The Sinister Seven SSE

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ORIGINAL MOD

The Sinister Seven is a backstory quest line. Seven Assassins are dispatched to kill the player, taking place across several levels. This grants stalking minions and seven intense single duels as the assassins chase the player across the land. It is meant to give an open ended background storyline, along with the feeling of being hunted. I find Skyrim to be a very static experience, going from spot to spot and slaughtering rubes standing around in one spot slackjawed. With this mod, they'll actively seek you out. Now you get to be the prey!

By default, hired minions will show up to chase the player periodically based on time. After level 12, boss assassins will also begin to show up to duel you. Every two levels, they'll show up, for a total of 12 levels to reach the option to end the questline. However, all of these values can be modified in the MCM menu. You can have as little as no minions to as many as ten per spawn event, with a spawn event happening as often or as rare as you'd like. You can also choose how staggered the bosses show up.

These seven duels are not supposed to be easy fights. Hard, but winnable, and hopefully memorable. Each of the seven unique assassins is at least twice the players level and will track them down across the map. They're also imbued with unique abilities outside your normal Skyrim bandit and thus may result in unusual battle tactics to win the fight. Some may be more challenging to particular player archetypes, others less so. They may show up when you're sleeping, when you're exploring a cave, or just on the road. You can try to fight them or run into the wilderness, which should buy you some time, but don't expect them to give up. Eventually they'll track you. Use your cunning to evade and eventually defeat them. Leap off of waterfalls dramatically to buy time, lead them through a series of traps Rambo style, make friends who will watch your back, do whatever you have to do to survive.

Pro tip: if you want total control over when the bosses come for you (or are having difficulty with the bosses showing up at all), set the offset values for bosses really high (like 100 level offsets, scaled up by 2 for each succeeding boss). Then, when you want a boss to come out on the next level up, reset that one boss value to 0 (I found that useful for when I wanted to do other things in the game without worrying about a boss popping on me in Blackreach, for instance). Soon, after you level, a badaz boss will be breathing stinky hot breath down your neck, faster tha