In Which Nona and Her Friends Set Out for High Hrothgar

And now, finally, a new post on a current Skyrim playthrough! Here’s the fourth session of my playthrough with Nona the Imperial, featuring the Tuxborn modpack!

Main action: heading to High Hrothgar to talk to the Greybeards, but with a heaping side helping of mod-added content!

Play by play

Play date: 11/24/2024
Session number in this run: 4
Picked up again at Whiterun
Set out to head for High Hrothgar, as you do at this early stage of a Skyrim run
Encountered Nazeem on the way out of the city, and LOL, he’s still a dick even if he looks a lot different!
Killed a few wolves and a Novice Ice Mage near White River Watch
Stopped and cleared the area around the Ritual Stone this time, since I had a full slate of four followers with me!
This let me level up to 5; took Stamina bump and turned on Alchemy Mastery perk
Tried again to clear Graywinter Watch, but that didn’t go well; got thrown back to coming out of Whiterun (which also lost me the level up)
NEW PLAN! Decided to go nab the Wild Horse near Whiterun
Bought the Wild Horses map from Skulvar Sable-Hilt
Tamed the horse!
Once I rode the horse back over to the stable, got met by a courier–who had the intro letter from Auryen! Fabulous!
Registered and named my horse via the stable, which dubbed said horse “Foresti”
Horse acquired, did take two of heading towards High Hrothgar
Once again took out initial wolf just past the crossroads
This time, got a thief near White River Watch, and my follower squad and I educated that person as to the error of their ways
Killed a couple more wolves
Hit a couple ore veins
Re-did level up to 5; re-took Stamina bump and Alchemy Mastery perk
Re-did clearing the Ritual Stone
Found the book Arkay the Enemy
Got the spell tome for Conjure Spectral Wolf
Actually slept at the Ritual Stone since there was a bed right there, so I expect the followers and I had to arrange who was keeping watch when?
Got a very weird nightmare, see below
Aviendha then asked me to take her back to Riverwood, the next sign of her personal plot showing up; I agreed to do this when I could
Reached Valtheim Towers
Passed Persuade check to get the toll bandit to back off
So heh, that made getting Amren’s sword easy!
However, as I proceeded, something else killed me; I didn’t record what in my screenshots, oops
Got thrown back to the Ritual Stone, so had to clear it a third time
This time, remembered to actually activate the Stone so I could turn on the museum display for it, even though I didn’t actually take that Sign
And this also meant I had to re-do discovering Valtheim Towers
This time through, failed the Persuade check, so GAME ON, let’s do this, bandits
Cleared the place
Slept there this time, and once again got the Ominous Nightmare
Got Amren’s sword and other loot
Aviendha asked me again to take her back to Riverwood, so agreed again to do that; this kicked off a quest called Moraine
For now, proceeded onward towards High Hrothgar
Got attacked by an NPC called Isidor and took him out, and this kicked off a quest called Foot of the Mountain
Passed a random Mercenary, but no different behavior there from usual vanilla Mercenary behavior
Diverged off the road at about the point I usually do (just past the bridge by Hillgrund’s Tomb), so I could cut through the woods to get to Ivarstead
And found another quest hook: a Baandari camp with three Khajiit at it
Talking to them kicked off the first quest for the Carved Brink mod
Got objective from Ri’Suen-dar to eat moon sugar he gave me
That felt like a big ol’ nope, but for now, decided not to further progress that story; was more interested in getting to Ivarstead so I could get up to High Hrothgar
Cut on through the woods along my usual route that crosses the river
Found the troll lair and took out the troll there
Made it to Ivarstead!
And got more new commentary out of Lydia!
Went into the inn after that and talked to Wilhelm the innkeeper as per usual
Picked up the quest pointer for Shroud Hearth Barrow
Also got him to tell me a rumor about Aventus Aretino
Rented a room and stopped there until next time

Tuxborn’s version of Nazeem

Started this session off by finding Tuxborn’s version of Nazeem. Like almost every NPC I’ve seen in the game so far, Nazeem gets a visual overhaul in this modpack. I don’t actually hate his look! He has a sort of Yul Brynner look to him, both in terms of his being bald in this modpack, and having Brynner-esque features. His clothes aren’t all that different; he’s now wearing the blue version of the standard “Fine Clothes”, rather than the brown version.

That said, he’s still totally a dick. LOL. Tuxborn’s adding of a whole bunch of new dialogue choices with so many NPCs applies to him, too–but all of those choices do basically end in Nazeem being his usual arrogant self.

One option I did not take, because it was not at all in character for Nona, nonetheless amused the hell out of me:

“I don’t like you. My fist doesn’t like you either. (Brawl)”

LOLOLOL. 🤣

Having a squad of followers

Playing the Tuxborn modpack is giving me a whole new take on having followers in Skyrim. And I’m liking having a squad of followers more than I anticipated I would!

Nona made it up to four followers as of this session, and as her playthrough has proceeded, I’ve amassed even more followers than that.

In fact, I’ve picked up enough followers that trying to run them all at once was, I strongly suspect, causing me performance issues. As of this writing, I’ve actually had to scale back again on how many followers Nona has.

But it makes me a little sad! Because I’m seeing Nona (like her namesake in the Locked Tomb books) being a very open and friendly person, and liking everybody, so of course she wants all the awesome people she meets to come with her on her adventures.

And as Nona’s player, I gotta say, I’m mostly very impressed with the wide range of followers available in the modpack. I haven’t met anywhere near all the followers Tuxborn makes available. And of the ones I’ve chosen to run, I like almost all of them well enough that I’m sad I can’t keep running them all. But since a large group of followers has impacted my game performance, I’ve had to scale back.

So as of this writing, I’m back down to four, the same number of followers I had in this session, although not the exact same people. See my follower roundup post for who did and did not make the cut.

How leveling up works in Tuxborn

Before I go any further, let me talk a bit about how leveling up works in Tuxborn compared to regular Skyrim, since I haven’t really gone into that yet.

In regular Skyrim, assuming you aren’t playing Survival Mode, you level all your skills by actively using them. And when you amass enough experience points doing that, then you go up an experience level. This allows you to drop additional points on one of your primary attributes (Health, Magicka, or Stamina), and spend a new Perk point on one of your skill trees as you like.

If you’re playing Survival Mode in regular Skyrim, the main difference is that you have to sleep to level up.

Tuxborn has variations on this, and what variation you have will depend on a) what specific Tuxborn profile you’re playing, and b) again, whether you’re playing Survival Mode. Since I’m running the “Tuxborn – Deck” profile (which means, best possible performance on the Steam Deck, but not using the fancier community shaders or the BFCO combat system), this means I do still level up immediately when I get enough experience points.

But I do not level all my skills immediately just by using them. I’m actually finding this somewhat distracting, because I’m so used to leveling Smithing, Alchemy, and Enchanting by doing all the crafting I’ve done in prior playthroughs! What does get you experience is adventuring, fulfilling quests, and reading found books.

Once I get a level up, I get a more complex set of choices than vanilla Skyrim gives me, and a UI that reminds me a lot of how Morrowind handles skill point assignments. On each level up, Tuxborn gives me a certain amount of points to spend as I like, all over my skills. From what I’ve seen so far, the amount of points you get per level up steadily increases as your character advances. And I’m pretty sure there’s a measure of under-the-hood checking to determine how much any given skill in your list can advance.

I kind of like this system, so far, even though it’s definitely different from what I’m used to in regular Skyrim, even with the mods I’ve used so far. And while not being able to power-level my crafting skills still feels weird, I’m willing to run with this just for the sake of it being different.

But that said, I’m throwing skill points onto the various things I usually level up in Skyrim anyway: Smithing, Alchemy, Enchanting, One-handed, Light Armor, Marksman/Archery, all the schools of magic, and as whim dictates, Sneak and Lockpicking.

Likewise, I’m throwing points fairly evenly across Health, Magicka, and Stamina.

In other words, fairly standard spellsword-ish build strategy for me, even though the UI and approach to get me there is different.

As of this writing, Nona’s way ahead of what I’m covering in this specific post; she’s up to level 33. As of this post’s session, she’d only hit level 5. So I can say at this point that I’m still liking this version of leveling pretty well, aside from not quite being a fan of not being able to level my gear as fast as I’m used to.

Boss fight UI changes

One of the UI changes Tuxborn does is a thing I really like: putting big health bars up onto the screen once you get into a fight with a boss-level creature or being. This reminds me a lot of ESO! So it’s fun to have that bit of extra similarity of look and feel across the two major Elder Scrolls games I like to play.

And I saw in Graywinter Watch that it is, in fact, possible to have two boss bars on screen at once. Which was a fair degree of yikes. Especially given that, even though I came in there with four followers, I got killed pretty quickly and thrown back to coming out of Whiterun.

A disturbing nightmare

While sleeping at the Ritual Stone, I had an actual nightmare! Or, rather, an Ominous Nightmare, according to the dialog box that popped up while I was sleeping. It appeared to involve an invitation from Hircine to drink beast blood.

And I’m assuming this was courtesy of the mod called Growl, which overhauls how lycanthropy works in Skyrim. But as being a werewolf is not on my agenda for this playthrough (at least unless I decide to join the Companions), I noped right out of that nightmare.

That stop at the Ritual Stone got retconned by my getting killed later, but I got the Ominous Nightmare again after sleeping at Valtheim Towers. Noped out of it then, too. Nona is not on board with Team Werewolf.

Aviendha’s plot showing up

It didn’t take very long for the next glimmer of Aviendha’s plot to show up: her asking me to take her back to Riverwood, which kicked off a quest called “Moraine”.

She actually had to ask me this twice, again because of things getting retconned due to my getting killed. But I did at least get to the point of kicking off that quest.

Foot of the Mountain quest starter

On the way to High Hrothgar, not far from the access up to Hillgrund’s Tomb, I got attacked by an NPC named Isidor. For no apparent reason. Dude just came running at me all RAR.

This turned out to be the starting incident to kick off a mod called Clockwork. I’m going to have a lot more to say about this in posts to come.

For now, I’ll just note that once I looted this guy’s dead body to see what he had on him, I found a note from someone called Camilla (not to be confused with the Camilla in Riverwood). She had urged Isidor to get his hands on the best gear he could find, even if it meant attacking someone on the road, and to get to her as soon as he could.

Only when reviewing the screenshots for this post did I actually read that note closely enough to find this as an explanation for why Isidor attacked me in the first place, heh.

And I gotta say–Isidor, my dude, attacking a party of five armed strangers was really not a good way to get better gear.

Quest hook for Carved Brink

On the way to Ivarstead, after going off road so I could cut through the woods as I typically do, I found a camp with three Khajiit at it. This turned out to be a quest hook for the first quest in the Carved Brink mod, Inglourious Khajiits.

(I’m pretty sure that quest title is supposed to be a riff on the movie Inglourious Basterds. At least I hope so, because otherwise I gotta side-eye that typo.)

I’ve already gotten ahead of myself on documenting this playthrough, and I’ve put up a separate review post about the Carved Brink mod in general. Here, I’ll just note that I got the plotline kicked off here, though I didn’t go any farther than the initial conversation with the Khajiit in question. My priority was making it to Ivarstead so I could go up to High Hrothgar!

I’ll also note that heh, I actually looted that camp before I realized there were actual NPCs around that were attached to it. Force of habit! This let me find a note that appeared to be orders these Khajiit had received from the Thalmor–and I’m a little sad that the mod didn’t actually give me any way to follow up on those orders, because the note hinted at a spicy little shipwreck adventure that could have been fun to play. Especially given that it could have involved taking out Thalmor, and that’s never not fun.

(But given how the interactions with these assholes played out later, not sorry in the slightest that I took some of their stuff.)

Lydia’s apology at Ivarstead

Once we made it to Ivarstead, I kicked off a new round of commentary out of Lydia–because apparently that’s a main quest trigger point that impacts her behavior to you!

She offered me an apology! Aw. <3 Making it to Ivarstead demonstrated to her that I could hold my own in a skirmish. So while she was still very much of the belief that all the guards that died at the tower were as much heroes for fighting that dragon as I was, she now was no longer inclined to dismiss me as some frivolous choice on the Jarl’s part.

In fact, she expressed her gratitude that she’d been chosen as my housecarl–because it got her out of the city, and now she knew I wasn’t just some stuck-up merchant. Ha!

And that led into her lamenting what it might have been like if she’d been assigned to guard Nazeem! Which gave me an opportunity to quote his infamous Cloud District line, and that in turn made Lydia LOL and tell me I sounded just like him. This tied in great with the beginning of the session, hee!

More seriously, it gave Lydia a chance to express her frustration that men and women were dying all over Skyrim, defending what they thought was right… and the Jarls were in her opinion wasting their honors on merchants. And while she was now a bit more inclined to see me as worth protecting, she was still salty that my being Dragonborn would overshadow the sacrifices of everyone else who was spilling their blood for Skyrim.

And she wasn’t wrong in the slightest.

Overall, I enjoyed the hell out of that conversation, mad props to the mod writer!

One more thing about Ivarstead

Once I rented a room at the inn, my interactions with innkeeper Wilhelm were pretty much what I can get out of him in the vanilla game.

But I also really liked the visual changes to the inn, and in particular the fancy tapestries on the wall in the room with the bed I rented. Those made the place look much nicer, especially given that it was the inn in a teeny tiny town like Ivarstead. It raises all sorts of fun questions about where the tapestries came from. Did someone in Ivarstead weave them? Or is someone in the town wealthy enough that they were able to commission them and have them delivered? And if someone in Ivarstead is that wealthy, what the hell are they still doing in Ivarstead? 🤣

Other notable follower lines

Eris, regarding Lydia:

“Sworn she may be to your service, but do not mistreat the housecarl. There is honour in duty, and that is something she knows well, it seems.”

Gorr, when I asked him if there was anywhere he wanted to go:

“But if you want my advice, I’m a “this way” or “that way” guy. I just flip a coin, or a bandit. and let it make heads or tails of the situation.”

Lydia, when sounding off about her opinion on Jarls making thanes out of merchants:

“… Who I am kidding. Nowadays, a lot of successful merchants get that title for helping to fill the coffers of Jarls all around the province.”

Lydia telling me what her duties are now, and what they were before the Jarl made her my housecarl. And if this is the case, LOL, I’m definitely a step up in the world because Balgruuf’s kids are little terrors:

“I keep you and your belongings safe, or die trying. Before you, I was responsible for de guarding the Jarl’s children.”

See, even Lydia thinks they’re little terrors!

“As much as I respect Jarl Balgruuf… his spawn are a nightmare.”

Gorr makes a strong argument about what I ought to do once I kill Alduin. Nobody tell Gorr that dragons go up in smoke as soon as I kill them, he’ll be sad about missing out on the barbecue:

So when you kill this world eater…I was thinking you should try and slice off some of his meat. Seems only fair we eat him, given his name.

Lydia, remarking on my current fighting skillset (not entirely sure what she classifies as “unconventional” fighting here, unless she means sneak attacking?):

“You’re not good with the unconventional kind of fighting, are you? Neither am I, but I’ll admit that it works better sometimes.”

Lydia also is not quite as surly at me as she might have initially appeared! Gosh, Lyds, you sound actually helpful here! And honestly, I think Nona was grateful to hear this:

“You’re still learning a lot about fighting and travelling, aren’t you? Don’t worry – I’ll help you along the way.”

Lyds gets a bit into her backstory:

“I grew up on a farm in the plains here, but I wanted to be like my parents and become a soldier or a mercenary. They were… somewhat supportive.”

Lydia has no patience for arrogant necromancer assholes:

“…I’m pretty sure I can conceive of the power you wield”!

And this version of Lydia has Life Goals! We can totally go there, my friend, I hear the Gold Road is gorgeous but you gotta look out for the Wildburn–whoops, wait, wrong game:

“I’ve lived in Skyrim my whole life and never left. I’d like to visit Cyrodiil some day, though. My father told me to visit West Weald before the Thalmor invade again.”

(Now, though, I’ll be real curious to see if this version of Lydia reacts to Bruma!)

Next time

Nona’s next post will feature actually heading up High Hrothgar and meeting the Greybeards; clearing Shroud Hearth Barrow; swinging back around to see what those shady-AF-looking Khajiit were on about back in the woods; and discovering an Abandoned Grotto with someone’s house in it! Gosh, this can’t possibly be plot relevant, can it?

And oh yes: going to Solitude for real this time, and getting signed on with Auryen as his relic hunter!