In Which Shenner Kills Dragons and Quests for Daedric Princes

Very eventful session, in which Shenner killed not one, not two, but three dragons, and finished a total of three Daedric quests! Most notably: I have Dawnbreaker. \0/

Highlights

• Play date: 5/26/2022
• Session number in this run: 9
• Picked up at Rimerock Burrow; hoofed it from there over towards Kilkreath
• Dragon on the way! Pretty sure I saw Lydia throw the line “I’m not staying around here to fight a dragon”?
• Made it safely to Kilkreath and started running the place; see commentary below
• Leveled up to 13 partway through; took Health bump; went ahead and spent both pending perks, took Novice perks for Alteration and Conjuration
• Fast traveled to Haemar’s Shame and zipped through there to give Barbas and the Rueful Axe back to Vile
• Fast traveled to Whiterun; did some selling, enough to get unburdened
• Went to Dragonsreach and bought all the furnishings for Breezehome! Ducked in to retrieve all the things I’d stashed in the chest there
• Did another round of selling and organizing of stuff, then fast traveled to Hendraheim
• Dropped off a full set of silver armor and Malkoran’s necromancer robes onto a couple of the mannequins; put the sapphire dragon claw on the shelf in the trophy room
• Grabbed the scaled armor Eydvina had been wearing, because I realized hey, bug fix patch = I can actually improve horned scaled armor
• Boinged back to Western Watchtower; another dragon! Saw it land and start hassling the Khajiit, so ran over to engage it in battle; between the Khajiit, Lyds, and Whiterun guards, got the dragon killed
• Sold Ri’saad a lot of what I was carrying
• Headed into Whiterun and bought enough corundum to get that entire armor set improved up
• Leveled up to 14; took Magicka bump; took Elven Smithing perk
• Sold dragon bits to Arcadia
• Boinged to Falkreath with intent to try to run the favor quests to become thane, but first got a bounty from the innkeeper to kill the dragon at Ancient’s Ascent
• Found the unmarked burned-out cabin location on the way, a place I’d seen before on a prior playthrough
• Cut through Bonechill Passage; killed a wolf and a snow bear
• Emerged by Ancient’s Ascent and took out the dragon; got the word for Animal Allegiance Shout
• Boinged back to Falkreath
• Got Thadgeir’s quest to drop off the ashes; gave the ashes to Runil and got the quest for his journal, which happened to be in Bloated Man’s Grotto, so okay then guess I’m running Ill Met By Moonlight!
• Did that, talked to Sinding, he escaped; went and killed the stag not far from Pinewatch; got hircine’s directive to take out Sinding
• Made it to Bloated Man’s Grotto; decided to follow Hircine’s directive this time too; got Runil’s journal out of the chest part way through, and got the Savior’s Hide
• Boinged back to Falkreath and gave Runil his journal
• Picked a few cabbages and sold them to Mathies; feels weird selling him his own cabbages but okay I’m supposedly helping him gather his crops, so whatever works 🙂
• Spotted asshole mill owner Bolund and yep he’s a lot nicer to Nords, go fig, also I am not a son of Skyrim, you oblivious git
• Reported to the Jarl that I’d helped his people, got made thane
• HI RAYYA! Sorry I don’t have a house for you to go be housecarl of yet, I’ll work on that
• Boinged to Whiterun for a bit of selling and smithing; made some elven arrows since I had firewood I’d chopped in Falkreath, and a moonstone ingot found in the grotto
• Bought a Dwarven warhammer and an ingot to improve it, gave the warhammer to Lydia
• Bought another moonstone ingot off of Belethor
• Boinged to Hendraheim to drop off stuff; put the Leather Scout armor on a mannequin; dropped off assorted building materials in the chest by the forge outside the house
• Decided to go hunt down the zombie ritual site; boinged to Helgen as nearest fast travel marker; found Fort Neugrad while I was hunting for the spot
• Killed about 8-10 zombies; kind of like fresher, pinker draugr, but without armor, ew; they dropped Mort Flesh; nabbed the various weapons they were carrying as well
• Dead necromancers also at the ritual site and copies of Conjure Zombie spellbooks, and a journal that basically went I WILL HAVE AN ARMY OF ZOMBIES TAKE OVER SKYRIM I SEE NO WAY THIS PLAN CAN GO WRONG
• Once I cleared the place, boinged back to Whiterun; sold the weaponry and the extra copies of the spellbooks
• Experimented with the Mort Flesh and identified at least a couple of things it’s an ingredient for
• Bought more moonstone so I could boing to Hendraheim and make more elven arrows
• And, yet another dragon!
• Boinged back to Whiterun and sold a few things to Elrindir
• Saved for the night

Commentary

I am not a hundred percent sure of this, but I’m pretty sure that during at least two of the dragon battles in this session, I heard Lydia throw the line “I’m not staying around here to fight a dragon.”

Which struck me as weird. Lydia, hon, you’re my housecarl. Sworn to defend me and all I own with your life, right? So if I’m fighting a dragon, what does that mean you ought to be doing? JUST SAYING.

So I’m now real curious about how that line gets triggered. And I’m also not a hundred percent sure it was Lydia that did it, either, mind you. Both times, the subtitle went by so fast that I wasn’t entirely sure it was her. But the first dragon battle, going to Kilkreath, I thought she was the only NPC in the immediate vicinity. It’s possible a hunter might have shown up, but if so, I didn’t see them.

Likewise, the second time it happened was the dragon that landed to hassle the Khajiit by Whiterun. At which point there were a lot of NPCs in the vicinity. So again, not a hundred percent sure it was Lydia.

I’ll have to see if this happens again. This is behavior I’ve never seen playing on the Switch, so I suppose it’s certainly possible something got introduced by the Unofficial Skyrim Special Edition Patch? I haven’t been able to find any good documentation on who says that line when, though.

Aside from that, the first major action of this session was running Kilkreath and getting Dawnbreaker. \0/ Which had several notable aspects to it:

1. This is now my record for how early in the game I’ve gotten Dawnbreaker, as Shenner was level 13 at the time
2. Barbas never disappeared on me in Kilkreath like he did with Faanshi, though this may also be aided by how I tried to make a point of waiting for him and Lydia to catch up with me if I got ahead of them
3. First sighting of amber, as I found some in the boss chest on the Kilkreath balcony!
4. Even though I threw the flame atronach into the boss chamber, by definition I could not trigger the double Dawnbreaker bug! Because that got fixed in the USSEP!
5. Was able to actually find and loot Malkoran’s corpse, and he had a) necromancer gear I’d never seen before, and b) a spell for summoning a skeleton minion
6. When Meridia teleported me out of the temple, Barbas and Lydia actually came with me, so apparently this is also fixed in the bugfix patch?

Round one of visiting Hendraheim helped me figure out that even though there are named shelves, armor racks, and weapons racks for assorted interesting artifacts, there is not any place to put the Masque of Clavicus Vile. Which I suppose is an indicator of how few fucks anybody gives about the Masque of Clavicus Vile? 😉

Next new action in this session was running the Plague of the Dead plot, which was easier than I expected. All that I really needed to do there was show up at the ritual site, where I found a few dead necromancers and several mobile zombies.

I am not sure whether adding zombies to Skyrim actually brings much to the game. As I noted above, they are basically fresher, pinker draugr. Without armor. I don’t imagine I’m going to actually conjure me up some zombies any time soon, since historically necromancy has not been a thing I’ve done in Skyrim playthroughs so far. So mostly, running this plot’s major result appears to be “I’ll periodically have random zombies show up to bother me”.

I am totally amused by the necromancer’s journal that was basically all “I WILL TAKE OVER SKYRIM WITH MY ZOMBIE ARMY, HERE, HOLD MY BEER”. Because that does seem to be the mindset of every single batshit mage in the game, LOL.

Sidebar: it is arguably dodgy to sell copies of Conjure Zombie spellbooks to Belethor. On the other hand, I’d feel kind of dodgy selling them to the College of Winterhold, too! The college isn’t exactly fond of necromancy! And there’s not really much I can do with extra copies of spellbooks except sell them to somebody. There is no mechanism for destroying a book or blanking it out to use it for something else.

Round three of visiting Hendraheim (since round two was very short) had this as its major aspect: not only fighting a dragon, but also discovering that the house is literally right next door to Lost Valley Redoubt. And, I’m pretty sure Fort Sungard is the fort I’ve got a view of off in another direction. So in other words, surrounded by bandits and Forsworn and a frigging dragon burial mound.

I look at Hendraheim’s page on the wiki, where it talks about how followers and/or children may sometimes refuse to enter the place, and all I can think of is “Shit, it’s surrounded by Forsworn and bandits, who the hell wants to live here to begin with?” The place looks neat inside, but from a purely in-character standpoint, I got real issues with the security of its location!

Next time

I think I’m to a good place where I can go run Bard’s College with this alt, so that’s likely to be next.

I’m still pondering what I want to do in terms of factions to join, as well. I was tempted to join the Stormcloaks, but as I’d mentioned, I have a hard time as a player with the idea of having to invade Whiterun and depose Balgruuf.

But also just as importantly: it occurred to me that the various big battles you have to do for the war could be hard on my PC. I struggle to get decent frame rates as it is, and combat with one or two opponents is a little tough. I figure any of the forts you have to clear, or for that matter the battles for Whiterun and Windhelm, would be arguably too big a hit on my poor machine’s ability to cope.

So I think I’ll have to forgo running the war with her at all.

And I gotta admit that I’m tempted to run the Thieves Guild with her just to get access to Shadowfoot Sanctum, but I’m not sure I want to be running the Thieves Guild with her while I’m also doing it with Faanshi.

I need to think more about this, and see if I can come up with a narrative that makes sense.

For now though, Bard’s College will definitely be next.

Screenshots

No screenshots this time. I took some, but discovered that if I kick my graphics settings down to the “Poor” tier provided by the BethINI tool, it seems to have an adverse effect on how third person view looks. My character is still fairly high res but the backgrounds are not so much, which makes her look like she’s in front of a bad green screen. So I may need to kick back to Low and just put up with poor frame rates.

I’ll experiment with this more and see if I can at least get better screenshots next time.

Editing to add

• 11/22/2023: Added play date and session number markers.