Skyrim, fifty years after the war. Free, cold, and still full of people.
Every other server like this strips the people out completely. The towns go quiet, the shops close, and what is left is a very large field you only enjoy on the nights twenty others happen to be in it. Vanilla Skyrim has the opposite problem: so many faces that none of them matter. Thornswood keeps a chosen few. Enough that a hold feels lived in when two of you are online, few enough that you are still the reason anything happens.
Most of the crowd goes. What stays is what a town actually needs: the innkeeper, the smith, the shopkeeper, the guards on the wall. You can buy from them, rob them, and be chased for it.
Getting in is an application while we are playtesting. After that there is no character sheet to have approved, no lore exam, and no waiting on somebody to bless your backstory.
Your character, your gold, your house and every chest in Skyrim live on the server. Nothing is on your machine to lose, and nothing anyone edits on theirs changes what you see.
The Stormcloaks won. The Legion marched out in the first
thaw of 4E 203 and the Moot put a crown on Ulfric's head. He held it for
twenty-six years and died in bed, which surprised him as much as anyone.
The Thalmor were thrown out in 209 and have been illegal ever since.
That has not stopped them being here. The Empire came back in 221 the
way empires do when they cannot come back with soldiers, and there is
an embassy in Solitude flying a flag that used to fly over all of this.
There is a High King of Skyrim and nothing above him. Each hold keeps
its own Jarl, its own court, and its own opinion of everyone else's.
The terms were short. Skyrim would govern Skyrim. Imperial soldiers would leave by the first thaw. The Empire kept its claim on paper and nothing else, which is what a claim is worth without soldiers standing on it. A Free Skyrim, Windhelm, 4E 252
A Nord of any hold. An Imperial citizen or embassy staff, legal and
watched. A Thalmor remnant, hunted by everyone including the Empire.
A Jarl, a steward, a housecarl, a guard, a priest, a smith, a thief.
Not the Dragonborn. Not the Listener.
Not the last of anything important. Those slots belong to the world.
All of it server side, so it is the same world for everyone and none of it can be edited away on somebody's own machine.
Proximity voice in the launcher, not a separate call. Whisper to the person beside you, shout down the length of a hall, and hear the room the way your character would.
A house is locked because there is a lock on it. The key is a thing you carry, hand over, have copied by a smith, or lose to a pickpocket. Anybody can try the lock. Most people should not.
Pay coin to pin up work, warnings, rumours, a shop opening or a reward for a name. Anyone can read them. Guards can tear them down, and sometimes do.
What you are good at grows out of what you spend your time on. Swing a hammer long enough and you are a smith. A few things stay shut until somebody who knows them agrees to teach you. Classes and skill trees.
Go to the hold's steward, pay for the plot, then build it, furnish it and defend it. Land inside a hold means a Jarl you answer to, and the Jarl is a person who can say no.
Every guard is somebody. Bounties, cells and courts are run by the people holding the keys, so getting caught is not a fine and a loading screen. Somebody has to decide what happens to you.
The ones who stayed are getting jobs, routines and errands of their own, so a quiet hold still has something happening in it and somebody to ask.
You need a legitimate copy of Skyrim Special
Edition on Steam. That is all.
We are in closed playtesting, so the first step is an
application rather than a download. We are taking people in small numbers
because a bug found by four people is a bug we can fix, and the same bug
found by two hundred is a bad week for everybody.
Open a ticket saying who you are and why you want in. It is a few lines, not an essay, and somebody answers. If you are accepted your Discord account is what lets you through, so there is nothing else to sign up for.
Two files into the same folder, then run the exe. It installs its own copy of Skyrim in its own place and never touches the one you already play.
One click. Your browser opens, you say yes, and it closes itself. You never do it again.
No address to type, no password to remember. The launcher patches anything that changed and puts you in the world.
Every picture on this page was taken by somebody playing. Send yours in and it goes up.