Let’s Illustrate Morrowind Part 9: Exploiting The Limits Of The Engine

Between the training at the guild and actual combat from doing side quests Fault has raised her spear proficiency by a whole ten points now, which really contrasts against the fact that her conjuration has barely gone up. This is a problem for our build. Fortunately it’s an easy one to solve.

First we Fault heads to the mage’s free dormitory. Then she spends all of her mana summoning every piece of demonic weapon and armor she can. Then she takes a nap to fill up her mana and does it all again. Every casting gives her a few points towards leveling up conjuration and the gains really start stacking up after a day or two.

In Skyrim they removed this by making it so that spells only got stronger if used in the presence of danger, but to be honest I think the idea of letting people become better at something by practicing in a safe space is very realistic. Sort of boring, but nice nonetheless.

On the other hand, the mage’s guild may not be as safe as Fault thought because she is rudely awoken from one of her naps by an assassin! And since being woken up prevents mana regeneration she’s basically helpless.

Discretion is the better part of valor so rather than trying to fist fight a trained killer Fault takes advantage of the fact that Morrowind enemies can’t transfer between zones and leaves the building to hide out at the Fighter’s guild instead. Just long enough to regain all her mana. Then she charges back into the mage’s guild, summons her arsenal and kills her killer.

This is admittedly not the most dramatic way to fight an assassin but it works.

This is admittedly not the most dramatic way to fight an assassin but it works.

Afterwards the game suggest we probably ought to tell a guard about the what happened. Fault does but the guard’s only response is to tell her she’s probably doomed if the famous “Dark Brotherhood” is after her. But even so it wouldn’t hurt to talk to their commander, who is currently stationed at Ebonheart.

I don’t know where or what Ebonheart is and for some reason the normally extensive conversation system doesn’t list it as a topic of interest. Is it a town? A city? A tavern? Who knows! We can worry about that after we finish our conjuration training.