Previously on Alarrah the Dragonborn

Twitter thread from 5/11/2021, in which Alarrah begins the quest through Ustengrav to search for the Horn of Jurgen Windcaller.

Previously on “Alarrah the Dragonborn”:

Lydia: You dragged me all the way to Riften for this?
Alarrah: Yeah, and now I’m going to drag you all the way back to Whiterun! I’m the BEST BOSS.

9:36 AM · May 11, 2021

Alarrah: And if you’re _really_ good, I’ll let you kill a bunch of draugr! OH WAIT, we’re going to do that next!

And with that, our heroines began their descent into Ustengrav, in search of the Horn of Jurgen Windcaller!

9:37 AM · May 11, 2021

1. Only a few steps in, found yet more bandits. Bandits had clearly been camping out at this place using it as a lair.

2. Found a couple of necromancers as well.

9:38 AM · May 11, 2021

Unclear whether they were in collusion with the bandits, or whether they just happened to have gotten there first and made it farther into the barrow! Either way, Lydia killed ‘em all _real good_.

9:38 AM · May 11, 2021

Even though one of those necromancers managed to summon a fire atronach before we took them out. This was the same kind of fire golem that the cultists had fried me with earlier, but now I’m several levels higher and better armored.

9:39 AM · May 11, 2021

3. Which highlights a bit of a problem with Lydia. It’s _great_ that she charges in and obliterates anything attacking you, but on the other hand, it makes it a trifle difficult to actually practice killing things _myself_ and actually, y’know, _level up_. 😉

9:39 AM · May 11, 2021

4. A couple of the bandits we ran into in the lair were actually already dead. Possibly because of gotten jumped by draugr, possibly triggering traps? I heard at least one of them die from a distance, but didn’t really see what killed him.

9:40 AM · May 11, 2021

5. Got a couple of magical items off the necromancers, robes that Paul advised me to take just because they didn’t weigh anything, and they had enchantments on them that I could learn by destroying them.

9:41 AM · May 11, 2021

Conveniently enough, further down the barrow I actually found an enchanter table and was able to nuke one of those items to get the enchantment learned.

6. Honestly, fewer draugr and skeletons than I expected for this lair, so far?

9:41 AM · May 11, 2021

(She said, probably shooting herself in the foot, or perhaps the knee, as she descends deeper into the dungeon…) And they’ve been fairly easy kills. If Lydia doesn’t take them out, I’ve been able to down them in one blow or one shot.

9:42 AM · May 11, 2021

7. Side note: _damn_, it’s amazing how much better you can shoot things when you actually know how to aim. 😀

8. Despite Lydia being a fighting machine and mostly taking out things before I have a chance to take them out myself, I leveled up to 11!

9:42 AM · May 11, 2021

Getting to the point now of having to make interesting decisions about where I want to put my skill emphasis. So far I’m feeling inclined towards Light Armor, Archery, and Sneak, with a side helping of One-Handed and Alchemy.

9:42 AM · May 11, 2021

I don’t know how much magic I’m going to feel like doing yet, but some of the simpler spells certainly seem necessary, so some points will probably be spent there too soon.

9:43 AM · May 11, 2021

9. This is a dungeon that pretty well typifies a phrase old gamers like myself will remember: “You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.” This is a _very_ twisty kind of dungeon.

9:43 AM · May 11, 2021

I did a lot of backtracking through it trying to figure out where the hell I needed to be going, and even utilizing certain strategies I remembered from D&D, like “always follow the left-hand wall!”

9:44 AM · May 11, 2021

Kept having to load the local map to see where I was, as well, and specifically where I was in relation to the symbol that indicated “go here to get the thing”.

9:45 AM · May 11, 2021

But after backtracking multiple times, and making liberal use of the Candlelight spell, I finally got low enough in the dungeon to find how it bends around and finally heads towards where I need to be.

9:45 AM · May 11, 2021

10. Speaking of that Candlelight spell: super useful for “seeing where the hell I’m going” purposes. But not so much for “completely nuking my ability to sneak”. It’s a _dilemma_.

9:46 AM · May 11, 2021

Discovered though that I am by far not the only Skyrim player to remark upon how dark the game renders on the Switch.

9:47 AM · May 11, 2021

And Dara discovered that the current favored solution for this, since controls for brightness are not provided in-game, is to turn off auto-brightness at the Switch-level settings and then gun the brightness slider up to taste. Tried this and it did in fact help some.

9:47 AM · May 11, 2021

11. Which meant I got to exercise my Sneak more, and now my Sneak is up to 47. 😀 And _that_ means I think Lydia loses track of me occasionally! She periodically goes “Huh?” as I try to move past her.

9:47 AM · May 11, 2021

12. If I were writing this as an actual novel I’d expect Lydia would have some OPINIONS about the justice of raiding the tombs of the Nords to find loot, given that she’s a Nord and all.

9:48 AM · May 11, 2021

But as this is not in fact a novel, Lydia can put up with me looting every single burial urn we pass and grabbing whatever gold in there I can find. That house in Whiterun ain’t gonna buy itself.

9:48 AM · May 11, 2021

13. As a Bosmer, though, I do have some serious questions about Nord burial practices. Seriously, you people, have you considered _not_ leaving your tombs filled with the shambling undead bodies of your ancestors?

9:48 AM · May 11, 2021

14. I also have serious questions for the Greybeards about why the hell this horn they want is stashed down in a tomb past the shambling undead bodies of Nord warriors, too. 😉

9:49 AM · May 11, 2021

15. Lydia, bless her heart, is not good at figuring out how to get past fire traps. We found one, the only real trap I’ve encountered in this barrow so far as of this writing, and I figured out how to skirt along the edge of it to NOT singe myself.

9:49 AM · May 11, 2021

Lydia, not so much. I turned around to see her follow me over the trap and it was slightly alarming to see her ON FIRE. Good thing I gave her better armor.

9:49 AM · May 11, 2021

16. Another thing Dara discovered, as I was asking her questions about “hey if I have an arrow nocked in my bow, how can I un-nock it without actually firing the thing?”, was this:

9:49 AM · May 11, 2021

If you’re playing on a Switch and you have the JoyCons disconnected, you can actually use them with motion gestures to hit with your weapons. _Cool_. I’m going to have to try that.

9:51 AM · May 11, 2021

Also, the answer to my question was “hit Y to un-wield”. Excellent, now hopefully I’ll stop wasting arrows!

And that’s about it for this update! Next time, we’ll see if our heroines actually make it to the horn!

9:51 AM · May 11, 2021

Notes

1. This post was written on 3/17/2022, but backdated to the time of the tweet thread for organizational purposes.
2. Post updated on 12/28/2022 to reconstruct the original Twitter thread here in the body of the post, and to remove links to Twitter.