Fans of the Tomb Raider series will likely remember Croft Manor, with its obstacle course, its grand halls and its rickety butler. Skyrim gives you the opportunity for your nomadic adventurer to tailor her own manor, not just giving them a place to call home, but giving them the ability to start a family by adopting children and to hire various servants to fill that home with activity and merriment, giving your adventurer a place to look forward to at the end of an adventure - or to retire to, should they ever take a dreaded career-ending arrow to the knee...

The quickest and easiest way to start a family in Skyrim is to get this DLC and then remodel your existing house (such as Breezehome in Whiterun) to have a children's room. To do this, I had to give up my Alchemy Lab, but you can always go mix your potions and poisons down the street at the Alchemist's shop. If you haven't bought an existing home yet, you could do so and renovate it as I said, or you can secure a building site and build one from scratch.

In a world where dragons roam the skies and are likely to attack any time you step outside of a building, "safety" is a relative term. However, when you are living in a house in a city, you have the protection of the guards and the walls between you and the world. If you decide to strike out on your own and construct a palatial retreat in a remote location... you'll need to look to your own safety.

The Hearthfire DLC gives you the ability to build huge mansions, custom tailored to your needs, but this is not a free-form building system. Think of it, instead, as a single house plan with a few different options to choose. You first consult your plans, then you move to your house building bench and you determine a part to build, secure the required materials and then click to select that part and it's built immediately onto your house.

The materials required include: lumber and special smithing items, such as nails, iron fittings, hinges and locks. You can make the smithing items yourself, right next to the house building table, as long as you have the materials. It can be handy to build the outdoor smelter, so you can smelt down ore into ingots and then move to the anvil and make your building materials without having to do much traveling. The required lumber comes from a nearby lumber pile, which holds the lumber you have bought for building (including some lumber you get when you buy the home site). Don't worry about moving your lumber around, however, your lumber is available at all of your building sites. To get more lumber, you can either trek into a town and order some from the owner of the lumber mill, or you can hire a steward for your home and have them take care of buying the lumber. If you hire your companion as steward of your home, you can have them join you on your adventures again by talking to them and scrolling to the bottom of the discussion list.

When building your home, you create a small home, first. You can leave it at that, if you like, or you can continue your building and create a much larger room behind the small home and then convert the small part into an entry into the large house.

From there, you can add three additions (on the remaining three sides other than entry room. Each of these three sides can be one of three different types of structures: a flat-topped addition, a slanted-roof addition or a tower. You can choose the type individually for each side, allowing you to have one of each, or a home with three towers around the outside, if you like. The choices for each side, however, are only allowed on that side, so if for example, you want to have an Alchemy table in your house, you would need to have the Alchemy Tower, which is only an option for one wing of the house. This also means that you may have to make some tough decisions, since you might find that you're interested in more than one option that are both only available on a given wing.

Since you have to make some tough decisions when building a house and, as a result, may not be able to get everything you want in your dream home, you may consider building a second home and selecting different options when building each wing. Since there are three different options per wing and three different locations you can build a home (Lakeview Manor, Windstad Manor and Heljarchen Hall), you could build three different homes and have all of the options at your disposal.

There are also a lot of extras that can be added to make your home more "you." You can add a garden and grow your own ingredients, a pen for animals, a stable for your horse or an area to do metalworking - and that's just the options for the exterior. Inside, you can add various furniture, storage and lighting to the different rooms. In the kitchen, you can add an oven and bake a variety of treats, and a cooking fire, for cooking the normal items. There are also a few different types of tables to choose from.

For some extra room to play, you can build a basement beneath your home. The basement has a decent amount of room, with the option to add smithing equipment (even a smelter), as well as an archery target and, if you like, a special display table for religious statues. That's right - now, you can receive blessing enhancements in the comfort of your own home.

Hearthfire brings new (day to day) life to Skyrim and provides something to do with your gained wealth that feels rewarding and worthwhile. If you're looking for room to stretch out, a place to store your stuff, more customization and, perhaps, the pitter-patter of little feet, then I heartily recommend Hearthfire; at only $5.00 USD, it's actually quite reasonable.