In Which the Dragonborn Beats the Drum

Twitter thread from 5/19/2021, in which Alarrah goes after Rjorn’s Drum, located at Halldir’s Cairn, for the Bard’s College.

In Which the Dragonborn Beats the Drum, as it were (cue Great Big Sea):

1. Started this run by doing another pass through the shops in Solitude, and the notable items gained from that were an Elven Helmet to help fill out the rest of my elven armor, and a Dwarven Bow.

10:46 AM · May 19, 2021

As expected the Elven Helmet TOTALLY makes Alarrah look like she stepped out of one of the Lord of the Rings films. I’ll be getting a screenshot of that to show you all!

10:46 AM · May 19, 2021

2. Next item on the Bards College agenda: finding another professor to get an instrument for, and the one I found sent me off to get Rjorn’s Drum, which is apparently famed for being in half a dozen different major Skyrim battles. Okay then! C’mon Lyds, let’s do this!

10:47 AM · May 19, 2021

3. This time the quest took us south again, close enough to Helgen that I rather suspect my Alarrah was not entirely happy about that. Got down to where we needed to be by way of fast travelling down to the Guardian Stones, since that was the nearest landmark I’d seen before.

10:47 AM · May 19, 2021

4. The road from there did go real near to Helgen before it swerved off to the west, close enough that I can imagine Alarrah getting very grim of expression as she and Lyds went along their way.

10:48 AM · May 19, 2021

I envision her not saying a damn thing, but Lyds perhaps making a point of suggesting that they alter their route a little so as to not go nearer that place than they have to.

10:49 AM · May 19, 2021

And Alarrah, who might normally be a little disdainful of Nord superstition, gruffly telling her housecarl that that’s a very good idea.

10:49 AM · May 19, 2021

5. Onward from there. Noticed that the map said we’d be going near Falkreath, which as the astute audience may recollect, is where the Jarl who sent Alarrah the “you seem badass, want to be my thane?” letter lives.

10:50 AM · May 19, 2021

6. We did not, however, get into Falkreath. Our route didn’t go directly there, either, just very near.

10:50 AM · May 19, 2021

7. I was amused to see that this area was much less snowy than the northern stretches of Skyrim, but that doesn’t mean “entirely snow-free”. The lower elevations in the hills had no snow but the upper ones did.

10:51 AM · May 19, 2021

And since the in-game time indicator now says it’s the month of Frostfall (in-game equivalent of October), I expect that the lower elevations should probably be seeing more snow soon too.

10:51 AM · May 19, 2021

8. Better weather in the area possibly means higher chance of bandits, because I did have multiple bandit encounters. One which involved random bandits charging up at us (like they do), and another with a bandit fortification.

10:52 AM · May 19, 2021

Had to tackle that one twice because of accidentally whacking an NPC who was NOT a bandit and I didn’t realize that a Talk prompt had popped up until I hit her. She was a Thalmor Justiciar, and that triggered a 40 gold bounty set on me in Falkreath, presumably for assault? Oops.

10:53 AM · May 19, 2021

9. Not wanting to deal with a bounty, I rolled back to the prior auto-save, which fortunately didn’t set me back too far, and did that bandit fortification again. This time I made it safely through.

10:53 AM · May 19, 2021

10. Found other signs of bandit deprivation in the area, when I came across a little campsite with a dead dark elf sprawled nearby. And another campsite with a couple of dead bodies marked as ‘Refugees’. Didn’t want to loot poor refugees, so I left them be.

10:54 AM · May 19, 2021

11. Found our destination without too much trouble: yet another barrow, this one called Halldir’s Cairn.

10:55 AM · May 19, 2021

(Halldir with two L’s, not to be confused with Haldir from Lord of the Rings! The blond elf y’all may recall is the one in the movies who has the line “The dwarf breathes so loudly we could have shot him in the dark.” That guy. ;D)

10:56 AM · May 19, 2021

12. First notable thing for me about this barrow as that it was chock fulla mushrooms. (Cue Merry and Pippin yelling “MUSHROOMS!” because why yes, folks, I have a LOT of crossover of Skyrim and LotR in my brain, why do you ask?)

10:56 AM · May 19, 2021

Figuring this should be interesting for alchemy purposes, I nabbed all the samples I could find.

13. Next notable thing about the place was a big room with a cairn in it with a beam of magical purple fire coming up out of it. And three dead bandits lying around it. Yikes?

10:57 AM · May 19, 2021

It was not immediately apparent to me what to do about this, and when I cased the place, the only exit available was a locked door. And I had a tiny number of lockpicks. Off to the wiki!
10:57 AM · May 19, 2021

14. The wiki advised me that there was a journal and a key to the door, which I had TOTALLY missed because I hadn’t looked hard enough. Oh okay you mean THAT journal and key, over there on the pedestal! >nab<

10:57 AM · May 19, 2021

15. Once I had the key I could get through the door, and into the barrow proper. Which led to fewer draugr than expected, because the first opponents Alarrah and Lydia found were ghosts!

10:58 AM · May 19, 2021

16. Which could be dispatched easily enough. And at least once, when I triggered a critical hit, I got a cinematic shot of Alarrah AND Lydia attacking and taking down the opponent. Teamwork! \0/

10:58 AM · May 19, 2021

17. Found more puzzle rooms similar to other barrows, but the puzzle I had to get through this time was less complicated and didn’t give me any trouble. Had to backtrack a few times to find all the interesting loot, though.

10:58 AM · May 19, 2021

Main items of interest were assorted soul gems AND a pair of Dwarven Gauntlets. Since those are heavy armor, I gave them to Lydia, who immediately put them on!

10:59 AM · May 19, 2021

18. While most of the opponents in the barrow were ghosts, this is not to say there weren’t draugr. Because there were! I’m to a point now though where I can take out lower level draugr with one hit.

10:59 AM · May 19, 2021

19. Made it to the final room, and the boss opponent: Halldir himself. Who turned out to be a powerful draugr and a little alarming with how he KEPT RESPAWNING WHEN I HIT HIM. Yikes?

11:00 AM · May 19, 2021

And he threw different kinds of elemental magical attacks as well. I started wondering how many times I was going to have to kill this guy, but the answer was “not too many”, as I did actually finally kill him.

11:00 AM · May 19, 2021

20. There seems to be a bug with his staff, though. I’m pretty sure I got two copies of it?

21. Found the drum quickly enough. Also found a locked chest that I couldn’t get into because I was out of lockpicks. >sadface<

11:06 AM · May 19, 2021

22. Went back out the way we’d come, because I wanted to see if I’d missed any soul gems. Didn’t mind taking the long way this time, since it was a reasonably small dungeon and not terribly complex.

11:06 AM · May 19, 2021

23. Once we were back out again, back to Solitude to drop off the drum! By now the Switch was beeping alerts at me about running out of power, but I managed to find the professor and return the drum to him before I needed to re-dock the device.

11:07 AM · May 19, 2021

The professor bumped up a lot of my physical stats this time, enough that I was able to level up to 17. 😀

24. And I made it back to the Winking Skeever to re-rent the room.

11:11 AM · May 19, 2021

On the way in I heard the bard starting to sing “The Dragonborn Comes”, and at this point I figure Alarrah is not entirely sure how she feels about people singing Dragonborn-related songs now! Part “oh wow, is she actually singing about ME?”

11:17 AM · May 19, 2021

She’s not exactly going to walk into the middle of the inn’s common room and go “Hi, I’m the Dragonborn” though!

25. But I can totally see Lydia giving her a little bit of snarky shit about it. Possibly singing “Beware, beware, the Dragonborn comes” when walking into shops. <:D

11:18 AM · May 19, 2021

26. And also, actually meaning it if she starts belting out “Beware, beware, the Dragonborn comes!” in battle. 😀 She’s a Nord, she would totally do that.

27. Got settled and ready to quit just as the device made it down to 1 percent power!

11:18 AM · May 19, 2021

28. Next time: the final fetch-an-instrument Bard quest!

11:18 AM · May 19, 2021

Editing to add

1. This Twitter thread was not actually linked in on the original version of Alarrah’s page! Oops.
2. This post was written on 3/18/2022, but is backdated to the date of the Twitter thread for organizational purposes.
3. 10/1/2024: Reconstructed the original Twitter thread locally, since I deleted my Twitter account.
4. 10/3/2024: Converted timestamps on the reconstructed tweets from GMT to PDT.