if you enjoy game walkthroughs that seem destined to break the game someday, this is where I got the information that that was a thing that exists:
Somehow I knew this was going to be from the Polygon guys. And I knew what the dragons were going to look like. This is excellent.
There were skeletons at regular intervals all throughout the cave system. Had they been dumping bodies here? Unlikely, these ones still had heads, and none of them were fresh or even newly rotten. Someone had been down here recently, though, there were lit braziers and a cart just down the hill. Although apparently whoever was on cart duty made the executive decision to cancel work on account of bear. Or the other skeleton next to the cart was its previous minder. Apparently though the Imperials had considered this place a viable escape route should it be necessary, they’d done nothing to clean up the giant wildlife or bits of people’s Ancestors. I’d already acquired a bow from one of the soldiers in the conflagration room. Apparently he remembered even less of that than I thought. Stuck between madman and bear, I wasn’t feeling entirely confident. But at least the bear was sleeping. Until it wasn’t. I panicked a little and might have fallen in the nearby stream, but no one can judge me by this point in the day. In other news, I own part of a bear now. It’s charred and smells like burnt hair, but maybe Jarl Bearback had a single, solitary good idea. I suppose I’ll find out. And I got the claws, those can have some interesting alchemical effects when ground up in oil. If these bears are like southern bears. I'm not entirely sure on that. Mainly because the bear had a garnet. I don’t know why or how it had a garnet, but. I have bear garnet now. Unless, like the spiders, this is all a product of head trauma-induced hallucinations. At least this one hasn’t floated menacingly at me yet. Maybe seeing a healer should be on the agenda, when I can find one that won't ask questions, such as "where did you get this injury" or "why are you paying me with a garnet that smells like burnt bear".
buggeration, they did. This is what happens when you try to bang out a post before dinner. Fixing now!
was just thinking about this in relation to some graphics mods I'm going to be trying out. tl;dr: having a good solid floor of black in your images can make colors stand out much better. The challenge is doing this with mods without making the game too dark to make sense of in screenshots, where you don't have the visual cues provided by movement.
Oh, also for bonus Oh God What's Going On: One of the mods I have is an immersive HUD. This is why I don't constantly have a crosshair in frame, there haven't been any objective markers, and why none of the screenshots have a compass on them. That last bit is most important, because that means I can't see when nearby location markers pop up. I can still consult the game map itself, but I'm going to try to not look on the wiki to locate places unless you guys specifically want me to head somewhere. Oh, and this means I can't see the little enemy dots on the compass either. There is now a significant chance that even with Skyrim's AI, I might get ambushed on occasion. WHOOBOY.
"why are you paying me with a garnet that smells like burnt bear" anonymous healer's asking the REAL mysteries of the universe :D
you know, I have the enemy markers turned on I never look to see if they're popping up I am frequently ambushed while traveling
in backreading, I realized we have missed at least one opportunity for a beautiful pun how dare, London, I expect better wordplay from someone with a concussion
Ralof: That looks like the way out! I knew we’d make it! Snow had drifted in the mouth of the cave and it was already cold again. I almost wanted to go back inside, set the bear on fire again and not come out for a while. Deciding to flee to this country was a stupid decision. Yes, it had a more porous border than the other options available, you had options on where to head next, and while the locals were superstitious there was more territory to hide in and no laws against necromancy… But it’s so cold. And this is just the southern border of the country! Up in the mountains, yes, but it’s only Last Seed and already there’s snow. Also, dragons. I don’t know the typical season for dragons. I didn’t share his optimism on the dragon’s intentions, nor on the vitality of the charred corpses in the caves. At this point I was half-expecting Gerdur to be a sheep, or a rock with a face painted on it. But neither of those things usually hold down professions, so she might actually exist. Then he just… stood there. Note to self: If I go to Riverwood, don’t drink the water.
>Go see if his sister-who-runs-the-mill is actually a rock. Alternately, >go find someone who can sort this concussion out without asking too many questions.
Also, I just got Vividian ENB working! This messes around with the graphics a bit to prettify the game a little more. I have it set to Vivid color rather than Vanilla and don't have the cloud and fog optional file on here, might add it in a bit. Let me know if there's anything in particular that you like/don't like about it. There's some options I can mess around with to tweak it as necessary. Too saturated, too dark, too whatever? Let me know!
I had no map, no food, no other provisions of any kind. So against the other half of my better judgement that was telling me not to do this, I started down the same path as the Beard. I also saw Ulfric only twice: Once in the murderyard, and next in the first insufficiently robust tower Beard and I escaped. He wasn’t in the tunnels, and I’m willing to bet he’s looking rather a lot like the rabbit I set on fire while Beard was giving his sales pitch. I’m finding that the nicest thing about fire magic is that your food doesn’t take much more cooking once you’ve gotten it to stop moving. Rare rabbit in one hand, I set about collecting useful plants and fungi with the other. I realized in the process that almost none of these things I was looking at were actually the same variety that I was used to. Even with all my research notes taken and probably burned (someone will pay for that, I just have to figure out who), I probably would have to start from scratch on the necessary alchemical preparations. Just in case I forget later due to the concussion, this is why there’s butterfly wings sandwiched between these pages. I have no idea what these are, and I need to test them once I’ve got the mental fortitude for it. I have nowhere else to put it, so into the journal it goes. My suspicions seem to be confirmed: Beard is a frustrated tour guide who was rejected by the establishment, joined a violent gang and has slowly been going insane from his unfulfilled dream to lead people around, expositing about local landmarks. This is what happens when you grow up in a town with ten people in it, they will get bored of you. And then you will start seeing the dead as if they were alive and assuming that concussed Dunmer give a single solitary fig about your Nord nativist movement.
So, which Guardian Stone should be chosen to smoosh London's face up against? For those who haven't played before, the options are Thief, Warrior and Mage, representing three of the thirteen astrological symbols in Elder Scrolls. You can switch between which one you want to use at any time, with each conferring a bonus for skill experience gained in their respective class-shaped skills. I'm also going to leave stuff open to people if they want to make suggestions on where to spend points: Remember though that I'm using Ordinator, which redoes every skill tree to a ridiculous extent. I'm starting out with the standard Dunmer skill spread, so that means I have approximately level 15 in every skill, save for Destruction (25-ish), and 20-ish Alchemy, Alteration, Illusion, Light Armor, and Sneak. I probably should have checked where precisely I am in those before closing the game. Whoops.
Oh, also there might not be a post tomorrow: I'm going to be rejoining my local choral society, which meets once a week on Tuesday nights. It eats up about three hours total with commute and practice so I probably won't have time left over for writing the journal of this lunatic.
