In Which Alecto Escapes a Shipwreck and Wanders South

This is the first of my playthrough posts for Alecto the Dunmer, and featuring version 1.0.1 of the Tuxborn modpack. Main action here: trying out the Alternate Start option that strands your character in a shipwreck; getting back to the mainland; having my ass kicked repeatedly until I finally made it to the relative safety of Dawnstar; stopping in Whiterun, and being stymied from proceeding to Riften by bandits also kicking my ass; and finally going to Solitude to talk to Auryen at the LOTD museum, and pick up Katana as a follower.

Since this playthrough is my first time running Katana, I’ve got some review commentary about her in this post, too. (A full review of her and her associated NPCs, Megara and Shale, will come later.)

Play by play

Play date: 4/18-4/19/2025
Session number in this run: 1-2

April 18th

Came out of chargen stranded in the Wreck of the Skinny Horker
Determined I was within visual range of Yngvild and swam to the shore
Found a surprise Word Wall, for the Lightning Breath Shout!
Also found Deekus, one of the NPCs from Interesting NPCs, but did not engage
Did however mark Hela’s Folly for the map
Also a place I hadn’t seen before as Nona, called Auta
Found the spot where Yisra burned herself up with a Flame Cloak spell, and got her spellbook of Flame Cloak
Found Frostflow Lighthouse but definitely wasn’t going to engage, not as a level 1 character, was not in the mood to get eaten by chaurus
Found Driftshade Refuge
Got into a fight with the two exterior Silver Hands there–but also with a wraith that proceeded to repeatedly kick my ass
Finally had to hide and let the wraith fight with the Silver Hands; she kicked their asses, too
Yoinked gear off one of the dead Silver Hands, but the wraith still came after me
Was finally able to kill it, but took a pounding from that, ow
Made it to Snowpoint Beacon and cleared the place
Leveled up to 2; took first Scout perk in Light Armor

April 19th

Picked up again at Snowpoint Beacon, and talked to Tikrid
Took some of the ruder dialogue options to try those out, and see if they felt appropriate for this character
Agreed to take her back to Dawnstar, though, and did so
Killed assorted wolves on the way
Thought I’d probably head to Riften, so set out again from there to more or less work my way south
Passed the Hall of the Vigilant, and stopped to check the place out, since I’d never actually seen it in a non-destroyed state!
Found the Tower of Mzark (and the launchpad for the AHO there)
Spotted novice necromancers fighting a wolf
Took them out
Dug at the Dwemer excavation site by the stairs
Killed more wolves as I kept going
Finally made it to Whiterun and the Khajiit caravan was on site
Tried to head to Riften from there, but got my ass repeatedly kicked by bandits near White River Watch; couldn’t kill all of them
Finally turned and ran, and had to get within range of the patrolling Whiterun guards to take the remaining bandits out
Slogged back to Whiterun to try to sleep
Got a courier with the letter from Auryen
Sold stuff to Elrindir at the Drunken Huntsman
Rented a room at the Bannered Mare and slept some more
Sold stuff to Belethor
Went back out again and talked to Skulvar Sable-Hilt to get the Wild Horses map
Then took the carriage to Solitude
Found the Solitude Khajiit caravan on site, too
Reached the museum and talked to Auryen
Agreed to fetch relics for him
Leveled up to 3 and took first Skirmisher perk in One-handed
Talked to Corpulus at the Winking Skeever and got the pointer to go to Helgen
Picked up Katana as first follower and set out again with her
Headed out again with her
Passed noble on horse + Imperial soldier escort on the way into Dragon Bridge
Passed Talsgar the Wanderer
Marked the Tall Mast Tavern for the map
Picked up Meeko!
Went by more Imperial soldiers
Initially thought about cutting through Labyrinthian and then realized I wasn’t in the mood to get my ass kicked by frost trolls
So just fast traveled back down to Whiterun
Sold more stuff to Belethor
Then went over to run Silent Moons Camp with Katana
Took out all the bandits and got Denstagmer’s Ring, and also Malrus’ Journal
Dug at the Nordic excavation site in there
Hit the silver veins outside on the way out
Got Katana’s magical feather
Saw Talsgar again
Leveled up to 4; took first Elementalist perk in Destruction magic
Went with Katana to clear the Ritual Stone, and unlock that display for the museum
Got the first round of Katana’s personal quest from her
Returned to Whiterun to go to the Drunken Huntsman and talk to Megara

Starting intentions

As this is the very first post in Alecto’s playthrough, I’ll start off by noting that I was intending for this character to be my Thieves Guild run in Tuxborn. And hopefully, to try to revisit the whole necromancer concept, and maybe also vampire.

I can say right now that that I’m nearly up to level 30 with her as of this writing, and that definitely hasn’t happened. Two things stymieing me here, I think. One, I’m habitually disinclined to go out of my way to find “evil” things to do in Skyrim, and that definitely includes both necromancers and vampires. And two, given that Tuxborn makes it very easy to find followers, building up a sizable follower squad kinda makes it tough to set up an RP situation where you’re going to bugger off and steal stuff for funsies.

I’m taking steps to correct this problem in Kenna’s new playthrough. For Alecto’s, I may still make her a vampire if the opportunity arises–but so far it just hasn’t!

What Alecto looks like

I tried for an appearance for her that would at least be somewhat in the neighborhood of how her namesake is described in the Locked Tomb series. At the same time, I wanted her to be a reasonable-ish Dunmer. And I’m not entirely happy with the look I came up with, which is why I’ve been messing with it in the sessions since this one. (More on this, when I get to the part where I run Project AHO with this character.)

I think my main issue at the moment with her is that she looks too pale to my eyes, for a Dunmer. She’s easily mistaken for bog-standard white girl Breton, Imperial, or Nord. You have to look at her closely enough to see that she’s actually a very pale shade of gray.

To be fair, I don’t necessarily think that’s out of bounds for a Dunmer, and I’m also thinking that my expectations for this are still based off of how vanilla Skyrim handles it. Without mods, all your options for Dunmer appearances do skew a lot darker gray for skin tones. But over in ESO, there are certainly examples of paler Dunmer NPCs running around, so I don’t even necessarily think the set of mods used by Tuxborn is out of bounds for skewing Dunmer skin tone options paler.

I do wish it was a bit more obvious that Alecto is, in fact, a Dunmer. So I’m going to probably experiment with her appearance some more through the course of her playthrough.

Starting shipwreck

Just because I hadn’t done it before, I decided to start Alecto’s playthrough by taking the Alternate Start option Shipwrecked Off the Coast. Tuxborn cuts down on the Alternate Start options hard, and this is one of the two remaining ones to play that can be challenging. And I wanted to see how challenging.

Answer: fairly challenging!

I’d thought this start option would do the same thing that the Left For Dead start does, and spawn you in random locations. I was wrong. Skyrim’s not lacking for coasts, but all of its coastlines are along the northern edge of the landmass, on the Sea of Ghosts. And the open water may just not have any opportunities for spawn points?

I learned, anyway, that this start option drops you into the Wreck of the Skinny Horker, way up at the top of the map, almost in the center. And the very first thing I had to do was figure out how to get out of the wreck. This wasn’t hard, as there were at least a few places where I could surface for air before I finally found the hole in the hull that let me escape . Also, it was convenient to be able to nab assorted random items on the way out.

Once I was out, I was able to figure out where, roughly, I was: within visual range of Yngvild. So I set off swimming in that direction.

I also found that I was within range of the island on which Warden of the Coast takes place–though when I went ashore briefly there, nothing of interest happened. Warden of the Coast’s quest doesn’t kick in until you hit level 25, so that tracked.

Hela’s Folly

I finally came ashore on the mainland, near a spot that’s actually vanilla content but which I’d managed never to see before, because that is apparently still possible for me in Skyrim: Hela’s Folly. This is a spot you can get sent to if you get the Dark Brotherhood assassination quest to kill Deekus.

And since I’ve played the Brotherhood exactly once at this point, and didn’t do this quest at the time, that explains why I never saw this spot before!

I didn’t bother to actually engage with Deekus at the time, in no small part because I didn’t realize he was actually a vanilla NPC. I thought he was part of the Interesting NPCs quest “The Gales of Guilt”, which I’ve now run as Nona. And since I know now that you have to start this quest in Winterhold, I wasn’t expecting to try to talk to one of its NPCs yet.

Now I know differently, though!

Auta

This was another location I didn’t recognize, and which is apparently brought in by Pilgrim to contain a shrine of Auriel. I thought at the time that it looked like an Ayleid ruin. But I didn’t try to explore it, just because I had the rough idea of trying to get to Dawnstar as fast as possible.

Fight at Driftshade Refuge

And here’s why running the Shipwrecked Off the Coast start is so challenging: it is sending you ashore in Winterhold. Which pretty much means that no matter what direction you take to get to safety, you’re going to have to face one or more hostile NPCs or creatures who will be way better equipped than you are, and who are definitely going to kill you.

This happened once I reached Driftshade Refuge. I normally only bother with this place if I’m running the Companions, but since I did know the place, it wasn’t a surprise to have to fight the two exterior Silver Hands there.

They weren’t too much of a problem. The actual problem was the wraith that came after me.

Tuxborn adds wraiths to the mix of random monsters you can encounter in Skyrim. And pretty much without exception, every time I’ve run into one of these without being properly prepared, it’s handed me my ass. This time was no exception.

More specifically, the frost attack that wraith had kept wiping me out, over and over and over.

At first, I managed to elude the problem by getting close enough to the two Silver Hands that the wraith diverted to fighting them instead, and took them out for me. I was hoping they’d all kill each other, but not so much. The wraith made short work of the two Silver Hands, and then kept coming after me.

I paused long enough to grab stuff off the downed Silver Hands, and then ran like hell. Which was not nearly as fast as I wanted, due to those frost attacks wiping out my stamina.

I think what saved my bacon was remembering that DERP I AM A DUNMER AND I HAVE FLAMES.

So I finally killed the damn thing, and was then able to go on my ~~merry~~ tired, frozen, and Death’s-Grip-nerfed way.

Snowpoint Beacon and Dawnstar

Next stop of interest was another vanilla spot, Snowpoint Beacon. Not normally terribly interesting in vanilla. But Interesting NPCs does drop an NPC there, Tikrid, who I’d found in Nona’s playthrough. So I stopped to rescue this person, and agreed to escort her back to Dawnstar.

This gave me an opportunity to try out some of the ruder dialogue options Skyrim gives you. This is another thing I’m not normally inclined to do. But in this case, a) Alecto is named after a character who is really seriously not good at human interactions, and b) I was thinking she was pretty fucking surly about the whole being shipwrecked thing, not to mention having to run for her life from the wraith. So by the time she found Tikrid, she was running drastically short of social give-a-fuck.

Which gave me an opportunity to get a good line out of Tikrid, to the effect of, “Well, you may have a point, but you don’t have to be so sharp with it.” LOL.

I haven’t decided yet if Alecto is just naturally bitchy, or if it comes out of whatever circumstances brought her out of Morrowind, only to get shipwrecked!

I did not, however, linger long in Dawnstar. I stayed there basically long enough to drop off Tikrid, and to sell some stuff to raise enough gold to keep going on my journey.

So where was this character going, anyway?

Which raises the question of, well, if Alecto needed to get to safety, why didn’t she actually stay in Dawnstar?

Much, I think, depends on why Alecto was on board the Skinny Horker to begin with, and why it sank. I’m still mulling what I want to do with this. I’d like something that calls back a bit to Alecto’s namesake from the Locked Tomb books, but I will need to think hard about how to borrow some of those same ideas for a Skyrim context.

For now, I think I’ll assume that Alecto was in a fucked-up enough state that she wanted to get the hell away from the coast, to reduce the chances that any other survivors of the shipwreck might find her. And also, because Skyrim is frigging cold and she wanted to make it to somewhere less snowy if at all possible.

So that meant heading southward as fast as she possibly could. And since she was in a fairly fucked-up, semi-feral state, I’ll assume she was not inclined to actually hire a carriage at Dawnstar or seek shelter there. Not the wisest choice in the world! But again–not exactly in the sanest of states.

Hall of the Vigilant

Without particularly planning to, I went past the Hall of the Vigilant on my way south. This was, for the record, the first time I’d ever actually laid eyes on the place prior to it burning down as part of Dawnguard!

And that right there was weird and kind of cool.

I think it wigged Alecto out a bit further, though. If nothing else because she’s a Dunmer. And her people, as of Skyrim’s time frame, are on record as worshipping three Daedra. It’s not impossible for Dunmer to be worshippers of the Divines, of course; there are multiple examples all over Skyrim. But given that the Vigilants are stridently anti-Daedra, and given that most of Morrowind’s citizens do in fact worship Daedra, that strikes me as a huge, huge religious disconnect.

So yeah, while I did find it interesting to actually see the place intact–and to see Keeper Carcette alive!–I noped out of there pretty quickly. I shall assume that the instant Alecto figured out who those people were, cold and hungry though she might have been, she wasn’t going to hang around an instant longer than she had to.

Whiterun and Solitude

I finally made it down to Whiterun, and I think at that point I must assume for the sake of story that Alecto’s strength gave out on her. She got down to Whiterun on sheer dogged determination, but I couldn’t go any further. In no small part because when I tried, some bandits spawned right by the road past White River Watch–and proceeded to hand me my ass again.

So I had to swallow my pride, turn around, and run back towards Whiterun. That at least let me get the surviving bandits within range of the patrolling guards near the meadery! Who helpfully did their jobs for me and took those bastards out.

Take that, bandits.

Returned to Whiterun to try to rest up (and get rid of the Death’s Grip nerf), sell some stuff, and make a plan for what to do next. But since I sold something displayable (to Ri’saad, I think it was?), that actually triggered the courier with the “hey, wanna come be my treasure hunter?” letter from Auryen!

Heh. Auryen must be making use of the same scrying spells Calcelmo uses to keep tabs on when you buy a Dwemer thing. Auryen and Calcelmo are both Altmer! Is this a thing they teach Altmer mages? 😆

And, of course, I did go talk to Auryen for important Kicking Off Legacy of the Dragonborn purposes. Also, to pick up Katana as a follower as long as I was in Solitude anyway.

On the way back down to Whiterun, nabbed Meeko. And that put me in a good position to go clear Silent Moons Camp, as well as the Ritual Stone.

And speaking of Katana

I should take a moment to talk about her, at this point. Because I’ve been jumping around so much between Tuxborn builds over the last few months, without really documenting any of that testing on this site, that I only just now realized I haven’t written about Katana before.

Alecto is the first official playthrough I’m doing that actually includes Katana as a follower. She wasn’t available in the 0.5.2 build of Tuxborn. She was added in the test builds for the 1.0 release, and I picked her up a couple of times during testing those. But I didn’t write about those, because they were test builds!

So now, with Alecto’s run being the first official one for Tuxborn 1.0.x that I’m covering, this means writing about Katana for the first time.

She’s technically a package deal. Initially, you only pick her up as a follower, if you talk to her in the Winking Skeever in Solitude. But as you progress through her personal quest, you’ll eventually also meet two other NPCs included with her mod: Megara and Shale.

I have yet to play through Katana’s entire quest, and to meet Shale; I have met Megara. But I want to play through all of that quest before I do a full mod review of the Journey in the Shadows mod, which is the one that provides all three of these characters.

For now, I’ll say that I’m kind of two minds about Katana. I’m not a fan of her carrying a rifle for ranged fighting. This seems really out of place to me for Skyrim’s overall technology level, and there’s no in-character explanation for why Katana’s carrying around a weapon that should get a lot more attention in Skyrim than it does.

(Because I mean seriously: I should think the Imperials and the Stormcloaks would be extremely interested in getting their hands on a new weapon type that could have major impact on how the war plays out.)

I’m also not exactly a fan of how Katana’s personal quest launches. She asks you outright if she can join forces with you, and you’re given a little prompt that hints at something going on with her. But she’s cagey about what that might be, and you have to actually travel around with her for a bit before she’ll actually ask you about why she clearly wanted to team up with you in the first place. Namely: she wants you to go talk to Megara at the Drunken Huntsman, and Megara wants you to go kill a bandit for her at Silent Moons Camp.

More on this to come as I proceed with this playthrough’s posts.

On the upside, though, I’ll say that I do like Katana’s personality. She’s pretty laid back, and I appreciate that in a follower. She’s got a good variety of commentary, but she doesn’t talk so often as to be annoying about it. And I’ve seen on the Nexus page for her mod that she, Megara, and Shale all are set up to explicitly not talk while you’re having important quest conversations, which, yes please I’ll have some. I love a bunch of the followers I’ve run to date, especially Lucien.

But FOR THE LOVE OF TALOS, PEOPLE, CONSIDER SHUTTING UP FOR A FEW MINUTES WHEN THE DRAGONBORN IS HAVING QUEST CONVERSATIONS, won’t you? Thank you!

So mad props to Katana’s creator for making that a feature of the characters.

Katana’s also got this thing where she’ll blip up behind an opponent and deliver a sneak attack on them. I’m torn on that, too. And kinda really can’t be, because anybody who plays certain classes in ESO will know that this is absolutely a thing that ESO characters can do. (Nightblade players, represent!) But I’m not used to seeing it in Skyrim. So it still feels weird to me, every time I see Katana do it.

All that said: I can definitely endorse Katana as a follower, particularly for the early stretches of a Tuxborn run. I’ll have a lot more to say about her, Megara, and Shale as Alecto’s playthrough continues, I’m sure.

The goodest of boys, Meeko

And OH YES, I should also talk about Tuxborn’s version of Meeko. We’re running a mod called Meeko Reborn SE, which basically overhauls that particular doggo. It gives him a unique appearance, additional dialogue options, a way to summon him if he gets lost… and, most importantly, it makes him Essential.

This overhauled version of Meeko was another thing I discovered during conducting testing on Tuxborn’s 1.0 build prior to its release–since it was not included in Tuxborn 0.5.2! So Alecto’s run is my first time trying this mod, too.

And so far I’m torn between being absolutely enchanted by this version of Meeks… and wishing he was not so damned barky. He’s set up to be less barky if you’re actively sneaking, to be fair. But if you’re not actively sneaking, he’s still pretty damned barky. And there does not appear to be a way to adjust that.

I’m still probably going to do the same thing I’ve done with Meeks in previous playthroughs: hand him off eventually to whatever kid I might choose to adopt. Until then, even if he’s super barky, I’m still enjoying having him around.

And how surly a Dunmer can Alecto be, if she has a soft spot for doggos?

Next time

Alecto’s next post will feature more “getting a Dragonborn started” stuff: namely, Helgen, Bleak Falls Barrow, fighting Mirmulnir at the watchtower, and last but not least, Lydia!