In Which Elessir Steals Everything That Isn’t Locked Down

Quick-ish post to move Elessir’s playthrough catchup a little further along. This session is from mid-April of this year, and mostly features a bunch of running the jobs for the Thieves Guild.

Play by play

• Play date: 4/16/2024
• Session number in this run: 48
• OH HEY HI SKYRIM! Woke up Skyrim because ESO had a surprise outage
• Picked up where I left off in Riften and basically did a hard push through a bunch of Thieves Guild jobs
• Or at least tried to, snerk, the game locked up on me as soon as I loaded it, just as I was getting a screenshot of my unicorn paused on the steps of the Riften docks because I’d forgotten Rigmor was set to auto-follow me
• So had to restart
• Once I was safely back in the game, started for real by going to Markarth to talk to Endon
• Got his job to go retrieve his silver mold from Pinewatch
• Boinged to Lakeview to do this, and had a surprise burst of battle when some wolves spawned nearby
• One of them ran off and I pursued it, as did Lucien and Serana
• Chased it all the way over to the bandit structure over the road, so of course we wound up fighting the respawned bandits
• One of them was a Wood Elf so I got the fifth blood sample for Septimus off of her
• But I still had red dots on the HUD, so followed those over to find a couple of bandits fighting a Blood Dragon
• This turned out to be at the bandit camp by the river, so took out that dragon and those bandits
• But the game actually crashed and threw me back to desktop, vs. locking up
• So had to pick up again with coming out of the inn in Markarth
• Once more fast traveled to Lakeview
• This time getting to Pinewatch was calmer, although Lucien and Serana did get aggro on the mudcrabs at the pond
• Headed in to run Pinewatch, and bribed Rhorlak to GTFO
• Then got in and started running the place
• Really didn’t bother much with stealth, since, Serana
• Took out every single bandit we ran across
• Did not actually make it to the bandit leader, but that was okay, didn’t need to to satisfy the quest objective
• Got the Stone of Barenziah in there
• Made it to the treasure room (although Serana and Lucien kept triggering the traps), and got the mold and all the loot
• Then got out again and boinged back to Markarth to return the mold to Endon
• Returned to Riften to turn in the quest with Delvin, and unlock merchant number two in the Flagon
• Then started running Solitude jobs
• Round 1: Addvar’s house
• Boinged in, left Serana and Lucien in Proudspire Manor, then snuck over to Addvar’s place across the street and broke in
• Popped in and saw Greta was still awake so hastily popped out again
• Waited one hour and tried again; this time I was home free
• Stole the required items and got out again
• Got Serana and Lucien, and returned to Riften to turn in the quest and get round 2
• Round 2: robbing the Hall of the Dead
• This threw me a curve ball as I discovered that this actually meant robbing the house that the priest Styrr lived in, not the catacombs
• And also, turns out Styrr keeps a nocturnal schedule, so I had to wait for morning hours before I could actually get in and steal stuff
• Told Lucien and Serana to park it in Proudspire again
• Slept until the morning, then went out and sold assorted items to the shops
• Then waited a couple more hours and slipped into the House of the Dead; did not actually have to pick the lock
• Took the items and got out again
• Did not retrieve Lucien and Serana, to see if I could just leave them parked as I boinged back and forth between Solitude and Riften
• Round 3, single job, tried to get a Bedlam Job
• Decided to nab the Stone of Barenziah out of Elisif’s quarters first, but this did not get me enough value to satisfy the Bedlam Job, since this is a modded run
• So I decided to hit the Thalmor headquarters in Castle Dour–which delivered another surprise: THALMOR ACTUALLY IN THERE, OOPS
• One of them came running out after me when I fled, and threw a storm atronach in my face
• Was not sure if I could kill him without getting a bounty, so I chugged potions of healing and invisibility, put on the Ring of Khajiit, and ran like hell
• That got me out of the guy’s range, anyway; he didn’t come after me
• Then went back into the city with a new plan: rob Erikur’s house!
• Broke in and nabbed a bunch of items off the bottom floor of his place
• Then boinged back to Riften to turn in the job
• That finally got me the special job to talk to Erikur (LOL)
• Why yes, Erikur, I am Delvin’s best
• What’s that, you say? Somebody just broke into your house? What a damn shame!
• Got the objective to go get the Balmora Blue
• Now I wanted Lucien and Serana back
• Lucien was still waiting for me, but Serana had disappeared
• So I had to try to port her back to me via the console, which fortunately worked
• Then we proceeded out to the Solitude docks–where I discovered that Sabine Nytte was clipped right into the mast of her ship, I could only see parts of her hand sticking out, WTF
• The game locked up on me again at this point though as I tried to get a screencap of this
• (I may have triggered this by trying to hit the wrong button for screen cap taking? Because muscle memory keeps making me try to hit the button I use for ESO)
• So once again had to restart
• Picked up with coming out of the gates of Solitude
• Hoofed it back over to the docks and did take two of talking to Sabine
• Noted that she bitches about the player’s hygiene even if you’re a dude, so I suppose it’s at least nice that she’s not gender-specific in her snottiness? 😉
• Bought the Balmora Blue off her
• Put on my Ring of Waterbreathing, threw a Candlelight spell, and dived underwater to retrieve the goods, then got out again and hoofed it northward to the Dainty Sload
• Didn’t really bother with stealth there, either
• Took out a lot of corsairs, including the first mate, though the ones on the deck managed to survive by virtue of not actually coming close enough to us to fight!
• Looted a bunch of chests on the way through the boat, and picked up the Stone of Barenziah in there, too
• Returned to the stable at Katla’s Farm and told the unicorn to park it
• Then returned to the Blue Palace to check in with Erikur
• Found him coming out of the place and turned in the quest with him
• Then boinged straight back to Riften to turn in the quest with Delvin
• Unlocked merchant number three, and started trying for Whiterun jobs
• Also got Tonilia to give me the quest to take the moon sugar to Ri’saad
• Boinged to Whiterun and conveniently, Ri’saad’s caravan was actually there, so delivered the moon sugar
• Then waited a few hours until midnight, when in theory Lillith Maiden-Loom was supposed to be asleep, but found that a) her house was unlocked, and b) she wasn’t even in there
• So apparently even though Cutting Room Floor implemented her house, she doesn’t actually sleep in it…?
• Boinged back to Riften, anyway, and turned in the jobs
• Tried for round 2 only to trigger the bug I’d seen before with the Thieves Guild mod, where Delvin stops giving me Bedlam Jobs, dang
• So only got a Sweep Job from Vex, this time to hit Amren’s house
• So boinged back to Whiterun and did that
• Tried entering Amren’s house around 3am game time, got in and found he was actually awake, oops
• So stepped back out and waited an hour, then tried again
• This time I saw him and his wife asleep on the bed, so was able to proceed with nabbing the items
• Then boinged back to Riften to turn in the job
• Saved in the Ragged Flagon until next time

First, an editorial note

I’m not done posting about Elessir’s playthrough, but his playthrough actually is complete. So since he’s now past tense, this will be reflected in how I speak of him in this post and the rest of the ones I’ll be putting up about him.

Now then, let’s get to it.

Waking up Skyrim again after a hiatus

The couple of updates that Bethesda dropped at the very beginning of this year, not gonna lie, threw me out of the Skyrim groove for a while. This was mostly simply due to having to wait for a few critical mods to catch up–and in one case, to wait for an update to FISSES that was ultimately delivered by a different modder, since the creator of FISSES had bailed on doing updates.

But even after the post-update furor settled down, I had a lot of ESO activity earlier this year that got me more focused on that game than this one.

When ESO went down for surprise maintenance, though, that was an excellent opportunity to be reminded I still had Skyrim around. And it’s a damned good thing I keep detailed notes of all my playing, because that exact scenario–going for a couple months on end without regularly playing–is a big motivator for me to do it. It helps a lot in remembering where I left off with a character.

So I was able to pretty much jump right back in with Elessir where I left off…

Of course, Skyrim being Skyrim, I had to have crashes

… only to be reminded that it’s not a Skyrim session unless I have bugginess and crashes!

But at least the lockup at the start of this session didn’t keep me from getting a screenshot of Rigmor the unicorn on the steps of the Riften docks, her back hooves in the water. Because I’d forgotten she was set to auto-follow me. LOL.

And I got an actual hard crash on the first attempt to run Pinewatch–when I had bandits and a Blood Dragon to fight, just by coming out of Lakeview. That threw me all the way back to Markarth, coming out of the inn after talking to Endon. So not much progress lost, but still.

Thievery in Solitude

Most of what I did in Solitude was familiar territory, since I’ve run Thieves Guild jobs there a bunch at this point. But not all of it!

Case in point: discovering to my surprise that the priest Styrr keeps a nocturnal schedule, and he’s not even a vampire! Which meant I had to actually get into his house to rob things during daylight hours.

I don’t think Elessir was terribly pleased about that. Not just for daylight hours being a greater risk, but also just for the “robbing the house of a priest” part. (The job wanted me to go to the Hall of the Dead, but the marker was actually in Styrr’s living space!)

Elessir, like his namesake, probably professed to no religion. But he was a Dunmer. And as such, he was probably at least a little bit cautious about disturbing the places of the dead even before he began his career as the Dragonborn. By this point in his playthrough, he’d had enough experience with Halls of the Dead and various other tombs in Skyrim to know that the souls of Nord dead do not hang around like the souls of Dunmer dead do. The bodies of Nord dead, on the other hand… well. 😀

Kinda thinking that by this point, Elessir had developed a bit of disdain for how Skyrim treats its dead. But given that he was living in Skyrim and all, he was also smart enough to keep that to himself.

He’d also actually dealt with Styrr before, as part of taking down Potema. As anyone who plays through the Potema plot knows, Styrr is a perfectly nice old priest. And I figure that if there was any priest of the divines Elessir was inclined to respect at least a little, it was probably a priest of Arkay.

Ergo, he probably had at least a twinge or two of conscience about robbing the guy’s house.

But not enough to not do it. He was, after all, a thief.

And the second surprise that thieving run threw me: actual Thalmor in the Thalmor headquarters in Castle Dour, oops. This was courtesy of Cutting Room Floor! But apparently I’d managed to miss this change when I ran Harrowhark, even though she did have Cutting Room Floor in her load order. I just never managed to rob Castle Dour while running her in the Thieves Guild!

Recovering Serana via the console

Serana did that thing where she up and vanishes on me for no apparent reason, so when I went back to retrieve her and Lucien from Proudspire, I could only find Lucien.

So I had to get into the console to get Serana back. But she does not have a static prid. So I had to do the thing with dumping a save file into text format, so that I could search for her specific prid in my game. (The same process I learned about when recovering Finds-The-Way’s lost dog!)

And I had to reboot the Deck into Desktop Mode to do this correctly. It’s possible to do this in Gaming Mode, but it’s a lot more awkward, since the Gaming Mode UI is not really designed to let you swap over to another window and search it.

But I got the information I needed in Desktop Mode, so I was able to switch back into Gaming Mode, move Serana back to me, and set her to following me again.

This is apparently a common enough problem for all Skyrim players, not just me, that there is at least one attempt at a mod to fix this. But that mod’s approach is to simply give you an easy to edit batch file. It’s not an in-character thing you can do, like, say, a Summon Spell. Or the mechanisms built into Lucien and Inigo to let you find them.

I suppose it’d be challenging to build an in-character way of doing this, though, given that Serana’s prid does change.

Next time

Elessir’s next post will be another jump forward in time, since I went another four months between this session and the next one. But that next post will feature some high action:

• Finishing off the Thieves Guild jobs, and becoming Guildmaster
• Proceeding to arrange the truce so Whiterun can deal with a dragon problem
• Taking care of a murder problem in Windhelm
• Finally playing through the Paarthurnax Dilemma mod for the first time, and I have some opinions about that
• Trapping Odahviing and going to Skuldafn
• Taking out Alduin!
• And adopting Lucia <3

Screenshots