Introducing Family Ties - a series of small background mods that will make the player character the relative of a family from Vanilla Skyrim.

The mods feature:

- Relationships (mother/child, grandparent, aunt.. ) between the player and NPCs from the family.

- A key and night-time access to the family home.

- Family NPCs are renamed to Mother, Father, Grandpa etc… names of siblings are preserved.

- I made small adjustments to houses to give the player a bedroll and a safe storage with starting clothing.

- I also added map markers to your home town and family house.

- There is no proper quest yet - just the basic minimum to access a family home so far.

My goal here is to put together small mods (script free if possible) as templates for others to make their own and share them back. Eventually we could even envision small quests around family secrets.

Families already implemented:

- Imperial - start as the son or daughter of Adrianne Avenicci in Whiterun.

- Imperial - start as the son or daughter of Carlotta Valentia in Whiterun.

- Nord - start with Birna in Winterhold as a mother and Ranmir, your uncle.

- Nord - start with Lemkil in Rorikstead as a father, with two sisters and a childhood friend (Erik)

- Breton or Reguard - start in the Lylvieve family Dragon Bridge. Since the father is Reguard and the mother Breton, it can fit a Redguard start as well.

- Altmer - start as a sibling of Taarie and Endarie in the Radiant Raiments store

- Any race - start as a former orphan from the Riften orphanage

- The Belethor start was provided through the forum and hasn't been tested yet [REMOVED FOR NOW - I need to test it first]

I didn't make any racial check to keep things simple and script free. Up to you to role play the starts the way you want.

Obviously, you should only activate one module at a time (unless you want to have multiple parents in different places).

The mods will not make you start at your home though, so you are free to use Live Another Life or other start mods on top of these.

I am releasing these Family Ties modules as plain Skyrim mods - not SexLab - as it may be of interest for anyone interested in role play.

Requirements

None (see below for companion mods).

Q: What does the main FamilyTies.esp mod and script do?

FamilyTies.esp is an optional file and scripts. This mod will grant you treats as you age. This is a complement and it is not required for the other family esps to work.

The optional esp is loosely based on the Growing in Skyrim mod from Nexus. I tweaked it and changed it so much over time that it doesn't have much left from the original and should be treated as a new mod instead.

What you can expect in this mod:

- a script to handle aging. The minimum age is hard coded as 16. The default age is 18. A configurable 'birthday' parameter will count days until the next birthday and will grant you new perk points once you have a birthday. The scale of your character will also change from 0.96 to 1.0 between the ages of 16 and 20 (so it should exclude you from sex scenes if you are too young/short).

- an MCM menu for easier configuration of anniversaries and aging

- a custom race for 'teens' (age 16 to 20) in case you want a different body type. This is still experimental at this stage.

Note: you don't have to use the experimental teen races to use ages lower than 20. You can use your normal race as well. The teen races are there only if you want to use a different body type.

Q: What about Incest (since this is LoversLab).



Of course, since this is LoversLab, with SexLab, Aroused, Lovers Comfort and Stories installed, incest cannot be very far.

My plan is to make these as plain and leave the sexual content to a quest in Stories (I can detect if the player has a parent/child relationship with certain NPCs and take it from there). I already have updated Stories with incest and love triangle behaviors so that would fit in nicely. The quest in Stories will be about uncovering a family story/secret, with different topics whether you are part of the family or not. Nothing large, but enough to keep things interesting hopefully. I only ask you keep any incest discussions to the SexLab Stories thread instead of this one.

I made a list of potential NPCs and their families broken down by race and activity (noble, mill worker, innkeeper, etc) that I may cover eventually. There is quite some potential for families with the player in the game.

Q: Why multiple mods instead of a single file?

Relationships between NPCs are hard coded as form IDs in the ESP file. I can't create new ones on the fly or turn them off.

Also, to give access to an NPC house at night, I had to edit the cell to make it public and give the place a key to the house. Editing the public flag of a cell is also not doable dynamically and keeping track of all keys would be a mess in a combined mod.

The only solution I could think of is to create these little modules individually.

Q: Why are you working on yet another instead of finishing SD+, Parasites, Hormones, Alicia, etc

I start a lot of new characters to test development of my other mods. It’s a tedious and boring task, and I need some diversity to keep things interesting. Mods like this one help a lot.

That and … procrastination and distractions are more fun than working on the hard tasks ahead with these mods.