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About this mod
Adds properly perked and outfitted female guards to Imperial-controlled holds in Skyrim, as well as female soldiers for the Imperial army.
Requires Requiem v3.4 on SSE, not for vanilla Skyrim. I uploaded a version of the ESP saved as Form 43, but no idea if it works on Oldrim as I do not own it. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK.
- Permissions and credits
Disclaimer:
This entire page is written on the assumption that this mod will actually function for other players, which I cannot guarantee. I am not and do not consider myself a modder, and this is actually the first mod I've ever created. Use this mod at your own risk. I am not responsible if this corrupts your save file, causes your computer to catch fire, increases the frequency of Category 5 hurricanes, causes you to break up with your significant other (real or imaginary), worsens world hunger, makes you inexplicably want to send a legal complaint to Dick Cheney, or causes you to choke to death on a hot dog.
There are 2 standalones files available for optionality:
1) Female Guards Standalone, which adds female guards for holds that are Imperial-controlled by default (Solitude, Markarth, Morthal, Falkreath, Whiterun). These are the guards that wear the normal hold armor. This does NOT add female Imperial Guards post-Civil War.
2) Female Soldiers Standalone, which implements changes for the entire Imperial Legion, including both soldiers and Imperial Guards post-Civil War.
These mods can be used together and load order between the two does not matter. A changelog with more details on what they do can be found in the comments.
If you download this mod and like the changes, please consider endorsing this mod. It'll help with visibility and I'd like for as many Requiem players as possible to see it in case these modifications are something they want.
"I call all times soon."
-Aslan, Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis
Recommended Mods:
Perfect Legionnaire - Imperial Armor Reforged 6-0
I always thought that the vanilla Stormcloak armor was passably decent (not gonna lie, the general armor was pretty cool), but in comparison the Legion armor was rather meh and I wished for something better. My prayers were answered in the form of an angel named Ali Bengali, who through this mod gives the Legion armor a much-needed spicing up. Screw compatibility, I'll download this any day of the week so my Legionnaires look cool. Although since the file is primarily textures, it should be fully Requiem compatible.
Background:
Having started a playthrough with the wonderful overhaul mod Requiem a short while back, I noticed that one of the things it carried over from vanilla Skyrim was that guards in Imperial-controlled holds and soldiers in the Imperial Legion were only male. Given that female Imperial soldiers clearly exist in the game (captain at Helgen, battlemages, Legate Rikke, female legion soldier on loading screen, female soldier corpses can be found, various other NPCs in game who used to be in the legion, etc.), I always thought it was odd you never see any others beyond Rikke when actually participating in the civil war or interacting with guards in the various holds.
I mean, sexism as a whole in Skyrim seems pretty minimal when compared to the racism, since you've got female bandits, wizards/mages, mercenaries, housecarls, Jarls, Delphine the Psychopath, thieves, etc. But no female Greybeards, probably because it's hard to grow a grey beard as a lady. But the Greybeards are pretty accepting of a female Dragonborn, so there's that. Maybe they think she can grow a grey beard? (Now there's a quality mod idea.)
As such, I always used mods in vanilla Skyrim to fix this, but given how Requiem basically overhauls everything, none of these mods are really compatible with Requiem (plus I like the Requiem heavy guard armor design).
Imagine my surprise when I went looking for a mod to address this issue in Requiem and realized I could find nothing at all. Given the large Requiem fanbase and variety of mods to address this specific issue in vanilla Skyrim, surely something would exist. But in all my searching, I never did find anything. You'd think that with an entire site dedicated to the category of Mods-that-must-not-be-named, someone would find some time to work on a mod to add more women into the game for a very popular overhaul. But nooooo, we'd all rather spend time making our lady characters look like anime girls and wear heels. (Not to say that the mod authors didn't put time or work in - I'm sure they're quality products, given how popular some of them are.) But seriously, if you know of something like this, do inform me so that I know I'm not insane and hallucinating. But unslaad krosis. Innumerable pardons. I digress.
On to mod content:
Now we can discuss lore implications of a male-only legion all day and its parallels to the Roman Legion, and I do like how you can interpret it as a reason to side with the Stormcloaks beyond "muh racism" and worshipping a guy who had nothing better to do than conquer the entire known world.
But the sad truth is that this was probably (and by probably I mean with 110% certainty) a Bethesda oversight that they were too lazy to fix, because why fix stuff when the modding community will patch the entire game for you?
I say this because beyond the fact that female soldiers exist in-lore and in-game, there are female voice assets for guards in Imperial holds and soldiers in the legion, and they work just fine when implemented in the game. Why spend money recording this if you aren't going to use it? Really, Bethesda, how hard would it have been to add female guards and soldiers into the spawn lists? Then I wouldn't be here writing this wall of text.
Something to note: Requiem dev Ogerboss commented on a forum that: "...in imperial holds (where you had only male guards, I did not change this to avoid accidentally breaking any quests)."
Which I respond with "fair enough, valid point." That being said, I personally experienced no quest issues or conflicts myself after modding my game, but since bossman says so, it's a point to keep in mind. (As an example, the quest "The Forsworn Conspiracy," which by default takes place in Imperial-controlled Markarth and involves guards pretty heavily, worked perfectly fine for me with female guards implemented.)
Okay, on to actual mod content. Seriously this time. I promise.
What this mod does (in theory) is as written in the description, adding female guards and soldiers to Imperial holds and the legion. These guards/soldiers should be appropriately perked and (in the case of the heavy armor guards) spawn with Requiem-specific equipment and armor.
Racial diversity is not included here - it's purely Nord women, for two reasons: (1) I thought it didn't make sense for guards to be anything but the local race, and (2) because creating new appropriately perked and factioned female NPC templates using other races takes a lot of time, and I'm an adult with other responsibilities that come first.
Perhaps if this mod actually works for other people and enough people want it, I might try to include racial diversity in the legion at a future date. But that's an afterthought for another time.
Process:
I created this by using xEdit/TES5Edit to tweak the leveled lists to include female Nord templates in the the leveled lists that are referenced for guard spawns and soldier spawns. I don't claim to have a deep understanding of how modding works - in fact, when I started doing these tweaks, I didn't even know what a leveled list was.
If that doesn't inspire a deep-seated, unshakeable confidence in you similar to what the Stormcloaks show for Ulfric "Skyrim-belongs-to-the-Nords" Stormcloak, I don't know what will.
All I did was mimic what the Requiem devs did for female spawns on the Stormcloak side and apply it for the Imperial side, and eventually, after I spent enough time screwing around, actual female guard NPCs and soldiers started spawning instead of naked, headless, floating T-pose NPCs.
Compatibility/Troubleshooting:
In basic words: this should be compatible with anything as long as it doesn't touch the guard/soldier spawns, and (I assume, I'm not sure about this second point) doesn't do crazy modifications to the base Requiem female Nord race template.
Deeper dive: this mod should be compatible with anything that doesn't utilize the same FormIDs, and that doesn't touch the guard spawn leveled lists for Imperial Soldiers (both in the civil war and the ones that act as guards afterwards, if you side with the Imperials), and guard spawns in the Imperial-controlled holds.
I recommend checking yourself using xEdit/TES5Edit if you are unsure.
Open up the Female Guards esp, and if you see the color red go check for a conflict. If you don't know how to use xEdit, I highly recommend learning, it's a very useful tool.
Requiem v4.X+: I do not know if this is compatible with v4+ of Requiem, as I play on v3.4. In theory, if the leveled lists are unchanged and the FormIDs are the same as in v3.4, then it should. Basically a fancy way of saying maybe, if the Requiem devs didn't touch a few specific leveled lists? But I don't know, test at your own risk. Or check yourself using TES5Edit for conflicts, and if there are none, you're probably good to go.
Minor Arcana: Since I use Minor Arcana, I know for a fact the Soldier file is not 100% compatible, since Minor Arcana makes its own edits to the Imperial Soldier (civil war specifically) spawn list to add the possibility of battlemages and a few other soldier types spawning. Regular hold guard spawns (Guard file) should still be fine. I'll consider making a patch at some point to make life easier since I like Minor Arcana.
EDIT: You are welcome to try patching it yourself in TES5Edit, but after my round of revisions my Imperial Legion file is much more complex than the initial upload, when I said it would be an easy fix. You'll want to focus on integrating the spawns for the leveled NPC list LCharSoldierImperial, as that's the main spawn list for the Imperial Legion.
Otherwise, if you don't make your own fix, load Minor Arcana after this if you like battlemages and want them to appear. I can't guarantee that female soldiers will spawn if you do that though. If you don't care and just want female soldiers, then loading this after MA should do the trick.
Troubleshooting: I likely will not be able to help with specific bugs and problems, since as I said before, I do not consider myself a modder. Everything I know about making a mod (which is minimal knowledge at best) I picked up while creating this. I cannot help you with your load order conflicts or buggy games beyond what I already mentioned above.
The one thing I can say - in the process of creating this, I had a lot of headless, naked, floating T-pose guards spawn. Hopefully this doesn't happen to any of you, but this happened when I set the count of male guards to 0 while testing to check if female guards were spawning properly. If the body is female, it means the game attempted to spawn a male character in a female template, and vice versa. But in theory I don't think this shouldn't be happening unless you've got a spawn list conflict somewhere that completely changes spawn counts.
Installation:
REQUIRES REQUIEM v3.4 on SSE. I uploaded a version of the ESPs saved as Form 43 for use with Oldrim since it is easy to do so, but no idea if it will work for LE. Use at your own risk. (Guard file will probably work, I'm less sure about the Soldier file.)
Note: I think this is okay to install mid-game, as I created it in the middle of a playthrough, but as always a new save file is recommended. This is NOT NOT NOT safe to uninstall mid-playthrough unless you want a bunch of naked, headless, floating T-pose guards and soldiers gliding around. Trust me, I tested it on my own save.
1) MAKE A SAVE BEFORE INSTALLING THIS IF DOING IT MID-PLAYTHROUGH. This will allow you to restore your game if this mod doesn't properly work or you decide it's not for you.
2) Install using your mod manager of choice (which I assume is MO if you're playing Requiem, but leave a comment letting me know if you somehow managed it with Vortex). This goes after Requiem in your load order. I'm not even going to mention manual installation, since I don't think you can properly play Requiem without a mod manager of some sort.
3) Run the Reqtificator. Make sure Requiem for the Indifferent.esp is at the end of your load order. You need to do this anyway to play Requiem, but since this mod utilizes Requiem's ActorVariations feature, it won't function without running the Reqtificator first. (For those of you who don't know what that means, I basically used a modding resource that ships with Requiem to increase NPC look variation.)
4) Once installed, you'll want to do a full reset of the relevant cells in Skyrim (i.e. the Imperial-controlled holds). This can be accomplished by going to a remote location and waiting the duration of your cell reset time (default 30 days, but can be reduced to 10 in v3.4 Requiem MCM settings). Or you can use the console to set your timescale to something ridiculous so 30 days passes in a second, while praying that it doesn't have the unintended side effect of breaking your game. Up to you.
5) Once the reset is done, female guards should start spawning. Congratulations! Your Skyrim now has slightly more diversity, assuming a bunch of naked, headless, and floating T-pose guards didn't spawn. But I suppose that's its own kind of diversity, who am I to judge?
"It's not a bug, it's a feature."
-Bethesda, probably
TL;DR: Go read the wall of text, you lazy bum. I put a lot of effort into writing it. But seriously, at least read the installation instructions.
Just a random thought, but I think I might've made a good Skyrim dragon with how wordy I am. Shame the Dragonborn probably would've come along and absorbed my soul.
This entire page is written on the assumption that this mod will actually function for other players, which I cannot guarantee. I am not and do not consider myself a modder, and this is actually the first mod I've ever created. Use this mod at your own risk. I am not responsible if this corrupts your save file, causes your computer to catch fire, increases the frequency of Category 5 hurricanes, causes you to break up with your significant other (real or imaginary), worsens world hunger, makes you inexplicably want to send a legal complaint to Dick Cheney, or causes you to choke to death on a hot dog.
There are 2 standalones files available for optionality:
1) Female Guards Standalone, which adds female guards for holds that are Imperial-controlled by default (Solitude, Markarth, Morthal, Falkreath, Whiterun). These are the guards that wear the normal hold armor. This does NOT add female Imperial Guards post-Civil War.
2) Female Soldiers Standalone, which implements changes for the entire Imperial Legion, including both soldiers and Imperial Guards post-Civil War.
These mods can be used together and load order between the two does not matter. A changelog with more details on what they do can be found in the comments.
If you download this mod and like the changes, please consider endorsing this mod. It'll help with visibility and I'd like for as many Requiem players as possible to see it in case these modifications are something they want.
"I call all times soon."
-Aslan, Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis
Recommended Mods:
Perfect Legionnaire - Imperial Armor Reforged 6-0
I always thought that the vanilla Stormcloak armor was passably decent (not gonna lie, the general armor was pretty cool), but in comparison the Legion armor was rather meh and I wished for something better. My prayers were answered in the form of an angel named Ali Bengali, who through this mod gives the Legion armor a much-needed spicing up. Screw compatibility, I'll download this any day of the week so my Legionnaires look cool. Although since the file is primarily textures, it should be fully Requiem compatible.
Background:
Having started a playthrough with the wonderful overhaul mod Requiem a short while back, I noticed that one of the things it carried over from vanilla Skyrim was that guards in Imperial-controlled holds and soldiers in the Imperial Legion were only male. Given that female Imperial soldiers clearly exist in the game (captain at Helgen, battlemages, Legate Rikke, female legion soldier on loading screen, female soldier corpses can be found, various other NPCs in game who used to be in the legion, etc.), I always thought it was odd you never see any others beyond Rikke when actually participating in the civil war or interacting with guards in the various holds.
I mean, sexism as a whole in Skyrim seems pretty minimal when compared to the racism, since you've got female bandits, wizards/mages, mercenaries, housecarls, Jarls, Delphine the Psychopath, thieves, etc. But no female Greybeards, probably because it's hard to grow a grey beard as a lady. But the Greybeards are pretty accepting of a female Dragonborn, so there's that. Maybe they think she can grow a grey beard? (Now there's a quality mod idea.)
As such, I always used mods in vanilla Skyrim to fix this, but given how Requiem basically overhauls everything, none of these mods are really compatible with Requiem (plus I like the Requiem heavy guard armor design).
Imagine my surprise when I went looking for a mod to address this issue in Requiem and realized I could find nothing at all. Given the large Requiem fanbase and variety of mods to address this specific issue in vanilla Skyrim, surely something would exist. But in all my searching, I never did find anything. You'd think that with an entire site dedicated to the category of Mods-that-must-not-be-named, someone would find some time to work on a mod to add more women into the game for a very popular overhaul. But nooooo, we'd all rather spend time making our lady characters look like anime girls and wear heels. (Not to say that the mod authors didn't put time or work in - I'm sure they're quality products, given how popular some of them are.) But seriously, if you know of something like this, do inform me so that I know I'm not insane and hallucinating. But unslaad krosis. Innumerable pardons. I digress.
On to mod content:
Now we can discuss lore implications of a male-only legion all day and its parallels to the Roman Legion, and I do like how you can interpret it as a reason to side with the Stormcloaks beyond "muh racism" and worshipping a guy who had nothing better to do than conquer the entire known world.
But the sad truth is that this was probably (and by probably I mean with 110% certainty) a Bethesda oversight that they were too lazy to fix, because why fix stuff when the modding community will patch the entire game for you?
I say this because beyond the fact that female soldiers exist in-lore and in-game, there are female voice assets for guards in Imperial holds and soldiers in the legion, and they work just fine when implemented in the game. Why spend money recording this if you aren't going to use it? Really, Bethesda, how hard would it have been to add female guards and soldiers into the spawn lists? Then I wouldn't be here writing this wall of text.
Something to note: Requiem dev Ogerboss commented on a forum that: "...in imperial holds (where you had only male guards, I did not change this to avoid accidentally breaking any quests)."
Which I respond with "fair enough, valid point." That being said, I personally experienced no quest issues or conflicts myself after modding my game, but since bossman says so, it's a point to keep in mind. (As an example, the quest "The Forsworn Conspiracy," which by default takes place in Imperial-controlled Markarth and involves guards pretty heavily, worked perfectly fine for me with female guards implemented.)
Okay, on to actual mod content. Seriously this time. I promise.
What this mod does (in theory) is as written in the description, adding female guards and soldiers to Imperial holds and the legion. These guards/soldiers should be appropriately perked and (in the case of the heavy armor guards) spawn with Requiem-specific equipment and armor.
Racial diversity is not included here - it's purely Nord women, for two reasons: (1) I thought it didn't make sense for guards to be anything but the local race, and (2) because creating new appropriately perked and factioned female NPC templates using other races takes a lot of time, and I'm an adult with other responsibilities that come first.
Perhaps if this mod actually works for other people and enough people want it, I might try to include racial diversity in the legion at a future date. But that's an afterthought for another time.
Process:
I created this by using xEdit/TES5Edit to tweak the leveled lists to include female Nord templates in the the leveled lists that are referenced for guard spawns and soldier spawns. I don't claim to have a deep understanding of how modding works - in fact, when I started doing these tweaks, I didn't even know what a leveled list was.
If that doesn't inspire a deep-seated, unshakeable confidence in you similar to what the Stormcloaks show for Ulfric "Skyrim-belongs-to-the-Nords" Stormcloak, I don't know what will.
All I did was mimic what the Requiem devs did for female spawns on the Stormcloak side and apply it for the Imperial side, and eventually, after I spent enough time screwing around, actual female guard NPCs and soldiers started spawning instead of naked, headless, floating T-pose NPCs.
Compatibility/Troubleshooting:
In basic words: this should be compatible with anything as long as it doesn't touch the guard/soldier spawns, and (I assume, I'm not sure about this second point) doesn't do crazy modifications to the base Requiem female Nord race template.
Deeper dive: this mod should be compatible with anything that doesn't utilize the same FormIDs, and that doesn't touch the guard spawn leveled lists for Imperial Soldiers (both in the civil war and the ones that act as guards afterwards, if you side with the Imperials), and guard spawns in the Imperial-controlled holds.
I recommend checking yourself using xEdit/TES5Edit if you are unsure.
Open up the Female Guards esp, and if you see the color red go check for a conflict. If you don't know how to use xEdit, I highly recommend learning, it's a very useful tool.
Requiem v4.X+: I do not know if this is compatible with v4+ of Requiem, as I play on v3.4. In theory, if the leveled lists are unchanged and the FormIDs are the same as in v3.4, then it should. Basically a fancy way of saying maybe, if the Requiem devs didn't touch a few specific leveled lists? But I don't know, test at your own risk. Or check yourself using TES5Edit for conflicts, and if there are none, you're probably good to go.
Minor Arcana: Since I use Minor Arcana, I know for a fact the Soldier file is not 100% compatible, since Minor Arcana makes its own edits to the Imperial Soldier (civil war specifically) spawn list to add the possibility of battlemages and a few other soldier types spawning. Regular hold guard spawns (Guard file) should still be fine. I'll consider making a patch at some point to make life easier since I like Minor Arcana.
EDIT: You are welcome to try patching it yourself in TES5Edit, but after my round of revisions my Imperial Legion file is much more complex than the initial upload, when I said it would be an easy fix. You'll want to focus on integrating the spawns for the leveled NPC list LCharSoldierImperial, as that's the main spawn list for the Imperial Legion.
Otherwise, if you don't make your own fix, load Minor Arcana after this if you like battlemages and want them to appear. I can't guarantee that female soldiers will spawn if you do that though. If you don't care and just want female soldiers, then loading this after MA should do the trick.
Troubleshooting: I likely will not be able to help with specific bugs and problems, since as I said before, I do not consider myself a modder. Everything I know about making a mod (which is minimal knowledge at best) I picked up while creating this. I cannot help you with your load order conflicts or buggy games beyond what I already mentioned above.
The one thing I can say - in the process of creating this, I had a lot of headless, naked, floating T-pose guards spawn. Hopefully this doesn't happen to any of you, but this happened when I set the count of male guards to 0 while testing to check if female guards were spawning properly. If the body is female, it means the game attempted to spawn a male character in a female template, and vice versa. But in theory I don't think this shouldn't be happening unless you've got a spawn list conflict somewhere that completely changes spawn counts.
Installation:
REQUIRES REQUIEM v3.4 on SSE. I uploaded a version of the ESPs saved as Form 43 for use with Oldrim since it is easy to do so, but no idea if it will work for LE. Use at your own risk. (Guard file will probably work, I'm less sure about the Soldier file.)
Note: I think this is okay to install mid-game, as I created it in the middle of a playthrough, but as always a new save file is recommended. This is NOT NOT NOT safe to uninstall mid-playthrough unless you want a bunch of naked, headless, floating T-pose guards and soldiers gliding around. Trust me, I tested it on my own save.
1) MAKE A SAVE BEFORE INSTALLING THIS IF DOING IT MID-PLAYTHROUGH. This will allow you to restore your game if this mod doesn't properly work or you decide it's not for you.
2) Install using your mod manager of choice (which I assume is MO if you're playing Requiem, but leave a comment letting me know if you somehow managed it with Vortex). This goes after Requiem in your load order. I'm not even going to mention manual installation, since I don't think you can properly play Requiem without a mod manager of some sort.
3) Run the Reqtificator. Make sure Requiem for the Indifferent.esp is at the end of your load order. You need to do this anyway to play Requiem, but since this mod utilizes Requiem's ActorVariations feature, it won't function without running the Reqtificator first. (For those of you who don't know what that means, I basically used a modding resource that ships with Requiem to increase NPC look variation.)
4) Once installed, you'll want to do a full reset of the relevant cells in Skyrim (i.e. the Imperial-controlled holds). This can be accomplished by going to a remote location and waiting the duration of your cell reset time (default 30 days, but can be reduced to 10 in v3.4 Requiem MCM settings). Or you can use the console to set your timescale to something ridiculous so 30 days passes in a second, while praying that it doesn't have the unintended side effect of breaking your game. Up to you.
5) Once the reset is done, female guards should start spawning. Congratulations! Your Skyrim now has slightly more diversity, assuming a bunch of naked, headless, and floating T-pose guards didn't spawn. But I suppose that's its own kind of diversity, who am I to judge?
"It's not a bug, it's a feature."
-Bethesda, probably
TL;DR: Go read the wall of text, you lazy bum. I put a lot of effort into writing it. But seriously, at least read the installation instructions.
Just a random thought, but I think I might've made a good Skyrim dragon with how wordy I am. Shame the Dragonborn probably would've come along and absorbed my soul.