In Which Merawen Explores Yngol’s Barrow and Narzulbur

Another “general adventuring” type session! Details behind the fold.

Highlights

• Session number in this run: 80
• Made some potions at Proudspire
• Went out into the city to look for Irnskar; got him to forgive Octieve’s debt by paying it off for him
• Found Octieve in the Temple of the Divines; he bumped my Two-handed skill for my trouble <3
• Shopped at Angeline’s
• Boinged off to Windstad to do some building and enchanting work
• Unmarked burned down house with a carriage and a corpse by it, not too far from Windstad; wiki says this was apparently a bandit’s house?
• Throughout the session, made assorted sabre cats, bears, and wolves run off by throwing Pacify or Fear spells at them
• Pacify and Fear did not work on frost trolls, so had to fight every one of those I saw
• Heard but did not engage with dragon not far from Mount Anthor, might have been respawned dragon for that lair
• Made it to Winterhold, then went to the college for training (Tolfdir, Faralda, Drevis, Phinis x 2, because I’m maxed on how much training I can get from Colette)
• Proceeded south towards Fort Dawnguard
• Passed two Vigilants of Stendarr, heard one say “The suffering the Daedra caused will not go unpunished!” Which always makes me go “how the hell do you plan to punish the Daedra, exactly?”
• Possible Dawnguard went by me on a horse near Stillborn Cave? looked like Dawnguard heavy armor
• Shot at near Fort Kastav, time to sneak, but had to roll back to a prior save back in the college after getting stuck in a crevice 😛
• Reached Windhelm, Whirlwind-Sprinted across most of the narrow bit of the river
• Found and ran Yngol Barrow, and found cute little glowing blue orbs that followed me around; were possibly the sea-ghosts from the book Yngol and the Sea-Ghosts?
• Oh hey I forgot to spend my perk point when I leveled to 75! Reactivated Ebony Smithing
• Came out near the Wreck of the Winter War; heard somebody yelling “No more, I yield”, but did not see any actual sign of the fight
• Found Traitor’s Post, small bandit lair, meh, not interested
• Found Refugees’ Rest; took out a couple of frost trolls there and cleared the chest
• Summoned Arvak to ride as I was overloaded
• Reached eastern edge of the map! Circled back
• Oh hey there, Khajiit! parked by Brandy-Mug Farm; sold them a lot of my excess stuff and got unburdened
• Another vampire assassin! Conjured Dremora Lord to help me, it fought her summoned skeleton while I took down the vamp with fireballs; her writ was from the patriarch of Mara’s Eye Pond, which I haven’t found yet
• “You feel weaker as the sun rises”–whoops! Time for a Cure Disease potion!
• Found Gloombound Mine after climbing up a mountainside
• Found orc stronghold Narzulbur; bought ingredients and potions from their wise-woman, and some ingots from their smith
• (Ooh wiki says there’s some drama here involving the wise-woman and her sister possibly having killed the chief’s wives but no quest about that so moving on)
• Bonestrewn Crest dragon still flying about, but did not engage
• Engaged assorted additional bears and wolves and a frostbite spider, with another Dremora Lord, a Fear spell, and Flaming Familiar; flaming familiar looked like a wolf!
• Unsaddled but clearly owned horse not far from Dayspring Canyon, showed me ‘Steal’ when i passed it
• Hit eastern edge of the map again; swung back to get to Dayspring Canyon
• Made it into Fort Dawnguard
• Bought a boatload of smithing materials off of Gunmar; smithed a whole bunch of things and got my Smithing back up to 100
• Gave the other two Elder Scrolls to Dexion
• Saved for the night

Commentary

Since this was a “general adventuring” type of session, I had no particular goal in mind other than wandering around and seeing what happened.

It was kind of nice to have a favor quest still to do in Solitude, and also to discover that Octieve is another potential skill trainer! The lesson to be learned from this is, talk to all the NPCs, never know when I’ll be able to get a skill bump.

I wanted also to practice my Illusion magic, which is why I wandered around a lot and threw Pacify and/or Fear spells on any animal that attacked me. It was valuable to learn which animals I could do this with and which ones I couldn’t. So bears, sabre cats, and frostbite spiders, yes. Frost trolls, no!

Yngol’s Barrow was small, with only Yngol’s Shade as an enemy to fight in it. His Helm, the dungeon reward, confers frost resistance–but I’m not hurting for that particular attribute, and the helm doesn’t match up with any of the armor I favor anyway. But I’m still glad I ran the dungeon, just because the odd little blue orbs that chime and follow you around were kind of neat. They all vanished when I picked the Helm of Yngol up, which does make me wonder what they were supposed to represent. The story as told in the in-game book Yngol and the Sea-Ghosts doesn’t really explicitly say, as near as I could tell, or even give a really good hint.

Visiting Narzulbur was interesting, just because of wanting to see what another orc stronghold was like. Particularly one with still-living NPCs! I only discovered via the wiki–because this is apparently not a thing that comes up in quests for this place, per se–that there’s apparently some implication from NPC dialogue here that a couple of the women in the stronghold are murdering any wife the chieftain takes. DO TELL. Little sad that this particular drama isn’t apparently something the player can learn about? Because it’d be nice to have at least one other quest to run in an orc stronghold.

Last thing of note in this session was getting Smithing back up to 100 a second time. Not sure yet if I’m going to set it Legendary again or not. My three crafting skills, Smithing, Alchemy, and Enchanting, are all at 100 at this point. They’re my easiest ways to level up, so it’s possible that I may need to set one or more of them Legendary soon.

Heavy Armor is at 96 so it’s also possible I could do that one, too, but I need to get those last four points via actually bumping the skill in combat use since it’s past the point of being able to train. If I set the skill Legendary I can swap back to using Light Armor as my primary armor skill.

Next time

Probably another general adventuring session. Left off in Fort Dawnguard, so I’ll probably derp my way westward from there, and keep making a circuit around the map.

Screenshots

Editing to add

• 11/17/2023: Fixed missing gallery, and added a session number.