EPT
On September 17 2011 11:04 Serejai wrote:
I cordially challenge you to a Skyrim blog grudgematch upon release! ... May the best adventurer win!
I cordially challenge you to a Skyrim blog grudgematch upon release! ... May the best adventurer win!
I guess this is my response to the gauntlet being thrown down. I'll use this blog post to document some of my experiences as a man who is, essentially, incapable of playing RPGs correctly.
Fair Warning: Some very minor spoilers from here on, not for plot, but for environment I guess.
The Sickness in Skyrim:
There's something about the way Elder Scrolls games open that's a strange look at one aspect of the world; on arriving in Morrowind and I engaged with the imperial bureaucracy so that I could get my passport, I had fun with Captain Picard as we escaped his creepy S&M dungeon, and Skyrim had me navigate a series of basements in a seedy no-name town.
A few hours later, having painstakingly disengaged myself from anything that might be mistaken for the plot, I found myself roving across a blasted tundra, snow whipping from the hills in a fine mist. A blizzard descended on me, and I found myself shivering, lost on a mountainside and miles from anywhere. I hadn't yet figured out how to fast travel, so my method of transportation was still walk-wherever-you-need-to-get.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/2HWFt.jpg)
No Mom, I'm not underdressed; I'm cosplaying as a sexy barbarian.... no, it's ironic. God!
With the cold closing in around me, I clutched my sword, the only weapon I yet possessed with some flame enchantment, and hoped it would keep me safe. I wrapped myself in my blanket and sat there, my hands numb with the frozen grip of that midnight blizzard.
I still remember the exact moment when I thought,
Fuck, if I don't get to a town soon, I'm going to die out here, I'm going to die out here on my own in the cold and nobody will ever know, and that'll be the way Skyrim ends for me.
At no point had it occurred to me that there was anything unreasonable about this line of reasoning, until I died and found myself shunted back to warmer latitudes. I looked around at the sun, the trees, a butterly and, not far off, a waterfall. I looked down at my quivering hands and realised that, just maybe, something was off.
As it happens, I've got some fierce variety of flu, a flu for which a man of my poet's constitution is poorly suited. Naturally, in the interest of enhancing the narrative, I continued to play in the vague hope that I could tease as much out of Skyrim as possible while I was still capable of drawing only the faintest of lines between "me" and the "me" of Skyrim. I would indulge this strange, quasi-hallucinatory state as fully as possible... and it proved beautiful.
Dragons:
Skyrim, for those who haven't yet indulged, is beset by dragons. I have now "killed" four dragons. I feel like a champion, an accomplished wyrmslayer. Mighty would be the beast that felled me. I have stripped their bodies of scales and bones, that I might gain strange powers and profit on the hunting I've done.
Of course, I am also a con man.
One:
My first dragon landed outside town, and a militia was formed to hunt it. I had no place in such a militia; they were well kitted out, and I was scrawny, flighty, a novice archer with a poor bow. Still, if these brave men would die to save their town, I couldn't let them go alone. If there would be tragedy, I would be there to see it happen, I would be with them as they ran to hide.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/RGPLe.jpg)
I tried to explain, but they got the impression that this had happened.
We encountered the dragon by an old tower, and as its shadow darkened the yellowed grass around me, I was overcome by a fit of heroism. I dashed to the tower, rounding landing after landing on my journey to the top. These men needed an archer, and I was to be that man.
By the time I'd reached the top, the dragon was already near death; he had landed to better combat the veritable A-team sent to confront him. I loosed a few arrows, but the angle proved too acute; they had killed him by the time I got downstairs.
They made me a lord for that... in shame, I left, never to return. I would wander the world until I found another dragon.
Two:
Having failed so utterly, I decided that perhaps the way of the archer was beyond me. I wasn't cut out for this sneak-and-shoot business. Having to carry arrows is silly anyway, what I wanted to be was a mage - so I joined wizard school. It's essentially Harry Potter, only I'm not the chosen one and the whole college is Slytherin.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/Ypi6o.jpg)
This is not how the fight went down at all.
Having joined, I was shown to my room, where I stowed all of my old equipment. I wouldn't be needing a bow anymore; I was a wizard now. I would harness arcane powers, bend the laws of phsyics to my will, and reach out to rupture the meaty husks of my opponents. As I crossed the hall to my first lecture, a dragon attacked the college. Now carrying no weapons, I quickly equipped the spells I had learned so far, mage-light and a lesser ward.
In a fit of desperation, sure I'd die, I illuminated the beast's claw and hid behind my pathetic shield.
The other wizards killed the dragon, searing it with raking energies and rending its flesh. I, as was fast becoming my way, lept upon the broken hulk of its corpse and stripped it of valuable pieces. Again, they congratulated me on my contribution, my shocking capacity to deal damage to enormous reptiles.
I am not proud of what I did, but I had become addicted to the presitge.
Three:
The third dragon I encountered quite by accident. A local lord, somehow given to the impression that I was some sort of master-huntsman, had given me a bounty on some rogue chieftan. If I were to track him, the bounty would be mine. I figured, I've seen two dragons and not died, one bandit can't be so much trouble.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/NArl2.jpg)
Lessons Learned: 1) Giants and Mammoths are natural allies, or at least bros.
2) Giants beat the shit out of dragons without breaking a sweat, I guess.
As I walked out to survey his hideout and perhaps pick of straggling guards (I had by now given up on being a mage, it seemed a silly thing to do, magic is for fairies), an eerily familiar shriek echoed overhead, and the grass darkened again. A dragon was tracking me... this would be the end.
I did what any good confidence trickster would do; I ran. I ran and hid behind something bigger, in this case a mammoth. The dragon immediately dispatched the mammoth and now found itself facing down an angry giant, to whom the mammoth had once belonged.
The enraged giant quickly bested the dragon, and while he mourned his fallen mammoth, I crept in (by now I had decided I might be best suited to the path of rogue) and stole everything of worth from the draconian corpse.
I stand before you now, SirJolt, wyrmslayer of no small renown. A lord, a mage, a rogue and, under it all, a lie.
+ Show Spoiler +
Well Jai, here are my 1k words. Gauntlet down, grudgeblog born.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/F0WMn.jpg)
