In Which Nona Quests into Faceted Stones

More Skyrim catchup, but this time with one of the active playthroughs. This is for my Nona playthrough in version 0.5.2 of Tuxborn, which is still in progress even though Tuxborn has now updated to its 1.0 official build.

Main action here is a mix of standard Skyrim stuff, and playing the Carved Brink mod. Accordingly, there will be spoilers for Carved Brink.

Play by play

Play date: 12/1/2024
Session number in this run: 10
Picked up again at the Safehouse
Lucien asked me to train him
Experimented with whether the Seasoned Traveler gear looked good on Lucien, and whether the issue I saw with it reproed with him
Decided I did not like the gear on Lucien, and also confirmed issue didn’t repro on a male mannequin
Tried making Last Whisper Silver Arrow Shematics (sic)
Put more stuff on display and got to 209 displays
Went out to shop at Bits and Pieces
Got rumor about the Bards College from Corpulus at the Winking Skeever
Also got note warning of weird chanting at the tower near Lost Echo Cave, and objective to check out Bird’s Eye Tower
Returned to Falkreath
Headed into Dead Man’s Drink and talked to Valga
Got pointer to go find the lost hunters at Moss Mother Cavern
Slept the night at the inn
Got up in the morning and re-did purchasing the land for Lakeview
Also re-did going to Half-Moon Mill and buying lumber from Hert
Re-did initial Lakeview building, including the jetty that comes with it in this load order
Planted stuff in the house garden
Boinged to Whiterun for a supply run
Shopped with Belethor, and also with Warmaiden’s
Returned to Lakeview to do more building
Dismissed Gorr from my follower group since I felt like it was getting too large and unwieldy
But I also arranged to keep him headquartered at Lakeview, since I didn’t actually have Rayya yet
Boinged back to Whiterun, this time for actual questing
Went to the temple of Kynareth to report in with Danica about retrieving Nettlebane
HI MAURICE
Agreed to let Maurice accompany me to the Eldergleam Sanctuary, and headed out
Got dead Breton + bandits encounter at spawn point near White River Watch
Took out wolves en route, shortly after that
Attacked out of the blue by an NPC named Isidor, and Team Dragonborn made quick work of him; this turned out to be the beginning of Clockwork
Marked Hillgrund’s Tomb for the map
Got into a fight with a troll that also took out an Afflicted Refugee; dispatched the troll
Made it to the Eldergleam Sanctuary
Played through getting the sapling as per previous playthroughs
This time, through, at least tried to talk to Maurice a bit more since that felt in character for Nona; for the record, though, he’s still a pompous git
On the way back from that, stopped at the Abandoned Grotto to pick up where I left off with Carved Brink
Fought skeever there
Chatted a bit with Imp
Headed into the House of the Arcane Arts and nabbed the Altmer Adventurer Armor in the safe
Also nabbed the True Path spell
Read Sinmiaran’s journal to get the clue for how to open the portal to the goblin realm
Made it into Faceted Stones and started exploring the place
Kept encountering random Corrupted Shades who were very similar to hostiles inside Kilkreath, or in Vahlok’s Tomb on Solstheim
Found a bunch of chests to loot, and random various types of loot inside and out of chests: Ancient Falmer Coins, Falmer Paragons, Ancient Crystals, random spellbooks, Curate’s armor items, soul paragons that function as soul gems, and powders with the same effects as potions
Found and activated a Shrine of Auriel, although Auriel wouldn’t take me as a worshipper because I wasn’t a High Elf, a Wood Elf, or a Breton
Started finding statuettes that functioned like the Dwemer statuettes in Project AHO, only these ones only bumped a single random skill rather than bumping all of them
Discovered Auriel’s Boxes, which were opened via the Falmer Paragons
Had first encounter with the Stranger, who pressed me into playing a game involving ghosts with a deadly disease, and two unlabeled potions that had poison and a cure
Took the option of quaffing the contents of both bottles, and the Stranger critiqued my choice
Proceeded from there to do more exploring
Finally reached a little female goblin and Imp urged me to defend her against an attacking Corrupted Shade
Ported down to the Lasting Bones goblin village
Imp talked to the chief to try to get the info on where Geleada was
Learned from their conversation that I would need to talk to the tribe shaman to try to learn how to communicate with the goblins
Went into Ekt the shaman’s hut and smoked a peace pipe
Saw a vision of Abamath, a goblin talking to Sinmiaran, and Sinmiaran checking his pockets for a Memory Stone that would let him understand the goblin language
Returned to shaman’s hut and got objective to proceed to Abamath to look for the Memory Stone
Ported up another couple of levels to get to Abamath, and looted stuff on the way
Imp announced to me that he was going to bugger off to go visit a friend of his in Abah’s Landing
Played through hunting down the Memory Stone
Also found the access out into the next section of Faceted Stones, and Imp showed up again
(And at this point, Imp’s dialogue was confusing about the name of the friend he went to talk to)
But I also got killed by black-skinned goblins, and thrown back to the point of needing to get stuff out of the safe
So re-did everything from that point forward
This time, I also took the time to make additional potions at the alchemy table in the house
Once I reached the Stranger and did the game with the bottles, this time I gave both bottles to the ghosts, but it seemed to “kill” both of them
Gave Lucien the Altmer Adventurer armor, which I think looked really good on him
Re-played to the point at which Imp came back
Learned that the black-skinned goblins were apparently infected with something
Explored more in that area of Faceted Stones and eventually got Brain Rot off an Auriel’s Box
Swung back to go to the Abamath Residental District and get Sinmiaran’s Memory Stone
Re-encountered the Stranger, who gave me a narrated flashback about a plague killing a bunch of Snow Elves that settled in Abamath (which he referred to as Balnenseliye)
Once the flashback was done, the Stranger disappeared again
Found Sinmiaran’s study and got the mace called Altmer Grandeur, as well as the Memory Stone
Found another statuette and got a random skill bump off of it (Smithing up to 60)
Returned to the Blue Horn goblins and found I was now able to understand them
Got quest to go get twenty gold ores for the goblin crafters
Used rune to go to the Great Forest and get the gold ore
Reached a forested area that led down to a mine full of bandits
Team Dragonborn dispatched all hostiles encountered
Hunted through the place and mined as many ore veins as I could find
Leveled up to 13; took Elven Smithing perk
Returned to the goblins to give them the gold ore and got quest reward
Picked up a couple more side quests from other goblins
Stopped there for the time being

Ulfberth War-Bear checkpoint

Later in Nona’s run, I started seeing an issue with no longer being able to interact with Ulfberth War-Bear in Warmaiden’s. As of when I last checked, he’s still showing that issue in Nona’s run.

But calling that out here, because at least as of session 10 in her playthrough, he hadn’t started showing the problem yet. I had a screenshot of his delivering his usual “Welcome to Warmaiden’s” greeting.

Carved Brink commentary

Since most of this post’s new-to-me action was centered on the Carved Brink mod, most of my commentary will be as well. I’ve already put up a general Carved Brink review, but that was addressing the mod on a general level. Here, I’ll focus instead on specific aspects encountered in this play session.

In the House of the Arcane Arts, I liked the safe you could actually physically enter. We know from other sources in lore that magic exists that lets you enter a thing in miniature: i.e., Clockwork City. So it’s very easy to apply the same kind of concept here.

And doing it as a safe also means a tight amount of space that you don’t have to spend too much effort on, when it comes to designing an area that the player can enter.

Now, why exactly Sinmiaran decided he wanted to be able to enter his own safe is a whole other question. But, LOL. As I wrote about in my review post, this mod doesn’t seem exactly eager to provide solid explanations for a lot of what it does, so you just kinda gotta roll with it.

I’m still not a fan of Imp, mostly.

Also not really a fan of the first encounter with the Stranger. In this particular session, I wound up doing that twice, and neither of the options I took for what to do about the bottles really went over well with me. It seemed that no matter what choice I took, the Stranger gave me shit about it. Which kinda goes against the whole “let’s play an amusing game together as host and guest” idea of the encounter, at least for me. It played way more like “let’s play a game where I present you a moral exercise and then critique you no matter what choice you make, just to show how more intellectual than you I am.”

(Mind you, this tracks for what’s established about this character as you play through the mod. The guy is clearly just like that.)

It doesn’t help, either, that the Stranger’s word choices and way of speaking make him come across as very formal and haughty. For example, he used the word “lethiferous” to describe a disease, rather than “fatal”. Don’t get me wrong: as a writer and as a reader, I tend to love me some unusual vocabulary. But I’d have been more impressed by this if the Stranger had actually pronounced the word correctly. His voice line does not agree with the subtitle. He says something that sounds like “letherous”, instead.

(Because yes, I do play with subtitles on, and if you’re going to throw me a weird vocabulary word and the character is not saying the word I see in the subtitles, then yes, I’m going to nitpick that.)

I really liked finding the Blue Horn goblin village, though. It’s charming, and it’s legit fun to go on the little side quest to figure out how to talk to them. (Even though that side quest, a vision of Sinmiaran, raises all sorts of questions that never get answered about where the hell Sinmiaran went…)

And I really liked the initial glimpse of the Abamath Residential District, when I went in there looking for that Memory Stone. I’ve come to learn since playing this session that the first time through, I didn’t actually properly explore the place all the way through. I’ve since corrected that error. More to come on this in a future post.

The Stranger’s flashback about what happened to the Snow Elves was certainly interesting, though it struck me weirdly that it involves a place called Abamath. I’m an ESO player, so I actually have encountered an Abamath in ESO. It’s not clear to me if Carved Brink intends that their Abamath is the one in ESO or not, though. And here, the Stranger throws in another weird word: a whole separate name for the settlement, Balnenseliye.

And again: I’m a writer. I have in fact been on record to use long and complex names for elven settlements in the Rebels of Adalonia books. So believe me, I get it. But what I do not do is throw around two names for the same place in the same scene, at least not without a little context as to why the place has multiple names at all. Such context is not given here. Other than that one throwaway line of the Stranger’s, the place is always Abamath. Why throw in the extra name? So who called it Balnenseliye? Was that the name of the place before the Snow Elves showed up?

I’d suggest it was maybe the Ayleid name, except for the part where Abamath itself is supposed to be an Ayleid name, according to lore. So I don’t even know. Yet another thing you just kinda gotta roll with about this mod.

All that said, I still did like what I saw of the look of the Abamath Residential District at the time.

When I hit the point of being killed by the black-skinned goblins, I was legit startled by that. I don’t know if it was an indicator of my being underpowered for the mod, Tuxborn making combat more difficult anyway, or maybe both. I’m kinda feeling like maybe I’ve been trying to play Carved Brink at a bit too low of a level. Given that I felt underpowered trying to play Project AHO at level 20, and this is a mod by the same team, I’m not terribly surprised by this either.

Notable follower lines

Gore, my dude, this line would be more informative if you hadn’t said it literally after I’d just gone to sell stuff to Belethor:

We should go see Belethor. I heard he will buy just about anything. Sell it too.

Eris, who is not very talkative at all compared to others on Team Dragonborn, is moved to express herself when we head into the Eldergleam Sanctuary:

This place… I… I am lost for words. The feeling here is as if a warm blanket on a cold night.

Gore has opinions on what the Greybeards have asked Nona to do. Son, you have no idea how pointless this errand is going to turn out to be:

The horn of Jurgen Windcaller? A pointless errand. I doubt they asked as much of Talos of Atmora, else they would already have the horn.

Lucien dropped this comment while we were in the mine getting gold for the goblins. Given that Lucien does not as far as I know specifically have reactions for Carved Brink, this must be a line he throws when he’s in any mine?