RedRavyn

@ Nocturah: It's not an unequivocable "yes", as you imply. That's why I said "maybe". On some of my playthroughs I picked a LOT of pockets and only occasionally got a gang of thugs sent after me for it. To my knowledge, there are only two "hired thug" quests in this game. One is WIKill06 ("Revenge, Hired Thugs") which you get if you kill someone with a relative (who is the one who sends the thugs). The other one is WIAddItem03 ("Steal, Thugs Hunt Player"), which you get if you steal something from someone, in which case that person is the one who sends the thugs. In both of these radiant quests one of the thugs will be carrying a contract with the name of the person who hired them. I can find nothing in the CK that indicates that any thugs are just sent out randomly by the game for no actual in-game reason -- only these two instances, and they require a specific crime against a specific person. I'm not sure what the actual chances of either of these quests being triggered are, since I haven't looked into those quests in any real detail, but someone with a little extra time on his or her hands could probably inspect them in the CK and figure it out. I do know that the "steal" quest requires the "Player Add Item" event and the "kill" quest requires the "Kill Actor Event" to even run, so neither of these can even take place unless you actually steal an object or murder someone.

@ landy8: Yes, the Anise/Moire issue can be fixed by a mod. The reason Moire takes out the bounty on you if you steal something from Anise's hut is because all the grabbable objects in the hut (exterior and cellar) are set to ownership by the Hagraven faction. I've gotten these thugs four times, already, and they've always been hired by Moire -- never by any of the other named Hagravens, so my assumption is that she's just the default Hagraven to do this. By removing ownership from all those objects the game is prevented from promulgating that contract. I've been dealing with it for most of my playthroughs by meticulously hand-changing every object in the cabin with the console "setownership" command. I finally got tired of this, especially after missing one object once and accidentally grabbing it before I realized it (the last time Moire sent thugs after me) and decided to make a mod so that ownership is removed from the very beginning of the game. I left the trigger in place that makes Anise go postal on you if you enter the cellar, just so you can kill her without incurring a bounty (I think I got a bounty for doing that during one of my early playthroughs, when I did a sneak attack on her). So far I'm at level 16 and have yet to have her thugs meet me, although I don't expect it to happen, anyway, since I know what's going on with this particular contract. Thugs are sent by specific people with respect to specific things which you do in-game. I'm not saying that there aren't random thug encounters, but I've never had one of these. At least with me they're always by a particular person who I can identify as someone I've crossed in the game. At least once I understood what was going on with Anise's Cabin after investigating it with the CK I was no longer mystified by Moire's involvement. It's random whether or not you'll be targeted, but as far as I know you have to actually do something bad to someone before you'll get it. This is in total contradiction to the mechanism that spawns DB assassins and characters with names like "Khajiit", "Redguard", and "Breton" who attack you without warning. Those all appear to be truly random events, determined solely by a roll of electronic dice.

I'm using an alternate start in which the Main Quest isn't even engaged, so none of the implied backstory that leads up to Thalmor assassination contracts applies. I've religiously avoided any criminal activity at all, short of goading Anise into attacking me so that I could kill her in relatively good conscience. I haven't stolen anything. I have only six assaults (all against bandits), and only two trespasses (both in Anise's cellar, prior to installing my mod which "fixes" this little issue). No murders. No horse thefts. My kitty has a clean nose. I've just as religiously avoided any contact whatsoever with Imperial Troops, Stormcloak Troops, and Thalmor. They don't even know I exist. I've never even been in a city, save for Riverwood. I do all my trading in Riverwood and with the Khajiit caravans and hunters. I've been hunting and fishing, exploring, gathering alchemical ingredients, and doing good deeds for people for sixteen levels and this evening I got my very first DB assassin. I think it's funny in that same game-day I also had "Khajiit" attack me while I was out in the wilderness and "Orc" was actually waiting INSIDE the inn in Riverwood (never met one of these random people inside a building), exuding her usual arrogance that required me to rid the world of her. Random events are random events. There doesn't have to be a motive, just as landy8 said. The Bethesda developers just like doing this sort of thing. They make sure that trouble follows your character around Skyrim even if you're playing an absolute saint. I think that their assumption is that every player is going to follow their lead (if you can call a chain attached to a nose-ring a "lead") and get into all sorts of trouble as a direct result of the quests they build that seem to have just this agenda in mind. Some of us aren't so easily led, but we still have to deal with the fallout of a gamesystem that assumes we're going to be nice little robots and do everything according to the developers' schedule.

@ xMcNerdx: No, I don't think making a hard save before every transition point is excessive. The game will make an autosave for you at those times, you know. The problem is that if something goes wrong, like if you die, the game will restart with the autosave. Then you turn that into a hard save the next time you do it manually. Like I said, overwriting saves in Oblivion was a well-documented, game-breaking bug. There's no indication at all that Bethesda fixed this issue, and some indication that it hasn't been fixed. The people in the know will tell you not to use autosaves or quicksaves. You can ignore this advice if you like, but you're on your own when one of your saves becomes so corrupt that it suddenly stops working. Chances are you will get very little warning until it happens. The problems are small and cumulative. Your first indication will be game save bloat (typified by longer loading times). Your next will be instability, possibly including CTDs and likely including "odd" behavior of various types. Your final indication will be a saved game that will not load and/or crashes the game upon access. The first two indications might be so ephemeral you won't even notice them. It's too late to save your game once the third situation happens, and reverting to a prior save will only stave off the inevitable, because your game save is already corrupt -- just not corrupt enough to quit working. In short, if you use your autosaves and quicksaves I think your game is living on borrowed time. It's not that difficult to make hard saves so that you can revert to those when the game, itself, insists upon loading an autosave. In fact, I always manualy delete any autosaves after every gamesession.

@ Tidus44: You made that up, right, Tidus? Seriously, I know of no "History of Skyrim" written by Eslaf Erol. A number of books written by Reven deal with the adventures of Eslaf Erol, but those date back to the game Oblivion. I seriously doubt that Eslaf Erol even lived into the times that the events in Skyrim unfold, so how could he have possibly written a book describing the assassination attempts on the Dovahkiin? Indeed, Eslaf Erol, himself, was totally fictional. Read his name backward. It says "False Lore". Don't get taken in by every in-game book you might read. Very little of that information can be considered canon within the context of the ES games because they were all written by authors who were both fallible and may have had agendas of their own. @ VileTouch: Well, I've actually killed wolves in sneak mode with multiple chickens (and goats and farm workers) nearby and I never accrued a bounty for it. Nor did the killings (five wolves in all) increase the number of my assaults. I'm pretty anal about re-checking my crime stats after every encounter in which one of my stray arrows might have hit an innocent bystander, so I'm pretty sure about these facts. I can absolutely guarantee that the other wildlife isn't reporting this, either. To date (level 15, almost to level 16 in this playthrough) I probably have well over a hundred wolf kills, at least half of them in sneak mode, and many within full view of giants, mammoths, elk, deer, mudcrabs, slaughterfish, bunnies, bees, and butterflies. Not a single one has gotten me a bounty or an assault. During the short time I was using a horse I went out hunting on a number of occasions. No bounties or assualts got reported by my horse. If this is happening to you I suggest you look to your mods for the culprit, because it's not in the vanilla game. Now, having the wildlife report real crimes against people ... that's a different matter altogether. I'm in the process of trying to learn the Skyrim AI so I can fix that issue on a global basis.

I've been a busy boy this weekend, revamping Anise's Cabin, fixing some issues with Candlelight, Magelight, and Nightvision, and mulling around the idea of turning Meeko into a valid companion. I need to get my feet wet in the AI, though, and I thought I'd tackle something that would have been trivially simple in Oblivion -- changing the follow distance of a follower so that he isn't constantly bumping into you -- the main reason I don't use followers in Skyrim. I figured I'd start with Barbas, who is undoubtedly the single most annoying follower to have around because of this. I look in his AI section and he has NO AI packages at all. Zip. Nada. Nil. Zilch. Nothing. There's obviously something I'm missing, here, but for the life of me I can't even find a menu option anywhere in the CK that lets me even peruse all the available AIs. Bottom line -- can anyone point me to a Skyrim AI tutorial that isn't a video tutorial? Sorry for those of you who have spent a lot of time and effort making video tutorials, but I don't learn very well from most of them because you guys zip through the steps so rapidly I'm spending more time stopping, rewinding and restarting the videos than I am actually absorbing the information. It doesn't help that most such tutorials have such poor video quality that it's nearly impossible to read any of the text on the screen without a big stretch of the imagination (read that, "guesswork"). So far I've been pretty much learning the CK by trial and error, although a little bit of what I knew when I was modding for Oblivion seems to work, here. My experience modding Oblivion fails me when it comes to AI in Skyrim, though.

The problem with that, Chuck, is that it's possible to "jumpstart" the Main Quest in alternate starts that don't begin with Helgen destroyed. Having your new Helgen in place may play havoc with the Main Quest in this case. I don't know this for sure, since I'm not sure of exactly what events that take place in Helgen may be triggers within the Main Quest. All you have to do is to check for the stage of the Main Quest and make sure it's at least at Stage 10 of MQ102, since at that point Helgen has been destroyed and Alduin is on his way to revive Mirmulnir for the eventual showdown at the Western Watchtower in MQ104. Remember than an alternate start that doesn't enable the Main Quest will leave Helgen untouched by the dragon attack, which doesn't occur until sometime before Stage 30 of MQ101. I don't know the exact stage since the wiki only documents a few of them from 30 to 900, but there are 18 stages before Stage 30. I'm sure one of those is when Alduin appears during the cinematic intro to the game. Stage 900 marks your exit from Helgen and at that point it's already destroyed, but there are 63 stages before that in which the initial Helgen can be replaced by the destroyed Helgen. I'm guessing it actually happens at stage 900. You'd have to go into the CK and examine the quest stages to sort all this out.

Arcane Blacksmith is simply the ability to improve magical armor and weapons. So the answer to your last question is "no". You'll get the same improvement, depending upon your other perks, on an item whether you improve it before enchanting or improve it after enchanting.

For the most part, other people's saves are going to be of limited use to you, depending upon what mods they (and you) have installed. It's generally not a good idea to import other people's saves into your game because of this. I'll make a suggestion, although I know it doesn't help you with your immediate problem. As TalimIvy said, don't rely upon autosaves. There are issues with autosaves which can destabilize or even break the game, at least with Oblivion, and I don't think it's been fixed in Skyrim. All Bethesda did was to spread out the problem over multiple autosaves, but those are still being overwritten, which is the cause of the game bloat and game instability in Oblivion. Instead, make a new hard save (not quicksave, because those have the same overwriting issue as autosaves) before every transition (door or fast travel), and before any anticipated event where something could go wrong (like before a fight). Never load an autosave, by the way. If you do, and then make a hard save, any problems which have accrued within that autosave will now be permanently in your regular save. Prune out the older saves and keep maybe the latest fifty or so, if you have the hard disk space for it. This way you'll nearly always have a recent save to fall back upon in the event your game glitches out.

Short answer, "maybe". It's not a sure thing, but there's a chance, even if the crime went undetected. The gamesystem doesn't take witnesses into account for things like this. You can even kill the victim of the theft and that person's "ghost", I suppose, can still hire thugs to hunt you down. I know. It doesn't make any sense. Bethesda developers made this decision. It doesn't have to make any sense. Enough said, I think.

@ gameknight: It goes almost without saying, I should think, that if you kill an NPC that NPC isn't going to be available later on the game. :facepalm: The moral of this story is simple: Never, EVER kill a named NPC unless you know exactly what the consequences are going to be. That's just common sense when you have the wikia and wiki to tell you everything you need to know about that person.

Decorator's Assistant I used it in Oblivion and considered it an essential "tool mod". I haven't tried it for Skyrim, yet, since I'm not really into houses or decorating them, but I'm sure it's just as good in this incarnation. I feel your pain, though. In Oblivion we could at least get some control over an object. It was possible to grab just one corner and spin it around, for instance, however rudimentary the control was. In Skyrim all you can do is pick something up. If you turn while you're carrying it, the object maintains the same orientation with respect to the world, rather than turning with the actor. The problem, I think, is that this is yet another example of how the gamesystem has been simplified. What it seems like is happening is that grabbing any object grabs it at its center. This is why you don't have control. I've even run into problems where a corpse might be partially stuck in the terrain and can't be moved. In Oblivion if an arm was over an object you wanted to interact with you could just move the arm out of the way. You didn't have to move the entire body. In Skyrim you can't. Oh well ... I guess that's "progress", at least from Bethesda's perspective. Decorator's Assistant is real progress, though. Try it. I think you'll like it.

@ Tidus44: I've gotten those random assassinations without ever having met Shavari, or, indeed ever having been in Riften (which is the only place she appears). Most of the time the Thalmor will send out their own agents in "death squads" to hunt you down once you've riled them up. @ Georgiegril: Random events are random. I can't offer any absolute proof about this, since I have yet to locate the script in the CK that promulgates an assassination attempt, but there have been comments by other people more knowledgeable than myself that these are, indeed, random. I've been targeted before any dragons (except Alduin) appeared during normal games. In one of my playthroughs involving a start in which the Main Quest isn't even engaged (and Helgen isn't destroyed) I've had one such random assassination attempt. Dragons have nothing to do with them. According to the wikia the random assassination encounters have only two requisites: You're moving and you're "on the road". According to the wiki "The person behind the assassination isn't mentioned (because there's no in-game motive for it)". Both of these imply that it's just a roll of the dice in the game whether or not a random encounter is going to be an assassin or something else (like a Stormcloak patrol, Maiq the Liar, or any of about a hundred possible random encounters that are coded into the game). @ VileTouch: Animals won't snitch on you for killing wildlife. There's nothing illegal about killing wildlife and doing so isn't a crime. I think the old Oblivion problem of your own horse ratting you out to the city guards and Imperial Legion has been fixed in Skyrim, but was replaced with other animals reporting crimes. This has less to do with any intent on the part of the developers, but, rather on the way that factions operate in Skyrim. The whole faction issue is broken in a number of ways, including creating the "illusion" that a chicken has a hot-line directly to the office of the Captain of the Guard of the hold in which the chicken lives. I could be wrong about this, but it's my best guess. After the flack that Bethesda took from players regarding horses reporting crimes in Oblivion, I can't imagine that they'd build that into Skyrim as well. Well, maybe I can imagine it. Bethesda developers have a penchant for sheer meanness.

OK, I read this thread for the first time and I think it's time to put a few things in order. First of all "Asta" is not the hag who lives near Riverwood. She the woman in Eldergleam Sanctuary. The woman with the hut is named "Anise". Her "sister" isn't going to take out a contract on you if you steal anything from the hut, either. Anise doesn't have a sister (at least there's nothing listed in "relationships" in the CK for her). The problem is that the ownership of items in Anise's hut is set to the Hagraven faction (Anise is a member of that faction). The person who takes out the contract on you is "Moira", who is an actual Hagraven who lives (when she lives at all) in a shack in the hot springs district -- half the country away from Riverwood. The problem is that Moira doesn't even exist in the game until you start the Daedric quest "A Night to Remember", but this doesn't stop Bethesda from having her hire thugs to get even with you for stealing something from someone she probably doesn't even know. This all amounts up to one of my main pet peeves with the game, and I set out to fix the problem. I'm currently running a privately-created mod that, at present, changes all ownership in Anise's cabin (including the cellar) to "none", so that taking anything won't be classified as stealing. I've also removed the dripping water, puddles, and fog from the cellar and added an additional alchemy satchel (for preferred ingredients) and a strong box (for soul gems) near the alchemy and enchanting stations. This is still a WIP, but when I've got a little more work done on the place I'll be releasing the mod to the public. No more hired thugs from Moire! Oh, and you can kill Anise without incurring a bounty. Some people might not know that. You don't have to make her go aggro on you. Just a nice, simple, one-shot sneak attack usually does the trick. Now, for people complaining about assassins with notes from Astrid, but no indication of who took out the DB contract on you, these are random events spawned by the gamesystem and have nothing at all to do with what you have or have not done in the game. Blame Bethesda for this. I'm sure they thought they were being clever in having you hunted down by everyone in the country, but it's not clever. At least not in my opinion. It's just random BS that they put into the game, probably to make it "interesting". To a lot of us it breaks immersion because we're left wondering what in the blazes we did to deserve it, or how in all the Planes of Oblivion did anyone find out? Thugs are a different matter. As far as I've been able to determine, you actually have to do something bad to someone in order to have a gang of thugs attack you. That makes sense. What doesn't make sense is that it can happen even if there are no witnesses to the crime -- yet another instance of Bethesda not being clear about the whole concept of cause and effect. @ Daytona675r: You were a bad boy in Eldergleam Sanctuary, weren't you? If you took anything that belonged to Asta she's going to hire thugs. All that stuff in and near the napsack belongs to her. It doesn't even matter if the spriggans kill her. I guess her ghost hires the thugs. Blame it on poor game design. I understand she might hire thugs if you opt to get the sap, rather than let the monk convince the tree to give you a sapling, instead. I can't really verify this from personal experience in the game, though. The "Free, again" is one of things that thralls will say when they are killed by the PC. I'm not sure what could have enthralled her, though. Spriggans, to my knowledge, are not able to enthrall humans -- just animals. I think you've experienced a glitch of some sort. Sometimes a character that is in dialog with you will travel with you through a transition (either a door or via. fast travel). And, sometimes the game gets confused about such things. My guess is that the game thought Asta was speaking to you, even though she wasn't, and warped her along with you. I've had this happen on a few occasions with other NPCs, including one quest-related NPC who kept following me all over Skyrim. She wasn't essential and she would set out walking back to her home every time I fast traveled. I knew she wouldn't make it back, alive. I was finally forced to travel back to where I knew she belonged and use "moveto player" in the console to get her back "home" and then reset her AI, so the game wouldn't get glitched. Skyrim is full of little quirks like this. At least PC users can fix a lot of them. I feel sorry for console users who have no choice but to sometimes revert to saves much earlier in the game before the bugs occur.

Actually, you don't have to wrong a single person in the game to get a DB contract out on you. On one playthrough I kept my nose completely clean. Yes, I picked some locks here and there, but not in any "owned" area. I, miraculously, didn't even have an assault to my name by the time I reached level 20 or thereabouts -- I was that anal about not hurting anyone who might be "innocent". I still got DB contracts. The "person" who takes these out on you is the game-system. Blame Bethesda for stupidity -- it runs rampant in this game, with lots of little things like this that make no sense at all by any stretch of the imagination. It's basically one of those random things that the developers put into the game, ostensibly for the purpose of making your trips between cities "interesting". I just find them annoying enough to get an early vendetta against the DB going.