In Which Marwyth Becomes a Vestige

Here, have a big drop of sessions for my ESO alt! Here’s five whole sessions at once with Marwyth, in which I did more action in Stonefalls; ran the opening act of the main quest in Coldharbour; and also did a side jaunt off with Gwendis of House Ravenwatch. And also, I started picking up on which things you can share between characters if you have multiple characters in ESO, and which things you cannot!

Play by play

• Play dates: 5/29, 5/31-6/3/2023
• Session numbers in this run: 2-6

Monday the 29th

• Picked up again at Dhalmora
• Nabbed the daily reward when logged in as Marwyth–which was Alliance Points
• Did a little inventory managing
• Decided to help the people fight off the attack at the dock because that’s where Captain Rama and Sergeant Seyne were
• Leveled up to 10 during this fighting and got more skill points off of that, so started unlocking things on the Bow skill line
• Helped Captain Rama take out the Covenant commander on his ship, then was sent off to report to the Argonian general in charge of defending the docks; he told me to head to Davon’s Watch and take word of what was going on
• Davon’s Watch was not actually far though; just had to go through the gate to enter Stonefalls
• Spotted plague victims at the gate that I think I’d already seen before as Gyllerah; didn’t stop to deal with them as Marwyth just because I wanted to get to Davon’s Watch
• Got hailed by Anais Davaux on the way into Davon’s Watch, with the quest hook for talking to Abnur Tharn to launch The Demon Weapon
• Came in through the gate and WHY HELLO THERE HOODED FIGURE; took her request to go talk to her benefactor
• But also reported to a Commander Holgunn there and got asked for help organizing defense against the Covenant; told Holgunn I had some things to do before I could help him, though (by which I mostly meant, inventory managing)
• Found all the merchants in Davon’s Watch and confirmed that oh good, they did have a jewelry station, so I was able to blow up some accumulated loot and use Ezabi to offload some materials
• Stopped there for the night

Wednesday the 31st

• Picked up again at Davon’s Watch
• Went to go talk to the Hooded Figure–and BOOM dead
• Cue Coldharbour! Ran the opening act of the main plot, got the Prophet rescued, jumped back through at the dark anchor to get out
• Leveled up to 11 while doing this–and landed right back in Bleakrock Isle
• Covenant forces were still fighting in Bleakrock Village–soI took out a couple of them, but mostly just dropped into Sneak and ran for the nearest wayshrine
• Boinged back to Davon’s Watch
• Started setting her keybindings up the same way as Gyllerah’s–notably, the ; key to toggle the UI and 9 to go back to primary house
• Did some inventory management on the loot from Coldharbour
• Went to the Marbruk wayshrine–which meant I then discovered Marbruk (because location discoveries do not port across characters)
• Boinged again back to Davon’s Watch and started running more Pact plot there
• Reported to the commander, who told me to let a Dunmer named Garyn lead me to a nearby manor
• Found Tanval Indoril, Grandmaster of House Indoril and Garyn’s father, who recruited me to get into his nearby house ancestral tomb and bring out a skull for him to use in a ritual
• Fought assorted skeletons in there, and practiced a bunch of range shooting
• Ghost of that ancestor was all HE WILL DESTROY US ALL, which seemed, well, problematic 😉
• Holgunn sent me to go burn some ballistae on the beach to fuck things up for the Covenant forces trying to come in and attack
• Despite it being broad daylight and there being a bunch of fighting going on on the beach, still managed to burn several of the items without getting directly challenged
• Ran back up to check in with Holgunn, who sent me back to the ancestral tomb where Tanval was
• Had to help a couple of other Pact soldiers protect Tanval as he did his ritual, and I leveled up to 12 somewhere in here
• Ritual turned out to be summoning a bone colossus, yikes? Which Tanval ordered to go wipe out the incoming Covenant army
• Tanval sent me over, cloaked in shadow (i.e., invisible), to observe the bone colossus Balreth doing its thing
• He did not however give me a way to come right back, so I jumped off the Covenant ship, swam to shore, and ran back to catch up with him again
• Tanval told me I brought honor to my House, about which I feel Marwyth is deeply dubious, and he thanked me on behalf of House Indoril and asked me to accompany his son to go find out how the hell to put Balreth back where he came from, Ash Mountain
• Paused at that point for the night though and did inventory managing

Thursday the 1st

• Picked up at Cliffshade
• Boinged back to Davon’s Watch to resume plot action
• Hoofed it out past Starved Plain and onward to Othrenis
• Went past a guy a couple of times who was all “the hearts of the Dunmer are as dry as their land” (Marwyth: “Yes, and, your point is…?”)
• Reached Ash Mountain where Garyn Indoril and his men were camped out
• Got directive to go to Othrenis and try to figure out intel on how to re-bind Balreth
• Found a cowardly Argonian there, Onuja, who gave me pointers on how to wake up the ghost of the Chimer mage Mavos Siloreth
• Got Mavos’ instruction to get him a skull and a candle from nearby shrines, which had puzzles to solve that looked quite cool, with colored beams of light
• Saw a vision of how Balreth had been originally bound via a couple of flame atronachs
• Headed back out to report to Garyn
• But on the way out found a Dunmer woman mourning her lost love; for her, Marwyth stopped, particularly once she identified herself as an Ashlander
• The woman asked for help identifying where her noble-born lover had been buried, and had me throw some dust on a few urns until I found the one that triggered her lover’s ghost
• But he turned out to be an asshole and chortled about how he’d just been toying with the Ashlander just to cruelly fuck with a servant for his amusement and his wife’s
• Went back and told the woman her lover was an asshole; she did not take this well, and ran off
• Then finally returned to Garyn; got directive to kill some daedra and get their hearts for the necessary binding ritual
• Also found some other soldiers nearby, who needed help with closing up some caves that had scamps coming out of them and attacking them, so did both of these things at once
• Closed up the caves and killed enough scamps and clannfear to get 10 Daedra hearts
• Did the ritual to call the atronachs Ragebinder and Blaze, who as it happened actually had lines as well as names
• Got a storm totem from another Argonian with the Pact forces, Walks-In-Ash
• Jumped through a portal into the heart of the mountain
• Confronted Balreth and hit him with the totem a few times as well as general fighting, until he was down and the atronachs could re-bind him
• Got some grudging congrats out of the ghost of Mavos and quest resolution from Walks-in-Ash
• Leveled up twice during this session and hit level 14
• Boinged back to Cliffshade and started working on making better gear
• Did not really like the Daedric style gear I made as Gyllerah, but decided it’d hold me until I can build out a set of Outlaw style
• Logged out from there for the night

Friday the 2nd

• Boinged back and forth between alts to get Marwyth’s armor into a state I actually wanted to look at; wound up with a combo of Dark Elf and Ancient Elf stuff
• Once I had her gear in a state I liked, boinged back to Davon’s Watch for adventuring
• En route, intending to sell a couple of items to Marbruk’s merchant, I went past Cinnar who tried to do the opening hail at me for the mini-plot about the Artisan, LOL; deliberately skipped that
• Landed in Davon’s Watch
• But the game threw me a curve ball as I was trying to get to a nearby skyshard–by which I mean, I found the NPC Gwendis from House Ravenwatch who wanted to know if I was there for a contract, and I went !!! since I knew about Ravenwatch from running Western Skyrim
• Initial part of the quest was me accompanying Gwendis to Bangkorai, where I had to work with her to get more information on the Gray Host
• But we came into a war situation and wound up first having to rescue some scholars, and find a warrior who’d gone missing from the scholars’ company
• Investigated two different delves, Crypt of the Exiles, and Viridian Watch
• Leveled up to 15 while running these delves, which let me unlock weapon swapping and wield the two Legendary daggers I made! 😀
• Boinged with Gwendis off to Ravenwatch Castle and snuck into the place with her via a secret entrance
• Discovered evidence that her mentor Verandis had been involved with the Gray Council
• Boinged with her off to Grayhome Island and deactivated some wards there to be able to break into the castle
• Vampiric critters on this island like the ones I’ve seen in Western Skyrim, yikes vampire bears and sabre cats
• Got into the castle and took a potion from Gwendis that let me do a “dream walk” and see what Verandis had done there in the past
• Got the intel that Verandis was leaning heavily on the Gray Host to not make war on mortals, and was getting shit from Rada al-Saran about it
• And oh hey there are the other exarchs I slew as Gyllerah!
• Came back out of the dream walk and reported my findings to Gwendis
• Did a ritual to resurrect an exarch and get more intel from him, but he came back batshit and we had to fight and kill him
• Verandis showed up because we’d taken down the ward crystals, and he and Gwendis had a “WTF” conversation, but Gwendis backed off as she realized her mentor had not in fact lied to her
• They promised to get in touch with me if they needed me again
• Boinged back off to Cliffshade after that for inventory managing

Saturday the 3rd

• Picked up again at Cliffshade
• Worked some more on Marwyth’s armor, then started running more RP in Stonefalls
• First up: investigated what was going on with the Starved Plain just outside Davon’s Watch
• Found a contingent of Pact soldiers with a conflict going on about whether to enslave the spirits all over the plain, or set them free
• Dunmer mage Furon Rii wanted to enslave them to use them against the Covenant; Argonian mage Reesa wanted to liberate all the spirits so they could all move on
• Talked to both of them, did a test for each, and finally voted in favor of Reesa
• Reesa sent me to go find relics of the spirits’ commander and his two seconds
• The ghost of the commander got pissed when I dug up the relics, and attacked me when I met Reesa at a shrine to burn the relics; that did however send the commander on to his rest
• Reesa asked me to go to a nearby kwama mine and get some kwama cap for her, and take that to two of her students so that she and the students could sacrifice themselves to bring life back to the plain
• While taking the kwama cap to the two students, also found Shuldrashi hanging out on a ridge, who asked me to find her Argonian colleague Stands-In-Still-Water so they could continue their travels
• Since she was an Ashlander, Marwyth was naturally inclined to help her out
• Started heading off to find Stands, but checked Senie first to see what the local plot there was
• Checked out the Nord guy at the bridge who had the “the hearts of Dunmer are as dry as their land” line; he wanted me to soothe some conflicts between the Dunmer and Argonians in the village
• Senie had been obliterated by the volcano erupting, but the local Dunmer leader was being a dick about accepting help from the Argonians
• Went to talk to everybody to find out what was going on
• Gathered shalk chitin to bring to the Argonians to make a healing salve for the burned victims, and took that around to various villagers to heal them
• Dunmer leader was still being a racist dick though, and was convinced the Argonians had kidnapped his daughter, which of course they had not done
• Found the daughter with a twisted ankle trapped on a little spur of land in a lava flow, and sent up a signal flare the Argonians had given me so they could come find me
• Dunmer leader also came running and was pleased his daughter was alive, and grudgingly allowed that the Argonians had helped (but he’s probably still going to be a racist dick)
• Once that was settled, tried to find Stands-In-Still-Water, only to realize his camp was totally not near Ash Mountain where I was
• Boinged back to Davon’s Watch to get within range of his camp, which was on the shore; went past the Pact forces pleased to have fought off the Covenant, from before
• Hoofed it along the beach till I found Stands’ camp, and found he’d been killed by an alit
• While there, realized I was also near the Daen Seeth Dolmen not far from Ebonheart, which I’d found before as Gyllerah
• Dolmen fired off so I ran over there to see if I could get in on that action; shot a few things! 😀
• At that point I was also full up on inventory, so boinged back to Cliffshade for inventory managing and handing off mats to Gyllerah
• Logged out of Marwyth for the night, having leveled up to 16 during this session, and logged back into Gyllerah to work on armor stuff

Additional “what it’s like to have an alt” discoveries

Logging into Marwyth first on the 29th meant that Marwyth got that day’s daily reward–which was Alliance Points. I immediately got two skill points off of that, and also unlocked the Assault and Support skill lines.

Lesson to note here: I’ll need to consider which alt needs the daily reward more, when deciding who to log in as first. This will I think argue in favor of logging in first as Marwyth on any day when the reward is poisons. Marwyth might actually use them; I don’t want them as Gyllerah though.

And I was super pleased to discover Marwyth has access to Ezabi. This helped me set up sharing resources between the two characters, not to mention building a little headcanon for how exactly they can do that. 😉

Pleased as well to discover, once I leveled up to 10 and also got the order to take word to Davon’s Watch, that I actually already had access to Gyllerah’s unlocked mounts! Awesome. So since Gyllerah’s been bounding around on her senche-leopard, I took the generic horse for Marwyth. I’ll assume for narrative purposes that somebody at Dhalmora got her a horse.

Helping fight off the attack at Bal Foyen

When I’d left off in Marwyth’s first session, I’d gotten to the point of the decision between helping the people at the dock and helping the people at the fort. I’d seen on the wiki that yes, either way there were going to be casualties. But I ultimately went with the people at the dock, just on the grounds that that’s where Captain Rama and Sergeant Seyne were. And I felt like Marwyth was going to be a bit more sympathetic to helping out fellow Dunmer women.

This whole combat was a good opportunity to practice just being a Nightblade. Got in a lot of practice with the bow, as well the Nightblade skills I’m starting to accumulate. I’ve started trying to set up Marwyth’s skill bars in a way that’s sorta kinda similar to how Gyllerah’s primary combat bar is–for example, X and Y for ranged attacks, B for a self-heal, and such. It helps that unlocking these skills seems to automatically stick ’em more or less on the skill bar where I want them, with only minor tweaking necessary.

Heading into Davon’s Watch

A few items of note here.

One: got hailed by Anais Davaux, who I’d seen before as Gyllerah. Again, she had the quest prompt to talk to Abnur Tharn to kick off The Demon Weapon. I still haven’t run this as Gyllerah. So we’ll see which alt gets to it first. (Gyllerah, probably.)

Two: And there’s the Hooded Figure! Got to her a lot faster in this playthrough, of course. Which was part of why I wanted to go ahead and get Marwyth into Davon’s Watch, because I knew that was going to happen.

Three: Holgunn and other NPCs keep calling Marwyth “soldier”, and I’m not sure if Marwyth’s really down with that. Right now I feel like she’s being kind of pulled along by events, but all these Ebonheart Pact people sure do seem to be treating her as one of them. And she’s all I don’t actually care about any of this, so real soon now she’s going to crack and run off and join the Thieves Guild. 😉 (Now that I have in fact bought that DLC!)

Of course, she’s also striking me as destined to totally pull a Han Solo. Events are trying to pull her into grander action (particularly now that she’s had her intro to Coldharbour, more on this below) and she’s going to want to run off and do her own thing for a while, until it’s time for her to come back and help destroy the Death Star Molag Bal. 😀

And speaking of Coldharbour

Went ahead and ran the opening bit of Coldharbour just to get that out of the way. It played pretty much the same way it had done for Gyllerah–except this time, of course, I landed right back in Bleakrock Isle.

And that was straight up weird. Because I landed back there to find it still on fire and overrun by Covenant soldiers.

Reaction to this as a player: I found this a very strange play experience. And now that I’ve gone through the opening of Coldharbour twice, I’m slanting more towards really not liking that the game changed from just expecting you to run that first.

When I did it as Gyllerah, I ran Coldharbour pretty late in Gyllerah’s playthrough. So landing on Khenarthi’s Roost and doing the starter stuff there, after having established my connection with Razum-dar in Summerset, was weird. So was getting all those “Armor of the Trainee” rewards as a player whose level was up in the high 30’s.

Doing it as Marwyth, it was even weirder. Because I explicitly chose to land on Bleakrock Isle from the tutorial, I had the whole thing run before I even got to the Hooded Figure. So dropping right back into that location after escaping Coldharbour, when all the major NPCs in Bleakrock Village have already fled or been killed by the Covenant, was not satisfying from a narrative perspective. Because I had nothing left to do on Bleakrock Isle except try to get the fuck back to Davon’s Watch as fast as possible.

I can only conclude that it’d be the same running a character for the Daggerfall Covenant, too.

Overall it seems to me like the game had a noble idea in trying to make new players choose how they wanted to start, rather than forcing everybody to go through Coldharbour first as had been the original functionality.

But it also seems to me that they didn’t implement the change cleanly enough. I feel like if I run my alliance’s starter zone completely, then get my alliance plot line underway, and then start Coldharbour, I shouldn’t get chucked right back to my alliance’s starter zone.

(And for that matter, if I haven’t run Coldharbour yet at all, people shouldn’t be commenting at me that my soul is missing.)

From a technical standpoint, I understand the likely reasoning for how they did it this way. Which is: ESO is a huge, complex game, and trying to fix every single little scenario to doublecheck whether you’ve actually run Coldharbour yet would have taken a lot more time and trouble. Especially in any situation where they might have had to get additional voice lines out of actors voicing NPCs.

But from a player standpoint… yeah. Not satisfied with the bumpy narrative here.

Reaction to this as Marwyth: as with Gyllerah, this would have certainly been a great big pile of WTF JUST HAPPENED. Particularly with being thrown back to Bleakrock Isle.

And I don’t think it helped Marwyth’s frame of mind any to bounce into somebody else’s house. ;D

Oh hey look Marwyth apparently lives in Cliffshade too?

Working on Marwyth’s keybindings to get them set the same way as Gyllerah’s led to my discovering that if you have multiple characters, they share access to the same houses. And each character has the same primary house.

Which makes no goddamn narrative sense, but okay sure why not! And as I noted in my last Gyllerah post, I’m even toying with a little headcanon for why there can be two Vestiges at once and why they’re overlapping into the same house now.

From Marwyth’s side of this, I figure she was frightened as fuck after Coldharbour and then seeing Bleakrock Village being overrun again. And then all at once she was in this unfamiliar house, mostly empty, except for one little Alfiq. So I think, once she started finding herself drawn back there a few times, that she seized the opportunity to sleep in what seems like a safe place. And fix anything she has on her that needs fixing.

And start leaving things for the owner of said house, who she hasn’t even seen yet!

Still though, Cliffshade in my mind is Gyllerah’s house, not Marwyth’s. Marwyth will need her own house eventually. I’ll have to think about which house would be best for her. And heh, maybe I can assume Gyllerah will leave her little notes about which inn rooms in which cities Marwyth could use.

Back in Davon’s Watch

Once I resumed plot running in Davon’s Watch, it was back to “fight off Covenant attack” kind of stuff. And I did like the whole interaction with Tanval and Garyn, even if I found it kind of silly that Tanval sent me in to get that skull for him so he could do a ritual… only for me to come back and find him right there in the tomb.

Marwyth: .oO (Wait, you wanted me to bring you this skull out of the tomb, and then you came back down into the tomb anyway for the ritual? So the point of my getting it was what, exactly? Okay okay fine…)

I think Marwyth was also a little salty about Tanval proudly teleporting her over “cloaked in shadow” to observe Balreth wiping out the Covenant forces on the ship, but neglecting to actually bring her back. GEE THANKS TANVAL!

And I don’t think she really knew what to make of a House Grandmaster telling her she brings honor to her House. Dude, bold of you to assume I actually have one.

(Which is an interesting question. I’d already decided Marwyth was likely an Ashlander. But I’m not sure why she left her birth tribe yet. Probably got kicked out of her tribe for some reason, but I haven’t decided yet whether it was because she committed thievery, or maybe got framed for it because of trying to act against a powerful tribesmate’s crime?)

And she was feeling really salty, too, about Tanval going to the trouble of summoning a big-ass bone monster without knowing for sure he could put him back. She is not, however, stupid enough to sass the head of an entire House when she knows damn well she has no rank to speak of.

But that said, she was definitely feeling like that ancestor ghost was on to something.

Ash Mountain and Othrenis

I’d seen this area of Stonefalls already as Gyllerah, but now I actually got to start playing it as Marwyth. And finally running the local plot at Othrenis was fun.

I really rather liked Onuja the cowardly Argonian. He seemed kind of adorable. <3

And the particular puzzle I had to solve was super easy by comparison to a lot of other puzzles I’ve solved all throughout my various Elder Scrolls playthroughs. What made it stand out to me though was the visuals! The colored beams of light were very cool and striking. See screenshots.

Ran into a side plot here as well, as you do. Found a Dunmer woman mourning her lost love, who asked me to help her find which burial urn had his remains so she could commune with his spirit. This one turned out rather sad, though, because the dead lover in question turned out to be a total dick. He was a noble who’d deliberately toyed with the affections of his Ashlander servant, and even in death, he tried to convince me to get the woman to come find him just so he could crush her feelings and see her heart break.

Marwyth had no patience for this shit, and went back and told the other woman what was going on. She did not take it well, and ran off unhappily. I don’t think Marwyth felt entirely happy about that, but at least this way was kinder than any other options.

I also felt like Marwyth would probably have set the guy’s urn on fire, even without the request of his unfortunate lover. Because fuck that guy.

Retrieving his artifacts for him got Mavos’s spirit to be on board with helping me, so then I was able to return to Ash Mountain and work on getting Daedra hearts for the binding ritual. This was another part where I ran two objectives at once, and the part I liked the most here was summoning the flame atronachs. Because not only did they each have names, Ragebinder and Blaze, they also had lines. So this was the first time in any Elder Scrolls game that I’d heard atronachs have dialogue, and that was pretty neat.

A note about gear

A side effect of running Coldharbour with Gyllerah is that I am getting a fuckton of Daedra hearts. So it’s super easy for me to make Daedric gear right now. Which is convenient if I have an alt that really needs quickly upgradeable gear.

Here’s the problem with that, though: I just don’t like the look of the Daedric gear. So throughout the course of these sessions, I wound up swapping out Daedric gear ASAP for a mix of Dark Elf and Ancient Elf.

What I really want for Marwyth, though, is the Outlaw Style. You can see that style on the ESO Fashion site, and in particular, on its page for the Rawhide version of the Medium Armor for this style.

I would also happily wear the Thieves Guild style, for that matter. It looks very similar to Outlaw, but a bit bulkier. Given how I designed Marwyth’s body type (she’s a thin little wisp of a Dunmer), though, I think the Outlaw will look better on her. And I’ve started acquiring style sheets for it.

Mind you, I’ve also acquired the Thieves Guild DLC (more on this in Marwyth’s next post!), so ideally I can start gathering pages for both of these armor styles without having to pay through the nose for them. But we’ll see. So far I’m working on getting style sheets so I can do the building as Gyllerah.

Also haven’t been entirely happy with the color schemes I’m selecting, which is impacted of course by what dyes I have available. I find myself wanting to lean darker on colors for Marwyth’s gear than I usually do with Gyllerah, partly because of Marwyth being a Nightblade, but also because I feel like that’d better suit Marwyth’s temperament. But given that she’s also a Dunmer, if I go too dark with her color schemes, she comes out looking super monochrome. Which does not satisfy me. So experimenting with this, still. I feel like as Marwyth levels up and grows more confident in her abilities, she may finally land on some bolder tones. But for now I think she’ll want to lean darker just for stealth purposes.

I’d thought that I was not going to bother to spend points on crafting with Marwyth. But I’m finding it slightly irritating to have to switch back and forth between characters if I want to work on Marwyth’s gear. Now that I have an Armory Station, I may consider doing a craft-only build for Marwyth.

Which would also raise the question of what crafts I’d care about for her.

For now, though, I’m making Marwyth’s gear as Gyllerah because that’s where I’ve got craft points spent. This does allow me also to focus on dropping points on Marwyth’s other skills, which is letting me level up nicely in Bow and also in Dual Wield.

I am really digging dual wielded daggers as my backup combat bar. 😀 Bonus that I’m swimming in enough blacksmithing mats that I can easily make Legendary-grade daggers for Marwyth, too!

And so far I’ve been doing a mix of Adept Rider and Night Mother’s Gaze sets for Marwyth’s stuff, though I think I may switch the Adept Rider stuff out for Night’s Silence instead. Because SNEAKING.

Unexpected adventure with a vampire

On Friday the 2nd, I started that session intending to do more adventuring in Stonefalls. What the game threw at me, though, was an encounter with Gwendis of House Ravenwatch.

Who, as it turned out, was hanging out outside Davon’s Watch ready to hand out a hook to her little prologue quest about the Gray Host. This is the prologue for the Markarth DLC, which I do now have!

And of course I knew about House Ravenwatch from having run Western Skyrim with Gyllerah. So running into her made me go !!! for several reasons. Since I wanted to know more about her in particular and House Ravenwatch in general, I decided to go ahead and run her quest.

Which naturally meant I had an IC reason to actually get out of Morrowind–important to Marwyth! I take her running off to help Gwendis as the first of a building wave of “I need to GTFO out of Morrowind and also get the fuck away from this whole idea of having been killed in Coldharbour”. We’re talking fucking traumatic experience here, y’all, and so Marwyth seized the chance when it presented itself.

(As a player I felt a little twitchy about running off on the Pact like that. Marwyth was probably less twitchy about it than I was–in theory. She will of course come back to help more, because rogue with a heart of gold archetype, yo. Again, more on this in my next post!)

I was also very pleased that Gwendis name-checked Fennorian. And intrigued that she called him “my brother”, given that Gwendis is a Bosmer and Fennorian is an Altmer. So clearly not biological siblings. Presumably she considers him her “brother” in terms of “we’re both members of House Ravenwatch”. Whether there’s anything else here, such as “both of them are proteges of Verandis”, I don’t know yet. It’ll be interesting to find out.

(Just not sure as which alt I’ll do followup on this with. I’m kind of disinclined to repeat plots between alts if I don’t have to, so so far, likely followup on this will be on Marwyth.)

I did like this plot overall. The parts in Bangkorai were interesting just because I think that’s the first I’ve ever actually run RP there. But overall the main thing I liked about this plotline was seeing the background on Verandis, and seeing the relationship between him and Gwendis.

Bonus points for glimpsing characters I’d previously slain as Gyllerah too, LOL. Background on them was interesting, too.

And, as noted, back to Davon’s Watch

Yeah, Marwyth tries to convince herself that she wants to GTFO of Morrowind, and that she has no fucks to give about the Pact. And yet she finds herself going right back to Stonefalls to try to help out.

This is of course me as a player wanting to do a variety of things. And I’ll cheerfully call this a question of Marwyth wibbling hardcore about her priorities, with a side helping of finding it surprisingly easy to travel very quickly across Tamriel now that she knows she can do that with wayshrines. I think Gyllerah may have slipped her some advice on that. ;D

First thing I wanted to do back in Davon’s Watch was investigate what the hell was up with the Starved Plain. I’d seen that place before when I’d come through as Gyllerah, but hadn’t actually RPed the local plotline. So this was new material to me!

And this plot started off with my having to help the nearby ranking soldier make a decision. Sergeant Rhorlak had to decide whether to let his Dunmer mage, Furon Rii, enslave the spirits on the plain–or let his Argonian mage, Reesa, liberate them. I ultimately decided in favor of Reesa. Marwyth has some dubious morals, absolutely, but she’s not okay with enslaving spirits.

Or living people, for that matter. I feel like this is probably a contributing factor to her being super ambivalent about her own homeland, given the Dunmer track record with slavery.

This plot did not however go where I was expecting–because it turned out that Reesa and two of her students all wound up sacrificing themselves to restore the land, by way of kwama cap mushrooms Reesa had me fetch for her.

Marwyth was dubious about this entire concept, I think. But she wasn’t going to argue with the Argonians about it either, if sacrificing themselves for the sake of the land was what they really wanted to do.

I think it struck Marwyth as a bit too heavily religious for her tastes, really. And as I write this, it now occurs to me that I feel like Marwyth is only nominally a worshipper of Azura. I don’t think it’s possible for Tamriel’s culture to really have atheists based on how prevalent the activity of the Daedric Princes is. There’s too much evidence across Tamriel’s history of “there are powers greater than us and we must either revere or repudiate them”.

But I also kinda feel like Marwyth may lean towards option C, i.e., “okay yeah fine there may be powers greater than us, but I opt out of giving a fuck about any of them”. We’ll see how this attitude persists through Marwyth’s run.

While delivering the kwama cap to the students, I found another Ashlander, Shuldrashi, hanging out with a quest hook. Talked to her, and learned from her that she wanted me to find her missing Argonian colleague Stands-In-Still-Water. Marwyth is naturally inclined to help out other Ashlanders, though in this case I think she couldn’t help a bit of weary cynicism about whether this one would be any happier with her than the last one.

After I got done with the Starved Plain quest, finding that missing Argonian was going to be my next goal. But I got detoured by the plot at Senie, another place I’d seen as Gyllerah, but this time I paused to actually run the local plot.

Which was basically “oh shit Senie has been destroyed by a volcanic eruption, and of course there’s drama going on about helping the survivors”. But it was less satisfying than I would have liked.

For one thing, the main drama here was that the local Dunmer leader was being a racist dick about accepting help from the local Argonians. And for another, this was a weird situation to play as a Dunmer, because everybody’s dialogue prompts seemed to assume the player character has no background with the relations between Dunmer and Argonians. Which seems pretty fucking dubious to me if your character is in fact a Dunmer, even if she’s an Ashlander.

So I’m going to headcanon here that Marwyth is an abolitionist and has no fucking patience for slavers. So she had very little sympathy for the Dunmer leader being all pissed off that previously “gentle” Argonians had revolted against their Dunmer masters.

Last but not least, as I found Stands-In-Still-Water (or what was left of him, as he’d been killed by an alit), I also got my first opportunity to run a dolmen as Marwyth. The Daen Seeth Dolmen fired off while I was near it, so I ran over there to get in on that action. And did successfully shoot some things! I feel like I’m getting a better hang of how to fight with a bow as my primary weapon. Awesome.

Next time

Marwyth’s next post will have more activity in Stonefalls–but also activity in Hew’s Bane. Because I have acquired the Thieves Guild DLC, and oh my yes, there will be thievery. Muahaha.

Screenshots

Editing to add

• 11/25/2023: Restored missing gallery.