In Which Gyllerah Quests in Wrothgar

Back around to ESO! And specifically, to Gyllerah! This is a short one as it only covers a couple of days, and only one day of actual adventuring. But I’m wanting to get this out to move along to the next posts in the queue. Main action covered here is questing in Wrothgar, both main quest there and side quest stuff.

Play by play

Play dates: 2/12-2/14/2024
Session number in this run: 353
General non-adventuring things done:
- Writs, both regular and master
- Farming resources
- Selling stuff
- Fishing on Artaeum
- Made level 6 gear for Veghra

February 13th

Main action part 1: playing out more of the Wrothgar storyline
Turned on Bastian for backup for this, so I could work on leveling him up
Boinged to Orsinium and found the inn I had to get to, which was confusing given that the access point for it was in a building labeled as someone’s house
Questioned the barkeep for info on the guy I was looking for
Got the tip that the guy favored a very strong fragrance, which I used as a means to track him through the city–by which I mean, visible green smoke trail!
Found some Khajiit who were working on setting up a stall in the city, and who pointed me at a local bathhouse to find the guy
Went in there and found him; he’d rented the place out
Challenged him on his association with the Winterborn and he caved pretty quickly
Warned him the guard would be informed and that he’d better not leave the city
Headed over to the keep to find out who to report this to, and found a High Priestess of Trinimac, Solgra
And also Forge-Mother Alga, who turned out to be King Kurog’s mother
She told me to find her son at a keep to the east where he’d gathered forces to fight the Reachmen
BUT FIRST: decided to run Orzorga’s plots to get her recipes, since I needed those for master writ purposes
Got all of her offered recipes, and I already had one, so that one I could sell on the Guild stores!
Then later: returned to main plot and hit up that keep I had to go to, which was a nice crunchy battle scenario
Volunteered my assistance and got immediately recruited to help the Orc forces get into the keep
This required me to take out some harpies
And also help Eveli Sharp-Arrow (HI EVELI) get into position to set a couple of harpy nests on fire, which made for some cool combat visuals
Also had to rescue another character, a Breton alchemist, who apparently is going to be a recurring character as well
That guy was on hand to try to help them figure out Briarheart ritual magic, so I had to help him out by burning some saplings of the briarheart tree growing out of corpses
King Kurog, who was following me through this combat (good on ya, king), bitched about not getting to set any saplings on fire, LOL
Finally led Kurog to the Reachman leader we had to take out and we got into combat with the guy
He and Kurog exchanged some amusing taunts, but we killed him pretty damned quickly
(See, Kurog, this is why you wanted the Vestige on hand to help you out here)
Then had to swing back around and rescue the alchemist from being roasted
Once we did that then we secured the keep properly, and I got the directive to return to Kurog’s keep in Orsinium
BUT FIRST: decided to go run Old Orsinium, one of the two public dungeons in Wrothgar
Wanted a crack at some Ancient Orc stylesheets for purposes of making gear for Veghra
So hoofed it over there with Bastian since it was in a part of the Wrothgar map I hadn’t reached yet
Discovered a few more spots on the way, and killed assorted hostiles
Reached the place and began to run it
Had to talk to the Aspect of Malacath a few times (which was manifesting as assorted weapons)
Couple other players also running at the same time and following a similar path, so Bastian and I often had help on the larger mobs
Did not get any style pages, but did get an Anvil of Old Orsinium antiquity lead, so there’s that
And Bastian went up two levels to level 6
Finished that run up and made that Gyllerah’s last action for the night

Making level 6 gear for Veghra

Continuing a previous habit of using Gyllerah to make leveling gear for other alts, I built a level 6 gear set for Veghra. This involved pairing the Adept Rider and Heartland Conquerer sets. I set the Swift trait on all the jewelry, with magicka regeneration glyphs. For the armor, I did magicka runes, and for the weapons, frost damage.

I gave her a battleaxe and a Destruction staff, thinking at the time that those would be her weapons of choice once she unlocked a back bar. This has not proven to be the case; Veghra’s evolved into mostly fighting with Desto staves. And while I do periodically still have her use a physical weapon, I’m just not fond of the battleaxe. I’ve swapped her over to a greatsword since.

Orzorga the chef

I already knew about Orzorga in general, and that several of her recipes were master writ material for Provisioning. Once I got access to Wrothgar, though, this meant I could actually go find Orzorga, and get those recipes.

So I leapt at the chance when it arose, and was very glad I did. I kind of adore Orzorga, not only because I love the idea of an Orc chef, but also because she’s just highly entertaining as a character. I loved her getting enthusiastic about things like harpy brains and bile as ingredients–and discussing the ethics of whether using ogre guts counted as cannibalism!

I did feel a little sorry for the pitiful Breton dude who was supposed to be her actual assistant, though. He came running up to her late, after I did her first quest, only to have Orzorga fire him on the spot. Even given that Orzorga is an Orc, that seemed unnecessarily harsh! I kinda wish that guy could have gotten a chance to redeem himself a bit as I proceeded to get the rest of Orzorga’s recipes. Maybe by having to be my temporary follower as I went out to harvest the ingredients?

And I could totally see it playing out two different ways–either he manages to kill something that lets him bring Orzorga a really rare ingredient, at which point she’s grudgingly willing to keep him given that I can’t hang around permanently as her assistant. Or, he freaks out at having to hunt so many dangerous creatures, and decides he’s going to return to Wayrest and be a merchant or a tailor or something. 😀

Main Wrothgar questing

Orsinium is a particularly challenging city for me to navigate through in the game. As I write this, nearly six months to the day after having run the session described in this post, I still don’t have a good sense of Orsinium’s layout. Case in point: trying to get into the Greedy Gut inn. I kept having the quest marker direct me at Mazabakh’s house, and only realized after a few rounds of frustrated exploring that you actually got into the inn through the house. (If there was some sort of other exterior access to the inn part of the building, I did not find it.)

And ah, I see on the wiki page for the inn that there is in fact a known bug about this:

Quest markers for objectives taking place inside the inn always direct you to take the way via Mazabakh’s house rather than the actual inn entrance.

Because yeah, this is exactly what happened to me. So this explains why I found getting into the inn highly confusing.

Once I got past that point, though, tracking down the guy I needed to find was entertaining. The proprietor at the inn told me my target was known for wearing a strong fragrance, which I was then able to use as a means to track him through the city–but the game rendered that as a visible green smoke trail! That had to be one hell of a strong fragrance. 😮

When I made it over to participate in the attack on Frostbreak Fortress, that whole sequence of action was very strong. I was particularly impressed by King Kurog actually accompanying me through the keep, and making bitchy commentary about not getting to set saplings on fire. This was the first “I think I really like this guy” impression I had of him–which, given how the Wrothgar plot went later, all the more impresses me now!

I was quite pleased to have Eveli Sharp-Arrow heavily involved in the action pretty much as of here, which continued all throughout the rest of the plot. She’s delightful and I always enjoy seeing her. ❤️ I only discovered later, once Veghra and Gyllerah got to running Glenumbra, that Alinon the alchemist is also a recurring character. But heh, more of Gyllerah running into people out of sequence!

Running Old Orsinium

This public dungeon’s main plot was pretty neat! An order of Orcish monk types (the Order of the Wrathful Flame) was trying to conduct a ritual of keeping a flame for Malacath lit down in the bowels of the place. But they’d all run afoul of danger, and their last surviving member urged me to go do the ritual in their name before he croaked.

I was very amused by the opening exchange with the Aspect of Malacath–and how Malacath noticed I wasn’t bowing to him. The game gave me a line asking him if he wanted me to bow, and Malacath got all huffy about that: “Do you mistake me for Molag Bal?!”

My answering line was “Actually, I defeated Molag Bal”, to which Malacath promptly snarked in reply: “You should have finished the job!”

LOL. Well, if the game would have actually let me do that, I would have. But as it stands I was only able to chop the guy in half. 😆 Still, that was hilarious.

Also, I liked the ritual that the monkish type wanted me to do. The first part of it was for honoring the clans of Orcs who’d done things Malacath thought were worthy, and the second part was to actively scorn the clans who’d offended him. Some of these were the same clans, which I thought was an interesting touch. And overall, it was a nice look into general Orc history and culture, and a highlight of Malacath and how he expects his followers to behave.