Initial thoughts

When I first started playing the game, I wasn't much interested in much of anything beyond wandering around the landscape and dungeons killing anything and everything that presented itself to me in a semi-hostile fashion.  At some point, I started adding mods to make my ability to sneak around and kill things a lot better (if only by wearing proportionally less cloth while doing it).

When the game got too easy being a murderhobo I beat the main storyline, put that character on the shelf and picked up a different one, heading out into the world to do the DLC a different way (magic murdohobo instead of sneakysniper, fwiw).  Yep, that's almost run its course now.

I thought I was done with the game at that point, but I guess I wasn't because I now have a third character lined up and wandering around Helgen.  But this one is different, because I have (probably for the first time since I was 12) a desire to write the story that that this character is living.  So I will, at least for a little while, unless and until I get bored with it.  I know how I want to play the character, and I know game mechanics and stories don't mesh so I'll have to work around that.  Shouldn't be too hard.

This is my open letter to myself to remind myself of why I'm doing this, even though I'm writing bad fiction in a world I don't own, it's still a story that I feel like trying to tell.  So when I look back at this post in a few weeks and wonder what the hell I was thinking...well, here you go.  This is what you were thinking. :)

(Added 10/11/14)

I've always been intrigued by the idea of words of power.  I think that's one of the things that drove my early exploration of the world in a first play through...trying to find all of the dragon shouts and see how they worked together.  The idea that the very language of dragons is one of power, and that the use of those words could bend the world around the speaker was one that I really latched on to.  For purposes of this story, the use of magic by the younger races is going to be tied to the dragon language.  Much like the greybeards, magic users learn to speak Words, but they aren't using the words 'properly', as it were.  They're tying together words to force changes to the world that aren't complementary in the language and by force of will can tie them together into more complex patterns.  More powerful magic users can force more Words together and have learned to speak them more correctly when casting.

The difference between magic and a Thu'um, then, is that a Thu'um is a proper naming of a draconic concept and the power is reinforced by the soul of the speaker.  The power amplifies without needing to be forced, but only if the words are spoken perfectly.  In all cases, the words resist being spoken correctly (both for magic and a Thu'um), perhaps because the world resists change.  The advantage that a dragonborn holds is, much like the game, knowledge of how to perfectly form a word is part of them and further knowledge, power, and language can be learned directly from word walls and the souls of slain dragons.

So, magic is to a thu'um like deep south slang is to book english.  Similar enough to follow along, but really, really hilarious to listen to if you know the source material.  Dragons in this story are probably laughing into their wings at all of the mages.