I just hope you'll be able to convey the hundreds of years worth of history in that singular quest, without being overly preachy :3 What's the scope gonna be? How many quests? Are you doing this entirely solo? Too many questions?

Keep me posted

Well, so far, I have outlined 16 Quests for the various characters and for after you acquire the follower himself, some of them are small, some big.

As I mentioned in my post on my website, my thought process was this:

A further example would be that one of my Quests requires a... rare character, one that needs to be explained very carefully, and that existence of his stemmed from the times of the Oblivion Crisis. This means I had to plot 200 years of his family line so the now rare character in question can appear within 4E201. Now, no NPC will burst out with this extensive history when talking to the player, to avoid over saturating them. Instead, you will pick up various segments of the story from various NPCs across the relevant Quest, with the important stuff being woven into the required dialogue, and the rest requiring the player to ask for more detail.

All that background though leads to a solid Quest foundation, that will allow me to maintain continuity while also giving the fans of the series a small shock or smile here and there. It doesn't really stop there either, because events I may describe in this background will get their own items for the player, to let them delve deeper into a rich history. The player may find a journal which would document events from a characters perspective, thus educating those who want to know more detail.

The background itself will never present itself as the "story" I've wrote for each quest in the game, it just serves as a foundation for me to pluck bits from which will make the actual Quests and story that much better

Edit: Yes, solo for the moment, it was only delayed initially due to a friend wanting to get involved, then he became busy so we waited and waited. Being solo I can work at my own speed and get what I done, done!

Cool stuff! Sounds like you've got your stuff sorted out. Are you planning to release all those quests at once? Or are you going to do the main flow, and then proceed to add additional content over time?

Well, all the quests that are currently planned actually relate to the follower and the characters around him, so the 16 or so will be within the initial release. The follower himself has an acquisition quest of course, but you will need to earn the trust of him by helping out the other members of his stronghold, then his quest will become available. Once you have him, there are currently two big quests in writing that will appear at set intervals and in sequence. First of these two, will expand into 4 sub-quests, which are pretty much the size of normal quests themselves. That rare character and his 200 year lineage is for one of those 4 sub-quests actually. The second is slightly bigger, and may be split into an update or a separate mod for him, like an episode. That quest at the moment contains 6 sub-quests on paper, but will require a lot of CK work in regards to adding NPCs both important and generic, as well as building the locations themselves.

A cool side effect of all this background story though, is the amount of standalone quests that could spew from it. Just from writing what I have so far, I can see several great quest mod ideas that could be totally standalone from the follower mod itself! The actually timeline for the entire process was estimated on the website, although that estimation does include that big 6 quest chain.