Overview

This mod allows NPCs of your choice to be able to absorb dragon souls when a dragon is killed – in the same way as the player can. Absorbing souls will increase their shout damage by 1% each time (as long as their shout magic effects have the MagicShout keyword). After a dragon is killed, an NPC can absorb the soul under the following conditions:

• they’ve targeted that dragon during combat at least once (targeted doesn’t necessarily mean hit),
• they didn’t leave combat before the dragon died (if they leave and re-enter combat it’ll be fine, as long as they get to target the dragon again).
  

If those are true, there’s a 50% chance they’ll get the soul.

You may have noticed that I’m also including a vanilla script – this is because I had to remove a notification that appears in the top left corner during the Dragonborn DLC main quest when Miraak steals a soul – otherwise it’d appear if a dragon soul is absorbed by anyone other than the player.


Installation

Install with a manager or manually, and then follow a few easy steps described in this article to set it up with the NPCs you want. You can add as many as you like, and change them during your playthrough with no issues. It only take a few minutes in SSEEdit. If you don’t follow the tutorial, the mod will do absolutely nothing.
If you wonder why I did it that way instead of providing a version with a few NPCs included – compatibility issues. In order to apply the script to an NPC, you need to override their record, which would automatically make it incompatible with any overhauls and replacements that involve said NPC, and require a bunch of patches. My ‘empty’ version lets you add the script to anyone you want, and without worrying about compatibility.


Configurable Parameters

These 3 values can be changed at any point during the game using the console:

• Absorb chance (default: 50%); to change, type in set SAbsorbChance to X, where X is a number (e.g 25, 70; any number less than 0 will act like 0, and any greater than 100 will act like 100).
• Maximum distance from the killed dragon (default: 10000); to change, type in set SAbsorbMaxDistance to X, where X is a non-negative number.
• Maximum number of tracked dragons (default: 5); to change, type in set SAbsorbMaxTrackedDragons to X, where X is a number. Given that you can’t have an array that has a variable as its size, there are three options: 5 for any number less than 10, 15 for any number less than 20, and 30 for anything else. Tracked dragons are dragons who have been targeted by the NPC before leaving combat. I think 5 is more than enough, it’s highly unlikely to fight more than 5 dragons at once even with mods.
  

Known Issues

If your NPCs have dialogue lines that can be used when they absorb the soul and you set them up according to the tutorial, they will have no subtitles. This is because they won’t be actual dialogue, just sound files. I had two reasons to use sound files instead of dialogue in the script:

• The Say() function ended up being buggy – the lines either weren’t said, or the subtitles were stuck forever.
• It’s easier for the end users to set it up in SSEEdit that way.
  

Don’t worry if your NPCs don’t have plausible lines, they’re optional and the mod will work without them.

As for bugs, I fixed the ones I encountered during my testing (I spent way too long making the code fail-safe), but if you see anything strange happening, mention it in the comments.


My Other Mods

• Greybeard Meditation
• Talkative Dragons
• Odahviing Improved
• Ash Pile – Texture Replacement
• Combat Fixes for Flying Mod Beta
• Clean and Improved Mage Robes
• Dispel Magic Effects
• Better Blessing of Akatosh
• Dragon Aspect – Mage Version