Thunderchild – Epic Shouts and Immersion
Thunderchild enables players to create shout-centric characters, adding 29 new shouts with multiple effects. It also includes several buffs that are unlocked by completing Kyne’s tests of faith, a custom Greybeard Robe in several variations, the High Hrothgar Library, and an assortment of buffs and bugfixes for vanilla shouts.
Features
29 brand new shouts with multiple effects.
3 abilities that make shouting more effective and fun.
Learn new shouts by revering Kyne and completing her tests of faith.
The High Hrothgar Library.
24 colour variants of the Greybeard Robes based on an upgraded custom model.
23 Pillars of the Voice to power up your shouts.
Several new weapons and items.
Buffs and bugfixes to existing shouts.
Configuration options available in the Thunderchild MCM if SkyUI is installed (SkyUI not required to use Thunderchild).
Meditating and learning new shouts
Meditating to Kyne
After completing the Greybeard crowning ceremony, you gain access to the High Hrothgar Library. Meditate in front of the statue of Kyne in the Library to gain new insights in the Voice.
While meditating, your stamina gradually depletes until you enter a trance and the stamina bar vanishes. Count the heartbeats and interrupt your meditation when you are as close to zero stamina as possible; too early and you learn nothing, too late and you may summon angry figments of the Voice! You can meditate as many times as you want.
Learning new shouts
Each new shout comprises three words that each represent an “alternate meaning” of a word in a vanilla shout. Through meditation, you may learn the alternate meaning of any word you have unlocked as part of a vanilla shout, gaining new shouts accordingly and upgrading them with additional words.
Favor with Kyne: When you embark on your journey, you are only capable of learning the first word of each new shout in the above fashion. Before you can learn the second and third word, you must first gain the favor of the goddess Kyne. Shouting, meditating and completing quest objectives permanently increases the effectiveness of your shouts (this bonus can be found in the Champion of Kyne ability under Magic Effects) and may grant you a free dragon soul. Eventually, the goddess will allow you to learn the second or third word – if you have unlocked them as part of a vanilla shout.
Note that you can’t learn the second or third word in a shout before you learn the previous word, and not all three words come from the same vanilla shout.
(For instance, the first word of Earthquake is “Fus” from Unrelenting Force, so having one word of Unrelenting Force is enough to learn Earthquake, but the second and third words of Earthquake are “Klo” and “Ul” from Slow Time, so you can’t learn those until you have unlocked them as part of Slow Time and have enough favor with Kyne.)
Hodir’s Notes in the High Hrothgar Library contain an overview of the new shouts and the words they contain.
List of shouts
Alessia’s Love – MORTAL PEACE TRUST: Enter a bond of life with another living being, sharing vitality.
Annihilate – ESSENCE UNLEASH STRIKE: Use gravity to harm enemies or lift them into a black hole.
Arcane Helix – FIRE FURY TEMPEST: Breach an enemy’s resistances or summon raging spirits of magic.
Armageddon – WHIRLWIND INFERNO SUN: Call down a rain of meteors or a devastating impact event.
Curse – MIRROR SPIRIT BIND: Condemn targets to suffer the same pains they inflict on you.
Dance of the Dead – ANIMAL TEAR ZOMBIE: Juggle enemies on your weapon or dance to create shockwaves.
Earthquake – FORCE SAND ETERNITY: Slam enemies to the ground or turn allies into invulnerable stone.
Essence Rip – LIFE BALANCE PUSH: Swap your lifeforce with an allied or enemy target to heal or harm.
Evocation – WIND MAGICKA HEALTH: Shout a spell of your choice or raise a tower of magic to cast from.
Geomagnetism – EARTH SEEK HUNT: Trap enemies in a swirling magnetic field or drag them with you.
Iceborn – ICE HUNTER WING: Briefly deal huge damage or freeze time and set up a shatter combo.
Jone’s Shadow – VOICE LEECH SUFFER: Scout in a dreamstate, undress your enemies or strip magical boons.
Kingsbane – STRENGTH NEVER DYING: Stun or scatter nearby enemies or stop time and blow up your enemies.
Lifestream – STAMINA VALOR INSPIRE: A healing shout, affecting nearby allies or creating healing weather.
Lightning Shield – STORM FLESH STATUE: Shock nearby enemies, retaliate against damage or become invulnerable.
Oblivion – CURSE MIND DRAGON: Overwhelm enemies with knowledge or unleash the power of Hermaeus Mora.
Riftwalk – AIR RUN TERROR: Block spellcasting, teleport to enemies or drag them to you through the void.
Shattersphere – FROST FOOL FAR: Cast a single powerful sphere of ice, or summon a spirit storm.
Shor’s Wrath – HERO HAND DEFEAT: Oust intruders, gain godly powers or sing Shor’s ghost into the world.
Shroud of Snowfall – FADE COLD FREEZE: Summon a blinding storm that cloaks you and muffles your steps.
Speak Unto The Stars – TIME ALLEGIANCE PACK: Assault your enemies from above or explode the stars for power.
Splinter Twins – KILL DECEIVE PHANTOM: Summons the evil shadows of your enemies to fight them.
Stormblast – SKY WRATH LIGHTNING: A single powerful melee strike that calls down Talos’ lightning.
The Conqueror – LOYAL ARMOR WYRM: Levitate those around you or blow up the sun.
Trueshot – KYNE BATTLE GRACE: Enchant arrows with the power of wind or call down Kyne’s wrath.
Wail of the Banshee – FEAR FINITE TEMPORARY: Damage, slay or drain the lifeforce of weakened enemies.
Wanderlust – SNOW SPRING SUMMER: Move lightly out of combat, illuminate the area or cast random shouts.
Warcry – WEAPON CHAMPION LEGEND: The frenzy of battle restores your health, stamina or magicka.
…when you are crowned by the Greybeards, you receive:
Phantom Decoy: Summon an illusion or shatter it to deal damage.
List of abilities
These are unlocked by completing quest objectives.
Storm Crown: Shout cooldown is removed when you enter or leave combat.
Thundering Echoes: The first shout you use in combat has no cooldown.
Way of Peace: Shouts have a greatly reduced cooldown out of combat.
The High Hrothgar Library
Should you decide to make High Hrothgar your home, the Library contains a bed, permanent storage space and possibly a few secrets… (Don’t bring your family, the monks don’t like that!)
Pillars of the Voice
Scattered throughout Skyrim and Solstheim are these mystic pillars inscribed with draconic wisdom. Each Pillar corresponds to one shout. If you have unlocked all three words of the shout, you can activate the Pillar to gain a blessing that improves the shout. Only one Pillar blessing can be active at any time. When you activate your first Pillar, a quest appears, encouraging you to find other Pillars. Activating your second Pillar marks all of them on the map.
Enhanced Greybeard robes
A set of unenchanted Greybeard robes with a higher polycount and the clipping issues fixed. The Library also contains 20 other variants in splendid colour schemes: Akatosh, Dreams, Earth, Harvest, Herma Mora, Kings, Kyne, Moons, Novice, Oath, Red, Rose, Sands, Sea, Shor, Sorcery, Talos, White, Wild, Worms. An extra 4 variants can be unlocked as follows:
Myths: Juggle a victim twice without touching the ground with Dance of the Dead 2 – The Jugglenaut.
Stars: Banish 70 stars with Speak Unto The Stars 3 – Stellar Extinction.
Witch: Hit a victim with 6 monopoles during Geomagnetism 3 – Death Magnetic.
Snow: Detonate 6 enemies with Iceborn 3 – Time Freeze.
Amulet of Mantras
To make it easier to chain several shouts without going into the menu, this amulet allows you to create a chain of shouts and automatically equips the next shout in the chain when you shout in combat. Create or extend a chain of shouts (“mantra”) by wearing the amulet, selecting the desired shout and praying to the statue of Talos in the High Hrothgar Library. A mantra can consist of up to 10 shouts. Unequip the amulet to forget the mantra and start over.
Improvements and bugfixes
Many shout related bugs have been fixed and their effectiveness has been increased. See the Readme for more information.
FAQ
Compatibility with other mods
Do I need to start a new game to use this mod?
No, even if you have already completed the crowning ceremony. You get your reward retroactively.
I would like shouts to grant speechcraft experience
Thunderchild comes with functionality to grant speechcraft experience based on the effective cooldown of each shout. This functionality works with all shouts regardless of their source, but is disabled by default. To enable it and modify the amount of experience given, use the Thunderchild MCM (mod configuration menu, requires SkyUI) to adjust the value of “Shouting Gives Speech Exp”. If you don’t have SKSE, open the console and type set TC_ExpMultiplier_Global to [value]. The default value is 4, but this can be increased or decreased.
Troubleshooting
I meditate to Kyne but my stamina goes down very slowly: Base stamina regen is halted while meditating, but items or abilities that add points to stamina per second will continue to work and may overwhelm the stamina drain, in which case you should remove them before meditating.
TESEdit found several ITMs, do I clean them: The ITMs are intentional. Sometimes the idea is to keep a certain value the same in case another mod decides to rebalance the same shout in a different way. Others are erroneously detected as ITMs and cleaning them will break stuff; most of these are fixed in 1.06 and later versions.
When I return Kyne’s Fire, nothing happens: Firstly, make sure you return it within the time limit. If that is not the problem, perhaps another mod has modified either Arngeir or parts of High Hrothgar, causing reference alias allocation to fail. The only solution is to find the dude who made that mod and get it fixed.
I meditate and nothing happens: It appears that Skyrim sometimes swallows part of a script if its script processor is overloaded. Are you experiencing significant script delays? Also make sure you upgrade to the latest version to circumvent the “ability condition bug” in Skyrim.
