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About this mod
Craft rare and valuable books for your collection, record your adventures in new quest books, combine your maps and recipes into tomes, and recreate lost books from other Elder Scrolls games. This mod adds in a new crafting system at the Bards College, designed to be highly compatible that will boost your speechcraft skill as you use it.
- Requirements
- Permissions and credits
- Changelogs
Welcome to Bards Reborn: Bardic Lore, a new writing system for Skyrim designed to reflect the reality that books in Skyrim would have to be produced by hand as it is a pseudo-medieval culture without printing presses (unless you’re a LOD user). Books are one of the few things that you encounter and can’t make so I set out to change that after looking at the variety of scroll writing mods. You can make most game books, special tomes from maps and recipes, new books, and even special books written from your character’s perspective of quests!
Crafting Books
At the Scriptorium you can craft almost all books in the game provided you have the materials. The books are sorted into tiers in accordance to their rarity and value. The rarer the book, the most sophisticated and expensive the materials to make them. Additionally, as this crafting system has no perks attached, you unlock more books to craft based on your speechcraft skill while crafting them raises your speech skill. This will allow you make more valuable and rare books to fill in your collection.
Journals and notes are not included in this mod as it makes no sense to me that they would be reproduced. Here is the breakdown of the book tiers and their crafting materials. Everything you need can be made at the crafting Scriptorium so the mod doesn’t interfere with crafting overhauls.
List 0: created with paper, inkwell, quill, leather (no speech requirement)
List 1: created with paper, inkwell, quill, leather,firewood (25 speech requirement)
List 2: created with paper, inkwell, firewood, quill,leather, leather strips (40 speech requirement)
List 3: created with paper, inkwell, firewood, leather, leather strips, colored ink, (60 speech requirement)
List 4: created with paper, inkwell, colored ink, leather,leather strips, gold leaf (80 speech requirement)
Write Quest Books
You will unlock the ability to write books based on some your quests as you explore dungeons and experience special events. These books are a bit vague so that they can potentially be written by almost any Dragonborn and are intended to reflect someone heroic or at least writing as though they are for good PR. There are twelve books for the main game quest line and an additional seventeen books for side quests, adding a total of thirty brand new books. I stayed away from quests that had choice branches or sensitive information your character shouldn’t be writing about. The value of the books varies, but they have no speech requirement tied to them.
The side quests currently covered are: Tending the Flames, A Love Beyond Death, A Scroll For Anska, Coming of Age, Evil in Waiting, Forbidden Legend, Frostflow Abyss, Laid to Rest, Rise in the East, The Affairs of Hagravens, The Wolf Queen Awakened, The Heart of Dibella, Repentance, Blood on the Ice, Dark Ancestor, The Ghost of Old Hroldan, The Lost Expedition, and Silenced Tongues.
Nothing from the DLCs yet, but if there’s interest I’ll add more quests. If you want to write quest books for your favorite quests, I would appreciate the help and be happy to make this more of a community project with further additions.
Price Overhaul
Given that books have to be handmade, the value of books is not properly reflected in game. As of version 1.2, the book values have been set according to their rarity in the following tiers to improve the speech gain and make values more consistent within a rarity tier. Books will often be the most valuable thing in a home now similar to how it would have been in a real medieval society.
Tier 0: 100-150 gold
Tier 1: 100-400 gold
Tier 2: 500-900 gold
Tier 3: 1000-1500 gold
Tier 4: 1500-3000 gold
Added Lore Friendly Books
This mod adds over 150 new books to your Skyrim game from older Elder Scrolls games and some from Elder Scrolls Online. These new books (not notes and journals) are craftable using the Scriptorium. Additionally, some of the books have been marked to be potential gifts for children.
New Merchant
This mod also makes Giraud Gemane of the Bards College a book and book materials merchant. You can purchase books from the vanilla game from him, some of the new books, and materials for making books such as ink, quills, paper, and leather. I based this on his canonical statement that he does scribe work so I felt he was a good fit to serve as a book and scripting merchant.
Campfire Add On
There are two campfire options in the optional add on that you can use to add a Scriptorium to your home or use on the go. The first option is the full-sized Scriptorium as seen at the Bards College which will allow you write all the books. The second option is a book with quill and ink that you can place on a camping table or on an inn table and use to write only the quest books to provide a more immersive writing on the go option. You can construct both of these or purchase them from Giraud and may spot them on other merchants as well.
Clockwork Add On
The optional Clockwork Castle add on allows you to craft four additional quest books based on the events of the Clockwork mod. If you have the Campfire addon installed, you'll be able to make the books using the Campfire Scriptorium in addition to the base Scriptorium.
Compatibility
This mod uses a new crafting station so it will not interfere with the crafting overhauls you may have. Additionally, it adds craftable paper, inkwells and quills which can be used with other mods such as spell research and scroll writing. I put the one in game Scriptorium at the Bards College as it is a location that sees less modification than other places. If you have other mods that edit the Bards College, you will want to load this mod after them.
This mod is not compatible with other mods that modify books as all the vanilla book prices are adjusted without a patch. Check the files section to see the current patches. On the other hand, Book Covers Lost Library and Books Books Books are compatible without a patch though there is some duplication in the books added by me and that mod so don’t worry if you see two books with the same title out in the world.
Recommended Mods
I highly recommend The Skyrim Bestiary by dkdoubledub if you would like to add craftable bestiary books to your game. I considered adding bestiary books, but that would add over 60 books and there is an excellent bestiary mod already completed save for pictures and that mod gives you a bonus against the beast in question. If you’re looking to boost your speech and this mod isn’t enough, then I also recommend True Scholar by Sthaagg which boosts your Speech as you read new books.
Changes 2.3
Small adjustments to the object bounds of books for compatibility and adjusted Giraud's packages to match Bards Reborn.
Future Plans
The first priority is to sort any issues that users find. I'm hoping to add animations into the mod, but that is new territory for me so there is no timeline on that yet. I'm working on making patches for other book mods to improve compatibility options.
I am open to adding more quest books, even from mods, or more books from Elder Scrolls games though I’ll likely do that as additional files so people can decide for themselves how long they want their book lists to be. If you’d like to write some books of your own for quests and send them to me, I’d be happy to have the help in expanding this mod further.
Final Notes
It is not possible to write your own books using this system. If you want to add books, you need to use creation kit and link them to the system. This is a limitation of the engine the game is built on and not something that can be changed. I’m also not going to add spell tome or scroll crafting to this system. There are many great options for those so this is going to stay focused on the mundane so that crafting menu doesn’t become insanely long.
Final Credits
Thank you to lelocrow who created the map tomes and combined potion books featured in this mod. They left permission for these assets to be used on the mod page and I was happy to use their excellent combination books. Additional thanks to Blary for their OpenBooks resource and Oaristys for the modder's resource pack. Thanks to Leodoidao for the new open book textures.
Redistribution
You are welcome to translate this mod and post it on Nexus or Bethesda.net, but it must remain free. You are also welcome to port this mod to other systems provided you don’t make changes beyond that as long as it remains free. Always link back to the original so people can view the full credits. I welcome any modder to make their own addons to the system and share those with the community. You are welcome to use all assets that are not credited to another creator.
Crafting Books
At the Scriptorium you can craft almost all books in the game provided you have the materials. The books are sorted into tiers in accordance to their rarity and value. The rarer the book, the most sophisticated and expensive the materials to make them. Additionally, as this crafting system has no perks attached, you unlock more books to craft based on your speechcraft skill while crafting them raises your speech skill. This will allow you make more valuable and rare books to fill in your collection.
Journals and notes are not included in this mod as it makes no sense to me that they would be reproduced. Here is the breakdown of the book tiers and their crafting materials. Everything you need can be made at the crafting Scriptorium so the mod doesn’t interfere with crafting overhauls.
List 0: created with paper, inkwell, quill, leather (no speech requirement)
List 1: created with paper, inkwell, quill, leather,firewood (25 speech requirement)
List 2: created with paper, inkwell, firewood, quill,leather, leather strips (40 speech requirement)
List 3: created with paper, inkwell, firewood, leather, leather strips, colored ink, (60 speech requirement)
List 4: created with paper, inkwell, colored ink, leather,leather strips, gold leaf (80 speech requirement)
Write Quest Books
You will unlock the ability to write books based on some your quests as you explore dungeons and experience special events. These books are a bit vague so that they can potentially be written by almost any Dragonborn and are intended to reflect someone heroic or at least writing as though they are for good PR. There are twelve books for the main game quest line and an additional seventeen books for side quests, adding a total of thirty brand new books. I stayed away from quests that had choice branches or sensitive information your character shouldn’t be writing about. The value of the books varies, but they have no speech requirement tied to them.
The side quests currently covered are: Tending the Flames, A Love Beyond Death, A Scroll For Anska, Coming of Age, Evil in Waiting, Forbidden Legend, Frostflow Abyss, Laid to Rest, Rise in the East, The Affairs of Hagravens, The Wolf Queen Awakened, The Heart of Dibella, Repentance, Blood on the Ice, Dark Ancestor, The Ghost of Old Hroldan, The Lost Expedition, and Silenced Tongues.
Nothing from the DLCs yet, but if there’s interest I’ll add more quests. If you want to write quest books for your favorite quests, I would appreciate the help and be happy to make this more of a community project with further additions.
Price Overhaul
Given that books have to be handmade, the value of books is not properly reflected in game. As of version 1.2, the book values have been set according to their rarity in the following tiers to improve the speech gain and make values more consistent within a rarity tier. Books will often be the most valuable thing in a home now similar to how it would have been in a real medieval society.
Tier 0: 100-150 gold
Tier 1: 100-400 gold
Tier 2: 500-900 gold
Tier 3: 1000-1500 gold
Tier 4: 1500-3000 gold
Added Lore Friendly Books
This mod adds over 150 new books to your Skyrim game from older Elder Scrolls games and some from Elder Scrolls Online. These new books (not notes and journals) are craftable using the Scriptorium. Additionally, some of the books have been marked to be potential gifts for children.
New Merchant
This mod also makes Giraud Gemane of the Bards College a book and book materials merchant. You can purchase books from the vanilla game from him, some of the new books, and materials for making books such as ink, quills, paper, and leather. I based this on his canonical statement that he does scribe work so I felt he was a good fit to serve as a book and scripting merchant.
Campfire Add On
There are two campfire options in the optional add on that you can use to add a Scriptorium to your home or use on the go. The first option is the full-sized Scriptorium as seen at the Bards College which will allow you write all the books. The second option is a book with quill and ink that you can place on a camping table or on an inn table and use to write only the quest books to provide a more immersive writing on the go option. You can construct both of these or purchase them from Giraud and may spot them on other merchants as well.
Clockwork Add On
The optional Clockwork Castle add on allows you to craft four additional quest books based on the events of the Clockwork mod. If you have the Campfire addon installed, you'll be able to make the books using the Campfire Scriptorium in addition to the base Scriptorium.
Compatibility
This mod uses a new crafting station so it will not interfere with the crafting overhauls you may have. Additionally, it adds craftable paper, inkwells and quills which can be used with other mods such as spell research and scroll writing. I put the one in game Scriptorium at the Bards College as it is a location that sees less modification than other places. If you have other mods that edit the Bards College, you will want to load this mod after them.
This mod is not compatible with other mods that modify books as all the vanilla book prices are adjusted without a patch. Check the files section to see the current patches. On the other hand, Book Covers Lost Library and Books Books Books are compatible without a patch though there is some duplication in the books added by me and that mod so don’t worry if you see two books with the same title out in the world.
Recommended Mods
I highly recommend The Skyrim Bestiary by dkdoubledub if you would like to add craftable bestiary books to your game. I considered adding bestiary books, but that would add over 60 books and there is an excellent bestiary mod already completed save for pictures and that mod gives you a bonus against the beast in question. If you’re looking to boost your speech and this mod isn’t enough, then I also recommend True Scholar by Sthaagg which boosts your Speech as you read new books.
Changes 2.3
Small adjustments to the object bounds of books for compatibility and adjusted Giraud's packages to match Bards Reborn.
Future Plans
The first priority is to sort any issues that users find. I'm hoping to add animations into the mod, but that is new territory for me so there is no timeline on that yet. I'm working on making patches for other book mods to improve compatibility options.
I am open to adding more quest books, even from mods, or more books from Elder Scrolls games though I’ll likely do that as additional files so people can decide for themselves how long they want their book lists to be. If you’d like to write some books of your own for quests and send them to me, I’d be happy to have the help in expanding this mod further.
Final Notes
It is not possible to write your own books using this system. If you want to add books, you need to use creation kit and link them to the system. This is a limitation of the engine the game is built on and not something that can be changed. I’m also not going to add spell tome or scroll crafting to this system. There are many great options for those so this is going to stay focused on the mundane so that crafting menu doesn’t become insanely long.
Final Credits
Thank you to lelocrow who created the map tomes and combined potion books featured in this mod. They left permission for these assets to be used on the mod page and I was happy to use their excellent combination books. Additional thanks to Blary for their OpenBooks resource and Oaristys for the modder's resource pack. Thanks to Leodoidao for the new open book textures.
Redistribution
You are welcome to translate this mod and post it on Nexus or Bethesda.net, but it must remain free. You are also welcome to port this mod to other systems provided you don’t make changes beyond that as long as it remains free. Always link back to the original so people can view the full credits. I welcome any modder to make their own addons to the system and share those with the community. You are welcome to use all assets that are not credited to another creator.