Well this character has fallen to the fire magics of a random mage, leaving Erik to carry the body of his oldest friend back to Rorikstead to be buried. She also leaves Lucia in Erik's care, hopefully the two can comfort each other following this loss.

Something I thought I'd mention is that I'm using the mod Experience which seperates skill levels from character levels, instead your character levels up through completing quests and basically anything that you'd get experience for in a Fallout game. So when I said level 13, this may be later or earlier then when others would get there depending on what I was doing. It also means that I could max a crafting skill and still encounter level appropriate enemies for the level of my combat skills.

I was going to point out that not being able to take both destruction and one handed makes it harder to play a spellsword, but after thinking about it only being able to use magic to support your martial skills makes for a far more interesting playstyle then just hold down flames while swinging your sword. Most of the difficulty that I've had when trying to create a character has been around me trying to line up Wintersun and my own ideas with what skills this challenge allows. 

I've also sort of ignored the permadeath rule with my latest character because she's taken on a life of her own, and I have a bunch of newly installed mods that my previous attempts failed to use because they died before they could get to them.

It wasn't actually any of the gods that Wintersun includes that were causing me problems. Wintersun assigns each race some dieties that they can pick at level 1 based on the lore for the given race. In the case of my character I wanted to play a Dunmer, Wintersun provides only Daedra as starting Dieties for them which is fine. I then wanted the character to be a warrior of sorts to wear a set of heavy armour that I added with a mod, again the challenge allows that regardless of what diety I choose. I then wanted the have Brelyna as a follower, which meant having at least one magic skill to get into the college (and justify the character joining from a roleplay persepective). When those three things combined it narrowed my choice of diety, but it was still possible. The problem then happened when I died and had to start over and was compelled to choose a different diety so I wasn't just playing the exact same character. So really the problem was centred around me trying to force a square block into a round hole.