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After playing around with the Afterlife mod recently released, I have been struck with a pretty cool idea. How about...giving the player the opportunity to make their own ethereal prison/space where the souls would go after you chose to send them? For example, through a custom soul trap spell, the NPC will find themselves in the ethereal prison instead of the Soul Cairn after they kick the bucket. The ethereal prison could be located somewhere inside the Soul Cairn, and you could perhaps add a mechanic which would give buffs to the player according to how many souls their personal soul prison would contain. This would be awesome for necromancers. Moreover, you could also add features such as customizing the prison. Magical paraphernalia such as ethereal crystals and plants as well as arcane torture devices in order to achieve various effects, for example. Also, referring to the buffs I mentioned earlier, the power each soul would give to the player could be based on its type. For example, a human/elven soul would give much more power than a chicken soul. Perhaps you could also include the ability to imprison a daedra in this prison (if you also added the ability to influence their characteristics by imbuing them with specific chaotic creatia then that would be awesome), which could boost its power even more. Also, you could have the people trapped inside it to work the facilities too, e.g. have a daedra torture a soul in order to extract more energy for the prison, which would mean greater intensity of the buff the ethereal prison would give to the player. In addition, the mod could also benefit from random events, such as getting notified that an astral projecting mage has reached your prison and is attempting to hijack it in order to steal the souls, daedra have come to lay waste to your base or even the Ideal Masters themselves growing envious of you hoarding souls in spite of them and coming to claim what they believe is theirs. Or even some liberation attempt either by the Vigilants or perhaps Meridia. Or Molag Bal coming to steal your souls and attempting to enslave yours as well. Or Mehrunes. Or Azura getting tired of your s*** and deciding to have a legion of Winged Twilights kick your ass all the way to Moonshadow. But hey, this ethereal prison doesn't have to actually be a prison. It can just be a space where you gather souls of people that you like. Yeah, I know this sounds pretty psycho but e.g. let's say that a friend or the spouse of the player dies. When they die, they will be able to be found in this place instead of being carried off to Aetherius in order to be emptied out of their memories in order to get ready for reincarnation...speaking of which, perhaps by utilizing extremely powerful magic (which might or might now include sacrificing a human to a daedric prince or striking some short of bargain with one) the player could actually resurrect some NPCs from the soul prison/vault. Also, remember when I talked about customizing the prison? If the prison is not meant to be a torture room, perhaps the player could be given the choice to fill it with furniture or otherwise edit it however they liked (afterlife lounge with your loved deceased ones on the one side, ethereal purgatory of doom with criminal scum on the other). Last but not least, it would also be super cool if the player could summon these souls with spells. Not all of them at once, but rather summon either a random soul from their ethereal prison, or a specific one. Or, who knows, maybe also include a power that could be used only once a day which would summon all the souls in the prison and have them all wreak havoc. But this would make the game go blazing nuts on weaker computers, so perhaps not. But the power of the souls could be utilized through spells through some other way than summoning. I thought of using some "ghostly", but not really ghostly spells. For example, a spell called Wrath of the Dead which would unleash a storm of black flames whose damage and/or quantity would depend on the number of souls in prison. Or a spell called Grip of the Fallen, which would cause some short of otherworldly mass paralysis whose duration would depend, again, on the number of souls collected. More or less, think of this as a personal soul collection gallery where you could store souls of NPCs and do various stuff with them which could also benefit you magically if utilized through magic.