In Which Merawen Quests Through Falkreath and the Reach

Short-ish session, without any particular goal in mind other than general adventuring! Most notable things I did were taking out a trio of Thalmor who had an execution order against me, and visiting a haunted inn!

Highlights

• Play date: 10/14/2021
• Session number in this run: 75
• Decided not to run Southfringe Sanctum after all; there’s apparently no reward for clearing the place and no quest? And I kinda don’t feel like attacking spellswords who aren’t blatantly attacking me, the XP gain is not large enough to justify that for me at this point
• Tried to run the place briefly but bailed and rolled back to previous save, and just cleared the alchemy table outside the entrance
• (Was amused however to discover that the spellswords in the place have a pet fox named Pumpkin)
• Cleared two silver veins and used them for Transmute practice; cleared an outdoor chest as well
• Proceeded westward through Falkreath Hold
• Attacked by three Thalmor Justiciars with an execution order, calling me extremely dangerous and quite capable of defending myself, and an enemy of the Thalmor. They’re not wrong ;D
• Killed them all with lightning bolts (very satisfying), and took their stuff
• Found Angi’s Camp; elected to not stop there as I’m already at 100 for Archery so it’s not like Angi can train me
• Did however stop in Falkreath to rent a room at the inn, and then sell stuff before heading onward to the west
• Found burned carriage with a corpse and two horses
• Killed a spriggan and spriggan matron at Evergreen Grove
• Blood dragon! Attacked nearby bandit camp first, then found me when i was trying to mine an iron ore vein
• Killed the dragon with lightning! Destruction made it to 80 😀
• Switched off to stalhrim armor though as was overburdened due to dragon bits
• Found Bannermist Tower
• Found Hunter’s Rest; hunter inside was sleeping! But found the other hunter and bought a few things from her before continuing on my way
• Switched to greatsword to work on Two-handed; took out two wolves, a bear, and a hostile Argonian
• Found Glenmoril Coven; attacked by hostile hag as soon as I was in range, and held on exploring it for later as it’s relevant to Companions quests, so I’ll save this for playthrough three
• Came up near Bilegulch Mine; orc bandit came running up going “GONNA RIP YOU OPEN” or at least trying to, but didn’t make it to “open” before I killed him with my greatsword 😉
• Passed a hunter’s camp near the mine, with a single hunter hanging out there
• Saw a couple of Companions taking out a bear; one (Vilkas) stopped to tell me “you look strong! Come to Jorrvaskr and be a Companion!” Will be working on that next playthrough, dude
• Took out another bear
• Went by three Thalmor with a prisoner; lots of Thalmor wandering around this session, is there a convention?
• Found Old Hroldan Inn and got innkeeper’s pitch that “Tiber Septim totally slept here and his bed is as good as it was hundreds of years ago!”
• Booked the room and heard the innkeeper scream, then got up to find a ghost who called me Hjalti and begged me to give him his sword
• Innkeeper gave me a location to look for it; looks like I need to go check Hag’s End again?
• Found the camp where Talvur and his Breton lover had been killed, presumably by the nearby cranky bear
• Found a hostile hagraven in her camp, took her out after she threw ice spikes at me from down the hill
• Massive Forsworn camp nearby? Didn’t get close enough to identify it at the time, but the wiki says it must have been Karthspire, which I didn’t recognize since I was seeing it from a different angle; ran like hell before their mage conjuring a frost atronach could catch up with me
• Found Bleakwind Bluff, which apparently also has Forsworn
• Tried to head to Hag’s End but realized I had too much loot to really run another dungeon, so boinged to Markarth to offload
• Sold stuff to Lisbet and Endon, then went to Vlindrel hall to crash for the night

Commentary

Not too much to say here other than what I covered above, since this session didn’t have a huge amount of in-depth exploration of anything, or specific quests to run until I reached the haunted inn.

I will however note my satisfaction that my Destruction magic is up to 80! I have a ways to go yet to unlock the Destruction Ritual quest—apparently I have to go all the way to 100 for that, because there’s a bug against unlocking Faralda’s quest option for it until then, and that’s not consistent with the other mage college quests.

On the other hand, Destruction is the magic school I use most often! So it’d make sense to have that get to 100 first.

Meanwhile, I was really kind of charmed by the innkeeper, Eydis, at Old Hroldan Inn. And particularly her pitch about how “this is totally the bed Tiber Septim slept in when he came through here several hundred years ago and it’s still every bit as good!”

Honey, I’m pretty damn sure you’ve changed the bedding on that thing since then. But okay fine maybe the actual frame of the bed has held up this long!

Still though I also liked how the ghost is not hostile, and just hanging out in the inn. He isn’t the first non-hostile ghost I’ve encountered (hi there little Helgi in Morthal), but it’s always nice to see another one just for a change of pace.

Next time

I left off in Markarth, and I’d thought I would proceed to do the Forsworn Conspiracy plot–but I’m seeing on the wiki that there is a possible bug involved with that, if you have the Alduin’s Bane quest active. Namely, you might not get the Elder Scroll back, which would break your ability to do the main quest.

Yikes.

So yeah, I’ll need to hold off doing the Forsworn Conspiracy until at least after I do Alduin’s Bane.

Backup plan: do a bit more crafting in Markarth, sell what I can, and proceed on to Hag’s End to get that sword for the ghost! Then after that, maybe head to Solitude and see about getting the Wabbajack.

I’m maybe about halfway through level 70 so I may or may not make it to level 71 in the next session. We’ll see!

Screenshots

Editing to add

• 11/17/2023: Fixed missing gallery, and added a session number.
• 10/5/2024: Added a play date to the highlights section. Converted the gallery to a native WordPress one.