Gah! I spent a better part of the day trying to rid skyrim's female elf population of the "mark of the beast"
Occasionally, when using face texture changing mods, a conflict arises between the stock face textures and the new ones. You end up with either a number of grey headed people or elves with a red or grey forehead with a strangely muted stylized star tattoo right smack in the middle; thus the mark of the beast to which I was referring. Ended up having to uninstall all things Skyrim, including manually deleting any and all left over files, the reloading all my mods making sure to get the most updated version, all 90+ of them. It's worth it though from my perspective. I've played the game so much, that I need to have a ton of new content to make it more interesting.
As for followers, if you don't mind a rather bawdy female companion,
Sofia, the funny fully voiced follower can be pretty entertaining. Just don't put any mead or ale in her inventory, she has no self control.
That said, the mod is very well done and with the work the developer did on her AI, she's pretty darn good in combat, almost over-powered due to her stats.
The Stones of Barenziah map markers are a necessity as far as I'm concerned. Apparently, the reason the didn't include then in the original quest was because some locations can spoil other quests. I never finished the quest until I got the map marker mod, so worth a few spoilers to me.