In Which Gyllerah Goes Hunting for a Vampire Lord

A bunch of my recent posts for Gyllerah have been multi-session ones, but this one is just for a single session, which I want to go ahead and get out of my queue. So here’s her play on the 23rd, featuring the Signal Fire Sprint, not one but two harrowstorms, and an unsuccessful hunt for a vampire lord!

Play by play

• Play date: 12/23/2022
• Session number in this run: 78
• Ran writs
• Boinged to Kynesgrove to pick up another round of New Life Festival questing
• Boinged to Alik’r Desert to visit Bergama for the Signal Fire Sprint event
• Had to figure out how to run all four signal fires quickly; answer, hitting my button mapped to shift so I could sprint
• Got the festival box for that, then decided to try to run the rest of the Bloody Reunion quest
• Got sidetracked to Windhelm and then Skywatch trying to remember where the hell to go, but then finally went “derp right Western Skyrim”
• Used Skywatch Wayshrine to boing to Dragon Bridge Wayshrine, and headed towards Mel
• Hit a harrowstorm on the way
• Also killed assorted critters, and spotted vampiric sabre cats o.O
• Made it to Mel and got his update for where to go next, and the backstory on who exactly the Pale Worm is
• Met him at the proper site, where he opened a portal that led into Blackreach
• Got sidetracked down there too by a bigger harrowstorm–which, harrowstorms can happen in Blackreach, apparently? :O
• However, discovered the end of the questline appears glitchy; could not get the Pale Worm boss to spawn; see below
• Boinged back to Alinor for inventory management
• Logged off for the night

Commentary

Of the various events in the New Life Festival, I think I rather liked the Signal Fire Sprint. I was prepared to be irritated by it, just because it was another timed puzzle–and see my previous commentary re: not liking timed puzzles. This one, though, turned out to be one I was able to solve just by hitting the controller button I’d mapped to the Shift key, so that I could do a proper sprint.

Plus, I just liked the character Aubatha, and her presentation of the story of Zoreh. I’m a little sad this character is only around during the festival! But I’m now more intrigued by the prospect of visiting the Alik’r Desert in depth.

After that, I wanted to try to spend some time with at least one of my queued up quests, so I opted to try to finish up Bloody Reunion. This took me a little bit to get started properly, though, because for the life of me I couldn’t figure out where the hell the quest markers wanted me to go. I had a couple of false starts before I finally remembered, derp, Western Skyrim.

But even after getting there, I was sidetracked by a harrowstorm. And I don’t know if this is objectively true or not, but so far I feel like fighting a harrowstorm seems harder than fighting a Dark Anchor. Because I die a whole bunch when fighting harrowstorms. I should keep closer track and see if I can get a better read on this.

And of course there were assorted critters to kill while trying to find Mel’s location. Most notable of those: not just regular sabre cats, but vampiric sabre cats. From what I’m seeing on the wiki, there are apparently creatures infected with vampirism in Western Skyrim in this game, and yikes, that’s chilling!

Which does raise the question of how exactly beasts of Skyrim became infected with vampirism. Did a sabre cat or a bear try to take on a lone vampire one night? Did a hungry beast eat a fallen vampire, and gain the disease that way? Is this a plot point that could get filled in if I quested in Western Skyrim? I may need to find out!

Finally found Mel, at any rate, and followed his lead to make it down into the final area for his quest–which turned out to be Blackreach. Cool.

I’ve written plenty of times about loving Blackreach in Skyrim. And of course, in this game, it was both similar to and different from the Blackreach I know. I was intrigued to discover that there were wayshrines down there, as well as what looked like multiple inhabited structures. What I didn’t see down there: Falmer. I’m assuming this is because in this era of Tamriel’s history, Blackreach is still in the hands of vampires.

Problem was, I couldn’t finish off the quest. First, I got distracted by another harrowstorm–and I was legit surprised to see one fire off in Blackreach. Which, after all, is underground.

But then, I don’t know enough yet as a player or as a character about what the deal is with the harrowstorms, since I haven’t played out anything regarding those. Or read up about them on the wiki yet.

Once I got that out of the way, though, I still had trouble resolving the quest.

Part of it is that It’s not clear to me whether the Bloody Reunion quest is a thing I can legitimately finish off outside the Dark Heart of Skyrim festival–even though I started it during the festival. When I tried to get to the point of fighting the Pale Worm, the guy just would not spawn.

I reached the spot in Blackreach with the rune on the ground, where Mel urged me to follow him. At that point in theory I was supposed to find the Pale Worm spawned up on a bridge just overhead, but in actual practice, no sign of him. Went googling about this, and found multiple threads in which players reported similar issues, even during the festival. So it seems like the end of the quest was glitchy in general.

I’ll check back a time or two to see if it unglitches itself, but right now at least it seems like I’ll need to hold off on trying to finish this until the next time Dark Heart of Skyrim rolls around.

Next time

I’m still on vacation, so next time I return to Gyllerah, I want to get a bit more festival action in. And then see if I can resolve one of the other quests still parked on me, or maybe move the Main Quest along some more!

Screenshots

Editing to add

• 11/25/2023: Restored missing gallery.
• 10/14/2024: Converted gallery to native WordPress one. Changed header graphic to the one I’m using on later Gyllerah posts.