In Which Ashoshah Takes a Contract

I got Ashoshah started as a character on ESO nearly a whole year ago at this point, and have I posted about her more than once since then? No, no I have not. So here’s a post to try to get caught up on what I’ve done with that character.

Highlights

• Play dates: 7/24-7/26/2024
• Started running around the Gold Coast to get acquainted with the terrain and practice using Arcanist skills
• Picked up where I’d left off with the Brotherhood, and following the Matron’s directive to speak to various other NPCs in the Sanctuary to get acquainted with them
• Talked to Tanek, Kor, Mirabelle Motierre, Green-Venom-Tongue, and Elam Drals
• Got a contract off of Elam Drals to go take out a target in Kvatch

Commentary

I would have summarized a bunch of activity for Ashoshah from the tail end of July 2024, but I actually wanted to spend more time on talking about the Dark Brotherhood than a summary post would allow me. So I’m covering just two sessions in this post, rather than a whole slew of them.

And mostly, what I want to talk about here is meeting the various NPCs at the Brotherhood Sanctuary, and then getting a contract from Elam Drals.

I gotta say, I did like that the Matron explicitly told me to take the time to speak to the various NPCs in the Sanctuary. It made all those people stand out better as characters–and given how the plot proceeded, it gave them more narrative weight. (More on this to come in future posts.)

Some thoughts on the people I talked to:

Tanek: This guy, being a Redguard, inevitably reminded me of Nazir in Skyrim. He also had in common with Nazir that the Dark Brotherhood apparently gave him a way to “focus his anger”. It’s kind of hilarious to me that this guy was taking the Brotherhood as his own personal anger management therapy.

He was not, however, the guy to talk to for contract quests–which set him apart from Nazir.

Tanek’s main point in my conversation with him was to start dropping more hints at me about the faction’s main plot. He had some ominous stuff to say about my being a tempting target for whoever’s hunting Brotherhood members.

Kor and Hildegard: I need to take these two together, even though Kor was actually the only one I talked to. He struck me as surprisingly earnest and friendly for a dude who was both a) a Nord, and b) a member of the Brotherhood. He also gave me an introduction to what’s going on with Hildegard, who I initially took to be simply a caged wolf–until Kor explained that she was in fact a werewolf, and not really in control of her transformations.

Mirabelle Motierre: First thing I noticed about this character was her last name, Motierre, which struck me as immediately familiar. She was in fact from the same Motierre family as Amaund Motierre in Skyrim. And when I looked her up on the UESP, I saw that the Motierre family shows up in Oblivion as well. So apparently they’ve got a long-running connection to the Dark Brotherhood!

Second thing I noticed about her was the name Mirabelle, which my brain of course also strongly connects to Skyrim, courtesy of the character Mirabelle Ervine at the College of Winterhold.

And lastly, she came on hard to Ashoshah, establishing herself as the Dark Brotherhood’s resident flirt–although her dialogue also established she was in a relationship with another NPC, Cimbar.

That she told me I was cuter than the last initiate was particularly amusing given that Ashoshah was a) also female, and b) a Khajiit. So clearly Mirabelle is very open-minded in her flirtations. 😉 And this does tie in amusingly with the multiple examples I’ve seen at this point in ESO of non-Khajiit and Khajiit absolutely sharing attraction, heh.

The conversation with Mirabelle in particular, once I reviewed it in my screenshots for this post, reminded me that I do really wish that the Elder Scrolls games let you speak in appropriate patterns if you’re playing a Khajiit. You can do this in Skyrim with the right mods, to be sure.

And heh, now that I looked it up, I’ve just discovered that there is in fact an ESO addon to let you do the same thing. One which explicitly pays homepage to the Skyrim mod of the same name, in fact. I’m going to have to try this out!

Green-Venom-Tongue: It was probably inevitable that one of the members of the Brotherhood would be an Argonian, since the Argonians do have the whole Shadowscale thing in their lore. And I liked that this one seemed better rounded as a character than Veezara in Skyrim.

(I’m not going to say that all of the NPCs in this group were better rounded than the ones in Skyrim, because that’s not exactly fair. But the Matron specifically instructing the player to and get to know everybody in the group presented those NPCs better. By contrast, Astrid in Skyrim’s Dark Brotherhood clearly has no fucks to give about whether or not you get to know any of her crew.)

And I did like this guy’s name, as well as how he specifically tells you a joking story about how exactly he got that name. Which only makes it more intriguing. It was not, however, a detail I got any further info on afterwards!

Elam Drals: Last but not least, there was this guy. He turned out to be this Brotherhood Sanctuary’s version of Nazir, because a) he was full of snark, and b) he was the one in charge of handing out daily tasks to the player. And by tasks, I mean contracts to go kill people.

And I did in fact get a contract off of him, which was to go kill a randomly selected NPC in Kvatch.

My screenshots do not actually show which random NPC I killed. And since I’m writing this post nearly a year after I actually played these two sessions, I legit do not remember which of the targets you get was the one I actually killed. Ah well.

This is also indicative of the main problem I had with playing the Brotherhood in Skyrim, too: namely, that I don’t exactly enjoy sneaking up on random NPCs and killing them. And in ESO’s case, there’s the added complication that no NPC you assassinate ever actually stays dead. They respawn. So it seems especially pointless to do Brotherhood contracts in ESO.

But, well, I already knew that going in, and that was why I set up Ashoshah’s backstory the way I did!

I can count on one hand, though, the number of times I’ve actually killed somebody for the Brotherhood with this alt, as of this writing. There is a skill line for the Brotherhood in ESO, but the passives it provides aren’t terribly useful outside the context of doing Brotherhood stuff in general, by which I mean, assassinating NPCs. So I haven’t been exactly motivated to take any further contracts.

I’m enough of a completist, though, that I may try to swing back at some point and try to bump those passives up a bit more. We’ll see what happens. Running around stabbing NPCs as Ash is a thing I’d have to be in a particular mood for.

Last thing I’ll note here is that while running around the Gold Coast zone, I noticed green triangles periodically floating around me. I figured at the time that they had to be an Arcanist thing. I only learned later that they actually indicated how much crux I had available. Crux is the resource used by Arcanists to control their skills. Some skills spend crux, other skills create it.

But at least as of this pair of sessions, I hadn’t had a handle on how crux worked. Fortunately, I picked that up later as I continued to play this character.

And come to think of it, there’s a fun question here about what Ash herself thinks of those glowing floaty triangles. And how exactly she started being able to fling tentacles out of her hands!

Next time

Ashoshah’s next post will feature moving the main Dark Brotherhood plotline along a bit further.

Screenshots