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I imagine it has to do with a second, very important meaning of the word 'firstborn' in traditional cultures: besides the simple meaning of born first, it was a designation that this person is the heir. It's a claim that Alduin rules by right because he is closer to Akatosh than anyone else.
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Oct 26, 2018 13:48
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Zulily Zoetrope posted:It's really stressful when you spend so much time at half health around enemies that can kill you in two hits. Especially since the video itself is on the shorter end. Yeah I was quite concerned myself throughout that fight. There have been waaaay too many close calls in this LP. I just don't seem to be able to get back into proper form. I used to do whole dungeons without getting hit as a melee fighter. Now I'm a washed-up has-been, trying to relive the glory days: Days 54-55: Fungeon Crawl
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Oct 28, 2018 21:15
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Dammit Serana, noone invited you! If she wasn’t a vampire, any outing she’d try to join would just instantly dissolve. Reminds me of me.
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Oct 29, 2018 00:27
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If she was a proper vampire going out would instantly dissolve her. 
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Oct 29, 2018 09:07
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One rule of thumb I've discovered when dungeon crawling is that the game never actually forces you to pick a lock outside of possibly the Thieves' Guild questline. Easy locks lead to side areas, while expert/master locks either lead to big treasure rooms (particularly in Dwemer ruins) or have a key elsewhere in the dungeon and act as shortcuts if picked. Also I played through Dawnguard again recently, and the Dawnguard path is exactly as stupid as I remembered it being. No one ever bothers to ask how Serana feeds as a "good" vampire, the only response you can give when she offers to turn you into one is "I won't feel right as a vampire," and she will actively boot your current follower and refuse to part ways or wait in place, leading to things like her following you home and creeping on your spouse and kids. You don't even get to say you oppose vampires on principle as part of the climactic showdown, and get your choice of a handful of dialogue options for why Serana is allowed to live and remain a vampire when Harkon tries to call you racist. Somehow I don't think that DLC is well written.
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Oct 29, 2018 09:52
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I just realized, I never saw serana eat. Isn’t it a common thing in the lore of these games that, when you lock a vampire in a box for, let’s say, centuries, when they finally get out of the box they’re super-duper miffed? Particularly when there’s a human right nearby? Why’s she chatting with her food?
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Oct 29, 2018 16:32
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BattleCattle posted:I just realized, I never saw serana eat. Isn’t it a common thing in the lore of these games that, when you lock a vampire in a box for, let’s say, centuries, when they finally get out of the box they’re super-duper miffed? Particularly when there’s a human right nearby? Why’s she chatting with her food? Well, there are freshly killed corpses scattered around the area... oh wait, no, they're also vampires. Well, there is the one Vigilant dude they were torturing, but he might have been that vampire lord guy's last meal. I got nuthin'.
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Oct 29, 2018 16:41
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She feeds on you and you forget it just like it works when you do.
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Oct 29, 2018 18:03
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This was honestly one of the most heartwarming videos in the series. Getting to watch Melth not know what exactly to do, and see his reaction to seeing everything with more or less fresh eyes in a dungeon that turned out to be one of Skyrim's better dungeons was just really nice to see. Then Serana jumps in right at the end and ruins everything
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Oct 29, 2018 18:24
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Zulily Zoetrope posted:One rule of thumb I've discovered when dungeon crawling is that the game never actually forces you to pick a lock outside of possibly the Thieves' Guild questline. Easy locks lead to side areas, while expert/master locks either lead to big treasure rooms (particularly in Dwemer ruins) or have a key elsewhere in the dungeon and act as shortcuts if picked. It's a pretty obvious design decision in Skyrim that every character should be able to complete every quest in every way. If lockpicking was required to proceed in a quest then someone who runs out of lockpicks or isn't very good at it will not be able to finish the quest and Skyrim won't brook that. It's just that instead of Fallout New Vegas, which gives you actual options for finishing quests in different ways based on your skills, build and previous choices, right down to defaulting just to murder, or even just Oblivion which gives you multiple tools to solve the same problem, Skyrim just removes any problem you can't stab to death from the game.
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Oct 30, 2018 01:51
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Zulily Zoetrope posted:One rule of thumb I've discovered when dungeon crawling is that the game never actually forces you to pick a lock outside of possibly the Thieves' Guild questline. Easy locks lead to side areas, while expert/master locks either lead to big treasure rooms (particularly in Dwemer ruins) or have a key elsewhere in the dungeon and act as shortcuts if picked. Yeah, I should have connected those dots about the lock meaning that path wasn't the main route. I think at the time I was thinking that the lock might not be the only way in; possibly there was some other route available to all characters since the bandits had been talking about a boss trying to find ways to open it. I've always really hated that you have to be a hypocrite about Serana during that conversation. Dawnguard railroads your character into saying one stupid and OoC thing after another no matter which side you take, and at moments like that it feels like it's going even farther and trying to railroad the player into liking that verminous nuisance. BattleCattle posted:I just realized, I never saw serana eat. Isn’t it a common thing in the lore of these games that, when you lock a vampire in a box for, let’s say, centuries, when they finally get out of the box they’re super-duper miffed? Particularly when there’s a human right nearby? Why’s she chatting with her food? Yeah, ancient, sealed-away vampires are completely mad and attack mindlessly in every other case I can think of across this entire series. However, it was always my assumption in this case that Serana was in some kind of magical suspended animation and therefore wasn't any hungrier than when she was locked up, whereas all those other vampires were in a torturous state of being consciously trapped and isolated and starving for a thousand years. Just the risk of that happening should give a sensible person pause about whether becoming a vampire is a good idea. Sordas Volantyr posted:This was honestly one of the most heartwarming videos in the series. Getting to watch Melth not know what exactly to do, and see his reaction to seeing everything with more or less fresh eyes in a dungeon that turned out to be one of Skyrim's better dungeons was just really nice to see. Thanks, I felt the same about this video. Some of them had been feeling like a chore lately, but this one was genuinely so much fun! It was a reminder of everything I've always loved about this game. And then Serana.
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Oct 31, 2018 06:31
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The bonuses on the dragon masks are really weird. Most of them seem as if they were designed by an RNG.
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Oct 31, 2018 14:15
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Melth posted:Just the risk of that happening should give a sensible person pause about whether becoming a vampire is a good idea.
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Oct 31, 2018 17:15
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I'm pretty sure I'd rather die of asphyxiation/exhaustion/thirst (depending on the box) than spend a millenium trapped in my own decaying and maddened mind.
Zulily Zoetrope fucked around with this message at 17:34 on Oct 31, 2018 |
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Oct 31, 2018 17:29
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I, personally, don’t like being in boxes. I think I’d take it pretty hard.Melth posted:However, it was always my assumption in this case that Serana was in some kind of magical suspended animation and therefore wasn't any hungrier than when she was locked up AH! Maybe that’s what the button spike was for! It pokes ya, and the blood flows into her mouthhole like one of those beer hats so she’ll wake up with less murder on the brain! Could do without the lifelong hand injury, but the vampire engineer probably wasn’t thinking too hard about the human in the equation. I wanna complain to skyrim osha.
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Oct 31, 2018 23:07
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BattleCattle posted:
This is the most brilliant thing I've ever read that wasn't written by me.
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Nov 2, 2018 06:04
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Sordas Volantyr posted:This was honestly one of the most heartwarming videos in the series. Getting to watch Melth not know what exactly to do, and see his reaction to seeing everything with more or less fresh eyes in a dungeon that turned out to be one of Skyrim's better dungeons was just really nice to see. This is why I hope Melth goes to Solstheim at some point, since apparently he hasn't played the Dragonborn expansion.
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Nov 2, 2018 16:01
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Mountaineer posted:This is why I hope Melth goes to Solstheim at some point, since apparently he hasn't played the Dragonborn expansion. He's mentioned having a list prepared of the order he wants to do every questline that he can possibly justify having Hjalti do, and Dragonborn's near the end of the list.
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Nov 2, 2018 20:32
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Back when I first played this I didn’t know how to pronounce “draugr”, so I wound up calling them “sarcopha-guys”.
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Nov 2, 2018 21:23
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BattleCattle posted:Back when I first played this I didn’t know how to pronounce “draugr”, so I wound up calling them “sarcopha-guys”. Well, this is my official name for them now. Also, I'm only in day 20 or so, but man, I wish Hjalti was a conjurer archer  I just started using bound bow in my playthrough and I don't think I can go back.
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Nov 2, 2018 22:18
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Apparently I play mages in Skyrim completely wrong because I never use alteration or illusion spells.
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Nov 2, 2018 22:36
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Star Man posted:Apparently I play mages in Skyrim completely wrong because I never use alteration or illusion spells. Well all the alteration spells other than detect life are garbage till the expert levels. One of my vids explains why the mage armor spells are horrible for one thing. Illusion though is amazing as you can see, particularly for vampires
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Nov 2, 2018 23:04
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I've never gone through the trouble of becoming a vampire because it seems like a lot of work to deal with it. The character I'm playing with right now is a high elf wizard and even though my first character ever was a wizard when I picked up the game in 2012, I never really used restoration magic much because it just seemed easier to down a bunch of potions. Turns out I love being able to heal Lydia while she tanks for me in a narrow hallway.
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Nov 3, 2018 01:09
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It's good to see you relax and poke around a completely unrequired dungeon, for once. I dunno if that slope would let you get back up to it, though.
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Nov 3, 2018 04:38
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:Well, this is my official name for them now. I know what you mean. I don't think I'll be able to go back to Serana being dismissable: Days 55-57: Serana, Begana!
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Nov 5, 2018 00:54
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Solitude is a pretty nice town. If you put your kids in the house there, they'll join the street tag gangs and make them a bit bigger. Also the Court will respond to the death of any of its essential members, which is a nice touch. If Sybille Stentor somehow bites it from, say, a visiting vampire slayer, Erikur's housecarl (the altmer mage) will be promoted to court mage. If Erikur's housecarl somehow dies, Bryling's housecarl will send you a thank you letter. He can also be promoted to thane if Bryling dies, but it won't make him any less grumpy.
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Nov 5, 2018 21:56
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I’m playing Oblivion right now, and Yes, Wisps. If you kill one on a hill, you’re never getting that loot, because the body is small, round, and has zero friction with the ground, so it’ll roll for drat ever. I also didn’t spec for magic, so I have level 5 destruction and the weak fireball you get from the mages’ guild. It also heals, as you said. The hour it took to kill that stupid litebrite taught me to never ever sell my last silver sword.
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Nov 5, 2018 23:35
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I panic a little every time I encounter a Bonewalker in Morrowind, which can be found in basically every dunmer ancestral tomb across Vvardenfell. Those fuckers drain strength, and you can potentially have your strength drained down to 0 so you are overencumbered no matter how much stuff you drop, leaving you stuck in place unless you came prepared with a potion or spell to restore strength.
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Nov 5, 2018 23:56
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Mountaineer posted:I panic a little every time I encounter a Bonewalker in Morrowind, which can be found in basically every dunmer ancestral tomb across Vvardenfell. Those fuckers drain strength, and you can potentially have your strength drained down to 0 so you are overencumbered no matter how much stuff you drop, leaving you stuck in place unless you came prepared with a potion or spell to restore strength. Ahhh, game design. Morrowind was fun, but a very, very broken fun. I miss levitating and throwing 50' radius, all elements-included nuke spells at the ground.
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Nov 6, 2018 03:29
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I thought this might be the only quest in Skyrim where you don't have to fight people. Day 57: Like Moths to Flame I was wrong.
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Nov 11, 2018 21:46
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Dawnguard’s dumb.
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Nov 11, 2018 23:04
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BattleCattle posted:Dawnguard’s dumb. But it gave us salmon roe and those fish eggs are why I can level up alchemy faster. And being able to make my own arrows is pretty nice.
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Nov 11, 2018 23:35
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BattleCattle posted:Dawnguard’s dumb. I haven't played it yet, why is it dumb?
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Nov 12, 2018 00:03
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I've been catching up on this LP and it's kind of neat to see how much of Skyrim is unintentionally worse than it's meant to be in vanilla. I've been making a bit of a list of mods that fix things that you mention are broken or badly-designed in these videos for my own playthroughs, although so far I haven't found a solution for followers being both overpowered and useless gits. Some of them I already knew about but things like most shouts being useless (and the unofficial patch making Marked for Death useless) I've been happy to find fixes for. A couple of notes though, you mention that the Elder Scrolls weren't introduced until Oblivion. There's some books in Morrowind that mention them in passing - notably, in Wolf Queen. So they at least existed in the lore as tools of foresight, kept in the Hall of Records, as early as Morrowind. Oblivion was of course the first game to involve them in any significant way and established some of the lore about them, but it's not until Skyrim that any of it was significantly fleshed out. Hopefully the next game can restrain itself from devolving into a collectathon for these alien and unknowable fragments of creation because while it is established that there are a lot of these things, they're a lot better as a background detail than as a focus of the game. Also, you could have put off the Soul Cairn and having Serana following you around all this time by just telling her you had some things to take care of when she tells you about Valerica's courtyard. They do give you a few chances to ditch her for a while, at very specific story moments, but you have to actively be trying to get rid of her basically every time you advance the quest to find them. It's definitely still annoying to be saddled with her as often as you are, because even if you use modding/ini edits to allow more than one follower she'll refuse to travel with anyone else and you can't advance most of the quests without her. If there's any followers in this game you're actually interested in having tag along with you, too bad. I've never seen a convincing enough argument that those particular crystals in the Soul Cairn are the Ideal Masters. As far as I can tell it's mostly fan lore and speculation, there's nothing in the game that I've seen to strongly corroborate it. If they were the ultimate masters of this domain, why can you interrupt their power just by eating some weird grass you found on the ground? The writing for Skyrim, and especially Dawnguard, has shown absolutely no trace of nuance or subtlety at any point; I just don't see them having the Ideal Masters present and not hitting you over the head with braindead "hints" to that effect at every turn.
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Nov 12, 2018 00:58
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:I haven't played it yet, why is it dumb? Serana
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Nov 12, 2018 01:09
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Makrond posted:
Well, Battlespire introduced the Soul Cairn and the Ideal Masters. The Ideal Masters definitely take the form of crystals, and you go up and talk to them and make a deal with one. And if you annoy them, they hit you with magic when you're close.
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Nov 12, 2018 01:15
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:I haven't played it yet, why is it dumb? It's just incredibly poorly written all around, and features mostly unfun dungeons (though the next one up is admittedly real pretty). You spent most of it with the writer's pet Serana, who will follow you around for all the main quests and forcefully remove any companion you might actually want to have around. The vampire faction storyline that Melth is playing through is just generally half-assed and stupid, but since Serana is the main character of Dawnguard and she's also your permanent companion if you side with the vampire hunters. This is kind of thorny since she's a vampire herself and the Dragonborn isn't allowed to dislike her, so the plot becomes some kind of weird "truth is in the middle" moral lesson where you, the woke main character, impart the knowledge that some vampires are cool and some vampire hunters are overzealous and kinda racist. Zulily Zoetrope fucked around with this message at 03:38 on Nov 12, 2018 |
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Nov 12, 2018 02:27
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Melth posted:Well, Battlespire introduced the Soul Cairn and the Ideal Masters. The Ideal Masters definitely take the form of crystals, and you go up and talk to them and make a deal with one. And if you annoy them, they hit you with magic when you're close. I mean the game admits the possibility that the crystals are related to the Ideal Masters, but if they were the sole entirety of the form of the Ideal Masters then there's no real reason for them to not actively interact with the Dragonborn. Of course, I wouldn't trust the game not to do something incredibly dumb with this so I'm glad the Ideal Masters have no real presence in the game but I don't think these insatiable, powerful necromancers would be content to just float around as inanimate crystals while the Last Dragonborn tools around messing with their dragon, their Keepers, stealing their horse and freeing one of their captives. Even if they're smart enough to realise they have no claim to your soul (and assuming that's even true of the Dragonborn as it is of the dragons), they could have an interest in manipulating a legendary hero who willingly entered their domain into doing a few things for them. I think it's more interesting if most of their attention is turned outwards, so they don't even notice your presence, because otherwise (like the rest of this DLC) nothing that happens here makes sense. Edit: vvvv I can accept that, although it does make the existence of the Ideal Masters a bit pointless in general. Makrond fucked around with this message at 05:26 on Nov 12, 2018 |
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Nov 12, 2018 03:32
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Makrond posted:I mean the game admits the possibility that the crystals are related to the Ideal Masters, but if they were the sole entirety of the form of the Ideal Masters then there's no real reason for them to not actively interact with the Dragonborn. Of course, I wouldn't trust the game not to do something incredibly dumb with this so I'm glad the Ideal Masters have no real presence in the game but I don't think these insatiable, powerful necromancers would be content to just float around as inanimate crystals while the Last Dragonborn tools around messing with their dragon, their Keepers, stealing their horse and freeing one of their captives. Even if they're smart enough to realise they have no claim to your soul (and assuming that's even true of the Dragonborn as it is of the dragons), they could have an interest in manipulating a legendary hero who willingly entered their domain into doing a few things for them. I think it's more interesting if most of their attention is turned outwards, so they don't even notice your presence, because otherwise (like the rest of this DLC) nothing that happens here makes sense. Seriously, the Ideal Masters are presented in Battlespire as having no physical form other than helpless little crystals. You can talk to the crystals like any other NPC and each is named 'ideal master'. They apparently have some sort of non-corporeal existence too, but that helpless glowing rock is the entirety of their ability to actually influence the world. So they can't do a darned thing about you running around killing their servants and looting their treasures in that game or Skyrim. And their dialogue suggests they're not even very bright. Only one grasps that it's going to be a problem to have armies of daedra constantly rampaging through and looting all their stuff, and all of them think that the best possible use of the epic hero who just volunteered to help them is to tell him to turn himself into a mindless skeleton. They were a dumb idea from the get-go and if anything Skyrim made them better.
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Nov 12, 2018 05:10
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6msg3s4Y8Z8 So I found the single solitary reason why you would want to go Khajit
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Nov 12, 2018 06:32
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