Now that Fault has powered up with some training and custom spells it’s back to Caius who has looked over our reports and decided that we need an informant from the Ashlands since their beliefs about the Neverine differ slightly from more mainstream dark elves. He even has a particular merchant scoped out as a potential ally and gives us 100 gold to buy him a convincing present.

The mage’s guild has a branch in the Ashlands so Fault has no problem getting herself teleported there. It’s a unique looking city full of little round stone huts and plagued by a constant windstorm. Switch to third person view and you’ll even notice that your character is covering their eyes against the storm, which is a nice detail.

Anyways, I’m sure there are lots of subtle ways to figure out how to bribe a merchant but subtle Fault is not so she just approaches the contact and asks him what sort of he gift he might like if a outlander were, theoretically, trying to get on his good side. He admits he’s fond of poetry so Fault heads to a nearby bookstore, gets a recommendation on a few newly released books of poems and BAM we have a new informant who gives us some notes all about the Ashlander nomadic tribes and their obsession with the prophecy of a reincarnated hero.

As a classic adventurer Fault firmly believes all problems can be solved with either violence or gold

So back at the guild Fault finally ranks up. That means access to new trainers with better spells none of which she can afford!

But this is a Bethesda fantasy game so there’s bound to be a few treasure filled random dungeons somehwere nearby, right? There are lots of unexplored locations around Bolera and Fault manages to raid a tomb, a cave full of bandits and even accidentally bumps into the back door of that one orc filled volcano temple she cleared out earlier. Out of a sense of curiosity I steal the gems off the alter and this time Fault has enough levels to barely defeat the Deadra Lord that is summoned to defend the alter. He drops pretty good loot.

After hundreds of videogames filled with rubies and diamonds the size of your fist real world gems are a little underwhelming.

Back int town Fault is jut rich enough to prepare herself for her next adventure. Ten ranks of block training should give her +5 to agility next time she levels and help solve her “can’t hit the wide side of a barn” accuracy problem.

It’s then off to the mage’s guild to finally play around with the custom spell system.

Fault has been dilligently gathering more Bound X spells as she adventures and now has the ability to summon a full set of armor. But doing so one piece at a time takes forever and lets the enemies get in a lot of free hits. On the other hand, once she’s properly all magic armored up most fights last less than ten seconds.

So I create a new spell called “Daedra Burst” that summons all four four types of Bound Armor along with a Bound Spear. This would normally cost a lot of mana but by dropping it’s duration down to a mere ten seconds it now costs a mere five mana per cast!

As a bonus the short duration means it will get cast more often which means more conjuration points.

Last time Fault found herself completely broke and stuck on a tiny island. Fortunately since Alteration was one of our starting skills we began the game with “Water walk” and several repeated casts let Fault reach the mainland. Unfortunately the part of the mainland she reaches is volcano territory and infested with Cliff Racers, one of which has fantasy rabies and manages to infect her. Fault is really in no shape to cross a volcano in search of town so instead she carves one teleport spell worth of alchemy ingredients from the corpses of the cliff racers and then water walks back to the island town.

The one bit of good news is that all that water walking finally bumped her alteration score up to 40! She can rank up at the mages guild now and tries to do so when she first teleports into Balmora.

Except it turns out that to reach the next level she has to pay 200 gold worth of dues. Considering that the last person to skip out on dues had a murderous protagonist sent after them we put that on the top of our list of things to do.

So, still suffering from a horrible disease, Fault stumbles back to the cleared out dwarven ruins and loads her pockets up with all the heavy but semi-valuable gears and chunks of scrap she ignored on her first trip. It’s not worth terribly much but she only needs a few hundred gold to get her disease cured at the local temple and then pay for her advancement.

That said it’s hard not to feel at least a little sorry for poor Fault, having to hike several miles with two hundred pounds of scrap metal thrown over her back and a bad case of fantasy flu.

Or possibly a marine if half the stories they tell are true.

Fault has accepted a job to get rid of a ghost that keeps coming back to life no matter how often it’s killed. She kills it anyways just for fun and then goes off to interview the last person who tried to resolve the problem. Frustratingly enough the person we want to talk to does not show up as a conversation topic so it takes a good half hour to find enough hints to track her down. Along the way Fault gets lost and winds up wandering through a Mage Hall instead of the Council Hall she was supposed to, which is OK since the Mage Hall was kind of cool. In a nifty bit of world building Telvani mage halls are giant towers with no stairs. The idea is any competent Telvani mage should at least know how to levitate a few stories making the no stairs solution convenient and efficient for wizards while simultaneously keeping most sales men and random adventurers out.

Anyways, ghost busting. The wizard claims she found no evidence of a trapped spirit at the hotel and that the ghosts are probably being summoned on purpose. Fault follows a hunch, heads back to the mages guild and discovers that the whole “haunting” was a prank being played by a conjurer who had had a lot of trouble getting her immigration papers and was taking minor revenge on the local beuaracrats. She agrees to put an end to the joke but only if you first deliver an official and very sarcastic set of anti-ghost paperwork to the local immigration officer.

I don’t have much of an opinion on any of the movies but the Ghostbuster cartoon was a big part of my childhood.

Fault’s final reward is a magic ring our build prohibits her from using that doesn’t even sell for enough to afford teleportation back to Balmora. Guess we’ll be walking…

Wow. It turns out this particular town is built on an island. That could be a problem.

Fault is only five hundred gold or so away from being able to afford the last level of skill training she needs for ranking up in the Mage’s Guild. Unfortunately Balmora is starting to feel sort of tapped out on obvious quests so we have a guild buddy teleport us to the awesomely named “Wolverine Hall” in search of quick cash. It turns out to be a small outpost built in the middle of a city full of crazy mushroom rock houses.

Apparently the place is controlled by the Telvani mages we’ve heard so much about and chatting with them reveals that they are indeed evil, or at least close neighbors to it. They are basically a mage guild where murder and assassination are the official means of advancement.

They also have funny ideas about foreigners and Fault has to spend all of her gold but 1 buying some immigration papers. This game sure has a lot of paperwork!

Pretty much the worst random encounter ever.

But Fault is here to earn money, not spend it. Her first quest comes from the man who runs the local hotel for foreigners: There’s a ghost haunting one of his rooms. It’s pretty easy to kill but he claims it keeps coming back no matter how often it gets killed. He asked a local mage for help but they couldn’t see anything. That means this quest is now firmly in protagonist territory!

So Caius has given Fault some time off from doing spy work. Unfortunately I’m not 100% sure what to do with that free time.

I guess I want to rank up in the Mage’s Guild in hopes of unlocking higher level summoning magic but to do that I need to raise one of my mage skills to 40. The closest Fault has is Alteration which started at (and still is) 35. So maybe I’ll buy a few new alteration spells and go on a dungeon crawl.

But which dungeon to crawl? Well back at the fighter’s guild the buddy we gave the dwarf puzzle box to says he’s managed to craft a key that will probably unlock the inner depths of the dwarven ruins we were exploring. That sounds fun!

So off we go back to the dwarven ruins where the key gives us access to another half dozen or so rooms. But this time there are no tomb robers. Instead Fault is faced with the ghosts of angry dwarves and a small army of steampunk transforming robots. It’s honestly pretty cool, especially since none of them prove much of a challenge when faced with bound weapons and armor.

It’s like a Jack-in-the-Box but instead of playing music it tries to kill you

Our new selection of alteration spells includes one spell for levitating and one spell for unlocking doors and chests. Both get used roughly once which makes me think leveling up alteration without engaging in prohibited grinding might be a little harder than I originally thought.

There doesn’t seem to be any ultimate point to the dungeon besides looting some more dwarf artifacts but loot is a good enough reason for Fault and back in town she cashes things in and dumps it all on several expensive levels of alteration training. This makes up for how hard it is to raise the skill through actual use and puts us well on our way to ranking up in the guild.

Fault checks in with spymaster Caius and it looks like there are still some unanswered questions about this whole Neverine and Sixth House business. It’s now our job to go to the city of Vinnec and talk to three contacts. This mission is, more than anything, an introduction to the city where the five major political factions of the dark elves all live.

It’s actually a pretty cool place since it’s made up of several giant mega-buildings each dedicated to a different house and filled with it’s own selection of stores and housing. On the other hand it’s a terribly confusing place to explore at first, especially since Fault arrived at night and as a result couldn’t actually see the stairwells leading down to the lower levels of the blocks. This may have lead to her spending a good twenty minutes running in circles trying to figure out how to reach a bridge exactly one floor beneath her.

Once you’ve mastered the local architecture reaching the contacts is pretty easy. One is a lizard man that needs us to persuad some racist dark elves to leave him alone so he can give us his info. Another is a temple priest who we have to meet with secretly to avoid blowing her cover as an informant. The last one is a thief that won’t talk to us until we convince a local tax collector to leave the city and do his job elsewhere.

The only slight complication is that one of the informants suggests Fault should buy a certain rare and mildly illegal book to take back to Caius. Finding a copy is easy enough but the seller wants 150 gold and Fault kind of sort of spent all of her money on training.

Fortunately the local fighters guild is willing to pay money for a simple fetch quest. A local orc was hired to retrieve a certain ring for the fighters guild but appears to have decided to keep it instead. One lucky intimidate check is all it takes to get it back. Unfortunately the pay is only 100 drakes leaving Fault still a little short.

But then on her way to leave the guild she notices the equipment chest, full of basic armor and supplies for loyal new members of the guild. Five minutes later the chest is empty, a nearby merchant has a stack of millitary supplies and Fault can finally afford the book.

So you won’t lend me money but you will give me free swords? Hmm…

Was this a gross misuse of Guild resources? Probably. Did Fault care? By that point certainly not.

So what did all that spying lead to anyways? Well, I think I can spy the plot now.

The Neverine is supposed to be a reborn hero who will save Morrowind by, among other things, killing a trio of immortal men turned gods who have ruled over the country for centuries.Unsurprisingly the God-Men are not happy about this.

Over the years lots of people have claimed to be the Neverine but failed to fulfill the prophecies. However there’s a new one running around that has a lot of people convinced this time it’s real. This might explain all the weirdos who keep stopping Fault on the street to talk of the Sixth House.

Back in town Caius gives us a small reward and again suggests we go off and do side quests while he figures out where the plot is going.

Fault finally convinced the rogue wizard to pay her guild dues. One (hopefully) final volcano trek back to town and this quest is finally complete. Fault gets to keep half of the cash she collected as a reward and, of course, immediately gives it back to the guild in the form of training fees.

Fault’s conjuration skills and spell casting stats are actually looking pretty decent so she mentions she’d like to move up in the ranks of the Mage’s Guild. But for some bizarre reason it doesn’t work.

I double check the requirements: Int 30. Check. Willpower 30. Check. One guild skill at 40 and two at 10. Fault has Conjuration 43 and at least 20 in every other mage skill in the game. Why isn’t this working?

Wait a minute… let me double check the mage guild skill list…

Conjuration isn’t on the list?!

Well darn.

If you want to play with the Big Boys you’ve got to follow the Rules

Let’s head over to the fighter’s guild then. I bet they’ll at least appreciate Fault’s story about punching a fantasy pterodactyl out of the sky…

Guess what? Neither spears nor unarmed fighting are included on the fighter’s guild official skill list.

I appear to have accidentally stumbled on a build that absolutely nobody is impressed by. Which is ridiculous because after all those careful near-perfect levels Fault is actually rather powerful for her level; but apparently not in a way anybody cares about.

Well bummer. At least Caius still loves us. What spy work does the emperor have for us?

Fault hauls her most recent research notes back to Caius, who recognizes her skill at fetch quests and exposition listening by granting her the rank of Apprentice in the Blades. He then mentions it might take him some time to finish analyzing this most recent information and that if Fault wants to go off and do some adventuring now would be great time for it.

I just want to point out how really well done that is. Most open world games insist on pretending their main plot is super urgent which leaves players with a bad choice between A) Playing along with the plot and missing out on side quests or B) Breaking their own immersion by calling the plot’s bluff and doing side quests even though there’s an “urgent” problem waiting for them.

And it’s not like this is a hard problem to avoid. Just make sure your open world plot has a few natural breaking points where it would make sense for the player to go off and do their own thing for a bit. That’s all we really want.

Anyways, Fault figures it’s about time she gets on with her mage training and dumps a bunch of assassin loot cash to get some nice intelligence related skills. She also hints to the guild leader that it sure would be nice to rank up but apparently her growing magical prowess isn’t enough on her own: The guild master really wants those dues from that one rogue wizard we politely decided not to murder several updates ago.

So off Fault goes to brave the volcano once again. Making things even more interesting is the fact that according to Morrowind’s crazy leveling system Fault really needs to level up her unarmed skills before using too much magic and let me tell you punching a flying dinosaur bat out of the air with your bare hands is not an easy task!

Morrowind’s combat system isn’t exactly what you would call elegant

Fault finally arrives at the cave of the evil mage tax avoider and is more than ready to beat her to death for the crime of making a protagonist cross through cliff racer volcano territory twice. But just to be polite I give diplomacy one last try and by a stroke of luck make a good enough impression that the mage agrees to fork over 2000 gold in late payments.

Which is nice because I really wasn’t looking forward to murdering someone over membership fees. We’re supposed to be the hero here, right?

South of Pelagarius is the crypt Fault has been tasked to explore, which is fairly small and sadly lacking in significant treasure outside of the skull we were sent to find. Fortunately Fault gets ambushed by yet another assassin while exploring the tombs and those guys are basically loot pinatas. I am never going to resolve this subplot; it’s too lucrative.

I”m sure that skull is of great historical value, at least

Two interesting observations: I don’t know why but sometimes shop keepers will equip the armor you sell them. As a result half of the people Fault does business with are now dressed up like members of the Dark Brotherhood of assassins.

Second observation: I wonder if I’ve accidentally broken the assassin system? They seem to randomly appear every time you rest and I *think* they might be designed to discourage you from just resting every few minutes like potion-less Fault does. But they’re pretty easy to kill and worth a lot of gold so far from discouraging my play style they’re funding it.

Anyways, our mage guild contact tells us more about the cult of nizierth or whatever it’s called. Apparently there’s a local dark elf legend that one day a great hero will be reborn, cast down a bunch of false gods, kick all the outlanders out of Morrowind and generally make everything all better. This religion is technically illegal but since when has that stopped cultists?