In Which Kendeshel Quests at Arcwind Point

And now, swinging back over to Kendeshel in Skyrim, as I work on more catchup posts! This is Kendeshel’s first session from February of this year.

This was a fairly low-key session, and mostly involved a lot of crafting and putting up stuff in the Dragonborn Gallery. But also the by now inevitable Solitude dragon, as well as running Arcwind Point and Varlais Caverns.

Play by play

• Play date: 2/2/2024
• Session number in this run: 40
• Picked up again at the Safehouse; did a bit of inventory managing
• Then went over to Proudspire to sleep
• Sofie asked me for an allowance so dropped 1,000 gold on her 😀
• Came out of Proudspire aaaaaaaaaand a fucking dragon
• From there, boinged down to Lakeview to get in position to start the session’s main action
• Slept at Lakeview since I got there fairly late
• Iona caught up with me there, and summoned her horse; she apparently now has the same horn call that I can do to call mine
• So rode out from there to first look for Aleksey’s Key just south of Helgen
• This took me into Greywater Grotto, another of those locations I’ve noted before in previous playthroughs, but haven’t ever tried to enter
• This was basically an animal cave, so I took out assorted critters in there
• Found Aleksey’s remains at the bottom of the cave
• The key was in an open chest, but underneath a bunch of other keys that appeared to be clutter
• From there, rode over to Alchemist’s Shack
• Left Heidrun the horse near there, but she followed me up the mountainside anyway as I went up to check out the cultist camp
• Cleared that place by calling in the Golden Saint squad
• Then headed over to get within range of Arcwind Point
• First tried to clear Autumnwatch Tower
• This took a bit of extra effort as the dragon saw us coming, and this pissed off the bandits at the ruins of Bthalft
• Plus there were assorted cranky critters in the immediate vicinity as well
• Took everything out, and then did a sweep to make sure I didn’t miss anything worth looting
• Spotted Talsgar the Wanderer while doing the sweep around Bthalft
• Took me a moment to remember though that the Imperial camp was gone because I finished the war! 😀
• Then went over to Autumnwatch Tower proper and looted the place, and got the word for Marked for Death off its Word Wall
• From there, went over finally to Arcwind Point
• Revered Dragon was waiting there so Iona and I took that dragon out too
• Noted that Legacy did drop a dig site right there, so dug that and got my Archaeology stat up over 40, so that gave me a new perk point to spend
• Found Sanamia’s journal number 4 nearby as well
• Then tried to go up the tower to finish off Bones for a Crow
• Found a few draugr as per usual–but did not find Crowstooth or the generic Forsworn that are usually there, or Alvasorr the Rat
• Did find Bjormund Wind-Strider’s body at the top of the tower though, and was able to loot it for the dragonbone armor
• Also, LOL, both my and Iona’s horses followed us rather improbably up those tower stairs
• Somewhere around here also grabbed the Helm of Oreyn Bearclaw, since Legacy puts it in a spot near Arcwind Point
• Finally, went over to Rielle/Varlais Cavern and ran the place to move The Cause plot along further
• Main difference this time through was that Norion the Undying had an extra item in his inventory, the Ayleid Crown of Rielle
• Grabbed a set of Vigil Enforcer armor off one of the slain Vigilants at the end, just because that stuff was marked as displayable
• Then finally finished running the place and fast traveled straight back to the museum
• Put assorted items up for display–which took a few tries, I kept getting crashes moving around in the museum ;P
• Dropped the Arcane Blacksmith apron into the Saints and Seducers area since I can now enchant higher Smithing gear than 20 percent
• Also made a bit of Amber and Madness gear to put there
• Made some additional Dawnguard weapons to put into the armory
• Put the Vigil Enforcer armor in the Hall of Wonders
• Put a piece of coral in the Gallery of Natural Science’s gems display, and two books in the library
• Made a couple of replicas of the Explorer tools to put in the Guildhouse, and a set of Explorers Guild heavy armor as well
• Did a whole lot of alchemy to chug through my backlog of ingredients, and crosschecked the UESP wiki just to get everything properly identified
• After that, worked on improving my gear for Alchemy and Smithing; dropped better enchantments on assorted available items
• Partway through that finally leveled up to 62
• Took Stamina bump and dropped a perk point on Enchanting, which let me finish off making Smithing jewelry with even better enchantments, fuck yeah
• Made new versions of the Ringmail hood and Crimson Archer armor, with newer and better enchantments on all of that
• Ran my enchantment skill all the way up to 100
• Wound up going through a couple of days’ worth of game time doing all of this, and finally saved until next time

Commentary

Kicked this session off with yet another goddamn dragon in Solitude.

And this time, it wasn’t even coming out of the museum. It was coming out of Proudspire. Which is not part of the game cell occupied by the museum’s exterior, as far as I know.

I went and checked for any additional conflicts based on what I know how to do in xEdit, but didn’t see anything obvious presenting itself. And what this tells me at this point is, the frequency with which I’m seeing dragons just cannot be entirely on Legacy’s head. I’m really starting to suspect that some of this is the simple fact that I’m pretty damned far along in this playthrough. And at least as of the point of this specific session, Kendeshel had yet to take out Alduin. She has since I played this run, though. More on this in an upcoming post.

I don’t have hard numbers to back this up, but the frequency with which I see dragons feels comparable to the dragon frequency I’m used to seeing in Raven Rock. Kendeshel is, as of this writing, at level 63. And usually by then, I’m already running Dragonborn. So any random dragons I spawn are going to be Revered Dragons–and that means, in turn, much higher chances that citizens are going to die any time a dragon strafes Solitude.

Meanwhile, I found another of the various bonus special tools in this session, this time Aleksey’s Key. I found it at the bottom of a chest in Greywater Grotto, underneath a bunch of other keys that all appeared to be clutter. They don’t have a value, so not exactly sure what I can do with them. I’m hoping they’ll go up to 1 gold or something once I raise Kendeshel’s Speech stat high enough, then at least I can sell them.

If they don’t, I’ll either leave them in the sell chest in the Safehouse and see if they disappear, or just leave them in the key storage there. I think the latter is where I finally put them? I’ll need to doublecheck.

This key does at least seem to be one of the tools I’ll regularly re-use. The ability to auto-unlock something, even if it’s not always guaranteed, is too useful not to deploy when I can.

Arcwind Point and Varlais Caverns are things I’ve written about before, and I didn’t do anything too out of the ordinary here. What was out of the ordinary was characters not actually showing up at the tower when I wanted to finish off Bones For a Crow. More on this to come in my next post!

I forgot until I reviewed the screenshots for this post that I’d actually also found the Helm of Oreyn Bearclaw. It’s a Creation Club artifact, and one I haven’t encountered yet in AE playthroughs. It normally lives in Gallows Hall, and I haven’t run that yet in any of the playthroughs I’ve done since the Anniversary Edition came out.

But Legacy of the Dragonborn also has a version of it, so this is another thing that had to get patched for compatibility between Legacy and the Creation Club content. So Legacy’s way of finding this is different than the AE’s. Legacy drops it into an unmarked tower near Arcwind Point. So clearly I must have swung by to get the thing, though for the life of me I don’t remember doing it!

See, y’all, this is why I try to keep good session notes. ;D So I can write about this stuff even five months after the fact!

Next time

Kendeshel’s next post will feature some going back and further investigating that missing Crowstooth problem; getting yet another dragon in Solitude, and losing another Solitude citizen (cry); doing the Fishing contest in Morthal; becoming thane of Hjaalmarch, and getting Windstad Manor’s land; and last but not least, finally moving the Companions quest further along, to the point of Kendeshel becoming a werewolf and running Gallows Rock with Aela.

Screenshots