Appearance and Race

When you boot up Librum and create a new game, you’ll find yourself in the new character creation area—the Wanderer’s Glade, a completely custom alternate start inspired by Realm of Lorkhan but exclusive to Librum—and looking at the RaceMenu menu. Before finalizing your race and appearance, here are the details you need to know:

Race Abilities

Race Abilities. Race abilities are given by Legacy - A Race Overhaul, with two modifications. Argonians are 50% resistant to water damage, and Orcs are 50% resistant to earth damage. These are new damage types introduced by Elemental Destruction Magic, and you will encounter enemy mages who make use of them. For detailed information on racial abilities, see the Legacy mod page; notably, once-a-day powers have been supplemented with interesting passive abilities that apply to enemies as well.

There are a few non-ability-related differences between the various races. Importantly, beast races cannot wear shoes by default. In addition to locking them out of certain enchantments (e.g., muffle), this gives both Khajiits and Argonians a higher susceptibility to frostbite. You’ll need to find alternate solutions, like magical spells or avoiding Skyrim’s northern reaches, in order to avoid the cold.

Appearance

Appearance. Next, you’ll notice that the character appearance menu is a little janky for those of you playing VR. Unfortunately, that’s the state of the art in Skyrim VR; to fine-tune settings, you need to make use of the new cursor. In particular, Librum comes with a few hundred graphical overlays for your character: tattoos, scars, freckles, and more. These can be found in the Makeup and Paint tabs, at the far right of the menu. To apply a new overlay, click “Choose Texture” at the bottom of the menu, navigate to the one you want (using the cursor to scroll), and select it. Then, click “Choose Color” and repeat.

The Wanderer’s Glade

Once you finish selecting your race, gender, and appearance, you have a chance to explore the Wanderer’s Glade before venturing out into Skyrim. At this point, you will need to let the automation scripts run for some time until a message pops up to tell you the setup is complete enough for you to continue. Remember to take a look at your MCM settings after that if you want to adjust anything from the Librum default, such as Frostfall, Sunhelm, and many others.

Here are a few things to note about the Glade:

• You will find some starting gear and supplies in the central platform in loosely class-based groups.
• Be careful, as you can easily fall to your death. Watch the ground.
• To leave the Glade, you can cast yourself over the waterfalls to arrive in the major cities of Skyrim. There are also a handful of crystals for more specific locations.
• Once you leave the Realm, you cannot re-enter except by death. For this reason, it is recommended you make a save before exiting to Skyrim.

Birthsigns

Birthsigns. Every Standing Stone can be found on the platform in the upper area for you to select your character’s birthsign, but you can only choose a birthsign while you are within the Realm. These birthsigns are governed by Curse of the Firmament. Notably, each sign has both a blessing and a curse, and the modpage gives you recommended builds for each, as well as a difficulty rating.

Wintersun Faiths

Wintersun Faiths. Tucked in a cave in the rocky outcrop behind the spawn area, there is a fiery shrine which allows you to choose a deity for your character to worship, thereby receiving bonuses and abilities if you increase your favor with them. Your race controls which deities you may choose from to start, but you can discover other shrines once you are actually in Tamriel to worship other deities. See the complete list of deities at Wintersun Faiths of Skyrim.

Daggerfall Traits

Daggerfall Traits. To help assist you in your builds, we have a tweaked version of Daggerfall Traits, bringing the classic traits from Daggerfall into Skyrim via a point-buy system. Find the “Medical History” note on the table near the spawn point to choose your traits. For each Benefit you take, you spend points. To get more points, you must give yourself a Detriment. You can have 5 traits total. Once you have chosen your traits, you are asked to confirm them. Once you confirm, you cannot change them again, please make sure you are 100% on your choice before confirming.

Use the Character Creation hub!

Use the Character Creation hub! To keep track of the immense customizability of your starting build, there is a Librum Character Creation page! There you can find a list of every race, birthsign, faith, and trait, as well as a character builder tool where you can see your selections all in one place. Feel free to share your build on the Librum Discord or Subreddit, too!

Starting Locations

Starting Locations. Once you’ve chosen your traits, your birthstone, and your deity, (none of which are mandatory! Feel free to skip any of those if it fits your character) and found some equipment, you have to choose where to start out in Skyrim. As mentioned before, you cannot re-enter the Glade once you leave without dying first, so choose carefully. There are five waterfalls and five crystals from which you can choose where to enter Skyrim.

Since the fast travel network is much denser in Librum—with several new carriages and boats to bring you from place to place, thanks to CFTO—it largely does not matter if you start in one city or another. However, you’ll want to be careful if you start in the wilderness or (even more dangerously) in a dungeon. Dungeons are at fixed levels, so make sure you choose a low-level one or feel particularly confident. Similarly, different wilderness zones offer different challenges, as catalogued in the Creatures and Encounter Zones section later on. Do note that the vanilla start is completely disabled, so there is no way to start the main quest automatically; instead, you can just start asking around about dragons to people who may have seen one recently.

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