I was recently in Riverwood, casting Detect Dead following a Dragon attack to see if anyone had died.

Frodnar saw me casting the spell, and asked me if I could make him invisible.

I was given two speech options, either say no, I didn't know the spell (which at the time I didn't), or to say, "Poof, you're invisible!".

Since I hadn't saved in a while and was fearful of the consequences of making him believe he was invisible, I told him no. He was disappointed, and said something along the lines of, "Oh well, I'll have to think up something else then".

I'm wondering if anyone has encountered this dialog and knows what Frodnar does if you make him think he's invisible.

It is just a random event that happens when you cast a spell in front of children NPCs. Nothing really seems to happen if you tell them they are invisible.

They're supposed to go around trying to scare people.

My character gets this request from kids somewhat regularly. She has normally done the 'poof you're invisible' route. They reply by saying they don't feel invisible. She assures them that they are. They are then convinced that they are invisible and run around making ghost sounds and trying to scare folks. Very cute.

Some time ago, my character learned the 'Fade Other' spell (available only via PC command console) so she now takes the option of telling the kid she needs a moment to cast the spell. Then she does so and really makes the kid invisible (for 30 seconds). From there, it plays out the same as above. She has to convince them that they really are invisible, then they run around acting invisible.

And I don't think it's even possible. Would kinda make sense too, considering that you normally have to know a separated spell of it's own that works on "other" being than yourself.

By the way, detect dead won't detect actual corpses as far as I know, at least in vanilla (it didn't work in my game, unless that was a bug). It's designed solely to detect the undead, so unless someone raises people that are killed by the dragons, the spell shouldn't detet them.

My detect dead spell detects corpses just fine. In fact, I use it like OP to check for unwanted casualties after a dragon (or vampire) attack near a town. I also use it to find corpses after sniping them from long range (to loot) if they are hidden in the grass or bushes etc.

I do use mods, but none that affect detect dead.

So, I did some looking on UESP wiki and found this bit that seems to support detecting corpses as well as undead. http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Detect_Undead

Maybe your spell was acting up? As you say, perhaps a bug?

Thanks for all the posts, I've been too busy playing Skyrim to respond on the Skyrim board.

The day after my original post I realized that even if I did have the Invisibility spell that I wouldn't be able to cast it on anyone. Duh.

Since reading Acadian's post, I went running around Solitude with the children casting Detect Undead, but none of them took an interest.

Probably just acting up, as I definitely used the spell in vicinity of the dead stuff. Hopefully my next installation won't act up like that, that would've been useful. :/