In Which Alarrah Finally Drops Off the Horn

Twitter thread from 5/13/2021, in which Alarrah returns the Horn of Jurgen Windcaller to High Hrothgar, and her player discovers several varied ways for the game to kill her.

In Which Alarrah Finally Drops Off the Horn, But Other Than That, Mostly Finds Out Ways for the Game to Kill Her:

8:42 AM · May 13, 2021

1. As discussed in my last post, I’d decided to go give the Horn back to the Greybeards, finally. This was a fairly anti-climactic ending to the Horn quest…

8:43 AM · May 13, 2021

…as it involved just showing up back at High Hrothgar, going “Hey Master Arngeir I brought that Horn you wanted”, and letting them teach me the final word of the Unrelenting Force Shout.

8:43 AM · May 13, 2021

Then they actually Shouted at me for a little bit, and since I could take it, they essentially went “Yep you sure are officially the Dragonborn, High Hrothgar is open to you”, and then went about their business.

8:44 AM · May 13, 2021

2. Note however that it took me two tries to do this, because I apparently triggered some kind of weird game bug. First time I showed up, I found Master Arngeir out in the courtyard by the gates in back, where I’d done the practice of Whirlwind Sprint.

8:44 AM · May 13, 2021

I approach him, which triggers the game acknowledging I’ve brought the Horn, and he tells me to go inside where the other masters will meet us. But he doesn’t actually do anything and stays standing there in the courtyard.

8:45 AM · May 13, 2021

I try to go inside, and I find Master Wulfgar, but can’t get him to interact with me either.

3. I apparently triggered some kind of weird bug where the Greybeards get in a hung state if you don’t quite finish the Whirlwind Sprint test correctly?

8:46 AM · May 13, 2021

I rolled back to a previous save and tried again, and on the second time through I got it to work. Of interest on the second attempt: it was snowing this time, and it wasn’t before.

8:47 AM · May 13, 2021

Also: I stepped around a bit more around the gate area, and triggered a “try again” line out of Master Arngeir before he actually then moved to get inside for the ritual to give me the final Shout word.

8:47 AM · May 13, 2021

So it did seem like I triggered that bug with the end of the Whirlwind Sprint test. Interesting from a QA perspective (Dara and I weren’t sure whether it snowing on the second attempt was related to the bug or not), but from a play perspective, kind of weird.

8:48 AM · May 13, 2021

4. Anyway, after the Greybeards gave me the Dah syllable of Fus Ro Dah and open license to hang out at their place, decided Lyds and I would head back to Whiterun and sell some stuff.

8:50 AM · May 13, 2021

5. First stop: apothecary. Sold a bunch of potions, made some more as I experimented with ingredients I’d found in Ustengrav.

8:50 AM · May 13, 2021

6. Next stop: Warmaiden’s. Smelted a bit of corundum ore into an ingot, just to see if I could do that, and if I can do anything interesting with that ingot later.

8:51 AM · May 13, 2021

Also made some leather bracers and now have the question here of whether it’d be worth my time to wear those rather than the steel gauntlets I’m using, even though the gauntlets are a better AC.

8:52 AM · May 13, 2021

There are bonuses to be had if you’re wearing all Light armor, and right now I’m mostly Light but with a couple of Heavy items.

8:52 AM · May 13, 2021

Aaron Humphrey · @alfvaen · May 13, 2021

On the other hand, if you mix your armour types then you might be able to train multiple armour skills at the same time depending on where you get hit… :p

8:53 AM · May 13, 2021

Angela Korra’ti · @annathepiper · May 13, 2021

I’ve been seeing that exact thing happen in more hardcore battles, my Light AND Heavy armor skills have been periodically getting bumped.

9:24 AM · May 13, 2021

7. Third stop: General store. Sold a bunch more stuff (and amused myself quaffing a Potion of Haggling to get that chode Belethor to give me better prices).

8:53 AM · May 13, 2021

Spotted my first Amulet of Mara, but didn’t buy it; still thinking about whether I’m going to get to a point of wanting to propose to my loyal Lyds for tromping around Skyrim with me and putting up with my bullshit. 😉

8:54 AM · May 13, 2021

Aaron Humphrey · @alfvaen · May 13, 2021

At some point I like switching to other companions, just for variety, but Lydia is a great starter. (Wait until you meet Serana, too…assuming you have Dawnguard…)

9:32 AM · May 13, 2021

Angela Korra’ti · @annathepiper · May 13, 2021

The Switch edition of the game has all three DLCs built right in, yeah. I have Dawnguard. I also have the opening hook for that in my quests! But I’m PRETTY sure I’m not ready to take that plotline on yet. 🙂

9:36 AM · May 13, 2021

Aaron Humphrey · @alfvaen · May 13, 2021

A lot of these things do scale in power level, but I don’t know to what extent. (You gotta watch that. I recently ascended from Level 59 and Level 60 and felt like the enemies just got harder again…)

10:27 AM · May 13, 2021

8. After that I kind of wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next. I eventually decided to try to pick a random quest off my list of Miscellaneous quests, since I had several opening hooks listed there.

8:54 AM · May 13, 2021

9. Chose the Shrine of Azura, NOT to be confused with the Shrine of Azula, which is what I keep wanting to call it. That would be a VERY different game experience, but I’m tromping around Skyrim, not the Fire Nation. 😀

8:55 AM · May 13, 2021

10. (That said, I now totally want a Skyrim-style game where I’m tromping around the Four Nations, as the Avatar. 😀 )

8:55 AM · May 13, 2021

11. The Shrine of Azura is north of Windhelm, so I fast travelled up to Kynesgrove to go up there manually. Got to Windhelm, was reminded I’d already found the place as part of following Delphine around, and then wandered a bit west of there trying to find a way further north.

8:56 AM · May 13, 2021

12. Saw a dragon flying overhead, went “OH SHIT”, but it didn’t actually land and try to fight with me and Lyds. So I continued on my way.

13. Also got a neat screencap of two of Skyrim’s moons being visible at once and I need to pull that off the Switch to share!

8:56 AM · May 13, 2021

14. Found another fort, Fort Kastav, but since nothing came flying out of there to attack us, kept going.

8:57 AM · May 13, 2021

15. Next random encounter was a cluster of mages, and they were apparently packing a punch, because one of them took me down with a couple of cold blasts. Oops. :} Autosave reset back to Whiterun!

8:57 AM · May 13, 2021

16. And this time I found out exactly why it’s a bad idea to accidentally trigger a Shout in the Whiterun market square. BOY HOWDY did that piss off the guards. :}

8:58 AM · May 13, 2021

Frantically scrambled to re-load from a prior save point, this time landing back just outside of Warmaiden’s, and I think at this point I’d reset some of the stuff I’d bought and sold so I’ll need to re-check that next time I play.

8:58 AM · May 13, 2021

17. Paul made a remark at me about random encounter opponents getting tougher the farther north you go, so I decided to try to finish off the quest involving the Redguard woman this time.

8:59 AM · May 13, 2021

This involved needing to go talk to that prisoner she mentioned. So I derped around trying to find the dungeon, couldn’t find it and wound up outside Whiterun in the plains.

9:00 AM · May 13, 2021

18. Where I spotted a mammoth in the distance. And discovered why exactly hitting it with an arrow from afar, even if I was sneaking, was a very, VERY BAD IDEA. Ohhhh shit it’s pissed it’s running this way it’s STOMPING ME RIGHT INTO THE DIRT oh goody autosave reset again.

9:01 AM · May 13, 2021

19. Looked up mammoths on one of the Elder Scrolls wikis and saw that they’re a level 38 creature. For the record, I am level 11. Later on I will be able to win such fights. This is not yet that day.

9:01 AM · May 13, 2021

20. I kind of wanted to keep going but at this point it was getting late AND the Switch was complaining about running out of power, so I had to put it in its docking station and go to bed.

9:02 AM · May 13, 2021

But this was nevertheless an amusing exercise of, in the immortal words of Gritty, “Fuck around and find out”. 😉

9:02 AM · May 13, 2021

Editing to add

1. This post was originally written on 3/17/2022, but backdated to the time of the tweet thread for organizational purposes.
2. Post updated on 12/29/2022 to reconstruct the original Twitter thread here, and remove links to Twitter.
3. 9/30/2024: Updated the HTML reconstructing the tweets to use a couple of CSS classes I added under the hood, to make it easier to globally change the styling on posts that use this format.