Just discovered the shrine of Julianos that's north of Shearpoint and west of Irkngthand. It's on an almost-inaccessible ledge and is just the shrine object lying on the snow with a skeleton next to it. No platforms, pillars, or anything to give you a clue that it's there. I probably couldn't find it again if I tried.

Other than the basements of the Hearthfires homes, is there anything in the game that relates to "all the shrines" they way the Pilgrimage quest did in KotN? The shrine collections in Hearthfires are more about collecting the amulets, rather than shrine-visiting, anyway. I'd imagine the Dragon Priest mask collection is the nearest equivalent.

I've never found this shrine yet but I like it that there isn't anything special about it, as you say.

Today Lucius talked to Joric, the son of Jarl Idgrod of Morthal, and he said "You're different, aren't you? Not like anyone else. Not in Morthal, or Skyrim". I've never heard this line before and my former characters often talked to him. Maybe it's because Lucius is actually doing the MQ so he's been recognized as Dragonborn.

Another new thing I found is that if you repeatedly talk to some NPCs, they'll actually tell you a lot of little interesting things. For instance, Jonna from Morthal told Lucius that she came to Morthal together with Falion so it looks like they're related. They could be siblings but maybe they're also in a relationship.

Also, Frida from Dawnstar tells about losing her good husband years ago because of frost. I know that it's possible to find out about her dead husband by doing a quest for her but she also mentions it if talked to in the Dawnstar Inn at evening.

I have heard those same dialogues from Joric with non-Dragonborn characters. The last time was with White Persephone, which was rather funny. Really kid, you noticed that the living dead girl with ghost white skin and glowing eyes is not like anyone else?

ghastley, I can’t think of an “all the shrines” thing in Skyrim. There’s an “all the Standing Stones” achievement, but it’s just one of those player things and not part of an individual game.

I have an Imperial bard named Varia who has inexplicably taken a shine to Orgnar. She chats with him a lot when she plays the Sleeping Giant. One of the first things he said to her was a new one for me: “You like skeever liver? No? Tough luck. Food’s hot. Never said it was good.”

I think I've heard that 'You're different...' line from Joric. Buffy talks to Idgrod the Younger quite a bit and I'm pretty sure Joric has told her that line.

That's so funny about the skeever liver! I've never heard that one!

Buffy encountered something new today - remember, she is Dawnguard complete in her game. She was riding south along the road from Winterhold and saw another rider in the distance - at a trot with the haft of a 2H weapon rising above one shoulder of the rider. As the rider drew closer, they showed no sign of hostility. Once abreast, Buffy spoke to the rider - now clearly wearing heavy Dawnguard armor and a full-face helm. She was an NPC Buffy had never encountered before named something like Sariah and said she was sorry she hadn't time to talk, but she was on important business for the Dawnguard. Pretty neat!

I have never heard that Skeever liver remark either, and my older characters spent a lot of time in the Riverwood area.

Persephone has seen those Dawnguard riders as well. They never have anything to say.

As a member of the College of Winterhold, Buffy knows the road leading to Winterhold well. For 500 hours of gameplay, Fort Kastov has been a minor inconvenience along the way with its unavoidable skellies and necrodudes patrolling.

Buffy was surprised and delighted today to see no less than a dozen soldiers (bluecoats) moving in and taking over the place! I guess it has something to do with the civil war, but Buffy has remained fastidiously neutral between the red and bluecoats and remains welcome in both camps. Of course, she's happy to kill Thalmor when she can do so without witnesses/bounty or attracting attention.

Yes, eventually soldiers take over that fort, but they don't do so as promptly as the Imperials who take over the fort near Whiterun. I'm not sure what triggers the Stormies to show up; I've had my folks defeat Kastov many times, but it can take awhile for the bluecoats to show up.

It could be that you are traveling too near the fort, preventing the cell from resetting. Normal cells take 30 days to reset from the last time you were in it. Cells with bosses take 10 days if you get the cleared flag for killing the boss. I think the civil war forts count at the latter, as they have a bandit boss to start with. But those forts are weird, because of all the civil war scripting.

Riding along on the tundra plains near Whiterun at 3:15 in the morning. Beautiful night.

Some 'bird screeching' soft noises ahead that quickly get louder. Buffy and Superian are almost engulfed in a huge flock of passing bats for a couple seconds. Just as quickly, the bats moved on, out of sight. We didn't know what to think. Instinctively, Superian stopped and Buffy unshouldered her bow. She wondered if it was precurser to a vampire attack? Nope, just a big flock of bats probably on a bug hunt.

The other day I discovered a small bandit camp a distance south of Riverwood. If you follow the dirt path and leave Riverwood through the south gates, the path eventually branches. Following the left path you'll arrive to this small camp where two bandits will kindly try to kill you. Following the right path brings you to the main road leading north to Helgen.

Oh yes, that is the one up on the mountain side above Riverwood. They even have a campfire, some sleeping mats, and a skill book (forget which one though). So it is a nice place to camp out, after you throw the dead bandits off the cliff.

It's the Warrior skill book, I remember this because Lucius took it. He's on an unofficial quest to find all four books from Reven, namely Beggar-Thief-Warrior-King. So far he found Thief and Warrior.

The other day, while I was play-testing the Orc Stronghold, my character went down to the river to look for an iron vein. There are a couple near the mudcrabs' island. As she was getting close, a couple of wolves decided to hunt one of the mudcrabs. It backed into the water, where it could fight, but the wolves couldn't.
Result: Mudcrab 2, Wolves 0.

And who said the AI in Skyrim was dumb? Of course, it didn't spare the mudcrab, as I needed the ore it was guarding.

1) During the quest in the main questline, where you have to locate Esbern in Riften, Lucius and Lydia spotted a Khajiit that was following them. Whenever they went, she followed, and when talked to, she said "Pff. Go away, if you know what's good for you." After talked to, she Later it turned out that she was a Thalmor spy and she attacked them when leaving Riften with Esbern.

2) Arcwind Point! Do I have to say anything else? This ruin is stunning, since yesterday it's definitely my favorite ruin in Skyrim although not having any interior areas. It is huge and takes a lot of time to explore fully, when I thought that I've seen it all, I discovered another area. Maybe I haven't even seen it all yet.

Wow, a khajiit spying for Thalmor elves! Never would have guessed this.


Yeah, could be this.


Heh huh I've seen this too! It's so weird because it's hard to tell if those bats are based on something from Dawnguard, or if they are just a very rare random occurance of Skyrim itself.

Someone mentioned finding an overturned cart of books. I had never seen that, but Buffy discovered it (or one of them?) north of Rorikstead in kind of a blind canyon. Neat!

Oh, she just discovered something else she has never found. Some stonehenge-looking stones out on the tundra with three of those Nordic puzzle things that you set to the correct critter. That lets a nearby handle open a grate over a shallow pit with a treasure chest. Nothing fancy, but unmarked on the map and something new for her. Here's the exact location:

That's about the only instance of that kind of puzzle where the solution isn't shown right next to it. I wonder if they put it there for feedback during beta?

It did take her some time and head scratching, but she did find the three clues for setting each of the three figures.

And that reminds me that they did get a bit more subtle with Yngol's Barrow, and Ansilvund, where you have to read and interpret a book for the solution.

Dungeon puzzles for me are normally a big turn off. I simply get frustrated and go to a walk through. Happily, I've found that, between Buffy and I, we can solve the ones in Skyrim all by ourselves. So if that means Skyrim is 'dumbed down', bring it on!

Man, you should see some of the word puzzles in TES 1: Arena then. You literally are not given any sort of 'multiple choice' answer like we get in Skyrim, you have to come up with the answer on your own, then hit 'ENTER' on the keyboard.

Since I did Daggerfall after Oblivion, I was stuck for a long time entering Daggerfall Castle, where you have to answer the challenge of the doorkeeper, by actually typing "yes". It's not exactly a puzzle, but when you're not expecting text entry to be part of the UI...

The most "difficult" riddle for me so far was the one on Solstheim where you have to swing the energy sword in exact directions to open the sealed door. It wouldn't be a problem if I was playing with the crosshair but because I don't, my swings weren't exact enough so when I accidentally swung in the right direction, I didn't even know what did I do. I managed to unseal the door without cheating but when I later read the UESP and found this sentence...

...and center your cross-hairs directly on one of the bright...

...I realized why I had problems.

Another one which gave me some thought, is the one in Volskygge where you have to press animal totems in the correct order. You have some hints in the book but I remember that I had minor troubles figuring out the correct order.

I figured out Volskyyge once on my own. But the last two times I went in there, I couldn't figure it. I went on UESP and cheated, for once.

Yeah, I haven't even started Daggerfall yet. I'm looking forward to more complexity, but it'll be interesting spending sooo much time on things which we normally breeze through in later games.

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I have a New Thing to report. Okay, Claire goes into Bits & Pieces to buy and sell. This is the shop in Solitude. She goes in there, and Sayma is nowhere to be seen. We stand there, my character starts thinking Sayma's been attacked, or something.

But then a boy comes out from one of the back rooms in this shop. He says "You're not supposed to be in here right now.", something like this. He then warned us he was going to call the guards. All of this would have made sense if Claire broke into the place at night, but this happened right around noon.

She probably nipped off to the loo and told her son to tell any customers to leave until she returns. Nothing wrong with that.

I found a fur helmet the other day. For the first time! At first I thought that it's from some mod but then I read that it's a rare piece of armor, found only in a few specific locations.

That is true, you don't see them too often, and you cannot smith them - or any of the Fur armor - in the vanilla game. I recall you can find one fur helmet in the Nordic ruin down near Orphan Rock. With the two small ruins that are connected by a tunnel. Skybound Watch and North Skybound Watch!

Another location is the Dainty Sload - also a source of Scimitars after you eliminated the Alik'r mercenaries, and a mysterious gem, if you're collecting those.

And another location is White River watch, that's where I found it. It's on an end table in the circular room with several bedrolls.

Something that hasn't happened before. My character was doing the Goldenglow quest for the Thieves Guild, and just about to torch the apiaries, when a frost dragon attacked out of nowhere. Good thing it wasn't breathing flames, or the quest might have been a failure!

It did keep the mercenaries out of the way, some permanently.

Ha ha ha neat!

New thing today!

Just noticed something new. The Argonian who runs Bee & Barb always says "If you've got the coin, you're welcome to stay, otherwise hit the road!" She's overly rude, and I've never not heard her say this.

Well today Claire walks in, and she says "If you've got the coin, you've come to the right place, pull up a seat". ... And that's it. Maybe it's because one of the mods I'm using boosts the amount of money it costs to rent a room here (90 gp versus 10), and the Argonian has some sort of hidden disposition factor which gets affected by sales?

In my game she always says "If you've got the coin, you've come to the right place, pull up a seat" when you enter the inn but when you directly talk to her, she says "If you've got the coin, you're welcome to stay, otherwise hit the road!"

Funny, I always get "I can't stand this city. It's impossible to make a decent living here." I'm on the console so maybe that has something to do with it. Her name is Keerava btw.

Destri: Wow. See, I have never heard that one. Maybe it's because you have a beast-folk PC, right? Maybe she says different things to beasts, especially Argonians.

Lopov: you and I have the same mod, that's probably why.

Went into Shalidor's Maze for the first time last night, and realised that it's actually a Labyrinth - i.e. it's unicursal, with no choices of path for the player. You just follow it, and deal with what you encounter.

Labyrinthian dungeon, in contrast, is a maze, because you have a limited ability to choose a dead-end path. Not much of a maze, but then its challenge is a different one.

Athla did Dagon's quest last night, but it turned out differently than other times. My normal choice is to let Silus take the pieces and run, as the Razor just isn't worth killing for. This time, when Mehrunes Dagon told me to kill him, he just attacked without offering the alternative option.

He'll do that if you take too long responding, but in this case he hadn't made his offer at all. Still, we got the gold and ebony and Daedra hearts we wanted, and Silus isn't relevant after that quest anyway.

I have only done the Dagon quest a handful of times, because most of my characters simply don't have a use for a dagger. But most times Silus has ended up attacking my characters. I think it was only with The Morrigan that I attacked him first.

I never do it for the dagger, but the guaranteed Daedra Hearts are the draw. There are a couple of quests that call for one, and the alternative of Vaermina's in Dawnstar isn't always appropriate to the character. This one also provides gold and ebony ingots, which also have their uses. There are a few other sources of Daedra Hearts, but usually you only get one at a time. We're stocking up for making Daedric armour for Mjoll, so multiples at once is beneficial.

That's awesome. Wow there's a time limit to that quest before he attacks?? Interesting.

Couple tiny things I just noticed yesterday in Whiterun -

- Under the bridge right before the door into Dragonsreach I noticed a skeleton floating in the water. I'm not positive if the skellie is placed there in the game or one of those 'fell from the sky' anomalies.

- While up near Dragonsrach, I used tfc-1 to free the camera for a possible screenshot and, as I was panning around, realized that I had never looked carefully at the Skyforge or at it from a distance. I've generally focused on talking to the smith there. Anyway, I just noticed that the backdrop for the forge is a giant bird of prey with its wings spread as if partly wrapping them around the forge. I wouldn't be surprised if everyone but me has noticed this before, but it reminded me of a recent screenshot Lopov shared from Saarthal - as many times as I've gone through that College initial quest, I never looked up to see the 'all those coffins' mentioned by Tolfdir that now make sense.

The skellie has always been there in my games, I'm not sure what it's supposed to represent but we think of it as one of Whiterun's trademark. I would like to see it included it in The Gentleman's Guide to Whiterun.

It also took me some time to spot that bird at Skyforge.

A new thing in my game is that the other day when Aard was walking down the road that passes Mixwater Mill, he heard a voice nearby, saying "Traveler! Over here!", supposedly said by the Vigilant of Stendarr. He approached two Vigilants but they turned out to be vampires. After dealing with them he found bodies of real Vigilants nearby, stripped of their robes.

That skeleton under the bridge has always been there. Probably one of Balgruuf's ex-wives. I think he has seven children from eight different women... I thought they had removed it in the last game patch though.

I think that is an eagle that is carved above the skyforge. The Nords use the eagle a lot in their carvings, or at least the ancient Nords did.

Ah, thanks for the clarification that the skellie is not just my game acting funny. One of Balgruuf's ex-wives. That Jarl does have some screwed up kids though. . . . And I do really like how the ancient Nords used animal totems quite a bit - even for their puzzles and such. Helps to make a wood elf feel more at home in this frozen land.

Neat that Aard encountered the 'Vampires of Stendarr'. I have experienced that encounter only once also. I really like the road encounters.

Seriously though, Balgruuf has the Ebony Blade locked up in his basement, and only he and the court wizard have the key. If you do the Mephala quest, one of his sons says that he does not have the same mother as his siblings. The Ebony Blade becomes more powerful when you betray and murder someone who trusts you. We have never seen any of the mothers of any of Balgruuf's children. So... my completely conjectural conclusion is that Balgruuf murdered them all with the Ebony Blade. He is the Black Widower, he mates and then he kills.

OMG, you had me in hysterics with this! And both times he is sweeping innocently, like "SUUUUUURE you had nothing to do with it!"

Maybe he is sweeping up Anthrax or something, lol.







I was looking for Daedra hearts for the Midden forge, but didn't want to steal from the college and didn't know where else they could be found (at the time I was playing it, haven't played in a long time since then).







That is about as cool as it gets, I have to give Bethesda kudos for that little trick! I think this one is random radiants, because these two vampires caught me the same way, standing by the waters edge wearing robes and signaling me over closer to them. I was hopping from ice float to ice float, and came right over and got attacked, lol. That was Awesome !!! What a great touch to have the player be tricked - that AI is fantastic, I'd love to find it in the scripts!










SPEW !!! You are killing me today, this is the second time I've nearly choked to death on my cola reading something you've written!

OH! That sounds like your story in Oblivion that was written before Skyrim ever came out! Bethesda should pay you royalties if they used it! Seriously though, it does ring familiar to that sword in Castle Bravil that Teresa and Aela heisted!

Buffy quite likes the quaint village of Riverwood and gets on well with everyone there – especially little Dorthe, Frodnar and Stump. She’s talked with them quite a bit about such things as Dorthe’s blacksmithing aspirations and Frodnar’s fascination and creativity with practical jokes. She’s played tag with them and even turned Frodnar invisible briefly so he could ‘prank’ his friends.

Today she heard a new dialogue exchange between Frodnar and Dorthe about disguising Stump as a frostbite spider. Frodnar thought it would be a neat prank and Dorthe quickly pointed out how silly it was – not to mention potentially dangerous to Stump.

Sure enough, a quick check of UESP wiki lays it all out on Frodnar’s page:
Dorthe: "Wait, so... a costume? You're not serious..."
Frodnar: "Sure I am. We get some furs and tree branches, paint them white, and then tie them to Stump. Instant Frostbite Spider!"
Dorthe: "Frodnar... nobody is going to believe that your dog is a... Frostbite Spider. And if they do... they'll kill him. That's not much of a prank."
Frodnar: "Oh yeah, and what would you rather do?"
Dorthe: "How about... we play tag! You're it!"
Frodnar: "Hey, no fair! Get her, Stump!"

Just when you figure you've heard it all. . . .

Don't feel too bad about it, Acadian. Even though reading up on the lore is one of my favorite things to do in the game it has taken me nearly four years to realize that Jorrvaskr was (and is) the ship that Ysgramor and his peeps rode in on!


I actually just got three of them today with my nord, Hrungnir! We were on the road leading from Riverwood to Whiterun. He got really excited because Stendarr and Julianos are the two shrines he's missing in his Lakeview Manor cellar. Unfortunately none of the Vigilants was carrying an amulet… makes me think they either weren't really Vigilants after all, or all the Vigilants have sold off their amulets in an effort to remain incognito in light of the vampire threat (kind of like the Jedi going into hiding every time the Sith decide to flex).


That's awesome! I've heard Frodnar and Dorthe's conversation before, but I don't get the option to play tag with them on the console (though the option is available for Braithe and 'baby Battle-Born' in Whiterun). It would also be really cool to be able to turn one of the kids invisible… do the kids have dialogue options for that?

My new thing is that my Breton mage, Labelle Aurore (kudos to anyone who gets the reference), was wandering around the Hall of Countenance at 3am when she happened by Colette Marence's room to discover that the incredibly paranoid restoration trainer likes to sleep curled up with a troll's skull.

The Elder Scrolls never gets old!