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Like every Elder Scrolls game before it, a huge part of the Skyrim combat experience is a vast magic system.
Also, like previous iterations, the spells in Skyrim are divided into five schools that all go about different goals: destruction, conjuration, alteration, restoration, and illusion. With fifteen to thirty spells in each school, the total spell arsenal of a Skyrim mage is already impressive.
However, after many playthroughs as magicka-oriented characters, the thrill of the class tends to slacken. Thankfully, there are numerous mods to pad out the spells list even further and breathe some new life into the mage's routine.
Five great Skyrim mods that add custom spells
1) Odin - Skyrim Magic Overhaul
From the renowned mod author EnaiSiaion, whose mods are colloquially referred to as 'Enairim,' Odin is a lightweight overhaul of all the schools of magic in Skyrim. Unlike Apocalypse, which adds 150+ new spells, Odin is tighter in scope.
It focuses on improving and fixing the pre-existing spells where it feels necessary for balance and quality of life. The mod adds spells that one would expect a school to contain, such as poison spells to restoration and armor corruption to alteration.
It also introduces balance changes to staves and scrolls, making it the perfect baseline magic mod for a vanilla plus modlist.
2) Triumvirate - Mage Archetypes
Also, from the same mod author as the previous entry, Triumvirate adds 75 specific spells catering to five subclasses: druid, shadow mage, warlock, cleric, and shaman. These subclasses are playstyles that the vanilla game does not entirely fulfill with its default spells. Thus, these custom spells pad out these five 'mage archetypes' to fill in the gaps.
These include shapeshifting spells for the druid, mobility and target displacement spells for the shadow mage, scaling summon spells for the warlock, and so on.
3) Portal - Dynamically Placed Teleportation SE
While there are several mods to revive the classic mark-and-recall routine from the Morrowind days, Portal goes about it differently. As the name may seem to refer to, the sole spell added by this mod functions much like Valve's Portal franchise.
With this, players can have two portals up at any two places at any given time. Unlike other portal-opening mods like this, this spell can transfer the player character as well as NPCs from one cell to another, often leading to some fun shenanigans and exploits.
4) Cosmic Spells
Cosmic Spells contains some custom spells derived from the questline mod Spectraverse. While the quest itself had mixed reception overall, the spells within it are considered the biggest selling point.
The magics of the Magna-ge are a series of 18 end-game spells, all lore-appropriate in the world of Skyrim, divided between two subtypes: luminous and tenebrous. With EnaiSiaion's port, these spells have improved visuals, scripting, and usability.
The spells are all distributed between all five levels of expertise, from novice to master, and many of them interact with the core spells, Luminous Crescent and Umbral Orb, for greater damage and control up till the end-game.
5) Chronomancy
As the name might give away, Chronomancy is a set of 30 spells, all of them in the alteration school, focused on time manipulation. It is not particularly a type of magic the vanilla Skyrim attempts to address, thus making this mod essential for alteration-based playthroughs.
Distributed evenly between five different levels of expertise, these spells do a varied range of things with the umbrella theme, such as:
- Overclocking: Supercharges the gears in your crossbow, allowing it to fire at extreme speed for 2 seconds.
Another example is the expert level spell Metabolic Burnout, which slows time to 10% for 12 seconds at the cost of massive damage-over-time to the player's health. True to the theme of alteration, most of these are not actively damaging spells in and of themselves but open up new possibilities and combos with pre-existing player tools.
Note: This article reflects the author's views.
