Mod review: The Tools of Kagrenac

Just finished up running this mod in Tuxborn, so here’s my latest review, of the mod The Tools of Kagrenac.

Spoiler-free picoreview: this mod had several aspects to it that frustrated me immensely. Yet I did ultimately enjoy playing it. Details behind the fold (or, if you’re reading this on Dreamwidth, at the link immediately below).

Core concept

Players familiar with the lore of Morrowind know what the Tools of Kagrenac are: Sunder, Wraithguard, and Keening, the three items used by the Tribunal on the Heart of Lorkhan to elevate themselves to living gods.

Keening is available in Skyrim via the base game side quest Arniel’s Endeavor. This mod provides a means to also acquire Wraithguard and Sunder.

Stuff I liked

Fuck yeah, Morrowind lore!

I’ve written before on this site about how I’m a fan of Morrowind in particular in Elder Scrolls lore. And since the Tools of Kagrenac tie into the whole story of the Tribunal, yeah, I’m partial to those! So this mod hooking into that appealed to me.

Good tying in with Arniel’s Endeavor

The mod does a good job tying in with the existing base game quest Arniel’s Endeavor, and even accounting for how you were able to carry Keening to Arniel without it killing you. This led well into the idea of the three Tools being in a corrupted/uncharged state.

Contact at the College of Winterhold was a nice interaction

This guy seemed perfectly reasonable, and even knew I was the Arch-Mage. How exactly he managed to lose his Ring of the Wind seemed pretty on par with NPCs losing things and needing you to retrieve them, LOL.

I thought it was a little weird that he made a big point of asking me to go find the Ring of the Wind for him and then turned right around and let me buy it off of him, but hey!

And it was a little weird that he talked up how the stuff he had for sale was not like anything any other merchant would sell… yet most of his inventory was pretty standard merchant stuff. And I was hoping for more than that. Still, having another merchant hanging out at the College is an overall win.

Reveal on Mathis Valen’s master plan was good

Valen being a Sixth House aspirant and Dagoth Ur worshipper was good, concept-wise! I just wish I’d have gotten more about this through the course of the plot.

And ngl, the loot is good

None of the loot items you can get from running Tools of Kagrenac are things I’m likely to use in a playthrough, since I almost never play a heavy armor type. I also don’t tend to like the aesthetics of Dwemer armor. But the Aetherial Armor you can find as loot in the final ruin is pretty badass, in terms of enchantments on it.

I also like that the Tools do have some badass effects, and that the mod does take into account the lore that you can’t safely wield either Sunder or Keening without also wearing Wraithguard.

The loot from this mod that’s most interesting to me personally is the Aetherial Amulet, just because I really like crafting in Skyrim, and smithing in particular. I can’t actually use the amulet for that in the Tuxborn load order, since we’re running Simonrim mods that get rid of Smithing fortification enchantments. But if you’re not running Simonrim mods, the boost to smithing while wearing the Aetherial Armor set is substantial!

Atalatar was a relief after the other two Ayleid ruins

After the first two Ayleid ruins, it was a distinct relief to find one that was actually outside, which made it a lot easier to find the special stone I had to get.

Here, though, my main quibble was the dead body with a note by it, which warned that anybody trying to find these crystals was clearly Up to No Goddamned Good. Which ties into my commentary below on the mod working a little too hard to telegraph that your primary contact is going to betray you.

Stuff I’m ambivalent about

Sending you to Blackreach seems kind of pointless

Towards the end of the mod’s plot, you get the objective to meet your primary contact down in Blackreach–but you’re not actually meeting him there. You’re going through a portal that sends you to an entirely different location, a long outdoor path that sends you to a large Dwemer ruin.

Which raised the question for me of why, exactly, the mod didn’t just send you straight there. Requiring you to go to Blackreach first led me to believe that the final area was going to be part of Blackreach. But the long path to the ruin was clearly aboveground. I could see the sky, and I was in fact attacked by a dragon while following the path to the ruin.

So why have a portal to the place down in Blackreach? Presumably the idea was supposed to be that Mathis Valen opened the portal, but why do it down in Blackreach to begin with? Because getting down there requires the player to make it to the point of the main quest to get access to Blackreach, and if you launched this plot earlier than that and want to finish it up, it’s kind of a PITA to have to wait until you can get an attunement sphere to get down there.

Not to mention having to fight your way through automatons and Falmer to get to the Silent Ruin.

So why didn’t Mathis Valen tell me to meet him in some remote outdoor location outside of Markarth, and just open up a portal there?

Stuff I didn’t like

Kicking off the quest was janky

It’s always a risk to launch a mod’s questline in a modpack’s load order, just because chances are good that you’re launching the mod along with something else the mod creator may not have included in their original testing.

A bit too obvious that NPCs weren’t on the up and up

Two of the three NPCs you need to speak to as part of running this mod, Mathis Valen and
Yassour Tansumiran, were a bit too obviously telegraphing their nefarious intent.

Yassour was particularly bad about this, as the guy tasks you to go recover Wraithguard from Nchardak but also drops suspicious snickers in amongst his dialogue. Then, after you bring Wraithguard back to him, he maybe says about six words to you in reply before flat out attacking you. In the Retching Netch, in fact, which got him swarmed by my followers and other NPCs in the place as well.

And once you get to Atalatar, there’s even a note there next to a dead body warning that anybody trying to get the stones you’re looking for can’t possibly want them for legitimate purposes. Very much GOSH I WONDER IF THAT NOTE IS TRYING TO TELL ME SOMETHING, there.

Puzzle to get Sunder was brutal and not in a fun way

When you reach Rkulftzul, the sealed vault that contains Sunder, you discover two things:

Sunder is located behind a forcefield you’ll have to take down. And that you’ll have to solve a puzzle to do this.
It’s also in a huge chamber full of lava, and at the end of a metal walkway over all that lava.

And the first thing I thought when I came into that chamber was, “If I screw this up, I’m totally falling into that lava, aren’t I?”

I was one hundred percent right.

The puzzle itself was super tedious, with multiple stages. For stage one, I had to acquire three things called stanzas, which were basically reskinned Dwemer gyros, and which were located at various points around the chamber. Two of them were specifically located in spots that were going to be a huge PITA to get to and would require jumping and careful maneuvering to reach.

Did I mention I’m not good at jumping in Skyrim?

That seemed like a surefire path to falling into the lava. Damned good thing I had the Telekinesis spell, then! I used that to get the stanzas and then moved on to stage two of the puzzle.

That required me to find specific volumes of the Sermons of Vivec (present in the same chamber, thankfully), count words in each one to get to the proper clues to build the combination for the puzzle, and lastly, finally enter the correct combination in sequence to bring the forcefield down. Which, as a puzzle concept, was not exactly difficult.

Here’s the thing, though: I play on a Steam Deck. And I am also very nearsighted. So squinting at the small book pages on my small screen, and trying to count my way to the correct clue, is the exact opposite of my idea of fun. I could also have gone to the transcriptions of the books in question on the UESP, which would have been a lot more legible. But even with those, counting individual words would have been tedious AF.

To the mod creator’s credit, the mod’s page on Nexus does provide hints for how to solve the puzzle. And I took shameless advantage of those. But I feel like if you have to provide not one, not two, but five total hints for how to solve your puzzle, maybe that’s a sign your puzzle is too fiddly to be fun?

But it also took me a couple of tries to figure out that the three pillars, on which I had to place the stanzas, had to be activated in sequence with the proper corresponding number from the combination. So the first time I tried it, I failed the puzzle.

At which point the lava level in the chamber started rising, and I was doomed.

Part of me kind of admires the brutality of this. It does feel appropriate that the protections on Sunder would in fact incinerate any adventurer foolish enough to try to come and get it–although in this case, I feel that if the First Follower of Vivec was trying to protect Sunder, maybe completely destroying the chamber in the event of the puzzle failing was not the best idea? Maybe just fry the insolent adventurer instead.

One does wonder whether Sunder would survive being immersed in lava. But putting that to the test seems kind of counter to the whole point of protecting Sunder, is what I’m saying here.

Aba-Malatar was an exercise in frustration

Once I finally had Sunder, I had to move on to acquiring three special stones that would be used to recharge the Tools. Each of these stones was in an Ayleid ruin along the southern edge of the map, Skyrim’s border with Cyrodiil.

The first of these ruins I hit was Aba-Malatar, in the southeastern corner of the map. This ruin was pretty much non-stop traps from start to finish. And since Aba-Malatar showed some of this mod author’s tendencies to use very old-school dungeon design, it meant I had to navigate a lot through the same traps repeatedly in order to hit buttons in a required sequence. Which, again, I do not find fun.

Ditto Oio-Lalor

The second of the three ruins, Oio-Lalor, had the same frustrating type of dungeon design. With the added wrinkle of the place being super-dark, and accordingly more difficult to navigate.

And the Clairvoyance spell didn’t work very well in there either, so I couldn’t rely on that to try to get to the specific spots I had to find to trigger some pressure plates.

This seemed like another example of the “my mod isn’t going to hold your hand” philosophy I see in a lot of work out there. Which is fine if you enjoy that as a mod philosophy. But as I’ve written before, I have only so much patience for how long I’m willing to run around in a dungeon to solve a thing. Especially if you’re making it extra difficult by making it dark, adding a bajillion traps, disabling quest markers, or hobbling the Clairvoyance spell. Or all of the above.

Mathis Valen was too mustache-twirly at the end

I didn’t object to this dude turning out to be a bad guy. In fact, I was expecting it, even aside from his being a bit too obvious about it in how he delivered his dialogue.

But when I found him at the end, flanked by a couple of flunkies in chitin armor, he of course had to pontificate about how this was all part of his grand master plan. And that I had been his pawn and puppet all along, and now of course I was TOTALLY GOING TO DIE.

And at this point in my playthrough, I was a level 63 Dragonborn with a sizable arsenal of Shouts and spells, not to mention three, count ’em, three followers backing me up. We outnumbered Mathis and his flunkies. So killing them went very, very quickly. And left me thinking, “Well, my dude, what did you think that was going to get you?”

I felt like the guy made more of a point gloating over how he’d played me than he did his actual master plan. And his master plan was the more interesting part, so I wish I could have gotten more out of him on that.

This part isn’t the mod’s fault, but be aware of this if you run Shades of Mortality

Playing this mod in Tuxborn added an extra complication that the mod could not have accounted for: namely, we’re running Shades of Mortality in our load order, an alternative death mechanic that makes you turn ethereal for a few seconds, rather than throwing you back to your last save file. Which, for the most part, is handy.

In the situation of being killed by the Sunder puzzle, though, it meant that I kept coming out of the ghost state only to still be in lava. So I kept dying in the lava, over and over.

Nor could I get out. The destruction of the chamber also included the lift I’d used to get in there in the first place. And while I was able to clip through rubble to get to the lever and return to the surface, the world was still inundated with lava color. So I had to revert to my last save, regardless.

Takeaway from this: if you’re going to run Tools of Kagrenac in a load order that also contains Shades of Mortality (or any other mod that does something similar), you might want to temporarily disable that mod as long as you’re trying to solve the Sunder puzzle.

All that said…

Even though I had a bunch of quibbles about the mod, I did actually overall enjoy running it. I think the end loot would probably be more entertaining to players more interested in heavy Dwemer armor than I tend to be, but that doesn’t mean I don’t acknowledge that the Aetherial Armor set and the Tools of Kagrenac are in fact cool.

Next time I play it, though, I’ll be looking for better ways to handle Aba-Malatar and Oio-Lalor. The Sunder puzzle is easy enough to deal with once you know how, and ultimately I found those two Ayleid ruins more frustrating. So I’ll be looking for better ways to make it through them more quickly.

I’d give this mod a good solid B+, or 3 1/2 out of 5 stars.