In Which Elessir’s Last Several Sessions Are Summarized

I had six remaining posts pertaining to Elessir in my Drafts folder, and a few more directories’ worth of screenshots for which I never took notes. So I’m going to do an overall survey of them here, so I can knock all of that out of the queue.

This post will contain spoilers for the tail end of follower Lucien’s personal quest, and also some spoilers for Beyond Skyrim: Bruma.

Where I left off last with Elessir

Last post I put up about him was his taking out Miraak in Apocrypha, and I’d noted the next things I was going to cover would be his running Ghosts of the Tribunal, and doing more with Lucien’s personal quest. So let’s talk about those.

Ghosts of the Tribunal

I wrote in my notes that I didn’t really feel like there was a good RP explanation for why Elessir would kick this plot off. But really, this applies to any character starting this plot, I feel. You kick off Ghosts of the Tribunal by reading the Heretic Dossier in the temple. And that book’s down in a room on the lower floor of the temple.

Here’s the thing about that: I absolutely get that in Skyrim or any other similar game, it’s a good idea to read everything, because you never know when you might get a quest or a skill point bump or whatever off of doing so. I do in fact do that. Yet at the same time, I keep thinking that it’s a little weird to randomly read books just lying around everywhere. Especially in a temple. Especially when you’re a character who isn’t exactly religious.

And while I do like the overall Ghosts of the Tribunal plot, I still also feel like it’s a stretch to come up with reasons why most iterations of the Dragonborn should give a fuck about supporting an Almalexia cult. Plus, the plot only gives you the options of “I am going to join this cult and obey its religious mandates” or “I am going to wipe out this cult of heretics”. There’s no middle ground of “look, I have no fucks to give about your goddess, but on the other hand, I do care about you being abused for how you choose to worship, so I want to help you anyway.”

Elessir, like most of my Elder Scrolls characters, was not overtly religious. In fact, explicitly because he was a Dunmer on the wrong side of the law, I feel like that made him less likely to favor either side of the Ghosts of the Tribunal plot. Since Skyrim has plots all over the place that have you interacting with the Daedric Princes (or at least acting on their behalf), if anything, I’d think that Elessir’s moral compass would have pointed more in the direction of “I’ll act on behalf of a Daedric Prince if what I think they’re asking for is reasonable, but this doesn’t mean I’m worshipping them.”

Whereas with the cult in Ghosts of the Tribunal, all you have to go on is a bunch of Dunmer who still worship Almalexia even though the Tribunal are long gone from the face of Tamriel. Almalexia is dead. So unlike Azura, Mephala, or Boethiah, she’s not going to show up in person to speak to her followers or even manifest through an avatar. This leaves the player to have to make a judgment call based on the actions of the cultists themselves, how they are functioning in relation to the rest of Solstheim society, and the player’s own thoughts on what’s appropriate RP-wise for their Dragonborn.

So for me, I think Elessir fell squarely into the “I’m not going to worship Almalexia, but I’ll help you on general principles” camp. Which is how I usually play this plot, regardless.

This extended to the part of the plot where I had to take the propaganda letters into the town. Elessir bribed everybody to take them!

One question I had in my notes that I still don’t know the answer to: why the cultists’ propaganda letters to distribute in Raven Rock were written in Daedric text. That seems kinda anti-Tribunal to me. But maybe the author of the letter was using that script as a means of secrecy?

And here’s one more question that I think I didn’t catch on previous runs of this plot: why in the world did the cult matriarch say “Azure bless you” to me, when I came back after handing out the propaganda letters? Isn’t the whole point of this cult that they aren’t worshipping the Reclamations? Oops. 😆

Revisiting Dumzbthar with Lucien

I had some strong WTF reactions to the tail end of the Dumzbthar plotline, but overall, I enjoyed it!

In general, I called it in advance that Lucien was going to rebuild the homicidal automation and bring him under control. And I liked that the plot allowed for the player to get pissed at Lucien about this, because yeah, not telling the Dragonborn that he was going to rebuild the automation that tried to kill him was a bad move on Lucien’s part. To Lucien’s credit, he even realized he’d fucked up and sincerely apologized. So that was excellent character writing there. And I decided Elessir did grudgingly forgive him, just because they’d been adventuring together enough at that point that refusing to deal with Lucien any further would have been like kicking a puppy.

Also, this was the point at which I finally saw how Lucien gets his horse, the “Clive” I’d seen referenced before on Lucien’s official website.

Clive showed up in the bottom of the ruin once the Oblivion gate opened up and the place flooded with Daedra. And yet, he just looked like a perfectly normal Skyrim horse, complete with a saddle. Clive was clearly not a normal horse, as he mentally communicated with Lucien.

I think Elessir probably had a reaction of “Uh, Lucien, my dude, you are riding a daedra, this doesn’t seem exactly wise“. But on the other hand, given that Elessir had the ability to summon both Arvak and the Daedric Horse from The Cause, he didn’t exactly have a leg to stand on for that particular argument. 🤣

Finishing off Kolbjorn Barrow

This time through, Elessir took out Ralis. His patience had taken a beating from Lucien–and while he found it in himself to forgive his friend, that generosity didn’t extend to Ralis. Who, after all, had legit killed a whole bunch of miners and guards.

Bringing the unicorn to Solstheim

I learned that if you’re running Convenient Horses, the Horse Call power totally works on Solstheim. Which let me ride around on Rigmor the unicorn, while there. I’ve since decided that whether or not you get to have a living horse on Solstheim is really just a matter of:

Are you running any mod that allows you to bring that horse to you? And is magic involved?
How did you get to Solstheim, and was that a means of transport that could have allowed for bringing a mount?

So there are options to handwave this, is what I’m saying.

Neloth side plots

Just because I like Neloth, I almost always run his side plots at Tel Mithryn as part of a full Solstheim run. This time through, I took some of the more mercenary dialogue options with him. Just because that was in character for Elessir! Not only because of his being a thief, but also because, as a Dunmer, he was well aware of the pretensions of the various Houses. And absolutely on board with poking holes in the pretensions of House Telvanni.

That said: did Elessir take Neloth up on being a member of House Telvanni? Yes. Yes he did. Well okay yes fine, the game doesn’t actually give you an option of declining the offer. But I also think Elessir probably realized that if he ever did return to Morrowind, it’d probably be a good idea to have at least one major House supporting him.

This also gave me an opportunity to confirm that yes, the load order I was running allowed for a bedroll and a chest in Tel Mithryn, once Neloth granted me membership in his House. Practically speaking, this wasn’t exactly useful, since I was finishing up running Solstheim anyway and wasn’t going to need to ever use that bedroll or chest.

But it did amuse me that it indicated Neloth was too damned cheap to give me an actual bed in an actual room. LOL.

Beyond Skyrim: Bruma

I went to Bruma after finishing up in Solstheim, and have already posted a review of that mod.

I’d originally planned to get into spoiler-level detail talking about Bruma, since that was content new to me at the time. But as I’ve also recently posted, in Canceling Nona’s and Alecto’s playthroughs, and other catchup to do, I’m feeling overwhelmed with my backlog. So I’m going to keep detail light here. Most of what I wanted to say about Bruma is in the review, anyway. And I may get into more depth in Kenna’s playthrough.

Here, I’ll note that the first question I had to settle was why Elessir went down to Bruma to begin with. At the Cyrodiil crossing, I decided to introduce myself as the Arch-Mage of the College of Winterhold. And decided Elessir and Tolfdir had arranged that he’d go down to Cyrodiil to speak with the Synod, maybe as a gesture of good will? To follow up on that whole situation with the researchers in Mzulft, perhaps.

It was kinda hilarious how respectful the guard at the gate got about my being the Arch-Mage, though. Especially given that I was a five-o-clock-shadow-having Dunmer in armor, with a vampire bodyguard.

Meanwhile, Lucien had a lot of great commentary about stuff in Bruma. Not terribly surprising, given that he was an Imperial. He came across as really happy to be back in Cyrodiil, as well as just being generally knowledgeable about the history and politics of the area. This included mentioning how Molag Bal had tried to drop a Dark Anchor on Bruma, but the citizens had fought off the incursion! Which was perhaps the only time I’d ever seen anyone actually call Molag Bal “silly”. LOL. Nice work there on the part of Lucien’s creator.

It was definitely a pleasure to hear unfamiliar music at the Snowstone Rest, and music that was performed very well to boot.

What was not a musical pleasure: the NPC Renod, who suffered deep delusions about being a bard, and inflicted his screeching on everybody within earshot along with a heaping helping of being an aristocratic bastard.

At one point he sneered at the patrons, “You talentless fiends! Could you do better?”

And I really, really wished that the mod would have let me stand up and go, “You pig-voiced buffoon, I’ve trained at the Bard’s College myself. I helped the very ghost of Svaknir by slaying the undead corpse of Olaf One-Eye. I also saw Svaknir’s ghost in Sovngarde. You, sir, are no Svaknir. Now for Divines’ sake, shut the fuck up before I make you eat that lute. Stand aside while a real bard sings to these people.”

Also, I was generally boggling but also amused that nobody in Bruma:

Demanded the guy shut up
Told him to his face that he sucked
Had him arrested for disturbing the public peace
Sicced the Dark Brotherhood on him

Geez, people in Bruma are so civilized. 🤣 Apparently more so than people in Morthal!

The bard plot eventually led me to a point of getting to decide whether to let the guy get taken out by bandits, or get his stolen lute back for him. I really should have just let the bandits take him out! But I was at least trying to maintain a pretense of being a classy Dragonborn and Arch-Mage, and all.

Since I was running Serana as a follower still, she did of course keep raising bandits as we killed them during that plot. And I kept noticing how every person Serana raised had actually “please kill me, I am tormented” type dialogue. Which, I gotta say, was definitely creepier than zombie moan noises.

I was not terribly impressed by the side plot involving the museum of the Champion of Cyrodiil.

And I wanted to like the side plot involving the Orc who had me investigate his wife, who had in theory been kidnapped by bandits. But that one kept having me run back and forth between places in a tiresome, time-consuming way. And I wasn’t really satisfied with the outcome in which I left it up to the Orc as to whether to let his wife go with her chosen lover or not, since that resulted in his losing his temper and killing them both. I deliberately rolled back from that, just because putting the guy through that seemed cruel.

Also, I felt like the wife was fairly spineless for an Orc, just because she apparently had fallen in love with this other dude but didn’t want to leave her actual husband openly? That seemed fairly spineless and deceitful for an Orc.

I did like the side quest involving tracking down what happened to a missing soldier, only to discover that the guy had buggered off to Skyrim and joined the Stormcloaks. This ended in one of those situations where I got to choose what happened as a result, and wound up bringing the news to the widow’s father, who asked me to keep it quiet and not tell the widow and their kid what had happened to the dead soldier.

I got more evidence of the mod doing its best to tie into the situation in Skyrim, via another side plot where I had to help the soldiers at a fort interrogate a captured prisoner. That one was decently fun, and involved a splinter group of Stormcloaks who called themselves the Breakaways, and who were trying to take down the Empire from within Cyrodiil. It sounded like they were trying to get to the Imperial City to carry out some sort of terrorist campaign? Not sure how far they thought they were going to get with that.

Last but not least, there was the main Bruma plot. The big thing I liked about this was the captain of the city guard, Adius, who kept being my contact point for the various stages of the quest line. This guy was portrayed very well, and I felt like he progressed very nicely through getting more friendly and trusting with me. Which gave a lot more weight and heft to the part where he then got arrested by the Thalmor. Yowtch.

Mind you, I had some quibbles with the whole idea of my needing to go ask a bunch of Talos worshippers to be a little less obvious. Not for the general principle of the thing, because I did like how Adius was legit trying to act in that group’s best interests and keep the heat off of them. Rather, my quibble was how this group was already way out in the woods, a fair degree away from Bruma’s location on the map. They were minding their own business, and didn’t have a presence in the city at all. So they couldn’t have gotten any less subtle without going underground! And in my experience as Dragonborn, I was pretty damned sure caves full of frostbite spiders weren’t going to give a fuck about the word of Talos. So not exactly sure what Adius thought I was going to accomplish for him, LOL.

Plus, I thought it was weird that Adius himself then showed up to talk to this same group while I was there. Which raised the question of, if he was going to come talk to them anyway, why send me? That seemed like a weird quest design decision, there.

My last thing I’ll note about Bruma is, it was an unsatisfying play experience to me to have Adius get arrested–and to have absolutely no action I could take to do about it. I understand that this is a consequence of Beyond Skyrim: Bruma only being a proof-of-concept preview of the eventual Beyond Skyrim: Cyrodiil, and that this plot is considered unfinished. Bruma’s devs have said that in the final BS: Cyrodiil release, you will be able to take action on this situation. But until that final version actually drops, I can only play what we have in Bruma, and it’s not really narratively satisfying to play through a plot and not be able to fully finish it.

Hopefully we won’t have to wait too much longer for Beyond Skyrim: Cyrodiil. I did enjoy playing Bruma, and I’ll look forward to seeing more from that team.

And I’ll give additional props to Lucien’s creator here, because Lucien did have excellent commentary on the progression of this quest, as well as the arrest of Adius. So in general, Lucien’s an excellent follower to take down to Bruma with you.

A bit of final action at the college

After I got back from Bruma, my plan had been to do the end-stage College of Winterhold quests for the various trainers. But this is the point at which I finally just decided to bail on Elessir’s playthrough, because I was seeing buggy behavior at that point and wasn’t sure whether I’d started seeing signs of save corruption.

Notably, I was having multiple issues with Lucien and/or Serana seeming to “swim” in mid-air, or clipping through ceilings, any time I changed rooms. And I could not for the life of me get the fight with the unbound dremora in the Conjuration Mastery quest to work.

Narrative ending

So since Elessir’s playthrough just kinda stopped, here’s what I’m going to say happened to him once he finished saving the world from Alduin, Harkon, and Miraak, and cleaned things up down in Bruma.

I think he maintained friendships with both Lucien and Serana. Lucien because that boy brought out Elessir’s better nature, and even though Elessir would absolutely never have admitted, he actually liked the guy and respected his scholarly enthusiasm. And Serana, because, well, he was totes in love with her. But he also knew that Serana wasn’t exactly the marrying type, so I figure he probably carried on a longer-term romance with her without either of them ever calling it that.

I’m pretty sure he would never have asked Serana to turn him. But he may have consented to let her nibble on him every so often. But if a situation ever arose where his choice was “die or let Serana turn him into a vampire”, that might have actually gotten him to do it. But probably that would have happened decades down the line, once he no longer had to maintain a public “being the Dragonborn” presence in Skyrim. And he’d have wanted to maintain at least some level of public respectability at least until Lucia grew up.

And he definitely gave that kid her own house, so she could start a family of her own. Probably gave other houses to his various housecarls, too.

I suspect he probably eventually turned the Arch-Mage position over to Tolfdir at the College. Running the Thieves Guild was way more Elessir’s speed, anyway.

Notable Lucien (and Dumzbthar) lines

Lucien gets clued in that shit is going down at Dumzbthar:

Ah! That’s my resonant sphere! “Critical warning”… but that means… oh no. Oh dear me, no. No no no no no.

And then he tries to explain it to me!

We have a problem… well, I have a problem. Which sort of means you do too, I suppose, but… look, there is a problem. A big one.

I ask him who exactly is attacking Dumzbthar, and this is what he said about that:

I honestly have no idea. Rieklings? Reavers? Werebears? We won’t know until we get there.

Elessir: “See, son? This is why you don’t try to take over an entire Dwemer ruin by yourself. For fuck’s sake, I’m swimming in gold, let me hire you a corps of mercenaries!”

Lucien: “Because hiring mercenaries for Kolbjorn Barrow worked out so well for you?”

Elessir: “THAT WASN’T MY FAULT.”

Meanwhile, Lucien outright lies to me about his “recently hired assistant”:

Oh, I… recruited him in those first few days after we took control of the facility. Have I never mentioned him? Whoops, must have slipped my mind.

And he’s not exactly forthcoming when I see the fruits of his labors, once we get back to the ruin:

So… er… surprise! I’d introduce you, but we re all already acquainted. In case it isn’t obvious, this is Dumzbthar. Say hello, Dumzbthar.

As for the automation himself, he doesn’t sound terribly thrilled by Lucien strongarming him into apologizing to me:

Sorry for trying to murder you and possess your corpse.

I dunno, Dumzie, YOUR SHOWING ACTUAL REMORSE FOR TRYING TO KILL ME AND POSSESS MY CORPSE DOES NOT SEEM LIKE A WASTE OF TIME, and I have yet to see such remorse out of you, JUST SAYING:

It would seem that while we have been wasting time on apologies, our more pressing concern has caught up with us.

Okay fine I suppose it’s probably for the best that Lucien did slap some constraints on you, but I AM NOT LETTING THAT WHOLE TRYING TO MURDER ME THING GO YET, you hold that thought till I get back:

I will remain here to deal with any futher outriders. Good luck, fleshlings. Try not to leak too much blood onto my mechanisms.

Meanwhile, Lucien finds a new friend:

What in the world… Hello, you are a handsome chap, aren’t you? Where did you come from?

Lucien is awfully perky to me about his new best equine bud, and rather overlooking something important:

So I have a horse now! What do you think?

Yeah, see previous commentary about how YOUR AUTOMATION TRIED TO KILL ME, so yes, I’M A BIT SALTY ABOUT YOU LYING TO ME, son:

I know, I know. You’re upset that I brought Dumbthar back, aren’t you?

And this is the part where I cannot help but imagine anime Lucien with huge sorrowful eyes, and Elessir being all “…” and trying not to feel like he’s kicking the puppy:

I really am sorry, it’s just… I didn’t know how you’d react. He tried to kill us and to possess you and…
I suppose, deep down, I knew it was a questionable call, and… I didn’t want you to hate me for it.

Hey, Dumzbthar, THIS IS HOW YOU DO AN APOLOGY, maybe take notes from the scholar:

I did. You’re right. I shouldn’t have done. I can’t really make any excuses for it, I just… did the wrong thing.

Meanwhile, Lucien brims over with trivia about the Nerevarine, which makes me a little sad I wasn’t running Moon and Star in this playthrough, LOL. And also, I’ll call this out about a Solstheim-specific line Lucien has that is not related to Dragonborn in particular: