The Forgotten City is a quest mod for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition. 1 Story 2 Features 3 Quests 4 Characters The first quest will automatically start when the Dragonborn reaches level five, or when venturing into the Forgotten Ruins (located in the far south-west corner of Skyrim. You must help the woman, Cassia, find her brother. Thomas is a tank engine who lives at the big station on the Island of Sodor. He’s a cheeky little engine with six small wheels, a short stumpy funnel, a short stumpy boiler, and a short stumpy.
The Forgotten City is a quest mod for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition. 1 Story 2 Features 3 Quests 4 Characters The first quest will automatically start when the Dragonborn reaches level five, or when venturing into the Forgotten Ruins (located in the far south-west corner of Skyrim. You must help the woman, Cassia, find her brother. Hello all I just got the Skyrim SE for PC and have installed a lot of mods but I can't find the mod for Thomas the tank engine for the SE edition. I have found it for the regular version but it won't allow me to add it. Also if you have any crazy mods to recommend I would love to try them out. Thomas the train dragon mod for skyrim. Thomas the train dragon mod for skyrim. Full blorps ahead! Febreze it away SCORE.
From Disney’s Something Wicked This Way Comes to Square Enix’s Final Fantasy VI, trains have a rich association with horror in media of all stripes. Even today, many decades after the golden age of the railways, they remain potent symbols of inevitability and the brutalising force of industrial modernity. Depending on your tolerance for historical anecdote, you could argue that one of the first horror films ever made was, in fact, Auguste and Louis Lumiere’s celebrated L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, a 50-second long shot of a steam engine pulling up to a platform. According to legend, the film frightened audiences who imagined that the train would burst through the frame and crush them.
Skip forward a century, and trains are bursting through frames of a different sort. One of the video game modding community’s odder recent crazes is replacing characters in game worlds with Thomas the Tank Engine – the ”Really Useful” children’s TV character now owned by toy company Mattel. The first of these highly unofficial mods arrived for Bethesda’s fantasy epic The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim in 2013, morphing its roaming dragons into airborne, fire-breathing locomotives. Other victims of the trend include Rockstar’s top-selling Grand Theft Auto V, FromSoftware’s gloomy ninja adventure Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and Capcom’s flashy remake of zombie horror classic Resident Evil 2.
As you’d expect, the mods are essentially jokes, much like the stoner-friendly Thomas rap remixes of the noughties. “To be honest, the whole thing was spontaneous,” recalls Kevin Brock, game designer and author of the original Skyrim mod. “A friend of mine gave me some Thomas models he had ripped from a crappy iPhone game and asked me what I could do with them, so I spent half an hour replacing dragons. I read the books as a kid, but hadn’t really even thought about the whole thing in years. It was just ’what would be the funniest thing at the time?’.”
Brock had a track record for train mods, but it was the introduction of Thomas to Skyrim that made him infamous. As he suggests, the appeal of the mod was partly the snapshot it offered of an eccentric underground artistic community, where talented amateurs spend years fine-tuning games, warping them for kicks, or adding entire new characters, areas and plotlines. “At some point the collective consciousness of pop culture decided that mods equals Thomas the Tank Engine. By that point, there was enough steam behind the idea (pun intended) that everything that can be modded now at some point has Thomas in it.”
Naturally, parachuting licensed characters into games risks infringing copyright, though many mods are protected by fair use legislation providing they aren’t for profit. “I got in so much trouble,” recalls Brock. “Mattel pretty much want me dead at this point – it’s the reason why the Fallout 4 mod can’t be found on any normal website.” The company unleashed its lawyers following circulation of Brock’s Skyrim mod on Youtube. “It was some intermediary law firm based out of Macedonia, saying how I diminished the brand of Thomas by showing him blowing up (nothing about him violently murdering people). They issued takedown notices on the videos for it. The first time it got taken down. The second time Youtube told them it was covered under parody law, with no prompting from me. So that was nice.”
Legal threats aside, licensed character mods can attract a certain disdain from other modders, who object that they steal oxygen from more serious or intricate projects. “After my mod had generated a lot of buzz, I gained quite the reputation,” says ZombieAli, self-taught creator of the Resident Evil 2 mod, whose works include a set of blocky character models that mimic the aesthetic of the game’s original 1998 release. “I was often called ’the meme modder’ who only made mods for attention, when in fact this was my first ever mod like this.”
On the whole, though, he says that community reactions skew positive, because eye-catching character cameos in games help expose other mods to a wider audience. “Most actual modders understand that attention when it comes to a mod isn’t some limited resource,” agrees Brock. “Sure, more mainstream audiences pick up Thomas-style mods, but there’s never been a case where it’s somehow pushed attention away from another mod. If anything, I feel like my stupid viral joke mods contributed to introducing people to my more in-depth works.”
If the Thomas mods were created for shits and giggles, they can be deeply unnerving in ways their own creators perhaps don’t appreciate. In ZombieAli’s Resident Evil 2mod, the character appears in place of Mr X, a towering, faceless mutant whose approaching footfalls reverberate through floors and walls. Seemingly invulnerable, and able to follow you around the game’s gutted police station where basic zombies can be sealed away behind doors and barricades, Mr X is dreadful enough in unadulterated form. As an anthropomorphic steam engine, however, he’s somehow even worse.
Part of it, perhaps, is that Thomas and his world are innately horrendous, and there’s something horrendous about taking all that off the rails and into a digital space. The original books, penned in the 1940s by the Anglican reverend Wilbert Awdry, now read like an enthusiastic allegory for bigotry and exploitation. The New Yorker, among other publications, has a ghoulish piece of essayistic fiction on the drizzly dystopia that is Thomas’s Island of Sodor, where cheerful anthropomorphic machines are torn apart, worked to death or bricked up in tunnels at the whim of a well-heeled Fat Controller. For all its dark corners and clutching cadavers, Resident Evil 2’s setting can seem almost benign by comparison.
But perhaps there’s something here, too, of the train’s history as a horror trope, now exacerbated by its being transported into an environment it doesn’t agree with. Like the monolith of 2001: Space Odyssey, the Thomas character is an alien presence where even the most revolting of Resident Evil 2‘s undead feel at home in their surroundings (indeed, many were once employees of its unfortunate police department). The engine is too bulky and inflexible for the game’s dripping, jerkily-lit corridors, melting through door frames and corners as it lumbers wide-eyed into the beam of your torch. It doesn’t even get along its own anatomy: rather than moving like a wheeled vehicle, the model is rigged to an animation “skeleton” designed for the original character, which leads to heaving, queasy motions. It’s as though you were being pursued by a humanoid phantom with poor old Thomas rammed through its torso.
Where the train from the Lumiere brothers film embodied an approaching future, heedlessly grinding up everything in its path, this locomotive seems caught between eras, half-born-again. As such, it also embraces the beautiful weirdness of game simulations where “fantasy” games like Skyrim are too invested in their own coherence, too wedded to the idea of making sense. This is especially disappointing, of course, when you’re talking about a horror experience like Resident Evil. It’s certainly comic to see Thomas and chums trundling through such locales, but I think the Really Useful aspect of it is the fear.
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Now that Bethesda announced the release date for its Elder Scrolls Online, we’re sure those who religiously play Skyrim will soon migrate over to the highly-anticipated MMO. If you enjoy playing Skyrim on the PC, then you’re probably already aware of all the delightful mods that you can use to add a little something extra to your experience. But this mod will surely give you nightmares, or at least see trains in a whole new light.
The “Really Useful Dragons” mod was created by Pastaspace and it turns all of the dragons in the game into Thomas the Tank Engine who will breath fire and cause terror everywhere he goes. What makes the mod even more terrifying is the dragon’s shouts have been replaced with train whistle sound effects.
The video posted above is taken from the opening sequence of Skyrim, which is one of the most popular scenes to show off a mod that happens to replace dragons in the game. The sights and sounds of Thomas the Tank Engine causing completely anarchy and terror among the people of the world of Skyrim is both terrifying and hilarious at the same time.
Those who want to experience this mod for themselves can download it over at Steam.
Thomas The Train Mod Skyrim Xbox One
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