For making money I do a little bit of everything in order to keep from getting bored. One thing that has come in particularly handy for making some extra cash is a Transmute spell I found in some random cave (sorry, but I don’t remember where) that will turn iron ore into silver ore and silver ore into gold ore. So I just buy/mine/steal all of the iron and silver ore that I can get my hands on and then cast that into ingots and smith everything into gold necklaces to enchant and sell, occasionally with some gem bling if I happen to be carrying any that I don’t have other plans for.
If you’re on PC they can. See here. I married Lisette, the bard from Solitude.
I don’t think you’ll be able to marry the Thieves Guild gal though, if there’s too many quest related scripts around an NPC it cocks up the marriage, since they were never supposed to be married.
Well, if you consider Jordis the Sword-Maiden a concubine, it does!
I have this house, and it’s pretty nice digs. Alchemy lab, Enchanting lab, a couple mannequins, and a nice patio to have a drink on. A little less than convenient to get to, but not horrible. Someday I’m going to have a nice cocktail party there, I’ll make sure to invite you all.
I erally dislike the Dark Brotherhood story. In every other questline, you can play the hero. In the DB, you basically play a murderous jerk who takes orders from a other murderous jerks. The other DB characters are hilarious-slash-awesome, and the quests are pretty cool. Unfortunately, I think they mess up turning you into a mad dog. It’s the same critique I had of the DB in Oblivion. They force you to kill good, decent people and thus, it’s hard to reconcile with anything else in the game. Even the Thieves are at heart a decent enough sort. It’s as bad as Oblivion’s DB, though.
I know there are some who just want to play the bad guy. I instead think you should be playing different kinds of hero - or all of them, if that’s your thing.
Yeah, I opted to kill Astrid in the cabin after she abducted me as I wasn’t really interested in doing the DB quests. I knew I was wiping out an entire questline but oh well… At least if you do that you can get a minor quest to wipe out the DB, but it just consisted of traveling to their lair and killing them all. Tough fight but kind of hollow as an ending. The Thieves Guild is handled much better.
Astrid: Someone isn’t leaving this cabin alive…
Dragonborn: (Hefting her dwarven warhammer) Your terms are acceptable…
If you haven’t done any of the Daedra quests wait till you stumble on some of those. Those can get really twisted. I just finished one in Markarth that has you…
aiding a cult of cannibals and delivering a priest of Arkay into their hands. (And he came to you for help!) It’s possible to kill the cultists outright, but it marks the quest as failed, there’s no reward as far as I can tell, and you have to do it at the right time or you end up losing several merchants in the city.
It’s a small thing, but I wish there had been a ‘good’ scripted option to ending some of these quests.
I agree Jihi. Some of the quests begged for an alternative reward, because doing the “right” thing often means blocking off a major game reward. Likewise, I didn’t know you could do that to Astrid, and even so, I dislike blocking off major questlines.
For example, The Morag Tong were cool. They weren’t mad-dog killers. They acted under specific, honorable terms and only against specific targets who can reasonably defend themselves. Additionally, their work helps keep the political warfare down to a reasonable level. I think you could easily have done the same with the DB.
I dunno, Jihi. I did the quest you mention and
the whole thing is just so disturbing and sick that I found killing all those NPCs to be more than enough reward. Did you talk to each of them before killing them? They all deserve to die!
And there is sort of a good-guy reward:
The priest gave me 1000 gold for saving his life.
Ah, okay, I didn’t even think about that…
I completed the quest fully once just to see what would happen and then reloaded a previous save. The second time I killed Eola after clearing out the dungeon and never bothered bringing the priest there at all.
Yeesh, this game is awesome- it just unlocked last night for those of us in Japan, and I’ve been glued to the screen ever since I got home from work.
I do have a quick question for you folks, and I hope I’m not missing something obvious here, but I’m having some trouble with hotkeys: I’ve hotkeyed the weapons and spells I frequently switch between from my Favorites list, but I dual wield two longswords, and whenever I use my hotkey to activate a spell (to wit, healing) the spell will automatically equip to my left hand, yet both hotkeyed weapons will equip on my right hand.
So is there any way to designate which hand a hotkeyed item will equip in, so I don’t have to keep going into the inventory to re-equip my secondary weapon?
With a gamepad you can use the Right/Left trigger buttons to choose hand in the Favorites menu, so try the attack keys.
I all depends on which mouse button or controller button you use to activate it. Just as Telperion says, but it works that way for both PC and console.
Interesting detail for anyone considering playing a vampire; Dark Elves who become vampires keep their fire resistance, at least according to the Active Powers tab. Since vampires are weak to fire that’s useful.
I’m sure this is old hat to you guys, but I think I found an exploit, I guess, in the game last night. I’ve been trying to do the Transcribe the Lexicon quest in this huge Dwarvin ruin. Without getting into spoilers the place is freaking huge. And I wasn’t able to find or do whatever it was I’m supposed too (there are actually two quest tags down there). Eventually I found and elevator that takes you back to the surface, so I did that (this was a week or so ago) and decided to try again later.
Last night I had cleared most of the main quests so I figured I’d go back. Instead of jumping to the bottom, I thought I’d start from the top and work my way down (I assumed there won’t be anything in there, since I had pretty much cleared the place out of everything good) and see if I could figure out how to complete the quest. To my surprise, all the mobs AND all of the loot had re-popped. All the chests were back to full of loot (and locks reset). Dead bodies also had their loot on them…even quest books were still on them (I now have two of several of them). In a lot of the locked chests I’m actually getting better loot this time (I’m several levels higher, so I assume that the loot is somewhat random but based on your level).
I still haven’t figured out how to complete the quest (as of midnight last night I had slogged through about 2/3rd of the massive dungeon but still hadn’t found whatever I’m supposed to find…I suspect that it’s in the massive basement zone, some building or something that I missed down there).
-XT
That is a SLOG of a quest. At least, it was for me. And your goal is down in Blackreach, the massive basement zone full of Falmer and Dwarven dudes. When I did it, I didn’t find any elevators till the very end, by which time I just wanted to be DONE with the quest. I wish I’d found them, so I could have come up for air before finishing it! I need to go back to thoroughly explore Blackreach - I was so done by the time I got there that I just wanted to finish the quest and get out.
I also learned the hard way that even areas marked “cleared” on your map will re-spawn with whoever was originally there, after about 3 days. So “cleared” will still mean that you’ve gone through there and gotten whatever unique loot there is, but you can’t count on it to mean that there won’t be any baddies in there.
I didn’t know that…I never go back to the cleared zones. Well, I know how to get all the daedric hearts I want now! I’ll have to try and remember what other goodies I have gotten and maybe go revisit some of the earlier dungeons.
One thing…when I tried to do this quest the first time my guy was able to do it (well, not complete it, but get through the zones anyway), but it was still a bit of a challenge in some of the fights. Now though my guy is just so bad that nothing can even get close. An epic daedric bow with 20 fire damage on it (I have a second one for stealing souls) and elven arrows is doing over 190 damage (if I use ebony, glass or daedric then it’s even nastier…hell, it’s bad if I just use ancient nordic arrows)…the only problem is that it throws the mobs so far back when I hit them from stealth that I lose the bodies off cliffs and such. 
-XT
Great point: Enchanting has a perk which auto-recharges weapons when you hit with them. It’s not much, but IIRC as long as you have more than 20 uses on your attack effect it will never run out. And if you want a stronger attack you should still recharge enough juice to activate every second swing or so.
Another cool moment: I was playing my alt who is still low level. He was facinga bandit chief on a bridge and I was thinking that it was going to be a tough fight. I opened with the dragon shout that blows the opponent backwards and it knocked him off the bridge into the water and then the river carried him over the waterfall and I went on my merry way.
My favorite dragon shout moment was when I was trying to figure out how to get into a house in Riften as part of a quest and I couldn’t figure out how to get in. I could SEE how to get in, but couldn’t figure out how to open it. I got frustrated and just did a dragon shout at it, and suddenly the way was open.
-XT
Follow-up : when I tried to keep on playing, I discovered that my saved games were nowhere to be found on Steam 
. I’m assuming that’s because I downloaded the English version instead of the French one 
Does anybody knows?
So I had to start again, playing the exact same character, even though not exactly the same quests. I’m roughly back to where I left, level 30 or so. By the way, English bards do sing significantly better (it’s merely very bad instead of unsuferrable), and even though the sentence is the same, a different tone (quite respecteful) makes the French “sworn to share your burdens” much more pleasant to hear. In fact, I noticed the same in a couple other instances. A mere tone difference between the two versions can make a character more or less likeable. For instance, one of those BattleBorn just had to die due to the way he was adressing me in French (and also because he supports the Empire, of course).
More seriously : since I began to play the English version, I get crashes to desktop on a regular basis. Also, it takes maybe one hour of playing before I get graphism issues (NPC skin turns black, then various items and trees become sky blue, then faces begin to appear yellow). Maybe it’s my new laptop, or maybe the fact that I run the game at a higher setting, but I can’t help but suspect that the issue might be the patch. I think the French version isn’t patched if only because in it, the bookshelves didn’t break.
So, are those problems common or is it my computer?
I am not seeing these problems on my (North American) version. Check your drivers.