This is the diary of me attempting to play Skyrim using only
Illusion magic: I’m not allowed any weapons, armour, or magical items,
and I can’t attack anyone directly. The first entry is here, or you can see all entries to date here.
My attempts to play Skyrim using only Illusion magic have driven me
to intentionally contract vampirism, for the sweet illusion powers it
will provide. The disease takes three days to take hold, and I’ve spent
them messing with the Stormcloak rebels for the Imperial Legion. My
mission is to deliver some forged orders to a Stormcloak commander in
Dawnstar, and on my first morning in town, it happens.
“Your blood boils as your vampiric powers awaken.” The screen burns
red, then my vision clears. I look around. No-one is staring at me. I
switch to third person view to examine my face: it’s grim, steely,
shadowed, haunted – so no change that I can see. I also don’t have the
invisibility spell I was hoping for – I guess that, and the face stuff,
come later.
After looking left and right suspiciously, I find the Stormcloak
commander and give him the fake orders. He’s fine with just taking his
orders from whoever runs up to him and gives him some, which is a policy
we share.
Back at camp, the plot is starting to take shape. The orders we
intercepted revealed the Stormcloaks need reinforcements at fort
Dunstad. We changed those orders to say they didn’t. So now, we’re going
to attack Fort Dunstad, and retake the Pale. Again, The Pale seems to
be some kind of place with some kind of importance. I am ready to die
for it.
It’s going to be a huge battle, the decisive one for this whole chunk
of Skyrim. So I want to up my game a little. In practical terms, this
means lying down on a bedroll and going to sleep for 57 hours – two days
to allow my vampiric powers to grow, and 9 more hours to skip to early
evening, so that it’ll be night by the time we attack.
I awake with a whole host of new powers – no invisibility yet, but
one big improvement for a pure Illusionist: a universal 25% boost to the
power of all Illusions. I set off.
Fort Dunstad
The men are gathering outside the fort as I arrive. It’s dark, a
furious blizzard makes visibility even worse, and the fort is surrounded
by spiked barricades. We charge.
Rather than just buffing our own troops with Courage, I decide to
take a more aggressive role for this final conflict. I use Fear. Anyone I
hit with it runs from the battle, but unlike Calm, it doesn’t stop our
own troops from hacking them to pieces. I neutralise three archers with
it before I have to wait for my magicka to recharge, and I bide the time
by chasing my last victim, magicky hands waving.
“I yield!” he yells, sprinting away from me in search of some cover. I
keep chasing, despite having no way of harming him. Look at my sparkly
hands, soldier! Fear them!
“Victory is yours!” He cowers in a corner, hands over his head, terrified of the unarmed elf woman in a dress.
Meanwhile, the troops have smashed down several of the barricades and
are flooding hte fort, clashing with the Stormcloaks in the courtyard
and on the battlements. Belrand storms through them, stopping to
dispatch enemies with devastating sweeps of his jagged axe. His ghost
wolf is out and equally savage – I see him kill an archer and a
berserker.
I get back to my Fearsome work, sending the enemy troops packing just
long enough for ours to kill them in small, manageable batches. It
takes a long time, and I burn through all of my health potions to
survive the hail of enemy arrows, but at last the fort is ours.
It seems wise to heal up before the journey back, and with no health potions, that means sleeping.
Three days as a vampire.
The turn
When I wake up, everything’s normal for about a second – just long
enough for me to read that “As a fully developed vampire, you are hated
and feared.” Then the entire Imperial Legion turns on me. Ah. This is
going to be a problem.
Belrand, to his enormous credit, is still on my side. He summons his
wolf, draws his axe, and ploughs into the entire imperial legion.
I run – I still have no health potions, and this is an even higher
tonnage of incoming arrows than last night. I zig-zag through the fort
to dodge more arrows, and come against against two squads of my former
brothers in arms. I hit each one with a ball of Frenzy, and the enormous
splash radius catches every one of them with an urge to kill each
other. I keep running. I want to help Belrand, but the fight is just too
hectic right now. I hop onto a Legion horse and gallop away under a
rain of fire.
Once I’m out of range, I veer round and skirt the fort. The sounds of
shouts and butchery are still coming from inside, but I don’t see
anyone on the battlements now, so I cautiously canter back in. Belrand’s
doubled over on his knees in the center of the courtyard, two Legion
soldiers bearing down on him. I fling a Rally spell at him, summoning
him back to his feet in a ball of green light, and making him stronger
and tougher.
Belrand cuts down two more troops, then jumps into the air and brings
his axe down crushingly hard on the last of them. The body flops
awkwardly on the snowy stone, Belrand holsters his weapon and looks up
at me with a wordless look of, “Well, I guess this is what I do now.”
The problem
We’re in trouble. I mean, aside from the 18 murders and 1 horse theft
we just committed. I knew my vampirism would be ‘controversial’, but I
hadn’t quite accounted for the fact that my own employers would attack
me on sight, forever.
Normally, vampires pass as humans by drinking blood – it lessens
their power, but returns their appearence to normal. But they don’t sell
that stuff in bottles, you have to drink it from a sleeping victim’s
neck. Whichever way you slice it, puncturing someone’s jugular with your
teeth and drinking their blood definitely counts as an attack. I can’t
do it. There’s a cure for vampirism, but it involves soul-trapping,
which again is against my rules.
The war for the Pale is won – or maybe a draw, now that we’ve wiped
out the Legion forces too – but I can’t complete the quest until I talk
to General Tullius. And even if I could get past all of Solitude’s
guards and the entire Legion garrison at their headquarters in Castle
Dour, Tullius
himself would sooner kill me than talk to me.
I can’t end this without closure. I need that check in my journal,
the acknowledgement of my superiors, and to genuinely complete the
mission I was given as a soldier of the Imperial Legion. So I keep
thinking, and I think I have a plan. It’s a plan of which the following
clichés are true:
- It’s a long shot.
- It’s so crazy it might just work.
- And it’s something I have to do alone.
I’ve asked a lot of Belrand, and he’s done it all unquestioningly –
all the way up to slaughtering a whole Imperial army to defend me from
persecution as a vampire. But I won’t ask him to attack his home,
Solitude. Not because he wouldn’t, but because he probably would.
I could just tell him to ‘Wait here’, but I decide to be honest. I’m not coming back from this.
“It’s time for us to part ways.”
“OK, if you think that’s best. If you ever need me again, you know where to find me.”
I do. He sounds sad.
I hop back onto the black Legion horse I stole earlier and ride on into the night.
Solitude
I ride north, to the coast, and come at the city from across the
mouth of the Carth river. There’s a heavy fog on the water, and it’s
still dark – perfect for my approach. I slip off the stolen horse and
let him stroll back to Fort Dunstad, while I swim quietly across the
water towards the Solitude docks.
There are two guards patrolling the jetties, so I cast Muffle: it
creates a blue mist around my feet that conceals my footsteps, so I can
sneak as close as I like to the guards without them hearing me and
turning around. That makes it easy to slip by one on the pier, and
another on the winding path up to the city gates.
At the top, though, something incredibly awkward happens. Day breaks.
The sun isn’t strong enough to burn my skin, but vampires can’t
regenerate magicka when it’s light, and I’ve cast Muffle again before I
realise this. I’m low, and the sneaking only gets harder from here.
While I’m figuring out what I can and can’t afford to cast, I spy the
horse and cart guy up ahead – and he spies me. I’m rumbled. He jumps
off his cart, the guards come running from all directions, and I bolt
out of cover.
City guards are dramatically more powerful than Legion soldiers, and I
know from hard experience that their arrows can kill me in a single hit
if I’m not at full health. And I’m not. That’s a problem, because as
well as all the ones chasing me, there are two stationed at the gate
itself. Gee, if only I was a monstrous vampire who could turn invisible
at will.
Shadow’s Embrace, the power I became a vampire for, makes me
completely invisible and gives me night vision. It lasts for three
minutes, but I’ll have to reveal myself to open the city gates – you
can’t ‘use’ things or cast spells while invisible.
My pursuers still have a rough idea of where I probably am, but no
further arrows come near me, and the guards at the gate have no clue I’m
even there. I’m in.
Talking to Tullius
Now, it gets harder. The streets of Solitude are crawling with
guards, and it’s a long route through an open street to get to Castle
Dour. I decide to break it up by stopping off at the pub for a drink.
The Winking Skeever is where I found Belrand, and it’s restocked with
health potions since I last ransacked it for health potions. I run in
and steal all the health potions. The entire city guard follow me in, of
course, but I barge past them on my way back out before they can really
react. Before I go, though, I want to Frenzy them all – start a bar
fight that’ll keep them all busy in here while I run to Castle Dour. The
only problem is, I don’t have enough magicka.
I’m about to abandon the idea, then I remember something – I’m ready
to level up. All I have to do is pick a stat to improve, and my health
and magicka are fully restored. Level 11! Let’s Frenzy!
I escape the bar room bloodbath I’ve just created and burst back out
into the streets. I run zig-zag to stymie the annoyingly accurate guards
still on the streets, and jump a wall to get up the ramp to the castle.
The last obstacle before Castle Dour are the two Imperial Guards at
its door. Running straight at them, I can’t dodge both their arrows. I
can’t Calm them both, because that’d leave me completely out of magicka,
and I’ll need some once I get inside. Instead I calm the furthest
guard, then run straight at the nearest one. Before he can fire, I’m in
close combat range, so he puts away his bow and draws his sword. Before
he can attack, I’m inside.
Tullius is directly in front of me, surrounded by soldiers. I run at
him. He draws his sword. And for my next trick, I spend my last chunk of
mana to hit him with my last ever Calm spell, and immediately strike up
conversation.
Reporting for duty, sir!
As his men sink their blades into me from all directions, Tullius
commends me on my work, and lectures me on the strategic importance of
The Pale to the Empire’s war effort. The notification pops up: Quest
completed.
I quit out of the conversation, amazed to find I’m still alive, and
push past the troops to a door to the castle battlements. I have no
magicka, almost no health, and I’m stabbed and cut several more times
even as I open it.
It’s sunny out. My vampiric night vision makes the light dazzlingly
white, and at the same time, my skin burns in the sun. The combined
effects are so bright that, for a second, I don’t realise I’m dead. When
colour floods back into the world, I see my limp body slide down the
castle door.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been a wonderful audience!
