Development for Heritage 2 has hit a metaphorical, but temporary roadblock, so I release this mod as a concession. My second test playthrough used Rohzima's 'Playable Old People' and I enjoyed the experience, but there was room for improvement and since the mod ostensibly seems like it is unsupported at the moment, therefore I took the opportunity to make my own.

There is but one elder race in the game. According to the creation kit they are given Nordic facepaints for character creation, so mods that make elders playable prime the player for playing as a Nord. The trouble is the game does not treat you as one. Bandits see your wrinkled face and assume you're from the fatherland of Atmora and thus treat you like a foreigner accordingly. We know for certain that the elder race is also used for NPCs we know are not Nords, such as Crescius Caerellius (Imperial) and Jouanne Manette (Breton). This playable race mod seeks to address all these problems by integrating 4 new playable elder races and integrate them as fully as possible, as to not ruin the immersion.

Requirements

Race Compatibility for Skyrim Special Edition: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/2853
A hard requirement for any of the main files. 
Race Compatibility Dialogue SSE: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/17595
A requirement for the RCD SSE version. Enables patches race appropriate dialogue for some popular quest and dialogue mods via FOMOD installation.
Race Compatibility Dialogue Synthesis Patcher: https://github.com/Synthesis-Collective/RaceCompatibilityDialogue
A requirement for the Synthesis version. Enables Race dialogue for your entire loadorder, but you must be comfortable with the Synthesis patcher.

Races
This mod adds the following 4 playable races...

• Elder Breton
• Elder Imperial
• Elder Nord
• Elder Redguard
  

As of 1.0, the Elder races are purely cosmetic, so they will share the same starting skills and race abilites as their youthful counterparts. During that aforementioned test playthrough I manually added an ability to my elder character called the "Ravages of Age" that reduced regen rates, but I opted not to do so this time for easier compatibility with other race overhauls.

You will have an easier time creating your elder character as I took the opportunity to create aged versions of all vanilla human preset NPCs.

Race Compatibility
The mod is built on the Race Compatibility framework for SSE by TMPhoenix. This ensures that the races are compatible with the changes to lycanthropy and vampirism introduced in the Dawnguard DLC. It also means that the few quests that perform race checks will properly identify the elder character as the appropriate race and not break.

There are two options for the race compatible dialogue feature. The first requires Aelarr's 'Race Compatibility Dialogue SSE' and the other is compatible with the Race Compatibility Dialogue Synthesis Patcher. Regardless of which option chosen, the objective is to have the elder's race appropriately referred to in regular dialogue.

Voice and Shouts
A playable elder race would not be complete in my opinion without a change to the player voice. The mod changes the default elderly voice to maleoldgrumpy for men and femalecoward for elderly women. These voices were chosen as a compromise between sounding appropriately old and their similarity to existing shout voices. You may well be aware that shouts are only enabled for the player voicesets, so I decided to repurpose vanilla voicework to enable this functionality for these elder voices.

All shouts are covered, so all elder races will speak the appropriate words of power for each shout, but there are a few ironic differences. Male and female voices have the opposite problems. There are no old female tongues in the original skyrim, but there are some combinations that may not break your suspension of disbelief. The female orc shouts do not sound out of the place with the femalecoward's combat grunts and that means you will have a full repertoire of voiced shouts. 

There are 2 old male tongues in Skyrim (Felldir and Arngeir) so there is enough really appropriate voice acting available for 2 possible distinct elder male voicesets. Trouble is, these voice actors (Paul Eiding and Christopher Plummer) did not voice all the shouts. Below you will find all the shouts voiced by these actors, the ones Felldir is capable of are added for the default maleoldgrumpy voice, and the Arngeir shouts will be used for the future optional maleoldkindly voice.

• Unrelenting Force: Arngeir, Felldir
• Become Ethereal: Felldir
• Dismay: Arngeir, Felldir
• Disarm: Arngeir, Felldir
• Phantom Form: Arngeir
• Elemental Fury: Arngeir
• Whirlwind Sprint: Arngeir
• Dragonrend: Felldir
• Clear Skies: Felldir, Arngeir
• Fire Breath: Arngeir, Felldir
• Frost Breath: Arngeir, Felldir
• Ice Form: Arngeir, Felldir
  

The maleoldgrumpy voice will default to using the maleorc voice for shouts not on this list, they sound just alike enough. No-one shouts like Christopher Plummer does for Arngeir. No-one. The future maleoldkindly voice will be ideal for those roleplaying in the way of the voice and completely eschewing the DLC shouts and Dragonrend.


There may be some issues with some race overhauls. I have a patch for Aetherius right now. Morningstar is compatible with VETERANS without additional support.

The original "Elder" race has been repurposed to being the "Elder Nord" race. Any mods that extensively modify this race may be incompatible.

The shouts voices were appended to the dialogue topics of the quest "DLC2Init". I don't foresee any reason why another mod would edit this quest, so I do not foresee any issues.

Expired3678 - For the original 'Race Compatibility' file.
TMPhoenix - For the 'Race Compatibility for Skyrim Special Edition' and also thank you for helping me with the script.
Aelarr - For the 'Race Compatibility Dialogue SSE' and for informing me of the Synthesis patcher.
StackEmHigh - For the Race Compatibility tutorials
RohZima - For the 'Playable Old People' mod that inspired me to take on this project.
Bethesda Softworks - For Skyrim.

The screenshots were taken with 'Cathedral Player and NPC Overhaul' and 'Harlandson's ENB'.


The Heritage 2 issue I have revolves on my original set of repurposed voice work not being activated appropriately for my new intermediate level shouts. for NPCs. This mod was also used as an experiment for how I could go about resolving this issue without recourse to using SEQ files, but I would rather learn how to use them. If anybody can help me with my shout dialogue issue please reach out in the comments.