In Which Marwyth Saves Stonefalls and Fights a Plague in Deshaan

I’m seriously behind on my ESO playthrough posts. But before I get into this one, I want to call out the recent news about a Zenimax employee, Leona Faren, having been basically railroaded into resigning after months of abuse by a transphobic manager. I am seriously pissed off about this, as I wrote in the other post.

For the time being, I am not bailing on the Elder Scrolls games I already own; they’re too important to me as a means of maintaining my mental well-being until my household can finally abandon our COVID precautions. We are not to that point yet, and we don’t know when we will be.

But I will not be giving ESO any further money, and I will also not be buying Starfield. And I’ll be monitoring the situation to see how it proceeds. Also, I will totally understand if anybody who’s been following this blog’s posts until now is even more pissed off at Zenimax than I am right now and needs to stand down from following my playthroughs.

Right? Right. So let’s talk about what Marwyth did from 6/13 to 6/19.

Play by play

Play dates: 6/13-6/19/2023
Session numbers in this run: 15-21

Tuesday the 13th

Writs
Robbed the ships
Managed to hit the 110 item limit on fencing, LOL, and also bumped Legerdemain to 6
Jumped to Deshaan to hit the tower for the Fighters Guild quest; this was on Stonefang Isle, just north of Ebonheart, and within swimming distance
Killed Doshia, freed Merric, and reported to guildmaster after
Decided to go hit Knife’s Ear Grotto in Deshaan to meet up with Abnur Tharn and move the main quest along
Hoofed it south to find an overland path to get there
Passed the Ashen Grip set stations, good to have those marked for the map
Made it into Deshaan and ignored a bunch of plot hooks
Found Narsis and Mournhold
Also ignored the Ordinator trying to get me to stop and register, hold that thought, I’ll be back 😉
Knife’s Ear Grotto is in eastern Deshaan so had to hoof it all the way over there
Found the place and the nearest wayshrine, but by then it was fairly late and I didn’t actually want to run it yet; also, my inventory was full
Boinged back to Cliffshade for inventory cleanup and logged off for the night

Wednesday the 14th

Did six of seven writs; couldn’t finish the clothier one as I didn’t have enough rawhide
Went out in a circuit around Alinor to try to gather mats
Killed assorted wolves
Saw the Welenkin Geyser fire off so tried to get in on that action; however, the final boss handed me my ass, and I ran out of soul gems to resurrect myself
Once I got back the fight was over, and I missed out on the loot 🙁
After a break, boinged off to Deshaan and hit the wayshrine near Knife’s Ear Grotto
Ran the place with Abnur Tharn
Found a note from an artifact hunter at the start of the cavern, and got side quest to look for Daedric artifacts
Found an artifact and grabbed that for the quest
Killed a bunch of banekin and dremora
Triggered the three speaking stones to get info on where the hell Sai Sahan is
Tharn told me to meet up back at the Harborage, but I headed into Stonefalls instead to hit Fort Virak and run that plot
Met up with Garyn Indoril, who was leading the forces trying to take the fort back from the Covenant
Covenant general was resurrecting troops at the fort to keep up the defenses, yuck
Garyn had me discover this by investigating fallen soldiers on the battlefield, and trying to keep it quiet so as not to spook the Pact forces
Then he sent me into the nearby ruins, where I met up again with Walks-in-Ash
Walks gave me an elixir that would transform me into a wisp and let me sneak through a crack in the wall, and through some of the back passages
Had to figure out the proper path to follow and the speed at which to move so that nearby ghosts wouldn’t see me and attack
Got through after three tries, and opened up the blocked door for Walks-in-Ash and her squad to get through
Headed out into the fort proper and unbarred a couple of gates for the rest of the Pact forces to get through; had to fight a bunch more Covenant troops as I did this
Finally made it into a tower and found captive Pact soldiers General Serien had been experimenting on; set fire to the journals in there, using a nearby candle
Got into the keep with Tanval, Garyn, and Holgunn, and confronted the general and a couple other Covenant soldiers
The general turned into a flesh atronach, yikes, and also killed Garyn, YIKES
This understandably freaked out Tanval, who snatched the Coral Heart from Holgunn and ran off, vowing to destroy the Covenant for killing his son
Followed up with Holgunn outside and was warned that Tanval was going to release the other Brother of Strife, Sadal, and that Tanval had probably wigged off to Kragenmoor
Headed that way and found a couple of other locations on the way: a Nord settlement that looked like it was having spider issues, and an Argonian settlement as well; declined to deal with those for now
Avoided an area full of hostiles and finally made it to Kragenmoor
Found a guard stationed just outside the city who warned me that the Grandmaster was possibly going to be a problem
Found a Khajiit slave near the player house in the city; also found the wayshrine so I could get back quickly
Boinged back to Cliffshade so I could wind up the session
Finally managed to buy rawhide to finish the pending Clothier writ and turned that in in Marbruk
Dyed my current gear while building up the mats for level 26 😀

Thursday the 15th

Writs
Raided the ships in Daggerfall again
Fenced a bunch of stuff at the Marbruk outlaw refuge
No other significant action

Friday the 16th

Writs
Ship robbery
Ran the Summerset prologue quest to get that off my queue
Had to go to Davon’s Watch to take Vanus’s enchanted boat
I think the oracle’s camp was in a different location this time? Still in Glenumbra?
But then was taken to the same delves that I ran as Gyllerah
Had to pause before running Bewan because my inventory was full; returned to Marbruk for loot dropoff
Then wayshrined back to Skywatch and hoofed it to Bewan from there
Played that plot all the way through rescuing the oracle from the Spiral Skein and returning her safely to the Mages Guild
Leveled up to 25
Since I also took a skill point off skyshards, I was able to spend three points at once; put them all on passives for Bow

Saturday the 17th

Writs
Ship robbery

Sunday the 18th

Ran most of my writs but had no barley for the food writ
Hit Daggerfall to rob the ships (and look for barley)
Found that the Daggerfall Outlaw Refuge was conveniently located near the ships, so hit both ships, and hit Daggerfall’s Outlaw Refuge between them
Boinged back to Marburk to drop off the Hotspur’s loot at that refuge
Then boinged off to the Harborage to follow up with the Prophet following The Tharn Speaks quest
Resolved that and got the skill point; dropped it on the Thieves Guild passive to bring up the value of fenced items
Hoofed it over towards Ebonheart
Dolmen fired off so I stopped to fight it–and wound up running it solo, wow, at level 25 even
Headed into Ebonheart after that; got pinged by the Prophet to come back for followup re: location of Sai Sahan (hold that thought, Prophet, gotta go to Kragenmoor, Tanval is being stupid and I need to put a stop to it)
Reached Kragenmoor
Talked to the Grandmaster, who sent me to his steward, because he was too freaked out about his missing son
Steward said ‘yep this sure is a problem, you should go talk to this other person who knows more’
Third person finally told me the son was captured by Tanval’s Vanguard forces who wanted to wake up the second Brother of Strife
Had to buy a Vanguard uniform from a Khajiit merchant outside and use that to infiltrate the barracks
Failed a couple of times and got thrown out by the sentries; then figured out the pattern of sentries in the place and successfully snuck past them
Reached the two sets of orders I had to read to discover where the son was being held
Followed up with the steward who told me where I could find a tunnel to get into the place
Leveled up to 26 at this point, so boinged back to Cliffshade to break out the new gear, including new Outlaw helmet! Blew up the old gear and did other inventory cleanup, and dyed the new gear pieces that weren’t dyed yet
Then returned to Kragenmoor and got into the tomb where the son was being held
Saw another player running it and we took turns killing baddies for each other, nice
Freed the son!
Reported back to the grandmaster and was given the key to where the second Brother of Strife was bound
The grandmaster also asked me to kill a Vanguard captain in retribution
Went to go do that, and it surprised me a little by being entirely straightforward; she attacked first, so I didn’t even have to challenge her
Reported back to the Grandmaster who proclaimed me ‘the Hand of Dres’
Grandmaster’s son gave me the pointer to proceed to the Tormented Spire
Fought my way past a bunch of scamps and flame atronachs
Spoke with Holgunn and Walks-in-Ash
Destroyed some ward stones to lower the wards
Partway through this process discovered that Tanval had been captured by the Pact forces, and wounded, and now regretting his horrible behavior
He sent me off to get a key from a spider Daedra guardian, who I had to summon with a bowl
Once I had that, was able to get in and try the final ward of this set, a shadow ward that was actually kind of cool
Then Tanval directed me to go appeal to the spirits of mages that had been awakened by his actions
Had to get some focus stones to prove myself to these mages
This required me to do some hopping across lava flows, from which I took at least a little flame damage, but did actually make it across and back without dying
Got another one of those cool patterned wards to get the last focus stone
Last spirit to talk to was Mavos, again!
Got the stones and had to place them to get the mage spirits to fire up a portal
Tanval told me he was going to step down as grandmaster of his House and asked me to tell Holgunn to take over as commander of the Pact forces
Went through that portal with Holgunn, Tanval, and Walks-in-Ash, and fought Sadal the Brother of Strife
Hard fight, Sadal was a bastard to take down and kept throwing skeletons and fire at us
Tanval sacrificed himself in a literal blaze of glory, and we finally defeated Sadal and got him re-bound
I gave Holgunn Tanval’s wish that he take over the Pact forces
Had a guy run up to ask me to take a letter to someone in Deshaan, and something about a plague, and right then onward into Deshaan! But later
For now, back to Cliffshade for inventory cleanup

Monday the 19th

Writs
Robbed the Daggerfall ships
Boinged off to deshaan to begin running plot there
Hit the wayshrine and had Aerona Berendas run up to me, all “there you are” like she expected me
(And yet again, an NPC being all “didn’t Vivec send you?”)
Agreed to help Aerona find her brother
Then realized I also had to find and deliver the letter I’d been given, which required approaching another NPC not far from the wayshrine, Dandrii Dran
Aerona complained at me about going the wrong way, but I dropped off the letter, and then resumed helping Aerona
Questioned various townsfolk to try to find out where her brother had gone
Had to kill one villager who’d deteriorated into a plague husk, Grell Flan
Checked out the house of Aerona’s uncle, Ornis Verobar; he was still alive and lucid but not in good shape
Learned from Aerona that the Maulborn had locked themselves inside a quarantine set up in the graveyard
While looking for the key to get in, found the village alchemist, Nilyne Hlor, who asked me to get her samples of the so-called “curative”
Reached the graveyard and fought a couple of the Maulborn at the entrance
Took them out, got the key out of a backpack, and broke into the quarantine
Had to start killing plague husks in there
Found evidence indicating that yep, the Maulborn sure were setting up the plague on purpose
Found the missing brother, Dethisam, who of course was infected with the plague in the catacombs
He begged me to get his sister out of there and stop the Maulborn, and also to let him die
Aerona refused to leave him but I had to talk her into going
Dethisam took poison to keep himself from turning into a husk and endangering anyone
Killed Nostrum Breva in the catacombs, the healer who’d been overseeing the creation of the curative
Got samples of the curative and burned a bunch of the stocks of supplies, as well as the research notes, then got back out again and took the samples to the alchemist
Helped her create a potential actual cure and administer it to Aerona’s uncle
I think here was when I leveled up to 27?
Talked to Aerona to resolve the quest
Was then approached by a sergeant from Narsis who’d been sent over to investigate word of the plague; he’d overheard some of what was going on, and asked me to take word of his status to Defender Verilu in Narsis
Headed over that way and found her to drop off the message
Talked to Lieutenant Rarili who was nearby to get a read on what was going on in the town; she had some opinions about what was going on, but pointed me to the kinhouse to speak to people in charge
Went to the kinhouse and spoke to Councilor Ralden who was really wibbly about what to do about the crisis, but got his permission to search for more information
Talked to a few villagers to find out more about what was going on, and searched around for clues
Dala Marys complained to me about her husband Evis being missing
Got into a house and got a clue from a servant about her master doing a lot of writing in his journal
Went upstairs and found the master in question and also his journal, and LOL he didn’t seem to mind in the slightest as I went over and read the incriminating stuff he’d written 😉
Blacksmith told me his apprentice was missing and that they’d gotten some crates that were apparently not what they’d wanted in their last shipment, and which got broken into by “kids” overnight
Found a suspicious note in the crates, and got attacked by a Maulborn rogue who tried to warn me off; this did not go well for the Maulborn rogue
Found the missing Evis who was being interrogated by—YAY!—Naryu Virian!
She tried to warn me off but I told her I’m working for the councilor and THIS SURE DOES LOOK MIGHTY SUS; she handed me a letter and told me to go back to the councilor
Went back to him to report in and he decided to close down the village, and sent me upstairs to talk to a guy named Giron
Giron told me to search the nearby Maulborn camps, which I pulled off by sneaking, only had a couple of minor fights; I think i also bypassed taking out a commander?
Got the clue that the Maulborn were going to infect the lake with the plague
Found broken crates at the waterfall with something vile coming out of them, yep, this water is a problem
Naryu showed up again and warned me Giron was trying to kill me
Headed back to the kinhouse and OHNOEZ Giron has kidnapped the councilor, as per info from Varon Davel, an associate and possibly a superior of Naryu’s?
Varon pointed me at an Argonian called Slips-Through-Fingers
Found Slips just outside, where she was pretending to clean up papers that “fell” out of a backpack
She whispered at me to just look at the pack, which had a clue in it to “follow the star”
“The star” turned out be a cat with a key on its collar; took the key and followed the cat off to a house
In the Tedas house basement found a gathering of pissed off villagers trying to organize a plan to break out of the lockdown
I told them I thought this was bullshit and liable to get them all killed, which pissed them off so they told me to fuck off
Sergeant Rila Lenith was waiting outside and she clued me in to a plan to scatter the villagers without any bloodshed; she had me catch some harmless rats and turn them loose into the house, which freaked everybody out and made them run off
Rila gsent me back to the kinhouse where I checked in again with Varon; he sent me back outside and I touched bases again with Rila, who gave me a key and sent me off to the Narsis ruins
Got in there and took out Giron
Found Councilor Ralden but he was wounded and dying, and warned me to tell the village to not drink the water; he ID’d Magistrix Vox as the leader of the Maulborn
Came back out and found Varon to resolve the quest
He gave me Naryu’s spare blade, LOL, why is this guy giving me Naryu’s weaponry?
Had one last chat with Naryu, who sent me off to talk to Commander Renli at the Obsidian Gorge
Paused there for the night and boinged back to Cliffshade for inventory cleanup

Continuing my campaign of nautical larceny

My favorite discovery about robbing the Lydia and the Hotspur in Daggerfall in these sessions was discovering that in addition to the cabins on either end of each boat, I could also get into the holds. Which significantly bumped up the amount of loot I could carry off! Awesome.

Mind you, most of the loot to be found on these ships turns out to be food or drink ingredients, just because of all the containers. But there’s enough treasure to be had that it’s definitely profitable to hit the place. Even after you level your Legerdemain all the way up to 20!

The second useful discovery here was that Daggerfall’s Outlaw Refuge is located very conveniently near the ships. So if you’re hurting for inventory space after robbing one of them, you can run off into the nearby Refuge, unload with the fence, and come back to hit the other one!

Fighters Guild and Main Quest questing

The initial rounds of the Fighters Guild quest for Marwyth didn’t play out much differently than doing them as Gyllerah. Mostly, the difference here was getting to do this stuff in different locations, which did at least switch things up a bit.

And I was pleased that although I had to swim to get to the tower near Ebonheart, at least it was shallow water! So no danger of slaughterfish.

Same deal for heading to Knife’s Ear Grotto to meet up with Abnur Tharn for the main quest. I’m finding myself glad that the locations for these quests do vary depending on your alliance; that seems like a good way to keep things fresh for players with multiple alts.

I’ll say this, though: I think Marwyth probably actually likes Tharn a bit more than Gyllerah does. My sense of Marwyth as a character is that she’s the type to much more appreciate Tharn’s particular brand of snark.

And I think I said this during Gyllerah’s run, but will say it again here:

WHY ARE THESE STONES ACTUALLY IN A DELVE WITH RECORDINGS OF WHAT THE EVIL PLANS ARE?

This makes zero narrative sense to me. I mean okay yes, sure, fine, you have to put the evidence somewhere for the player character to find. I get that, I do know how games work. 😉 But I have a hard time coming up with even a half-bassed bullshit explanation for why Mannimarco might leave recordings of his evil schemes lying around in some remote delve. That’s just begging for some adventurer to come along and figure out what he’s doing!

Clearly, Mannimarco has no genre awareness.

Writ action for Marwyth in Alinor, and Summerset prologue

Marwyth does not, I feel, have any particularly strong narrative reason to do her crafting action in Alinor. I’m doing her writs there along with Gyllerah’s mostly because a) it’s familiar, and b) I really do like the convenience of the layout of the Plaza of the Hand.

And after many months playing Gyllerah, I also have a known circuit route I like to do when trying to harvest ingredients, if I’m short on any for finishing writs. Bonus points if the nearby geyser also fires off!

I’ve been finding myself missing the chance to hit Psijic portals as Marwyth, though. I am going to have to consider running the Summerset plot with her, just to get access to Psijic order stuff. I still love finding those random portals. <3

Relatedly, I did run the Summerset prologue with Marwyth in these sessions, so she’s now at least had a taste of potential trouble coming there.

But I’m kind of feeling like before I commit to running Summerset with Marwyth, it’d be nice to do the Daedric War storyline in order. Which would mean I’d need to do Morrowind and then Clockwork City.

Meanwhile, back at the front

A thing I realized in this set of sessions is that the Aldmeri Dominion plot gets all its conflict mostly from three things:

The Veiled Heritance
The attempt to subvert the Green Lady
The Tharn threat to Elsweyr

And none of these things are related to the Three Banners War. In my wandering all over the map as Gyllerah, I’ve certainly seen Dominion troops camped out in other areas, both in Covenant territory and Pact territory. But so far I’ve seen very little sign within Dominion territory of attacks by either Covenant or Pact forces. And I’m wondering now if there are such things in places, and I just have missed them because I haven’t run enough side plots?

By contrast, the Ebonheart Pact’s plot so far seems to be mostly driven by conflict with the Covenant. So there’s a lot more direct war action going on in the parts of the plot I ran with Marwyth in these sessions.

I’m finding that an interesting switch.

Which leads me into the Fort Virak plot. In which I had to be amused at Garyn Indoril trying very hard to not spook his troops with the possibility that they’ve been fighting Covenant forces raised from the dead.

Because seriously, my dude, pretty sure the Pact forces probably already figured this out. At least, the ones doing the up-close-and-personal melee fighting; archers might not necessarily clue in? But the ones hitting opposing forwards with swords and warhammers and maces? After a point, they’re going to figure out if the enemies they killed yesterday, and were sure they’d killed, come back the next day to fight them some more.

The part of this quest where I talked to Walks-in-Ash led me to another one of those moments in this game where they’re clearly expecting you to already have run Coldharbour. Walks has a line to the player about how you’re the one who has to take the elixir, because, quote, “not all of you is with us”.

I suppose you can handwave this a bit and say that if you happen to get this point without having already become the Vestige, you don’t have to take Ash’s line literally… but still.

Also, I liked that the elixir turned me into a wisp. That was kind of cool. And while there was a bit of a trick to figuring out the proper way to get through the back passages while in wisp-form, fortunately it didn’t tip over into too complicated. I made it through after only three tries. So in comparison to other areas of the game where the plot mechanics were frustratingly complex, I liked this much better. It was a good balance of “just tricky enough to be interesting” and “not so tricky that you can’t figure out after a couple of tries and move on with the plot”.

Really, though, once I got to the climax of the Fort Virak plot, it became much clearer that the entire Stonefalls zone quest can be summed up as the Tanval Indoril and His Extremely Poor Life Choices Show. Because apparently it wasn’t enough that he chose poorly summoning one Brother of Strife. The Covenant kills his son, and he immediately pivots to WELP IMMA SUMMON THE OTHER ONE!

As commenter Erin and I discussed in the comments on my last Gyllerah post, it just goes to uphold the pattern of a large majority of extremely unwise mages in all of the Elder Scrolls games being Dunmer. 😉 Not all of them, but a good strong majority to be sure!

Soloing a Dark Anchor seems promising?

Running the Daen Seeth Dolmen near Ebonheart by myself was pretty awesome.

The main baddie was a dread harvester that killed me a few times. But I had soul gems, so I kept coming back, and finally took it out! And remembered to keep moving and to pelt the damn thing from afar.

Because I am an archer, dammit!

I was frankly stunned that I actually managed to solo the thing at level 25, though. I may have to see if I can do that again! This may depend on where I hit the anchor, though. I’ve seen plenty of anchors where they just get frigging swarmed when they fire off, as I’ve written before. And I don’t really have a good sense of which bits of the map might be considered more “out of the way”, or even if there is such a thing in an MMO with millions of players.

Off to Kragenmoor

Then it was off to Kragenmoor, to put a stop to Tanval being stupid. I mostly liked this plot, but I did have quibbles with it.

One: it was super clunky to show up and have to talk to three different people before I finally got to the person who actually gave me a useful quest objective. I can kinda get the Grandmaster foisting me off on his steward, that seems legit if he’s in a state of stress about the situation with his son. (Though that said: I’ve run into plenty of other leaders in stressful situations in Elder Scrolls games that had no problems whatsoever throwing me a quest objective and their entire life stories, so I’m not sure what this particular leader’s hangup was. ;D)

But then the steward just basically said “Go upstairs and talk to this other person who knows more.” Meh.

I did like the part involving having to sneak into the Vanguard barracks in disguise, though I’m a bit unclear about when the hell Tanval actually managed to muster a force and basically take over Kragenmoor with it? The wiki says the Vanguard are specifically members of House Indoril, so this means he’s pulling on his position as his house’s Grandmaster to get them to act on his behalf, I guess.

And this adds an extra layer of LOL to the whole idea of sneaking into their barracks in disguise. At least Marwyth is a Dunmer, so is not blatantly out of place in the presence of House Indoril members… but on the other hand, I should think that militant members of House Indoril who’ve specifically convened in Kragenmoor under Tanval’s orders would damn well recognize one of their own.

Which, to be fair, did in fact happen! There were sentries on duty who did catch me a couple of times and kick me out of the place. So at least somebody in there was alert.

I liked the son character I had to rescue, he seemed cool. And rather hot for a Dunmer. 😉

Not entirely enthused about the Grandmaster asking me to go kill a random Vanguard captain in retribution for all the Vanguard shenanigans in his city, though. That seemed a little over the top, given that the person in charge of the Vanguard forces was no longer even in Kragenmoor.

I only came to this conclusion after the fact, though. And I feel like Marwyth probably didn’t give too many fucks about this particular ask. Gyllerah, however, would. (Which is why I skipped this part when I ran this same plot with Gyllerah. See a forthcoming post about that.)

That said, I also think Marwyth was fairly ambivalent about the Grandmaster proclaiming her the “Hand of Dres”. Particularly given that House Dres is a slave-owning house. I envision her making the thinnest possible polite noise at the Grandmaster’s proclamation here, and then getting the hell out of the city as soon as she had what information she needed.

Maybe the son at least will be a bit more promising than his father?

And finally, finale at the Tormented Spire

A few things stood out for me here.

One: while I had been given a key that gave me access to get close enough to the ward stones to destroy them, it nonetheless felt a little weird that all I had to do was actually just destroy the stones. It felt like a “none of you actually thought to hit the damn things with warhammers?” kind of moment. I kind of wish I could have gotten a line out of Holgunn or maybe Walks about that!

Two: I was a little disappointed that my next encounter with Tanval was fairly anticlimactic. I found him captured by the Pact forces, wounded, and apparently shocked back out of being a raving asshole? I really kind of wish this had happened on camera. You don’t get to see Tanval actually fucking with things in Kragenmoor, and you don’t get to really confront him in battle at all once you reach Tormented Spire.

I think I would have been way more satisfied by this if as the player character, I’d have been the one to actually confront Tanval, wound him in battle, and get him to stand the fuck down.

(Which is the exact opposite of how I felt at certain points during the Aldmeri Dominion narrative, when I wished that the Green Lady had had more agency, rather than the plot relying on me to do the main killing action! But different narrative flows, and all that.)

I really liked the wards I had to get past at various points in this part of the plot, of which there were two. They were visually cool, and were just challenging enough to be interesting. I had to suss out the patterns the wards moved in, and figure out the exact right time to slip through before I got hit by them and thrown back to the beginning.

Which struck me as a really elegant type of ward, really. Though I daresay they went a little easy on the player! I feel like a more realistic version of these wards would have done a fuckton more damage to anybody trying to make their way through them.

Not gonna lie, I was a trifle dismayed that trying to get through a couple of parts of this plot required me to go jumping over actual lava. But at least I took only a little fire damage.

But I did like that Tanval got a bit of sacrificial redemption at the end, even if I feel like the plot leading up to that didn’t really have enough on-camera action to give it the gravitas it needed.

So hurray, Stonefalls is saved! On to Deshaan!

Plague plot in Quarantine Serk

I’d seen the plague husks roaming around Serk in the western part of Deshaan when I’d originally explored the place as Gyllerah. But this time, I actually finally got to run that plot.

And right out of the gate, I got greeted by Aerona Berendas, yet another NPC who was all “Didn’t Vivec send you?” I think Marwyth’s getting a little antsy about how many NPCs in Morrowind seem to think the Tribunal has sent her to them. To the point that she may be starting to wonder if the Tribunal is actually sending her to help various people and she just hasn’t realized it yet.

This being a plague plot, there sure were sick people all over the place, including in the houses! Sick, delirious, and vomiting. Yuck. Because from what I’ve seen so far, all the plagues in Elder Scrolls games have to involve vomiting. ;P

It is only just as I’m working on this post that I realized that the villager I had to kill because he’d turned into a plague husk was named Grell Flan. Snerk. Insert obligatory joke about flans collapsing, here!

Finding the missing brother in the quarantine brought me to one of those player character decision points. I only found out later after running the plot with Marwyth that I could in fact have saved Dethisam, and chose to take that route later when I ran this as Gyllerah. (More on that to come in another post.)

But it did seem appropriate to me to have Marwyth respect his wish for her to let him die. And this part of the decision tree led to Aerona stepping up to take over the leadership of the town, which did seem quite appropriate.

Plague plot in Narsis

Hands down, my favorite part of this part of the plague plotline was finally discovering where the player gets to meet Naryu Virian, who I’d quite enjoyed meeting as Gyllerah before in Mournhold. <3 And meeting her here did not disappoint! Between her and Velsa over in the Thieves Guild plotline, I think Marwyth’s kinda now wishing she could join their cabal of badassed (and shady-as-fuck) Dunmer women. 😉

I had to giggle at the part of this plot where I got into a guy’s house, walked upstairs, and had no challenge whatsoever to reading his journal with the incriminating information in it. When the guy was standing right there. This does maintain the fine tradition of every bad guy across Tamriel scribbling down their evil plans in journals, but I’m a little surprised that the guy didn’t even demand to know why the hell I was trespassing in his house!

Another good player character decision point came up when I found the villagers plotting to break out of the lockdown imposed on the town. I told them point-blank that this idea was bullshit and liable to get them all killed, which naturally pissed them off. And at this point I was afraid I’d broken my ability to finish the plot!

But I shouldn’t have worried, because then I had an NPC sergeant bring me in a backup plan. I liked how the plotline handled that, giving me a way to advance the plot without getting any of the villagers hurt or killed.

I did have to wonder though why Varon gave me one of Naryu’s blades as a quest reward, though. 😀

(Still, though, the blade was Night Mother’s Embrace gear, so I kept it for a little while! I felt a bit guilty about deconstructing it later, but only a bit. The blade was leveled and was eventually going to be less powerful anyway, and my storage space is still at a premium.)

Last but not least

Since I unlocked some new dyes as Gyllerah during these sessions, I took advantage of those to select the chosen color scheme for Marwyth’s Outlaw style gear: Coldharbour Ash Black, Pyadonean Purple, and Undaunted Bronze. I am very pleased with this color combo, and I’ve updated Marwyth’s character page with a new character pic to show it off.

Next time

Next Marwyth post will feature some Thieves Guild action, more action in Deshaan (and Mournhold!), and last but definitely not least, finding more plot action with Lyranth the dremora!

Screenshots

Editing to add

11/25/2023: Restored missing gallery.
10/19/2024: Converted gallery to native WordPress one. Changed header graphic to the one I use on later Marwyth posts.