Skyrim / Tropes H to M

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H

• Hailfire Peaks: Eastmarch Hold has a mountainous, constantly snowy environment in the northern section around Windhelm. To the immediate south, however, is a caldera dotted all across with hot springs.
• Hammerspace:
  • The player and those NPCs which s/he can pickpocket. The player can carry dozens of broadswords and battleaxes and still sprint. Some NPCs can have their entire inventory removed via pickpocket save for one item. If caught, the NPC may draw a weapon which was never in their inventory, but it only appears they've summoned a weapon from no where. In actuality, they found a weapon somewhere in their vicinity, either on the ground, or in a container.
  • This is also apparently where Khajiit ears and Argonian horns and feathers go when they wear headgear.
• Hammerspace Police Force: You CAN kill all of the guards in a given town or settlement, but they will respawn after the reset period has passed for the particular game (usually 3 in-game days). The new guards are just as skilled and equipped as the previous guards.
• Handicapped Badass: Several characters, both living and in Skyrim history, have or had only one eye. These include Hakon One-Eye, Olaf One-Eye, Noster Eagle-eye (the beggar in Solitude), and Skjor of the Companions. Can also include the Dovahkiin, if played as one-eyed or blind.
• Happily Adopted: Orphans that you adopt in the Hearthfire DLC are always pleased to consider the Dragonborn to be their parent.
• Happiness Is Mandatory: Grelod the Kind has quite a way with children.
  Grelod: Constance!
  Constance: Yes Grelod?
  Grelod: Hroar's crying is keeping me up at night. I'll give you one chance to talk the tears out of him, or he's getting the belt.
• Happy Ending Override: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion ended with Tamriel being saved from the Oblivion Crisis. In the two hundred years since then, the Empire has been severely weakened by the Aldmeri Dominion (who used their influence to take full credit for saving the world) and forced into a treaty which essentially leaves them at the Thalmor's mercy. As the Empire has fallen into decline, some of its provinces get annexed by the Dominion while others secede, and Skyrim plunges into civil war as the Thalmor gathers its strength for another savage thrust at the Empire. And then the dragons show up...
• Hard Work Hardly Works: Played straight, though not fully in a few places. The Greybeards had to study until their beards were grey in order to master the language of dragons and the power of the shout. The Dragonborn can merely approach a written Word of Power and absorb its effects, needing only to find all three to master a given shout (though in order to actually use the Words of Power, one needs to kill dragons and use their souls to unlock them). Arngeir points this out as he is training you, though he explains that the Greybeards do not mind the ease the Dragonborn has, for it is a divine gift and they are happy to aid him/her. Furthermore, because he/she hasn't actually had the study and training they had, whenever they speak anything that isn't related to a Shout the Dragonborn has no idea what the heck they're saying, requiring an explanation. Also, they can Shout more often than you do and their shouts are more powerful.
• Harmless Freezing: The Ice Form shout freezes opponents and does some frost damage, but they thaw relatively unharmed in about half a minute. Well, unless they're on a hill.
• Harmless Luminescence: In the Dawnguard DLC, the Dragonborn can take a sunhallowed arrow and fire it directly into the sun, causing it to become extraordinarily bright. This will not harm the Dragonborn or their allies, even if they look at it directly; however, it will cause damage to any nearby enemies.
• Harping on About Harpies: Hagravens are a flightless variation of standard harpies.
• Hate Plague: There is a version of the spell powerful to an affect an entire town, causing them to turn on each other.
• Have a Nice Death: Mostly of the Coup de Grâce Cutscene variety, if you get killed by an execution. The execution by a dragon is probably the best example, as the dragon bites you off the ground and tosses you like a ragdoll. Plus, if you happen across an enemy with the right perks, you can even be beheaded.
• Have You Tried Not Being a Monster?:
  • During the Companions questline, Kodlak wants to be cured of his lycanthropy so his soul can go on to Sovngarde instead of Hircine's realm. Following his death in the assault on Jorrvaskr and the revenge on the Silver Hand, the Circle of the Companions gather at the Tomb of Ysgramor in "Glory of the Dead" to cure his lycanthropy posthumously by casting the Wolf Spirit out of his soul with the aid of the head of a Glenmoril Witch and then killing it. Following the quest in question, you can cure not only your own lycanthropy, but take quests to cure Farkas and Vilkas, two of the other three remaining werewolves of the Companions. All you need to do is wipe out the entire coven of Glenmoril Witches and bring back all of their heads. Aela, on the other hand, is quite fine with being a werewolf, and doesn't want to be cured.
  • In the Dawnguard expansion, you can ask Serana (the game's only sympathetic vampire) if she's considered getting cured. If you ask too soon, she'll close the discussion on it permanently; but if you're nice to her and patient throughout the Dawnguard questline, you can ask after Harkon is killed and she'll go and get cured.
• Headless Horseman: You may encounter a headless horseman's ghost riding along the roads at night; he's harmless, though, and you can't interact with him. If you manage to follow him, he'll lead you to Hamvir's Rest which is likely where his mortal body is buried. Going there on your own will often result in you finding him already there (occasionally even during the daytime).
• Healing Factor:
  • Argonians are resistant to all disease and can quickly (though not instantly) recover to full health with their Histskin ability.
  • Spriggans have the ability to recover all their health in an instant.
  • Trolls will quickly (though not instantly) regenerate any damage done to them, unless you Kill Them With Fire.
  • A Restoration perk instantly restores 250 hit points if the player's health falls below 10%, but only if the blow isn't fatal and only once a day.
  • Almost all NPCs and the player slowly regenerate health. It is unclear if this is an in-story ability of the Dovahkiin or an Acceptable Break From Reality; technically speaking, this is probably to prevent damage accumulation on NPCs so they can only be killed by a single brutal attack, rather than several survivable ones which add up to fatal damage. Combine this with gear which has been enchanted to "fortify healing rate," and one can see their HP recharge very quickly.
  • The Dragonborn has a canonical example of this, tying into their unique ability to absorb knowledge and power from slain Dragons. Should a fight with a Dragon cause the Dragonborn's health to become very low, absorbing its soul will immediately restore a small portion of their health.
• Healing Magic Is the Hardest: Restoration is the hardest type of magic to level, since it requires taking damage or specifically harming the undead with certain spells, which takes a while even if you're deliberately antagonizing a giant or something else that can harm you at a decent rate.
• Heart in the Wrong Place:
  • Averted with the Forsworn Briarhearts who, through a magical process, replace their real hearts with a magic substitute; they can clearly be seen with these hearts located in the centre of the chest. A high enough Pickpocket skill can allow you to literally steal their hearts!
  • In the Dragonborn expansion, Master Neloth has in the past attempted the same sort of thing with heartstones instead of briarhearts. He got it wrong, which causes a lot of problems for him until you set it right.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: The Illusion school lack direct combat ability, unlike the other schools which allow you to deal damage, summon, heal or protect yourself. But investing in Illusion, in particular Quiet Casting and Invisibility, allows you to become an Invisible Jerkass that can sow discord in the enemy ranks simply by casting Frenzy, or dole out Sneak Attacks like no tomorrow from your invisible state.
• Hellhound: Death Hounds, which appear here in the Dawnguard DLC, are large undead dogs with glowing red eyes and in impressive set of needle-like teeth that deliver a freezing bite. Many vampires use them as guard dogs and wild ones are so aggressive and predatory that they can depopulate their habitats if they stick around for too long.
• Hell Is That Noise:
  • The various sounds a dragon makes, particularly their roars. After a certain point in the main questline, dragons can appear any time while you're out traversing Skyrim, and that roar means you're probably in for a fight.
  • The distinct clicking sound that chaurus and frostbite spiders make. Usually followed by a poison projectile
  • The growl of a draugr or a bear.
    • The laughter of a draugr.
  • The "whoosh" sound of a fireball.
  • "Sons of Skyrim" is an amazing song, but if you start hearing it play while exploring the realm, that's your cue that a dragon is about to ruin your day.
• Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: Despite their contribution towards one's overall armor rating, a lot of named characters just don't wear helmets. Followers (housecarls, etc.), on the other hand, tend to equip any helmets they are given, but those are usually absent from their starting outfil. Note that being an Argonian or Khajiit does not prohibit a character (including the player) from equipping helmets - exactly how they manage to fit a helmet over their horns/frills/cat ears is a question that nobody ever seems to ask. Note the Dragonborn is shown wearing a helmet in the official artworks.
• Herbivores Are Friendly: Mammoths are mostly peaceful, just don't annoy them or their giant owners. Otherwise, it's played very straight: bears will attack you on sight; deer (which are covered on Real Life) flee from you on sight. Unless, of course, you have any active buff preventing animals from reacting to your presence.
• Here There Be Dragons: A mural shows a lot of dragons breathing fire on the humans down below.
• Here There Were Dragons: Fans that pay attention to the background lore raised some eyebrows when their presence was confirmed, as dragons were said to be an endangered species few in number, kept alive by the Empire only in return for helping them in war. The game eventually explains this, and the fact that they're returning is mentioned from the start; Alduin is bringing all of the dead dragons back to life. Apparently the dragons' souls still survive unless they're absorbed by a Dragonborn, so the ones slain by non-Dragonborn people (such as the Blades) simply need their bodies rebuilt.
• Heroic BSoD: Lucan Valerius and his sister Camilla give you a quest to return the Golden Claw which had been stolen. If Camilla is killed, Lucan just stares into space and doesn't say very much, and if you return the claw to him he sadly wishes Camilla was there to witness that.
• Heroic Mime: Normally you talk to people, but you can play completely silent throughout the Dark Brotherhood storyline.
• He Was Right There All Along:
  • Now and again with Giant Frostbite Spiders hiding in the ceiling. Despite how unimpressive they are in combat, being ambushed by one from above will still make you crap yourself every time. Ironically, it's scarier when you're also sneaking, because if you're just running around openly, it will probably notice you and drop in front of you as soon as you enter the room. If you're sneaking, it probably won't notice you until you're directly underneath it - and neither will you.
  • Also seen in the Dragonborn expansion with the Rieklings, who have a tendency to hide inside barrels, crates, and other similar structures. They just suddenly burst out of them as you draw near, or even after you pass. Much like with the spiders, this is a lot more alarming when you're sneaking. This becomes beneficial if you choose to kill the former occupants of Tirsk Hall and become the Riekling Chief: every now and then Rieklings will pop seemingly out of nowhere to attack your enemies.
• He Who Fights Monsters:
  • A book on Oblivion has an introduction that is also a Shout-Out to the quote by Friedrich Nietzsche, saying, "He who enters Oblivion allows Oblivion to enter him." Particularly true once you notice the hints that the Hero of Kvatch may be Sheogorath.
  • In the "Laid to Rest" quest in Morthal, the player discovers that a clan of vampires is planning to conquer the city. Their leader is Movarth, who was first mentioned in Oblivion in the in-game book Immortal Blood as a vampire hunter who fell victim to the author, who was himself secretly a vampire. If you didn't see the book in Oblivion (or never played it), copies can also be found throughout Skyrim, including in Movarth's lair.
  • The Silver Hand. It's hard to tell whether they are legitimate werewolf hunters or a pack of roving bandits who just hunt werewolves, regardless of their guilt, for sport. Their bases are littered with the tortured and skinned bodies of werewolves, presumably the victims of experiments to find flaws in their physiology. That's right: the Silver Hand hate werewolves so much that they will capture and dissect live werewolves, many of them probably innocent people, just to gain a slight advantage in combat.
  • The Greybeards frequently warn the Dragonborn against falling prey to this kind of hubris. After s/he inquires about Dragonrend, Arngeir warns against learning it because Shouts require the user to become the concept they are summoning and Dragonrend would cause them to channel pure hate into themselves and risk becoming that evil.
  • This is a major theme in Dragonborn, where Miraak is revealed to be the First Dragonborn, a Dragon Priest who in ancient times abused his powers to rule over Solstheim and entered the service of Hermaeus Mora to try and acquire enough power to overthrow his masters, before trying to backstab the Daedric Prince as well. After defeating Miraak and being "rewarded" by becoming the new Champion of Mora, Frea points out that the Last Dragonborn was made for a greater purpose and has the choice not to walk down the same path.
• He Who Must Not Be Heard: Three of the four Greybeards cannot even whisper, as their voice has enough power to cause earthquakes. Arngeir, thus, speaks for them.
• Hidden Disdain Reveal: Ulfric Stormcloak, the leader of the Stormcloak rebellion, highly respects Balgruuf the Greater, Jarl of the strategically-important city of Whiterun, understanding the difficult position the city is put into and his reluctance to involve Whiterun into the costly war, though Ulfric also insists that Balgruuf will have to choose his side eventually, and hoping it will be his. On Balgruuf's part, he actually remains fairly neutral regarding Ulfric, focusing instead on making sure his city stays as far from the conflict as he can get it until neutrality is no longer possible. And when that day comes, only then does Balgruuf open up about his true feelings towards Ulfric: He hates the man, and sees him as little more than a barbarian who has sent so many of their fellow countrymen to meaningless deaths, in the name of, at least to Balgruuf, spite from the White Gold Concordat. While the nature of the war is a bit more complicated in truth, Balgruuf's frustrations are understandable, given that he, like many other Empire-aligned holds, wished to keep Skyrim unified so that it may remain strong, in preparation for the day that it might take the fight back to the Thalmor alongside the Empire.
• Hide Your Children:
  • Played straight with non-human races. You only see human children in the game, not Elven or Beast Man children. The game takes place in Skyrim, a human land several provinces removed from the homelands of most Elves and Beast Races, so it's justified for them. Additionally, the Elves have a low birth rate and are Long-Lived, while the Beast Races have elements of Bizarre Alien Biology going on.
  • M'aiq the Liar references the fact that Morrowind and Oblivion had no children, and that Skyrim has no non-human children:

    M'aiq the Liar: M'aiq does not remember his childhood. Perhaps he never had one.

• High-Dive Hijinks: The "Bard's Leap", which consists of a bridge leading up to the edge of a waterfall. You do the math. Surviving nets you a free Speech bonus from the ghost of someone who didn't survive the leap.
• Highly-Conspicuous Uniform:
  • Most NPC groups and nearly all player-joinable factions have a specific, unvarying and often rather conspicuous uniform, which is worn by NPC members and optionally by the player as well. While this makes sense for the military factions (Imperial Army, Stormcloak Rebels), even groups that logically wouldn't have a uniform (such as the Thieves' Guild and the Volkihar vampire faction) have one nonetheless. Lampshaded in some of the guards' comments, where (for example) they will recognize you're a member of the Thieves' Guild by your Thieves' Guild uniform.
  • Members of the Silver Hand, a faction opposed to the Companions in Whiterun, will recognize Farkas during one portion of the questline because he wears the wolf armor given to members of the inner Circle. Since all the members of the Circle are werewolves, this is a case of Really Highly-Conspicuous Uniform. Ironically, Farkas is the only male member of the Circle who doesn't wear Wolf Armor, but instead wears generic Steel Armor. Nevertheless, one of the Silver Hand says that "He's wearing that armor, he dies!"
• Highly Visible Landmark: The Throat of the World, Tamriel's tallest mountain, is visible from almost everywhere else in Skyrim. It is a landmark of great historical significance to the native Nords, believed by their old religion to be where the goddess Kyne "exhaled" and created mankind.
• Highly-Visible Ninja: Once in a while, as a random event, the Dragonborn may become the target of a Dark Brotherhood assassin. They make no attempt at stealth and just charge, swords swinging, straight at the Dragonborn and to their inevitable death. Admittedly. the Brotherhood has fallen on some pretty hard times lately, but to think the quality of their recruits had taken such a hard hit...
• Hitbox Dissonance: Dogs, whose hitbox is much larger than what their slender appearance suggests, which makes it surprisingly easy to murder your pet in combat by accidental friendly fire. That they like to enter combat by jumping into the fray from afar (which makes it difficult to spot them coming) hardly helps. On top of that, said large hitbox makes them even more effective at blocking doorways than regular followers.
• Hitscan: There are three types of destruction spells: fire, frost and shock. Fire is the cheapest and most damaging, while frost has additional negative effects on the enemy. Shock, being the most expensive and least damaging, would look like a loser... except its attacks hit instantly, negating the need to Lead the Target and making it much easier to hit flying/fast targets. Oh, and it drains magicka.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: The Dragonborn in general is a living case of this, using the dragons' own power against them, but there are other examples too:
  • In one quest dungeon, you can release a trio of captive vampires, who will ignore you and run into the next room to kill their captors.
  • In another, a necromancer using ghosts as mooks can have those ghosts turned against him by grabbing a specific soul gem in the room.
  • You can learn pickpocketing from skill trainers, then steal back the gold you just paid them, further building the skill.
  • Dawnbreaker is a pretty handy weapon for fighting undead... unless you somehow forget you're a vampire and set yourself on fire, accidentally knock out Serana, or have your necromantic summons turn on you.
  • In the quest to retrieve Azura's Star, in one room you'll encounter a necromancer with his back to you. He has a Black Soul Gem in his inventory. If you have the right perks, you can sneak up behind him, pickpocket the gem, and backstab him with a Trap Soul enchanted dagger, instantly trapping his soul with his own gem.
  • Alduin himself; he first shows up right as the Dragonborn is about to be executed, saving him/her. The same person who goes on to kill him.
  • Of course, the Dragonborn isn't immune to this! Shooting an enemy with Ebony arrows (one of the strongest arrows in the game) will more often than not result in said enemy happily switching from their current arrows to use an unlimited supply of Ebony arrows against *you*.
• Holding Out for a Hero: The two sides are effectively deadlocked: the secessionist Stormcloak rebels in eastern Skyrim while the Imperial loyalists and their Imperial Legion forces hold western Skyrim. Other than some skirmishes in the countryside, the two sides are completely deadlocked. Only the involvement of the Dragonborn can break the stalemate. By joining one side, the Dragonborn will be instrumental in leading the attacks for that side on opposition forts and cities. Even if you do not choose a side, you'll still impact the situation during the main quest when you must call for a summit and a ceasefire to deal with the dragon crisis. It can make you wonder what would have happened if the Dragonborn never came along.
• Hold the Line: If you side with the Imperials, the Battle for Whiterun has you holding the line against countless Stormcloaks. You can fall back through the city, but ultimately your goal is to protect the Jarl. And winning it treats you to Jarl Balgruuf giving you one of the coolest victory speeches in the entire game. If you're more sympathetic to the Imperial cause, that is.
• Hollywood History: You get to participate in creating a bit of this for Solitude. The copy of King Olaf's Verse you find is too badly damaged to present to Elisif, so you suggest to the bard that you can make up the missing parts. Viarmo for the most part will go along with most anything the player suggests, but the more dramatic/fantastic options require passing a Speech check in order for him to accept. ("Olaf was the dragon. What a twist!")
• Home-Run Hitter: It is in your best interest to make sure giants never get within melee range, or at least not for more time than is needed for a quick swipe on your part.
• A Homeowner Is You:
  • You can own several houses, one in each of the five major holds. The Hearthfire DLC allows you to buy land in three of the other four holds, then construct a house with your own two hands, thus combining this trope with An Interior Designer Is You. The only hold where you can't own property is Winterhold, most likely because of how much land was lost in the collapse. However, the trope still applies in Winterhold, because if you complete the College of Winterhold questline, you become Archmage, which entitles you to the finest residence inside the college buildings.
  • The Dawnguard DLC exaggerates this trope by giving the Dragonborn a castle - but only in certain circumstances. Should you take the vampire path through the DLC, after you defeat Harkon, you are proclaimed the new lord/lady of Castle Volkihar. Serana's ancestral home and everything inside it is now yours, and all the vampires who live there are your devoted followers. If you take the Dawnguard path, you don't get the castle.
  • The Dragonborn DLC adds another house to your holdings, completely free of charge, if you complete the relevant quest in Raven Rock and are thus rewarded with the property. It's a very nice home, already furnished with no need to purchase any upgrades or changes, and even has an achievement attached to owning it. However, if you have a spouse and/or children, you cannot ask them to relocate to this house.
• Homing Projectile: In the Dragonborn DLC, Seekers are a Cthulhumanoid form of lesser Daedra in service to Hermaeus Mora, the Daedric Prince of Knowledge. Seekers, befitting their name, can use ranged Vampiric Draining spells which home in their targets.
• Honey Trap: In Morthal, there's a female vampire who seduced a man into being her guardian while she and her master, Movarth, plan the town's destruction. Her seduction is so thorough that if you try to convince him that she's evil, he'll fight you to the death before letting harm come to her. Even factoring in the power of Vampiric Seduction at her disposal, the way she dresses makes it easy to see how she convinced the poor guy to become her Thrall.
• Honor Before Reason:
  • Pretty standard fare for any traditional Nord. They fancy themselves a Proud Warrior Race, with customs and laws that they won't bend for anybody. In fact, this is what started the war, especially since there's proof that the Thalmor were manipulating things from the start.
  • Exaggerated in regards to dragons. On two separate occasions (first in a flashback with Alduin and then with Odahviing), humans have lured dragons to an obvious trap just by calling its name with the Thu'um. The dragons see this as a challenge, and will come straight away. In Odahviing's case, he says he was specifically curious about the Dragonborn, the one who had bested Alduin (however temporarily), though he admits he was overly eager.
• Horned Humanoid:
  • Orcs◊ have some of this going on.
  • Argonians, too, are able to get a wide variety of horns.
• Horny Vikings:
  • The hero can opt to be the classic "horned Viking" using the horned variant of the Iron or Steel helmet (the other standard Steel helm is more like the real Vikings' headwear) when using heavy armour or the Scaled helmet in light armour.
  • The Nords themselves are a very complex case. True, they do like their mead and they're not shy of violence, but on the whole they're a rather civilised people with an appreciation for concepts like honour, tradition and family, as well as bardic songs and tales, and ancient Nords even had a thing for magic. However, the elves and even other humans consider them to be nothing more than a bunch of violent savages; these bad apples certainly exist, but usually on the rustic and criminal edges of Nord society, and are certainly not representative of the Nords as a whole. As a backlash, many of the Stormcloaks actively embrace certain elements of the stereotype, mostly the rowdy, mead-swilling warrior part, in a form of in-universe Misaimed Fandom, while forgetting the more refined elements of their culture.
• Horse Archer: The hero can be one of these after patch 1.6, but proper aiming can be difficult with no aiming crosshair.
• Hospitality for Heroes: "Steal" tags on items in public places tend to vanish as your reputation increases, meaning that no-one reacts to you taking them. Or in non-rule terms, if you are the hero of the town, you can get away with helping yourself to a few knickknacks from a store, or a meal and a couple of drinks in the tavern, without the owners caring too much.
• Hot-Blooded: The traditional Nord way of life is, as Legate Rikke puts it, "following our hearts."
• Hot Skitty-on-Wailord Action: A few people don't quite understand the actual nature of being Dragonborn.
  Hadvar: "Dragonborn," huh? Was it your ma or your pa that was the dragon?
• Hot Springs Episode: In Eastmarch, near the border of Whiterun, some natural hot springs can be found, and at the southeastern tip of it is a permanent camp set up by a few hunters who lounge in the hot water with all their armor taken off and set aside.
• Hour of Power: Various abilities only last for a minute or so, then take an in-game day to recharge. One such example is the Argonian Histskin ability, which gives Argonians a minute of accelerated healing.
• Hub City: The game muddles this trope. Whiterun ultimately fits the description best as it is the Hub City of Skyrim due to its central location. However, due to the Civil War, the political hub cities of Skyrim are Solitude (for Imperial-aligned) and Windhelm (for Stormcloak-aligned) and both are large cities with port access to the other side of the country. Add into this the fact that all the Hold Capitals are Hub Cities for their holds, which add extra layers of complexity.
• Hub Under Attack:
  • Dragon attacks can happen in cities and other settlements when you're looking to hit the inn for the night or shopping for supplies, often requiring you to drop what you're doing and deal with the threat. The larger cities like Whiterun are walled-off cells like in Oblivion so dragons cannot get in, but vampires in the Dawnguard expansion can spawn inside.
  • Inverted in the Civil War storyline: the Player Character takes part in assaults on the opposing faction's major cities. The campaign starts at Whiterun with the PC either defending the city against the Stormcloaks or helping them capture it, and ends with an attack on the opposing faction's capital.
• Huge Rider, Tiny Mount: A certain stable master outside of Riften invoked this while drunk one night in his younger days. It didn't end well.
• Human Pack Mule:
  • The most common use of followers. Several of them are aware of this; depending on their personality, they may call you out on it.
  Serana: This better not be all the things you just can't be bothered with.
  • One of the abilities in the Dragonborn DLC lets you summon a Dremora Butler for the sole purpose of carrying your junk. He's even less thrilled about the task than most of your mortal followers.
  Dremora Butler: (as sarcastically as possible) I always dreamt of being a pack mule.
• Humongous Mecha: The Dwemer in general were fond of constructing mecha ranging from human-sized to the humongous variety. Parts of unfinished giant mechas can be found in their ruins, often guarded by smaller Steampunk Mecha-Mooks.
• Hunter of His Own Kind:
  • The Dovahkiin, possessing the soul of a dragon in a mortal's body, is basically this to the other dovah.
  • Taking Serana with you on Dawnguard missions make her this, even if she doesn't seem overly enthused by the idea.
  • The boss of Peryite's Daedric quest is an elf mage named Orchendor, who is completely immune to most hostile magic. Killing him is a fun time for a magic-focused Dragonborn, though having the "Deadly Shield Bash" perk and strong Daedra summons can really help turn the tide. If you do kill him, however, you can cast Dead Thrall on him and get a follower who is a big middle finger in the face of any magic-oriented enemy and casts Expert-level destruction magic to boot.
• Hunter of Monsters: The Dragonborn is considered to be the ultimate Dragon Slayer and "The One They Fear". According to lore, the Dragonborn are sent by Akatosh, for the sole purpose of acting as a natural predator to Dragons.
• Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: Hircine has you hunt down a Werewolf that stole from him. You can side with the Werewolf in question and kill the other members of the Hunt instead. If you do, it turns out that Hircine likes the twist of the hunters becoming the hunted, and is actually quite a good sport about the whole thing.
• Humans Are Warriors: Imperials and Nords, two of the human races, are both prone to fits of badass behavior when faced down by the so-called superiority of the elven races. See the fate of the entire freaking Snow Elf race for an example.
• Hungry Weapon: The Ebony Blade is your reward for helping the Daedric Lord Mephala, and she urges you to use it on those you love the most so that the sword can absorb their essence and grow stronger. The blade feeds on betrayal.
• Hybrid-Overkill Avoidance:
  • Lycanthropy and vampirism are mutually exclusive; both are technically diseases, and contracting one gives you complete immunity to diseases, which means you can't contract the other. (There is a glitch which allows you to subvert this, but it prevents vampirism from progressing.)
  • In Dawnguard, the more powerful vampirism offered by Lord Harkon and Serana will purge lycanthropy. The werewolf blood offered by Aela in the main game will in turn purge vampirism.
• Hyperactive Metabolism: Coming out second best in a fight? Just enter your inventory (which pauses combat), scarf down 6 bowls of soup, 9 salmon steaks and 4 cheese wheels - you'll be fresh as a daisy. Don't worry, your foe will wait.
• Hyper-Awareness: NPCs can quickly sidestep to dodge arrow and crossbow fire... even if you're in Sneak mode and they haven't seen you, and thus could not possibly know where the shot is coming from.
• Hyperspace Arsenal: Like Oblivion, the encumbrance/fatigue mechanic attempts to avert this, but the PC is still capable of carrying several armor pieces and weapons, as well as other items, all at once.
• Hypocrite:
  • Several Khajiit (notably caravan boss Ri'saad), as well as Nord trader Ysolda (herself a drug dealer), will lament that the Khajiit are not allowed inside cities, because "some" are thieves and the Nords have unjustly stereotyped them all... But almost all Khajiit NPCs in the game are thieves, assassins, or otherwise involved in illegal activities. Generic Khajiit appear as bandits and Dark Brotherhood assassins. A Thieves' Guild mission shows Ri'saad and the three caravans working under him dabble in fencing and smuggling, and Ri'saad openly sells illegal Moon Sugar and Skooma. Two other named Khajiit are Thalmor hitmen. Even J'Zargo, of the College of Winterhold, confesses to being a thief upon first meeting him. It's implied to be a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy; Because they treat all Khajiit like thieves, smugglers, and skooma dealers, these same Khajiit turn to crime in order to get by.
  • Rolff Stone-Fist is a big example of this. He's a racist dick who complains to Dunmer citizens that they do nothing to help the Stromcloaks and just leech off the local Nords - big words coming from a man who doesn't seem to have a job and spends all his days at the inn drinking away money he only has because his brother Galmar is the Jarl's right hand man.
  • Paarthurnax calls the Dragonborn out on this; regardless of whether you are playing as a heroic figure, by being of the same kith as the Dragons, you possess the same urge to destroy and conquer as they do.
  • While confronting Harkon for the final time, if the Dragonborn has sided with the Dawnguard, they can swear to purge all vampires from Tamriel. Harkon then asks if they intend to kill Serana as well. Refusing to answer or denying will prompt him to say, "Interesting that you can set aside your morals when it suits you."
  • Sabjorn, owner of the Honningbrew Meadery in Whiterun and the Black-Briar Meadery's main competition, has a bottle of Black-Briar mead under his bed.
  • Serguis, the Enchanter at the College of Winterhold, will resentfully point out how many of the local Nords look down on mages as cowards and weaklings who can't fight their own battles but are still more than happy to take advantage of his enchanting services to put magical effects on their swords and axes, and go running to a healer whenever they get injured in battle.
  • One of your fellow apprentices in the College of Winterhold, Onmund, traded away an item that's precious to him, and wants the Dragonborn to persuade the receipient, Enthir, to return it. If your Speech skill isn't high enough, Enthir says he'll return the item if the Dragonborn retrieves a staff he traded away. So basically, Enthir won't let Onmund out of their trade, but he wants out of his.

I

• I Call Her "Vera": There are numerous named weapons in the game. In addition, when enchanting an item, you have the option to rename it as you see fit.
• I Gave My Word:
  • Many Nords believe in this, particularly shown with Ulfric Stormcloak.
  • Odahviing, the dragon you capture at Dragonsreach, gives his word to be your ally if you set him free and is hurt if you ask how he can be trusted. Not only does he deliver, but he makes a Heel–Face Turn from that point on.
• I Have Your Wife:
  • If the player joins the Dawnguard, vampires may kidnap their friends or even wife/husband. Thankfully, a member of the Dawnguard who is tight with Arkay, the god of death, will be informed by Arkay (or so he claims) of the deed and send you to rescue your friend/beloved.
  • It can also happen in Hearthfire. Upon coming home to the house you personally constructed, you'll be met by a bandit with a ransom note. Rochelle the Red demands you pay her 5000 gold for the safe return of your spouse. You can try paying the ransom, or you can take a different option. Cue Roaring Rampage of Revenge and messy deaths for the bandit clan. ^note This will only happen if your spouse is at a home you built and there is no housecarl in residence (or the housecarl is the spouse). Otherwise, the housecarl bars the door and prevents the kidnapping. Additionally, this quest is not available with all spouses - the wikis have a list of spouses who, for whatever reason, cannot be kidnapped.
• I Know Your True Name: Played with. Twice in the game, dragons are summoned from anywhere in the world by speaking their names as a Shout, but not because it holds any power over them; it's because to speak a dragon's name as a Shout is considered a personal challenge, and because Odahviing and Alduin are too arrogant not to accept. Odahviing can be summoned any time after you learn his name, but only because he respects you. With Dawnguard installed, the player can summon Durnehviir, a dragon that has been trapped in the Soul Cairn, by calling his name.
• I Love the Dead:
  • Arondil's journals at Yngvild imply that, after being kicked out of Dawnstar, he discovered that he was a necrophiliac. After initially being hesitant to indulge in his urge to screw the dead, he apparently gave in. It's far worse than real necrophilia, however, since he is having sex with their souls and not just their dead bodies! The topper is that there are Red Mountain Flowers (read: rose petals) scattered on and around his bed, in which you find a sleeping female ghost. Since these female ghosts and draugr are under his magical thrall, it means they're being held against their will. And when you factor in him having sex with them in such a state, it basically amounts to rape. And considering that being under magical thrall can also mean they are still conscious and aware of what's happening (like the Apologetic Attacker ghosts located at Rannveig's Fast), it's no surprise that if the player breaks his hold on them by stealing a particular soul gem in his chamber, they'll go berserk and kill him.
  • There is another one, Lu'ah Al-Skaven, the insane necromancer in Ansilvund. Her husband died years ago; but unfortunately for her, there is not much left of his body because it was burned. Instead, she wants to use the Draugr bodies of the legendary lovers Holgeir and Fjori to be vessels for her and her late husband. She's a far more sympathetic example than Arondil, but still murderously insane.
• I Never Said It Was Poison: Endon, the jeweler in in Markarth, at one point gives you a quest to get a mold back for him from Pinewatch. If you question the guy that apparently lives there about the mold, he'll tell you that he doesn't know anything about any silver molds. The Dragonborn then reminds him that they never said it was a silver mold, at which point the guy starts stuttering and backtracking.
• I Own This Town: Maven Black-Briar basically controls Riften, the Silver-Bloods by and large own Markarth, and Kjeld may as well run Kynesgrove. The latter two hold their sway by virtue of owning the mines on which their respective cities depend for their prosperity, while the former holds hers through her close contact with the Thieves' Guild, the Jarl of Riften, and the Empire. In Maven's case, winning the Civil War for the Empire will make it official since she becomes the replacement Jarl, while the Silver-Bloods have one of their number as the replacement Jarl for the Reach in case of a Stormcloak victory. Averted by Gerdur in Riverwood, whose ancestors helped found the little community; many people regard her as owning the town, but she herself demurs, saying she just pays the taxes.
• I Shall Taunt You: The "Throw Voice" shout (used to purposely distract / draw the attention of enemies in an area without revealing one's position in the process) consists largely of insults like "Hey, skeever butt!"
• I Surrender, Suckers:
  • When an NPC character is critically low on HP, they will usually collapse to one knee while shouting something like "I yield! I yield!" ...but, in most cases, will (after a few seconds to recover HP) just stand right up and attempt to continue fighting. This goes double for enemy mages, since they're usually readying a healing spell while they say it.
  • Opponents who are not automatically hostile to you and are only fighting you for a non-faction related reason (say, someone who caught you pickpocketing, or is retaliating for being attacked, then received a beat-down from you) sometimes will stop fighting when they scream "I yield!" — IF you sheath your weapons at that point. Otherwise, they will eventually stagger to their feet, see you still have a weapon drawn, and resume the attack at a sliver of health (often with heroic, agonized gasps like "No... Not... Like this!"). Amusingly, if they do stop fighting because you sheathed your weapons, they will frequently quip things like "Well, I guess you've had enough, then," as they walk off.
  • If attacked by city guards (usually in response to committing a crime), you can sheathe your weapons and yield to arrest peacefully ... or you can resist arrest and just resume fighting again.
  • Spriggans in particular can restore themselves to full health, though they don't bother pleading in any comprehensible language. Also, see Reviving Enemy below.
  • Also Cicero at a point in the Dark Brotherhood chain. You are tasked to hunt him down through his blood trails, and finally you find him lying on the floor and bleeding. You have the choice to spare him or kill him, after he explains his reasons, and says that he has no more fight left in him; his fate is in your hands. Should you choose to attack him... he immediately stands up and gives a decent fight before going down.
  • Depending on your interpretation of events, this is what the Empire is trying - pretending to be a Vichy-esque nation for the Thalmor while building up strength so they can hopefully deliver them a more decisive defeat later. However it is deliberately left ambiguous as to the political situation in Cyrodiil and whether this theory is true.
• Iconic Outfit: The horned helmet worn by the PC in the trailer. Also, generally speaking, all the official art and images of the Dragonborn, be it male or female, will depict the character wearing an Iron Helmet, Studded Armor, Iron Gauntlets, and Iron Boots; and usually bearing a sword (either with a shield or dual wielding blades). Funny enough, despite being the armor most visible in all the merchandise; due to the nature of its component parts being from separate weight classes (in particular the chest armor is Light Class whereas the rest is Heavy Class) the set gains zero perks and is nearly useless unless the player stacks points across both classes that are better invested elsewhere or applies a liberal dose of enchantments that shouldn't be necessary. PC players in particular have since developed various mods to rectify this for those who specifically want to play as the "advertised Dragonborn."
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: From easiest to hardest, these are the difficulty levels of the game:
  • Novice
  • Apprentice
  • Adept
  • Expert
  • Master
  • Legendary
• I Fight for the Strongest Side!:
  • This is a staple of dragon culture, going hand in hand with their beliefs that Asskicking Leads to Leadership and their tendency toward Honor Before Reason. Dragons will only follow those who prove themselves to be the strongest. Odahviing, the right-hand of Alduin, aids the Dragonborn after the Dragonborn forces Alduin to run away at the Throat of the World and captures Odahviing themself. Odahviing explains that he is doing this because a) he wants to free himself and b) after Alduin fled like a Dirty Coward, Odahviing and the other Dragons are no longer certain that he is worthy to lead them. After the Dragonborn defeats Alduin, Odahviing will swear his loyalty, allowing the Dragonborn to summon him with the "Call Dragon" shout. An interesting variation comes from the backstory - Paarthurnax betrayed Alduin and sided with Mankind during the last Dragon War, teaching the Ancient Nords the Thu'um, the draconic Language of Magic, which allowed them to turn the tide and defeat Alduin and his followers once and for all. Essentially, Paarthurnax chose to follow the strongest side as all Dragons do... he just happened to make them the strongest side first.
  • The dragon example is repeated in the Dawnguard DLC with Durnehviir, an undead Dragon bound to the Soul Cairn and thus unable to truly be killed. He swears fealty after the Dragonborn proves to be the first person to ever defeat him.
  • If the Stormcloaks win the Civil War questline, then Jarl Elisif, who Ulfric Stormcloak widowed to become High King, is forced to submit to the Stormcloaks since the Empire is now gone from Skyrim and she has no other choice. She still despises Ulfric however.
• If You're So Evil, Eat This Kitten!: To join the Dark Brotherhood, you have to figure out which one of three potential victims has a contract on their head, and murder them.^note If you try to cheat the system by using Clairvoyance, it picks a random victim, and the target does not change with subsequent casts. After you've done the deed, it's revealed that it doesn't matter which one you kill; Astrid just wanted to know that you'd follow an order to murder someone without question.
• Illegal Religion: The worship of Talos, the Ninth Divine, was outlawed by the Empire at the urging of the Aldmeri Dominion as part of the White-Gold Concordat that ended the war. The Thalmor want to stamp out Talos worship for a number of reasons, chief among them that they're trying to unmake him as a Divine as a prelude to trying to do the same to humanity itself, even if it means ending the world entirely. While this isn't such a big deal elsewhere in the Empire, Skyrim was the birthplace of Talos, and the drive to stamp out his worship in his homeland has stirred up a lot of resentment, which is one of the factors leading to the civil war raging across the land.
• I'm a Humanitarian:
  • Namira's followers have... exotic tastes. The player character can also become this after obtaining Namira's Ring. Additionally, the Bosmer (Wood Elves) practice ritual cannibalism as part of their "Green Pact":
  • Ambiguous with Narfi in Ivarstead. If you help find his sister's remains, he may give you human flesh or a human heart as a reward (and both may also be found in his sister's satchel near her skeleton).
  • Werewolves in Skyrim are apparently this by default; they regain health and stamina by devouring their humanoid victims, as well as extending their 'bloodlust', allowing them to remain in beast form for longer with each victim. Come Dawnguard, devouring their victims' hearts allows a werewolf player to gain new perks on the werewolf perk tree. The ability to devour the bodies and hearts of non-humanoid creatures is at the end of one branch of the tree, implying that feeding on animals is an unnatural thing for werewolves.
• Imperfect Ritual: A mage at the College of Winterhold tries to duplicate the ritual that either caused the Dwemer to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence or collectively die, depending on whom you ask. Luckily for humanity, his substituting a modified soul gem for the Heart of Lorkhan means the ritual only kills him.
• Impossible Theft: With the proper perks, you can pickpocket the armor people are currently wearing as well as the weapon they are currently holding. With the Shadow Warrior perk, you can even do this while they are engaged in combat with you, causing enemies to become naked and unarmed as they are taking a swing at you. You can also pickpocket the briar hearts from Forsworn Briarhearts, and they die - meaning you actually steal the (magical replacement) heart out of their chest.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: The Falmer don't have much better or worse aiming with their bows than any other enemy, which is pretty damn impressive considering they're all blind. If they do know you're there, then they act much like any other enemy in terms of knowing where you are. However, the level of Super-Senses required to fire an arrow at a muffled moving target from long range would make it impossible to even come close to backstabbing them, so this may come under Acceptable Breaks from Reality.
• Improbable Infant Survival: None of the Death of a Child moments happen onscreen, and children are invincible to any of your in-game attacks. Attacking a child will cause them to start running in fear, calling for help, and causing everyone within earshot to attack you. Interestingly, this also extends to Babette, despite the fact that she only looks like a little girl and is a cold-blooded killer to boot. She's the only member of the Dark Brotherhood to live regardless of how you tackle the plotline: she's conspicuously absent when you storm the Sanctuary and kill everyone within during "Destroy the Dark Brotherhood!", and she and Nazir are the only members of the Brotherhood guaranteed to be alive after "Death Incarnate".
• I'm Standing Right Here: Due to the game's open design, it's entirely possible to get into a scripted conversation with an NPC regarding another character... who happens to be standing right next to them... and who doesn't react to the conversation at all. For example, during the quest "Missing In Action", if the player accepted Avulstein's offer to rescue Thorald as a group, Thorald will still talk about Avulstein in the same way as if the player rescued Thorald alone.
• Inescapable Ambush: The only way to avoid Karliah's ambush at Snow Veil Sanctum is to simply refuse to go through the door, leave the sanctum and do other quests. But this leaves the Thieves Guild questline frozen at that point. You can at this point potentially have the ability to turn yourself invisible and intangible and to invoke Bullet Time which normally slows down arrows to a crawl but Karliah will hit you if you move through that doorway.
• Indo-European Alien Language: Dovahzul, the Tongue of Dragons. Seeing as how the series usually averts this, it was probably done because it needed to double as a Cipher. It has nearly no case-marking at all, appears to be almost entirely monosyllabic, and does not differentiate between past, present, and future tense. (Given the nature of dragons, this makes quite a bit of sense.) It was apparently created by a composer, rather than a linguist. Overlaps with Fictionary.
• Infinity -1 Sword: The Ebony Blade, which you get as a reward for completing Mephala's quest. It can't be improved with smithing, and you have to kill people you've helped to power it up. Even after powering up, it's about as powerful as a unmodified weapon with a strong absorb health enchantment.
• Infinity +1 Sword: If you want one, you'll have to create it yourself because even the most powerful pre-created weapons pale before the power of what a Dragonborn with 100 smithing, alchemy and enchantment can make.
  • Chaos Damage can become the Infinity Plus One enchantment. Due to being a Frost, Fire and Shock enchantment at once, it is affected by every single perk and modifier that would affect any of those three enchantments. It benefits from the Augmented Flames, Frost and Shock perks in the Destruction tree, all at once. It also benefits from the elemental enchanting perks. If you wear one of the Solstheim Dragon Priest masks that increase elemental damage, that enhances the damage as well. So does placing it on a Stalhrim weapon (enhances Frost enchantments by 25%). And on top of that, due to a quirk in the enchanting system, with the Dual Enchantment perk, a second enchantment placed on the weapon (say, Drain Health) will receive an equivalent boost. If you fulfill all of these conditions, while the weapon itself is also smithed to maximum capacity... let's just say that if on your journey, you should encounter one of the Nine Divines, the Divine will be cut. And burned. And shocked. And frozen.
  • And for weapons the game gives you, Mehrunes' Razor has one of the highest DPS you can find, being a very strong, improveable-with-smithing dagger. It has a small chance of instantly killing anything you slash with it, so any enemy that can withstand being cut by it a few times (like a dragon) stands a good chance of just falling over before their health meter is even empty. Its enchantment also never runs out of juice, although you won't be able to put anything else on it.
• Informed Attribute:
  • Balimund in Riften says he feeds his forge fire salts so the flames burn hotter, and it's common knowledge among Whiterun and the Companions that something about the Skyforge makes the steel it turns out stronger. Despite this information, forging weapons in either of these two forges offers the same weapons with the same stats as any other forge; the only difference is that after the Companions questline is completed, the Skyforge can be used to forge a unique set of items that can't be made elsewhere.
  • Becoming a Nightingale is supposedly essential in order to beat Mercer. In practice, the Nightingale is only granted a suit of special armor and abilities. You don't need to wear the armor at all to find or kill your adversary, and the abilities are only granted after that person has been defeated.
• Informed Deformity: Rigel Strong-Arm in Pinewatch is mentioned to be ugly and hairy and smelly in game. However, she's just a randomly generated bandit, so she ranges from normal to attractive looking.
• Informed Flaw: Walk up to a guard, any guard at all. Some time you're bound to hear them say "I used to be an adventurer like you... then I took an arrow in the knee." In no way, shape, or form does this inconvenience their patrolling or even fighting skills. Presumably it just made them more averse to taking risks rather than being a permanent injury.

• Initiation Quest:
  • After assassinating an evil caretaker in Windhelm to save a group of orphaned children, the Dragonborn is abducted by the leader of the Dark Brotherhood, Astrid, and then enticed to kill one of the then-captured criminals to prove their capability to kill without remorse. From that point, the Dragonborn initiates the Sidequest Sidestory to perform assassination missions under the orders of the Dark Brotherhood, though other events (some of them unsavory) happen along the way too.
  • To join the Thieves' Guild, you'll need to participate in a con being run by one of the guild's current leaders in Riften to steal a ring from a vendor and then plant it on a different vendor to frame him. Only after proving your worth in this way do you get to join the Guild proper and access its services.
• Insistent Terminology: The description of High King Torygg's death. Pro-Stormcloak characters are quick to point out that Torygg was killed in a duel that met the requirements of Nord tradition, while pro-Imperial characters consider it to be murder and argue that Ulfric's use of the Thu'um prevented it from being a fair fight. To some extent, they're both right.
• The Inspector Is Coming: One of the Thieves' Guild quests involves you putting rat poison into a meadery's still so they fail inspection, and a competitor (your client) can buy up the defunct business. ^note This doubles as a Genius Bonus: the real world Reinheitsgebot ("purity orders") of the Bavarian region were some of the first formalized food regulations to reappear in Europe after the fall of Western Rome. Brewers had to be licensed and pass periodic inspections of their product and facilities, and a bad inspection could destroy a brewer both financially and in reputation.
• Insult Backfire: If an Orc Dragonborn approaches a Stronghold and calls the guard "pig-face", the guard will laugh and say the Dragonborn will fit right in before inviting them inside.
• Insult Friendly Fire: It's possible for your Housecarls to proclaim "Skyrim for the Nords!" or other similar insults at their enemies despite the fact that their enemies may also be Nords, and the person they're serving is a non-Nord (or better yet, a non-human). Bonus points if your enemies are the Stormcloaks, who also use that line as a Catchphrase and may shout it back at you, even if you are a Nord, yourself.
• Insurmountable Waist-High Fence: There aren't many of these, but Skyrim is a little bit more forceful than its predecessor in keeping you from going where you shouldn't - no more jumping over city walls, for example.
  • Most of the usual offenders in this trope have been avoided, though. In particular, you can gleefully jump over fences.
  • If you use cheat codes, you'll find that some walls have an invisible barrier that extends some distance above the actual wall (the Thalmor Embassy, for example, which you're supposed to infiltrate as a party guest), but if you jump high enough you can get in and break the quest.
• Interchangeable Antimatter Keys: The game has the breaking lockpicks, and one could go through a multitude of lockpicks on one lock, depending on the lock difficulty. However, once you get your lockpicking high enough and get the required perk, or you aquire the Skeleton Key, no longer will you have to worry about breaking lockpicks, especially on Master level locks.
• Interface Spoiler:
  • Dragon Shouts are captioned for players with subtitles on in the same way that any other utterance is, with the name of the dragon shown as well. This can rather spoil the main questline if one happens to catch the name of the dragon that attacks Helgen.
  • Delphine being more than she lets on can be spoiled if one turns on the subtitles, then returns with the Dragonstone to Dragonsreach to find her talking with Farengar.
  • Quest objectives are always indicated on the map, even if there's no way the player character could know where the next objective is. However, this falls under Acceptable Breaks from Reality, as many quests otherwise would be Guide Dang It! quests due to how obscure their objectives would be. (Morrowind required players to find their objectives and destinations using maps and notes, and this was considered very frustrating to many players.)
  • The top tier perk for Pickpocket, "Perfect Touch," allows the player to pickpocket items that NPCs currently have equipped. However, the perk does not work on essential characters (i.e. characters who are needed for quests and therefore can't be killed), thus allowing players with the perk to know that a character is special because their clothes can't be stolen.
  • In the quest journal, there is decorative knotwork surrounding the name of each quest. This varies depending on the type of quest (main quests, guild quests, Daedric quests, etc.) For many quests this isn't a problem, but for some of the Daedric quests, "A Night to Remember" being a perfect example, it may not be obvious at first that one of the Daedric Princes is involved. Finding this out can be a major twist.^example like when Sam Guevenne is revealed to really be Sanguine
• Internal Retcon: The Thalmor have arranged it so that they look like the ones who stopped the Oblivion crisis, rather than the Champion of Cyrodiil, at least within the Aldmeri Dominion. According to various books written outside the Dominion, Martin Septim is mainly credited with stopping the invasion and the Champion has all but faded from memory. However, the Champion is properly noted in history as the one who defeated Mankar Camoran.
• Interspecies Adoption:
  • As of Hearthfire, there are several children available for adoption... all of them Nord, Imperial, Redguard, or Breton. This means if you want to have kids and are an elf, Khajiit or Argonian, you're stuck with this trope.
  • Outside of the Dragonborn's family, there's an in-game example in the case of the Dunmer merchant, Brand-Shei. He has that name because he was raised by Argonians. The Altmer Reldith in Rorikstead adopted Ennis, a Redguard. Redguard Falion adopted Agni, a Nord.
• Interspecies Romance:
  • What you get if you marry anyone from a race other than the one you select during character creation. In particular, there are no available Bosmer or Khajiit spouses, so if you play as either of those, this trope is your only marriage option.
  • You'll also encounter a lot of these throughout the game's story - far more than you might expect in a country so infamous for its Fantastic Racism. These include:
    • In Riverwood, Faendal (Bosmer) is in love with Camilla Valerius (Imperial), as is Sven (Nord).
    • In the Thieves' Guild you have Karliah (Dunmer) and Gallus (Imperial). Karliah may be a bonus example, as her backstory posits that her maternal grandparents were this too - her grandmother was Queen Barenziah of the Dunmer, and her grandfather may have been Tiber Septim himself.^note Karliah has a possible claim to the Septim Dynasty and the Empire's throne, being the daughter of Dralsi Indoril, who in turn was the daughter of Barenziah, the mistress of Tiber Septim. Many therefore believe that Dralsi was the result of that liaison; however, Dralsi claimed her father was Drayven Indoril, not Tiber Septim. Barenziah's pregnancies from Tiber and Drayven were about 300 years apart, meaning that Dralsi would no doubt know if Drayven was her father or not judging by her own age. This makes the chances that she was Tiber's daughter very slim at best, and likely impossible.
    • In Riften, fishery owner Bolli (Nord) is married to Nivenor (Bosmer). Theirs isn't a happy example, however, since Nivenor is a Gold Digger and will proposition any male Dragonborn who speaks to her, regardless of race and he's having an affair with Haelga, as well.
    • Vantus Loreius (Imperial) is married to Curwe (Altmer), and they own a farm near the Whiterun/Pale border.
    • In Dawnstar, the blacksmith Rustlief (Nord) is married to Seren (Redguard). Ambient dialogue reveals that she is pregnant, and wants her husband to take her back to Hammerfell to raise their child rather than expose the baby to the civil war in Skyrim. (If Rustlief is killed in, say, a dragon attack, she presumably does go back alone, as she's never seen in the game again.)
    • Near one of the mountain ranges you can find a location called "the Lovers' Camp," where a Dunmer man and a Nord woman spent the night while eloping. They're both dead; the woman's journal explains that they were eloping. And you can steal from their stockpile, which is in a nearby stump.
    • During the quest "The Book of Love," Dinya Balu sends you to help Calcelmo (Altmer) woo his beloved Faleen (Redguard). After the quest is complete, you can hang around the Temple of Mara and listen to conversations between Dinya Balu (Dunmer) and Maramal (Redguard). They are both priests of Mara, happily married, and expecting their first child!
    • The Dragonborn expansion adds the example of Crescius Caerellius (Imperial), who adores his wife Aphia Velothi (Dunmer).
    • In Riften, Shadr (Redguard) has a crush on Marise Aravel (Dunmer). You can hear conversations between Shadr and Madesi, where he's buying some jewelry for her and also where he shyly asks her out for a drink at the Bee and Barb.
    • In Solitude, Ataf (Redguard) has a crush on Illdi (Nord). Illdi has noticed him making eyes at her and asks Aia for advice. Another conversation has Ataf defend Illdi's singing and Jorn tells him, in a sing-song voice "I think someone has a crush on Illdi!"
    • Also in Solitude, Ahtar (Redguard) is the live-in boyfriend of Jala (Nord). Kayd is the son of husband and wife Beirand (Nord) and Sayma (Redguard).
    • In Dragon Bridge, Azzada Lylvieve (Redguard) and Michel Lylvieve (Breton) have a son, Clinton.
    • In Morthal, there was Laelette (Breton) and Thonnir (Nord) are married and have a son, Virkmund. Tragically, Laelette was turned into a vampire and has to be killed during Laid to Rest.
    • In Karthwasten, there are some hints that Lash gra-Dushnikh (Orc) and Ragnar (Nord) have a crush on one another.
• In the Hood: Most of the hoods in the game seem designed to invoke this, obscuring the wearer's face and hiding their eyes. The Dark Brotherhood cowl, interestingly, leaves the eyes exposed, even on the masked version.
• Intoxication Ensues: Following a certain drinking contest with a certain Daedric Prince.
• Inventory Management Puzzle: You are no longer unable to move if overencumbered. Instead, you simply move very slowly and (unless you have a specific perk) cannot fast travel while overencumbered. Like Oblivion, you can also still ride a horse if you're overencumbered. The encumbrance limit includes everything the player is wearing, unless they have either the Steed Stone blessing or a perk. You can store items indefinitely in any of the houses you can buy, and can store items in the inventory of your owned horses and/or followers, such as your Housecarls. You can put stuff in containers outside of your home, or drop them on the ground, but they will disappear after a time and can be picked up by NPCs. Active quest items do not count towards your encumberance.
• Invisibility:
  • This is one of the "Agent of Nocturnal" abilities granted to Nightingales. It is a special power that will render them invisible for two minutes, but can only be used once per day.
  • A variation occurs when encountering Falmer. Because they are completely blind and rely on sound to hear, having the Muffle enchantment on your gear or the Muffle spell makes it possible to walk straight in front of them without being "seen" at all.
• Invisible Monsters: A handful of creatures make use of the Invisibility spell, usually to cover their retreat when they're critically injured or hopelessly outmatched by their opponent(s). Spriggans and high-level vampires are the most notorious examples. Their invisibility isn't a direct threat because it has a fairly short duration and breaks the moment they attack. What makes it annyoing is their habit to heal themselves and/or recover lots of magicka while cloaked, so when they finally do show up again for another go at your Player Character, they're often back at full strength from near-death. Thankfully, this type of invisibility is far from perfect, allowing observant players to keep track of the target and hunt it down before it can retaliate.
• Invisible to Normals:
  • Glowing golden eyes are a trait of Vampires (as revealed in the Dawnguard DLC. It's implied that this is a trait which is Invisible To Normals, and can only be seen by certain other supernatural beings (such as the Dragonborn, who has a draconic Aedric soul).
  • Despite anyone being capable of reading the Dragon-Language inscriptions on Word Walls, the Nordic denizens of Skyrim have puzzled for millennia over what their true function was. It's implied that only the Dragonborn is capable of perceiving the hidden Words of Power written upon them.
  • When the Dragonborn or his/her companions successfully sneak, they are able to pass right under the noses of NPCs without being seen. On the other hand, when an NPC sneaks around the Dragonborn, he/she always sees them even if they're implied to be invisible to everyone else, leading to awkward moments in which a rogue character leaves a conversation with the Dragonborn and sneaks away... clearly visible as they crouch-walk around the corner. Why? Well, Uriel Septim VII did say in Oblivion that those with the Dragon Blood "see more than lesser men".
• Invisible Wall: Skyrim is expansive, however there are roads leading "out" and you'll hit exactly this. Same with out in the ocean if you try to swim away from Skyrim. For the most part, well-placed mountains keep you in check.
• Invulnerable Civilians: Averted, like in all Bethesda RPGs. Towns are part of the world map, and are all potentially subject to random monster attacks. This mostly manifests as dragon attacks. Unlike Fallout 3, though, monster spawn points no longer occur inside or near the towns themselves, except for those very rare instances of dragons attacking a walled city, or vampire attacks after dark if you've installed Dawnguard. So it's less likely for a Deathclaw to wander into town and murder everyone (although some of the smaller settlements do have monster spawn points very close by and are therefore potentially subject to monster attack). And of course, you can always flee to a settlement having one or multiple enemies follow you.
• Ironic Nickname:
  • Laila Law-Giver, the Jarl of the biggest Wretched Hive in the province. An almost tragic case, as while she wants to be a fair and just lawmaker in her hold, she's so clueless and easily influenced that her authroity means nothing.
  • Grelod the Kind, the woman who threatens orphans with "extra" beatings.
  • Kesh the Clean, a Khajiit worshipper of Peryite, the Daedric Prince of pestilence and disease. On the other hand, currying favor from an eldritch god in charge of disease can be a good way to avoid getting sick...
  • Inversely, Susanna the Wicked, the Nord barmaid who is actually very sweet and one of the few Nords in Windhelm who sympathises with the Dunmer in the Grey Quarter. Unfortunately she proves Too Good for This Sinful Earth when she ends up the first victim of the Windhelm Killer.
• Irony:
  • The one and only school of magic that even the most magic-averse Nord warrior respects—Restoration—happens to be the one discipline that everybody of note in the College of Winterhold treats with various degrees of contempt. No wonder the College's attempts at improving their image don't get off the ground, given how insanely useful healing magic is for people that live in a world as harsh and deadly as Skyrim.
  • General Tullius is exasperated at Jarl Balgruuf's initial neutrality in the civil war, and chalks up his refusal to pick a side (preferably the Empire's side) to typical Nord stubbornenss. Yet once the issue is forced, it becomes clear that Balgruuf is perfectly alright with throwing in with the Imperials, and the person most strongly advocating the "wait and see" approach is Balgruuf's milquetoast Imperial stewart Proventus.
• Irrelevant Importance: A bug sometimes causes quest-related items to retain that status after the quest is completed. This is both good and bad: On the one hand, quest items are weightless. On the other hand, you can't get rid of them.
• Irrelevant Sidequest: The game continues this fine tradition in the Elder Scrolls series, and even does it one better by introducing Radiant Quests that give you mundane, infinitely repeatable tasks of all sorts (most are about killing something, though). They usually pay very little and have no impact on the larger story, but they work nicely to provide you with something to do after the hundreds of more elaborate quests have been exhausted. They also often send you to locations you haven't explored or even discovered yet, which is always welcome in a Wide-Open Sandbox as huge as Skyrim's.
• It Amused Me:
  • The only reason behind the mess you find yourself in during Sanguine's Daedric quest. "Your old Uncle Sanguine" invokes the trope practically by name when you talk to him at last.
  • Subverted by Sheogorath's quest. Initially it seems like the only reason he's in Pelagius's mind is to relax and have a little shared crazy, but his dialogue at the end of the quest implies he was there for a different reason.
  Sheogorath: "Pelagius Septim the Third. Once the mad emperor of Tamriel, now so boringly sane! I always knew he had it in him!"
• Item Crafting: The game adds the ability to forge your own weapons and armor for the first time. By possessing the required raw ingredients, as well as the requisite skill level and perks, it is possible to forge (or improve upon) weapons and armor that are much stronger than what you'd be able to find or loot at your level. Potion making and enchanting also remain.
• It Has Been an Honor: Ralof says this to Ulfric in the intro, when they're lining up to be beheaded.
• It's All Upstairs From Here: You have to ascend the Seven Thousand Steps, the path circling around the Throat of the World, tallest mountain in all of Tamriel, that can be seen in the distance from almost any point in Skyrim. Somewhat unusual as you have to climb the mountain near the beginning of the game to get your powers as The Chosen One. You'll have to return to the peak later in the story, but that time you can simply skip most of the ascend by fast traveling to the monastery just below the top.
• It Sucks to Be the Chosen One: Being the Dragonborn means every major cosmic power either wants to kill you, use you, or both. Daedric Prince Hermaeus Mora is particularly interested in Dragonborn, and arranges events that eventually force the Dragonborn to act as his new champion.
• It's Quiet… Too Quiet: When you travel cross-country, there's usually soft music in the background. When you enter a dangerous area with enemies lurking about, the music fades and there is a brief moment of silence before enemies engage you and the combat music starts playing. When playing a stealthy character this can raise the suspense of stalking and being stalked.
• It's Up to You: Averted in quests that give you assisting NPCs — you're perfectly free to sit back and watch them do your fighting for you (up to and including slaying a few dragons). For example, in the Civil War questline, your allies can and will take control of cities without you if you delay, although they will still act as if you were there and contributed to the war effort.

J

• Jackass Genie:
  • Clavicus Vile, Daedric prince of power and pacts, is once again an example of this, particularly during his quest, "A Daedra's Best Friend". Somebody wanted a cure for his daughter's lycanthropy? He gifted that guy an axe. A group of vampires want something to cure them of their undead misery? Somebody just happens to appear at the right time to slaughter them all. ("I couldn't have planned that better myself!") Somebody wants an end to the Civil War plaguing Skyrim? Do absolutely nothing and let the dragons kill both sides of the fight. Really, the only thing that keeps him honoring a deal at all instead of just killing everybody is Barbas, the manifestation of his conscience (and a major source of his Daedric power, without which he can only manifest around his physical statue - which, as he puts it, is forgotten deep in some backwater cave in the middle of nowhere).
  • This is also the case with the Ideal Masters in the Soul Cairn, seen in the Dawnguard DLC. Necromancers seek to bargain with them in an attempt to raise powerful souls, but more often than not the necromancers find themselves trapped in the Soul Cairn instead. For an example of another kind, the dragon Durnehviir made a deal with them to act as a guard for Valerica until she died. He's immortal, so this seems like a good deal. What they neglected to tell him is that she is too.
• Jedi Mind Trick:
  • Technically speaking, this is how Invisibility magic works (hence the reason Illusion magic generally does not work against atronachs or automatons, as they have no "mind" to affect), but most people don't care about these semantics.
  • Eola, a cultist for Namira, uses some form of this on Verulus to convince him that he's a guest of the cult and has been invited to dinner. Does not end well for him.
• Jerkass: A fair number of characters qualify, what with Fantastic Racism in such abundance. Rolff Stone-Fist, whom you meet upon first setting foot in Windhelm, certainly does — you know you're dealing with a Jerkass when their Establishing Character Moment is plain old Fantastic Racism. Fortunately, you can beat the crap out of him.
• Jerkass Gods:
  • The Daedric Princes again. In fact, Molag Bal's quest, while named "The House of Horrors," is anything but scary (unless you are really that afraid of the Forsworn) and mainly serves to show you how much of an asshole Molag Bal is (Logrolf is a jerk too). Mocking Molag Bal at the end is optional.
  • Boethiah makes no secret that she has low opinions on mortals, even her own worshippers. Her quest has you sacrificing one of your followers to prove your worth to her. Then she has you kill the rest of her followers at her shrine in a free for all fight, before going out to retrieve her deadric artifact.
• Jerkass Has a Point:
  • Although the Silver Hand is presented in a negative light throughout the game, as Sinding demonstrates, a werewolf who lacks control is a massive threat to the citizens of Skyrim. Odds are if they weren't so fanatic about destroying werewolves and left the Companions alone, they'd likely be much more successful.
  • On a similar note are the Blades. Given how dangerous and wicked a single dragon is, their fervor to exterminate then makes sense. The problem comes in when you realize they are going after reformed dragons too; though even then Paathurnax, himself a dragon, agrees most dragons should never be trusted and understands why the Blades desire his death.
  • General Tullius really should work on how he speaks with the Nords and be more respectful towards their culture, but his remarks that their Honor Before Reason ways cause a lot unnecessary trouble is not off the mark.
• Joke Item: The Wooden Sword from the Hearthfire DLC. Justified in that it's a toy, though it is funny when you beat a bandit to death with it. Still odd since you can give your children real daggers, even Daedric/dragonbone ones, as gifts. Dawnguard lets you dual wield a knife and fork.
• Journey to the Center of the Mind: Sheogorath's quest has you going into the mind of the deceased, murderously insane Emperor Pelagius Septim III. Sheogorath apparently finds it a lovely vacation spot, since he's been hanging out in there for about a decade.
• Jump Scare: You'll be treated to these on the regular.
  • Some dungeons feature giant spiders dropping from the ceiling. Have fun.
  • Can also happen in the various Dwemer ruins, when the various automatons burst out of the walls.
  • In the Inner Sanctum of the Chapel of Auri-El in Dawnguard, you'll find frozen-solid Falmer. Many of them are holding bits of loot. Grab some and see what happens.
  • Sometimes in the wilderness, Sabre Cats will jump at you from behind, and oh lord do they scare you.
  • This can also happen in a harmless fashion if you're a little too focused on what's going on. You'll be out in the world, moving in a stealthy fashion, and hear something moving. You spin around, but no red dots pop up to indicate the presence of an enemy, which may make you feel like you're just paranoid. Suddenly, a large creature bursts out of the nearby brush to startle you... oh, by the Nine, it's just a deer!
  • Some of the gargoyles in the Dawnguard quest will come to life and attack you when you get close, and they do so very loudly.
  • And if you play Skryrim VR, it's got a little more punch.
• Just Add Water:
  • Alchemy allows you to somehow combine, say, a mudcrab's claw with a pile of fire salts, and get a potion of Resist Fire. Where you get the bottles for all these crafted potions, or exactly how you combine the ingredients, is never explained.
  • With Smithing, the crafting components needed to craft weapons and armor usually makes sense. Leather strips are needed for nearly all armor and weapons (binding and grips), some need iron ingots for fasteners or other structural support, and the main crafting material is usually required in a larger quantity for physically larger items (crafting a greatsword needs more ingots than a dagger, and so forth). Where it falls apart is the weight of the components. You can take a five-pound animal pelt, craft four units of two-pound leather sheets from it, craft one of them into four 0.1 pound leather strips, then use three of those leather strips with five one-pound iron ingots to craft a 30-pound suit of iron armor. While it usually makes sense for the crafted item to weigh less than its components due to waste, in Skyrim they'll more often than not weigh more than their components, which doesn't make sense no matter how you look at it.
• Just Between You and Me: During the "Forsworn Conspiracy" quest, your investigation leads you to a man who will gladly explain all the sinister details of said conspiracy. When you point out his self-incrimination, he reveals that his servants are Forsworn agents who plan to kill you at the end of the conversation (not that you should be surprised, since they pulled a similar stunt when you were talking to the last guy).
• Justified Tutorial:
  • You'll be given quite a few of them in rapid succession during the opening, but they are broken up into logical portions. Shortly after the dragon interrupts your execution by roasting the garrison, you're ordered to run for it (movement tutorial), followed by jumping off a ruined tower into a nearby inn (jump tutorial). You run inside the keep with a companion who tells you to arm yourself (inventory tutorial), you fight off some hostile enemies in the basement of the keep (combat tutorial), you find a storeroom and search it for potions (looting tutorial), you see some goodies locked inside a cage in the torture chamber (lockpick tutorial), and near the end of the caves leading out there's a sleeping bear you can either sneak past or stealth-attack with a bow (sneaking and/or bow tutorial).
  • After making good your escape, you can follow your cohort (either one of the two you can side with) to the village of Riverwood; along the way you can stop at the Guardian Stones, where you get a brief overview in how Standing Stone blessings work. Once you reach Riverwood, the local Blacksmith will offer to teach you some basic metalworking skills if you ask if he needs any help (Smithing tutorial). Failing that, the smith in Whiterun walks you through the process step-by-step. If you split up with you cohort and head to Falkreath (another nearby settlement, but in the opposite direction to Riverwood/Whiterun) you can get the smithing tutorial with its local blacksmith as well.
  • You can also get tutorials for alchemy, archery, and enchanting from various NPCs specialized in these disciplines.
  • After defeating your first dragon, you're asked to use your shout to prove that you are Dragonborn. You cannot progress farther in the quest until you do this, and until you finish the quest you cannot get additional shouts.

K

• Kamehame Hadoken: Combining two of the same Destruction spells into one overcharged shot, right down to the pose. Lightning Storm and Incinerate especially invoke the Trope Namers in performance. And this sound mod even adds a very hammy attack call that literally invokes the trope.
• Kangaroo Court:
  • In the opening, the Imperial Captain orders your execution even though you aren't on the convicted list. This alone gives the player plenty of motive to side against the Empire. Note that in this case, there isn't even a "court" involved; the Empire is executing everyone involved (be they Stormcloak, random horse thieves caught in the cordon, or roaming Dovahkiin) without bothering with a trial.
  • Should you choose to follow Hadvar, during the journey back to Riverwood, he will state that he believes your aid in helping him escape Helgen alive is more than enough to earn you a pardon, despite his belief that you were still wrongfully arrested in the first place, and even vows to straighten the matter out with General Tullius and vouch on your behalf if you decide to join the Imperial Legion.
• Karma Houdini:
  • The Black-Briar family. Their head, Maven, is connected to the Thieves' Guild, the Dark Brotherhood and the Empire, and runs a powerful mead-brewing plant. She's so rich and powerful that she's untouchable by authorities, and the Thieves' Guild mentions that nothing happens in Riften without her express consent. If you side with the Empire, she gets named Jarl after they conquer the city, and she even says the title is a formality and that she's always been the one running the city. Riften is a Wretched Hive, since even the city guard are in Maven's pocket. The Houdini part is that she's marked as essential, so you can't kill her, and there's no quest to bring her to justice. The worst thing you can do to her is steal a horse, and she genuinely doesn't care about that; if you choose to rat out the man who asked you steal it, she'll tell you to go on with the theft. Of course, destroying the Dark Brotherhood under her nose and becoming Thane will make her begrudgingly respect you as she hands you the title of Thane of Riften (which is seen as a Fate Worse than Death).
  • The Thieves' Guild is in full decline in Skyrim and, without the player's intervention, their bad luck will eventually do them in. So if you destroy the Dark Brotherhood, win the war for the Stormcloaks, and do not join the Thieves' Guild, well... It's only a matter of time before Maven's influence completely crumbles.
  • The rest of her family isn't as horrible but are still carrying out her will. Special note, though, goes to Sibbi, who is in prison for a measly eight months because he killed his fiancée's brother. Why? The siblings found out he was having an affair and confronted him about it. Then when you visit him in his nicely furnished jail cell, he tries to hire you to find his fiancée so that he can kill her too. You can send his men on a wild goose chase, keep him in the dark about this, or shoot him through the bars of his cell when you've finished his quest and he's no longer essential.
  • Thonar Silver-Blood, who is responsible for all the events of the "Forsworn Conspiracy" quest, gets off scot-free if you choose not to side with Madanach in escaping. However, you can condemn him to a particularly delicious Karmic Death. After the quest, he is no longer essential, so you can cast a Frenzy spell on him and let the city guards, whom he's got in his pocket, kill him.
  • Orc sisters Bolag and Yatul from the orc stronghold of Narzulbur have been murdering their nephew's wives so that they can retain their influence over him. While there was originally a quest involving finding a wife for the chief, which would have presumably led to the discovery of the murders perpetrated by the sisters, the quest was scrapped so there is no way to stop them or tell the truth about them to the chief and his children.
• Karmic Death:
  • If you go with Ralof, the first weapon you get is an axe... and the first NPC you get to fight and kill is the Imperial captain who insisted on your execution via beheading.
  • Many dungeons have Apocalyptic Logs or ghostly visions that let you see the fate of the adventurers who preceded you. In many cases, one or more members of the group chose to betray their fellows, only to die themselves.
  • Arondil, the necromancer of Yngvild who murdered Dawnstar's milkmaids so he could have a ghostly harem, can possibly fall victim to this courtesy of your actions. Sneaking into his quarters undetected and taking the soul gem he keeps next to his throne will break his control of the spirits, causing them to rip him to shreds.
  • Ulfric Stormcloak used a Dragon Shout to kill High King Torygg in the backstory. If you side with the Imperial Legion, you are given an opportunity to kill him. While Tullius gives you his sword to do the deed, you are perfectly free to shout Ulfric to death if you wish. Alternatively, you can refuse his final request to "let the Dragonborn do it," which is karmic in its own way.
  • Inversely to the above, Tullius tried to have both you and Ulfric executed. If you side with the Stormcloaks, either you or Ulfric execute him at the end of the campaign.
  • Alduin himself. By going on a murderous rampage at the beginning of the game, he freed the one person capable of defeating him.
  • Lord Harkon sacrified a lot of innocents to Molag Bal to obtain his vampiric powers, and nothing stops you from killing him with the Mace of Molag Bal in the end of the Dawnguard questline.
  • Vyrthur, believing Auri-el abandoned him, created a prophecy to remove Auri-el's influence from the world by blacking out the sun using the god's bow in combination with the blood of a pure-blooded vampire. He ultimately gets killed by either Serana (one of the pure-blooded vampires his prophecy needed) or the Dragonborn (a creation of Akatosh - the non-Elven variant of Auri-el).
• Karmic Jackpot: If you give money to a beggar, you gain a buff called "The Gift of Charity", which boosts your barter skill for 12 in-game hours, saving you far more than that coin (or bottle of mead) that you just gave away. Then for extra Video Game Caring Potential, you gain the buff when you give your adopted kid(s) a present.
• Katanas Are Just Better: Dragonbane is an Akaviri katana which is the best weapon against dragons (+40 damage), with a power that scales depending on the level you find it at, reaching Daedric stats at high levels. The Ebony Blade, a legendary Daedric artifact weapon, can be powered up and becomes one of the strongest weapons in the game. It is a two-handed katana.
• Keystone Army: Any minions that are summoned or reanimated with the Conjuration school die immediately upon their creator being killed. Mikrul Gauldurson, a named Draugr boss, is aided by a variety of non-boss draugr. Kill him before the others, and they all drop on the spot. If you're really fast with a powerful bow, you can actually kill him before he even gets the chance to summon them; this will result in several draugr falling out of their tombs, already dead.
• Kiai: The Shouts are generally this along with Calling Your Attacks. Both the player character and NPC also do this when performing power attacks. Most notably, Dremoras always do it in over the top manner. The subtitles even agree with it. Rrrraaaarrggghhh!
• Kick the Dog:
  • A quick glance around the bases of the Silver Hand will clue you in that they don't just hunt werewolves; they capture and torture them, then display their remains as trophies. They also seem to have a hatred for normal wolves as well, as many can be found gruesomely slain in their bases.
  • Upon first walking into Honorhall Orphanage (whether on the mission to kill Grelod the Kind or merely wandering in to see the place), you can hear the horrible old lady promise extra beatings to those who "shirk their duties", shortly before telling them that they can forget about ever being adopted. And then she expects them to tell her they love her.
  • Many of the Daedric quests present opportunities to do this yourself, such as torturing a priest of Boethiah into submission (Molag Bal), luring another priest into a cannibal den so that you and the other cannibals can feast upon him (Namira), luring a follower to the Pillar of Sacrifice so he or she can be sacrificed and used as a conduit (Boethiah), or murdering ten of your closest allies to power up an evil katana (Mephala).
  • Hermaeus Mora kicks the dog in a big way during the second to last quest of the Dragonborn DLC's storyline by killing Storn Crag-Strider.
• Kidnapped While Sleeping: This is how the Dragonborn may be drafted into the Dark Brotherhood. Should they kill Grelod the Kind after meeting with Aventus Aretino, or kill her and then interact with the child, they will find themselves stolen from their bed the next time they go to sleep. The local chapter of Murder, Inc. does not take kindly to Kill Steal.
• Kill It with Fire:
  • Justified. Of the Fire, Ice, Lightning spells that make up the Destruction school of magic, fire is arguably the most useful of them. Fire damage is the cheapest of the three elements to cast, and can cause 10% afterburn damage after the initial hit. Being that Skyrim is a far northern land, many types of enemy (including trolls, vampires, and draugr) have no special resistance to or are weak to fire, and draugr are some of the most common enemy types found in every tomb. As well, many dungeons come with oil slicks that can be set alight with spells or by looking for and knocking down a lantern, and they burn for a while and do good damage. All in all, fire will probably be your most used type of elemental attack.
  • The Dragonborn expansion offers an unpleasant surprise for fire-reliant players, as the majority of humanoid enemies are now Dark Elves, all of whom are 50% resistant to fire. Additionally, fire has no effect on Ash Spawn or the entirely flame-immune Burnt Spriggans.
• Kill It with Ice: Ice destruction spells, doing damage, slowing foes, and depleting the target's stamina. Unfortunately, this can be a little Awesome, but Impractical as a mainstay offensive spell, since undead (a common enemy type) are resistant to cold, as are Nords (who are understandably over-represented in the region of Skyrim), leaving only a certain subset of enemies vulnerable to it. It will come in handy during Dragonborn, though, against those creatures who can resist fire.
• Kill Sat: The Dawnguard expansion features Auriel's bow, a weapon forged by a god. Whenever this weapon is used to fire Sun-Hallowed Elven Arrows directly at the Sun, cue the magical equivalent of a powerful Kill Sat being unleashed on nearby enemies.
• Kill Steal:
  • The Dark Brotherhood contacts you after you take on a mission in their name. The contractor was performing a ritual to summon them, but you got there first. Even if you just kill the intended victim without ever speaking with the contractor (and thus have no in-story knowledge of the Brotherhood's connection), they will still have a beef with you for stealing the contract; however, they will only act on that beef if you speak to the contractor after the fact, and tell him what you did.^note This is only the case with that specific kill. If you kill anyone else for whom they've received a contract, such as Narfi or Alain Dufont, they don't bother you at all. Presumably this is either because you don't discuss the contracts with the people who ordered them, and thus the Brotherhood realizes that you didn't steal the kill intentionally, or else because you kill them before anyone does the Black Sacrament to have them killed, and thus the Brotherhood has no involvement.
  • In the expansion Dragonborn, once you've awoken the Arc Villain Miraak (also a Dragonborn), he may teleport in and absorb the soul of any dragon you kill. You get them back when you defeat him at the end of the main questline.
• Kill the Ones You Love: The Daedric Prince Mephala's artifact is the Ebony Blade, a two-handed katana with gold and red markings in it. In order for the Dragonborn to strengthen it 10 close friends must be sacrificed to it. At full strength, it will absorb health for 30 points each hit. Granted, you don't have to kill "good" people with it; 3 cannibals, a Thalmor agent, and a few drunks can be substituted for any people you actually like. You just need to do a few favors for them and then you can kill them.
• Killed Mid-Sentence: The visiting princess can be killed while giving speech on a parapet, either by falling stone gargoyle, arrow, spell, or... Suplex Finisher.
• Killed Offscreen:
  • An unfortunate possibility with Hearthfire. Depending on which followers you recruit to serve as stewards of your custom-built houses, you may return to the property following a lengthy absence and find your steward was killed while you were gone by someone/something that attacked your home. This is particularly possible at Windstad Manor, situated on the edge of Morthal's swamp. You can avert this by making your steward one of the followers who are flagged as protected, meaning they will not die normally unless a deathblow hits them while they're down. (Only certain followers are eligible to become stewards, which can make it tricky to pick one who will survive, but the wikis can help with this.)
  • If you're playing through the Dark Brotherhood questline, then this happens to most of the Brotherhood, with only Nazir, Babette, and Cicero surviving, and you witness the last moments of Arnbjorn and Astrid before they die too.
  • During the Companions questline, both Skjor and Kodlak are killed offscreen - the former after he chases after the Silver Hand, and the latter when the Silver Hand enter Whiterun and attack Jorrvaskr. The latter will explicitly happen while you are away, to ensure that it happens offscreen.
  • During the College of Winterhold questline, Savos Aren and Mirabelle are killed while trying to contain the power of the Eye of Magnus.
• King of Thieves: Mercer Frey in his position as leader of the Skyrim Thieves' Guild. It turns out he murdered the previous Guildmaster Gallus and took over the position, and is determined to wipe out the only witness before leaving the rest of the Guild to rot while he makes off with all their treasure. Should you manage to confront and kill him, you will become the new Guildmaster, provided you have completed all Fence quests for the Thieves' Guild.
• Kleptomaniac Hero: Stealth-oriented players will almost definitely turn into these. The player's tendency to steal everything that isn't nailed down and then steal the nails is lampshaded several times through the Thieves' Guild questline.
• Klingon Promotion:
  • Stronghold Orcs choose their leaders this way. In fact, when you visit one Orc chieftain, he expounds that he got his position by challenging his father in open combat. He's waiting for the day that one of his sons will do the same, and succeed. An orc Wise-Woman adds that Malacath firmly believes in this.
  • If you join the Volkihar Vampires in Dawnguard, you end up taking over the clan by slaying Harkon.
• Klingon Scientists Get No Respect:
  • Nord mages. Onmund at the College and Farengar Secret-Fire in the Whiterun court have to put up with this attitude. It wasn't always this way; if you declare yourself the Archmage to Tsun when you meet him in Sovngarde, Tsun laments that Nords have lost the respect their forefathers had for the "clever craft". It is implied that Nords took a distrustful stance against magic after the Oblivion Crisis, which they blame on mages.
  • Neloth in Dragonborn isn't impressed if you tell him you are head of the College of Winterhold. He does find it impressive that you're the one who found the Eye of Magnus, though. A few more decades of dedication to magical study, and you might be qualified to become his apprentice.
  • Late in the main questline, you enter Sovngarde, and among the old heroes are several men and women wearing what are obviously mage robes. One of them is even wearing the College of Winterhold's Archmage vestments!
  • A variation with the Thalmor: Since their ruling class is composed of scholars and mages, the basic soldier gets zero respect. At the Thalmor Embassy, you can hear two guards talking about their mages' arrival - they hope that a dragon will eat them.
• Knee-capping: Try counting how many guards used to be adventurers like you, then took an arrow in the knee.
• Knight Templar: Several examples:
  • The Guard Captain in the opening orders your execution, despite your name not being on the list, purely on the basis that you were captured with the Stormcloaks; the other soldiers seem to think it's a bad idea, but can't do much about it.
  • The Silver Hand: Yes, werewolves can be a menace, but they wish to exterminate every single one, and are not above torturing and skinning captured ones. In practice, they're more like glorified bandits with a hatred of werewolves. They also turn this disgust against regular wolves.
  • The Vigilants of Stendarr are a subversion. While they sound like they're an example of this, in truth they ignore worshipers of non-threatening Daedra (like Orcs worshiping Malacath), will only attack werewolves and vampires if they're seen in monstrous form or attacking innocents, and will only attack the player if they refuse to hand over any Daedric artifacts they're carrying. And due to a bug, they won't even do that.
  • Meridia, one of the least evil of the Daedric Princes, is a hardcore undead hater and will task you with slaughtering vampires and undead. That said, she is a Daedric Prince, so don't forget that Meridia has her own unfathomable agenda, and she was also behind the powers of many of the Ayleid sorcerer-kings and their countless atrocities.
• Knockback:
  • A power attack will cause an opponent to stagger.
  • The Unrelenting Force shout has this effect. One word of the shout will stagger an enemy. Two words will cause them to fall to their knees. A full three-word shout releases a projectile that ragdolls enemies and sends them flying several dozen feet through the air.
  • One of the higher tier archery abilities, Power Draw, introduces knockback to arrows, half the time. Needless to say, the ability to stun an opponent at range over and over again is almost game-breaking. The only reason it isn't is because it only affects creatures that are about as big as the player; dragons, for example, don't care about knockback at all.
• Knockback Evasion: Some very high-level opponents can use the "Unrelenting Force" Shout to send you flying, just as you can do it to them. However, any of the "Ward" spells can block the Shout. (So can the shield "Spellbreaker," which you get as a reward for completing Peryite's daedric questline.) You just need a few seconds to prepare...
• Know When to Fold 'Em: The Conjuration Master quest requires you to summon an unbound Dremora and force it to retrieve a Sigil Stone. It cannot be conventionally killed, so you accomplish this by summoning it, kicking its ass, resummoning it, then kicking its ass again until it finally gives up and decides to placate you.

L

• Lampshade Hanging:
  • Of the Soft Water ever so common in games. The journal of Sild the Warlock notes that "Putting a foot or two of water [in a cage below a trapdoor] didn't help either. In fact, it may actually be making things worse." If the player manages to avoid the trap and sneak below, an unwary bandit falls through and dies on impact with the water. Sild's reaction is kind of hilarious:
    "Well, that's disappointing."
  • Katria, in the quest "Lost to the Ages" in the Dawnguard expansion, even remarks that she might have survived her fatal fall if she had just been a little further to the side; unfortunately, she completely missed the river and landed on an outcropping instead.
• Language of Magic: The Dragon language. "Dragon Shouts" are the highlight of both the game and of your character, the Dragonborn. In the franchise's expansive lore, it's also known as the Thu'um, the power of the Voice. A variety of alternative magical effects are invoked by shouting words in the ancient Dragon language; to use a computing metaphor, you're using root-level commands to reality to achieve these effects. Only the first word is needed to get the basic effect of a Shout, but each successive word increases its potency.
• Large Ham: The priest of Talos at Whiterun, who spends the whole day preaching to the town and Chewing the Scenery. It's the same speech on a continuous, very hammy loop.
  • Dremora lords too. If you have the perk to summon two of them, you better be ready for a hamfest.
  • Subverted by General Tullius. Complete the Imperial Legion quest and he will give a rousing speech to his troops celebrating their victory, then mutter, "I hate giving speeches."
  • Esbern in the trailer, particularly when he slips into Trrrilling Rrrs. "And when the truth finally dawns... it dawns in FIYAAAH!"
  • Like many modern representations, Dragons are creatures of ham, prone to punctuating for emphasis.
  • And just like he was in Oblivion, Lucien Lachance's spectral form.
  • You get to be one when you impersonate the Gourmet for the Emperor's assassination. "Do not question the Gourmet!"
• Laser-Guided Karma:
  • The sidequest villain Arondil, who is a Necromancer and a necrophile. After being kicked out of Dawnstar for lusting after women there, he decided to retreat to the tomb of Yngvild and start kidnapping women, murdering them, and raising them from the dead with magic so he could keep them as undead Sex Slaves. If you've been to Rannveig's Fast previously and encountered the Apologetic Attacker ghosts there, you know that ghosts are fully conscious but unable to control their actions. One of the best ways the player can dispose of him is, instead of confronting him directly, to simply run back to his chamber and remove the soul gem controlling the ghostly women — doing this causes them to go berserk and tear him to shreds.
  • Between Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim, the Dunmer (Dark Elf) people get hit with this. The post-Red Year invasion of Morrowind by the Argonians is a result of the Dunmer's own centuries of raiding Black Marsh for slaves. Admitted by a member of House Telvanni in a posthumous letter to his son:
    Lymdrenn Telvanni: The irony of our demise glows brighter than Masser on the summer solstice. We brought this upon ourselves; the Argonians simply answering a rallying cry incited by a millennia of suffrage imposed by my kind.
• Last Chance Hit Point: Followers (such as mercenaries and housecarls), when receiving what would normally be a fatal blow, will instead fall to the ground and admit defeat; their attacker will then ignore them until their HP recharges and they stand back up to continue fighting. They're not immune to getting killed, however; if the player lands any hits on them while they're down (e.g. by accident - be careful with those Fireball spells), it will kill them (unless they're a quest-essential character).
• Last Disc Magic: The Amulet of Articulation, a powerful necklace that allows the wearer to pass nearly any persuasion check in the game, can only be obtained by finishing the Thieves Guild questline and becoming the leader of the guild. Unfortunately, most of the persuasion checks that are the most difficult and useful to pass occur during the course of the Thieves Guild questline, and thus you get the amulet just far too late for it come in handy.
• Last of His Kind:
  • The prophecy of the main game's plot asserts that the player character is the last Dovahkiin who will ever be born.
  • The Dawnguard DLC introduces Knight-Paladin Gelebor, who is one of the last, if not the last, of the Snow Elves - which is what the Falmer were before they became the monsters you encounter frequently in Dwemer ruins and caves. He was guarding a sacred place along with a few other surviving Snow Elves, and since they were rather isolated, it took some time for them to hear about the Snow Elf/Nord conflict that drove the former underground. He then tells you that the Falmer, whom he calls "the Betrayed," attacked the temple and overwhelmed them with their sheer numbers. His brother later states that he brought on the attack, rather than being turned by them. Gelebor says that the Falmer are getting smarter, and one day they may become like the Snow Elves again. Being immortal, he might even see it happen.
  • By the events of the game Delphine and Esbern are the last surviving members of the Blades; however, three new members can be recruited in the questline "Rebuilding the Blades."
• Last-Minute Reprieve: The very beginning of the game has the player captured by Imperial Soldiers, accused of being a spy by their officer, and about to be executed via beheading. Alduin shows up while their head is on the chopping block and panic ensues. The head officer dies in the carnage and his second in command lets the player character go out of sympathy.
• Last Stand: In Tolvald's Cave, if you're doing the quest to retrieve Barenziah's crown, you can find a Dunmer caravan that conducted one of these. You can find their three skeletons, along with several dead Chaurus and Falmer skeletons.
• Late to the Tragedy: Many side-missions and places you can find in the overworld and certain dungeons fully engage in this, and you'll often find the bodies of hapless men, mer, or beastfolk who got on the wrong side of some monster or dangerous animal in the wilderness, or the smoking ruins of a house where you'll find the inhabitants have been murdered by bandits. One mission in particular is starts when you walk into a lighthouse in the mountains, where you find the body of a woman and a chaurus and are immediately given the quest prompt to find out what happened. Another occurs when you happen upon an archaeological expedition into a dwarven ruin and find the bodies of the expedition littered through the whole dungeon as you slowly learn what transpired there.
• Lava Is Boiling Kool-Aid: The Aetherium Forge, added with the Dawnguard DLC, has a large lava pool that acts just like water except for its unsurprisingly high fire damage on contact. You can even walk on it with the water-walking boots from Dragonborn.
• Lava Pit: In the Dawnguard DLC, one of the side missions called "Lost to the Ages" involves the Dragonborn helping the disembodied spirit of an adventurer, Katria complete her life's work in discovering the Aetherium Forge, an ancient site of the Dwemer race said to be capable of forging great artifacts. After restoring the crest needed to enter the Forge, the two discover it's built over an inactive magma chamber. What's worse, however is what's inside the lava, as they soon learn when the resident guardian of the forge, a unique Dwarven Centurion called the Forgemaster, comes out to fight. And due to its decades-long "slumber" inside the burning hot lake, it's constantly glowing and capable of shooting a stream of fire as opposed to the typical Centurion's steam attack.
• Leeroy Jenkins:
  • Most NPCs - which is the primary reason that Vampire (if you've got Dawnguard installed) and Dragon attacks inside Hold cities are problematic; anyone within range will drop what they're doing and run headlong into a level 81 enemy even when they themselves are capped significantly lower, including potential quest-givers and merchants. PC, Xbox One, and PS4 gamers do at least have the option to install a mod that gets the townsfolk to run for cover rather than joining the fray.
  • A more specific example would be the personal bards, who can be hired for your homesteads in Hearthfire. If they happen to be outside when bandits raid, they will immediately rush to help defend your property alongside your steward and/or housecarl... despite being completely unarmed and wearing regular clothing. If they die (which is very likely), they can't be replaced, as the DLC has exactly one specific bard assigned to each of the three homesteads.
• Lethal Chef: Part of a Dark Brotherhood quest has the player become this to kill the Emperor.
• Lethal Joke Item:
  • The Wabbajack, obtained from Sheogorath, casts a Random Effect Spell on targets. Sure, it might heal an almost-dead enemy or turn a harmless Mudcrab into an angry Dremora, but most of its effects are detrimental to the target, ranging from powerful Destruction spells to turning them into harmless critters. There's also a chance of changing the target into a sweetroll or a shower of coins, or just making them drop dead on the spot. Finally, the Wabbajack is surprisingly reliable against Dragons as it will only cast Destruction spells against them, which also happen to ignore all kinds of resistances.
  • Wooden Plate. No, really. Not for combat, but for gameplay. This little everyday item can be used to skip some dungeons by placing it on a wall and using Whirlwind Sprint to glitch through walls or gates that required long-trekking, blocked by rubble, or unfortunate glitches.
  • Forks and knives are usually virtually worthless, but occasionally you can find versions that are wieldable. These wieldable forks and knives have a base damage of one, cannot be improved at a grindstone, and do not benefit from any weapons skills... but they can be enchanted, which given a certain developer oversight that allows the player to use alchemy and enchanting to create enchantments that deal hundreds or even thousands of damage...
• Leave No Witnesses: Used as a game mechanic. If you commit a crime within sight of a law-abiding citizen or guard and get a bounty added to your head, you can remove the bounty by killing that person. As long as no one else witnesses either crime, you get a message saying the bounty has been cleared because you killed the last witness.
• Left Hanging: The political plotline is considered by both leaders to be a mere distraction before the inevitable second Great War, but that story peters out after one side wins the civil war.
• Lethal Lava Land: The Dawnguard DLC has the Aetherium Forge, which is one of these in miniature. It's a single cave whose far side is flooded with magma. You can swim in it by either using the Become Ethereal shout or by increasing your fire resistance as high as you can and mainlining healing potions the whole way. There's an island with a chest against the far wall. There are also two side passages nearer to the forge that you need to open gates while swimming in the lava to access, leaving you open for some very rapid Damage Over Time if you're just relying on the shout.
• Let's Fight Like Gentlemen: Fair hand-to-hand brawling is a specific combat mechanic in this game. Many towns contain someone looking to brawl with you if you put up a wager, always with the rules of no weapons or magic, just fists. Of course, you can boost your unarmed combat damage in a number of ways without technically cheating, turning the fight into a Curb-Stomp Battle. You can also heal yourself.
• Let's You and Him Fight:
  • A number of random world encounters include members of two opposing factions battling one another (Stormcloak rebels vs. Imperial soldiers, Stormcloaks soldiers vs. Thalmor justicars, Vigilants of Stendarr vs. Vampires/Necromancers/Daedra worshipers, etc.). Depending on your allegiances, you can aid one side against the other, or simply sit back and slaughter the weakened winning group.
  • In a storyline-driven example, crossing over with Enemy Civil War, it's revealed that the Thalmor-led Aldmeri Dominion have been carefully manipulating the Stormcloaks and Empire into a war with one another, as part of a grander plot to weaken them both for an inevitable Second Great War, and eventually, exterminate all of mankind as part of an even greater plot to unmake the mortal world.
• Let Us Never Speak of This Again: Said word for word in the College of Winterhold, when an experiment with another student's spell turns the player into a string of different animals — after turning them green the first round.
• Level Cap: Prior to the addition of "Legendary Skills", your main character's level would max out at approximately level 81... not because your level actually caps there, but because getting there requires mastering all of your skills to the maximum value of 100. Making a skill Legendary resets the skill so that it can continue contributing to your character level again, meaning that you can level your skills indefinitely.
• Level Editor: Creation Kit, the official modding kit, allows you to edit the landscapes, characters and weapon stats. You can shape the entirety of Skyrim into a world as you desire, allowing PC players to play god.
• Level Grinding: As is tradition with the series, skills (and thus levels) can be increased by using them repeatedly, even if it means doing tedious repetitive tasks for minuscule increases.
• Level in Boss Clothing: Hag's End is the third and last part of the Deepwood Redoubt dungeon. While the game tends to blur the line between regular enemies and bosses, the Hagraven is the strongest enemy in Hag's End. She teleports deeper into the ruins each time you take out a quarter of her health, leaving you to fight your way through the witches that inhabit the place and otherwise make your way through the dungeon. You even get a new word of power before the last part of the battle, which takes you back outside where she summons a pair of ice wraiths to back her up and spams destruction magic until you can get to her and shave off the last of her health.
• Level of Tedious Enemies: Lake Ilinalta in Falkreath Hold has the game's highest population of slaughterfish. Being fish, they live in the water. But thanks to the game's limitations in water, you cannot attack, cast spells, or otherwise do anything to harm them while swimming. You have to lure them to knee-deep water to kill them. And if you want to just ignore them, you can't fast-travel away while one's nearby.
• Level Scaling: Done much more subtly than it was in Oblivion, and the system was much better received for it:
  • Generally speaking, when you first arrive at an area, the game notes your character's level at that time and scales everything in the area to match. Random Encounters, on the other hand, are scaled to your level at time of encounter (which can be bad news for inhabitants of Riverwood or Whiterun, two of the first settlements you're likely to visit, should they get attacked by wandering dragons, brigands, or vampires in the late game). One thing that makes it easier in Skyrim than it was in Oblivion is the elimination of stats beyond Health, Magicka, and Stamina; you can no longer gimp yourself by failing to level up the right skills as you go, although perk selection can still leave you at something of a disadvantage if you opt for noncombat perks early on.
  • Each family of enemy (bandit, vampire, etc.) has a range of 4-5 subtypes, each with its own range of levels to which it can be scaled; so as your character reaches certain level thresholds, you will start to encounter the higher types of that enemy and more often. For example, if you raid a Nordic barrow at level 5 you'll generally encounter just "Draugr" and the occasional "Restless Draugr", but at level 50 you'll be fending off "Draugr Scourges" and "Draugr Deathlords" with the same regularity with the occasional weaker "Restless" sprinkled in.
  • It's worth noting that everyone and everything has a level bracket with minimum and maximum levels; this is why a Sabre Cat is so dangerous at low levels, as it cannot spawn lower than level five, but it also becomes an annoyance later because it has a maximum level of 11. Meanwhile Followers (housecarls, etc.) scale to match the player's level up to level 50 regardless of when they were met or hired. Bosses such as Alduin are always five levels higher than the player.
• Level-Up at Intimacy 5: Getting married has a number of benefits:
  • Your spouse will open up a shop to keep themselves occupied while you're away, and you get a cut of the profits (approximately 100 gold per every 24 hours). You can also buy and sell items from your spouse as you would a regular merchant.
  • Once per day your spouse can prepare a homemade meal for you that increases the rate of health, magicka, and stamina regeneration.
  • Sleeping in the same house as your spouse gives you a temporary buff called "Lover's Comfort" that increases the rate of skill-learning by 15% for eight hours.
• Level-Up Fill-Up: But only when you go into the Skills screen and choose an attribute to increase. It can be to your advantage to ignore a level-up early in a fight, and then process it later on when you're in rough shape (especially if you're out of healing spells and potions).
• Light and Mirrors Puzzle:
  • The "Discerning the Transmundane" quest. There is a "challenge" in which you must orient a set of lenses to shine light on a massive dwarven sphere to gain access to an Elder Scroll, but in fact all you have to do is press the leftmost button repeatedly until the next one to the left becomes usable, and rinse and repeat until you are on the last button.
  • There's a Dwemer ruin where you need to focus multiple beams of light onto a central object. This is done by using the two most basic fire and frost spells to expand or contract the focusing crystals. You can also use the more advanced spells, but these will realign the beams to a much stronger degree, making the puzzle nearly impossible to figure out, and it can be quite a challenge even if approached the intended way.
• Light 'em Up: The Candlelight and Magelight spells. The Dawnguard DLC adds the Vampire's Bane and Stendarr's Aura spells. Dawnguard also adds two weapons which have this effect. The Rune Shield of the Dawnguard creates an aura of sunlight that damages undead over time while one blocks, and shield bashes cause a spark of light that deals more damage to vampires. Auriel's Bow is a super-powerful bow which, when equipped with sunhallowed arrows, turns every shot into an explosion of light. It can also turn the sun into a Kill Sat if shot directly at it. Conversely, it can blot out the sun for a full day instead if used with a very different kind of special arrow.
• Lighthouse Point:
  • Frostflow Lighthouse is an optional dungeon, whose former inhabitants were a group of Determined Homesteaders who didn't realize their would-be homestead was built directly over a Falmer lair...
  • Another mission has the player get hired by bandits to shut down the Solitude Lighthouse, causing a ship to wreck so they can rob it. When you go to collect your share, they try to pull You Have Outlived Your Usefulness.
• Light Is Not Good: Like the Daedric Princes, several of the Divines are portrayed in a darker light.
  • An in-game lorebook seems to suggest that the only real difference between the Aedra (gods) and Daedra (demons) is that the former participated in the creation of the universe and thereafter were only able to affect it in a limited way, whereas the latter refused to participate and are now free to do whatever they want.
  • The Vigilant of Stendarr, despite being knights of the god of mercy, have little to offer those who worship malicious Daedric Princes.
    Stendarr Vigilant: Stendarr have mercy, for the Vigil has none to spare.
  • If your character is male, then a group of Dibella's priestesses may strong-arm you into a quest by threatening you.
  • The most notable priest of Mara is a former fanatic of Vaermina.
  • Alduin, the Big Bad of the game, is not only supposed to be the dragon god Akatosh's "son," but also an "aspect" of Akatosh. The explanation is fragmentary at best. One fan theory says that the dragons are "fragments" of Akatosh based on a line from a developer in-Universe text, and that he was the first to split, making "sons" of Akatosh just the way they explain it to humans. As an extension of this, dragons as a whole are effectively angels from the in-universe religious viewpoint.
  • The guardians of the Eldergleam Sanctuary, associated with the nature goddess Kynareth, will kill anyone inside the sanctuary if the tree is harmed - even harmless pilgrims that came there just to admire it and have nothing to do with damaging the tree.
• The Lightfooted: Characters with the Light Foot perk, an intermediate Sneak ability, don't set off pressure plates.
• Lightning Bruiser:
  • Sabre cats and especially the dreaded bears; they hurt quite a bit, but also have leaping power attacks which are nigh-impossible to dodge, and can still hit the player even if you're sprinting away from them.
  • As with most combat tropes, the Dovahkiin can also qualify with the right build, combining high stats with abilities that allow you to dilate time or perform flash steps. It's especially easy to accomplish this with a Nord or Redguard character, as they start with bonuses to using two-handed and one-handed weapons and light armour.
• Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: Played with.
  • Warriors are perfectly able to finish the game just fine by sinking their levels into HP, Stamina and associated perks, equipping the best armor they can find and swinging a big weapon. Mages begin with the handicap of low magicka and few spells, and Destruction spells do not scale their damage with your level. But by the end of the game, Conjuration spells can reanimate the dead indefinitely, giving you extra followers of your choice from the huge line-up of NPCs, Alteration spells give effective buffs and have spells like Candlelight and Waterbreathing to help with exploration, and with the right enchantments on your equipment, you can cast spells of a particular school of magic or two for zero magicka cost. So while warriors are Boring, but Practical, mages grow to be far more versatile. Which is objectively better depends on your personal preference.
  • While it may not be clear which archetype ultimately ends up "better," the trope applies well to the way that each one's abilities grow. Warrior characters tend to gain more stats in small but steady increments (10 more HP for each level up, a few more points of armor or damage each time they find a higher quality weapon or take a new smithing perk, etc.); mages are stuck with the same line-up of spells with the same effects for long stretches of time, until they finally reach a high enough skill level to unlock the next set of spells, leading to a drastic spike in their powers which then stay mostly the same until they get to the next tier above that, and so on.
  • Played straight with thief-based builds. Early in the game, enemies will always catch you Sneaking and your damage output won't be very high. Later, with the right perks and contact with the Thieves' Guild and Dark Brotherhood for some of their faction armor, your backstab damage does 30 times the base, stealth archery shots can kill even dragons in one hit, and with the right perks you're practically undetectable and can safely and patiently take out rooms full of enemies one by one.
  • The ability to create extremely powerful gear via crafting ultimately inverts the trope, since better weapons and gear allow you to hit harder with physical attacks (up to insane levels), but options for increasing magic damage output are not only very limited, but much smaller in scope - the game mostly focuses on reducing the Magicka cost of spells instead of increasing damage. Increasing weapon skills also scales weapon damage up, whereas spells do not scale with increasing skill. The lack of spell creation in Skyrim also means that you can't reduce the cost of spells and then create more powerful ones that you wouldn't normally be able to cast. And to make things even worse as if the above wasn't enough, the master level spells are extremely slow to cast making them mostly unusable in combat. Getting a sword that does twice the damage? No drawback at all. This can leave mages struggling to keep up with enemy Level Scaling in the late game, as while you can cast spells for free with properly enchanted armor, they're still only doing Scratch Damage. It becomes all but required to craft fortify destruction potions for tough fights, as they're one of the few ways to actually increase the damage of your spells.
  • Comes back around to being played straight with the powerful arcane accessory spells being canonized in the Anniversary Edition. Builds are on YouTube of characters annihilating high level enemies, paralyzing mobs with a single spell and clearing entire dungeons by just taking a stroll through them while surrounded by raging storms.
• Live-Action Cutscene: Skyrim had a live-action ad featuring the Dragonborn entering a village under attack from a dragon.
• Living Gasbag: Netch return in the Dragonborn DLC, having drifted from Vvardenfell to Solstheim after the Red Mountain erupted.
• Lizard Folk: The Argonians, once again.
• Loads and Loads of Loading: Because the game holds the location of every single object (from chairs and tables to that arrow you fired at that bandit and missed by two miles to that apple sitting on a plate in some dude's home somewhere), the longer you play a particular character the longer the initial loading time will be.^note this is often referred to as "save file bloat" On the PS3 version, save file bloat can be so problematic that it becomes unplayable in long running games. This is somewhat alleviated on the PC versions with the unofficial patches (but can quickly be countered by adding mods). One of the biggest things the unofficial patches do is keep weapons and shields attached to a dead enemy. Because of the physics engine, a weapon or a shield could be knocked out of a defeated NPC's hands. As a result, the weapon and the corpse would become separate entities and while corpses would be removed, weapons and the like would not, thus remaining in the game world, cluttering it up. In comparison, the PC version loads much, much faster than console versions because of more RAM and the hard drive being faster than a disc, and you can also use big texture mods many times the size of the original textures... which take as long as the console versions to load.
• Loads and Loads of Sidequests: The game integrates some of the sidequests with the main quest; the "Civil War" questline is a fully fledged B-plot which ties into the main one (with some parts of each changing based on progress in the other). Like Oblivion, it still leaves open the question of why the Player Character is able to spend time working for the various non-Civil War factions while the Beast of the Apocalypse is on the loose bringing dragons back to life.
• Locked Door: There are puzzle locks in some of their dungeons, such as those requiring blocks to be pressed, switches to be flipped, or statues/symbols to be lined up. These locks cannot be bypassed in any other way besides being solved.
• Lockpicking Minigame: You are shown the keyhole and can move a lockpick in a circle, then rotate the lock when it is in position. If it is just right, the lock will rotate 90 degrees and open; otherwise, it will stop at some point (the further down it gets, the closer you are) and the pick will break. The more complex the lock, the more precise you have to be in placing the pick, although a higher Lockpicking skill score gives you more room for error. Breaking picks gives you a small skill boost, while opening a lock gives a larger one (how large depends on its complexity).
• Logic Bomb: In the Yellow Book of Riddles, one of the riddles has this as the punchline.
  A man says, "If you lie to me I will slay you with my sword. If you tell me the truth I will slay you with a spell."
  What must you say to stay alive?
  "You will slay me with a sword."
• Long Song, Short Scene: "Dragonborn", the main theme of the game, plays nowhere in the game except the main menu, which players usually skip past in a couple seconds.
• Loophole Abuse:
  • You can start abusing loopholes as early as the prologue: whichever character you choose to accompany while escaping from Helgen is flagged essential, for fairly obvious reasons. This has led a number of players to enter stealth mode, corner their escort, and proceed to beat him continuously with spells or weapons. Hadvar and Ralof can't die or even take real damage, and they never become hostile. Meanwhile, the Dragonborn is leveling up various skills before ever entering the game proper.
  • If a guard ever tries to arrest you for crimes, often you have the option to bribe them or talk them out of it, or submit and pay off the bounty or go to jail. Alternatively, if playing on the PC, you can just press the Escape key to exit the conversation and they'll usually just let you leave.
  • If you somehow knock someone off a high ledge and the fall kills them, guards and the bounty on your head only register it as assault on your part; you aren't blamed for the death. Provided you can get them in the right place to kill them by the fall, you can use Unrelenting Force (FUS RO DAH) to kill NPCs for a measly 40 coin bounty, then loot them freely. As a bonus, this also means the loot items don't count as stolen and can be sold to normal merchants.
  • Stolen items are flagged as such in the menu and can only be sold to fences, special contacts with the Thieves' Guild, or else you need a specific perk to be able to sell stolen items to merchants. But as long as you don't sell the items, the game doesn't care what else you do with them. You can give stolen items to NPCs to fulfill quest objectives, and if you steal crafting materials and expend them crafting something, the resulting item is not flagged as stolen, even if it's a suit of armor where every ingot and leather strap used to make it was not thirty seconds ago stolen from the blacksmith to whom you're now selling it.
  • With the addition of Dragonborn, you have the Summon Dremora Butler ability, with which you can bypass several gear-removing situations by giving him all your stuff and then resummoning him to get it back. This lets you smuggle all your weapons into jail, or get additional gear for the "Diplomatic Immunity" quest. You can also acquire the ability to Summon Dremora Merchant, which accomplishes the same basic thing except that you sell things to him; then, if you wish, resummon him and buy them back. You have roughly a 24-hour window of time to get your things back before they're gone.
  • You can literally abuse one in dialogue by Shouting inside cities but not actually hurting anyone. When the guards demand that you stop because it's frightening people, you can retort by saying there's no law against Shouting inside cities. The guard is forced to agree and let you go with a warning.
  • This trope is also used by one of the characters, Jarl Balgruuf: You're told to deliver a message to him. He asks that you instead give it to his advisor. When you respond that it's confidential for him only, he says that since he presumes he's free to do whatever he pleases with the message there's nothing stopping him from just taking it from you and then immediately giving it to his advisor.
• Lord British Postulate:
  • While there are no HP To 0 mechanics in this game like there were with Oblivion's lava, the Wabbajack's effect of transforming whatever it hits into random things sometimes circumvents the Essential flag, meaning that under the right circumstances, one can turn Jarl Balgruuf into a sweetroll. The community has yet to figure out how to weaponize this without mods, however.
  • In early releases, NPCs could drown even with the Essential flag. Once that was discovered, no one was safe, not even the children. This was eventually patched out not long after discovery.
• Lost Language: The Thieves' Guild questline involves translating Falmeris.
• The Lost Lenore: During the quest "A Love Beyond Death," a necromancer named Lu'ah Al-Skaven is trying to raise a army of undead to attack both sides of the Civil War, besides some other disturbing intentions. Her reason for it is because her husband, an Imperial soldier, died in the Great War and later had his body cremated by the Legion, which made it impossible for Lu'ah to reanimate him. She went mad because of it; see I Love the Dead, above.
• Lost Property Live Drop: In Markarth you are approached by a man who gives you a note under the pretense that you had dropped it. This gives you a miscellaneous quest which turns into The Forsworn Conspiracy.
• Lost Technology:
  • The secrets of the Dwemer have long been lost to the mists of time, but they accomplished things that absolutely baffle even the most proficient mainstream mages today - like being able to build a machine that can discern knowledge from an Elder Scroll without any training on the part of the reader. The best the game's quests allow is the construction of a crossbow by stealing their schematics for the Dawnguard.
  • A more mundane version is Dwarven Metal; no blacksmith currently living knows how to recreate it, meaning the only way to make more of it is to melt down things like Dwemer plate metal, struts, and the like.
  • Dragonborn has the usage of Stalhrim, a super-hard mystical ice found on Solstheim. The secrets of forging it are only known to the Skaal, who have passed it down for centuries, and mining it requires an Ancient Nord Pickaxe; something about the construction of those pickaxes allows them to chip apart Stalhrim deposits when normal pickaxes break apart, and not even the Skaal can figure out why.
• Lost World: Blackreach. A vast underground cavern, connecting three completely different Dwemer cities, and accessible only through their deepest levels. At the beginning of the game, their entrances are sealed off, and the location is barely even heard of by scholars of Dwemer lore, let alone generally explored.
• Louis Cypher: Keep an eye out for one Sam Guevenne.
• Lousy Lovers Are Losers: If 'Vipir the Fleet' attempts to hit on Sapphire, she'll find his offer disgusting and rebuff while mocking that he's named after his bedroom prowess, which quickly makes him angry.
  Sapphire: Vipir "the Fleet." The only man who's foolish enough to name himself after his bedroom prowess.
  Vipir: You stupid cow. You don't know what you're missing.
• Love at First Punch: Uthgerd the Unbroken (female) and Benor (male) become marriage options after beating them in a bar brawl.
• Love Freak: Maramal and Dinya Balu, the priests of Mara in Riften. They task you with playing The Matchmaker for three couples in love and handing out love pamphlets to the people of Riften, the content of which is overly sweet if you read one yourself. Additionally, their interactions with each other (they're married and Dinya is pregnant) border on Sickeningly Sweethearts.
• Love Triangle: One of the first missions you can get in the game is to resolve a triangle between Camilla Valerius and her two suitors, Faendal the archer and Sven the skald. Dragonborn can also Take a Third Option and marry her themselves.
• Low-Level Advantage:
  • As a Vampire Lord, your powers improve by killing people with your bite attack at low health, or using the Vampire Drain move. Since low-level enemies are weaker and appear more frequently when you yourself are low level, Vampire Lord becomes incredibly fast and easy to level at low level: Most enemies die in 1 or 2 shots of the vampiric drain, and gaining Vampire Lord perks do not cause your character level to rise. This means there is also no danger of doing it too much and finding yourself facing enemies too tough for you to handle because you leveled too fast. Contrast that with doing it at a higher level, where leveling Vampire Lord is a chore, since the un-upgraded drain and melee attacks take forever to chip at higher level enemies' health.
  • The Khajiit's racial bonus of +15 to unarmed attack is devastating in early game, allowing you to basically three-shot any enemy (if not breaking their necks on the first hit outright). However this doesn't scale, and somewhere around level 30 it starts becoming less useful, and requiring you to actually start getting weapons. By late game it becomes completely overshadowed; with the proper perks a one-handed sword can deal an upwards of 200 damage, making the 15 unarmed damage bonus seem trivial, unless you gear toward an Unarmed build.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me:
  • The Block skill has a lot of surprising utility once you level up its perks. Among the most useful is one that grants you a resistance to elemental damage when blocking, so your shield-guy can stand up to dragonfire now. Another lets you charge opponents with your shield and bash them out of the way. Still another slows time if an enemy starts a power attack (which will slam through a block if it lands) while your shield is up; see Bullet Time above.
  • There are also Wards, new to this game, which are magic shields mages can throw up. They’re not so cost-efficient against physical attacks, but they block elemental damage very well, including dragon breath. The only downside is they tend to burn through your magicka quickly.
• Luke Nounverber:
  • There are some in the game's opening theme—"Alduin, bane of kings, ancient shadow unbound." Every dragon's name is a three word epithet; "Alduin" means "destroy-consume-lord". Alduin was made by Akatosh (or may even be an aspect of Akatosh) to destroy the world at the end of time, hence his other major title, the "World-Eater".
  • Many other dragons have names which fit when translated from draconic, such as "Curse Never Dying" and "Snow Wing Hunter," for example. Crosses over with Names to Run Away from Really Fast, as the translated names sound quite intimidating.
  • In addition, numerous Nords have names like this (Ulfric Stormcloak, Brunwulf Free-Winter, Torsten Cruel-Sea, Galmar Stone-Fist, Hajvarr Iron-Hand, Sjoring Hard-Heart etc.). Some are even given name origin stories (e.g. Hofgrir Horse-Crusher), but the majority are given no such justifications.
• Lunacy: Lunar weapons can only use their effects while the moons are out, and the Lunar Forge supposedly can forge such weapons under the same conditions.

M

• MacGuffin: The Elder Scrolls themselves and Auriel's Bow in Dawnguard. In the vampire questline, it's justified in that these items are needed to fulfill the prophecy. But there's no reason given why you and the Dawnguard are unable to besiege Castle Volkihar and take out Harkon, once you let them know where the castle is. Auriel's Bow will be needed to negate a barrier, but your character is never told this beforehand and has no reason to think there's a problem going without it.
• MacGuffin Delivery Service: When storming Castle Volkihar, you bring with you the key pieces of Harkon's plan, Auriel's Bow and Serana. If the Dovahkiin were to be killed, Harkon would presumably enact his plan right then and there. Arch-Curate Vyrthur, the guy who made the prophecy around which Harkon's scheme revolves, also thanks you for bringing him one of the key components of it (namely Serana, as he already has Auriel's Bow under his thumb).
• Made of Iron:
  • Only you (or poison, due to a glitch) can kill your spouse. Watch as they take a hit from a Giant and come running back for more.
  • Any character flagged as essential cannot be killed by anything, including you. Some of these eventually experience a Plotline Death, while others remain flagged essential until the end of the questline which involves them. Some, however, such as Mjoll the Lioness and Farkas from the Companions, retain their essential flag for the entire game, and there's not always a clear reason why.
• The Mad Hatter: Sheogorath, right down to the tea party he's hosting with Pelagius the Mad.
• Magic Fire: With the Dragonborn Fire ability introduced in Dragonborn, enemies killed with the Fire Breath shout will have Flame Wyrms created from their corpses.
• Magic Music: Nirn's Dragons are capable of bending reality with their Language of Magic, known to mortalkind as the "Thu'um". As seen most prominently in this game, the ancient Nords were taught this technique during their Merethic Era war against the dragons, who were seeking to be worshipped as gods. They not only defeated the dragons using the Thu'um, but expanded their empire across all of northern Tamriel. It took a coalition including the aforementioned Dwemer for their expansion to finally be halted. One of their leaders, Jurgen Windcaller, experienced a Heel–Faith Turn and preached that the Thu'um should only be used to honor the gods, preaching pacifism and founding the Greybeards. Use of the Thu'um as a weapon of war would drop drastically in the centuries to follow.
• Magic Pants: Werewolf and vampire lord transformations involve the clothes simply vanishing as the body transforms, and they remain in the inventory when you turn back, leaving the transformed individual only wearing their underwear, or as of the Special Edition, are immediately re-equipped. It's not clear what happens to the clothes and items while transformed, but since the change is magical in nature and the body is completely covered by a mystical darkness during the process, it probably ends up the daedric equivalent of Hammerspace.
• Magical Society: The College of Winterhold is the primary Magical Society and can be joined by the player, but a member of the Psijic Order also makes a few appearances during quests that involve the College.
• Magitek: Dwemer technology is half "steam engine," half "magical golems," evidently, as nearly all of their robots run off of soul gems rather than conventional power sources (and the steam appears to be generated magically).
  • The Dwemer apparently developed technologies that have reality-bending powers (or outright reality-breaking powers in the case of Numidium), so much so that they can use magitek apparati to divine information from Elder Scrolls, circumventing that pesky blindness problem that the scrolls cause. Just casting magic is a quaint thing to them, but they were extraordinary enchanters, and that's the part that makes the "magi" in their Magitek.
  • It's actually implied by some writings that the soul gems are not involved in the basic operation of Dwemer animunculi. Those soul gems are linked to the shock attack of non-worker spiders, and may otherwise be involved in high-powered attacks, but whatever makes the animunculi move has never been made clear.
• Make It Look Like an Accident: There's a Dark Brotherhood assassination that gives you the option to push a statue onto a target. However, the Clairvoyant Security Force suggests that the game's AI does not view it as an accident at all. The player CAN pull this off and sneak away, but the odds are harsh. What makes this ridiculous is that another option to perform the assassination is to snipe the bride from an even lower, easier-to-see perch, with a unique bow and some arrows, both planted in there by your assassin pals. Not only this doesn't make the deed look like an accident at all, it's also harder for the player to get caught in that way.
• Malevolent Masked Men: Dragon Priests.
  • The Cultists who journey from Solstheim to destroy you in the Dragonborn expansion also qualify.
  • Forsworn Briarhearts are powerful Breton tribals who use Sword and Sorcery to terrible effect. They wear crudely made masks made of animal skins, antlers, and sabre cat teeth.
• Maligned Mixed Marriage: This is averted because, despite the fact that Fantastic Racism is a fairly big part of the setting (The Thalmor, for example, run on it, and the Stormcloaks are fairly vocal about it as well), no one in Skyrim seems to have an issue with people of two different races, or even species marrying. As an example, one series of quests allows you to help the Love Goddess's temple get people together. One part has you pay someone to write a poem on behalf of an old High Elf wizard addressed to a human Redguard woman because he Cannot Spit It Out.
• Mana Burn:
  • Shock elemental Destruction spells deal damage to the target's Magicka as well as Health, making them ideal for combating other spellcasters.
  • The "Equilibrium" spell converts your Health into Magicka. This is very exploitable, as it allows nigh-infinite grinding of the Restoration skill if the caster is also casting a healing spell at the same time.
• Manchurian Agent: Played with the Thalmor. When they're not secretly torturing people to spread fear and gather information, or to fulfill their amusement, the Thalmor would also manipulate certain people (through any means possible, including Cold-Blooded Torture) for their own benefits. Best exemplified with Ulfric Stormcloak, where they tortured him and shaped him into believing that the rotting Tamrielic Empire is detrimental to Skyrim's future and the independent Skyrim is the only solution to fix many problems that currently plagued Skyrim, thus instigating the Civil War. The only reason why this isn't played straight is twofold: One, that Ulfric himself is uncooperative towards them (given what they did) and Thalmor's main purpose isn't removing Empire's presence in Skyrim nor letting Ulfric take Skyrim for himself, but to instigate endless conflict that put both forces in state of stagnant and exhaustion so that they will never be able to actually top off the Thalmor anytime sooner, and two, the Thalmor didn't count on the Dragonborn showing up and semi-accidentally becoming a key figure in the Civil War, allowing either the Empire or the Stormcloaks themselves to tip the balance in their respective favors and end the war and ostensibly prepare to re-start the war with the Thalmor again.
• The Many Deaths of You: As you can perform finishing moves on enemies, Human, Orc, Argonian, Khajiit, and Elven enemies can perform those same moves on you with low enough health on you. All of these are virtually the same finishing moves you can perform on them. It is very infuriating and humiliating regardless.
• Map Stabbing: Daggers are frequently found stuck to map tables. These can be looted into your inventory.
• Marathon Level:
  • There are multiple dungeons that can be rather long, but the longest of them is almost certainly Blackreach and the Dwemer dungeons attached to it. For starters, you must complete one of three Dwemer ruins which are fairly meaty in of themselves, but upon doing so, you enter Blackreach, a MASSIVE cavern with multiple secrets. To explore it from start to finish can take a few hours. This becomes a bit more understandable from a meta perspective given that Blackreach houses an Elder Scroll needed to complete both the main campaign and Dawnguard.
  • The Forgotten Vale quest of the Dawnguard DLC. The region you must work through is easily one third the size of the original game map. The fact that there is gratuitous amounts of Scenery Porn there helps, however.
• Marrying the Mark: Alain Dufont from the Dark Brotherhood questline seduced your client Muiri, who was a good friend of Windhelm's Shatter-Shield family (in particular Nilsine, who lost her sister to the Serial Killer running around the city), so that he could get into the Shatter-Shield home, rob them blind and then make Muiri take the fall for it. This heartless betrayal not only costs Muiri any good will she may have had with the Shatter-Shields, but leaves her very, very pissed off at Alain, such that she wants him dead.
• Mask of Power: The Masks of the Dragon Priests, all of which come with a powerful enchantment and a high armor rating. In addition, there is the Masque of Clavicus Vile, which doubles as a helmet.
• The Masquerade: Plenty of examples. You can be talking to a character and have no idea that you're conversing with a vampire, werewolf or Daedra. There are ways to root them out, such as casting Detect Life or going into quests which expose them; but going by appearance, sound and behavior, you'd never know. Dawnguard alters this for vampires, who will now have golden Glowing Eyes. However, it is implied this is only visible to the Dragonborn, who is also a supernatural being, possessing an Aedric draconic soul. Other mortals only comment seeing an ill-defined "emptiness" in the eyes of a vampire.
• Massive Race Selection: As is par for the course in Elder Scrolls, you have a choice of several races to choose from for your character, each with their own quirks and perks. They include:
  • Nords, the native folk of Skyrim. Haling from the wintery province gives them natural resistance to frost spells, and being a Proud Warrior Race grants them bonuses for melee weapons, blocking, smithing, light armor, and speech. Their unique skill is "Battle Cry", which forces all nearby people and creatures to flee for 30 seconds.
  • Imperials, the dominant race of the Cyrodiilic Empire. On top of having a knack for finding more gold coins than anyone else, they have bonuses for Restoration and Destruction magic, blocking, heavy armor, one-handed weapons, and enchanting. Their unique skill is "Voice of the Emperor", which removes aggro from humanoid enemies for 60 seconds.
  • Bretons, the people of High Rock. A magically inclined people, they have natural resistance against magic attacks and bonuses in Conjuration, Alteration, Illusion, and Restoration magics, along with speech and alchemy. Their unique skill is "Dragonskin", which allows them to absorb magic attacks to restore their Magicka for 60 seconds.
  • Redguards, the people of Hammerfell. Another Proud Warrior Race, they have bonuses in one-handed weapons, archery, blocking, smithing, and Alteration and Destruction magic, along with a natural resistance to poison. Their unique ability is "Adrenaline Rush", which rapidly restores Stamina for 60 seconds.
  • Wood Elves, the people of Valenwood. They benefit from bonuses to archery, alchemy, sneaking, lockpicking, pickpocketing, and light armor, and have a natural resistance to both disease and poisons. Their unique ability is "Command Animals", which causes all beasts in range to fight for the player for 60 seconds.
  • Dark Elves, the people of Morrowind. They have a natural resistance against fire damage, and benefit from bonuses to Destruction, Alteration, and Illusion magics, as well as sneaking, light armor, and alchemy. Their unique skill is "Ancestor's Wrath", which inflicts fire damage over time to all nearby enemies for 60 seconds.
  • High Elves, the people of Summerset Isle. They benefit from bonuses to all schools of magic, along with enchanting, and have naturally higher reserves of Magicka. Their unique ability is "Highborn", which rapidly regenerates Magicka for 60 seconds.
  • Orcs, the people of the Wrothgarian and Dragontail Mountains. Yet another Proud Warrior Race, they have bonuses to heavy armor, melee weapons, blocking, smithing, and enchanting. Their unique ability is "Berserker Rage", which doubles their damage output for 60 seconds.
  • Khajiit, the Cat Folk race of Elsweyr. They benefit from bonuses to sneaking, archery, one-handed weapons, pickpocketing, lockpicking, and alchemy, and have natural claws that adds bonus damage to bare-handed strikes. Their unique ability is "Night Eye", which enhances their vision in darkness for 60 seconds.
  • Argonians, the Lizard Folk race of Black Marsh. They benefit from bonuses to lockpicking, light armor, sneaking, pickpocketing, and Restoration and Alteration magics, along with natural resistance to disease, the ability to breathe underwater, and natural claws that strengthen bare-handed attacks (albeit not to the same degree as Khajiit). Their unique ability is "Histskin", which rapidly regenerates Health for 60 seconds.
• Master Console: The Console Command "`" is available for PC version, which allows you to alter the world as you see fit, from obtaining weapons to spawning people, altering camera, gravity, relationships, and more. In short, you can play god with it. WARNING: Misuse of the console can mess up data in your gamesaves. Use responsibly. It is meant first and foremost as a debugging tool, not a cheat tool.
• Master of All: You could originally do this in spirit, since level was raised by raising skills and the effective level cap was reached by maxing out all available skills, making you very good at everything. You were still not perfectly balanced, however, due to the (finite) number of available perks not being enough to truly max out every possible specialty. In a later patch, Bethesda added the ability to "prestige" in a skill after it was maxed out, resetting it to zero for the ability to grind it back up, gaining more levels and unlocking more perks. This effectively raised the level cap and gave truly insane level grinders the ability to max out absolutely EVERYTHING and make their character a true Master of All.
• Maximum HP Reduction: This effect is limited to poisons, rather than magic, and can only be cured by 'cure poison' effects or praying at an altar. The disease Sanguinare Vampiris, contracted from vampires, will also reduce maximum HP before progressing to full-blown vampirism, at which point you only lose maximum HP while standing in sunlight.
• The Maze: Shalidor's Maze, located in the aptly named dungeon of Labyrinthian, where past generations of Arch-Mages endured trials to prove they were worthy of the title. The Dragonborn can optionally solve the maze, which is relatively straightforward and, strangely, doesn't even require actual magical knowledge to get past its traps and tricks. Every applicant is automatically offered four magical staffs upon entry — one per discipline — so even a Dragonborn who's never used a single spell before can traverse the maze and claim its rewards (The Diadem of the Servant) without any hassle.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Vilkas and Farkas, two of the Companions, whose names mean wolf in Lithuanian and Hungarian respectively. A case of Werewolf Theme Naming and also Twin Theme Naming, as they are fraternal twin brothers. Meanwhile, Aela the Huntress is the Companion who most enjoys being a werewolf.
  • A mad skeever (rat) controlling mage you encounter is named "Hamelyn".
  • The inn in the first town you encounter is named The Sleeping Giant Inn. The innkeeper turns out to be the leader and one of the only known surviving members of the Blades, and will be vital to the main quest.
  • The name of the blacksmith Ulfberth War-Bear, who works in the "Warmaiden's" armory in Whiterun, might be inspired by the brand of Germanic Ulfberht swords.
• Mecha-Mooks: The extinct Dwemer were a race of Robot Masters. Known to them as "animunculi", they created these ranging from miniature Spider Centurion workers to human-sized Sphere Centurion soldiers (who roll around as metal balls before unfolding into blade and/or crossbow armed humanoid robots) to massive Steam Centurion golems. Given that the Dwemer were known to tinker with the "earthbones" (essentially the laws of nature and physics in the ES universe), their creations were built to last a long time, with many still up and running in their old ruins even thousands of years after their disappearance. Plenty of intrepid scholars have attempted to gain control over these Dwemer creations in that time, but usually discover rather quickly that AI Is A Crap Shoot as the creations have the tendency to go berserk when activated outside of Dwemer ruins.
• Mechanical Monster; Dwemer Centurions. These things are difficult to kill, hit hard, can end your quest in a few blows if you are careless, and their steam jet is a pretty good approximation of dragonbreath. And as if that was bad enough, Skyrim also has the Dwemer Centurion Masters. They are twice the size of their lesser brethren, as well as having double the armor and killing power. If that wasn't enough for you, try the Forgemaster on for size. This unique Centurion boss is even bigger, hits even harder, and instead of a steam breath is armed with an outright flamethrower.
• Medieval Prehistory: Although it is a fantasy world with medieval norse inspiration, prehistoric Fauna such as Woolly Mammoths, Sabertooth cats and Cave Bears co-exist with the fantasy creatures such as Dragons, Werewolves and Draugr.
• Megaton Punch: A weird interaction in the way the game handles damage and physics calculations means that when giants hit a target hard enough to kill them, they will often be launched hundreds of feet into the sky. This hilarious bug was made canon in The Elder Scrolls Online, with a book mentioning that a foolish elf who tried to befriend a giant was found a league away from the giant's camp with all of his bones broken.
• Mêlée à Trois:
  • Dragons have a tendency to charge into the middle of existing battles and attack everyone. The other two sides usually put aside their differences to deal with the massive fire-spewing immortal god-monster assaulting them, but not always. Of particular note is during the quest "Alduin's Wall," when you have to go with Delphine and Esbern to Karthspire, a major Forsworn camp. At high levels, there are numerous Forsworn Ravager mages to be fought; additionally, there is frequently a dragon attack at the same time, and the dragon can be a Revered or even Legendary dragon and everybody is fighting each other. Be prepared for a long, difficult battle. Thank goodness Delphine and Esbern are both essential.
  • While it rarely if ever leads to a three-way fight in-game, the Reach is claimed by three different factions — the Empire, the Stormcloaks, and the Forsworn, native Reachmen who object to their land being conquered by the Nords in the first place. Being little more than bandits and terrorists by this point, there's No Campaign for the Wicked, but they provide an interesting foil to the Stormcloaks in many ways. Ulfric put down their latest rebellion incredibly brutally, and set Markarth up as a city accepting of Talos worship... while worship of the old gods of the Reach is still banned. The old gods of the Reach being, ahem, the monstrous Hagravens and (implied) a few of the Daedra.
• Memetic Badass: In-universe. Ysgramor, among the Nords, was believed to have been a giant of a man who could kill elves in his sleep and eat soup with a fork.
• Mentor Occupational Hazard:
  • The Dovahkiin has a severe case of this. Nearly every single person who serves as a mentor to you in Skyrim ends up dead. Kodlak Whitemane, Astrid, Lord Harkon, Savos Aren - the list goes on. Only Arngeir, Delphine, Esbern, Tolfdir, and the members of the Dawnguard escape this fate; even Paarthurnax can fall victim to it, should you choose to kill him. In some cases the trope is zigzagged, such as Astrid and Harkon's deaths being largely for you to gain more power, but otherwise, mostly played straight.
  • Averted for nearly all the DLC mentor-figures. Isran, Neloth, Frea, and Mora all live through them, as do Serana and the Knight of the Snow though his brother bites it. The only DLC mentors who don't survive are Storn Crag-Strider and, once again, Lord Harkon (if you go vampire).
  • Whether the Thieves Guild Questline plays this straight or averts this depends on whom the player considers to be their mentor in said questline - it's played straight in combination with Expose the Villain, Get His Job if they consider Mercer Frey to hold the role, but an aversion if they regard Brynjolf as this.
• Mercy Kill:
  • If you kill a bandit who has been raised from the dead by a necromancer, he will thank you as he disintegrates. NPCs who are thralls to vampires may also utter things like "At last!" when you kill them, as you have freed them from their mental enslavement. This is one way to view the Dark Brotherhood contract on Narfi. Narfi is a totally destitute and mentally challenged beggar who lives in the ruins of his family's farm on the outskirts of a sleepy wayside village, waiting for the return of his missing, commonly believed to be dead (and later confirmed to be dead by the Dragonborn) sister Reyda. He has no clear enemies and reportedly keeps to himself, so it is likely that he was contracted for death because somebody who knows of him actually thinks killing him is doing him a favour.
  • Astrid asks you to do this in a late Dark Brotherhood quest. Seeing how badly burnt she is due to the Imperials setting fire to their hideout, as well as their having killed almost all of her "family", it's not hard to understand why she would rather die at this point.
• Meteor-Summoning Attack: The Big Bad, Alduin, has a unique Dragon Shout which only he can perform. When he uses it, the sky turns darker, a vortex of clouds appears in the sky, and meteors start raining down. This attack first gets unleashed in Helgen at the beginning of the game, contributing to the village's destruction at the dragon's hands; and it also gets unleashed during your battles with him toward the end of the game.
• Mickey Mousing: The gameplay trailer matches cuts of action to music in a dramatic, manly fashion.
• Might as Well Not Be in Prison at All: Within Cidhna Mines, Madanach not only has a private cell with various accommodations but still holds power as the leader of the Forsworn, which Thonar Silver-Blood uses to get him to use them as his personal assassins.
• Mighty Glacier:
  • Dwarven centurions. You can outrun them without even having to sprint (unless you get caught in their steam clouds), and their only ranged attack is fairly easy to dodge from a distance, but its hammer and axe hit quite hard and the steam blast hurts a LOT. Trying to go toe-to-toe with them at close range is a challenge for all but the most resilient of player characters.
  • Giants are easy enough to outrun, which is a good thing, as their oversized clubs can turn low-level or otherwise squishy characters into a Twinkle in the Sky with one hit.
  • Most two-handed weapons hit very hard, but swing very slowly.
  • Mudcrabs are only really "mighty" by the standards of the lowest of mooks, but they definitely have elements of this. They move slowly and are generally effortless to kill for any ranged fighter, but their powerful claws can absolutely eviscerate an unprepared low-level player, especially on high difficulties.
• Miles Gloriosus: The eponymous braggart in the song "Ragnar the Red," who meets an untimely end at the hands of an unimpressed shieldmaiden.
• Mind Rape: A number of things in this game cause this.
  • Dragonrend does this to dragons by forcing them to experience mortality, something their minds literally cannot comprehend.
  • The Thalmor pulled one on Ulfric Stormcloak prior to the events of the game. Specifically, they tortured him for information during the Great War, then told him that it played a crucial role in the capture of the Imperial City - in spite of the fact that the city had already fallen by the time he broke. It's implied that he never figured out they were lying.
  • Also a specialty of Hermaeus Mora's Black Books, if Neloth's comments and the randomly encountered "Madman" on Solstheim are anything to go by.
• Mind Screw:
  • The Elder Scrolls themselves do a form of this to anyone who reads them. Unless you are a being somewhat outside the bounds of reality like the Scrolls themselves (such as the Dovahkiin with a draconic, Aedric soul), you will either be driven mad or will eventually go blind. Septimus Signus, one of Skyrim's foremost experts on the Scrolls, is quite clearly not operating on all cylinders when you meet him - and he hasn't even read one. They're just Mind Screwy enough that even reading too much about them can drive you insane! Their very existence is a cross between Mind Screw and Reality Is Out to Lunch. If you ask Paarthurnax to explain them, he simply replies, "They do not exist. But they have always existed." Well, that clears things up...
  • The nature of Alduin is a bit of a Mind Screw for the player. While the previous lore suggested he was Akatosh, he is a physical aspect of Time and the firstborn of Akatosh, who is... a physical aspect of Time. So he is his own son.
• The Minion Master: Any Conjuration-focused mage. However, the player can take it to extremes, commanding at any one time: a dog, a follower, two Dead Thralls (with the Twin Souls perk), and a friendly dragon; if you give the follower and thralls summoning staves, you can add another three daedra on top of that.
  • There are plenty of examples among the game's NPCs as well:
    • Magic-wielding enemies are often just as capable of summoning servants to aid them as you are, and vampires will often bring along death hounds or thralls when they attack a town.
    • An insane mage encountered during one Thieves' Guild quest commands a pack of magically-enhanced skeevers.
    • The necrophiliac mage in the Pale has a small army of female ghosts to serve his every whim.
    • After you summon him to fight for you, Durnehviir will summon a pack of undead minions to help him help you.
    • Potema and King Olaf both raise a group of draugr which you must dispatch before facing the bosses themselves. Mikrul Gauldurson likewise sends a small army of weaker draugr at you until you defeat him.
• Minor Injury Overreaction: NPCs generally can't tell the difference between accidental friendly fire and a deliberate attempt on their lives. In other words, their default response to an attack is to turn hostile on their attacker (typically, you) and fight to the death. Followers (such as housecarls) are a general exception to this rule.
• Mirroring Factions: The bard songs "Age of Aggression" and "Age of Oppression", sung by bards in pro-Imperial or pro-Stormcloak holds, respectively. The song tunes are identical and both songs have parts where the lyrics are the same. Try saving before the peace treaty and take different dialogue options to favor the Empire or Stormcloaks, and make note of how often the two sound just like the other between dialogue trees. If you finish the Civil War before the final battle, you'll meet Rikke if you sided with the Stormcloaks, or Ulfric and Galmar if you sided with the Empire, in Sovngarde. It seems as far as the gods, or at least Shor, is concerned, they're all honorable heroes worthy of the afterlife. Tullius is only excluded because he's not a Nord, and so couldn't enter Sovngarde.
• Misaimed Fandom: In-universe, and Played for Drama. Some of the more unsavoury Nords, like Nord criminals and the Stormcloaks, play up the "barbaric Proud Warrior Race Guy" aspect of the Nord identity for intimidation factor. But law-abiding and Imperialized Nords resent them for it, as they believe it gives Nords a bad name to outsiders.
• Miscarriage of Justice:
  • The game actually opens on this note. You wake up under arrest (in proud ''Elder Scrolls'' tradition) being carted to a public execution because they think you're with the rebels they captured. Notably, one of the Imperial soldiers has his doubts about you but the other, his captain, says to get on with the beheading. It's entirely up to you, as you create your character's backstory, whether or not the arrest was justified.
  • You can accidentally get the court wizard of Windhelm arrested, if the player doesn't catch the subtle clues and goes straight to the authorities instead of confronting him directly.
  • Happens in the side mission "Forsworn Conspiracy". Once again, the one getting arrested is you, because the guards are attempting to cover up recent murders; they decide to pin the blame on you and serve you a life sentence in the mines.
  • If you join the Thieves' Guild, you cause a few of these by framing one merchant for theft and another merchant for running an unsanitary establishment. The latter, though, is a Jerkass Victim and guilty of other things - just not the one for which he's being put away.
• Missing Secret: You can pickpocket or kill Nazeem to find a key to Wintersand Manor. However, no such place actually exists in the game. It's believed this would have been his home, and it was cut near the end of the development. This would explain why Nazeem, despite being rich and arrogant, lives in a tavern in Whiterun rather than having his own home.
• Money for Nothing:
  • Money is terribly easy to obtain once you've gotten on your feet. In fact, the real problem late in the game is that merchants are too poor; even with perks to increase the gold they keep for trading, they only keep between 1000-3000 septims on hand at a time, when you'll have tens of thousands of septims in loot you could sell them. This trope is so prominent that numerous fan mods for the game exist that serve no purpose but to try and rebalance the world's economy in various ways. The Investor perk on the Speech tree helps some, as it lets you provide several merchants with additional funds, but as the game continues it's still not enough.
  • The crafting system is flat broken. It's possible to buy alchemy ingredients from alchemists, brew them into potions worth much more than what the ingredients cost, and then sell them back for profit. You can do the same with smithing components to forge into equipment pieces, or you can just buy a bunch of basic Iron Ore from a shopkeeper, use the Transmute spell to transmute it into Gold Ore, and use that to craft jewelry that'll more than cover the cost of the original ore. Also, any equipment piece you make can be enchanted to jack up the price even more; once you learn the Banish and Paralyze enchantments (the most expensive enchantments in the game), you can craft Iron Daggers worth a thousand septims each. This also all presumes you're buying your craft materials, but they're plentiful in the wild for free; in fact, each of the three houses comes with sources of some of the crafting materials you need.
  • Every dungeon is crawling with random coins, precious gemstones, and minor enchanted apparel. You'll probably leave any given dungeon with several thousand septims of Shop Fodder. Part of the reason is a bug causing all races to get the Imperial Luck perk, rather than just Imperials, which has a high chance to add an extra 2-10 gold in every container.
  • If you complete the "No Stone Unturned" quest, it just gets ridiculous. The reward for that quest is a permanent and quite significant increase to the chances for finding gemstones in containers. That means every container starts forking out pretty stones worth hundreds of septims.
  • Once you become the leader of certain factions (like the Companions and the College of Winterhold), you are given your own special lodgings within the faction's home base. These special lodgings are stuffed with treasures, ranging from valuable ingots to daedra hearts to soul gems to potion ingredients to high-level weapons, and they are yours to do with as you wish. And they respawn, anywhere from once a week to once a month, giving you unlimited sources of quick cash. Even just becoming a full member of the faction allows you to take many items out of the home base to sell in order to line your pockets; as long as an item's name isn't red when you look at it, no one will pay you any mind.
  • Dragon Bones are worth quite a pretty penny to those who would buy them. Given the premise of the game, once you become competent enough to dispatch them with ease, you'll be swimming in money - at least, until you've bankrupted every single trader in the land and end up with almost entire graveyards' worth of Dragon Bones in your stashes, waiting for their wallets to recover.
  • In the Dragonborn DLC, you can accept a series of quests to clear out the dangerous ebony mine and restore the entire economy of Raven Rock. As a reward, you'll be allowed to wander into the mine and help yourself to all the ebony you want. Since ebony is one of the rarest and most valuable crafting materials in the game, this is a good way to fund your adventures.
• Money Grinding:
  • Skyrim has the same Alchemy example from Morrowind, while also adding Smithing as another viable option. In the same way, you can purchase raw materials (metal ingots, leather, etc.) then forge them into weapons which sell for more than the cost of the materials. Again, the only limitation is merchant gold.
  • After a certain point in the main quest, dragons will be swarming all over Skyrim. In addition to absorbing their souls, you can loot their corpses for 1-3 Dragons Bones and Dragon Scales each. Given that you'll be slaying lots of dragons, these valuable parts add up and can be sold to keep you swimming in gold.
• Money Sink: Likely to counteract the above trope, dedicated players can still find ways to throw away tens of thousands of septims.
  • The various houses player can buy provide only marginal benefits to the player (which can be obtained by other ways via the various free lodging from the factions, or various free crafting stations all over the game world), but each once costs thousands of septims to purchase and fully upgrade them. If you plan to purchase a homestead from the Hearthfire add-on and want to fully expand and upgrade it into a mansion, you'll be spending tens of thousands in crafting materials; even just purchasing home staff and animals for the exterior runs you over 3,000 septims.
  • Upgrading the houses will require you to manufacture hinges, iron fittings, locks, and nails - you'll be searching every blacksmith for sufficient iron to make all these things, but as a bonus, making them is an easy and quick way to improve your Smithing skill.
  • Skill trainers increase your skill level by 1 per payment, and will do so five times for one player level. This starts out at a few hundred gold, but reaches up to 4000 in the 80s range. If you're a good pickpocket, you can steal your money back, but 3000 is usually the soft cap for that unless you artificially boost the skill past 100 or abuse Paralysis poisons.
  • The Dragonborn expansion has an optional sidequest that costs roughly 10,000 gold to complete, since you have to keep paying miners to dig out areas of the dungeon in which it takes place. That said, there's a fair amount of really valuable loot in there and a Word Wall, so it pays for itself.
• Money Spider:
  • Rarely, animals will have jewelry and gold coins in their carcasses. Yes, this includes the frost spiders. In cases like bears or trolls, it's understandable, because they probably ate someone along with their coin purse.
  • Dragons drop valuable Bones and Scales, which are some of the most expensive loot in the game. In addition, they usually carry coins and sometimes gems on them... as well as armor. Three guesses at how the dragon got them, and the first two don't count.
  • Ash Spawn, in Dragonborn, normally drop ores, which can range from the valuable and rare (e.g. Ebony) to the common but still valuable (e.g. Gold). At higher levels, they can also drop flawless gems which can sell for several hundred each, making Ash Spawn-hunting a very profitable venture.
  • Gargoyles, in Dawnguard, have ores and gems of varying values as well.
  • The Dwarven Spiders are a literal example; unlike the living spiders you encounter, they frequently have valuable items on their corpses, and they even look like they're made out of gold.
  • Giants also carry plenty of gold with them, along with some random loot of varying values. They are also more numerous than dragons and come in one or two per camp.
• Monologuing: It's common for an enemy to walk up and announce their intention to kill you. Sometimes, you can end the conversation quickly and kill them before they're even done speaking. Can be done with hilarious results against Lord Harkon from Dawnguard before the final battle while he argues with Serana. Because the player isn't "conversation frozen" as is usual for boss battles in Bethesda games, while they're talking you're free to walk up behind Harkon with your Assassin character, bring up Mehrunes' Razor or the Blade of Woe, and backstab him for massive damage. Harkon will immediately teleport to his "boss battle" starting position and just as immediately turn into red ash.
• Monster and the Maiden:
  • A female Dovahkiin that belongs to one of the "men" races (Breton, Imperial, Nord or Redguard) can recruit a Khajit Kharjo or an Argonian Derkeethus as her follower. Likewise, a male Khajit or Argonian Dovahkiin can recruit one of many female followers that belong to "men" races, like Lydia or Mjoll the Lioness.
  • Special mention should go to a female "men" Dovahkiin who recruits Farkas or his twin brother Vilkas. While both of them appear to be normal Nords, the Companions faction storyline reveals that the brothers are actually werewolves, like all high-ranking members of the guild.
• Monster Lord: Vampire Lords from Dawnguard.
• Monty Haul:
  • The quest where you retrieve a special Bonemold formula for Glover Mallory in Dragonborn is an unintentional example. You can sneak into the location with the instructions from behind, avoiding a mildly-challenging dungeon, so getting to the location is the only part that presents a challenge. As a reward, Glover lets you take his old gear and supplies from his basement stash, which includes a valuable, unique set of armor and many precious gemstones, which is worth several thousand gold alone. However, everything in there respawns twice a week, allowing you to farm it indefinitely.^note Note that this quest and reward are only available if your character is a member of the Thieves' Guild in Riften, and thus acquainted with Glover's brother Delvin.
  • Mehrunes Dagon's Daedric artifact quest, "Pieces of the Past", isn't especially short or easy, requiring you to acquire three quest items scattered around Skyrim. However, once all is said and done, you have permanent access to the Shrine of Mehrunes Dagon, the inside of which consists of nothing but a single room containing loads of treasure and two Dremora. Due to the dungeon respawn mechanic, you can keep visiting the shrine and clearing it of its valuables, and the Dremora spawning inside and immediately outside it provides the only easily repeatable way to gather Daedra Hearts, which are necessary for forging Daedric equipment. The quest itself also rewards you with Mehrunes' Razor, one of the best daggers in the game (unless you choose not to kill the questgiver, in which case you get 500 gold instead).
• Mook Horror Show: The game casts you as a mook horror show. Sure, normal bandits and enemy soldiers will charge you at any time, but they don't matter. No, the Dragonborn scares the Dragons. When you fight and kill your first Dragon, as the beast dies you'll hear this:
  Mirmulir: Dovahkiin?! ''No!!''
• Morale Mechanic: When a humanoid enemy (usually bandits or civilians) reach a certain health threshold, they drop to the ground while crying out for mercy or declaring their surrender. Sometimes subverted when they run away, only to heal and attack again. This is governed by a hidden stat called Confidence used for each NPC, with low Confidence characters being prone to fleeing when outmatched and at low health and higher Confidence characters being more willing to stay and fight to the death. Illusion spells like Courage and Fear operate on the Confidence stat to make the target either stand their ground or flee.
• More Predators Than Prey: Averted. For every bear, sabercat and wolf pack you come across, you see a lot more deer and rabbits. Whether mammoths are preyed on is unsure, what with giants keeping and protecting them as livestock. Though given that no predators seem to hunt in packs, it's unlikely anything that would try to prey on a stray mammoth would actually succeed in taking it down.
• More than Meets the Eye: Many characters. Some are not human despite looking human, and some have murderous tendencies while being seemingly innocent on the outside. For example, Babette appears to be a young girl, but is a vampire assassin centuries old, who not only kills as a member of the Dark Brotherhood but sometimes kills in gruesome ways, then laughs about it when retelling the tale.
• Morton's Fork:
  • The Civil War is this, to the point that neither side has a completely happy ending for the province should they win: If the Empire wins, they have consolidated their power in the region and can now focus on rebuilding their military strength against the Thalmor, but at the cost of deeply dividing the province along political lines and dealing a massive blow to Nord traditions and independence. If the Stormcloak Rebellion wins, they have won Skyrim's independence from the Empire and Thalmor, but now they are ruled by nationalists who see nothing but contempt for non-Nords, especially non-humans, and doom them to a lifetime of persecution, if they're not executed or run out of the country by the Stormcloaks themselves first, and have further fractured the already-struggling Empire, which would make a war to rid Tamriel of Thalmor all the more difficult.
  • Also what basically happened to High King Torygg before the events of the game: by Nord tradition, any warrior can publically challenge the High King to a duel and become the High King if he wins; Ulfric was the challenger in this case. Accept, and surely be killed by a man who was ten times the warrior he was even without the Thu'um; refuse, and be shamed throughout Skyrim and give Ulfric grounds to call a moot which would likely make Ulfric the High King anyway. Torygg chose to accept, and he literally earned his ticket to Sovngarde for it.
• Mugging the Monster:
  • Unsurprisingly, the many thieves, robbers, bandits, and brigands of Skyrim share that traditional RPG thug deficiency of not being able to tell that the guy they're about to accost is in fact, walking on a road made of the bodies of everyone s/he has mangled, even if they are wearing armour made of dragon bones and carrying a bloodstained greatsword. One random encounter even includes a dialogue option that says "I don't have time for this" in response to getting mugged — yes, you can actually tell the muggers that you're too busy to get robbed right now (not that it'll stop them from attacking anyway).
  • Alternatively, if you've completed the Thieves' Guild questline, you can bawl them out for trying to rob their boss.
  • This trope can be even more literal if the Dragonborn happens to be a vampire or werewolf.
• Mundane Made Awesome: When Dragons fight each other, they're really just having an intense verbal debate... in a language that creates fire from nothing and can slow time, just by saying the words for 'Fire' or 'Time'.
• Mundane Utility:
  • Dragon shouts are devastating against your enemies, but they can also be used to do things like freeze animals to make it easier to hunt them or knock objects off shelves and out of sight so you can steal them, or disarm traps by remotely triggering them. Or go fishing.
  • Unlocking all doors is apparently only the most simple use of Nocturnal's Skeleton Key. In the right hands, it could be used to unlock metaphorical locks such as the ones that limit human ability.
  • The "Become Ethereal" shout lets you fall off of cliffs without taking fall damage. This makes it a useful shortcut tool.
  • Arvak, the jet-black skeleton horse wreathed in purple flames that you summon from the Soul Cairn, can be used as a makeshift cushion to avoid Fall Damage. If the fall is long enough to kill him, all you need to do is cast his summoning spell again and he'll be right back, good as new.
  • You can use the "Slow Time" shout to catch arrows out of the air, skillfully dodge deadly attacks by dragons and giants... or you can just use it to make potions last longer instead. Normally, skill fortifying potions last for 30 seconds, only enough time to improve between one to five items, depending on what you're doing (smithing improvements are simpler and therefore faster, while enchantment has several steps). With a full duration Slow Time, you can extend that into nearly twice as long with no penalties since you are not slowed while browsing the menu.
  • Unrelenting Force is a mighty tool to destroy enemies, but it serves an equally useful purpose in that it can be used to swat butterflies out of the air to collect their wings. Or knock objects off shelves you can't reach (Dwemer ruins are bad about this).
  • Aura Whisper lets you locate your enemies to sneak around them or determine if the next room is filled with dozens of hostiles. It also lets you find people you're looking for in large buildings.
  • Whirlwind Sprint is probably the most abused shout. Other than for running away or closing the distance to hostile spellcasters, it is also useful for crossing chasms and rivers, or just for walking around quickly, or perhaps to 'cheat' in a game of Tag. You can also use it when you're carrying too much to run, and would otherwise be forced to walk at a snail's pace until you unload your inventory. Perhaps not coincidentally, the fully leveled Shout covers almost exactly the distance between Whiterun's main gates and the local player house.
  • You can use Elemental Fury to quicken the rate at which you hack your enemies to pieces with melee weapons... or you can use it to clean out a mine's ore veins in record time with a pickaxe.
  • Dwarven ruins can be filled with flame vents set up to roast unwary intruders. However, bandits in Raldbthar have discovered another use for them: cooking.
  • One of the shouts the Greybeards use is Bex, which harnesses the awesome power of the Thu'um to open and close doors and gates.
  • By the end of Dawnguard, you have in your possession three Elder Scrolls. And all you can do with them is sell them for a few thousand gold^note Or not even all three, if you had to buy one back earlier in the Dawnguard storyline. You can't even display them in your home because they're quest items and so must stay in your inventory. Dexion even asks what you plan to do with them, and two options (use them to find fame and fortune, use them to make indestructible armor) are not only mundane, but are not even allowed to be attempted.
  • Have the power to raise the dead? Raise a corpse to carry your stuff. Store the items on the corpse first, raise it, and then kill it once you fast travel back home.
  • Lycanthropy nets you a powerful beast form and associated perk tree which can match a lot of the threats in the game. It also has a far more mundane use: disease immunity. Even if you never use the beast form, having this trait does away with a number of very annoying status effects that come from skeever bites and Nordic tomb traps, and completely protects you from Sanguinare Vampiris, the precursor to Vampirism.
  • The beast form itself also has mundane utility, because it has no carry weight and runs quickly with a huge stamina pool and regeneration rate. This lets you load up on all the loot you want to carry out of a dungeon, transform, sprint to the nearest city, and use the wait function to de-transform right outside of it (or, if you own a home in the town, you can just make a beeline to your home where you can safely wait it out, then unload).
  • The Secret Servant power in Dragonborn lets you summon the Dremora Butler, a Dremora in a robe whose job is to carry your stuff.
• Murder Ballad:
  • Bandits are frequently overheard singing, "With three rounds down, the Orc did drown, and bid the Elf good-bye ... for none could know, 'twas not for show, and someone had to die..."
  • One of the bandit voices turns the "Kill him, if he talks to me like that again... get him while he's sleeping... poison his meat..." line into a song instead of just speaking it.
  • Cicero likes to sing them when idle.
• Murder Is the Best Solution: After you kill Grelod the Kind, one of the orphans notes that so many problems can be solved by killing just one person, and that the possibilities are endless.
• Murder, Inc.: The Dark Brotherhood, per series tradition. The Morag Tong also make an appearance on Solstheim, though they are always hostile and can't be interacted with.
• Musical Spoiler: The standard music switches to battle music whenever you aggro an enemy — regardless of whether you've actually spotted said enemy. More pignant with the dragons, which come with convenient Dovahzul chanting, often in the form of Triumphant Reprise of the game's main theme, to let you know annoyance-from-above is on its way.
• Mutually Exclusive Power-Ups: Multiple:
  • You can only have one blessing from Standing Stones or temple shrines at a time. Guardian Stone blessings remain in effect indefinitely (until changed), while shrine blessings wear off after a few hours. Dawnguard adds a chance to get the Aetherial Crown, a circlet which allows you to have two Standing Stone blessings at the same time. The biggest issue is that you can't wear a helmet while you have it equipped. However, there are two helmets (the Penitus Oculatus helmet and the Falmer helmet) which are bugged in such a way that they will let you have a circlet and the helmet at the same time.
  • Vampirism and lycanthropy preclude each other. Both are powerful and useful in their own ways, so the choice mostly comes down to player preference.
• My Country, Right or Wrong: Some Nords still loyal to the Empire, or at least the idea of it, shade into this: they hate the policies forced on them by the treaty with the Thalmor, acknowledge the Empire is not what it used to be and that they've suffered for their loyalty, but "the Nords have never been fair-weather friends".
• My God, You Are Serious!:
  • The guards' reaction when you ask them to whom you should report that you killed the leader of the Dark Brotherhood.
  • Constance Michel also reacts this way if you tell her you're the Dragonborn, Harbinger of the Companions, or Arch-Mage of the College of Winterhold when asking to adopt one of the orphans in her care.
  • Once you're done with it, you can offer to sell Urag your Elder Scroll. Naturally he takes a moment to realise it's not a joke.
• My Little Panzer: You can give your kids wooden swords, which do as much damage as you can expect... Or you can give your kids any dagger - up to and including enchanted and/or tempered dragonbone daggers and even some unique ones.
• My Species Doth Protest Too Much:
  • The Circle of the Companions turn out to be Werewolves who have decided to help and protect others rather than devour them.
  • Even some high elves have an antipathetic attitude towards the Thalmor: a senior Legion officer presiding over a camp near Riften is a high elf, and finds the Thalmor to be detestable.
  • The player can be any of the elven races without gaining favor or alliance with the Thalmor, and he or she can just as easily be a Nord serving the Empire or a Stormcloak-aligned Imperial. In fact, most of the playable races lack their cultural baggage from pre-Skyrim lore, so the player will often be the odd one out of his or her people. This is pointed out directly when some non-Nord races ask Ulfric about whether the Stormcloaks will accept them - the line is something about how Skyrim is home to more races than just Nord and loyalty is what's important. Too bad his townspeople didn't get the memo.
• Mystical Plague: Peryite's Daedric quest involves hunting down and killing the leader of a group of his rogue followers who've been inflicted with such a plague. Before going rogue, Peryite intended to have these followers spread a this plague to "cover the world" with his "blessing".
• Mythology Gag:
  • It is heavily implied by Sheogorath that he is, in fact, the Champion of Cyrodiil, the player from Oblivion. Makes sense when you consider Oblivion's DLC.
  • There is also a book that gives help on thievery which has apparently been written by the player character of Oblivion (assuming that person completed the Thieves' Guild storyline), although the game's developers state the author is an impostor.
  • M'aiq the Liar shows up... for about the third game in a row. He's a random encounter on the road, and will make commentary about some of the newer (or weirder) elements of the game. Listen to his sweet lies here.
  • The New Gnisis Cornerclub, a Dunmer tavern in the Grey Quarter of Windhelm, is named after Gnisis, one of the cities in Morrowind, from whence the Dunmer hail.
  • During the Civil War questline, one quest will have you deliver a set of forged orders to an enemy officer to divert their troops away from a lightly-defended fort. However, if you aren't wearing an armor set belonging to the faction you're trying to fool when you do this, the officer will ask why you're out of uniform, which is exactly what would happen in Morrowind if you joined the Imperial Legion and tried to talk to anyone in it without wearing a proper Imperial cuirass. Bonus points for one of the factions involved actually being the Imperial Legion to boot.
  • Sergius Turrianus, Enchanter at the College of Winterhold, can be asked to enchant items for the player, a request which he always declines in a confused tone, as if he doesn't know why they would even think such services were available. This is a reference to the two previous games; in Morrowind, you could pay enchanters to infuse items with spell effects, which was more reliable than doing it yourself if your Enchant skill was low, and in Oblivion, enchanting for a fee at the Arcane University was the only way to create magical items. Frustratingly for those players not well-versed in enchanting, it is implied in dialogue that the college actually does offer enchanting services to local residents with enough cash.
  • One of the quests in the Dark Brotherhood chain is called "...Where You Hang Your Enemy's Head." In Oblivion, Gogran gro-Balmog uses those exact words to describe what home means to him.
  • If the player chooses to be a Redguard, Hadvar will ask if the player is a sellsword or a sailor from Stros M'Kai. This is a reference to The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard, in which the player takes the role of a Redguard named Cyrus, who is indeed a sailor from the island of Stros M'Kai.