In Which Ysani Joins the Dawnguard

I had thought I was going to go up to High Hrothgar and check on that Paarthurnax situation in this session—didn’t work out that way. Instead, I wound up doing a few rounds of bandit and dragon fighting at Lakeview, and then went off to find Fort Dawnguard! Because I hear they need vampire hunters.

Highlights

• Play date: 3/15/2022
• Session number in this run: 50
• Shopping in Whiterun with Belethor and Warmaiden’s, bought iron and corundum to make steel, but also locks
• Off to Heljarchen for building!
• Mined two corundum and one iron vein on the way up
• Ran across a bandits vs. conjurer fight; didn’t know they weren’t attacking me so sicced the dremora on them, who took out one of the bandits and the conjurer; one remaining bandit didn’t come after me, so I left him alone
• Did a little hunting, two deer and a wolf
• Made it to Heljarchen and built out more things in the storage wing
• Did a round of improvement on the Blades armor, some alchemy, and dropping off of things, including stashing the Thalmor Embassy stuff in a safe in the cellar
• Boinged briefly to Windstad to doublecheck if I needed to pick anything up; answer: no
• Boinged to Solitude and sold stuff to Gulum-Ei
• Bought all remaining furnishings for Proudspire from Falk Firebeard
• Hey Jordis, you bored? Wanna follow me around a while? Let’s get you better outfitted, shall we?
• Shopped at Beirand’s, Sayma’s, and Angeline’s
• Boinged to Lakeview, and that proved a bit more exciting than anticipated
• Round one: bandits, trio of wolves, and Ancient Dragon, which finally killed me
• Round two: bandits, killed by same
• Round three: finally took out two of the bandits myself this time but never did find the third one, i think he rendered inside the walls of the house again 😛
• Heard the dragon again but i think this time it flew off? Never did engage
• Gave boots off the chief bandit to Jordis
• Boinged to Honningbrew and sold bandit loot to Mallus
• Boinged to Whiterun, picked up a few clothing items to enchant from Breezehome
• Checked to see if Warmaiden’s or Drunken Huntsman had any additional armor items i could get for Jordis; answer: no
• Boinged to Riften; went to Honeyside and enchanted blacksmith’s outfit with smithing bonus
• Slept the night and doublechecked Balimund’s, he didn’t have any interesting ebony armor items either
• Went ahead out the back gate to head towards Fort Dawnguard
• And triggered BEARAPALOOZA, starting with one single cave bear
• Then, all at the same goddamn time, two cave bears, one regular bear, and one frostbite spider
• Spotted fourth cave bear but it didn’t get close enough to engage
• Shot at by bandits not far from entrance to Dayspring Canyon, did not bother to engage
• Headed on into canyon and saw Agmaer headed in, and he chatted at me en route
• Chatted with Celann at the door to the fort
• Went in to hear Isran’s intro conversation with Tolan
• Why yes I will go check out Dimhollow Crypt for you, see you there, Tolan
• Saved for the night

Commentary

This was mostly actually just a general adventuring/shopping/crafting type session, with a conclusion of starting Dawnguard just enough to get the Dimhollow Crypt quest onto the queue. So not too much to say about this other than the play by play noted above.

But goddamn that was a lot of bears just south of Riften. Three bears and a frostbite spider all at once certainly seems to be an indicator of playing on a higher difficulty setting! Makes me wonder how much bigger of an animal swarm might I trigger when playing on the next two tiers of difficulty?

And that bug with the bandits at Lakeview is super weird. I don’t remember this happening to me before at Lakeview on previous playthroughs? So it makes me wonder whether it’s a factor of not only just Lakeview, but what building choices you make when building out the house as well.

Also, it’s annoying! Because those random bandits always come in sets of three, and I don’t get adequate closure if I can’t take out all three of them! I’m all goddammit I want to take out the third bandit, lol.

Language commentary

Interesting terms observed:

• Mort-Dragon: Dragonbane (lit. “Death-Dragon”)
• Canyon du levant: Dayspring Canyon (lit. “Canyon of the rising sun”?)
• La Crypte de Sombreval: Dimhollow Crypt (lit. “The Crypt of the Dark Valley”)

The translation of Dragonbane strikes my eye just because the elements in the name are reversed. I.e., “Mort-Dragon”, not “Dragon-Mort”. And it’s also doing a hyphenation thing here, rather than making it “Dragonmort” or “Mortdragon”.

What interests me here is that we have a prior example of a name that uses “bane” in French Skyrim: Fléortie, i.e., Nettlebane. But I can kind of see why the translators might not wanted to smoosh fléau together with dragon. Dragonfléau doesn’t exactly flow. Neither does Fléaudragon.

Likewise, it’s interesting to me that they chose to put Mort first in the name. Possibly because it flows slightly better?

Next time

It’ll be off to Dimhollow Crypt to fight my way through some vampires, and discover Serana!

And time permitting, I may detour en route to taking Serana back to Castle Volkihar, and go through Deepwood Redoubt and Hag’s End to see if I can get Serana to resurrect that ancient assassin. 😀

Screenshots

Editing to add

• 11/21/2023: Restored missing gallery, and added play date and session number markers.