Skyrim mod adds Icewind Dale's starting town so you can return to the Forgotten Realms

The starting village is a classic fantasy RPG cliché. From Hommlet in The Temple of Elemental Evil to Riverwood in Skyrim, it's no surprise when we start our adventuring career dealing with small problems in a small town. Icewind Dale, the D&D game Black Isle developed in 2000, was no exception, beginning in the frozen village of Easthaven. Now we can go back there thanks to a Skyrim mod of the same name.

This incarnation of Easthaven includes plenty of familiar elements. It borrows the opening narration, as well as the voices of a couple of the locals—Hrothgar, leader of an expedition to a nearby town, and Everard, the local high priest of the war god Tempus. It's also full of familiar quests, some easily missed unless you explore thoroughly. The basement of the local tavern is infested, though it's giant beetles rather than rats, there are groups of goblins and orcs up to no good nearby, and there's a mysterious water spirit hanging out on the shore.

The mod also brings back some of Icewind Dale's D&D mechanics. Magical items need to be identified to learn their properties, and you'll need a party of adventurers, or at least one companion, to join you on your adventure. Fortunately you can recruit someone from a selection of Skyrim NPCs like Lydia and Aela the Huntress early on.

You can download Easthaven from Nexus Mods, and you'll need a couple of other mods installed to make sure it displays all the text of Icewind Dale's longer conversations and item descriptions. Legible Item Descriptions and Dialogue Interface ReShaped are recommended, and Fuz Ro D'oh–Silent Voice is a hard requirement.

Easthaven is designed for level one characters. You can begin it by fast-traveling to the portal to Faerûn it adds to the north of Skyrim's map near Winterhold. It doesn't take long to explore the village and its surrounding area, but maybe we'll see more of Icewind Dale added to Skyrim in the future.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.