Gaming

She goes back to Breezehome if you lose her.

Nah, turned out she was hanging out at the inn. Without me.

(Edit: It might have been a hint that I should talk to the inn keeper for a clue to where I was going.... though I could have just activated the quest marker instead... In the end I did both and the quest ended up glitching. Apparently it does that. )

A guard just said "Watch the skies, traveller" when passing and I looked up and.... there was a dragon

Far away luckily, I guess they don't usually actually attack the towns of Skyrim

The town attacks are quite exciting. The dragons alternate between landing on top of the houses to spray everyone with fire/frost and stalking between the buildings while all the NPCs try to attack with whatever flimsy weapons they have.

And after you kill it you get to wander around making sure your favourite characters aren't dead.

Edit: I think I've only ever had one quest glitch on me and that was the early Thalmor rescue thing (where I looted that useful Elven sword). The final guy I had to talk to locked his house and wouldn't come out and when I picked the lock to enter he attacked me for trespassing. In the end I had to "summon" him via console commands.

Not sure I've done that one. Anything elven I have found has been less useful than my current gear.

But in this case the glitch was just that nothing happened when pressing "E". I reloaded and it worked. And now I have to investigate someone's home but I'm reluctant to lock pick because of guards and the person who owns the house seems inclined to sleep all day. Which probably shouldn't come as a surprise...

Oops. Should have known a quest with a handful of "followers" would end badly. Especially when none of them actually followed me to where they basically forced me to go "right now". I probably need to google how to best handle this. Again.

Edit: Well, great. It's one of those "go there, after you killed them all there's this loot." Apparently they're not supposed to be the least difficult to kill, then? sheesh. I guess I just suck at being the hero.

Edit 2: Well, I died the first time. Went back out and talked to the townsfolk, which mostly went back home. One of them followed me, constantly running in my way and lighting us up so we were discovered faster and I got killed again. Tried a third time, this time telling him to wait outside which resulted in him following the other townsfolk home. But I still died. Fast. *sigh*
Come to think of it those 7 seconds were awfully short (I used a paralysis poison but the enemy got straight up to attack me anyway. According to the guides "three arrows from a specific orc bow" should do him in. I don't have that particular bow and I can't get off three arrows before I'm attacked.)

What's this!? I have a Lydia and a Lydia's Vampire
And when I google all I find is questions about whether Lydia can be turned into a vampire and know it alls claiming it can only be done if this and that, which is totally irrelevant. Why hasn't anyone written anything about this thing appearing??? What should I do???

Edit: Well, apparently it was just uhm... dying belatedly? It keeled over after a while, but it wasn't hostile before then... just, kind of glowing blue.

So Lydia's dead again?
Or just the vampire lookalike that's dead?

Either way, this quest doesn't sound familiar to me.

Anyway I had plans for my Saturday Skyrim outings but as usual I got a little sidetracked.
First of all I popped in the Bannered Mare during the late evening Happy Hour.
Don't worry about me, Saadia, you just keep on cooking and do try to stay back as I fire off my bow...

 

...hopefully the arrow will fly through that door and take out this naughty thief at the bar. He's a bad man, it's all OK.

 

Got Him!

 

Of course the party continued and Brill continued to drink while standing over the body...

 

It's still not the best thing to have on the floor of your tavern so I was hoping to raise him from the dead for a moment to then walk him out of the building to dump the body elsewhere but he was too high a level and my magic isn't good enough so I dragged him into that back room and left him over a chair.

And off I go again on my travels but... just to prove that I get dragons too...

 


I was just at that bridge trying to harvest some nirnroot now that I have that Riften alchemist's collecting quest and while tolerating that awful NNNNNNNNNG sound I heard some other noises and saw this Elder chap swooping around.
Killed it mostly by myself but one poor guard died.

 

But I don't have a Whiterun Guard outfit yet.
You died for a good cause, my friend.

Right then, let's make our way to the Mage's College to finish off those jobs. Oh, wait. I have to go home to plant some things, don't I? Detour!

How can you see the dragon from above?

I just finished that Nirnroot et al. quest. I needed to finish three quests in Morthal and ended up finishing three in Riften

Edit: Dang it! I needed to clear my inventory so I didn't loot the er... "bandits" in that last cave. and now all their bodies are gone. Even the dead spiders are gone! Good thing I took gold and small things, but I didn't get any weapons or armour... *sigh* And all I got now, except for boots (I think the leader must have had a boot fetish) was wine bottles. 

Well, it's past my bedtime, again, so... no more dragon slaying tonight. 

But is Lydia alive or dead???

I haven't been into Morthal yet (although I know it's a miserable place) but I've been all the way around it.

And for close-up dragon views Skyrim's equivalent of Photo Mode is to open up the console by pressing that "tilde" key (the one above TAB. It's often called "tilde" even though it isn't on most keyboards, it's really a backward accent like this ` )
But anyway, whatever it's called, it toggles open the console window and then you type the command "tfc 1" with the space.
Now when you press "tilde" again to remove the console the game is frozen and your controls now move the camera about.

In order to go back into the normal game you open the console again and type "tfc" and close the console again.
That's how I waste all my time composing screenshots.

I have heard people say that opening the console can affect the achievements (same thing is often said about mods) but that hasn't been my experience. Even so, do it at your own risk.