The Gray Cowl of Nocturnal Is a Great Experience Buried Under a Lot of Mazes

The Gray Cowl has been a loose thread in Elder Scrolls lore since Oblivion. The Champion of Cyrodiil picked up the Gray Fox’s mantle, and then the artifact quietly walked out of the story and never came back.

MannyGT, the Italian modder behind Lanterns of Skyrim and Books of Skyrim, spent about a year building the answer and released it in 2015. The 10th Anniversary edition is what I played, and it is enormous.

This is post four in my run through the Nolvus mod pack, where I stop and review the standout content mods as I hit them. So far that’s Sirenroot, Moonpath to Elsweyr and Carved Brink.

The Gray Cowl ran me about 10 hours and I had a good time with most of it. The first half tests your patience, and then it hands you a wide open desert area with sidequests and optional dungeons.

What the Gray Cowl of Nocturnal actually gives you

The quest starts itself. Steal or pickpocket anything at level 10 or higher and you’ll get a vision nudging you toward the cowl.

That triggered fast for me, because I steal constantly for the Legacy of the Dragonborn museum. Which turns out to be exactly the right mindset for this mod.

What’s on offer is genuinely DLC-sized. New worldspaces, a hidden quarter of Hammerfell and an island in Coldharbour, plus a city, a stack of dungeons and three main quests.

MannyGT has said the Oblivion Thieves Guild questline was his direct inspiration, and it shows. The story assumes you’re a thief, though nothing stops you playing it as something else.

I went in at level 60 as a sneak and bow character who switches to a greatsword the second stealth breaks. The mod is tuned for roughly level 30 to 35, so I was fairly overleveled and the combat never once threatened me.

The first few hours are the price of admission

The opening stretch is a run of linear, fairly generic dungeons. They aren’t bad. They’re just not why anyone installs a mod this size.

Corridors, a bit of story, another corridor. If you’re going to bounce off the Gray Cowl, it will happen here.

Stick with it. Everything good is on the other side.

Then Hammerfell opens up and the mod gets fun

Light spoilers for the midpoint from here on.

About halfway through you walk out into the Alik’r Desert and the shape of the mod completely changes. MannyGT has said this worldspace started as a simple linear path and grew into a quarter of a province, which is precisely how it plays.

The best part is that you can see. Coming straight off Moonpath to Elsweyr, where a baked lighting problem blows the sky out to a flat sheet of white, standing on a dune and looking at an actual horizon felt like a gift.

Ben Erai is the city out here and it’s about as alive as any smaller hold town in vanilla Skyrim. The architecture is its own thing entirely and I enjoyed wandering around admiring it.

From there you get required story dungeons, optional ones, and a pile of side quests. I did everything I could find, and the back half is where those 10 hours earn themselves.

I still missed things. There’s a betting and fighting arena out there called The Pit that I never once stumbled across, which tells you how much is packed into this desert.

Every dungeon is a maze and the switches never tell you anything

Now the big complaint. Almost every dungeon here is a sprawling maze where every corridor looks like every other corridor.

You make progress by finding switches that open doors somewhere else in the maze. Pull one and you get no sound cue, no on-screen message, no hint about what opened or where it is.

It gets worse, because the switches toggle. Hit the same one twice and you’ve closed the door you opened, with nothing telling you that’s what happened.

After I finished the mod I read a comment from a player who dropped an arrow on the floor next to every switch he’d already pulled. That’s the trick, and I wish I’d thought of it.

Do it from your first dungeon and save yourself a lot of walking in circles.

For the first half I honestly didn’t mind the mazes. By hour eight I was done with them, and there’s no version of this mod where you get to skip that part.

The traps kill you instantly, then become your best weapon

The other thing filling those dungeons is pressure plates, and they are everywhere. Step on one and you’re dead outright, with no chunk of health shaved off as a warning first.

That sounds harsher than it plays. Once you know to scan the floor ahead of you they’re easy to spot and easy to step around.

Nearly every death I took was my own fault for sprinting down a hallway I’d already cleared.

Then the whole thing flips on you. You can pull enemies across the plates and let the dungeon do your fighting, and that never stopped being satisfying.

The enemies themselves are reskinned Skyrim stock. Draugr get reworked into Egyptian-style mummies and zombies, and it lands better than it has any right to.

Voices, desert music, and orange saber cats

The voice acting is the mod’s creator and his friends, and you can absolutely tell. It’s also not bad at all, and there’s something endearing about hearing a project’s own community in the roles.

Sheogorath turns up, because he always does, and he’s a good time every single appearance. The Coldharbour stretch with Molag Bal was another highlight for me, since I’ll take any excuse to visit the stranger corners of Elder Scrolls cosmology.

The music deserves a mention. There’s a set of desert themes here credited to Grensir with licensed work from Scott Buckley, and it carries entire stretches of the mod on its own.

The environments are sparse. Large empty spaces, very little clutter, closer to an early 2000s PC game than to anything modern Skyrim usually looks like.

They work anyway, because they read as deliberately designed rather than unfinished.

My favorite thing in the entire mod is a gated area full of Ancestral Cheetahs, which you need a special item to get past. They are very obviously the Skyrim saber cat model painted orange with black spots, and I adore them.

What Nolvus and the museum change about it

Nolvus ships the Gray Cowl in its list, so it was installed on my save from the very beginning. That matters more here than with most mods, because the Gray Cowl is explicitly not safe to add or remove mid-playthrough.

If you’re building your own load order, start a fresh character. Bolting it onto an existing save leads to broken quest stages and crashes.

Legacy of the Dragonborn players get a second reason to care, since the cowl itself is a museum display piece. Mine went into a case about ninety seconds after I got it.

I did hit scripting trouble. A portal that was supposed to appear simply didn’t, and I ran laps around the area until it popped into existence with no clue what I’d done to cause it.

The candle puzzle was worse. You’re meant to light a series of candles in a specific order, and mine were all lit already and completely non-interactive, so I used the console command tcl to switch off collision and walked straight through the door.

That’s twice now in this series I’ve had to no-clip past a dead script. It’s the toll for running a mod pack this size.

Should you play it?

Yes, as long as you know what you’re signing up for.

The rewards aren’t the reason to go. I got the cowl and donated it immediately, and the spell you unlock for collecting every journal only opens the two lowest lock tiers, which my perks already covered.

Play it for the desert. The back half is one of the better open areas anybody has built for Skyrim, and the fact that one person terraformed a quarter of a province in roughly a year is still a little absurd to think about.

Where it sits for me: below Sirenroot, which is still the benchmark for this whole series, and right alongside Carved Brink. Carved Brink is the better looking mod, the Gray Cowl gives you far more to actually do.

Go in knowing the maze dungeons and their silent toggle switches are the core loop, drop an arrow by every switch you pull, and you’ll enjoy the last two hours more than I did. Ten hours of hand-built, free Hammerfell is a lot to walk away from over some bad switch feedback.

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Screenshots in this article were captured by the author and used under Fair Use.