Where Are You Today? Options

[mirocu]

Lothran has now quit his shift and has enjoyed a day in Plundered Mine. Not sure the inhabitants of the mine thought it was much fun though

[Renee]

Whoa what do you mean he "quit?" He quit for good? Or just for the season?

[mirocu]

Neither; just for this time around. He may do more shifts later this season



Isn't it a bummer not remembering you have killed someone, especially when you really never did it? Good that Renee only needs to collect some bear pelts instead of spending 2 lifetimes in prison

[mirocu]

Something quite cool happened today when Lothran was on his way to Silver Tooth Cave.

When he approached the bandits at the camp on the road east of Dragonclaw Rock he summoned his spriggan as usual which also brought up his Daedric shield (combo spell). As they were fighting the spriggan and her bear, one of them took a shot with his bow but missed and the arrow flew right over Lothran's raised shield to the right. I almost ducked in my seat! It was so cool!

This post has been edited by mirocu: Jan 8 2017, 09:28 PM

[mALX]

Something quite cool happened today when Lothran was on his way to Silver Tooth Cave.

When he approached the bandits at the camp on the road east of Dragonclaw Rock he summoned his spriggan as usual which also brought up his Daedric shield (combo spell). As they were fighting the spriggan and her bear, one of them took a shot with his bow but missed and the arrow flew right over Lothran's raised shield to the right. I almost ducked in my seat! It was so cool!

I love when that kind of thing happens and just for a split second you are reacting instinctively! They had a ride at Universal Studios Florida that made you feel like that, you saw it coming at you and the whole audience ducked.




This post has been edited by mALX: Jan 8 2017, 09:58 PM

[Renee]

and the arrow flew right over Lothran's raised shield to the right. I almost ducked in my seat! It was so cool!

Ha ha yeah, I do this all the time as I'm gaming. I constantly swerve and squirm around on my bed , avoiding blows and missiles and what not.


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Middas, Rain's Hand 3

Cool but pleasant weather. Party heads toward Hackdirt, starting about mid-morning.

Renee and Jada met a new follower for the party, named Arraya. Arraya is a very rare type of person, ghostly in appearance, though she is not really a ghost. I'm not sure if she's supposed to be undead. Anyway, she was met in Chorrol's chapel. It is unclear whether a Party of Five will be good or not. Maybe having two casters around (since Haili is also magically-trained) might be too much. But RG3 reasoned it would be good once she's luring vampires out of Fort Carmala.

Arrived to Hackdirt about mid-day, and stopped in Moslin's Inn to chat about any vampire menace which might be occurring. Everyone in Hackdirt was acting strange though; nobody would speak to Renee at all.

After being attacked by three separate people in Hackdirt (killing all three, don't worry, all of these were hostile Brethren, not named NPCs) Renee decided to just head back to Chorrol. The party would need to take down Carmala without advice from those who live in Hackdirt. As it turns out, the day was getting too late for an effective vampire attack, and it had been foggy all day anyway.

[Renee]

We really have the place to ourselves again, mirocu. I wonder where everybody goes?

I might start posting these RG3 snippets over at Beth too, just 'cause. I want to wait until a clear moment shows up though that I can introduce her over there.

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Turdas, Rain's Hand 4,

Days Passed: 221

Ah much better. Full sunlight today. Look out vampires!

Renee gathered the entire party, and headed straight for Fort Carmala.



Almost as if on cue though, as soon as the party began to fall into the valley in which Carmala lay, it became progressively foggier. Renee left the party in front of Carmala, and headed back to Hackdirt, to see if anybody wanted to talk about what's supposedly going on there.

Nobody would speak to her though.* Renee decided everybody in town is simply nuts. Maybe something is wrong with their water supply.

Headed back to Carmala to begin the proper vampire hunt, which went very well. Four of them were found this time, along with a few skeletons and rabid rats. By the time Renee lured the first vampire out, the day had become full sunlight again, meaning that the vampires would not have a chance at all, once greeted by the entire rest of Renee's party, along with the sun itself.

By the time it was all over, and the entire party searched through Carmala's locked treasure chests, it was now nighttime. Renee made one last effort to speak to people in Hackdirt, only to find locked doors, and the Moslin Inn's owner simply missing from his desk.

An odd fact about the Party of Five: they get along fabulously. Nobody has been snapping at one another, which makes everyday life for Renee Gade III so much easier. Of course, things may change when the party meets jealous and petty Gabrielle, Renee's friend.

*Even though Gabs is also a CM Partners follower, for some reason she and the others eventually wind up fighting if they spend too much time together. Next thing I know, I have to console tcai, and RP that RG3 has gotten everybody to chill.

This post has been edited by Renee: Jan 11 2017, 10:48 PM

[mirocu]

We really have the place to ourselves again, mirocu? I wonder where everybody goes?

Maybe they know the last one gets the tab?


How good of ms Gade the Third to keep hunting vampies now that Buffy is in ESO. Well, I guess she could be in Cyrodiil as well, after all...


As for Lothran, he has just returned home from another goblin hunt in Silver Tooth Cave and staying the night at Azura's shrine. Usual shenanigans at Olav's in the evening so everything is as it should

[Acadian]

Renee - sounds like a great tactic, luring those vamps out into the waiting sunlit party. Hope everyone keeps getting along.

mirocu - Azura's Shrine is a wonderful place to camp for the night! Nice to see Lothie enjoying his winter in Bruma.

[Lopov]

@Renee - did Renee Gade III run into any special vampire in Fort Carmala? The one with a magical broom perhaps?

@mirocu - Lothran spent the night between the dusk and dawn.

[Renee]

No magical broom-lady. Luckily, RG3's tale runs roughly 15 years after Sarah's and it's a good thing they'll never meet.

Acadian: NPC vampires take sun damage in the vanilla game, but this effect moves way too slow, much slower than it does for us. Maskar's Oblivion Overhaul has a setting which makes NPC vampires take the same damage as we do, if one of ours becomes a vamp. So what RG3 does is gets them riled up in their lair, and then lures them outside!

mirocu: See it's good that Lothran hunts goblins, because that is one thing Renee never does, she never goes into goblin lairs. Very rarely.

----------------------

First Seed 5

Cays Passed: 222

Slept 6 hours, and then woke to a fabulously warm day. Visited the Imperial Requisition Agent, And finally, Renee had an item he wanted: an ancient vampire stone....500 gold right there, meaning Renee now had enough money to get the party's gear repaired. A good bulk of this day was spent doing so. It wasn't til late afternoon that the party began to head out of Chorrol.


-------------------------------


First Seed 6

Warm, lazy day around the Imperial City. Went to get lunch with Gabrielle, bought & sold, and got RG3's claymore of fire repaired, then headed toward the spa for a couple hours.

Then the important stuff. Went to visit the Order to sell vampire dust for good coin, but first they went to Tiber Septim Hotel, where a dark elf woman named Kendrel Vando told Renee about her father, who she claims is the 'best vampire hunter in all Tamriel, no offence". But this man has gone missing due to vampires (as Kendrel herself explained), somewhere near Skingrad, so he can't really be 'best', can he?

Kendrel told Renee where to go, to possibly meet this man.

-------------------------------------------


First Seed 7

Location: Goddess Store

Renee got her Claymore of Burning recharged (300 gold), and also a Staff of Silence (800). This staff never gets used by her personally; instead one of her followers often carry it. She then couldn't resist a splurge on a complete set of Athena Silver Chainmail` (nearly 900 more) leaving her with just 66.

Time to get out of the Imperial City!

Gabrielle really wanted to come this time, but the party would be too big if everybody was present. First things first: Fel and Jada would be absolutely necessary. But what about the mages? Renee had trouble picking between Haili and Arraya (her new, magical ghostly companion). In the end, she left both of them behind to protect Maple Cottage. So now this trip to Skingrad would comprise of RG3, Gabrielle, Felrika, and Jada. A foursome. Good to go.

As usual, they didn't get very far though. Spent the night in Wawnet Inn, matter of fact. It wasn't actually night when party got there, but a thick fog had rolled in...yeah, that's a good enough excuse.

This post has been edited by Renee: Jan 20 2017, 10:56 PM

[Renee]

Morndas, Rain's Hand 8

Days Passed: 225

Just when it seems the rain might not return, it's torrential outside. Party begins to head to Skingrad though, bad weather is never an excuse for no travel.

The weather cleared up as they climbed the hill into the Great Forest though. There were some enemies in there: mostly trolls, and one will 'o wisp. The party stopped in Oranstad Township, and had to spend the night sleeping outside, because this town's inn is still under construction (I mean, c'mon mod-maker, no inn? I'll have to add this myself, I guess).

[Lopov]

Do you use a mod that advances time while repairing gear or do you fast forward the time yourself?

[Renee]

Oh, I forward time myself. In some cases, the smith does all the work, in other cases, Renee herself grabs a repair hammer (along with Felrika her Nord companion) and if this is so, it doesn't take as much time as when the smith works alone.

------------------------------------

Turdas, Rain's Hand 9

Location: Oranstad Township

Quest: Find Vendrel the famous vampire hunter (or any trace of him) in a "secret" manor outside of Skingrad.

Amazingly, Renee did not get sick, even though the party slept outside, and it had been raining coldly all night.

And this rain continues on into the morning. She changes into her new Athena armor, which is really not warm enough for this cold, wintery weather, but it turns out her legion armor suit is not being carried by the horse. Uh oh, where did it go?

The rain clears up as the party heads toward Skingrad. They get there around mid-day. Renee didn't have enough money for anything (not even renting a room or buying a requisition) so she sold one of her bandit rings to Colovian Traders. This gave her 63 more gold, which was enough to buy a bandit death requisition, which meant 524 more gold. (Requisition agents pay more, you see).

Rain falls outside, as Renee & Gabrielle get cozy in West Weald Inn. Renee has not been able to find anyone who knows about vampires, or Ano or Kendrell or any vampire hunters. Time for a trip into the CS to make a map-marker for this quest, since no NPCs in Skingrad offer any advice where the dang place is located.

*Restoration advanced to Journeyman level during this session.

This post has been edited by Renee: Jan 22 2017, 05:30 PM

[gpstr]

Just spent a few busy hours with Elenin the Altmer.

I created her a year or so ago - I think I posted about it on another thread here. I wanted to play a female Altmer and had already come up with the name, but that was about it. I had a notion of someone who looked relatively normal most of the time, but fought in really over-the-top bound armor, but when I finally found a good face, she took off on her own.

Elenin has some tragedy that I'm still not clear about in her relatively recent past. As near as I've worked out so far, she had a lover who was killed - I think by a vampire (which opens up the tantalizing possibility that he's not actually dead, but is himself now a vampire). She carries a keepsake from him - an enormous claymore with a cross-shaped hilt. She doesn't use it though - she's very much a pure mage. She just can't part with it.

I use Pimpskinny's awesome Paladin Mod with her - it's a great fit, since her history has made her hostile to undead and particularly to vampires, but underneath it all, she's very compassionate. So she gets to hunt down and kill undead of all sorts, then release them from their curse.

So... it'd been months since the last time I played her, and I'd left her with nothing really pressing to do. But I was in the mood to spend some time with her, so I started her up. In browsing through her journal, I saw that she hadn't yet returned to Chorrol to check in on the presumably reunited Jemane brothers, and that seemed like the sort of good-hearted thing she'd do, so off she went to Chorrol.

She got in relatively late and just got a room at the Oak and Crosier. Then she got up the next morning and tracked down the Jemanes, and found that they wanted her to investigate their family home, Weatherleah. AND she found out that apparently Seed-neus' daughter Dar-ma was missing. After asking around a bit, she was told that Sabine Laul at the Fighters Guild would most likely know where Weatherleah was, so she swung by the Guild and talked to her, then went by Northern Goods and Trade and talked to Seed-neus.

She decided that Dar-ma was the more pressing problem, so she went by Hackdirt first, only to get the brush off from the whole town. She finally met one guy who was willing to talk to her, but he wanted her to come by his house after dark. It was about 2 in the afternoon then, so since she had some time to kill, she hiked the rest of the way up to Weatherleah and found three ogres there. She dispatched them fairly easily (they're big and slow and she's a pure mage), then hiked back down to Hackdirt and got there just in time to meet with Jiv and find out about Dar-ma.

She happened on one of the Brethren in Hackdirt caverns (he wandered out of a side cave right after she came down the ladder and saw her and charged her), but he went down with a single shot of her multi-element touch destruction spell. Then she got Dar-ma out, led her to her horse and followed her back to town to make sure she arrived safely. And she qualified for a level up along the way, so that night went to level 5 (at 65 hours playing time, which is actually a bit slower than I prefer, but much better too slow than too fast).

The next morning, she tracked the Jemanes down again, then left for Weatherleah, then went back to the Gray Mare when she discovered that Reynald hadn't actually followed them, then left for Weatherleah again. The trip was sort of eventful, just because she hadn't taken the direct route from Chorrol to Weatherleah when she went on her own, so they ran into a few wolves, a boar and an Imp along the way. The brothers, in spite of Guilbert's insistence that they weren't fighters and Reynald's alcoholic stupor, handled themselves quite well, and they arrived at Weatherleah at about noon.

I played it that in the course of asking around about Weatherleah, which is "south of Fort Carmala," she learned that Fort Carmala was home to some vampires, so she swung back around and up the road past Hackdirt and to the fort, then went in and cleaned the place out, redeeming each of the vampires along the way.

And she's currently parked outside the door to Fort Carmala. She's going back to Chorrol for the night, but I'm not sure what'll be next.

[Acadian]

Elenin sounds like an interesting and fun character to play. Her backstory strikes a chord with my own little elf - a love stolen by evil forces. Enjoy your time with Elenin!

[Renee]

Good to have Elenin around, we can never have enough undead-hunters, imo.

I know what you mean about "leveling too slow". I can remember Luci Pheria, my dark elf witch who actually lived at Weatherleah (pre-quest) because it suited the image of the 'storybook witch who lives in the woods' I was going for. Anyway, I believe I put all her Majors so that none of them were things she'd regularly use, except maybe Restoration. So she became perpetually stuck at Level 3. This seemed cool at first, but eventually I wanted to see some more enemies in her game, other than rats and ordinary wolves and such.

This post has been edited by Renee: Jan 24 2017, 04:19 PM

[Renee]

Rain's Hand 10

Days Passed: 227


Renee Gade III sleeps a lot, gets party together, and then decides to just go exploring. *

It didn't take long to find the place, the so-called "secret" manor, but Vendrel the famous vampire hunter was not there. Renee managed to find his book though, in which he described having to leave his manor because somebody found out about it, and also he wrote about some sort of vampire cult hidden somewhere near or even IN the Imperial City. This makes sense too--all the vampires attacking the I.C. lately...where did they all come from?

Although the party was looking forward to a leisurely walk toward Kvatch, it looks as though this will have to wait. They must head back to the Imperial City, at once!

They got back to Oranstad Township by the time night was falling, and spent the night in the place's new Oranstad Inn, which is open for business on its very first day (thanks to me, yah!).

*I have a feeling this "manor" is located just west of Skingrad, because we did this quest before.

[gpstr]

@Renee - good job on the inn.

More and more, that's what I love about this game. I get an idea for something or see something that I think should be there or shouldn't be there or should look like this or whatever, so I just do it. In part I do like the feeling of accomplishment from doing those things, but more it's just that it makes it more satisfying to play the game when the world is the way I think it should be.

On that note, I didn't actually play Elenin today. After the events from yesterday, she went back to Chorrol, then I fast-traveled her over temporarily to Maigrets' Maple Leaf Cottage.

I've had that house in my games for years now, but nobody's ever actually used it. It's something I consider, at least briefly, for most characters, but it just hasn't been right for any of them.

I started thinking about it while I was playing yesterday though, and I think it could work really well for Elenin. It wouldn't be her current home - it'd be the home she shared with her now dead (or possibly undead) lover. It's quaint and cozy and, maybe more to the point, it's right down the (Roads of Cyrodiil) road from Fort Vlastarus, which is a vampire dungeon.

So I took Elenin over there to check it out, but I didn't bother playing it, since she didn't really go there, and probably isn't going to go there at least for quite a while - it's just too painful. I'm tentatively thinking that the climax of her story is going to be her return - possibly to a showdown at Fort Vlastarus. But for the time being, I knew that the house wasn't quite right for what I was envisioning, so I moved her over there so she could check stuff out in-game. I finished that up earlier today, but then I wasn't quite sure what Elenin would want to actually do next, and I feel like she's at an important point in her story, so I need to be sure that I get it right, so I decided to just let her percolate in Chorrol for a while. I'm pretty sure at least that the house is going to be the house she shared with her lover, and that Fort Vlastarus is going to figure into things, but I feel like I still need to work out some details before I continue with her story. When I come up against something like this, I find that the best thing to do is just set the character aside. It'll wander through my head off and on while I'm doing other stuff, and sooner or later, an idea will come to me.

Since I had so much fun with Elenin's pure magery, I decided to switch to another pure mage I haven't visited in quite a while - Ughoth gro-Sharam, who's my arrogant and powerful Orc mage (as opposed to Bogmok gro-Lob, the morose and cowardly Orc mage). He's just killing time waiting for his next quest for the Mages Guild, in pursuit of his single-minded goal of becoming arch-mage, so we just went out and did some dungeon diving. I figure I'm going to give him another week or two in-game before I play it that he got word to report back to Traven for his next quest. He's not doing much other than the Mages Guild, and I don't want him to finish the quest line too soon.

Since he lives in Frostcrag, so has access to the teleporters, he could go pretty much anywhere to dungeon dive. He's been doing some work for Umbacano, and hadn't yet visited all of the sites he discovered, so, since it was convenient to Bravil, he teleported down there, then hiked up to Wenyandawik. That was pretty easy, and when he was done, he teleported (custom spell) back up to Frostcrag for the night. It's now the next morning and he's going to port down to the IC to sell loot, then look into maybe doing another Ayleid statue dungeon.

[gpstr]

Well.... since I appear to have killed the thread....

I'm doing something lately that'll likely be of interest to exactly one person here.

I finally got around to tracking down and getting and watching the complete run of the anime Claymore - the origin of the character Teresa of the Faint Smile. And probably not surprisingly, watching it made me want to spend time with one of my claymore-wielding characters. But not just any claymore-wielding character - it really needed to not only be a female character, but a particularly noble, honorable and strong female character.

And who better than Kyla?

I just now realized that I didn't take any screenshots of her. I've got a bunch from the old days, but I'd have to track them down. Or take some new ones.

Anyway - some of the Beth old-timers should remember Kyla. She's a Dunmer who grew up in Cheydinhal, daughter of a formerly wealthy and influential family fallen on hard times. She went to the IC to fight in the Arena, but had something of a crisis of conscience when she realized that the combatants she was killing were people more or less just like her. She quit the Arena and started traveling the land, using her strength and her skill to help people in need. She's easily the most noble and honorable character I've played, and the one for whom I have the most respect. And she's smoking hot too.

In setting it up, I discovered that it had been almost three years since I'd spent any time with Kyla, so I had to play with her mod setup a bit first, but then off we went, and it was so nice to be with her again.

First I got her house organized and spiffed up a bit (since I know much more about modding now than I did at the time I parked her), then we did a quick warm-up run through Capstone Cave, then we set out just to see what she could find.

She's done a couple of the Ayleid ruins she heard about from Umbacano, and a couple of other dungeons that just piqued her interest, and is sort of considering doing some more work for the Fighters Guild. That was a thing she started fairly late in her career, but she found she really didn't like the FG much. Modryn's a good guy, but she just didn't like most of the guild members. She doesn't know yet that she's soon going to get a note from Bothiel at the AU, asking her to track down some parts for the Imperial Orrery that were stolen.

Mostly it's just been a ball traveling with her - getting back into the swing of a pure claymore fighter - standing until the last second then unleashing a power attack, or dodging a swing then stepping in just far enough to hit the opponent with the tip of her blade. And just as it was back in the day, it's just so pleasant to see the world through her eyes. She's just such a fine person.