In Which the Dragonborn and Her Housecarl Set Out on Another Road Trip

Twitter thread from 5/17/2021, in which Alarrah and Lydia do another road trip, this time to Solitude; in which Alarrah slays a dragon at the Western Watchtower, and battles multiple bandits; and in which she witnesses the execution of Roggvir in Solitude.

And also in which Alarrah’s player learns why it’s necessary to be careful when you’re reading books in a location you don’t own!

In Which the Dragonborn and Her Housecarl Set Out on Another Road Trip, Destination: Solitude

1. Setting up all the furnishings in Breezehome in Whiterun pretty much blew away my entire stock of gold, so it was therefore time for a new road trip!

10:50 AM · May 17, 2021

Dragonborns and their loyal housecarls gotta eat, after all. I was low enough on gold that I was pretty sure I couldn’t even hire a carriage to Solitude, so opted to head along the road this time.

10:51 AM · May 17, 2021

2. And I literally didn’t even make it past the Western Watchtower before a friggin’ dragon showed up. I imagine Alarrah yelled at this point the Bosmer equivalent of “OH FOR FUCK’S SAKE” before running in to engage in battle.

10:52 AM · May 17, 2021

Lydia and the watchtower guards were both pelting it with arrows. Me, I’m still not to the point of being able to switch weapons fast enough in battle, so I just charged at it with the ebony sword as soon as it landed.

10:52 AM · May 17, 2021

3. Cue those action shots I posted yesterday! Because apparently when the game goes into cinematic mode like that, that’s your character doing critical hits. Awesome.

10:53 AM · May 17, 2021

4. Paul told me that in all the times he’s played Skyrim he’s never killed a dragon with a sword. So seeing me do that was something new to him. 😀

10:53 AM · May 17, 2021

5. Cue the dragon soul absorption! And actually, cue two of them, which rather startled me. I was all “wait why am I getting TWO dragon souls?”

10:54 AM · May 17, 2021

Dara said something like that had happened to her in a previous Skyrim run, and the answer to that had turned out to be, another dragon had been killed by guards nearby to her.

10:55 AM · May 17, 2021

Which means that there were two dragons dropping down on us, not one, and it happened so fast that I hadn’t realized there were two of the things. Still though I got dragon bits only off the one I killed personally; I didn’t feel like hunting around for where the other one was.

10:55 AM · May 17, 2021

6. After that, I figure Alarrah was all “WELP that was a little bit more excitement than I wanted to start off this trip, but c’mon Lyds, daylight’s wasting. Hey guards, have fun cleaning up that dragon corpse. Ciao!” And off we went further along the road.

10:58 AM · May 17, 2021

7. Cue general random road encounters. Wolves, bandits. A couple of times, the wolves in question were actually chasing a deer. And I THOUGHT I saw wolves chasing a woman, but if they were, the woman didn’t stick around to be interacted with.

10:59 AM · May 17, 2021

It may have been a deer that I just parsed wrong, visually? Hard to say!

8. Stayed at the inn in Rorikstead, but didn’t do anything else of note there before setting out again.

11:00 AM · May 17, 2021

9. More bandits. I figure Alarrah’s very, very weary of random bandits charging at her when she’s just trying to mind her own business and get to Solitude. “Look, I just killed a literal actual dragon, I do not have time for your bullshit.”

11:01 AM · May 17, 2021

10. More bandits especially at Robber’s Gorge. Hastened past that place this time through, given that Lyds and I were pretty outnumbered and the place is pretty well fortified.

11:01 AM · May 17, 2021

11. Headed north from there, taking a different route than the one that veers east towards Morthal.

11:02 AM · May 17, 2021

This route took me over a pretty neat bridge styled to look like a dragon, which made sense once I crossed it to the little hamlet beyond and had the location alert triggered: “Dragon Bridge Discovered”.

11:02 AM · May 17, 2021

12. Didn’t do much here either, other than noting that there was some kind of official-looking outpost at the building closest to the bridge. It was still fairly early in the day at this point, so on we went towards Solitude.

11:03 AM · May 17, 2021

13. Along this stretch of road, we got jumped by a troll. Took a little bit to find and take it out, just because it ran from us initially after we wailed on it a couple of times.

11:03 AM · May 17, 2021

14. Finally, though, we made it to Solitude! And aside from “geez, this place is big and fancy” (even compared to Whiterun), the very first impression of the place was foreshadowed by the guard greeting me with telling me who I could go talk to if I was there to join the legion…

11:04 AM · May 17, 2021

…and otherwise, to keep my nose clean or else I’d wind up like some poor sod whose name I didn’t quite catch.

15. But once I passed the gate it became eminently clear what poor sod the guard was talking about, because the first thing that met my eyes was a public execution.

11:05 AM · May 17, 2021

Yikes. Dude had apparently aided Ulfric Stormcloak by opening the gate for him to get out of Solitude after he’d killed the High King. The people of Solitude were NOT AMUSED.

11:05 AM · May 17, 2021

16. And I figure both Lydia and Alarrah, keeping well out of the way, were looking at one another going ‘Yikes?’ Meanwhile, Paul said cheerfully to me, “Welcome to Solitude!”

11:06 AM · May 17, 2021

17. I would go into more detail about what I did next, involving going to various stores and getting the Bard quests underway, but it turns out that I had to reset the whole thing thanks to triggering what I felt was an annoying and kind of unfair bug.

11:06 AM · May 17, 2021

18. Went into the Winking Skeever to rent a room. Innkeeper cheerfully showed me the room and left me to it, and I looked around it thinking “gosh this is nice”.

11:07 AM · May 17, 2021

Saw some books on a shelf and started trying to browse them, just because of getting earlier tips on “read every book you find in Skyrim”…

19. … only to have the game parse that as STEALING THE DAMN BOOKS.

11:08 AM · May 17, 2021

Innkeeper yelled for help, guards came running in, and I got hauled off to pay the 2 gold bounty. At which point I figure both Alarrah and her player are going “SERIOUSLY?!”

11:08 AM · May 17, 2021

Because I mean honestly, if the game doesn’t want you actually reading books in a room you paid to rent, maybe don’t actually put books on shelves in there? JUST SAYING.

11:08 AM · May 17, 2021

Because I’m pretty sure the UI presented those books to me as just “Read” and not “Take” with the (A) button. But apparently not?

11:09 AM · May 17, 2021

20. And when I did all my other Solitude things and came back to the Skeever to settle down for the night, I came back to the room and found THREE HIRED THUGS waiting in there to beat me up.

11:09 AM · May 17, 2021

Lydia and I took them out, at which point I discovered one of them had a contract on me, FROM THE INNKEEPER.

11:09 AM · May 17, 2021

At this point I was going “OH FOR FUCK’S SAKE”, not only from the earlier annoyance at getting accused of stealing a book I just meant to read right there in the room, but also from the overkill. Because the books were still in the room, I dropped them out of inventory.

11:10 AM · May 17, 2021

And my bounty was paid. So what the actual fuck, innkeeper?

11:11 AM · May 17, 2021

21. That was annoying enough to me that I reluctantly decided to roll back to a pre-Solitude savepoint and re-do all my Solitude activity, because I do NOT have property in Solitude yet and I didn’t want to compromise my ability to stay at that inn.

11:11 AM · May 17, 2021

22. That previous savepoint dropped me between Rorikstead and Robber’s Gorge, so I had to redo that entire stretch of the road trip.

11:11 AM · May 17, 2021

And it took two tries to get through the Gorge—because I made the mistake of actually trying to search the place’s upper level after taking down several of the bandits. Mage took me and Lyds out. Oops.

11:12 AM · May 17, 2021

23. So went back to the savepoint again and this time ran like hell through the Gorge to get past it, and finally made it back to Solitude (after killing the random troll again) more or less intact.

11:12 AM · May 17, 2021

24. And this time I’m not going to read the damn books in the room at the Skeever, because the innkeeper is apparently really fucking possessive about his books.

11:12 AM · May 17, 2021

About which I kinda can’t fault him, though I do take issue with him putting them in rooms he’s renting if he doesn’t want his patrons to read them. 😜 (I will be checking how the UI presents the books, though, my QA brain is curious about the circumstances of the repro!)

11:13 AM · May 17, 2021

25. Oh yeah I forgot to mention how after I killed that dragon with a SWORD TO THE BRAIN, one of the watchtower guards as well “I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes!” Which, I have to admit, was pretty flattering. 😉

11:17 AM · May 17, 2021

26. And annoying as the hired thugs in the inn were, I also have to admit it was kind of hilarious that my sneak is so high at this point that two of them LOST TRACK OF ME right there in the room, and ran into the room next door.

11:17 AM · May 17, 2021

Lyds and I had to chase them in there. And I wasn’t even sneaking at the time! Lololololol.

11:17 AM · May 17, 2021

Editing to add

1. I didn’t realize this at the time, but what very likely happened when I read that book in the Winking Skeever was that I hit (A) without realizing it, after I opened the book to read it. And the game counted that as stealing. Which I still think is kind of bullshit, just because I could argue that you’re not actually stealing the book if you don’t take it out of the inn with you! But I suppose that’d be harder to code than just checking to see if you’ve picked up an item that isn’t actually free to take. 😉
2. This post was written on 3/18/2022, but is backdated to the time of the tweet thread for organizational purposes.
3. 9/30/2024: Since I deleted my Twitter account, recreating the original tweet thread out of my archived data and removing prior embed code that linked off to that site.
4. 10/1/2024: Additional tweets added, pulled out of my local archive of my now-dead Twitter account.
5. 10/3/2024: Converted timestamps on reconstructed tweets from GMT to PDT.