Thursday, July 23, 2009

I myself don't need a weathervane to tell which way the wind blows

The Helseth questline is ridiculous. The man continues to make transparent attempts to kill me, and there's nothing I can do but pretend I don't notice. "Assassins are coming to kill the queen," he says, "and since I can't trust my guards, I want you to be the only one there to defend her." Fine, I say. Just so I can get the stupid piece of the legendary weapon that one of his guards has in his possession. So the assassins come, big surprise, they really came after me. This king is an idiot who thinks that three Dark Brotherhood assassins will be enough to take care of me after I fought through their entire lair and killed their leader. My only handicap in this fight was that I couldn't use my wide-spread attack spells, because Barenziah was in the next room, and she would die too.

Helseth drops his guard a little in his surprise at my return safe and sound from the assassin attack, again, as if he forgot that I came straight from the DB lair at the beginning of this ridiculous plot. So then he tells me that I need to prove my worth by dueling his champion, who no one has ever beaten. You've got to be kidding me. What's next? He'll pull out a shotgun and tell me he just wants to test the quality of my robes?

Happily, as far as I can tell, there won't need to be a "next", after I beat his champion and obtained the blade fragment I needed. Helseth of course seemed more dismayed and shaken at my success than anything, but he pressed on in preparation for his grand speech about his plans for me, at which point I said "goodbye" and left before he had a chance to add any crap to my journal that I didn't intend on completing.

This is not to say that I have any more love for Almalexia than I do for Helseth. After I got all the blade pieces and left them with the smith to reforge the weapon, I checked back with Almalexia to see if she was as tired of the ash storms as I was. In fact, she stated in no uncertain terms that she planned to continue the ash storms until she was fully satisfied that the poor people of Mournhold had suffered enough and feared her divine power again.

Yay. Of course, it wasn't her divine power that started the ash storms, it was me pushing a few levers on a dwarven weather control device. Just in case, I made a trip back down into the ruins to see if I could just turn it off again, but no luck. The levers were "held in place by a mysterious force". Mysterious? I think not.

At this point I installed Yellowdude's Amulet of Weather, and brought back the clear skies for my own personal comfort, main quest be damned.

I think I need to get away from all these nasty politics and paranoia for a while. I'm going to take a trip to the land of the ice and snow, and...werewolves?

Addendum: Although the aforementioned weather-control amulet worked as advertised, it seems to interfere with the scripting on my purchasable alchemy lab, which is unacceptable. When I attempted to access my alchemy materials after installing this weather mod, nothing happened. I uninstalled the weather mod, and my alchemy lab returned to normal. So caveat emptor.

5 comments:

  1. Since my character is still lost because I keep forgetting what I was doing and "oh, cliff racers!! *shoots shoots shoots....*", I haven't met one of those storms yet. The ones I did were harmless, and I even find it kinda cool, I keep remembering Star Wars for some reason.

    Anyway, you got me all affraid of the ash storms. So I did a little search, all I could find is code stuff to maybe make a mod to alter it. I wonder if this is the source for the addon you were talking about? Maybe you can make a better item to turn the storm off and can share it around? ;)

    Source is: http://www.uesp.net/morrow/editor/mw_cscommands.shtml

    ChangeWeather
    ChangeWeather, [Region], [Type]

    Where: Region = Region name to change the weather in.
    Type = The type of weather to change to.
    0 = Clear
    1 = Cloudy
    2 = Foggy
    3 = Overcast
    4 = Rain
    5 = Thunder
    6 = Ash
    7 = Blight
    8 = Snow (Bloodmoon?)
    9 = Blizzard (Bloodmoon?)

    Type: Weather

    Returns: none

    Example: ChangeWeather, "Red Mountain Region", 0
    ChangeWeather, "Bitter Coast Region", 1

    Scripts: EndGame
    CharGen
    Changes the weather in the specified region right now. The weather will begin transitioning immediately. It will reselect a new weather on the next weather update (12 hours).

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  2. You'll come across the ash storms when you get to places like Ald'Ruhn, or anywhere in the Ashlands. As far as I've ever seen, they seem harmless. They're just an annoyance, because they slow you down if you're walking against the wind, they reduce your ability to see in the distance, and if you're using Regional Mana, they also drain your mana.

    I'll see if I can find another solution, maybe just the console command, if possible, but for now I'm checking out Solstheim. ^_^

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  3. Apart from the initial DB attacks I don't think he is really trying to get you killed. He is just testing to see how good you really are.

    I really like him. He is one of my personal favoruite NPCs, but the game doesn't really do him justice. The Helseth from Tribunal is kind of lame, but the Helseth in the book A Game at Dinner is a true magnificent bastard. :D

    -Dragatus

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  4. http://www.imperial-library.info/mwbooks/game_dinner.shtml

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  5. "testing to see how good you really are."

    That's his excuse for the ever more direct attempts on my life, but it seems pretty transparent to me. Barenziah herself said she was never even concerned about the assassination attempt on her, as if she knew that they were sent after me, not her.

    A Game At Dinner is a pretty good story, but I'm not sure Helseth would warrant inclusion on the TV Tropes list of Magnificent Bastards, as his poison ploy didn't succeed in exposing the narrator as a spy, and who knows how many others at that dinner were also really spies, besides the one that took the bait?

    ReplyDelete