BrettM

Skyrim is a console game ported to the PC. Even without a Microsoft deal, why wouldn't we expect that they'd finish the console version of any DLC first and then do the PC port? If they finish the console first, why would they sit on it, getting no income from it, while doing the port? Just to make us PC players feel better? Heck, I don't mind coming in second, since the console users will uncover a bunch of bugs that can be corrected in the port so we'll never see them on the PC.

My first character through I actually tried communicating with the Afflicted, but they always attacked me regardless of my being on a mission from Peryite himself and feeling sorry for them, so I ended up killing them. I also tried talking to Orchendor, figuring he might give me a reason to refuse to obey Peryite's demand and say "screw you" to another Daedric Prince. Perhaps he was trying to keep all the Afflicted quarantined so as to contain the plague, which would make him a pretty good guy. But he also attacked me on sight. Next character just slaughtered everything. After all, all of them seemed to be working on various vats of goop and stuff that they planned to use to spread plague across Tamriel. Not nice! Third character snuck past everything except the dwarven bots, but did have to kill Orchendor to get the key to exit the place. So I still couldn't say "screw you" to Peryite. No approach to this quest made the least bit of difference to Peryite or to the Afflicted. All characters who did the quest were still subject to random attacks by Afflicted later on. So do it whichever way you like. You aren't supposed to do anything but kill Orchendor, and nobody cares what you do on the way to find him.

Never having seen any Morrowind myself, I will be quite happy just to get more Nordish lore and story. The bad title hardly matters, since the game doesn't throw it in your face once you've bought and installed the DLC. Edit: I do wish they'd find some way to get at least a few of the characters from the base game involved with the DLC, but I imagine it will be like Dawnguard and all of them will be oblivious to the new content. Vampires attacking towns everywhere but even the jarls don't have a word to say about the crisis.

However a true pacifist doesn't just forswear killing, but violence in all forms. Knocking someone out is still something a pacifist wouldn't do, along with barroom brawls and the like.

These people are bandits, evil mages, vampires, etc. They have adopted a way of life in which they rob, steal, kill, kidnap, enthrall, and perform unholy rituals using unwilling victims. Yet you expect them never to tell a lie about yielding because that is just wrong? :D Anyway, one can play a game free of murder but not one free of killing. The two are not the same. A true pacifist may not do either, but that doesn't mean the terms are synonymous. Killing a person in self defense is not murder even if a pacifist still refuses to kill for that reason.

Forgotten Vale, on the big frozen lake where the word wall for Drain Vitality is found. The Inner Sanctum Balcony is directly above the southwest corner of the lake and the Wayshrine of Resolution is directly north of it. It sounds like you must have somehow avoided crossing the ice while going after Auriel's Bow. Even skirting the edges in the vicinity of the word wall seems to be enough to trigger those dragons. If not, then just go wander around the lake for a bit. I'm sure they'll show up.

Relax. You can't mess up your game no matter what decisions you make. There are several possible outcomes to the conference, but all of them are just a matter of which side controls what holds afterwards. The only difference that makes is what quests will have to be done to win the civil war for your side, if you decide to resume the war after finishing the main story line.

Keep it going! I'm enjoying this greatly. A sterling example of how to construct back story.

And yet ... many fortresses and towers have these small rooms containing nothing but a tall stool, a bucket, and a book sitting on a handy ledge. Hmmmm. (I rofled the first time I noticed one of those little rooms. :))

Except that committing that murder is also your only path to destroying the Dark Brotherhood. It doesn't make much real sense, but, there it is. So, will you sacrifice one abusive hag to destroy a whole nest of assassins? Except that's an unfair way to put it for RP purposes, because your character has no way of knowing the long-term consequences of killing or not killing Grelod. That decision must be made on its own merits. If a character is willing to murder Grelod for a reason, it doesn't mean that he must be of a moral inclination to join the DB and murder for hire. Willingness to murder for some reasons =/= willingness to murder for ANY reason. It's really a tangled mess. To me, it would have made more story sense to use Aventius to introduce you to the idea of the Dark Brotherhood, do something non-lethal about Grelod if possible, and then get directed to the Penitus outpost for more information. The commander there could still give your hero the assignment to wipe them out. For less-good characters, the option to simply kill Grelod would still be there, with the same paths to follow that exist now. This structure would give you four options: do nothing, do only good, be morally flexible, or embrace evil all the way.

As I recall, the abuse wasn't just verbal. Grelod was physically abusive as well. In addition, she was deliberately preventing the adoption of any of her charges and then throwing them out on the street -- uneducated and with no resources -- on the day of their majority. Talk to Balimund's apprentice, who is a product of Honor Hall. He got lucky in that Balimund was willing to take him on, but he's still a pretty sad excuse for a human being. In a Skyrim hold, there are no regular courts, licensing laws, child-welfare agencies etc. that you can call down on the head of someone like Grelod to get her shut down. You can't report her to the guards and get her thrown in jail, since there are no laws against what she's doing. Your options are limited. Unfortunately, the game limits the options even further. Administer street justice or leave the kids with no justice at all. I would have more respect for the devs if you could at least intimidate Grelod into leaving town, administering a few bruises if necessary. The sensible option, though -- especially if you're a thane -- would be to petition the jarl as an advocate for the children. After all, it is her job to hear petitions from her subjects and provide what passes for justice in their society. How hard would it be to convince the jarl that Grelod is doing great harm by releasing uneducated, abused street rats into the hold, leaving most of them with little choice but to make their way down to the ratway and take up a life of crime? If nothing else, the jarl certainly has the power to banish Grelod, or at least forbid her from operating an orphanage.

The rebellion against the dragon priests clearly had two phases -- before and after Paarthurnax's conversion to the side of humanity -- with an unknown amount of time between them. However, that time must have amounted to years because it would have taken that long for Paarth to train non-dragonborn humans into effective Tongues. Ten or twenty years at the inside, I would think. Would the other humans have just offered themselves up for slaughter during these years by keeping up the fight? I doubt it. So I think there is some justification for considering each phase a separate rebellion, separated by years of peace. Either way, Lachdonin came up with a good explanation of the situation. It's just quibbling to debate whether the rebellion should be considered one or two, because the end result is the same no matter what label you apply to it. Nice job, Lachdonin!

Dragons killed by ordinary means can be resurrected by Alduin. However, if a dragon's soul has been absorbed by a dragonborn, I don't think even Alduin can resurrect it. That's why Delphine tells you that a dragonborn is the ultimate dragon slayer. Even if you could learn Alduin's resurrection shout, if you got close enough to the corpse to use it, you'd absorb the soul and prevent resurrection.

It isn't a random encounter. There are five giants in total and they're always in the same locations. One of them is directly across the river from the platform where you use the gems. The other locations are a bit out of the way, so you'll have to search around the vale until you learn where they hang out.

So the existence of anything is merely a thought in the dream of a god? Bingo! God thinks, therefore I am. CHIM courtesy of Descarte. :)

It would certainly help keep a lot of citizens alive if the game took the time of day into account when spawning NPCs as you enter a city. It doesn't make sense to me that you can enter a city at, say, 3:00 am and find all of the usual NPCs wandering around, including children. If you were to enter the city during the day and just wait until 3:00 am, they'd all be safely indoors except for guards and drunks.

You know how thralls will sometimes say "thank you" when you kill them, releasing them from their thralldom? Apparently some are grateful in more tangible ways. After rescuing the Moth Priest, I returned to White Run and met a courier with a letter from Jarl Elisif informing me that I had a 300g bequest from Vampire Thrall. The two in that cave were the only ones I had yet killed in Elisif's hold, so I presume that one of them somehow managed to make out a will. Maybe I just mortally wounded him, so he had time to write it before he bled to death. :)

I think you're misinterpreting the point of collecting all the blood. The Aldmer are the common ancestor of all the mer races, including the Dwemer. Each race has a certain subset of genes from that common source, and those subsets have a certain amount of overlap between different races. By combining the blood of the other races, you get a mix that allows Septimus to select a subset that matches the Dwemer subset closely enough to open the box. The other races are "brothers" to the Dwemer, not descendants of them. For example, say Dwemer and Bosmer share gene A because both races received it from the Aldmer. Then suppose that Dwemer and Falmer share gene B but not gene A, and Dwemer and Dunmer share gene C but not A or B. By mixing the blood, you get a full set of A, B, C that could not be provided otherwise by any single race except the Dwemer.

Serana does refer to "previous owners" of the castle during a conversation about the moon dial in the courtyard. If Harkon didn't build it, who did? Certainly not the Nords, since it doesn't match their architecture from ANY era except for the watchtower out front. Could it have been built by Snow Elves, back during their heyday? We don't have any known examples of original Falmer construction with the exception of the Chantry, though they did build Windhelm as slave labor under the direction of the Nords. However, I wouldn't expect a temple like the Chantry to be totally representative of ordinary construction. Also of note is the similar architecture of the area where Serana was entombed. While it adjoins a typical ancient Nord crypt, it is very different. I see some resemblance to the architecture of the Chantry there, as well as the architecture of Castle Volkihar. On another note, where exactly did Harkon and his family come from originally? He claims to have been a wealthy king before becoming a vampire. The UESP wiki claims they're Nords, but that doesn't make sense to me, especially if they were around in the early First Era and before. I suspect that they're immigrants to Skyrim from elsewhere. High Rock, perhaps?

The evidence is a bit contradictory, but Serana may have been shut up in that monolith for about 4,000 years. 1. When released, Serana expresses amazement at the idea there's an empire in Cyrodiil. Yet, there have been three empires in Cyrodiil, founded by Alessia, Reman, and Tiber Septim. This means that the latest she could have been shut away is the interregnum between the second and third empires, before around 2E 850, for a minimum of around 600 years of imprisonment. This would fit with a later statement about having been shut away for a "few hundred years" when you ask her for ideas about where to find a Moth Priest. However, it doesn't fit with some of the other evidence, nor with the implication that she's amazed that there is any empire, not just amazed that a new empire has arisen. If she is truly unaware of any empire, then she would have to have been shut away before the beginning of the Alessian empire in 1E 243. 2. Serana has heard of the College of Winterhold, founded in the First Era, so she could not have been imprisoned before that founding. I don't know of any source with an exact date for that, but it was certainly well before the death of King Borgas in 1E 369, and probably well before his birth. As one of the "Old Holds" and very near to Saarthal, it would be fair to guess at a founding somewhere between the start of the First Era and the Alessian rebellion in Cyrodiil. This means that the earliest Seran could have been imprisoned was early in the First Era. 3. Durnehviir made a deal with the Ideal Masters to keep Valerica imprisoned in the Soul Cairn until she died in exchange for necromantic powers he could use in territorial battles against other dragons. This means that Valerica was in the Soul Cairn first, by at least a short amount of time, and she didn't go there until she had seen to the safety of Serana and her Elder Scroll. But, when did Durnehviir arrive? By 2E 373, the extermination of the dragons was nearly complete. I doubt that the dov were very concerned about vying with each other for "small slices of territory" during the years of the Akaviri Crusade against them. These dragon territorial conflicts almost certainly took place before the Dragonguard became a threat to their race. Thus, I would expect that Durnehviir entered the Soul Cairn some time between the beginning of the First Era and the arrival of the Dragonguard in 1E 2703. Coupled with Serana's surprise concerning an empire in Cyrodiil, it would have to be either before the founding of the Alessian empire or in the interregnum between the first and second empires. It seems impossible that it could have been during the interregnum between the second and third empires, as only a couple of dragons were known by the public to exist in Tiber Septim's time. 4. The prophecy that started the problem was invented by Arch-Curate Vyrthur after one of his initiates turned him into a vampire. Since there were initiates around, the Chantry of Auriel was not yet wiped out by the Betrayed at the time this happened. The culture of the Snow Elves was not entirely extingished until some time early in the First Era, since King Harald's men were still chasing down remnants of their armies in 1E 140. The creation of the prophecy and the final downfall of the Chantry could have been well before the race was thought to be finally extinct, possibly even in the late Merethic Era, but I doubt it could have been much later. The question then becomes when Harkon learned of this prophecy, but I know of no evidence at all on that point. (On a side note, it is interesting that Knight-Paladin Gelebor appears to be just as long lived as his immortal vampire brother. Do the Snow Elves have longer life spans than the other mer? Gelebor did tell us that it took the Betrayed "generations" to become so completely twisted, which suggests a much shorter life span, at least for those who were enslaved by the Dwemer.) In summary, I can only conclude from the above that Serana was put in her monolith sometime between 1E 0 and 1E 243. I can't see any way to fit the pieces together to support any other conclusion. Can anyone put a different spin on the facts?

When Serana is forced on you, it does help to tell her to "wait here". Even when she won't actually wait, she will agree to hang back and follow you at a distance. This keeps her back far enough to not start chattering or running blindly ahead into trouble. I'm glad I found that out because I was ready to kill her after an endless time in the Volkihar ruins with her saying "We're getting close! I can feel it!" every 5.2 seconds. I have a hard time considering her comments "banter", though. They mostly seem to consist of complaints. If it's sunny, she wants dark. If it's dark and snowy, she says the sun would be better. If you're outdoors, she wants to go in a cave. If you're in a cave, she complains that she's already spent more than her share of time underground. Nag, nag, nag.

How do you know that Paarthurnax can't resurrect other dragons? What proof is there that only Alduin has this power? As for being the only dragon left alive (which is not strictly true), that wasn't always the case. Between the end of the Dragon War and the arrival of the genocidal Akaviri there was a very long period during which there were still plenty of dragons around. Paarthurnax himself tells us so. There doesn't appear to have been any organized conflict between men and dragons during this period, though there were incidents such as Olaf's capture of Numinex. This seems to be confirmed by Durnehviir's story of dragons fighting among each other for small slices of territory, which must have been during this period since it seems unlikely that Alduin would have allowed it while he was in charge and equally unlikely that territorial disputes would have been a priority after the Akaviri became a threat. Paarth had a pretty good window of opportunity there if he really wanted to try to take over the world. But, you may say, Paarth knew it was really wiser to wait, knowing that Alduin would return but would be defeated for good the next time. However, this plan seems pretty risky. After all that waiting, what guarantee would Paarth have that he wouldn't end up with Alduin's teeth in his neck before it was all over? What guarantee would Paarth have that the dragonborn who defeated Alduin wouldn't set out on a new dragon genocide, turning on Paarth and spending the rest of his life putting as many dragons as possible down beyond any possibility of resurrection? Furthermore, even if the dragonborn was deceived into considering Paarth "safe" and died never knowing he'd been duped, why would the other dragons even consider following one who had already betrayed them once? Would YOU follow someone who'd already gotten you killed once by taking the other side in a war and teaching your enemy how to use your weapons? And, if they did follow him, what guarantee would Paarth have that Akatosh wouldn't simply send a new dragonborn to stop the new dragon tyranny? Immortal or not, Paarth would have to be pretty stupid to put 4,000 years into a plan with so many things going against it.

From the Dawnguard side I haven't had any problem getting Valerica back. You will find her at the alchemy bench where you first saw her during your first trip. Tell her that Harkon is dead and she will tell you that she'll return after she's gathered up her things. When you leave the Soul Cairn, you'll see her ahead of you on the stairs to the portal and then meet her in her laboratory.

The Dawnguard is still growing. You should have noticed a few improvements to the fort and surroundings when you returned after meeting Serana. There will be more changes as you proceed with the quest line, and one early change will give you access to the DG armor.

The first thing he wants you to do in the process of becoming thane is to bring him a bottle of Black-Briar mead, showing that he's decadent enough to care only about his own amusements rather than the welfare of his people. (In fact, I believe he tells you at one point that his interest in being jarl is access to perks like fine clothes.) The second thing he wants you to do is kill some bandits ... because they've reneged on their arrangement with him and are no longer giving him a proper share of their take. I would call that pretty corrupt, though it's petty corruption compared to Maven Black Briar. I would say Vignar is as good a jarl as Balgruuf, with the same concerns for the welfare of the people of Whiterun and definite plans for seeing to that welfare. Dengeir is certainly a better jarl than Siddgeir, and he has a very canny political sense and no great trust of Ulfric, though he supports the rebellion. Yes, I like Idgrod despite her not having the trust of her people, but Sorli is not a bad replacement and a ruler that does have the confidence of her subjects is probably going to be able to accomplish more.