The original inhabitants of Skyrim, the ancient Falmer, or Snow Elves, have all but disappeared; only the Betrayed, the twisted, blind Falmer creatures, were thought to remain.  But a few Snow Elves have survived. Generally mistaken for High Elves, they are gifted in both the arcane and combat.  The harsh climate of Skyrim has done more than whiten their skin; Snow Elves possess a 50 % resistance to frost, all know the spell frostbite, and can call upon a Snow cloak, once a day, to protect them from their enemies.  Living for many centuries beyond other elves, Snow Elves receive a +10 bonus to Restoration; gifted in the arcane, they receive a +5 bonus to Destruction and a +50 increase to magika, as their Altmer cousins do.  Skilled knight warriors with a devotion to Auriel, they receive a +5 bonus to archery, one-handed and light armor.  And naturally eloquent, they gain a +5 bonus to speech.  Quite tall, males stand at a height of 1.1, and females at 1.08.

This mod gives you a standalone, fully functional, male and female playable Dawnguard Snow Elf Race, capable of wearing all clothing, becoming a vampire/being cured of vampirism and lycanthropy, and retaining vampire status after transforming into a Vampire Lord.  I developed it in stages for myself, but never uploaded it to the Nexus, since I had no female snow elf textures.  A special thanks to Mudran for allowing me to use three of his textures!  Also, Expired has an excellent tutorial on the Nexus, "Creating a Playable Race - The right way". I didn't use his resources, but created by own scripts for the Snow Elf race.  Any similarities to other Snow Elf mods comes from great minds thinking alike...

I have used this mod in various stages of development for over 100 hours of playing Skyrim.  One difficulty remains.  I cannot seem to get the Snow Elf Vampire to automatically have glowing eyes as soon as you turn.  A checked "overlay head part list" in the "face data" tab (which is how it works for vanilla races) would cause a CTD for some reason; naturally, this mod uses an unchecked version, so as not to cause any CTD!  But you don't get the glowing eyes automatically.  A workaround is to save the game after becoming a vampire, quit to desktop, restart Skyrim and use the show race menu to change the sex of you character once, and then back again to your original gender.  A picture of this change is shown.

Please note that when you are creating your character, you cannot change the sliders on complexion without losing the Snow Elf skin tones.  I left that aspect alone from Bethesda's design. I thought of simply deleting the other darker complexions, but I cannot make that change without also changing the way the seven Snow Elf npcs look.  If you accidentally move the slider during character creation, simply move your gender to the opposite sex and back again to regain the proper Snow Elf texture.

Naturally, this mod requires Dawnguard.

Version 1.1 adds all Elf hair styles, including three more male Snow Elf ones.

Version 1.2 adds dialogue conditions so that your Snow Elf character is mistaken for a High Elf in various situations, such as by Hadvar and others at Helgen, in general dialogue greetings, if you impersonate the Gourmet in the Dark Brotherhood quest line, and if you join Harkon's court.

Version 1.3 adds new female textures, including eyebrows, and changes two familiar elven npcs to the Snow Elf race, so that your pc won't feel all alone!  All assets come packed in a .bsa file.

Version 1.4 Bug fix; Faendal recognizes you as a brother/sister elf; you can tell Gelebor you are a Snow Elf.  When you ask, "What will happen to the Chantry now?" and he says he may be the last of his kind, you will not be prompted to say the line about contributing to Snow Elf extinction, but rather be able to say, "Gelebor, I'm surprised you didn't notice, but I'm a Snow Elf" and give some more details about your background.

Version 1.5 Fixed a bug which sometimes turned the male Snow Elf eyes black.