcane University) has seemingly only been saved from collapsing into the sea because a master of Restoration fused himself with the structure itself when the Sea of Ghosts tried to tear it down a little under a century ago and his presence is constantly physically "healing" the foundation.

The Thieves' Guild has lost the favor of every possible patron deity, having been outright cursed by Nocturnal after one of her Nightingales murdered another and stole the gift she offers her champion, while the boon that the organization's founder claimed from her in ages past (the cowl) is missing.

The Dark Brotherhood has been all but completely dismantled, the Night Mother's tomb in Bravil having been raided and struggling to persist without a Listener for over a decade; the bodies of the Night Mother's children have been lost and she's essentially being smuggled from region to region in an attempt to find a safe place to continue operations.

The Empire itself has been kneecapped, forced into a traumatic treaty by a fascist regime determined to strike the beliefs and culture of anyone not Altmer off the face of the planet; the Thalmor have gone so far as to torture and radicalize the figurehead leader of the Nords in order to use their own nationalism and superiority against the Empire, sparking a civil war that will further weaken the Empire and allow the Aldmerri Dominion to destroy it wholecloth.

This extends out into the rest of the world, too! We have confirmed existence of Hist-deaf Argonians. The Dunmer are floundering to recover after the quadruple-whammy that is the fall of the Triumverate, the destruction of Vivec City when Baar Dau finally made impact, the Red Year, and the Argonian uprising. The Bosmer are literally endangered due to habitat loss following a super-isolationist cultural shift due to wars with the Khajiit and Altmer. The Void Nights were devastating to Khajiit culture and population in ways that have yet to be fully explained.

The world is falling apart. Everything is dying.

And then Alduin shows up.

We all kind of talk about Alduin carrying on as World-Eater through the course of the Skyrim storyline like it's him being a piece of shit, since he'd started it ages ago and was just displaced in time to land on the Last Dragonborn's head in the Fourth Era, but I don't think that's the case.

Based on the state of things, I think Alduin arrived right on time. I think it's the end of the world. The only reason he "should" be stopped is because the Last Dragonborn has the capacity to stop the world from ending in a more down-to-earth sense than just defeating Alduin: they can't save everyone, but they can "fix" every single organization that's holding "the world" together.

They can align with the Imperials and keep the civil war from further crippling them, keeping the Empire from being too weak to push back against the Aldmerri Dominion.

They can save the College of Winterhold, the only group in the right place at the right time to stop the Eye of Magnus from opening, and in doing so make sure that the Psijics are able to put it somewhere nobody else can find it.

They can lead the Companions, cure the curse for those members who don't want to run with Hircine after death, which bolsters their spirits enough to keep doing what they can even when everyone else is trying to kill each other. A single neutral martial force in the middle of a civil war.

They can regain Nocturnal's trust for the Thieves' Guild, restore the Nightingales, and in doing so they can return the luck that was stolen from them as punishment for Mercer Frey's transgression. They can even reclaim the Crown of Barenziah and award the guild with a paragon to increase their newly-regained luck.

They can hear the Night Mother, becoming Listener for the Dark Brotherhood to restore the balancing force of Sithis in the world, purify the most broken Sanctuary the Brotherhood has ever had, and finish a story set into motion way back in the Third Era—Emperor Titus Mede II is murdered under the order of a Motierre, a descendant of a mark the Brotherhood specifically kept from dying during the Oblivion Crisis.

The Last Dragonborn can't do anything outside Skyrim—there's nothing they can do for the Argonians or the Bosmer or the Khajiit, and they can only do very little for the Dunmer via work in Solstheim—but they can work with every single guild or guild-adjacent group, strengthening the Empire to stand against the biggest threat to Tamrielic culture since the First Era, and in doing so they can make it so the world isn't ready for Alduin to eat it.

The Hero of Kvatch exists when Tamriel, and presumably Nirn as a whole is in the prime of its life, that's what makes the Oblivion Crisis such a big deal. This is a world that isn't ready to give up, it still has the strength to fight, it just needs someone standing at the head to direct it. The Last Dragonborn comes into the story when everything is falling apart and nothing really feels worthwhile, when it's hard to see why the world is worth saving. They have the chance to prove that there's still some life left here, that the world isn't too far gone to save—Alduin arrived right on time, it's the Last Dragonborn's job to change that.

I can see how coming from Oblivion to Skyrim would feel disappointing and hollow, but I'm pretty sure that's literally the point of the story.

Oblivion tells you the world is worth saving because it's got so much left to live for, even with the odds stacked so high against it. Skyrim asks you whether a world that's dying is still a world worth saving, and it's up to you to prove that it is.

[falmerbrook]

Some OCs for @tes-gala. The outfit design seemed like it would be fun (it was!). I wanted to make them like something that would exist in-universe.

In order we have Stellar (Azura), Elisere (Auri-El and Alduin), Firuin and Thalia (Y'ffre), and Daphne (Sheogorath) and Morvyn (Akatosh).

Inspo and elaboration of my design decisions below the cut

Stellar (Azura) - He's my Nerevarine, so the Azura connection is obvious. For the most part it's just based on some depictions of Azura, but I included some Nerevar flairs in there (the pauldrons, bracers, and sword). I wanted to include something akin to the flower crown Azura is often seen with, but didn't feel like it would fit him, so instead I went with more of a wreath look ala Caesar, which I think is also a nice nod to the obvious Dictator inspiration for the role of Hortator.

Elisere (Auri-El and Alduin) - She's my Last Dragonborn. Part of her story is wrestling with the religious/cultural conflict of having grown up understanding Auri-El, but later learning she's the chosen one of a human version of that god and has some sort of cosmic duty to kill an aspect of said god. Add in her rediscovering her Snow Elf heritage and their depiction of Auri-El, and it just makes it all the more tough. Anyway, this design is more based on the sun based imagery of the Snow Elf Auri-El, since that one is more meaningful to her.

Firuin and Thalia (Y'ffre) - These two are my Silvenar and Green Lady OCs, so the Y'ffre connection is right there. I'll admit, this one was more of an excuse to make formal outfits for the two of them. Also, there aren't really any Bosmer depiction of Y'ffre, so I went more with the nature motif. I imagine these get ups are made of silk and leather and other Green Pact safe materials.

Daphne (Sheogorath) and Morvyn (Akatosh) - Morvyn is my Hero of Kvatch, so their connection to Akatosh is through Martin. For their outfit I was mostly inspired by the Imperial depiction of Akatosh and Martin's aspect of Akatosh. Daphne, meanwhile, is the one who ends up mantling Sheogorath.