Character, Leveling, and Skills
Though they are expanded upon in more detail below, the following changes and mods are core to your character creation and are included here for ease of reference:
- Races - Legacy not only significantly changes your race’s abilities, but it also affects NPCs in the world. The race of a bandit you’re fighting is no longer just a cosmetic distinction, but will significantly impact how you approach the fight.
- Standing Stones - Curse of the Firmament overhauls the familiar vanilla standing stone buffs into more interesting trade-offs and decisions. You cannot interact with Standing Stones out in the world anymore, so if you want to change your stone once you leave Nightmare of Lorkhan you must head to the Curse of the Firmament MCM page and change your Stone there. Standing Stone abilities have also been distributed to NPCs in the world, so much as with Legacy it’s worth becoming familiar with these and considering how they will affect the way you fight.
- Magicka - Starts at 10. In the low magic setting of Librum, nobody is a mage at level 1 – however, those who are prepared to invest the time and effort into their magical studies will be greatly rewarded. See the Magic section for (much) more detail.
Librum makes several major changes to character progression, described by the following comparison table:
| Vanilla Skyrim | Librum |
|---|---|
| Character progression happens primarily as you level, and primarily through the allocation of perk points. | Character progression occurs through four unrelated aspects of your character: spell/equipment progression, character level, collected dragon souls, and the discovery of Librum Antiquums in various places around the world. |
| Available equipment and enemies depend exclusively on your level. | Librum’s loot distribution is based on Morrowloot Ultimate, so equipment and enemies (with the exception of dragons) are entirely unleveled. |
| Higher level equipment can be made and improved at any time, mitigating any effect of leveled weapons and armor | Smithing now requires more knowledge than just a perk point; for instance, you need to acquire the Ancient Knowledge effect to make any Dwarven equipment, and Daedric smithing requires uncovering the secret of its construction. Improving equipment is no longer as effective. |
| Available spell tomes depend exclusively on your skill level, but are readily available at spell merchants. | Spell tomes do not exist, by and large, with the exception of select hand-placed tomes. Rather, all spell progression is done through Spell Research. |
| Perk points are gained when you level up. | You do not gain perk points through leveling. Using Souls Do Things 2, you will have a power to convert one dragon soul to one perk point. Leveling will continue to grant you 10 Health, Magicka, or Stamina. |
| Dragon souls are exclusively used to unlock dragon shouts. | Dragon souls have two purposes. They can be used to unlock perk points (as mentioned above), and you will have passive buffs applied depending on the number of unspent souls in your collection. |
| You can level up at any time by opening the Skills menu. | Apoapse’s Advancement, autocalculates stats AND player level according to your skills (and other achievements). Basically, no level up menus ever. |
| Perks are typically straight buffs to your existing skills, and form the core part of your character’s identity. | Librum uses Vokrii to mix up perk benefits and to help balance around having only a small handful of perks; a single perk investment in any tree replaces vanilla’s “20/40/60/80/100%” improvement perks or “Novice/Apprentice/Adept/Expert/Master” perks. |
| Standing Stones provide moderate benefits to an existing character build, and can be changed at any time. | Standing Stones entirely change your character’s make-up, thanks to Curse of the Firmament, but they can only be chosen during character creation. |
| Your race typically gives you a once-a-day power, as well as some moderate resistances. | Through Legacy, your race confers significant passive abilities. These typically change gameplay drastically. |
| You can open your map whenever you want. | Thanks to Helps To Have A Map you must have a Map of [Location] equipped in your shield hand to open the map menu. Maps eventually break the more you use them, and if you take damage with your map equipped. |
In regards to world-leveling mechanics, Librum primarily takes inspiration from D&D and similar tabletop games. The core point here is, the type of adventure you go on changes as you become more and more powerful – while you may just be hunting wildlife at low levels, you progress to the point where you can go into certain dungeons and abandoned forts, and next to the point where you can handle more fantastical opponents: for instance, automata, undead, or otherworldly beings. After that point, the player starts doing really crazy stuff: going to planes of Oblivion, traveling outside of Skyrim, and truly saving the world. The world is largely entirely unleveled, so be prepared to run away a lot at the start of your journey!