Skyrim - Your Way!

The Story
You stumble across a hidden chest, that you take to be abandoned, containing enchanted tomes, actually intended for collection by servants of Hermaeus Mora. This is a catalog of items, from the most domestic to legendary weapons, all of which will play some key part in the story of the Dragonborn. As with everything Mora does, his reasons for producing this list are deep and mysterious. Perhaps he intends to make the Dragonborn his servant, perhaps he intends to thwart them for his own purposes. With the correct ritual to open the daedric tome, these objects would have been easily gathered using the power of the book. Since you did not know what you were doing, the artifacts have instead been scattered across Tamriel. Unless you gather them successfully perhaps the history of the Dragonborn has been irreparably changed by your blundering.

Of course, anything that Herma wants so badly, the other Daedric lords are keen that he should not possess and therefore they have sent their own servants out to try to recover the items. Where daedra go, others opposed to the supernatural are sure to follow. To say nothing of the Dragon priests who obviously also have an interest in the Dragonborn too and are likely to pursue the artifacts too. Getting in the way of any of these groups could prove dangerous to you. 

The Practical Application of the Mod
You know how it is with Skyrim. You choose the character that you want to play, perhaps a heroic paladin-type character, bristling with heavy armor, weapons and deeply spiritual beliefs. Then with a sinking feeling you realize the game is not-so-subtly steering you towards murdering someone, or sending you off to college alongside milk-drinking wimpy singers.

Definitely not what you had in mind for your character. However, if you do not go along with what the game wants, you will have a heavy price to pay. Refuse to do that quest for Nazeem's codpiece, and there will always be a 1 inch gap in your collection, a space on your wall where it was intended to hang. You will never know inner peace as you pass through your trophy room, starring at all the empty spaces, even though you have the satisfaction of knowing you stayed true to your character.

Now, there is a simple and immersive way to obtain any object in the game included ones added by other mods. The mechanic is very simple. There is a room of chests, all labelled. Put the artifact in the appropriate chest, read the appropriate book and you have a quest to find that artifact and any others that were in the chest alongside it. Now, this does utilize the games Radiant quest system, which I would be the first to admit is not the most interesting, but doing so dramatically reduce the possibility of breaking other quests. I do say reduce, not prevent, this is Bethesda after all.

How much challenge you face is determined by you, along with the other mods you have installed. Should you install this mod after you have cleared all the dungeons and you do not have any mods that reset dungeons (such as All Cells Respawn ), or that add extra enemies (such as Genesis ), then it will pretty much be no more than the time it takes you to stroll to the relevant chest within the dungeon. If installed on a fresh game, then the default enemies, along with any ambushers you add may well keep you occupied.
 
There are twenty something chests already set up for you with accompanying books. These allow you to acquire objects from the following without doing the intended quests 

• Main quest chain
• Dark Brotherhood
• Thieves Guild
• College of Winterhold
• The Companions
• Dragonborn and Dawnguard DLCs
  

You will probably disagree with some of my choices. For example you may want the Miraak mask in with the other Dragon Priest masks rather than in a chest of his own. Simple. Reach into the chest, take the mask and move it to the chest (and therefore the list) where you want it.  

Say you have a mod that adds a great new sword but you want a more interesting and immersive way of your character finding it than just crafting. First obtain it through crafting, console or use of a mod like AddItemMenu  and then drop it in the 99 - OTHER chest. Now read book 99 - OTHER and you will have a quest to find it. Easy!

There are three archetypes for the questing. "Warrior" will send you to dungeons, bandit camps etc to recover the artifacts. "Thief" will place the artifacts in chests in private houses where you will need to sneak in and steal them". The "Mixed" configuration offers both in a 5:1 ratio between "Warrior" and "Thief" scenarios. Finally the "Assassin" archetype places the objects on people who you will normally need to kill in order to retrieve (some perks/mods may allow you to obtain by pickpocketing too. The targets vary between those within a city (similar to the DB Forever quests) and those wandering in the wilderness. 

Activating the Mod

You will need to obtain the "QFL Control Book" and the other books. These are in a chest in the river somewhere near Riverwood.



Take all the books out and read the Control one. After you have finished setting options then read the other books of your choice (note you can read books at any point in your game to add extra objects to the list. You can even read the item books without the Control One first but this will start your first quest with default settings that you cannot amend unless you change the settings and then use the relocate option). 

Each book corresponds to the appropriate chest in the hidden area. So when you read QFL Book 3 any artifacts in chest 3 will be added to the quest artifacts list and one object will be selected for you to find, if you do not have a current Lost Artifacts quest active already. Should you read a book whilst already on a quest then the "pool" of possible quest artifacts will be accordingly increased but it will not choose any of the new artifacts until you complete the current quest (either by finding the artifact or using relocate)

Control Book Options

Teleport - Takes you to the hidden room with the chests allowing you to customize their contents

Relocate - Should it prove impossible to find an artifact, or because you have other worldspaces installed, and you really don't fancy a trip to somewhere like Bruma at this time, then it is possible to return the current artifact to the list and have another selection made. While in theory it should cycle through locations endlessly, it does seem that the game then flags some locations as used and they do not come up again for a while. Therefore use this with caution. 

Settings - Gives access to configuration options. Currently:

Quest Types - Allows you to choose between the Warrior and Thief archetypes of gameplay

Ambushes - Enables you to enable or disable ambushes and choose the frequency.

Bosses - The game classifies enemies as easy, hard or boss. By default an ambush consists of between 1-5 enemies chosen from a themed list, of whom no more than 1 may be a boss. Should you want more challenge you can increase the number of bosses per ambush. Ambushes are triggered when you obtain the artifact, so if you are playing as a thief, be aware this may break stealth. 

Two Quests
This mod adds two quests to the log. A standard one  (Lost Artifacts) and a miscellaneous one. For technical reasons, two quests are actually needed, the only question is whether to show you both. I decided that I should, since the presence of the main Lost Artifacts quest reminds you that the mod exists and is still active when you have come to the end of your current list of artifacts. The miscellaneous quest normally shows you the quest for the current object, but if you have no current quest, obviously nothing will be there. The other way to do it would have been to have a main quest for each individual object, but with more than 70 currently possible, this would really have cluttered your quest log, with a log entry when each was completed, so I felt the way I went was better.

Compatibility
This mod should be compatible with pretty much anything, unless it alters the same area of Riverwood, which is hopefully a small chance. Let me know of any incompatibilities. 

Installation/Removal
Can be safely installed mid playthrough. Any position in load order. LOOT will probably chose wisely. 

Do not uninstall mid playthrough though unless you know how to clean scripts and even then there are risks.

Note: This mod does not contain any protections against your managing to break quests. I considered them but in the case of some objects there were multiple quests to test for,  and others there were no obvious tests that could be made. So use common sense. Do not read books containing objects for quests that you intend to do.  And as always with Skyrim save frequently and be prepared to load a save game if something goes wrong.