In Which Gyllerah Saves Khenarthi’s Roost from the Maormer

Double session post, in which I get in quite a bit of action on Khenarthi’s Roost: saving some shipwrecked marines, defeating an undead sorcerer’s ghost in a temple, destroying some cursed books, investigating the murder of the Silvenar in Mistral, and then saving the city from being destroyed by a magical storm.

Also, this pair of sessions sees Gyllerah finally buying a couple more places to live! Including a house!

Play by play

Play dates: 12/4-12/5/2022
Session numbers in this run: 61-62

Sunday’s play

Boinged from Alinor to Khenarthi’s Roost
Found the note from Razum-dar, “To My Friend From the Beach”, which let me start the quest A Storm on the Horizon
Went to go investigate the shipwreck and helped assorted marines find each other
Killed several alits while doing this
Had to find a Bosmer healing potion to help the injured
Discovered a dead lieutenant in a cave, who had apparently been murdered in a ritual
Got additional help from a more intact beached ship; patched a couple of leaks, and then convinced the marines I’d rescued to find a couple of missing items the captain’s crew needed
Captain clued me in about Maormer trying to start some shit by capturing a couple of her crew for rituals
Questioned a crewmember who’d made it back who gave me intel on where the missing crewmembers were, and headed over to check that out
Did a little fishing since I found a Foul Water spot on the way; fought off a couple of Sea Elves while doing so
Then went over to free the captured sailors; ritual disrupted!
Reported back to the captain to resolve the quest
Then headed over to investigate a parallel quest involving undead at a temple; this required me to help an apprentice, Gathwen, save her master whose body had been possessed by the spirit of an undead sorcerer
Killed assorted skeletons while she disrupted the Scorpion and Spider wards
Entered the catacombs and had to solve a puzzle involving phases of the moons
Found her master’s possessed body and confronted the sorcerer possessing him
Fought off a boatload of skeletons while gathwen broke the magic on assorted piles of bones
Managed to free Rurelion but he warned that Uldor would have to be re-imprisoned and he’d have to let the guy re-possess him
Gathwen was having none of this and tried to convince me to let her do it instead
Interestingly, Rurelion claimed Uldor would not try to possess me because he feared me
I went with letting Rurelion sacrifice himself, which required setting the gems called the Tears of the Two Moons on four pedestals to restore the Mourning Stone and trap Uldor within the great hall
Uldor also yelled at me about how he wouldn’t wear a poisoned outfit
Gathwen opened a portal to send me back out into the temple courtyard; went from there towards Mistral
Found a spirit, Cartirinque, who warned me about three cursed books and asked for my help to destroy them
Collected the books and took them to a ruined shrine
Khajiit called Sahira-daro also showed up and asked for the books, so I had to choose between giving them to her and destroying them
Went with the destroying option, which freed the spirit and rather disappointed the Khajiit
Headed onward to Mistral–and there was Raz, finally!
Who, heh, did not appear to realize that he’d met me before even though I totally know him, so here’s more of Gyllerah boinging around in time
Spoke with Raz some about what was going on in Mistral and he asked me to speak to the Silvenar, but I paused plot work there and returned to Alinor
Did some crafting of things to clean out backlogged inventory
Then parked in room and logged off for the night

Monday’s play

Ran writs
Got two new recipes and some yew and ingredients out of the Guild Bank
Did five of the seven writs
Couldn’t finish the kresh Clothing one or Alchemy, so went out hunting for mountain flower and kreshweed
Found two chests and two Psijic portals; got Sapiarch style page for shoulder armor!
Finally returned to finish the writs when I had found some mountain flower and enough kreshweed
Bought inn room at Mara’s Kiss Public House in Vulkhel Guard
Dropped an instance of my storage chest there
Then boinged to Khenarthi’s Roost and ran the remaining two plots there
Had to speak to the Silvenar about the treaty with the Maormer
Could not get a copy of it, so had to sneak into the embassy to fetch it
Which was less “sneak” and more “slip the guard a mickey”
Got the treaty and talked to Raz
Then tried to report to the Silvenar except OHNOEZ HE WAS MURDERED, and his beloved, the Green Lady, was super pissed
Had to investigate the murder next, and get Harrani’s sanction to act as her deputy
Investigated three suspicious locales for evidence
Found the assassin conducting a ritual, which I interrupted, and the assassin blew the whistle on Ulondil
Went to go confront him and barely kept the Green Lady from killing him
Delivered him into Harrani’s hands for justice
Then got the word that shit was going down at Cat’s Eye Quay
Helped Commander Karinith and Sergeant Firion gather survivors and then find evidence of what the Sea Elves were doing
Found the wizard Ealcil and got the objective from him to disrupt storm totems in the mine tunnels with his lodestone
Then had to go out and disrupt the primary ritual to try to summon a tempest
Got that taken care of, and hurray! Mistral is saved! And Khenarthi’s Roost is joining the Aldmeri Dominion!
That unlocked the ability to buy Moonmirth House, so i went ahead and did that
Since i still had a cat pet, I put the cat in the house, and an instance of my storage chest
Boinged back to Alinor after buying the house, and ran round two of writs
Built a bed for the house and then returned to place it
Experimented with setting a path for the cat to move around the place
Stayed there as I logged out for the night

Storm On the Horizon: Cast Adrift quest

All the action on Khenarthi’s Roost was fun, in a “here’s a conflict with much more local stakes”, which was kind of relaxing after getting the huge world-changing stakes of the Main Quest underway.

But even so, the events of the Main Quest did cast a shadow over what I did here. Certainly, finding a lieutenant who’d been ritualistically murdered in a cave was a thing for which Gyllerah had some extreme sympathy.

I really liked Sergeant Firion. <3 A very straightforward, no-nonsense, action-oriented NPC! Gyllerah had a lot of sympathy for her, too. And very possibly a bit of envy for her comparatively simpler existence.

I was a little surprised to find alits on Khenarthi’s Roost, since those are a critter I’m accustomed to seeing in Morrowind, a significant distance away. From what I see on the wiki, they’re considered native to Morrowind, so apparently they migrated south into other territories? Interesting that they made it onto Khenarthi’s Roost, then. I wonder if this was because they swam the distance, or if somebody imported them.

Another thing I appreciated about this plot: more direct involvement with the Maormer. I certainly saw their presence on Summerset, but this plot had me actually interacting with Maormer NPCs directly, not just fighting nameless Sea Elves as part of a delve or what have you. This helped cement them in my head as a force to be reckoned with. And I already knew they were assholes–I mean, constant assaults on the shores of Summerset made that plain. But here, it became clear that they were also actively contemptuous of the Khajiit, and had their treaty with Khenarthi’s Roost only as a thinly veiled effort to maintain control over the island.

Speaking of the Khajiit, I also liked Captain Jimila. <3 Interesting to see a Khajiit as a ship captain! Clearly, not all of the Khajiit dislike the water. Or at least, if Jimila does, she balances it very well against presumably liking being a ship captain. 😉

Storm on the Horizon: Tears of the Two Moons

After taking care of the shipwrecked marines and stopping that ritual threatening Jimila’s crew, I jumped over to run a concurrent quest, Tears of the Two Moons. Which required me to head over to a temple and investigate reports of undead there. I had to help Gathwen rescue her master Rurelion (not to be confused with Nurelion, the proprietor of the White Phial in Windhelm in Skyrim), who’d been possessed by the spirit of an undead necromancer.

FUN TIMES.

So I had to help Gathwen shut down several active hotspots of magic in that temple, and protect her from attacking skeletons, and solve puzzles. And ultimately get to a point of having to choose whether Gathwen or Rurelion would be the one to lock themselves up in the catacombs to keep Uldor’s spirit confined. I went with Rurelion.

The part of this I found really interesting: apparently, I was not in danger of Uldor possessing me, even though this spirit had a penchant for swapping dead bodies at whim, which he liked to call his “outfits”. Apparently, he actually feared me, and considered me a poisoned outfit! Presumably because I no longer have a “real” body, but rather a construct out of the very substance of Nirn?

(Which raises a real interesting question: would Uldor still have behaved the same way if I’d run this plot prior to being murdered as part of the Main Quest? The wiki doesn’t say! I suspect this may be a plot hole left over from the days when Coldharbour was the original way you came into ESO–because at that point, it would have been impossible to play this quest prior to Coldharbour. But now it’s absolutely possible.)

I do like the quests that give you a couple of options as to how to resolve them. And in this particular case, I liked that Rurelion and Gathwen cared enough about each other that each of them wanted to be the one who trapped Uldor, to spare the other from having to do it.

Interlude: Dark Knowledge quest

This was a smaller side quest, not directly related to needing to save MIstral from the Maormer, but I stumbled across it on the way to Mistral.

A spirit named Cartirinque hailed me on the way–actually, I’d heard her hail me first near the Temple of the Crescent Moons, and at least one other time after that. But this time I stopped to talk to her, and she asked me for my help in destroying cursed books.

I agreed to do this, and hunted the books down reasonably quickly. The interesting part of this was that I kept hearing a voice in my head trying to warn me off doing this, and I saw visions of people who had presumably been destroyed by these books as well.

When I acquired them and took them to a shrine, I ran into a complication: a Khajiit called Sahira-daro, who wanted the books for herself. From her, I learned that these books were apparently connected to Hermaeus Mora.

(“HA,” said the player of several Dragonborns, “I see why this could be a problem.”)

And at this point I had the option of choosing to go through with destroying the books, or giving them to Sahira-daro. I went with destroying them, on the general grounds that Gyllerah is in no fucking mood to allow artifacts of a Daedra to remain in the world to corrupt people, if she has anything to say about it.

The books put up a fight! I started experiencing severe pain throwing the books into the flame, but held out and finally destroyed them.

And I figure Gyllerah would have allowed herself to chug back some righteous beer as a reward, except for the part where she still had to go to Mistral.

The Perils of Diplomacy quest

And, finally, reunited with Razum-dar! Who turned out to be the person who rescued me from the ocean after I fell out of the sky, jumping through the Dark Anchor!

But of course, this is a Razum-dar who had no idea I’d already met him on Summerset and helped save the world with him there. Actual OOC explanation for this: nobody bothered to go back and tweak Razum-dar’s lines in this quest to account for the possibility of his having already met you! (Because presumably, that’d require engaging the voice actor for additional voice work.)

So, IC explanation: more of Gyllerah boinging around in time. Heh. (Though I’m toying with the idea of her death and escape from Coldharbour actually having stabilized her a bit, and running with that by trying to play things in better chronological order now. I reserve the right to diverge from this as interesting plot availability dictates!)

And since Gyllerah already knows Raz is a splendid fellow, of course she wants to help him. So I immediately agreed to help him out by going to talk to the Silvenar, to see if I could assist in stabilizing the diplomatic situation in Mistral.

The Silvenar was the local Bosmer authority, essentially on a same power level with Harrani, who represented the Khajiit, and Ulondil, who represented the Maormer. I learned pretty quickly that things were quite tense between the three factions, and this was exacerbated by Harrani’s copy of the treaty they were supposedly abiding by having gone missing. Ulondil, ever so conveniently, asserted that his copy was stored on an entirely different island, and he had no intentions of sending for it.

Because, apparently, the Silvenar’s simply asking to see the treaty was a diplomatic insult? Red flag, much?

Surprising exactly no one, and certainly not Gyllerah, this led to me having to investigate where Harrani’s copy went. Which was, of course, “to the Maormer embassy”. So I had to sneak in and get it.

Though really, there was a lot less sneaking involved than I would have liked. Subterfuge, yes. Sneaking, no. If this had been Skyrim, I’d have been able to actually sneak in there, preferably at night, and get out with the treaty with no one the wiser.

But since this is ESO, that wasn’t an option. What I had to do instead: come up with a way to distract the guard at the door. I had two options: blackmail him about his apparent crush on a local Khajiit, or else slip him a drugged drink. I went with the drugged drink option, and once he was out of the way, got in and got the treaty, and got the hell out.

The treaty in question, naturally, was not only weighted in the Sea Elves’ favor, it was also actively contemptuous of the Khajiit. But when at Raz’s urging I went to report in to the Silvenar, I discovered a new problem: the Silvenar had been murdered.

I am slightly surprised, as a player, that suspicion didn’t immediately fall on me? But it didn’t! And instead, the plot goal became having to investigate who did it. After gathering some evidence and also cornering an NPC who fessed up, it was no shocker at all to find that the Maormer representative, Ulondil, was behind it.

At which point I got another of those “choose how the quest is going to resolve” options: let the Green Lady kill Ulondil in vengeance for her husband’s murder, or turn him over to Harrani for justice. I went with the justice option, which actually made the Green Lady stand down as she admitted, extremely reluctantly, that I was right about how her husband wouldn’t have wanted her to slaughter Ulondil.

But as soon as I turned over Ulondil to Harrani for justice purposes, the next wave of the plot showed up! I got a messenger asking me to go speak to Commander Karinith, because apparently shit was going down at Cat’s Eye Quay.

The Tempest Unleashed quest

Here, finally, was the last phase of the overall “save Mistral” plot–because now that Ulondil’s conspiracy was uncovered, the Sea Elves had to resort to trying to destroy the city with a magically summoned tempest.

When I went to speak with Commander Karinith, I found Sergeant Firion again, who wanted in on my action. I gratefully accepted that request, and so she and I proceeded to comb the beach for hostiles to fight and evidence about what the Maormer were up to.

This led me into a mine, where I found the wizard Ealcil and got the objective to disarm five storm totems. But that wasn’t enough–I also had to finally disable three more magical “horn” things. The overall idea here was that the Sea Elves had captured a storm atronach, and they planned to use it to destroy the city.

So lots of action and high stakes here. I got in quite a bit of decent hand to hand fighting with Sea Elf hostiles, averted the crisis, and saved the city! Hurray!

This unlocked my ability to buy Moonmirth House on Khenarthi’s Roost as well–and since I had enough gold banked up, I went ahead and did that.

Epilogue: And now I have a house

Khenarthi’s Roost, I think, really kind of tugged at Gyllerah’s heart. She’s starting to remember hints of her family having raised her in Elsweyr, so the longer she hangs around Khajiit, the more she likes them. And this is certainly aided by hanging out with K’sragi and Razum-dar, too!

She likes Summerset’s temperate climate–but she doesn’t like that a lot of Altmer society is really quite racist. Khenarthi’s Roost seems free of that, especially now that she helped kick the Sea Elves off the island and got them to agree to join the Dominion.

And that house she’s acquired, in a comparatively more remote location, really seems peaceful and soothing to her. She really wants peace and quiet after having died, and if she needs to quietly freak out, she can do so in her own private space.

Out of character, I also appreciated discovering that I could actually put pets in a living space. This let me do something with the cat I had acquired! And I even discovered how you could program a little path for the pet to follow, to move around the space. I was slightly disappointed that I couldn’t get the kitty to sleep on things, but at least the kitty gets to move around. And having it periodically meow was nice too. <3

Moonmirth doesn’t have much in the way of furnishings yet–and neither does the new inn room I acquired in Vulkhel Guard, either. But now I have increased reason to try to build actual furniture. I suspect Gyllerah’s tastes in this are going to wind up a mix of Altmer and Khajiit, but we’ll have to see what my acquired furnishing recipes allow for.

Relatedly, I think I need to see if I can move my crafting stations to the house? Or if that’s going to have to be a thing I do with a larger house. I feel like being able to craft things in peace and quiet without having to deal with the tumult of Alinor would be a thing Gyllerah would want.

Next time

Main action to come in my next post: heading to Auridon and following up on this urgent question of Queen Ayrenn being in danger of assassination! And getting to meet the Queen herself!

Screenshots

Editing to add

11/25/2023: Restored missing gallery.
10/11/2024: Converted gallery to a native WordPress one. Changed header graphic to the one I’m using on more recent Gyllerah posts.