I remember when I first started playing Skyrim on release day I got halfway through Helgen before I found my first rolled up paper and a stick of charcoal and my heart leapt with joy at the thought of finally being able to make my own scrolls. It's something we've never gotten to do in any of the previous games and something I always desired as a magic loving player. It wasn't till much later when I got to the College of Winterhold that I finally realized that my collection of rolled paper and charcoal would remain uselessly in an end table at home in Whiterun. I was very disappointed

Early on as a mage, and throughout the game as a non-mage, scrolls play a big part of the way I play the game. They provide power that I don't normally possess as well as provide me an option for emergencies when I run out of mana and potions. In previous games I've always looked for and downloaded mods that provided the ability to create scrolls because they're so amazingly useful and I was really hoping that we'd finally be able to make scrolls in an Elder Scrolls game without a mod. In every game you run into some wizard npc that talks about making scrolls, and often there are quests related to the gathering of materials for scrolls or testing scrolls effects, it's never made sense to me that with attention to detail for the magic system they never let us create scrolls, or staves either now that i think about it.

I doubt it's possible for a feature like this to be added in an update, but if any of the devs are watching I would love to see the ability to make scrolls and staves added in a DLC for Skyrim. For Scrolls you could go to the enchanting table and imbue rolled paper using a soul gem, the different soul gems creating different levels of spell. Petty for Novice, Lesser for Apprentice, Common for Adept, Greater for Expert, and Grand for Master level spells. The same system could work for staves, though blank staves would have to be added to vendor lists and/or give us the ability to forge staves using Smithing before taking them to the enchanting table. I'm not sure how you'd deal with picking effects, but it makes more sense to use the player's known spells for scroll and staff creation than it does to use their known enchantments for it, especially considering being able to enchant an Expert or Master level of a spell when you can only cast Apprentice level spells makes no sense at all.

I'm not sure if the Construction Kit's been released yet, but if it has I'm sure it wouldn't be impossible to put together a mod for this functionality either. I know it's been done for the previous games in various ways.

Marvelous idea. Mods, hopefully, though a DLC would be wonderful.

I had this idea about scrolls and ley-lines, and how you could only make scrolls on leylines...your idea would probably work better, though.

The elders do that.

Cheers

Why can't we make staffs? Better yet, why can't we make spells? :brokencomputer:

Only use for paper and charcoal I've found in the game is makes rubbings of tablets.
Or rather, make one rubbing of one tablet during a Theive's Guild quest.

weed, need weed to bring ya back from a skooma binge.


In all seriousness, I am very disappointed that skooma isn't much of a drug in this game...

This is their only actual use tho, but given the mechanic is already there, I'm sure it'd be possible to insert other random tablets in places around Skyrim which can be used with paper and charcoal to make some special scrolls and so I expect we will see it in mods in that fashion.

pssst...hey you...yea you...we can make staves
Go under the College of Winterhold to the Midden and find the Daedric summoner. There you can make staves from brooms and spell tomes as well as other ingredients

OT: Yea scrolls sound like a great idea! Hopefully in a future DLC or mod!

Already done that, so you're not fooling me :tongue:

Don't forget there are also ink wells and quills. :wink_smile: Those, together with the charcoal, rolled paper and spell ingredients found throughout Skyrim should make some pretty interesting mods available to us after the CK comes out.

Given the revised magic system in Skyrim I'm ok with not being able to make spells. I thought it was a bit odd at first, but once I realized that the different levels of spells actually functioned differently and the effectiveness of the spells depended upon my related skill I grew to not only accept it but enjoy it. It removed a lot of the tedium of having to make sure you had the appropriate level of the appropriate spell equipped and removed a lot of the bloat that happened in a spell list late in the game. In Oblivion and in Morrowind my spellbook would be overflowing with spells by the time I got to level 20 or 30, it'd take me 10-20 seconds just to scroll through the list of destruction spells to find the appropriate magic to use on whatever target I was fighting. Now there are just 3 or 4 spells in each element and they actually grow with you as you play, you've got the novice sustained dps cone, the apprentice magic arrow, the adept aoe, and then the larger aoe spells from there if you go through the appropriate quests. Most of the non-destruction spells function similarly so there's very little bloat and your spells are always useful, you don't end up with a spellbook full of spells that are outdated.

If there's anything I'd use a spell creator for in Skyrim it would be the ability to extend the durations of spells that I want to keep up all the time so that it's not so difficult to keep my buffs rolling. Armor spells that last more than a minute would be awesome. I've got a favorites list a mile long but only 8 hotkeys and it's frustrating to have to constantly shuffle spells back and forth using the favorites while I'm questing. It's also difficult to tell what spell I have equipped sometimes since the name either doesn't appear on the screen when I equip it or it fades so fast I miss it...When I have 3 fire spells hotkeyed because they all function differently, but they all show the same burning hand effect it's sometimes difficult to remember which one I've actually got in my hand at the moment. I constantly find myself tapping hotkeys to try to make sure i've got the right spell on only to have the spell pop into my off hand when I didn't want it to.

You actually can make scrolls at the atronach forge with charcoal and parchement IIRC. I think they realized late in development they should at least try to include scrollmaking, so they shoehorned it into the forge.

Gotta bloat point :wink_smile:

We can't make staves...?

http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=956

Correction....

"We PC players can't make staves...?"

Excellent idea...dating back three or more games now!

I was actually really disappointed that they wasn't any sort of addiction or drug effects in the game at all. There's a lot of lore concerning skooma and moon sugar and they're in the game but they may as well just be a stamina potion and another type of snowberry. After the fun of addiction and drugs in Fallout 3 and New Vegas I was really hoping Bethesda would take something from those games to bring into Elder Scrolls. The first time I found ran into a Kadjit caravan I was able to pickpocket some skooma and moon sugar from them and was all excited that they'd have some sort of lasting effect and the possibility of addiction...I was sorely disappointed with that just as I was with the lack of scroll making.

The food system is lame too...it's all just healing items with less effect than a potion but weighs more. It's pretty much useless aside from a couple stews that I used for the tougher fights early on, but I don't even bother carrying food in my games anymore now that I'm past lvl 20. There's no 'hardcoe' mode in the game either that requires you to eat/drink/sleep and that's frustrating after having so much fun with the system in New Vegas and all the mods for Oblivion and Fallout 3 that inspired it.

Bethesda really dropped the ball when it came to learning from what they've done over the past decade.

Couldn't you make scrolls in Morrowind by enchanting parchment?

I don't remember being able to, but honestly I never played much of Morrowind. Maybe 20 hours or so on an old console. I own the game of the year edition for my PC, but I've never gotten around to opening it, let alone installing and playing it...

Already done that, so you're not fooling me :tongue:

You're right! the forge right? i thought you meant something else => hand/ring thing :blush:

Didn't got around to that yet => some scrolls, staves and spells => forge.