I DID IT Saving obsessively and not using baskets (they tend to spawn inside each other and I think that was causing the game to freak out) did the trick.
But London, won't being the only ones untouched make the other villagers suspect them? ...nah, I guess the villagers are too dense for that.
I found a nook beneath the entrance to hold the hoard, then made my way more stealthily through the rest of the cavern. I’m starting to understand why the arena was always so popular in the Imperial City, watching men kill each other for no reason was terribly fun. I searched the cave then, but found no sign of the claw. I’d thought that maybe the thieves had moved on to a less doom-y sounding location, but no. There were apparently two gangs of criminals near this town, stealing from the locals. Not counting myself, of course. I’m not a gang. Finally, I turned my attention to the forge they had set up in this cave for some reason. Did they actually have enough of a draft to not smoke themselves out with metallic vapors? I doubted it. Still, there were enough tools around for me to enact an idea I’d had. Even with my notes gone, I could probably manage it again. I just needed a good time to test it, and fortunately I hadn’t finished moving my haul yet. I’d only taken half the first time. And I’m happy to report it works, just as I thought it would. It looks ridiculous, but the buoyancy of the balloon makes the weight so much easier to bear. A victory for ingenuity! I moved everything to its appointed hiding place and spent the rest of the night brewing potions at the inn. That is my alibi. I’d been there the entire time. The shopkeeper was angry the next morning. This warmed my soul. Today's Final Tally: Items Stolen: Count in progress (Initial estimate: Many.) The List: Name Unknown: Nord/Male, Helgen. Spawned this whole mess in the first place. Deceased, but still requires kicking. Name Unknown: Imperial/Female, Helgen. Disrespected the importance of list-making. Added to The List, summarily crossed off The List. Frodnar: Nord/Male, Riverwood. Insufferable child with a stupid name. The plan: Acquire insects, unappetizing stew, poison. Plant items on child with varying degrees of vociferousness. Stage death to look like beetle-borne cosmic comeuppance for his hubris.
18th (?) of Last Seed Still not entirely sure of the date. It was cold, it snowed, I set fire to a witch lurking outside of town first thing in the morning. Given the bizarre behavior of the townsfolk, I still have the suspicion that their water was being poisoned. Perhaps this was the source. Or a minion of the source, for all I know. Oh well. I stripped off anything useful she had (I have a new knapsack now!) and tossed her in the river. Despite the weather, I wanted to take a look at the nearby tower halfway between the Barrow and Riverwood. If nothing else, it would provide me a good vantage point from which to get my bearings and sketch out a new map until I can purchase a proper one. Bandits were up there too, I could hear them, and one of them sounded like they might have heard me. Well, not a huge problem, I thought. I’ve been doing some very amusing things with this Fury spell I taught myself only yesterday, I can set them against each other. I did not count on the vampire that snuck up behind me. Damn him. I’m going to have to throw together a preventative within the next three days, just to be safe. Still, he was young and flammable. His ghostly orc friend was less flammable. At this point, I have to reassess what I’ve encountered here. Not just bandits, but undead bandits, lurking over a creepy little town. Have they been feeding on those people? It might explain the bizarre behavior, if they’re actually thralls. On the plus side, between them all, I’d found a cozy set of treated furs that only smelled a little of blood and death. Or perhaps my nose is running too much to be a good judge of these things. Still. Bugger doing reconnaissance, I’m going back down the mountain until the weather clears.
This the first time some of the extra mods I have in here make a real gameplay difference beyond that fantastic extra hundred points of inventory space that pickpocket gave to me. Organized Bandits in Skyrim adds a whole lot of variety to encounters that aren't scripted to have specific bandit NPCs, including the aforementioned vampires and ghosts. It forces you to switch up tactics a fair amount or chug health potions because a lot of these bandits hit hard. I got through the vampire ambush because I had that level up to spend which reset my health to max. Also, capes! snow that sticks to clothes! Knapsacks!!!
Replying late because I remembered as I was trying to sleep, I had a hilarious glitch involving baskets (if you're dropping them, drop one, move, drop again to avoid trouble). I was decorating a mod house (Jaxon's Positioner is great) and accidentally dropped two baskets instead of one. They went inside each other, and kept trying to separate, which made them move because collision. So they jerk-twitched up and all the way around the area, in the air, knocking shit over all over the place, until they eventually went off out of view into the fake sky. It was hilarious.
So I'm keeping a vague schedule for uploads, and in the mean time I've been messing around with doing a side-game with a different character build. Like, literally different build, I messed around with the creation kit to set his height scale to 1.2. This causes a few weird things to happen, like, say, swimming a half-foot above the surface of a river. Or cutting someone's head off at the neck by swinging through the top of their skull, that sort of thing. But I'm also just getting weird shit that seems unrelated. Gerdur apparently decided that to talk properly with this guy, she needed to feel taller. And Faendral just... did this for some reason. As soon as the Valerius siblings stopped talking, his eyes went back to normal. And I hit an Imperial so hard that his legs kept kicking for about a half-minute afterwards. I'm not adding it to the official bug tally but this is a heck of a start. Also the Thalmor guy on a horse didn't show up again for the intro. I have no idea what the hell his deal is but he needs to get his shit together.
I was kind of getting that on my first bandit burial attempt! I think there were too many baskets in each clump to actually manage to fly like that, so they just sat there, jiggling, making little rustling noises until they crashed my game.
Much better. The snow stopped, the sun came out, and I did a little target practice while I waited. Incidentally, it turned out that the body of the witch had hit a snag at some point and was only just now floating past the town. Girder didn’t notice it bonking gently against the far bank. She just placidly fetched a pail of water from the river. Enjoy the witchbits, Girder, I’m not going to be eating any of your cooking. Going back up the slopes, I found another approach. From whence I could hear the sounds of combat. Well good, I thought, they’ll tire themselves out and I can hide until an opportune moment. I need to stop thinking these things. More vampires. Out in the sun, the idiots. They’d been trying to attack a bard, and somehow not quite managing it. Talsgar the Wanderer: Hello there, fellow traveler. One itinerant minstrel and wandering wastrel, at your service. Who might be infected now, but… honestly the idea of a vampire musician was terribly amusing to me. I didn’t attempt to warn him. >What are you doing out here? Talsgar: The best tales are those of adventure. Who could truly write such a tale without first experiencing such? People with imagination? Talsgar: Ah, smell that fresh air? Truly, this is a good place to play a song. Just down the hill from the barrow that’s probably full of vampires. No. I’m hiding in the underbrush until the man goes away. Rarely have I seen an individual totally lacking whatever organ gifts us self-preservation, but he is definitely one of them. Once I pick his pockets.
As a note, if we ever meet Talsgar the Why The Hell Are You Even Here again, I can turn him into a vampire, even though NPCs usually can't contract the condition. I've never done it before and the game probably won't even notice anything's amiss, so he likely won't be hostile. But I can also change that too! Console codes/hitting people over the head can be great.
Current To-Do List: Shove soup and bees down Frodnar's pants, poison him Un-Braith the world in some way or another Turn a wandering minstrel surfer-brodude into a vampire
The bard didn’t actually sing. He just eventually wandered away, threat unacted upon. So, with continuing trepidation, I approached the barrow. I wouldn’t have done so at all, were it not for two things: First, I really wanted to make the shopkeepers’ day worse. Stealing the claw for a second time would be fantastic. Second, the disorder amongst the vampires seen thus far. Either troublemakers were being punished by being forced out into the sun—always an unpopular move and a sign of clan instability—or they were roaming in the daylight due to hunger. And that didn’t seem to be the case, because they were working with unturned gang members. This wasn’t a coherent clan, this was just a gang that happened to have some clan rejects in it. That seemed like a terribly stupid arrangement that was going to spiral into recrimination and fire and biting. Unless they actually did have a leader outside the gang, and they were just temporarily using the others. I have no idea if it’s true or who might be the leader, if that is the set-up. Going to take a wild guess and say it’s the shopkeepers. Could be from one of the Cyrodilic bloodlines, they can be very sneaky when they want to be. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the luxury of sneaky. For best protection against the vampires, I had to move in daylight. I shot one of the bandits dead, but it didn’t take. One of the vampires raised her corpse and I had to backpedal at speed. She wasn’t so sturdy the second time around, and I got a lucky hit on the vampire. Who then turned invisible to try and flee. While I appreciate her common sense, I dispensed flames anyway. No matter what piddly little restoration spells I’ve got, the scratches I’ve sustained probably aren’t wholesome. To better protect myself, the barrow is going to be attacked thusly: Identify and target the vampires first, then sprint away back towards the sunlight. All of them seem well-fed enough to not be going powdery, but it doesn’t change the fact that their eyesight is going to be poorer than mine out in the sun and the blindingly white snow.
Oddly, there weren’t any vampires inside at all. The ones outside were just abysmally stupid or stubborn apparently. It didn’t improve my luck much, though. I managed to hit a vase rather than the bandit I was aiming for right at the start. To make up for it, the last shot I could get on him struck at such an angle that his charge sailed right past me and brained himself on the wall. Well done, you. The tableau I found further into the hall was even more bizarre: one of their men had been overpowered by rats. They’d just left his body there to attract more rats, apparently, because this gang was run like the seasoned, trial-tested crew of a capsized fishing boat, bobbing sadly along towards a dreugh-infested shoal. The only other bandit I found there was… just staring at a lever. Next to what was… well. It was a pretty and ostentatious puzzle lock, but that was its only virtue. I might not have prodded at it, but I still hadn’t seen the claw anywhere, and blast it, I had a plan for that thing. The ruin had some rather excellently preserved books, and a lot of lit candles. That worried me. Why were these here? Were the rats lighting them somehow? Had I stumbled upon a secret warren of rat-men? No, I decided, probably the Dunmer whose voice I could hear around the corner. It sounded as if he was in trouble. The webs over the entryway made it clear he was in trouble. The especially giant spider that descended from the ceiling more than confirmed he was in trouble. And so would I have been, had it not been for one thing: It couldn’t fit through the doorway. It was smart enough to know that, so it kept seriously considering the other Dunmer every time I gave it a chance, but that just gave me space to fire on it. That worked just fine, for the most part. Then it spat ungodly stinging mucus at my face. By some miracle I stumbled back out the door and managed to fire off a last arrow at the fuzzy blob I could still make out in the doorway. What an epic confrontation that turned out to be. A half-blind klutz and a claustrophobic spider battle to the death. No. The man was obviously an associate of the vampire-bandits, and if I know anything about vampire-adjacent Dunmer, it’s that they can’t be trusted. It’s a lot easier when they can’t move.
oh ffs imgur. Images are out of order again. I'll fix that. I'm sure it'll make more sense now. Note to self: Upload these at least half an hour before bedtime. Edit: fixed.
Finally, found the claw. From what I could gather from his diary (terrible penmanship, and not even the slightest bit encrypted!) it seemed like the cheeky bugger had run ahead of his compatriots and dropped the gates behind him. On account of treasure, apparently. His notes made it seem as if he hadn’t quite figured out the trick to getting it, or he thought he was being clever by not entirely spelling out the solution in his journal. First, palms. I shouldn’t have to be pedantic at a legend, that’s the whole point of them. They get handed down and refined over time. Unless your arms were fused together in some horrible glue accident, you have two palms of your hands. Second: The solution was “match up Bear-Moth-Owl with a puzzle lock somewhere”. On the palm of the dragon claw. Which might count as a single hand. So either it’s the palm of your hand, the palms of your hands, or the palm of the hand in your hands which is the only way the wording would work and You know, maybe the bandit was just an idiot and wrote the phrase down wrong. That’s probably it. That makes me feel a little better. In any event, I found out who was actually lighting the candles: zombies. They were “asleep” when I entered the crypt, but they were breathing loudly. It was a little unnerving, but if they intended to be stealthy, it failed. I started setting them on fire before they could even stand up. They were very old, and thus very dry. They went up nicely. I have no idea whether the coins I pulled from their ashes are still traded for or if someone will get terribly upset for stealing funerary gifts, but really. They’re not proper ancestors. Those reside in shrines and you have to be polite to them otherwise they’ll be even ruder than usual. [ignore the fact that this is not a draugr. I looted everything else too fast for a screenshot to register. Oops.] Though someone had gone to quite a lot of work to secure this place. Not very smart work, though. All I had to do to avoid the swinging blade trap was crawl. I thought there might be spikes from below to keep that from happening, but my faithful zombie cadaver test subject remained unperforated when I threw him in there. Satisfied, I continued on, practicing my flame-spewing as I went.
The crypt temporarily opened up into a natural cave system lit by glowing fungi. Couldn’t pass up taking some of those, though not as much as I would have liked. The cut samples didn’t maintain their light for long, so I was forced to leave a few dotting the walls to make sure that I could keep my footing. Then it was back into another crypt, wherein I was surprised to find that these zombies aren’t exactly fond of arrows. Why? A usual zombie is far more robust against piercing blows, they’re animated by magic, not organs. Great-aunt Jolhima’s pet zombie Headless (nee Stumpy, nee Great-uncle Irdal) taught me that. Perhaps it was a symptom of whatever preservation process they’d gone through, that they required a higher level of physical coherency than your average cadaver. Maybe the inscriptions on the walls could tell me something of the process, but all of them were figures with no writing or immediately identifiable meaning. Possibly people interred there, or honored figures, or gods. Daedra? Maybe daedra. There was a woman with moths, a man with… giant rat skull-topped staves? Another with dragon wings, and a fourth with flaming daggers. Could possibly be representations of the House of Troubles, but I doubt it. The iconography is entirely unfamiliar. The claw worked to open the door at the end of the final hall, surprising no one. The flock of bats that hit me in the face did, though. Also, honestly, the size of the cavern on the far side is surprising too. It’s mostly unfinished stone, but the old Nords carved a giant monolith out of the rock overtopped with a horned head. Again, my immediate thought is the House of Troubles, because Molag Bal would be an obvious patron to a den of zombies and idiot vampires. One thing undermines that theory, however. One was the script employed beneath the wall. Entirely composed of straight elements and equilateral diamonds, it has no kinship to daedric script at all. More worryingly, the wall is yelling in an unintelligible chorus in my head, and one of the words on the wall is glowing at me. Also, there’s a stone coffin sitting across from it, and I’m not stupid enough to think it’s going to stay closed if I poke at the loud rock. Or the chest next to it. Still, this is intriguing. I’m going to sit over here and copy down the text to see if I can make any sense of it.
I've always vaguely wondered whether the word walls have some sort of magical compulsion tied to them. Because it would take a hell of a mindset to say "yes, I trust this glowing, hissing, yelling wall. I will let it come into my brain and have tea with my childhood memories." ...Also I should note that due to the nature of playing an Elder Scrolls game I have never finished the main questline, so if there's anything to that effect actually made canon, I have zero clue. Alduin could turn out to be a very angry and ancient corgi in disguise for all I know.
As a note, next week I have my interviews for a PhD program I'm hoping to attend. Obviously, this is disrupting my schedule a tad. I'm still posting, just not once a day the way I have been.
