In Which Nona Kills a Dragon, Alik’r Warriors, and Bandits

Session number 6 in my ongoing active playthrough of Tuxborn, the Skyrim modpack. Main action here: moving the plot along in the Wheel of Time mod included with Tuxborn, but unfortunately not enjoying that very much; running the In My Time of Need plot, this time in favor of Saadia; killing a bandit leader at Silent Moons Camp, this time on behalf of Belethor; and acquiring relics for Auryen at the Dragonborn Gallery.

Play by play

Play date: 11/26/2024
Session number in this run: 6
Picked up again in Whiterun
Sold some firewood to Hulda at the Bannered Mare
Rented a room to sleep
Went to talk to Saadia, and got her request to talk to her privately
Noted that there was not a note to trigger the Silver armor quest on the table as there is in vanilla
Agreed to help Saadia, and got objective to go talk to the prisoner in Dragonsreach
Shopped with Belethor
Asked Belethor if he needed me to help him with anything, and got him to give me a radiant quest to go kill a bandit, which happened to be at Silent Moons Camp
Shopped with Arcadia and used her alchemy table
Headed out from Whiterun and saw the Khajiit on site
Chatted with Lydia some about the friends she’d lost at the watchtower
Headed over to Riverwood to take Aviendha back to the bridge
On the way, ran into a random thief; this did not go well for the thief
Finally reached the bridge and met Moraine, who started cluing Aviendha in on why the hell she’d been sent to Tamriel
But the scene was rudely interrupted by the arrival of a dragon! Which we all then had to dispatch
Taking out the dragon also let me level up to 7, yay; dropped a Perk point on Speech Mastery
Sold stuff to Alvor and Lucan after the battle, to offload carry weight
Went back to the bridge and did take two of the conversation with Moraine
Moraine gave me a Tar Valon mark, though damned if I know what the thing is supposed to signify
This made Aviendha be on board with Team Dragonborn (though at this point, honestly, I was less eager about her being around)
Headed over next to find Silent Moons Camp
Passed Imperials with prisoner en route
Saw Ri’saad’s Khajiit heading out from Whiterun
Spent a dragon soul to unlock Kyne’s Peace Shout
Took out a wolf en route
Ran Silent Moons pretty much as per usual, took out exterior bandits and then the ones by the Lunar Forge
Read Heavy Armor Forging skill book and Light Armor Forging skill book for Smithing
Got assorted Lunar weapons, both at the forge and down in the interior portion of the camp as welld
Went into the interior portion of the place and took out the bandit leader
Got objective to report back to Belethor and tell him the bandit leader was dead
Also found Denstagmer’s Ring to satisfy the objective for that for Auryen
Found Malrus’ dead body and looted his knapsack for his stuff
Read his journal, and that kicked off the Book of Wonders quest for Legacy, which I’d known was coming!
Found a book Notes on the Divine Crusader Relics, that kicked off the Guardians of the Divine quest for Legacy
Excavated the Nordic excavation site in the place
Found a book (There Is No Umbra) that kicked off objectives to ask about Ulves Seloth at the College of Winterhold, and search for evidence of Daumbra at the Atronach Forge
Set up a campsite outside Silent Moons so I could rest until the morning
Hit the nearby silver ore veins as I usually do when running Silent Moons
Returned to Whiterun and reported back to Belethor about the bandit kill
Then went to Dragonsreach to talk to the Alik’r prisoner
Paid the prisoner’s fine, and left him to try to talk the guard into actually letting him go
Headed next to Swindler’s Den to take out Kematu
Passed a giant en route
Hit an ore vein on the way, while taking care to avoid pissing off a nearby mammoth
Reached Swindler’s Den and started running the place
Made it to Kematu and confronted him
Taking him and his warriors out took several tries!
During this bit I also leveled up to 8; took Point Blank Shot perk in Archery
Had to pause at one point to upgrade Lydia’s gear; I think here was where I gave her the armor Eris had given me?
Finally succeeded in taking them out after getting them to chase after me into the tight little twisty passage that leads to the waterfall; better able to fight them one or two at a time there
Notable in the loot: Legacy of the Dragonguard, a Speech skill book
Returned to Whiterun
Sold loot to Elrindir at the Drunken Huntsman
Reported back to Saadia at the Bannered Mare
Rented a room at the inn again and slept the night
Finally bought Breezehome from Proventus!
Spotted Eldawyn eating at the tables in Dragonsreach, so apparently she has enough pull with the court that she can take her meals there?
Furnished as much of Breezehome as I could afford, including the bedroom so I could store stuff in the chest there
Tried out making some Seasoned Traveller gear
Sold stuff to Belethor
Talked to Danica Pure-Spring in the Wind District and picked up the Blessings of Nature quest
Spoke to Lucia as well to give her a coin and get her backstory
Next up: headed off to Riften
Had initial encounter at the gate with the guard and passed Persuade check to let me in without having to fork over the “visitor tax” (Nona may look sweet, but she’s on to you, pal)
Overheard an NPC I didn’t recognize, Jalamar, proclaiming that if the person he was talking to wouldn’t listen to him, he’d find someone who would; did not engage that guy for now
Instead, went into the Bee and Barb; heard Maramal giving his Mara speech as you do
Rented a bed from Keerava
In the morning, had initial encounter with Maul
Headed out towards Broken Helm Hollow to get the next relic
Killed witch just outside Riften
Was attacked by Dark Brotherhood assassin; we dispatched same
Killed a kagouti! Critter added in by one of the mods 😀
Reached Broken Helm Hollow and ran the place
Killed an imp and got Imp Gall (mod addition)
Read Two-handed skill book The Battle of Sancre Tor
Found the Sixth House Bell Hammer for Auryen
Also found Leifnarr’s corpse and got the objective to report his death to his family
Returned to Whiterun
Finished up furnishing Breezehome!
Saved there until next time

No Silver armor quest yet

Tuxborn includes the Rebalancing Anniversary Edition mod, and the big thing with that is, delaying a bunch of the Anniversary Edition quests in the name of better balancing things out. Practically speaking, what this appears to mean in this playthrough is that a lot of the ways I have gotten used to triggering various “get the cool armor” quests do not immediately show up.

Such as M’Sharra’s Diary, which normally sits on the table in the side room of the Bannered Mare. When following Saadia upstairs to talk to her in private, I made a point of seeing if the diary was on the table. It was not. (Note: I did see it appear later, once I’d leveled up enough. So good to know that works as the mod intended.)

Really dark upstairs in the Bannered Mare

While talking to Saadia, I had more trouble with the overall lighting. It was impossible for me to see Saadia properly during our conversation.

This is a problem I later fixed by making myself a lantern and pretty much always wearing it, as an in-game workaround. But that said, I’ve also come to learn that the reshaders Tuxborn is set up to use may also be interfering with lighting conditions.

I learned Tuxborn includes a mod tool called KreatE, which lets you do a bunch of things to the overall look of the game, while the game is running. Including changing cell lighting. And I also learned that by default, Tuxborn is set to use a preset for this tool called Amethyst. But there are two versions of it in the modpack, and by default, Tuxborn is set to use Amethyst Plus. In later sessions, once I learned how to launch KreatE, I tried swapping over to the Amethyst preset itself (without Plus in the game), and got a lot more reasonable lighting conditions. I lost a lot of color vibrancy, but I’m okay with that if I can actually see NPCs I’m talking to in inns.

I still need to confirm this. But for purposes of this particular post, I’ll note that any other players running Tuxborn who run into a similar problem may need to change over to the regular Amethyst preset as well.

Bandit quests from shopkeepers

I’m not sure what I think about this as an addition to the play experience: shopkeepers having additional dialogue options that let you offer to help them out with stuff. So far, this appears to be “go kill a bandit for me”.

I can see this, I suppose, as a thing shopkeepers might want to hire sellswords for. The game makes it obvious that bandits are a problem all over Skyrim, and multiple NPCs in multiple markets lament how bandits are impacting their trade. So I can certainly see shopkeepers being motivated to try to hire people themselves to deal with this.

On the other hand, I’m used to getting these bounties from hold stewards! And it feels weird to me to not be doing it that way. Not so weird that I won’t do it! But weird nonetheless. 🙂

More on Lydia

I really liked the conversation I had with Lydia about the friends she’d lost amongst the guards, at the western watchtower. Lyds came across as faintly surly about being asked about this; she put it to me as “interrogating it” out of her. But she did pay homage to those characters, so let’s do so here!

Thor was only 19, but he was as Nordic as they come. Fought with a battleaxe, drank a lot – but mead never made him violent. He always had his temper under control.

Faldir was an older man with a wife and teenaged son. He’d been guarding the city all the way through the Great War. He said he regretted not going when he was younger, but had gotten over it.

Hroki was one of the only other women in the guard. She was about a decade older than me. She… was almost a mentor.

Jorving was smarter than what you’d expect from someone in that profession. He was very well-versed in the history of Skyrim, Morrowind, and Cyrodiil. He’d told me plenty of stories while we were on watch together.

Asvald reminded me of my father. Grew up as a petty thief in Windhelm, but turned his life around. I don’t know how he survived living on those streets in the cold…

Guards of Whiterun, the Dragonborn salutes you. And after she told me about them, she added to me:

And I know you would have saved them if you could have.

Aw. ❤️

Meeting Moraine at the bridge, take one

When I took Aviendha back to the bridge as she asked, another character called Moraine showed up.

I had some issues with this entire encounter. It was clearly along the lines of “let’s introduce the player to another critical character in this mod, and throw in some conversation about core ideas from the Wheel of Time for narrative context”.

And that was all very well and good except for Moraine pissing me off with this line:

As the Wheel of Time turns, places wear many names. Men wear many names, many faces. Different faces, but always the same man. The car’a’carn, The Dragon Reborn, or simply Dragonborn. The man is always the same.

I’m going to have more to say about this in the full review I’ll be writing up for this mod. But for now, said it before, and I will most likely say it again:

DAMMIT, MODS, DO NOT ASSUME THE PLAYER IS PLAYING A MALE DRAGONBORN.

And also, take one of this conversation was interrupted by a dragon attack!

Aviendha trying way too goddamned hard to matchmake

After the fight with the dragon, when I went into the Riverwood Trader to sell stuff to Lucan, Aviendha asked to talk to me. And went off on this huge pitch about how Ysolda was clearly the romantic partner for me, which was a great big barrel of WTF, WOMAN?

I’m going to have a lot more to say about this in the mod review. Here, I’ll focus on this last line of Aviendha’s, which was the one that pissed me off:

Very well, wetlander. When this land begins to break you, it will be a fitting punishment for your treatment of Ysolda.

This was incredibly fucking rude of Aviendha. Because one, she was acting like I had been deliberately cruel to Ysolda, which did not happen in any way, shape, or form. Shooting down Aviendha pitching Ysolda as a romantic interest does not equal being cruel to Ysolda. And two, Aviendha had no goddamned business getting bitchy at me about not wanting to discuss my romantic plans with a follower I had only met a couple sessions ago.

This right here by itself killed my interest in keeping her around as a follower. Just because I take on a follower as an extra weapon to help in the dragon fights does not mean that follower has license to try to foist a third party off on me as a romantic interest, and then to get salty at me when I shoot that idea down.

I felt strongly enough about this interaction that, as with Project AHO, I had to write fic about it. So this is now my official headcanon for how this conversation actually went: Courtship Doesn’t Work Like That.

Meeting Moraine at the bridge, take two

Since the dragon attack on Riverwood rudely interrupted my conversation with Moraine, I had to go back and re-do it. It wasn’t really any better the second time through.

Aside from my being cranky that Moraine’s lines were clearly written to assume that Dragonborn is male, I also got cranky about how she was super light on details that I would have considered critical to the narrative:

How the hell did the Aes Sedai become aware of Nirn to begin with?
Why did she feel it important to send Aviendha over to “keep me safe”? This doesn’t feel exactly respectful to my well-armed and well-armored housecarl, or for that matter, Eris or Gorr!
Or, while we’re on the topic, not exactly respectful to ME. Because okay yes fine, newbie Dragonborn, and at this point I was very squishy, but Divines’ sake, lady, I AM NOT EXACTLY HELPLESS. OR unguarded.
Also, I still take issue with Aviendha apparently being chucked over to Nirn without even being briefed beforehand on her mission. Bad planning, Moraine. I assume that this was so that the conversation briefing Aviendha could actually happen on camera where the player could see it. But my point remains.

I’ll have more to say on this as I put up more of Nona’s posts, and when I get to writing a full review for this mod. For now, I’ll just say that Moraine gave me a bunch of initial lines that I assume would make a lot more sense to somebody who’s read the Wheel of Time books, along the lines of who the Aes Sedai are, and where they get their power from.

Which was all very well and good, except that none of that actually answered the question of “why do these people care about finding the Dragonborn to begin with”. Or, what worldbuilding the mod is assuming here, for how the world of the Wheel of Time and the world of Nirn can connect at all.

Also, Moraine had this line that I had to quibble with:

There is a place of safety. In the White Tower of Tar Valon you would be among Aes Sedai and Warders. We can guide you and keep you safe.

Uh, lady, you seem to know a lot about me, but you’re not telling me exactly how you think you can guide me any better than the Greybeards can. And “keeping me safe” kinda goes against the whole “I need to save the world from Alduin” problem. Can’t kill dragons if I’m hiding in your tower. I’m thinking you don’t know nearly as much about my being Dragonborn as you think you do.

This line, too, raised my eyebrows:

But for now, trust that Aviendha will keep you safe here in Skyrim. She would lay down her life for you.

In fairness, I have to acknowledge that being promised Aviendha like this would have made a lot more sense if I hadn’t already also had three other followers, including Lydia. Especially Lydia. Whose job it explicitly is to protect me and all that I own with her life.

I don’t think sweet-natured Nona would have objected in the slightest to Aviendha being willing to fight by her side; she had at this point, after all, seen that fighting dragons is fucking difficult! And I see her being happy to take whatever new friends and help she can get.

But I cannot help but imagine Lydia putting in very frostily, “With all due respect, whoever you are, are you implying you don’t trust me to do my job?”

Lastly, Moraine gave me a Tar Valon Mark. Again, something that’d probably be more meaningful to me if I’d read the WoT books at all. But in the direct context of the game, I also couldn’t figure out what the thing was supposed to be for. It didn’t do anything when I tried to activate it. So if it’s supposed to have a function in the mod, as of this writing, that function hasn’t yet revealed itself. I’ll have to see if it turns out to have any meaning at all by the time I finish up playing the mod’s content.

After I finished talking to Moraine, Aviendha had a couple more lines to me about how she was now clear on her mandate from the Aes Sedai and that it was now her mission to “keep me safe”. So, okay fine, Wheel of Time equivalent of Lydia being sworn to my service.

But it still didn’t really answer the question of why the Aes Sedai wanted to do this to begin with.

Silent Moons Camp

Running Silent Moons Camp was mostly familiar territory at this point, even the parts added in by Legacy of the Dragonborn, since I’d done those bits in Kendeshel’s run.

Still, there was a bit of extra stuff with the finding of the There Is No Umbra book. And it was also a bit weird for what wasn’t there for me yet: i.e., the additional stuff for the Bow of Shadows quest. I still need to swing back and do that!

Also, I put the Spectral Wolf summon spell to use, Tuxborn’s version of Conjure Familiar. But with four followers, I barely even needed it. It was tight quarters for fighting in the interior parts of the camp, too, so I barely had any room to actually kill the final bandit leader myself.

More on In My Time of Need

After doing the stuff at Riverwood and Silent Moons Camp, I swung back around to the In My Time of Need plot. And I think this was perhaps the first time I’d run the conversation with the Alik’r prisoner in the Dragonsreach dungeon and been able to actually see him clearly. So that was nice.

Also noteworthy: he was wearing Remnants armor, as I’d already seen could happen earlier in the run, with the two warriors that showed up at the Whiterun gates. That was a nice touch, too.

This time through I opted to side with Saadia, as I usually prefer to do when running a modded playthrough.

My only regret about that: learning later that this modpack’s version of Lydia has opinions about that. Since finishing the plot, I keep getting lines from her about how Saadia always rubbed her the wrong way, and maybe the Alik’r had been right?

Lyds. Hon. IT’S TOO DAMNED LATE NOW, INNIT? You personally helped me kill Kematu and every single one of his warriors. So unless somebody else shows up looking for Saadia, or unless you maybe want to go find somebody to report her to, I’m pretty damned sure this issue is done.

Breezehome!

This session also saw me buying and furnishing Breezehome, as you do. <3 Not too much hugely different about it with this mod pack, everything is still recognizably “Breezehome”. Only notable bit of furnishing it this time through was doing it in a slightly different order, and realizing I didn’t get an active fire until I put in the kitchen furnishings.

Legacy of the Dragonguard skill book

In the boss chest in Swindler’s Den, I got a Speech skill book called Legacy of the Dragonguard. This is not a vanilla Skyrim skill book, and I don’t know what mod put it in.

But I really would like to know, because the damn thing’s marked as a quest item, and I cannot get it out of my inventory!

There Is No Umbra book

This book was in Malrus’ backpack when I searched it, and when I read it, it kicked off a couple of objectives to follow up on at the College of Winterhold. This stuff was, I think, for the mod There Is No Umbra, which does its own take on the Umbra blade.

As of this writing, I haven’t finished playing that out, so I haven’t gotten that sword yet as a follower. (Which, I gotta snerk at, for how that reads. LOL.) We’ll see what happens when I finish playing that quest!

Camping in Tuxborn

By and large, almost everything about Tuxborn is so awesome that I’m barely missing any of the other mods I’ve tried in prior runs, and which Tuxborn does not include.

But there are a couple of notable exceptions, and the Campfire mod is one. I am really missing Campfire’s tents, and the ability to set up better campfires.

In Tuxborn, I’m having to rely on the AE Camping functionality. Which does do the job, but just not nearly so well. And it does mean I have to keep re-making camping supplies and lugging them around in my inventory. As I’ve lamented before, camping supplies are heavy. So it’s a good thing I’m not actually running Survival Mode!

Other notable follower lines

Eris, talking about Saadia:

The woman seeks a different path than the one intended… and yet fate has found her once more. She is not as free as she believed.

Lydia, about hunting prospects around Whiterun:

Contrary to popular belief, there’s actually plenty of game out on the Tundra. It’s a great place to hunt.

Not sure what she’s on about there, given that the only other NPC I’ve ever heard comment on the hunting around Whiterun is Anoriath. And he’s always on about how the plains are ripe with game! LOL.

My boy Gorr continues to be a man of simple pleasures:

Bandits. I love killing bandits. Probably my second favorite thing in the world. Or third. Killing sellswords is right up there too.

Lydia, relaying sage maternal advice (it sounds like her mom sure did know something suspicious about the nature of the Companions!):

My mother was a Companion, before she married my father. Always told me to stay away from them. Never knew why, but I listened.

Next time

Nona’s next post will feature heading into the Reach to find the last of the initial relics for Auryen, which took me a few tries as I kept getting killed by stuff en route; dropping off all three relics with Auryen; signing on as his museum’s relic hunter; and unlocking the Safehouse!