Im trying to make part of my quest require you to talk to the Jarl of whiterun, but whenever I make an alias in the quest for the jarl the quest wont work at all (even the stages before the one that involves the jarl)

as soon as i remove the alias to the jarl everything works fine again..

is there some reason why we cant use certain NPCs as aliases or something? even if i just make the alias and dont even use it for anything in the quest, the whole quest wont work (and its set to be active on startup and the initial dialog with a different NPC wont even be available as long as theres a reference to the jarl in the quest)


any ideas?

For some reason it probably can't fill the alias with the Jarl's reference, and if a quest can't fill any of it's aliases it will generally fail to start the entire quest. Now if in the Jarl alias you tick the ''Optional'' flag the quest will know it can still safely start even if it fails to fill that specific alias.

That won't fix your problem, but it will tell you that the problem is in filling the alias with the jarl. Now why that would be... I'm not sure, but quest aliases seem a bit weird to me sometimes to. I think if he's already in use by another quest he can't fill the alias in your quest at the same time or something like that, but that doesn't seem to always be true either in my experience, just some times... aliases are just a bit weird

ya what i gathered was that you have to tick the 'allow reserved' checkbox to use references that are reserved in other quests or some such, but I thought i read on the ck wiki that quests that start active automatically use the 'allow reserved' option to allow this (as that checkbox is greyed out in the alias window options) but doesnt seem to be helping me any..

guess I'll just try to find another NPC in whiterun that has some position of authority to fit in with the quest.

I originally tried to use commander caius who is like in charge of the guards or something like that, but he's missing from my game for some reason. If i use player.moveto to get to him it just puts me out in the wild with no npcs around and trying 'resurrect' (even tho i believe he's supposed to be essential) or 'enable' on caius's ID doesnt do anything for me so idk where the guy is, hence why I tried to use the jarl instead.. but I guess I'll have to move onto trying someone else..

but maybe i should start a new save or something, after the civil war quest line i noticed alot of NPCs disappeared and alot of others just act strange and are found in the totally wrong places (like for example, several of the main whiterun npcs now just wander around aimlessly in the wild or in other cities, and some shops and vendors have really strange hours now.. like the vendors at those stands in the whiterun market are usually not there during the day but they'll be there selling stuff in the middle of the night)

well i found a way around this..

just had to set the quest to not start active and then i can check the 'allow reserved' option for the jarl alias and it works fine.. Ill just have to start the quest up a different way which will be easier then fighting with the jarl alias

I was stuck with the exact same issue in my quest mod (Orgnar instead of the Jarl). I suspected something about the aliases and being reserved but wasn't really able to pinpoint the real problem. Your workaround works and in my case I used the Change Location Event to start my quest (there's a bit on this around 9' in tutorial http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qfcet5hf5bs). It works perfectly well.

So I guess this workaround is particularly useful when aliasing existing NPCs

Thanks for this !