The Wheels of Lull Is a Sci-Fi Adventure Wearing Elder Scrolls Armor

Every big Skyrim quest mod eventually has to answer the same question: does this feel like it belongs in Tamriel? The Wheels of Lull looked at that question, shrugged, and dropped a clockwork research outpost at the bottom of the ocean.

This is the fifth mod I’ve written up from my ongoing Nolvus playthrough, after Sirenroot, Moonpath to Elsweyr, Carved Brink and The Gray Cowl of Nocturnal. It’s also the one where I spent the most time wondering whether I was still playing an Elder Scrolls game, and enjoying myself too much to care.

I put five to six hours into it and finished everything, main quest and side quests both. Here’s how it went.

A clockwork sci-fi mod wearing Elder Scrolls armor

The Wheels of Lull is a DLC-sized quest mod by Trainwiz, originally released for Legendary Edition in October 2014 and rebuilt for Special Edition as the Unwound Edition with DarthVitrial and themayor897. It’s a spiritual successor to Sotha Sil Expanded, the old Morrowind mod, and it runs on the deepest cut of Elder Scrolls lore there is.

You get pulled into the Clockwork City, the private pocket dimension of the Dunmer god Sotha Sil, and recruited by the Chronographers, artificial beings who maintain the machinery. There’s a mad mystic, an army of experiments, and a plan to unmake the foundations of the world.

If that sounds more like a science fiction plot than a fantasy one, it is, and the mod knows it. The quest names alone tell you what you’re in for, with a Philip K. Dick riff in Mer in the High Castle sitting next to Up and Atom and Riddling Rails.

The mod wants you at level 15 to start and level 30 to finish, and it requires both Dawnguard and Dragonborn. It also strongly recommends a fresh save, which is exactly why playing it inside a list like Nolvus Ascension works so well, since it ships in the DLC section with its patches already sorted before you ever create a character.

Five hours and a genuinely strange itinerary

Mild spoilers for the places you visit from here on.

The seven-part main quest runs through five large dungeons plus a hub settlement called Lull-Mor, and the variety in where you end up is the thing I liked most. You go from a secret clockwork city buried deep underground to a haunted forest made of brass, and then to the floor of the ocean.

That last one arrives after a failed teleport dumps you in a tiny research outpost on the sea bed with no obvious way home. You get an old-timey diving helmet out of it that looks fantastic, and it’s still the moment I bring up first when I describe this mod to people.

The side quests are short and there aren’t many of them, but they’re worth the detour for the extra gear. I did all of them and never felt like I was padding out the runtime.

The boss fights are the best thing here

Most Skyrim mod bosses are a damage sponge with a bigger health bar and a shout. The bosses in Wheels of Lull are puzzles, and you beat them by using something in the room or something in your inventory rather than by swinging harder.

The mod’s own pitch calls out puzzle and problem solving over combat, and it isn’t marketing talk. Each fight has a specific solution, and figuring out what the arena is asking you to do is the actual challenge.

I went in at level 65 and it barely mattered. That’s a compliment here, because these encounters don’t scale with your gear, and a mod that can still stump an overpowered character is doing something most quest mods don’t even attempt.

Do not walk into a dungeon without your kit

There are four things you need on you at all times: a staff, a sword, the Magnusian Visor, and a special power. You’ll use all four constantly to open the way forward and to solve boss fights.

I learned this the annoying way early on by walking into a dungeon without them and having to hike back out for the missing piece. Once you pick each one up, keep it equipped for the rest of the playthrough and never sell or stash any of it.

The visor in particular is the mod’s flashlight and lockpick rolled into one, and there are stretches where you can’t progress a single room without it. Treat the whole set the way you’d treat the hookshot in a Zelda dungeon.

The Sehtic Security Pack fixes the platforming

There is a lot of platforming in these dungeons, and on paper that’s a nightmare in a first-person engine that was never built for it. Skyrim jumping is floaty, ledges are inconsistent, and falling usually means a reload.

Then the mod hands you the Sehtic Security Pack and the whole problem evaporates. With it equipped, dying to a fall just teleports you back where you were, so a missed jump costs you a few seconds instead of five minutes of progress.

It’s a small mechanical fix that changes the entire feel of the mod. Get it as soon as the game points you toward it, because everything after that becomes much more relaxed.

The dungeon design is the weak spot

The mod describes its dungeons as non-linear and Zelda-like, and I can see what it was going for, but in practice it’s enter a room, find the key, open the next room. The loop repeats often enough that the layouts start to blur together.

The bigger issue is that these dungeons are built from a lot of small zones rather than the large single cells vanilla Skyrim usually gives you. You’re loading in and out constantly, and it chops up the sense of place that somewhere like Blackreach gets for free.

It never ruined a session for me and the boss encounters more than pay for it. It’s just the part I’d want reworked if this ever got another pass.

New enemies, great music, and two very odd voices

Plenty of mods reskin a draugr, call it something new, and hope you don’t look closely. Wheels of Lull does a bit of that, but it also brings a real amount of original enemy models, including a new fabricant race of living machine-mer and bosses built specifically for their fights.

The voice work is excellent nearly across the board, with a full cast covering the Chronographers and the residents of Lull-Mor. The Lull-Mor smith, who shares his head with a second furious personality, is a highlight of the whole playthrough.

Two performances go somewhere strange, though. The Dwemer character and Lord Fyr are both delivered in a bizarre affected voice that pulls you straight out of the scene, and it’s more noticeable because everything around them is so solid.

The soundtrack has no such problems. There’s licensed work from Miracle of Sound and Kevin MacLeod in the mix, and the music does a lot to sell the clockwork industrial spaces.

The reward is the adventure, and the mod says so out loud

At the end you can buy permanent stat upgrades for 100,000 gold each. They’re modest things like five percent extra bow damage, so nothing that breaks your build, and I had the gold sitting around so I bought the lot.

Beyond that there’s no legendary artifact waiting for you, and a character flatly tells you the adventure was the real reward. That would irritate me in a lot of mods, but I was playing with Legacy of the Dragonborn, and Wheels of Lull adds 33 displayable items to the museum with the official patch installed.

Filling display cases has been my favorite part of this whole playthrough, so a diving helmet and a stack of clockwork weapons on a shelf was payment enough. If you play with LOTD, install that patch first.

So where does it land? Not quite Sirenroot, which is still the one to beat, but comfortably alongside The Gray Cowl of Nocturnal and Carved Brink, and a better time than a lot of paid DLC I’ve played.

The lore purists will have a fight to pick with it, since a beam sword and a diving bell aren’t what most people picture when they think Elder Scrolls. I’d tell them to play it anyway, because the boss fights alone are worth the five hours, and there’s nothing else quite like it in the Skyrim modding scene.

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