Something I just picked up after 89 hours of play: If you ask one of the elders (the one who can talk to you) at High Hrothgar, he’ll tell you where the words of power so you can go straight to them. He’s told me about half a dozen so far.
Is that a named horse? :eek: I haven’t seen anything like that.
As for my NPC, I have her in heavy plate but as I can’t enchant or make armor it’s all found stuff. She has the named shield from the werewolf quest and an enchanted (found) glass sword…best sword I’ve found so far. She seems to prefer two handed weapons, but she seems to survive longer with sword and board.
-XT
Which elder? :smack:
-XT
Coolest horse by far is:
Shadowmere, obtained through the Dark Brotherhood quest line. Here’s a screenshot of my character riding him.
Forget the horse, that armor is bad ass! Makes my guy look like a piker. 
(the horse is seriously cool too though)
-XT
Yeah, it’s daedric. 
I had so much extra cash on hand that I outfitted my companion in it as well (though he’s covered up in that shot).
Arngeir. Yes, I did have to look that up.
You can ask him after giving him the Horn. After he’s told you, your map will be updated and the mission will be in the misc section.
You can use the force push shout in towns too and if someone sees you a courier will appear with a letter telling you the locations of a dragon roost.
I don’t even have an option to buy that stuff…none of the vendors I know sells it. I assume it’s heavy plate so wouldn’t be for me, but I could outfit the pack mule with it.
-XT
Definitely have to go back and talk to him. I’ve just been finding them randomly when I explore or sometimes as parts of unrelated quests I’ll stumble on one. I’d like to double up some of the words I know though.
-XT
Whirlwind Sprint works too; I suspect it’s just using a Shout in town that does it.
Misc quest in Riften. There’s several ways to play it out in the end. Talk to Louis in the bar to start it.
…
Thus far, I admit I’m leaning towards the Empire. After taking a look around, I decided several things.
Zeroeth, while Ulfric has a point, he’s an absolute bastard. Frankly, having good intentions, or even having a legitmate greivance, is not really enough.
First, the man was the friend of the High King, and by all accounts the High King admired his friend. He murders his friend. Yes, I acknowledge it might technically have been a legitimate fight, though I have some serious doubts. But using the Voice against the High King was a douchebag move of a coward. This was an honor duel of Nord blade against Nord blade. Ulfric did the equivalent of whipping out a concealed gun.
Second, Ulfric goes on a mad rampage against the Forsworn. I have no love for them, but they were doing exactly what Ulfric wants to do: have their own kingdom for their own religion. A nasty religion, and I’m glad they lost, but nonetheless.
Third, it’s Ulfric’s fault that the Nords and the Imperials now must suffer the Thalmor. His mad rashness gave the Thalmor powerful leverage, whereas before everyone was able to worship Talos quietly.
Fourth, the man has no strategic conception. If he did, he’d have understood that he was going to launch a bloody war. Instead, he gives me an impression of some damn fool full of himself and drunk on sagas. People with responsibilities can’t afford that. for a man who wants to imitate Talos, he forgot that Talos was a cunning politician who wasn’t hampered by losing his might.
In short, he tore Skyrim a gaping wound because of his ego. You can just hear the murderous ambition listening to him in his own hall. He openly talks about how he’s planning to butcher every Jarl who doesn’t support him, while of course many of them simply cannot do so whether they would or not. This man is a flat-out villain.
Now, I will return the favor by saying the Imperials are in a tight spot, arrogant, often blind to the obvious, unnecessarily harsh, and doing themselves no credit by working with the Thalmor. But their actions are a reaction to a desperate situation. And I would probably go so far as to say that the Stormcloak soldiers are no less brave, idealistic, and honorable than anyone in Skyrim. But the war isn’t about them or the Empire. It’s all about Ulfric.
I was leaning to the Empire already. Then I went to Windhelm, and found not a damn thing there to change my mind. By constrast, in Solitude they seemed more sad than anything else at what occured. They didn’t hate Ulfric, by rather were shocked at what he’d done. And Elisif may be inexperienced, but she’s clearly got good advisors and has a strong heart. She hears petitions from ordinary people, actually listens to what they say, and takes steps eccordingly. She can learn to be a more effective ruler. I don’t think Ulfric is going to learn not to be a douche.
All hail Elisif, High Queen of Skyrim!
Oh no, I didn’t buy it, I smithed it. You need 90 smithing skill in order to craft it (and yes it’s heavy plate). The money I referred to was what I used to level my smithing skill and buy components (ebony ingots and Daedra hearts) where I couldn’t find them or didn’t have the patience to. I mostly leveled smithing by buying up lots of ingots and making shit I didn’t need, then enchanting it and selling it off for a profit. Win/win, and it’s so easy you can pretty much raise smithing to 100 in an afternoon.
It’s cool, but the fact that it’s so easy to get it makes it feel like less of an accomplishment to me. Way back in the Daggerfall days, Daedric was super-rare and I remember that it took me months to get a full suit of the stuff. I feel the same way about quests within the various guilds. In Daggerfall, every guild had (I think) 9 ranks, and in order to advance in rank you needed to do a lot of quests for the guild. Each new rank unlocked certain spiffy services and abilities - like the alchemy lab would be unlocked through the Mage’s Guild, and at a certain (high) rank you got the ability to instantly teleport anywhere in the world (without advancing game time, which mattered for some quests). Yeah it could get repetitive, but by the time you got to the rank of Archmage, you earned that shit. In Skyrim you do three or four quests and boom - you’re now the guild leader. What ever happened to dedication?
Ah well, like someone else said I’m enjoying it for what it is rather than what it’s not. But I still think, for all its bugs and repetitiveness, that Daggerfall was the best TES game ever. Plus it had naked ladies as part of the core game without the need for a mod. Beat that!
Smithing is something I haven’t done at all. My points have all gone into basically combat skills. The only non-combat perks I’ve gotten are in lock picking and a few points I started putting into enchanting. That said, I’ve bought my way to, I think, around 45 smithing by just having npcs train me. I’ve been saving ingots and such as well, plus all the dragon bones. I figured that now that I have all the combat skills I wanted I can start putting points into something else.
-XT
The only one who’s not taking a vow of silence. 
Any shout, but I just use Whirlwind Sprint because a) it’s harmless and b) freaking awesome.
smiling bandit: I agree with the reasons you mention and have not picked sides. However, I almost want to join the Stormcloaks instead just to see what happens, and I feel they will offer more surprises than status quo Empire. And then I want to coup that bastard Ulfric.
[QUOTE=smiling bandit]
Misc quest in Riften. There’s several ways to play it out in the end. Talk to Louis in the bar to start it.
[/QUOTE]
I have a ton of thieves guild quests in that town that I haven’t done yet, plus there is a main line quest with the dragon lady there (I’m supposed to find someone in the sewers or some such).
Is there a reason I have to choose? Basically I’m still neutral…I don’t like either party and don’t really want to join either cause unless I have too. I’m the head of the Companions and Archmage of the guild so far (both of which were ridiculously easy to do and sort of a let down, along the lines of what Rigamarole was saying about the armor).
But you bring up something that I had a question about.
[spoiler]I was in a large mining city…don’t recall the name atm…and was doing a bunch of quests in there. Basically, the guy I was doing quests for wanted me to investigate a rash of killings by the Foresworn and their nominal king. I did this and eventually the guy I was doing quests for was killed by turn cloak city guards. They ambushed me and I killed them, but then some other city guards cornered me and said I either had to go to prison or kill them. I actually had saved so I started off by just killing them, but I ended up having to kill every guard in town. I could do that, but it seemed a bit, um, rash, so I allowed myself to be taken prisoner. Anyway, long story short, I met the Foresworn king, gained his trust and eventually he took me for a follower and helped me, himself and a bunch of his followers escape through some dwarf underground ruins. When we got out of the tunnels the Foresworn were confronted by the real city guards. They fought and I guess none of them considered me a foe so they just killed each other. I had no idea what to do, but the Foresworn had been a pain in my ass and the king was a dick, so I went into stealth and killed all the Foresworn (who were kicking the asses of the city guard btw) and the king. The question is, should I have done this, or let the guy go?
Also, along the line of the daedric, I did a small side quest that had me follow a witch hunter into a haunted house. There was a daedric in there, and he seems to have driven the priest mad…he tried to kill me. I killed him and the daedric then gave me a quest to bring some other guy back to his shrine so the daedric could kill him. It seems very, um, ambiguous, since just what I can see the daedric are, well, a bit evil. And not the evil light type but full on evil. There seems to be a LOT of ambiguous quests in this city…I have another to help some corpse eating stealthy woman clear out a choice feeding spot somewhere else and leave the city crypts in peace.[/spoiler]
At any rate, do you have to pick a side in this thing? Is there any advantage of going empire or Storm Cloak? They both seem fairly fucked up, and ISTM that the main goal should be taking care of the dragon problem…and getting some decent loot in the bargain. Perhaps a nice summer home and some half naked slave girls to peel me grapes as well. THOSE seem worthy goals, while the civil war seems, well, a bit prosaic to me…and hardly worth my time.
-XT
Smithing might be the second easiest skill in the entire game to level up. (Alchemy is probably the first). Assuming you already have leather strips, just buy a bunch of iron ingots from any blacksmith anywhere and smith the hell out of iron daggers. Your smithing goes up exactly the same regardless of what you actually craft. I do this once every three or four levels and my smithing is far outstripping any other skill I have right now. My smithing is in the high 70’s, my next highest skill is archery which is in the low 50’s. (And that’s through legitimate combat, I’m not grinding at all.)
After you get the daggers I’d recommend buying some petty soul gems from a court wizard and enchanting them before selling them back. You can actually make a profit this way.
The Daedra delight in using people as their minions. They’re usually not really concerned too much with good or evil, but they love watching people squirm. Most Daedric quests involve doing really fucked up stuff, because twisting people in knots is great Daedric entertainment. For example, getting people to commit cannibalism for them is like us teaching a cat to use the toilet instead of the litterbox. We’re basically doing tricks for them.
You don’t have to choose a side. I did, picked the Empire since although they were about to lop my head off at the beginning of the game they didn’t get all snooty with me about why would a Breton want to join them. Ulfric, dude, you were there, saw me being led to the block, and you ask me that? I shoulda killed you with the Voice instead of a blade just for poetic justice.
Anyways, yeah, there’s plenty of ambiguous quests, and the daedra are…well, I don’t think so much evil as completely don’t give a shit about morality. 'Cept Azura, usually.
I admit that I see legitimate arguments for both sides. Everyone agrees that the Thalmore are bastards, but the difference is that the Empire has given up trying to fight them, while the Stormcloaks haven’t. That makes the Empire a bunch of giant pussies. I wouldn’t be surprised if future Elder Scrolls games reveal that the Stormcloaks gave the Thalmore a severe asswhoopin’ after kicking out the Empire.