In Which Nona Meets the Greybeards and Various Khajiit

Time for another round of Nona’s adventures in Skyrim, featuring the Tuxborn modpack! Main action here is Nona and her squad of followers going to High Hrothgar to speak to the Greybeards, and then later to Solitude to speak to Auryen about the Dragonborn Gallery.

Post contains spoilers for Interesting NPCs, Carved Brink, and Aviendha, the follower from the Wheel of Time mod in Tuxborn’s load order. Also, some observations about the mods Nether’s Follower Framework, and Deadly Dragons.

Play by play

Play date: 11/25/2024
Session number in this run: 5
Picked up again at Vilemyr Inn in Ivarstead, after getting up in the morning
Found Temba Wide-Arm (who still doesn’t look terribly wide of arm or anything else in Tuxborn)
Met Khajiit named Dar’rakki who was obsessed with whether there really were 7,000 going up to High Hrothgar
Agreed to count the steps for him
Then headed out to the steps
Found Klimmek as per usual, and got the quest to take the supplies up to the Greybeards
Killed assorted critters on the way up the mountain as you do; did not have the frost troll at the fifth emblem
Found Karita at her meditations as you do; she didn’t have anything new to say
Made it up to High Hrothgar, which also resolved the objective to count the steps; got new objective to return to Dar’rakki
Got the Voice of the Sky perk off reading the last emblem
Dropped off Klimmek’s supplies and got objective to return to him
Entered High Hrothgar, met Arngeir, and did initial Dragonborn testing
Got the next word of Unrelenting Force
Then went outside and did the test with the first word of Whirlwind Sprint
Got objective to go get the Horn of Jurgen Windcaller
Lydia had additional commentary after seeing me actually Shout
We did get the frost troll on the way back down
And with a party of five, it was a lot easier to take the damn thing out, LOL
Leveled up to 6; took Health bump and Enchanting Mastery perk
Courier met me when I returned to Ivarstead, with an unsigned note from a group asking me to meet them in the Frozen Hearth in Winterhold
Found Klimmek and resolved his quest
Found Dar’rakki again and had a bunch of options about what to tell him; took the option for 700 steps
He did not take this well, and wandered off to be alone
Proceeded with investigating Shroud Hearth Barrow
Eris advised me to treat Lydia well, and also was a trifle bemused that I gave the Golden Claw back to the shopkeeper in Riverwood
Read the Illusion skill book (Before the Ages of Man)
Found Wyndelius and took him out
Came back out again to report back to the innkeeper
Found a bow lying on the leaves that was apparently dropped by a dead hunter, but no sign of a nearby body?
Reported back to Wilhelm with the journal, and got the Sapphire Dragon Claw
Returned to Shroud Hearth Barrow
Found Hagravi Gray-Wave hanging out in there so stopped to chat with him–and learned from him that something had happened to Dar’rakki
Headed back into the barrow to run the rest of it
Got past the puzzle door
Saw a notice that Gorr’s Regard for me had increased, nice, and another one later with Lydia
Played through to the end of the place and cleared it
Found Armor of Yngol next to the boss chest
Got the word for Kyne’s Peace off the Word Wall
Found the Nordic dig site added by LotD
That put my Archaeology at 3
Headed back out to return to the inn
At that point my plan was going to be to ride back and follow up with the Khajiit
But I had a dragon encounter that handed me my ass and threw me all the way back to just before I ran Shroud Hearth Barrow
So I had to do it again
Also, adjusted the settings on Deadly Dragons back down to vanilla level difficulty
Took a few more tries to get out of Ivarstead; took multiple attempts to make it past the dragon spawning, since the game was bound and determined to throw me a dragon
Returned to the camp of the three suspicious Khajiit
Ri’Suen-dar got pissed when I wouldn’t eat his moon sugar, and a fight broke out
He ran off into a nearby cavern, while we took out a wolf that got unwisely close to the fight breaking out
Found the Abandoned Grotto
Took out Ri’Suen-dar in there as well as at least one of his companions–but I think I got killed at this point?
But didn’t get thrown back too far, just had to re-do the encounter with Ri-Suen’dar’s group
Finally got the whole group taken out, and explored the Abandoned Grotto
Aviendha decided for some reason that this was a good time for her to take all her clothes off? WTF?
Found the House of the Arcane Arts
Found Imp in there, and had a long conversation with him that established what was going on with the next phase of the Carved Brink plot
Read Heavy Armor skill book (Chimarvamidium)
Got objective to open a portal into the realm Sinmarian had established with the goblins
Got Imp to travel on my shoulder
But for now opted to go to Solitude and get signed on as Auryen’s relic hunter since I had had that knocked out from under me in my first session
Returned to Whiterun and took the carriage to Solitude
BYE ROGGVIR
Slept the night at the Winking Skeever
Then went to talk to Auryen, and got signed on with him; got his initial quests to find him some relics
Did a little shopping with Beirand and Sayma
Took carriage back to Whiterun
Did a bit of forge work
Checked in with Amren and gave him his sword back
Left off there until next time

The Conspiracy of the 7000 Steps quest

Partway in on Nona’s playthrough, I’m beginning to see that the Interesting NPCs mod really does live up to its name. And Dar’rakki, the Khajiit I met at the Vilemyr Inn in Ivarstead, is an excellent example of this!

Let me note first that there was inconsistent spelling of his name: he was tagged as “Dar’rakki” in the UI, but referred to himself as “Dar’Rakki” in his actual dialogue subtitles. I don’t know off the top of my head which spelling is supposed to be canonical for this NPC. Searching for it gets me inconsistent data, between the mod’s original LE version on Nexus, a wiki set up for it, and the more general TES Mods wiki.

And the capitalization of Khajiit names with apostrophes in them isn’t even consistent across the lore. From what I see on the lore page, there was a shift from the Morrowind era to the Skyrim and later era, where the letters following apostrophes in those names went from upper to lower case. So “Dar’rakki” seems more in keeping with the style of names listed for Skyrim and ESO.

Now then, let’s talk about the actual character! He was weirdly obsessed with the seven thousand steps leading up to High Hrothgar. But as I continued to talk to him, his dialogue dropped hints that he had been severely traumatized by the death of someone close to him–and so he’d fixated on the number of steps as some kind of coping mechanism.

I offered to help him out by counting the steps on my way up the mountain. And once I came back, I had several options for what to tell him.

Since I generally opt to be truthful in these situations unless there’s a blatant plot reason why I shouldn’t, I took the option of noting that a lot of the steps had badly degraded, so I was only able to count about 700 of them. Which is, in fact, in keeping with how many steps are actually visible in the game.

This turned out to be a bad choice. Because poor Dar’rakki really didn’t take that well, and wandered off unhappily to be “alone”. And later, when I found Hagravi Gray-Wave hanging out in Shroud Hearth Barrow, he threw off a line about “Shame about what happened to the Khajiit.”

Which made me go WHAT. I looked up the quest on the net, and learned that given how I’d chosen to resolve the quest, the poor guy had actually gone off and committed suicide. 😢 Apparently he poisoned himself, because he couldn’t take the idea that the Greybeards were lying about the steps.

Yikes.

So all in all a very unhappy outcome–but definitely memorable, and interesting. So props to the mod for living up to its mandate!

Lydia is impressed, it’s official!

Lydia, as I noted in my previous Nona post, had already started warming up to me by the time we made it to Ivarstead. But once we actually reached the Greybeards, and she saw me actually Shouting, that kicked her up another notch or three in being impressed!

Seeing me Shout made her a lot more inclined to buy that I wasn’t bullshitting anyone with the whole Dragonborn thing. And since this version of Lydia is written to be half-Imperial, she was initially inclined to dismiss the Dragonborn legend:

You being Dragonborn… It’s bigger than I initially thought. I thought most of that was just some silly legend. “Nord Nonsense”, as Proventus called it.

But I showed her otherwise! Surprise! And heh, now I’m doing a head canon where this makes Lydia start paying rather harder attention to the Nord side of her heritage. 🙂

Hagravi Gray-Wave

This guy was another NPC from Interesting NPCs–but unlike Dar’rakki, he seemed to be mostly there for pleasant conversation. I didn’t get any kind of a quest off of talking to him.

But even he was interesting in his way, partly due to tipping me off to what happened with Dar’rakki, but also partly due to his telling me about how he used to get teased as a child for how his name was similar to “hagraven”.

Regard system in Nether’s Follower Framework

One of the things I’ve been seeing in this playthrough is a Regard system in Nether’s Follower Framework. As of this writing, I’ve had Gorr, Lydia, Auri, and a couple other followers all in NFF at various points. And not long after recruiting each, I saw the Regard system kicking in for them.

This triggered off three overall effects that I noticed:

Followers being reported to me as “fearless”
Followers starting to give me gifts
Followers causing me to get extra skill bumps

The latter two are self-explanatory, but I’m still not entirely sure what a follower being reported as “fearless” actually refers to? I’m not finding a useful answer to this question. It seems like the signal that the Regard system has now kicked in for the follower? I suppose that tracks, as a way of letting the player know that the follower is now thoroughly comfortable with following you around in adventures.

Deadly Dragons is exactly what it says on the tin

Once I got done in Ivarstead, my plan was going to be, return to the Khajiit camp I’d discovered and see what they were on about with the whole “giving me moon sugar” thing.

I ran into a complication with that, though: the game was bound and determined to throw me a dragon, right around the same river that has the troll lair and the dead Stormcloaks.

And that dragon repeatedly handed me my ass. Even with four followers, Lydia, Gorr, Aviendha, and Eris.

So I dug a little further into Tuxborn’s mod list and discovered that yeaaaaah, Deadly Dragons had in fact ramped up the difficulty on dragon fighting. I respect this, at least on paper–but since this was way early in my playthrough, and I was new to Tuxborn besides, I decided to dial the difficulty back down to vanilla levels.

As my playthrough progresses, I may reset it again, but I need to be a lot less squishy first!

A bit more about Aviendha

Aviendha had two lines I want to call out here. This one, re: female dragons:

Are there no female dragons? I’m sure they would be more reasonable…

And, well, fair question that. There are not any actual female dragons known in the lore, although the wiki mentions one that may or may not be fictional. And there is the notion of Jills, creatures who allegedly fixed the flow of time following Dragon Breaks.

But on the other hand, this line of Aviendha’s coupled with this one just kind of makes me sigh:

Men are strange. I think it has something to do with the hair on their chins.

Because here’s the thing: for me, this makes Aviendha come across as a very stereotypical “strong feminist character”. Men are weird, amirite? And a female dragon would totally be more reasonable than a male one!

Never mind that we have absolutely no evidence whatsoever to back that up in the lore; for all we know, female dragons, if they actually have ever existed, could be every bit as domineering as the males.

Neither one of these lines by themselves bug me all that much. But taken in total with everything else about this character, they just, well, make me sigh.

Especially the part where, as soon as we finished fighting Ri’Suen-dar’s group, she chucked off all her clothes. And we had this exchange:

My line to Aviendha:

Uhm. Aviendha you appear to be naked?

And what she said in reply:

I suppose it is not common in this land.

Yeaaaaah, not so much. Look, hon, if you want to run around naked, more power to you. But you may or may not have noticed that Skyrim is cold as fuck, frostbite is a thing, and you chucked off all your clothes before any of us had a chance to actually scope out this place, make sure it was safe from any other sus AF Khajiit, and build a campfire! If you wanted a climate more amenable to you running around starkers, you should have asked the Aes Sedai to maybe send you to Elsweyr or Valenwood or Hammerfell. Just a thought.

Since I don’t know anything about this character’s original version in the Wheel of Time books, I don’t know if this was in character for her or not. But just speaking as a female player, it just came across to me badly that this NPC decided to get naked for no apparent reason. And was confused about it not being a thing people did in Skyrim.

This just also underscores my lack of belief in how the hell this woman would know the slightest bit of anything about what kind of a leader Balgruuf is, or anything else about Whiterun. She doesn’t know people don’t typically get naked in their living spaces in Skyrim, yet she jumps straight to throwing off random dialogue lines about how good a leader Balgruuf is, and being best buds with Adrianne and Ysolda? Sorry. Does not track.

Meanwhile, speaking of those sus AF Khajiit

Once I did finally make it back to the three suspicious Khajiit at their camp, I played through telling Ri-Suen’dar I’d eat the moon sugar later. Which pissed him off, and initiated hostilities!

I touched on this very briefly in the review post I put up for Carved Brink, but here I want to go into further depth. I did not find the motivations here for these Khajiit clear at all.

So okay, sure, great, they’re agents working for the Thalmor and smuggling poisoned moon sugar. Interesting idea. But questions arise:

What exactly are the Thalmor hoping to gain by smuggling poisoned moon sugar around? Who are they hoping to kill off with it?
Why in Divines’ names would Ri’Suen-dar try to foist off some of his poisoned moon sugar on a complete stranger? Was this a robbery attempt? I have no idea, because the encounter gave me nothing to go on here for what the hell this cat was on about.
Also, why in Divines’ names would Ri’Suen-dar even tell a complete stranger that his little band was working for the Thalmor?

Overall, though, my biggest objection to this encounter was that it had absolutely fuck all to do with anything else in the Carved Brink mod. It felt very tacked on. And as I noted in the review post, hinted at an interesting plot that I didn’t actually get.

The House of the Arcane Arts, and Imp

Once my squad and I took out the Khajiit, that left me free to investigate the Abandoned Grotto. Of this, I’ll freely grant a thing I also saw out of these mod creators: excellent visual design. The Grotto was lovely, and so was the house it contained. Even if I raised an eyebrow at a plant called “Muck Sponge”.

And at this point, at least, I did finally get the setup for the actual Carved Brink plot, by way of talking to Imp.

As I noted in my review, I was highly ambivalent about Imp. In addition to what I said in the review post, I’ll also note here that I still don’t know what the hell Imp was actually supposed to be. Some kind of daedric creature? Fuck if I know, the mod didn’t give any context for this, either.

I did rather like the idea of his riding around on my shoulder, at least. Even if it rather reminded me of brain slugs in Futurama.

I did not, however, go any further with the plot at that point. I had more important relic-hunting fish to fry!

Solitude, take two

And this time, going to Solitude, meeting Auryen, and signing on as his relic hunter actually stuck. ;D

I didn’t have Lydia on the first attempt–but this time, I did. Which let me see, to my surprise and pleasure, that this version of Lydia is actually aware of the museum! She threw off a line that made me LOL:

I, for one, am just glad you’re not going to shove priceless artifacts into some dusty old cupboard anymore.

As my playthrough has progressed, Lydia’s had other lines as well, relaying her impressions of Auryen, and being proud of progress as I continue to bring in things to display. It’s a really nice touch on the part of the mod creator! And it’s the kind of commentary I love to get out of followers for something as hugely impactful to a playthrough as Legacy of the Dragonborn.

Here’s what Lydia has to say about Auryen:

Auryen seems like a good fellow. Smart, at the very least.

And I did like this! Even though it sets one up for snarky commentary about respect for smarts being rather un-Nord-ish. ;D But hey, this Lydia is half-Imperial.

And since I finally did actually make it to Solitude properly…

I should note at this point that Solitude absolutely looks different in this modpack. The big thing that stands out for me in its visual look is so much red! Almost all of the rooftops are red, which brings a whole lot of pop to the place.

It does, however, also make for an interesting visual contrast with the Blue Palace–since the Blue Palace’s rooftops are all done up in blue. I’m a little torn between wishing Solitude’s roofs were all blue instead for visual consistency, and wishing that there was more variety in roof color in the city. Kinda leaning a bit to the latter, just because while all the red does bring a much-needed burst of color, it’s a little bit too much red. Especially given that all the guards are wearing much more striking red uniforms, too.

But I really do like the look overall, even with all the red!

Other notable follower lines

Gorr offers a tidbit of his arena expertise, because he was apparently bored by tromping up the mountain:

Fighting styles often come down to build. You got arms like a Clannfear, then you got no range with a weapon, but you’re quick with a shield.

Gorr considers expanding his culinary horizons:

I’m hungry. Maybe today I’ll try something new. Like a vegetable or something, buried under an avalanche of meat.

Eris might be blind, but she still senses what High Hrothgar is like:

The stone is old here. It bears the song of ancients. I feel… at peace.

Lydia, after seeing me tested by the Greybeards, and seeing me actually Shout, is suddenly a lot less inclined to dismiss the idea of my being Dragonborn as “Nord nonsense”:

You might be more deserving of that title than I ever thought.

Lydia is impressed by ancient Nordic architecture, namely, Shroud Hearth Barrow:

Look at that ruin. The ancestors were almost as clever as the Dwarves were, the way they built it.

Eris has some advice for me regarding how to deal with Lydia being sworn to serve me:

Sworn she may be to your service, but do not mistreat the housecarl. There is honour in duty, and that is something she knows well, it seems.

Eris is also a trifle bemused about my having given the Golden Claw back to Lucan in Riverwood:

The Claw had no functional purpose to the trader, and yet you returned it to him.

And after I told her it wasn’t mine to keep, Eris added:

An honourable gesture, then. Ownership seems a curious term to use for such a thing… but I digress. Let us continue on.

Hagravi Gray-Wave clues me in that Dar’rakki really hadn’t taken my news about the steps well:

Shame what happened to the Khajiit. A hard truth can be too much for a weak heart.

Lydia muses on the unhappy spiritual implications of draugr:

It’s sad… these draugr have been dead for thousands of years and never set foot in Sovngarde.

Eris comments on the unhappy fate of Roggvir in Solitude, which struck me as rather lyrical and respectful for a character that in theory is supposedly True Neutral:

Fair travels, guardsman. To Sovngarde or beyond.

Lydia has a word of caution while we’re in Solitude:

Plenty of Thalmor patrols come through this part of Skyrim. We should be careful.

Next time

Nona’s next post is going to feature:

Running In My Time of Need
Taking Aviendha back to the Riverwood bridge and meeting a critical NPC from her plotline
Taking out some bandits at Silent Moons Camp (and getting a relic for Auryen while I was at it), on behalf of Belethor
Picking up the quest to save the Gildergreen
Recovering a second relic for Auryen from Broken Helm Hollow in the Rift