In Which Shenner Slays Bandits and Finds a Vampire Hunter’s Weapons

Another session full of some satisfying new stuff courtesy of the AE! Mostly centered in Haafingar this time, with a side helping of venturing off to an island and being reminded that yeaaaah, going after a location called Giant’s Tooth when you’re only level 17 is not the wisest plan.

Highlights

Play date: 5/30/2022
Session number in this run: 11
Started at Hendraheim, and boinged to Whiterun to do a little selling
Took the cart to Solitude, and witnessed the execution upon entry
Peeked into the Winking Skeever and found the book that gave me the quest hook for Dead Man’s Dread, awesome 😀
Talked to Noster and got the quest to get his helmet, which this time is at Broken Oar Grotto
Found several new clothing items on sale at Radiant Raiment, cool 😀
Also went over to the Bard’s College and got that plot underway
Did a little shopping with Ma’dran’s Khajiit on the way out
Tried to to go the Solitude docks to see if I could get the ferryman there to take me to Giant’s Tooth; answer: no
Tried to hoof it to Dragon Bridge
Fought en route: dragon!
Reached Dragon Bridge and found a new NPC hanging out outside the inn; GOSH HE CAN’T POSSIBLY BE PLOT RELEVANT CAN HE?
Found the note inside the inn talking about a missing member of the guard
Talked to innkeeper; got new bounty for somebody called Crowstooth, apparently a Forsworn with a camp in the Rift
Got a regular bounty for bandit leader at Ironback Hideout
Followed the note’s directive to search for the body downriver
Fought en route: troll; troll slid down a crevice and jumping after it got me stuck, oops; discovered the Haafingar Stormcloak Camp for the map when I did that
Had to fast travel back to Dragon Bridge to get out of there
Take two: found the body and the note on it that basically went YEP THIS NEW GUY SURE IS SUSPICIOUS
Went back to Dragon Bridge to confront him, but he’d left a confession on a table inside the inn asking me to meet him on the bridge
Did that and he drew on me, so Lyds and I killed him; claimed his enchanted steel soldier armor
But was overloaded at that point so had to tromp/Whirlwind Sprint my way back to Solitude
Guard asked me to stop Shouting
Courier with a Letter From a Friend pointing at Rannveig’s Fast
Ma’dran’s Khajiit were still on site so sold them the dragon bits as well as some loot I’d taken off the guard and Peladius the bandit
Went to the cart to try to go to Dawnstar next
Ferryman took me to Giant’s Tooth, and aaaaaand yeah there were totally giants; was able to sneak past them to get to the target cave
Harvested some ironfruit and defeated the three spriggans that came after us, but could not sneak or fight my way past the giants; level 17 not a good time to take on giants >_<
Wound up rolling back from this, and had no choice but to go all the way back to the point where I confronted Peladius in Dragon Bridge; so re-did that fight, but lost the return to Solitude, selling stuff to the Khajiit, and the Letter From a Friend
Ate all the food I had on me and gave a sword to Lydia so i could fast travel; boinged to Lakeview to take care of some building
Built out the main house structure, converted front room to entryway, did at least a few furnishings
Boinged to Hendraheim for loot dropoff including the enchanted steel soldier armor
Decided at that point to go run the Ironback Hideout bandit bounty, so that required boinging to the Statue of Meridia
Killed a cranky random Khajiit on the way
Took out the three bandits at the hideout; also found a note for a new plot hook, by an orc who’d been a vampire hunter and sacrificed himself to the sun when he got turned by his own prey
“Here, here is the key to my weapons stash, use it and kick vampire ass.” CAN DO SPORT
Except for the part where I was overloaded from bandit killing loot; tromped slowly back to Solitude and sold all the bandit loot to Sayma
Went up to the Blue Palace; saw opening scene for Potema; got the bounty payment from Falk Firebeard and accepted the Wolf Queen hook as well
Boinged back to Ironback Hideout and used the hunter’s key to get into the cellar (which was accessed by a trapdoor underneath a bedroll)
VERY tasty weapons cache, this is for the Elite Crossbows Creation, Ebony and Elven crossbows, fuck yeah! And several Exploding Dwarven Bolts of Fire and Shock
Other weapons acquired in the cache: Elven battleaxe, iron weapon with a Soul Trap enchantment, and a couple of silver weapons
Boinged back to Solitude and went to buy materials from Beirand
Interesting note: Beirand had some lines I hadn’t heard before? But these were documented on the wiki, so not clear if these were just not included in the Switch build:
- “I’ve got weapons for givin’, and armor for gettin’!”
- “Arms and armor! Forged by a master craftsman!”
Got some moonstone, improved the Elven crossbow and battleaxe, and gave those to Lydia; also gave her some of the exploding bolts so I could generate more of them if she drops any
Boinged to Hendraheim
Dragon! Lyds and I shot at it with crossbows, but it flew off, possibly was killed by the Forsworn next door since it fell off the HUD
Boinged to Lakeview, and oh good I did have some ebony; improved the ebony crossbow 😀
Boinged to Whiterun to look for additional silver ore; improved the silver greatsword and sword but determined nah, not good enough to be worth keeping, so sold them
Tried to boing to Dragon Bridge to go run Dead Men’s Respite, but killed by giant frostbite spider on the way 😛
Thrown back to coming out of Whiterun
Going to Dead Men’s Respite, take two: hoofed it cross-country but killed by bear at Greenspring Hollow 😛
Going to Dead Men’s Respite, take three: went initially by road
Came across an Imperial trio with prisoner being attacked by a sabre cat, that killed one of them
Also saw an Imperial soldier running from his Noble on a Horse, who was fighting a wolf and killed it without the escort’s help, bad job there, escort 😛
Cut cross-country from there; killed assorted wolves and a skeleton and a bone wolf
Discovered Orotheim en route for the map
And this time actually made it to Dead Men’s Respite
Saved there for the night

Commentary

So this session was all about the new stuff! Most of which was great, except for discovering the parts I clearly wasn’t leveled up enough to deal with. In no particular order:

Implementing the policy of “thoroughly investigate all inns to look for pointers to the new stuff”, I found the one for Dead Man’s Dread in the Winking Skeever. I didn’t choose to follow that quest yet, but very much looking forward to checking it out. Because PIRATES. YARR.

Relatedly, I also noticed that several clothing items brought in by that Creation are now on sale in Radiant Raiment, along with other clothing items brought in by Ghosts of the Tribunal. Trying not to read up on either of those in advance, so I don’t know yet how those clothing items fit in with their plots. But it was just cool to see new things on sale in the clothes shop!

Next up: trying to finish up the A Dying Wish plot, which required me to go to Giant’s Tooth. This did not go well. In retrospect I should have realized that a place called Giant’s Tooth was, most likely, going to have giants. And it did. Namely, two. Important safety tip: level 17 is not a good level at which to go up against two giants, which are level 32 opponents.

That said, I was at least able to get a look at the grove of trees where you have to go harvest ironfruit, and that was neat. See screenshots.

I’ll need to come back and finish off this plot later, though!

More or less in parallel to previous, did the plot in Dragon Bridge where you have to investigate a rumor about a guard going missing and in theory having jumped off the bridge.

I liked this one! First, since I’ve yet to actually run the plot for the Dark Brotherhood, Dragon Bridge is pretty much a non-entity to me and it was good to actually do something interesting there. Even if it was super-easy to pick out who the suspect in the plot was, given that there was exactly one (1) character there I’d never seen before. LOL.

And second, this was another plot that tied into that bandit group that seems to be associated with all the nifty new armor! I’m expecting that sooner or later the leader of that group is going to come after me for beating up on all her bandits.

After that, there was running Ironback Hideout. And I’d say that this was a combo of old and new stuff, except for how I do not have a prior tag for Ironback Hideout! So apparently I’ve never actually visited the place before?

So I guess it was all new, really! But still there’s a distinction here between how much of it was original to vanilla Skyrim, and how the cellar was added to it by the Elite Crossbows creation. I liked how the cellar of the place was added onto the existing hideout, nice little subtle touch of the corner of a trap door just visible underneath a bedroll. And now I have all sorts of questions about how well that vampire hunter was in with the bandits or what!

Also: the weapons cache was very, very tasty. I’m going to be real interested to see how well this ebony crossbow stacks up against the enhanced dwarven, once I actually start running Dawnguard with this alt.

(The one problem I see here: dubious that the responsiveness on the game on this ancient PC is going to lend itself well to actually using any crossbow, even the ebony one. I tried it a couple of times after I got it, and had a hard time responding fast enough to actually hit the dragon at Hendraheim with it. I have a bit of a problem with this on the Switch as well, but it’s aggravated by my laptop having to work harder. I may need to stick with standard bows for the Shenner run, we’ll see. Damn good thing I have the Bow of Shadows!)