In Which Nona Finds a Dragonstone and Fights a Dragon

And now, a much more current Skyrim post: session 3 of my new playthrough using the Tuxborn modpack! Major action featured here is the usual “getting a Skyrim run started” stuff: finishing Bleak Falls Barrow, fighting the dragon at the watchtower, getting made thane of Whiterun, and getting Lydia as housecarl! Only this time, the fight with the dragon was a lot harder. And this playthrough has a much, much more interesting version of Lydia.

Play by play

Play date: 11/25/2024
Session number in this run: 3
Picked up again at the door to Bleak Falls Barrow
Discovered that the “Soul Link” spell I now had was a built-in means of summoning Eris back to me if she managed to vanish, good
Got in and this time we took out the initial bandits properly
Gave Gorr a few extra armor items, and also upgraded him to a steel warhammer
Got ahead of both Eris and Gorr though
Read the Thief skillbook and got Pickpocketing boost
Took out the skeevers on the stairs down by myself, thank you steel sword and Flames spell
Also took out the Wounded Frostbite Spider by myself
Cut down Arvel the Swift, and he of course ran off like he does
At this point, stopped to get Gorr and Eris caught up with me
Found Arvel killed by the spike wall trap
Got the Golden Claw and objective to find the secret of Bleak Falls Barrow
Started flinging loot into the Stash Supplies spell (which i had to turn on again due to having rolled back)
Started finding things called “Bone Charms” which I didn’t understand until I got to the end of the dungeon
This time through, found out where the wraith shows up: it hangs out down under the bridge, down where the skeleton and chest are
This time, I saw it first, and Eris and Gorr and I were able to kill it
Made it through to the next area, the part where I usually drop into Sneak and hide behind a pillar to take out a draugr near the door
This time did not bother with stealth since we outnumbered the draugr, and this time that draugr actually had a name: Thorgar the Skulltaker, and he was carrying a weapon called Sanguinary Cleaver
In the room after that, once we got past the second of the two spinning blades traps, found a little glowing spot of light that had an activator prompt on it and the caption “Climb Up”
Got through the puzzle door in the Hall of Stories
Found the Nordic Excavation site I knew would be there from Kendeshel’s run, and excavated that
Which, again, LOL, just because I haven’t actually gone to the museum with Nona yet; that put my Archaeology skill at 2
Got the Word for Unrelenting Force off the Word Wall
Wth a party of three, it was not difficult to take out the draugr that came out of the sarcophagus
Got the Dragonstone and other loot
Found an Ancient Tome that explained that bone charms were for powering ancient artifacts of the Dragon Cult
Got out of the dungeon, very late in game time, and it was very dark out
Tried to find the corundum vein I knew would be around, but it was too dark to properly hunt for it
So just fast traveled to Riverwood
Couldn’t sleep in the inn since by now Delphine was of course at Dragonsreach, so waited in the inn until it was light out
Spotted Mandyn Hlaalu from Moon and Star hanging out nearby, but did not engage, since I knew he wouldn’t want to talk to me until I’d leveled up enough anyway
Bought fire salts from Lucan and returned the Golden Claw to him
Went out again and finally made myself an Iron Lantern
Got level up alert and leveled up to 4; dropped several points on various skills; took Stamina bump; dropped perk point on Conjuration
Headed out to Whiterun
Passed the wedding party trying to get to Solitude; the wife called me ‘Skyrim trash’
Nona, sadly: “That’s not very nice!”
Hit the iron vein near the Honningbrew Meadery since after several previous failures in the previous session, this vein was back to being active; got some fossils
Nona: “Ooh, science!”
Made it back to Whiterun
Saw Heimskr out preaching; apparently in this load order he only preaches on weekends
Made it to Dragonsreach; gave Farengar the Dragonstone; cue Irileth!
Played through getting the Jarl to ask me to help fight the dragon
Pretty sure at this point Nona was all ‘Wait, what? Me? Can I even fight? Wait, going to Helgen means I have to fight a dragon?! Oh dear, I’m not sure i like this…”
Off to fight the dragon at the watchtower! Which took a very damn long time
Kept getting fried over and over and over and over
Tried several strategies to deal with this, none of which were successful
Wasn’t doing enough damage with archery, so I tried to give Gorr my Hunting Bow of Fire that I’d found in Bleak Falls Barrow; that didn’t help either
And I didn’t have sufficient magic on me to do ranged magical attacks
Since Mirmulmir was spawning as a fire-breather, was pretty sure I wasn’t going to do much to him with Flames, either
Finally decided to do two things:
1. Kick the difficulty down to Novice
2. Roll back to my last save, partway through the barrow, and this time pick up a Sparks spell so I’d have that available in the fight
Rollback dropped me back into the barrow just past the puzzle door, so I didn’t lose a huge amount of progress
Adjusted the difficulty
This time on the way out, did find that corundum vein; I knew I’d need the corundum later
Found a surprise new location: Staadomaar
Reached Anise’s Cabin and found a surprise extra woman there, see below
Tried talking to Anise, but she did not have any dialogue options I didn’t recognize
Next up: headed towards the Riverwood bridge, since I knew the follower Aviendha was supposed to spawn by default on that bridge, more on this below
She asked if she could come with me, so I told her yes, and that put me at a party of four
Returned to Riverwood and talked to Lucan to give him back the Golden Claw
Noted that this time I actually had a prompt to ask him if it was for sale; don’t think I’ll bother to buy it, though, since I can make a replica for Legacy of the Dragonborn purposes
Bought spellbooks for Candlelight and Sparks from him, Candlelight for lighting purposes, and Sparks for using on the dragon
Re-did leveling up to 4 and headed back to Whiterun
Found the farmer on his way to Windhelm to join the Stormcloaks, and got the prompt to join the Stormcloak rebellion
Passed Alfhild Battle-Born on my way past the meadery
Passed Lillith Maiden-Loom and stopped to talk to her just because Nona is sweet and friendly like that; got a little bit more out of her than I usually do, including asking her what she thought about the war, and she admitted that it’s been excellent for her business
Re-made an iron lantern, this time at Warmaiden’s
Re-did returning to Farengar and giving him the Dragonstone
Went through several more rounds of trying to take out the damn dragon
This time what finally worked was not heading out immediately with Irileth and the other guards
Instead, sold a bunch of stuff to Belethor and Arcadia until I had enough on me to get more weapons
Bought another hunting bow from Elrindir in the Drunken Hunstman
Gave one bow to Aviendha and another bow to Gorr, and gave both of them arrows as well, just so that all three of my followers had ranged attacks they could use on the dragon
That delay in getting out of the city then triggered the arrival of the Alik’r warriors
Had this happen a few times since i was playing through this part several times too
Noticed on their first appearance that they were wearing Remnant armor, which was cool–although later they just had usual Alik’r outfits (the fancier ones I’d seen before in my modded playthroughs, not the standard vanilla ones)
After several new attempts, this time in growing darkness, finally took out the fucking dragon
Mostly hid in the tower, because Nona is very very squishy, and Mirmulnir did a lot more fire damage than i was used to
Looted a bunch of the bodies for stuff to carry back to Whiterun and sell, and of course also looted the dragon
Very overloaded at this point, so started trudging back to Whiterun (and this was a point at which I did not use Stash Supplies, because I was carrying stuff I wanted to sell)
Passed the two Alik’r warriors on their way to Rorikstead, ha! I don’t think I’ve ever seen them on the road before, this must be a consequence of triggering that encounter prior to running the fight with Mirmulnir
Passed two guards who hadn’t been in on the fight, or at least I think not?
One of them had a line about ‘Dragonborn or not, you took out that dragon, and that’s good enough for me’–which played weirdly, given that I hadn’t been told to my face that I was Dragonborn yet
Cue the Greybeards!
Returned to Dragonsreach, and did the scene with Proventus, the Jarl, and the Jarl’s brother
Got the objective to go to High Hrothgar, and got thaned up!
This got me the Greatsword of Whiterun and a ring I hadn’t seen before, courtesy of Legacy v6
HI LYDIA, and more on this below
Then she asked about going to High Hrothgar, and suggested the two paths you’d usually take to get there
I asked her to follow me, which brought my party up to 5, and she took slot number 2 in the follower framework
I told her yes, we’d be going to High Hrothgar, since the other option was also unnecessarily dismissive and didn’t seem appropriate for Nona
Finally found Irileth again on my way out of Dragonsreach–apparently it had taken her this long to walk back into the city after the battle?
Asked her about her background with the Jarl–and she had a line I’m not sure I’d heard before about my being dangerously curious, snerk (looked it up, confirmed this is a vanilla game line)
Headed down to Warmaiden’s
Noticed a new sewer grate cover near there
Did a little work at the forge
LOL, having four followers definitely made that a bit challenging, since I had to jump around just to go between the forge and the surrounding crafting stations
Made myself a backpack out of the “Seasoned Traveler” set of gear
Chose green since that seemed to go best with the “Traveler’s” gear Nona was currently wearing, and I think Nona just likes green <3
That was a good place to stop until next time

General commentary on this load order

In rough order of appearance in the session, here’s a whole bunch of small things I noted about the Tuxborn play experience in general, over the course of this session.

As I noted in Nona’s previous post, Eris gives you a Soul Link spell that you can use to move her to you if you get separated from her. Which is great!

I discovered during this session, though, that I need to be careful about where I aim it. As is the case with any conjuration spell in the game, you need to be pointing at a place where your summoned being can actually materialize. And I didn’t realize this the first couple of times I tried to use it. Maybe this was because normally, I’m not expecting to use a summon spell to summon people? Once I figured this out, though, it worked splendidly.

I am really liking the satisfying thwack of the different archery sounds in this load order. ❤️ It’s a more distinctive sound!

I haven’t really been able to tell yet if I’m better at archery with this load order, though. In general, I have a history of my aim being ass. But I feel like I had a bit better a time taking out that Wounded Frostbite Spider this time through than I typically have.

I mapped the N key to be my “Teleport Followers” key, for any followers that actually talk to the NFF. And I was pleased to confirm later that yes, this does impact all followers on the framework.

And I started setting up a radial menu for Tuxborn similar to what I’ve done in ESO and Morrowind. I don’t have as big a need for it in regular, less-heavily-modded Skyrim, but it definitely seems called for here.

Speaking of Nether’s Follower Framework, I also saw that this mod appears to let any followers it tracks have a level of regard for you. I saw Gorr’s regard for me go up more than once.

I’m really grooving on whatever mods are adding all the alternate types of locks on chests. The different types of locks are neat!

Really liking the magical effects for spells queued up on my hands, too. “Flames” looks kinda like I’m carrying a giant sparkler, LOL.

I noticed a couple of times in Bleak Falls Barrow that there were little bits of sparkly light hanging in certain places. When I approached these, I got an activator with the label “Climb Up”. So this turned out to be a way for me to do, well, what it says on the tin.

This was kinda neat, I guess? I don’t think I buy that the sparkly lights were something I’d actually be seeing in character… but on the other hand, I’m trying to establish that Nona is kind of otherworldly. And that she tends to see things normal people don’t. So hell, maybe “I can climb here” means “pretty sparkling lights” in her brain? 😀

That said, I’m not sure if I feel like having a visual prompt for somewhere I can climb is really necessary. But I’m willing to be convinced. I’ll look for further examples of this as the playthrough proceeds, and if I find somewhere where climbing becomes more critical, this may prove to be a lot more useful.

Running the puzzle door in Bleak Falls Barrow this time went a lot quicker–because Tuxborn includes a mod that lets you automatically unlock a puzzle door as long as you have the relevant Dragon Claw. I did kind of miss turning the three rings, a bit. But on the whole, I’m appreciating that if you’ve run a bunch of Skyrim games, this mod does save you a little bit of time! You don’t have to remind yourself of which symbols you have to turn the rings to.

I am not sure I approve of the mod that’s caused Heimskr to only preach on weekends! His blathering on and on and on and on and on about Talos is all part of the charm of Whiterun for me. 🤣

I didn’t dislike Balgruuf’s new look as much in this session–maybe because in the scene where the guard reports to him about the attack on the Western Watchtower, he was moving around and being active. That did look better than the hard closeup on him when I was talking to him at his throne.

And lastly, somebody on the Tuxborn Discord mentioned sewers in Whiterun as an option for me to play in to get a little more leveled up. I did finally notice a sewer grate near Warmaiden’s I had never seen before. So that will be interesting to check out later.

Thorgar the Skulltaker, Sanguinary Cleaver, and bone charms

This gets its own section in the post, just because these things all tied together!

I’ve written repeatedly about the one draugr at a door about halfway through Bleak Falls Barrow, who I usually take out by judicious use of Sneak. This time through, with two followers with me, I didn’t even have to bother with stealth. We outnumbered him, so I went with a full on frontal attack.

And this time through, that draugr actually had a name: Thorgar the Skulltaker. Which was intriguing, given that so far in all the Tuxborn play I’ve done, I have yet to see any other draugr have an actual name. As I understand it, this is courtesy of the Restless Dead mod–which says on its page on Nexus that it is adding in unique bosses to dungeons that previously didn’t have them.

Moreover, ol’ Thorgar was carrying a unique weapon, too: the Sanguinary Cleaver. Restless Dead’s page says unique weapons like this are supposed to be buffed by another thing I found in Bleak Falls Barrow: bone charms. And when I got to the end of the barrow, I found an Ancient Tome that talked about this. You basically carry the bone charms in your inventory along with the weapon, and whatever enchantment it has on it is buffed by the charms.

Now, so far I’m really liking all the different types of draugr, and it’s particularly cool for bosses and mini-bosses to be more diversified. Not sure how many fucks I’ll have to give about bone charms and unique weapons, though. We’ll have to see if I find any one-handed weapons or bows added in by this mod, since those are the weapons types I tend to prefer.

More on Stash Supplies spell

I only realized as of this specific session that flinging things into storage via the Stash Supplies spell was going to put each and every one of those things out of my reach until I could actually get the Safehouse.

So while I absolutely went ahead and took shameless advantage of having this spell available, I had to be a bit careful with using it over this session and a couple after. Anything I absolutely knew for sure I was going to want to quickly sell, I kept on me.

Staadomar

On the way out of Bleak Falls Barrow the second time through, I found a surprise new location: Staadomar!

This was not far from Anise’s Cabin, and looked like the entrance to yet another barrow. There was an ominously glowing red door in there, too.

I did a bit of internet searching and found that apparently this will be involved with Helgen Reborn! So I chose to leave it for now, until I get to it naturally in the flow of that mod’s story.

Extra NPC at Anise’s Cabin

Also on the second time out of Bleak Falls Barrow, I swung past Anise’s Cabin just to see if there were any interesting changes there.

Answer: yes! There was a surprise extra NPC there, another woman in a robe. She had a fuckload of magical things for sale, none of which I could afford, and which seemed to be involved with Shadow magic.

(I didn’t get a screenshot with this character’s name in it, though. Dang. I’ll have to go back and look for her later.)

Tried talking to Anise as well, but she did not have any dialogue options I didn’t recognize. And even with Tuxborn’s changes, I still didn’t particularly feel like picking a fight with Anise.

Follower number three: Aviendha

I gotta admit, I was a little ambivalent about picking up Aviendha as a follower. Her core concept is that she’s lifted wholesale out of the Wheel of Time series. Like, literally; she’s a named character in that series. And I was dubious about how well porting a character from the Wheel of Time series over into Skyrim would work.

This is not, repeat, not a slam of any kind on the Wheel of Time series. I haven’t read any of them, so by definition, I have no opinion on their quality. This is strictly a matter of my personal taste about pulling characters from an entirely different source into Skyrim; that’s a bit too much crossing the streams for me. And I’d feel the same way about pulling from sources I am a fan of, like, say, Tolkien or Star Wars.

On the other hand, Aviendha was also an easily acquirable follower. You find her right near Riverwood. Normally she spawns on the bridge into Riverwood, but Tuxborn has an additional mod that moves her spawn point off of that bridge. You don’t have to go very far, though.

And since I really needed the additional help to go after the dragon, I went ahead and picked up Aviendha anyway. Also, I was legit curious about how she’d be implemented, and whether I’d find her interesting enough to inspire me to go check out her actual source material.

So, the circumstances of her arrival were that she came out of a blue portal at her spawn point. And I got the impression from her that she was looking for a car’a’carn, clearly a term from those books. Which is supposedly someone “behind the dragon wall”. The obvious implication here being, she was sent by the Wise Ones to find me.

Now, why the Wise Ones of an entire other world would want to find the Dragonborn of Nirn, who knows? I am a bit interested to see whether this is an Aviendha prior to the events of the books she appears in, or something.

I’ll have more to say on Aviendha in coming posts; for now I’ll just note that she did definitely help turn the tide at the watchtower.

Fighting Mirmulnir at the Western Watchtower

I went back and doublechecked all of my previous playthroughs for what happened with the fight with Mirmulnir. It’s been common for me to take four or five times before finally taking out the dragon.

This time, though, it was a lot harder, even with three followers with ranged attacks, and with my game Difficulty kicked down to Novice.

I attribute this to a couple of things: not only the general game difficulty, but also that Tuxborn includes a mod called Deadly Dragons, which specifically ups the difficulty of dragon combat. I actually wound up dialing Deadly Dragons down in a later session, and really wish I’d figured that out in this one! Because yeah, it took a long damn time to take out Mirmulnir.

I saw that his fire damage behaved differently than vanilla, too. Areas he set on fire stayed on fire for several seconds, before finally cooling off enough for me to be close enough to them, and they did indeed do damage to me if I stood too close to them.

This also repeatedly killed guards. More than once, I nabbed a Nord bow off of whatever guard died nearest to me. This let me alternate as best I could between casting Sparks out the narrow windows, and shooting arrows until I ran out of arrows.

Last but definitely not least, I did not have the post-fight conversation about OMG YOU ARE TOTALLY DRAGONBORN. And that was very, very weird. Because I did get the objective to try my new Shout power as per usual–but there was nobody around to suggest I try that.

So I guess for narrative purposes I can assume that Nona realized something very important happened once she killed the dragon? And she just tried to Shout on instinct.

But I also noticed that I found seven dead guards lying around the tower. So maybe there were so many casualties that that OMG YOU ARE TOTALLY DRAGONBORN conversation had nobody left to start it?

I couldn’t even find Irileth standing around as she usually does, exchanging lines with the guards–and I was legit anxious that she’d been killed, too.

When I looted Mirmulnir, I noticed he had “Old Whiterun” armor and helmet in his loot, LOL. These were the traditional guard armor, and explicitly marked as displayable for the museum. The new Whiterun armor objects are not.

So presumably there’s a Legacy patch acting on this. I think the mod with the new guard armor styles is Sons of Skyrim? I do not see a specific Legacy of the Dragonborn patch for that in Tuxborn’s load order, but I do see patches for Sons of Skyrim in general. More on this later, once I reach the point of posting about Nona getting access to the museum.

And it’ll be interesting to see how I can find the other traditional guard armor types for the various holds.

Major changes to Lydia

Tuxborn does some major things to Lydia, and OMG I love them.

There are two big mods involved with overhauling Lydia, one that completely rewrites her dialogue, and another one that changes her appearance.

Let me talk about the replacer mod first. I’m pretty sure it’s this one, even though this one doesn’t appear by name in Tuxborn’s load order link–but there are merges for NPCs listed in that load order which could include that. And this mod matches what I saw of Lydia in play. She looks noticeably different, with longer hair and big pouty lips, and I don’t quite like the look.

But on the other hand, thanks to Improved Follower Dialogue – Lydia, her voice is also mostly completely different. All the new lines are by a completely different voice actor. So given that this is AU Lydia, I’m actually kind of okay with her looking completely different.

This version of Lydia was super fucking cranky at me, because five of her friends had just been killed in the fight with the dragon. And she was not happy about being asked to be the housecarl to the drifter who just showed up and happened to get in on that battle.

She also didn’t think I was going to be any more of a real addition to the Jarl’s court than anybody else in Whiterun. She had harsh words about Nazeem (HA!), and wasn’t impressed with Hrongar, the Gray-Manes, or the Battle-Borns, either.

I had a few conversational options as to how to respond to that, two of which did not seem appropriate for Nona at all. So I went with “Is this going to be a problem?” I imagined Nona looking stricken here and trying her best to keep her voice level–’cause this girl was already shaken as fuck from what just happened at the watchtower.

Lydia promised she’d do her job and keep me breathing, but asserted that she was an honest woman, and that I needed to know her concerns if she was in fact going to do her job. Overall I really like this take on the situation! It makes Lydia way more interesting, and makes me look forward to improving my relationship with her.

After Lydia signed on for the housecarl gig and we headed out of Dragonsreach, I overheard her talking to Eris. And that was in lines that sounded like Colleen Delany.

So it seems like even though I’m mostly dealing with an AU Lydia, she will still periodically sound like Colleen Delany. That’ll be a little weird, but another thing I’ll just have to roll with.

Notable follower lines

Gorr, when we headed into an area of Bleak Falls Barrow with draugr. He apparently perks up a lot when there’s imminent fighting:

Finally! Some action. Let’s go friend, time’s a wasting.

Eris, apparently having no fucks to give about leaving corpses lying around:

Leave them to rot.

Gorr, a man of simple pleasures, remarks upon his philosophy about both food and battle:

Just remember, everything’s better bloody.

Aviendha, taunting Mirmulnir:

Hah! Even a Shaido dog would be more of a challenge!

Lydia is way saltier upon meeting her new thane in this version of the story:

So you’re the one who helped with the Dragon? I’m Lydia. It’s an honor, you’re a hero… whatever it is I’m supposed to tell you.

Irileth’s name is actually misspelled in this line of Lydia’s, and also, my proofreader brain bitches about using the numeral 8 rather than the word eight in dialogue. But hey, fan-produced mod, so not terribly worried about that. Because this lays out why Lydia is salty at me:

Look, Irelith and 8 other guards were out there. I knew all of them. Including the ones who didn’t make it back.

And Lydia is aware of the dictates of her job, which makes me wonder if all the guards of Skyrim get trained in potential housecarl duties as a matter of course. I respect her being up front about this, too!

I’ll make sure you keep breathing, but you need to know my concerns if I’m going to do that.

Next time

Nona’s next post will feature her party setting out for High Hrothgar; actually clearing the area around the Ritual Stone this time, as well as Graywinter Watch; clearing Valtheim Towers and recovering Amren’s family sword; acquiring a horse; being attacked by a stranger and learning that he was in search of a ruin in Eastmarch; finding a suspicious group of Khajiit who made a big point of foisting off some moon-sugar on her; and last but not least, reaching Ivarstead and bunking down at the inn there for the night, to rest up for seeing the Greybeards!