Skyrim / Tropes N to T

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N

• Nailed to the Wagon: A Khajiit by the name of J'zhar signs both himself and his brother J'darr up for an expedition to a remote ruin in order to break J'Darr's Skooma addiction. It doesn't go well, and J'Darr eventually murders his brother with an ax.
• Naked People Are Funny:
  • Unintentional example. Until the 1.9 patch, a bug sometimes caused the courier to make his deliveries wearing nothing but a hat and a loincloth. It renders him The Comically Serious.
  • The 100 skill level perk for Pickpocket lets you steal equipped items, like clothing.
  • Choosing to walk around without any body armor or clothing equipped will elicit a variety of colorful comments from NPCs, such as:
    "It takes a lot of confidence to walk around naked ... trust me on this." (from a priestess in the Temple of Dibella, goddess of beauty)
    "Either Narfi's drunk or you're naked. Probably both." (Narfi in Ivarstead)
    "Put a cloth sack on at least! You're making me ... unseasonably warm..." (from a prisoner in Cidhna Mine)
    "This one wonders, can you not afford clothes, or do you just like the feel of the wind?" (Khajiit caravan trader)
    "Um... You've got no clothes. You should get some." (Farkas)
  • In the Dragonborn DLC, the owner of the Retching Netch notes that the drunken bar patron in the name's backstory was naked at the time
• Named After the Injury: A few characters are given sobriquets based on the fact that they've lost an eye, such as King Olaf One-Eye.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast:
  • Alduin, the World Eater.
  • Dirge and Maul, two thugs employed by the Thieves' Guild.
  • One of the followers is named Ghorbash The Iron Hand.
  • All the named Dragon Priests, in Dragon language at least: Hevnoraak (Brutal), Krosis (Sorrow), Morokei (Glorious), Rahgot (Rage Kill), Nahkriin (Vengeance), Volsung (Horror/Air Horror), Vokun (Shadow), and Konahrik (Warlord).
  • With the Dragonborn DLC, we get Ahzidal (Bitter Destroyer), Dukaan (Dishonor), and Zahkriisos (Sword Blood/Finite Kill Blood/Bloody Sword). Only Vahlok (Spring Sky/Guardian), Qahnaarin (Vanquisher) and Miraak (Allegiance Guide) break the tradition.
  • All named dragons.
  • One of the Silver Hand bad guys you face in the Companions questline is known as "The Skinner". As Aela tells you, "I don't think I need to tell you why."
  • The Dark Brotherhood, which is also nicknamed the "Black Hand" after their personal symbol. Bonus points for the rite to call them being called the "Black Sacrament".
  • They call Molag Bal the King of Rape for a reason.
  • The Dragonborn. There is a reason they are called "The One They Fear".
• Names to Trust Immediately: Subverted with Grelod the Kind. Played straight with Elisif the Fair and Balgruuf the Greater.
• Natural Weapon: Khajiit and Argonians both get a boost to hand-to-hand combat due to their claws (though the former get a larger boost than the latter).
• Navel-Deep Neckline:
  • The Daedric Lords Azura and Nocturnal both wear robes split from shoulders to navel. While Azura is only depicted through statues, Nocturnal appears in person (if you complete the Thieves' Guild questline). Her robes are unobtainable barring console commands.
  • Ancient Nord Armor, when worn on females (Aela the Huntress has a set as her default), is comprised of a deep-V halter-top and no back (or sides for that matter).
  • For Fan Disservice, Draugr who were female in life wear this armor.
  • The female version of Hide Armor also has cleavage that extends to their stomach.
• A Nazi by Any Other Name: It's not a big secret that the Thalmor have severely oppressed the other races to the point that they have been progressing to full-blown ethnic cleansing.
  • In addition to Nazis, they seem to have trappings of the Spanish Inquisition as well, since they like to go around enforcing their ban on Talos worship.
• Necessary Drawback:
  • Lycanthropy renders you immune to all diseases (outside of a glitch) and gives you a powerful werewolf form. In exchange, the player can never get resting bonuses from sleeping, the werewolf form levels separately from the player's normal form, the interface is completely disabled except for the skill tree while transformed, and you have to listen to everyone complain about the signs of it.
  • Vampirism is similar. Contracting vampirism gives the player a number of cool abilities, but it's regulated by lack of feeding and going too long without it renders everyone hostile to you (without the Dawnguard DLC, at least), forcing you to balance your feeding carefully. Sunlight also cuts off your ability to regenerate magicka, health, and stamina (barring enchanted apparel or potions). The more powerful Vampire Lord form introduced with Dawnguard removes the hatred and gives you a transformation even more versatile than the werewolf form.
• Necromancer:
  • You encounter a fair number of these in Skyrim; most of them are enemies, although Serana in Dawnguard is your staunch ally. With the right spells and perks, the Dragonborn can become one too.
  • Alduin himself is this to his draconic brethren, and is the reason that the dragons are returning to Skyrim.
• Necromantic: Calixto Corium, the Butcher of Windhelm, who commits serial murder in order to gather parts to create a new body for his beloved sister.
• The Need for Mead: Naturally, being a fantasy Norse-like culture, mead abounds. Skyrim has two major brands of mead, Honningbrew (brewed near Whiterun) and Black-Briar (brewed in Riften), and a generic "Nord Mead". In one sidequest, a group of drunks lambast you if you favor Black-Briar Mead over Nord Mead. If you share bottles of Honningbrew instead, they will be overjoyed and give you a magical amulet as thanks. Jarl Siddgeir of Falkreath, on the other hand, hates Nord mead (he calls it "local piss") and asks you for a bottle of Black-Briar to prove your worth.
  Random Bandits: Mead, mead, mead. Would it kill 'em to get a beer now and again? Stupid bees and their stupid honey...
• Neglected Garden: In Dawnguard, the Dragonborn and Serana will make their way through the bowels of Castle Volkihar and find the castle courtyard. Serana's mother Valerica, a master alchemist, used to spend her afternoons tending the courtyard gardens. In the present day, the courtyard has fallen into disarray (by design, as Valerica knew Harkon would never visit the courtyard and the entrance to her secret tower was hidden here). Serana wistfully remembers time spent in the courtyard with her mother thousands of years ago, back when their family was happy before Lord Harkon became obsessed with ending the tyranny of the sun.
• Nerf: Standard magical spells got this treatment as a justification for the new Make Some Noise powers that you can unlock throughout the game. In practice, this leads to spellcasters having a very awkward growth where they struggle with enemies as they scale beyond the set damage of the spell(s) until they have enough to get to the next level (Apprentice -> Adept -> Expert -> Master). When the school (Alteration, Conjuration, Restoration, Destruction, Illusion) reaches master level, that is it; there is no way of making stronger spells, and you have to face against stronger and stronger foes with spells that Can't Catch Up. Shouts themselves only have set effects too, with the stronger the effect having a longer cooldown period. This may have been done to make sure that the completely broken Magic system in Oblivion wouldn't be abused again but led to only weapons scaling instead and improving with Smiting, Enchanting, and Alchemy.
• Neutral in Name Only: Jarl Balgruuf, who rules the strategically important city of Whiterun, declares himself neutral and "on the side of Whiterun," supporting neither the Imperial regime nor the Stormcloak rebellion. However, his city's reliance on trade with the Imperials means that he privately leans much more toward them, and he ultimately chooses to support them openly when the Stormcloaks demand he make a choice.
• Neutrality Backlash: Jarl Balgruuf attempts to remain neutral in the conflict between the Imperials and the Stormcloaks, but the city winds up subject to a siege regardless and, depending on which side you pick, Balgruuf may wind up losing his position.
• Neutral No Longer: Jarl Balgruuf the Greater of Whiterun initially maintains a position of neutrality in the Civil War, refusing to get involved (though he has no fondness for Ulfric Stormcloak). Eventually, if you start the questline, regardless of which faction you side with Ulfric chooses to invade Whiterun, forcing Balgruuf to side with the Imperials. Speaking to him afterwards will have him reveal that he has nothing but contempt for Ulfric, who he regards as a power-hungry barbarian and that he favors the Empire for economic reasons.
• Never-Forgotten Skill: As of the Legendary update, the game has this trope. Once you've learned a spell, you will always know it, even if you reset the skill. Keep in mind that Master-level spells require you to be at level 90 to unlock the associated quest for them, and most Adept and Expert-level spells do not appear until you've passed 50.
• Never Got to Say Goodbye: You can meet a mad vagrant named Narfi who laments that, unlike the rest of his deceased family, he never got to say goodbye to his sister before she disappeared. If you investigate, you will learn that she is dead, and you will have the option of giving him the bad news or lying to give him hope.
• Never Say "Die": The game is very weird about this. While characters obviously have no problem saying "kill," "death," "murder," or variations thereof, the journal entries almost always provide the objective to "defeat" the enemy, never "kill" the enemy.
• Never Trust a Trailer:
  • The trailer on characters seems to depict General Tullius as an Obstructive Bureaucrat who doesn't pay any heed to his subordinate's advice. In reality, he's a Reasonable Authority Figure and Well-Intentioned Extremist just like Ulfric Stormcloak.
  • This iconic set of armour worn by the protagonist in a lot of promotional material must be important in the game, right? The items do exist in-game (iron helmet, iron gauntlets, iron boots, and studded leather armour), but are low tier armour pieces that already have become obsolete at the time the first dragon fight happens. They aren't supposed to be worn together anyway: it's a combination of light and heavy armour parts, and wearing such an outfit has no positive effect. (There are buffs gained from wearing heavy armours only or light armours only, but mixing them provides no benefit.)
  • The Live-Action trailer for the VR version features the player character wearing the recurring iconic but non-optimal armor, Alduin being pushed off a cliff with Unrelenting Force (it merely makes dragon stagger a bit), and the Dragonborn performing an attack while falling (such a move doesn't exist in-game).
• News Travels Fast: It doesn't matter what new thing you accomplish or again during your adventures, every single guard in every single Hold will instantly know all about it and likely comment on it to you. It gets especially absurd when there were no witnesses to the deed, yet you're already the talk of the next town you enter (across the country from where it occurred no less!) the moment you enter and pass a guard.
• New Weapon Target Range: At one point in the game, your character uses an Elder Scroll to study the past and watch Alduin be defeated by mortal heroes using the Thu'um Dragonrend, which serves as a Brown Note when used on dragons. This allows your character to master Dragonrend for themselves... and when Alduin flies by and attacks you shortly afterward, you get the perfect opportunity to practice it.
• Nice Day, Deadly Night: With Dawnguard installed, vampires with death hound pets will randomly spawn in cities at night to attack the townsfolk and Player Character.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Several examples; while some are not your doing, many of them come from the assorted questlines, none of which can be avoided if you want to complete that particular questline.
  • During the Companions' questline, after Skjor is killed during a raid on a Silver Hand encampment, Aela the Huntress sends you on a campaign of targeted vengeance against the rest of the Hand. This results in the Hand launching an attack on the Companions while you're away finding a cure to lycanthropy for Kodlak so he can enter Sovngarde when he dies, rather than be claimed by Hircine. And of course, Kodlak is the only casualty, and now his death as a werewolf means he cannot enter Sovngarde. To make matters worse, the Silver Hand also absconded with all but one of the fragments of Wuuthrad, the axe of Ysgramor that the Companions were guarding, and only Wuuthrad can open the way to the place where lycanthropy can be cured. Luckily, this is all fixable. Even Kodlak's lycanthropy can be posthumously erased.
  • To explore the Dwemer ruins beneath Markarth, you first have to get through a nest of frostbite spiders. At the end of the nest, guarded by a huge spider, you find a dead Legion soldier, with a note on him describing an expedition that delved deep into the ruins. If you follow the quest to find the missing researchers, you find the ruin crawling with Falmer, and, as one journal says, the spider nest was the only thing keeping them from flooding into the city. Your next target after that is to fix the problem you just created... by firing up all the dormant Dwemer animunculi to kill them.
  • In "The Blessings of Nature," if you choose to manipulate the Eldergleam in order to access your destination, you also give life to a number of Spriggans who turn hostile on both you... and some friendly visitors who were only there to confine themselves in the peace and tranquility of the grove. Unlike many other examples, however, this one can be avoided if you're willing and patient enough to bring a certain NPC with you, who can bring about a different outcome.
  • In "The Forsworn Conspiracy," choosing to aid Madanach in escaping the mine will likely end with about half of Markarth dead as angry Forsworn rampage through the city on the way out. This one can also be avoided, if you instead kill Madanach and steal his key to escape alone instead of with his men.
  • Bringing the mysterious artifact from Saarthal back to the College of Winterhold results in the death of its Archmage and his assistant, releasing a dormant dragon priest from his restraints, destroying part of the College and ravaging the countryside, and nearly causing the world to end.
  • As you progress through the game, you learn that the Stormcloak rebellion is in large part responsible for bringing the Thalmor's attention to Skyrim in the first place. They might never have bothered to enforce their ban on Talos worship if Ulfric hadn't started a civil war. Related to this, if Ulfric had talked to Torygg instead of killing him, he might have been persuaded to declare independence and no war would have been needed in the first place. Justified since the Thalmor instigated the Stormcloak rebellion in the first place to weaken the Empire and to give them an excuse to establish a foothold in Skyrim for their eventual invasion. They are concerned that Ulfric is becoming too successful, though.
  • Ulfric fulfills the trope on another level, too. The civil war, in which "the sons of Skyrim spill their own blood," is the final portent in the Prophecy of the Dragonborn. Because of his rebellion, the dominoes of fate are lined up for Alduin's return.
  • When the Dragonborn ventures to Sovngarde in hot pursuit of Alduin, it's discovered that to regain his strength, Alduin has been feasting on the enormous number of souls that have been sent there by the Civil War. If the Dragonborn has helped end the war by this point in the game, however, either Ulfric and Galmar or Legate Rikke (depending on who they sided with) can be found in Sovngarde despairing on how all the civil war did was make Alduin stronger.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Alduin inadvertently saves the Dovahkiin's life during the starting sequence when he attacks Helgen.
  • In Dragonborn, before embarking on their planned assassination of the "False Dragonborn," one of Miraak's cultists makes sure to carry written instructions with them mentioning both Miraak and Solstheim. From this, the Dragonborn is surprisingly able to figure out who wants them dead and where they can be found! Possibly justified; from something Miraak says, it may be that he needs the player's soul to escape Mora's realm, and so of course he wants to be found.
  • The "Innocence Lost" quest has you assassinating the caretaker of an orphanage for a child who's trying to summon the Dark Brotherhood. You can even gouge the kid for higher payment! However, it turns out that the caretaker was not so caring, and not only do the kids get a much more pleasant replacement, you will be given the option of adopting two of them afterwards (if you don't already have kids adopted from elsewhere).
  • After finishing "Innocence Lost", you'll get kidnapped by Astrid, leader of the Dark Brotherhood, the next time you sleep, and are forced to join them... unless you choose to kill her instead, at which point you'll get the quest to wipe the group off the face of Skyrim. This is the only way you can destroy the Brotherhood, meaning they'd have been better off just leaving you alone.
• Nigh-Invulnerability: The Dragonhide master-level Alteration spell can enable this. The manner in which it applies its physical damage mitigation effect makes it mitigate damage before armor does, meaning the Armor rating has even less to mitigate. This spell, along with enough conventional armor rating, makes almost any physical hit just do Scratch Damage.
• The Night That Never Ends: The goal of Harkon, the lead vampire in Dawnguard. He fails, thanks to you, but you can blot out the sun for a day by dipping your arrows in Serana's blood, then shooting the sun with Auriel's Bow.
• Ninja: The Dark Brotherhood armor has a distinctly ninja-like vibe to it this time around. Kinda appropriate when you think about it.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot:
  • Your character has the soul of a Dragon. This person could also be a thief, fighter or mage or some combination of the three, the champion of several god/demon beings simultaneously, vampire or werewolf (but not both, sadly) and one of nine races including a Half-Elf, an Orc or a Lizard/Cat Person.
  • It used to be possible via a glitch to be a Werepyre, but it has since been patched out. There are also plenty of mods that allow it.
• Ninja Run: Sprinting while dual-wielding any one-handed weapons becomes this.
• No Animosity in the Afterlife: Sovngarde, the Nord afterlife. Any major characters you killed before that point will show up there:
  • One such character is Galmar Stone-Fist, the second-in-command of the Stormcloaks. Initially, he bitterly accuses you of trying to continue tormenting him in the afterlife. But once you defeat Alduin, who had been eating the souls of the dead in Sovngarde, he warms up considerably, both out of thanks for defeating the World Eater and also figuring that "eternity is too long to hold a grudge."
  • One quest has you assisting the ghost of the bard Svaknir, who was punished for writing a satirical work attacking King Olaf One-Eye. During your visit to Sovngarde, you can meet king Olaf and he tells you that he considers Svaknir a Worthy Opponent and is looking forward to his soul arriving in Sovngarde so they can greet as equals.
• No "Arc" in "Archery":
  • A very subtle aversion. While most players have been trained by other games that arrows fire in a straight line, in this game, if you do this you may often find yourself missing. Unlike in most games that do have arcing arrows (like, say, Oblivion), the arrow is not fired directly at your cursor, but somewhat above it, so that a mid-range shot will hit where the cursor is pointing. For long ranged shots, you need to aim at or slightly above your target, as arrows fall due to gravity as they fly; for short-range shots it may be necessary to aim slightly down. If you pay close attention, you might notice that the arrow's path tilts slightly toward the nearest enemy in the targeting cross-hair. This can be a problem if you're trying to set up long range lead shots at moving targets, as the the arrow will hit where the enemy was rather than where it will be.
  • Downplayed with the Crossbows in Dawnguard. These fire a bit straighter than regular bows, making them more attractive to players used to this trope.
• No Campaign for the Wicked: Neither the Thalmor nor the Forsworn can be joined, despite both being valid factions in the Civil War questline.
  • On the other hand, inverted by the Dark Brotherhood questline - while you can, in theory, side against them, all you get is one short mission with no significant rewards, compared to the lengthy and detailed Dark Brotherhood campaign itself. Particularly painful if playing a good-aligned character who wouldn't go near an organization like the Dark Brotherhood; you miss out on all the achievements related to that questline.
  • On top of that, there's no way to go against the Thieves' Guild or Maven Black-Briar. The fact that Brynjolf forces the first of the Thieves' Guild quests on you the first time he sees you (which is pretty easy, as he stands in the center of Riften every day) has caused a few mods to pop up specifically to invoke this trope just so players won't be accosted by him. (You can tell him no, when he asks you to do it, but some players would just rather not be asked at all.) There was supposed to have been an alternate campaign to destroy them, but it was cut for time, and Maven would still have been a Karma Houdini regardless.
• No Clear Leader: The "Companions" of Jorrvaskr don't have a designated leader. They have a "Harbinger", who is the most respected of the group, and a "Circle" of senior members who can all give orders and assign missions, but they're all emphatic that the group doesn't have any one leader.
• No-Gear Level:
  • The "No One Escapes Cidhna Mine" sidequest, which strips you of all your inventory items (though magic is still available, you're given a pickaxe, and you can bargain with your fellow inmates for a shiv). Your stuff is all given back to you at the very end, however.
  • Averted in the main quest when you must infiltrate the Thalmor embassy. A collaborator can smuggle some equipment in for you, and instructs you to bring only what is absolutely necessary, but there's no weight limit on what he smuggles in, so you can dump your entire inventory on him and pick it up again ten minutes later without ever having to get into a fight.
  • Mastering the ultimate Restoration spell requires performing a ritual in which the player character is locked in a small room, stripped of all their gear and clothes, and must survive long enough being attacked by mage ghosts, or outright defeat them.
• No Hero Discount:
  • Averted in a sense. While being a good person doesn't net you a discount when it comes to purchases, merchants for whom you've done favors will allow you to take some items off their shelves without considering it stealing, and they regularly restock. This can even include gold pieces scattered on the countertop. As long as you see the word "Take" instead of "Steal" when you interact with an item, help yourself with no repercussions!
  • Also somewhat averted by the title of Thane; besides the housecarl and permission to buy a house, the other perk to Thane-dom is that you can, just once, have your crimes cleared without question. So if you ever have a particular beef with a city, you can go on a killing spree and immediately have it all pardoned before afternoon tea.
• No Kill like Overkill: Near the end of the Dark Brotherhood questline, you return home to find Penitus Oculatus agents sacking the Sanctuary. Festus was one of the first to fight back, and he was pinned to a tree by nearly 40 arrows.
  • Some quests have an optional rider of "wiping out X" where X is the enemy faction. Some have bonuses that can later be used (such as obtaining more Glenmoril Witch Heads), while others are entirely up to you. Similarly, in the Dark Brotherhood quest, you are free to kill Commander Maro for his treachery as an optional condition to the quest, and you are also free to completely annihilate everyone on the Emperor's ship if you so choose, depending on how much retribution you want. Neither of these actions will earn you a bounty, even if you do them in plain sight of the guards. And of course, if you've held off from doing the Civil War questline up to this point, you can join the Stormcloaks and ultimately drive the Empire out of Skyrim.
  • The Master-level Destruction spells, but in particular Firestorm and Blizzard. The former is basically a fantasy nuke centered on you, obliterating anyone without fire protection in the area. The latter conjures up a devastating hailstorm that constantly chews away at the health of everyone within the vicinity. Both will guarantee that you kill anything and everything with an HP bar dead. The problem is this would often kill friendlies too, which will cause everyone you didn't hit to start attacking you (and potentially racking up an impossibly huge bounty). This makes both of them completely unusable if you're running around with allies, or fighting in a neutral zone with people you don't wanna piss off. Factor in the fact that most bandits are Nords and in the Reach there are the Brenton Forsworn means that your seemingly fearsome Blizzard is not hitting quite as hard as you like you got a huge waste of both time and magicka though at least it slows down the guys with weapons (the mages? Not so much).
• Noiseless Walker: The Muffle spell reduces or completely silences the sound of your footsteps. Joining the Dark Brotherhood gets you a pair of boots enchanted with a permanent Muffle effect.
• Non-Combat EXP: the system is similar but has a few major changes. First, there are no longer Attributes. Increasing your skills 10 times still allows you to level up, but instead of increasing Attributes, you choose to add 10 points to your Health, Magicka, or Stamina. Secondly, leveling up allows you to choose a Perk in one of the skill trees, with more Perks being unlocked the higher your level in that skill.
• Non-Indicative Name:
  • Inverted. Despite the name of the series, it's only in this game that the titular "Elder Scrolls" have started actually being an important part of the plot.
  • The Dwemer, a sub-species of Mer (Elves), are also known as "Dwarves". Though they do still have some similarities to typical fantasy Dwarves (they were expert arcane craftsmen and enchanters, had a tendency to build deep underground, and their men tended to wear long beards), the term is an archaeological misnomer. The term "dwarf" was given to them by the Giants of the Velothi Mountains; the Dwemer were the first non-giant race with whom they came into contact, so they seemed very small even though they were average sized among the Tamrielic races. After it was picked up by the Nords (and through them, the other races of Men), the name stuck.
• Non-Mammal Mammaries: The Argonian females, again. Also, Flame Atronachs and Spriggans. Flame Atronachs do at least have the excuse of being Daedra, to which different sexes are nothing more than a mortal contrivance and they simply choose to take a female form because of their whim (as is the case for Daedric Princes too).
• Non-Nude Bathing: A few hunters can be seen relaxing in the hot springs south of Windhelm in their underwear. A woman who was bathing in a lake north of Markarth was also bathing in her underwear when she was killed by Forsworn.
• Noob Cave:
  • Helgen Keep and the adjoining caverns. Several locales around Riverwood are also toned down in difficulty, like Bleakfalls Barrow and Embershard Mine.
  • Considering its prominence, both visually (as you near Riverwood) and promotionally in pre-release demos, plus its appearance in both an early available side quest and one of the first main quests as well, Bleak Falls Barrow seems to be what Bethesda are treating as Skyrim's first 'real' dungeon. It also has two Warm Up Bosses - a Giant Frostbite Spider and a leveled Draugr "boss" in the room with the Word Wall.
• Noodle Implements:
  • After winning a staff in a drinking contest, the guy you made the bet with leaves you a note saying he needs a hagraven feather, giant's toe, and holy water to fix the staff. It turns out to be an elaborate prank on his part.
  • The Dark Brotherhood "radiant" conversations about their assassinations are full of these. The flow goes that one will mention where they went, and then...
  But really. A horker, some twine, three wood elves, and a hatchet? Points for creativity, if nothing else.
  It's the part with the severed head I find most impressive. My compliments.
  I'm just trying to imagine you hiding inside the body of a mammoth. Bloody brilliant idea.
  • The "shopping list" you find in Mercer's home looks like one: Milk, Goat Cheese, Turnips, Cauterizing Agent, Eggs, Flour, Cheese
  • A letter to Haelga praises her technique in the "Dibellan arts" and mentions a string of random items, including Daedric Boots and a Trout. You can also find a Horker Tusk and Honey near her bed. It's telling when the Leather Straps in the bedroom is the least noodley of implements.
• Noodle Incident:
  • Unlike the previous games, this time we know why and how the player character ended up being imprisoned. However, it's unclear why the player character was crossing the border into Skyrim in the first place, nor is there any set canon on whether or not the player ever did anything more illegal than just being around a bunch of Stormcloaks. (Dialogue at a few points will let the player decide this, but it's just for flavor.)
  • There's a bard named Talsgar wandering the wilderness. If you find him, you can ask him for speechcraft training, but he'll refuse, saying something about an incident with a roguish lad and the daughter of a prominent thane.
  • The "radiant" conversations for the Dark Brotherhood members are basically nothing but a huge pile of noodles; see directly above.
  • During the negotiations in "Season Unending", General Tullius may bring up a massacre at Karthwasten and demand that Ulfric pay compensation, while the Stormcloak leaders vehemently deny that such a thing took place. No other details on the incident are given anywhere in the game.
• No Ontological Inertia: Zig-Zagged. Attacking summoners and necromancers plays this straight: their zombies and/or atronachs will vanish or disintegrate. However, unlike in Oblivion, where the gates vanish after banishing Dagon, the dragons are still around after you kill Alduin. Justified in that Alduin revived a bunch of dead dragons, but he isn't keeping them alive, so they can continue to exist after he's gone.
• No OSHA Compliance: The Dwemer ruins are a rare subversion, at least with regards to labels and colors. It's sometimes hard to make out due to the lighting, but if you look closely, there's gold-black trim on almost any surface that could be an occupational hazard (such as pipes, steam vents, or even the pressure plates that activate traps), while safe surfaces are a flat silver-white color. It's like a Steampunk version of caution stripes in our world. And all the really big moving parts that aren't part of a trap are behind solid grates. Even better, most of the traps were meant to be used on the Falmer, who are blind. Naturally, the trap plates were made very easy to see so the Dwemer could avoid them, but the sightless Falmer would run right over them. On the other hand, they have the usual distinct lack of railings despite ramps crossing high up in large rooms being a common design feature.
• No-Sell: If you hit an atronach with a destruction spell of its elemental alignment, it just stands there. It doesn't aggro, it doesn't stagger. You get a notification that it "resisted" the attack too. Easily invoked by the player character, in several possible ways at that:
  • The most straightforward way is to simply raise your armor/blocking effectiveness or elemental/magic resistances up to the caps, depending on which type of attack you're facing. Combined with a respectable health pool, this results in you taking barely noticeable amounts of damage even on the highest difficulty setting.
  • The Deflect Arrows perk out of the Block tree describes itself as causing arrows that hit your shield to "do no damage." In practice, it's not quite that effective; it automatically raises the percentage of damage blocked to the maximum (85%) when blocking arrows, which is still pretty close to the described effect.
  • Once they are fully charged up, wards can achieve this with respect to blocking magic spells. Even dragon shouts can be negated by them!
  • This is the whole point of the Become Ethereal shout, which causes not just enemy attacks but even fall damage to No-Sell against you.
  • You normally cannot achieve a full immunity to magic, since resistances cap at 85%... but the rarer and more powerful magic absorption, on the other hand, has no cap. This means it is possible to become completely immune to all magic while simultaneously recovering magicka whenever you are hit with a spell. This always requires the Atronach Stone sign and the Atronach perk, which combined raise magic absorption to 80%. In order to take it further (without the usage of mods), you need to either A) be a vampire with the Necromage perk or B) wear Miraak's Robes and either his gloves or his boots. This not only protects you from hostile spells, but also from some environmental effects, so you can stand in the blizzard that blocks the way to Paarthurnax, walk around in the poison gas-flooded passage in Calcelmo's Laboratory, and even swim in lava with no ill effects, while normally any of these things would get you killed in seconds, regardless of resistance. However, the Drain Vitality shout used by high-level dragons can bypass magic absorption. Additionally, it does come with an odd drawback: Your conjuration spells are counted by the game as spells cast on you, which means they can also be absorbed, preventing them from actually working. This makes spell absorption rather problematic for a conjuration focused character.
• No Sense of Direction:
  • Plautis Carvain and Salonia Carvain, two Imperial nobles who are on their way from Cyrodiil to Solitude to attend a wedding. You can encounter them all over Skyrim, except near the place they need to be. In fact, they'll never make it to Solitude and instead end up in Windhelm, which lies in the northeast of Skyrim, while Solitude lies in the northwest. Quite the accomplishment, because while Skyrim is a big place, sticking to the main roads and following the signs normally gets you where you need to be - and there are carriages (including at Windhelm) that can take you to Solitude for a small amount of gold.
  • Another character you can meet on the road is Faldrus. He's a Dark Elf on his way to the Shrine of Azura. No matter how many times you encounter him in locations that are miles apart, he never seems to reach the shrine. However, if you follow him after encountering him, he does eventually reach the shrine.
• No Sidepaths, No Exploration, No Freedom: While the large world is the polar opposite of this, its dungeons are almost uniformly single-path affairs with only one way to proceed and no meaningful branches,. There are exceptions, but very few (not including Labyrinthian, a dungeon from Arena noted for being very unlinear).
• Nostalgia Level: The DLC Dragonborn is set on Solstheim, an island that was the setting for the Morrowind expansion pack Bloodmoon. By extension, it harkens back to Morrowind itself, as the southern half of the island is covered in ash from the (nowadays constantly erupting) Red Mountain, which, combined with typical Vvardenfell architecture and flora, paints a very nostalgic picture. You can even see the northern Ashlands across the strait from Tel Mithryn, for maximum nostalgia trip.
• Not Cheating Unless You Get Caught: Worship of Talos is illegal in the Empire... but it's illegal through a treaty with a bunch of Nazi elves that everyone hates, so it's never really enforced until the civil war. Whiterun, ostensibly an Imperial city, has a preacher crying Talos' praises openly in the streets while the civil war rages (though if the Imperials secure the city he will be sent to the dungeon, where he will continue his sermons).
• "Not Illegal" Justification: If The Dragonborn uses The Thu'um in the city, they may be confronted by a guard asking them to stop. If asked if using the Thu'um is against the law, the guard will admit that it isn't, but asks them to stop because it makes the citizens nervous.
• Nothing Is Scarier: This game can be quite unnerving whenever it goes in this direction.
  • There are a couple dungeons where someone has already gone through and killed some of the enemies inside... you almost always expect some kind of noise to happen (or to run into a bandit or Draugr) and it seems really unsettling when they're all gone. A great example is Dustman's Cairn, an early Companions quest. There's a few Draugr to fight, but many more already-dead ones, and Farkas warns you that someone else has been digging in the crypt already. Then you find a release lever for a door that traps you in the side-chamber with the lever, Farkas says he'll find a way to get you out... then the Silver Hand show up to kill Farkas for being a werewolf. He wolfs out and slaughters them, but it's pretty harrowing the first time.
  • Golldir's backstory. When he was a kid, his father (or brother, it's vague) locked him inside his family's tomb for almost a week. Just imagine, you're a little kid, locked in a massive crypt with nothing but dead bodies all over. Scary, right? Now imagine having this happen in the Elder Scrolls universe, where zombies and draugr are an everyday occurrence.
  • Dwemer ruins are often full of hallways lined with hatches on the floor, walls, and/or ceiling from which constructs can emerge and immediately start hunting you. You know at least one of them, likely more, is going to spit something out at you, but which one is a mystery. And some of them wait for you to pass by before the construct appears.
  • The Falmer hives that often interconnect with the Dwemer ruins mentioned above are even worse. There are distinctly shaped crawly-holes in the walls of these places which Falmer like to pop out of in the same manner as the constructs described above.... but their lairs tend to be more dimly lit and claustrophobic, and the Falmer themselves are more frightening in appearance.
  • After it happens to you a couple of times, you'll probably get more anxious when exploring cave areas coated in spider web, expecting a giant one to drop down from the ceiling at any moment.
  • Some of these can be averted if you use the Aura Whisper shout. For instance, the pipes holding a Dwemer automaton will light up, so you can expect something to pop out of them.
• Nothing Is the Same Anymore: As a result of Mehrunes Dagon's invasion in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, the entire political landscape of Tamriel has been completely changed by the time of Skyrim. After the death of the entire Septim Dynasty, the Empire was left in a state of complete discord and thus became easy prey for the Aldmeri Dominion, who hoped to take advantage of the aftermath to expand their influence. Their attack led to the death of the Empire's very competent and benevolent stand-in-emperor; afterward, the Argonians and the Khajiit seceded, while the Empire abandoned the Dunmer completely when their homeland of Morrowind was largely decimated by a volcano. After that, the Empire came under the rule of the Mede Dynasty and waged war against the Dominion, who ended up annexing the Wood Elves and the Khajiit. For a time, the Redguards were conquered by the Dominion as well, but they later drove them out of their homeland and left the Empire as a result. The war ended with the signing of peace treaty that consequently banned the worship of Talos, leading to significant outcry from the Nords and sparking Ulfric Stormcloak's rebellion. By the beginning of this game, the Empire only has three provinces to its name: Cyrodiil, High Rock, and Skyrim, though whether it maintains control of the latter depends entirely on the player.
• Notice This:
  • Nirnroot doesn't just glow, it chimes.
  • All dragon words literally glow, accompanied by a vortex of wind that clouds your vision of everything but the word as you get close; and if that doesn't clue you in, the crescendo chorus of dragon words will. Lampshaded in the Dragonborn DLC, where one of the walls is buried under the Red Mountain ash, but you can hear the chorus calling you.
• Not in This for Your Revolution: It is possible to play this way by avoiding the Civil War storyline almost entirely. During the one part of the main quest where it is required to deal with it (getting the sides to agree to a ceasefire in order to deal with the dragon threat), you can ensure that neither side leaves the parlay with more gains than the other side, meaning they'll pick right back up where they left off once the war restarts.
• Not Me This Time: During the "Diplomatic Immunity" mission, you can ask someone to do you a favor and distract everyone at the party so you can sneak off. Unless you're asking Razelan himself (who gives a sarcastic toast) or Erikur (who hits on a serving girl), the distraction will usually consist of the person walking up to Razelan and accusing him of saying something horrible. Razelan protests, claiming that this time he's completely innocent! It's an example of this trope because Razelan is a notorious drunkard, so whatever he's being accused of saying would not be out of character for him to say; it's just that this time he didn't actually say it.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: In the Dragonborn DLC, Hermaeus Mora's facade as a friendly Doting Grandfather-like figure slips when he shows us just what he does to people who try to keep secrets from him. The results are not pretty. We also get to see what he really looks like.
• Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: The Silver Hand. While one can certainly see where they're coming from, considering how terrifying and dangerous werewolves actually are, the fact that the Silver Hand extends their hatred to that of the friendly werewolves just trying to live their own lives without hurting other people and even ordinary wolves makes it clear that they're all just a bunch of insane extremists who deserve to be put to the sword.
• Not the Fall That Kills You…: Some incredibly long falls can be survived just by dropping into Soft Water, such as Kagrenzel and Bard's Leap (although the latter is said to have killed many people who tried to make it before you). The lethality of the most famous Shout, Unrelenting Force, is not from the blast wave but from the potential of inflicting this. If the sudden stop at the end doesn't kill a foe outright, oftentimes they'll still be really hurtin'.
• Not the Intended Use: The shout "Elemental Fury" is clearly meant to be used in battle so you can get more swings of your weapon in. However, since the pickaxe is counted as a weapon, using Elemental Fury will let you mine from an ore vein faster than normally interacting with one vein.
• Not Using the "Z" Word: Played with. The word "zombie" is used, but it's for temporarily-risen bodies that crumble to dust after a while and generally look the same as they did when they were alive. Also unlike traditional zombies, they can talk and seem to be self-aware (but incapable of controlling their actions). The more traditional rotten shambling corpses are "Draugr", ancient undead Nords who also have elements of Mummies and first showed up in the series in Morrowind's Bloodmoon expansion. (The word "draugr" exists in real life languages in northern Europe, and essentially means "undead").
• NPC Random Encounter Immunity: Averted.
  • Exacerbated by the fact that most NPCs, instead of running from an obviously superior adversary, will recklessly rush in with their iron dagger trying to stab at a Legendary Dragon or a Master Vampire, naturally getting themselves killed. This can happen to valuable vendors and even questgivers. Might want to think twice before walking into a city at night.
  • The people of Skyrim are notoriously sturdy and used to hardship for this reason. Farms are close to towns and guards include them in their patrols, and sometimes call the Companions for help if necessary. Merchants frequently travel in caravans, and make sure to bring some mercenaries. And if a mine or tomb gets taken over by monsters, the locals are quick to get the heck out and wait for a Player Character to deal with the problem before going back in.
  • In the Dragonborn DLC, the fact that the town of Raven Rock doesn't have monster-proof walls is a source of much anxiety for the populace, especially since Ash Spawn keep attacking the south bulwark periodically.
• The Nudifier: One of the random effects of Sheogorath's "Wabbajack" staff is to strip an enemy of their armour.
• Numerical Hard: Skyrim has discrete difficulty levels instead of a slider like in Morrowind and Oblivion.
  • Novice has you deal 2x damage and take 1/2 damage.
  • Apprentice has you deal 1.5x damage and take 2/3 damage.
  • Adept is the default setting with no modifiers.
  • Expert has you deal 2/3 damage and take 1.5x damage.
  • Master has you deal 1/2 damage and take 2x damage.
  • Legendary has you deal 1/3 damage and take 3x damage. This setting is only available in certain versions.
• Nun Too Holy: Danica Pure-Spring, the high priestess of Kynareth in Whiterun. She consoles Ahlam about the Jerkass proclivities of Ahlam's husband... not in being faithful to him, but agreeing with Ahlam's assessment that he's a jerkass and maybe that if the Stormcloaks attack the city then maybe he'll be killed.

O

• Obfuscating Insanity: Jarl Idgrod Ravencrone of Morthal purposely adopts the persona of an eccentric old mystic. She really does have some at-times-inconvenient powers of premonition, but admits that she has played it up for deceptive purposes on more than one occasion. If you've already ingratiated yourself with her and ask for her help during "Diplomatic Immunity," she'll use this to provide a distraction to allow you to infiltrate the Thalmor embassy. It's so much fun to watch, you might forget to sneak away at first.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat:
  • One particularly vicious and procedure-oriented Imperial captain hears one of her subordinates protesting that one of the traitorous rebels being sent to the block for execution is not on the list of Stormcloak rebels sentenced to death. She promptly shouts him down, since the prisoner is in that cart, so that prisoner is going to the block, and nothing is stopping this execution save for the dragon-god showing up a few minutes later. Said prisoner is you, the player-character. It is entirely possible after you escape to join up with the Stormcloaks and proceed to utterly destroy the entire Imperial presence in Skyrim out of raw fury at your near-experience with a Viking crewcut... because one jerk didn't double-check the list.
  • Should you favor the Stormcloaks during your escape^note By following Ralof, the same Stormcloak official who you shared the cart ride with at the first minutes of the game, inside the fort., the player can get retribution against said Captain, who's one of the enemy NPCs spawned inside said fort, right at the doors. No such chance is given if the player follows Hadvar, the Imperial officer, instead. This, of course, shifted many players in favor of the Stormcloaks.
• Obviously Evil:
  • Alduin. Is there any way to make a dragon look more menacing?
  • Ancano from the College of Winterhold, a rude Altmer who happens to be part of the most unsympathetic faction of the game.
  • Mercer Frey, the extremely rude guildmaster of the Thieves' Guild.
  • Lord Harkon, in Dawnguard.
• Odd Friendship:
  • In Dawnguard, this can potentially occur with Serana (Vampire) and the Dragonborn (Vampire Hunter).
  • If you've contracted lycanthropy through the Companions questline and refused to cure it either at Ysgramor's Tomb or when Harkon offers to turn you into a Vampire Lord (staying loyal to the Dawnguard), this relationship's oddity can be taken even further.
• Odd Job Gods: Alduin, the Big Bad of the game, is specifically the god of "world-eating"; a Beast of the Apocalypse who returns the world to its primordial state so that it can be reborn into a new world. While performing his duties as the World Eater, he is said to be an invincible monster who dwarfs mountains and eats entire countries in a single bite. When he's not, he's simply a very powerful and almost-invincible dragon.
• Off with His Head!:
  • Happens to one unfortunate Stormcloak in the prologue. Almost happens to you before Alduin unwittingly saves you by attacking the town, causing the execution to be interrupted right as the headsman is poised to swing. You can also watch another beheading when you first enter Solitude.
  • There are perks in the one-handed and two-handed trees that let you decapitate your foes as a finishing move. Certain enemies with these perks can also do the same to you.
• An Offer You Can't Refuse: When you return Meridia's Beacon, she will task you with purging her temple of the necromancer defiling it. Your character can lampshade that they have little option but to accept, given she makes this offer while magically suspending you above the clouds. But for all that, you can't tell her no; you can simply put off actually doing it forever.
• Offing the Offspring:
  • Done in a very twisted and tragic fashion, by a certain man in Morthal. Turns out it was an enthralled vampire who actually did the act, but he himself was enthralled to not give half a donkey's ass about it. Ironic, because children can't be killed in the game.
  • Lord Harkon's plan in Dawnguard includes this.
  • Part of the Night Mother's backstory in the Dark Brotherhood questline; as the Bride of Sithis, she bore him five children, then killed them all to please him.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: "Hold on, Dovahkiin! Prepare to see Skyrim as you never have before!" Take flight, rise into the air, Nord choir begins, and... cue loading screen. Bethesda later fixed their mistake by adding dragon riding to the Dragonborn DLC.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Occurs with the very first dragon the Dragonborn will slay.
    Mirmulnir: Dovahkiin!? Niiid!
  • When you fire an arrow at mid-long range, the target becomes "alerted" and is reported as such in your HUD for the split second between the point where they hear the arrow being fired and the point when the arrow actually hits. One can only imagine what's going through their head... before the arrow does.
• Ominous Cube: The Dwemer Lexicons, which feature into several quests. Lexicons appear as glowing Magitek cubes and are used to store vast amounts of information. The now-extinct Dwemer even devised a means to (relatively safely) divine an Elder Scroll, bypassing the usual side effects on mortal readers such as blindness and insanity, using a machine to store the information on a Lexicon. The main quest mission "Elder Knowledge" and the side quest "Unfathomable Depths" both feature Lexicons. In the latter, returning the Lexicon to its proper place grants you the passive ability "Ancient Knowledge," which increases your skill while wearing Dwarven Armor and causes your Blacksmithing skill to increase faster.
• Omnicidal Maniac: The Thalmor are attempting to unmake the Mundus by stamping out belief in Talos, which will help them break the last of the pillars holding up reality. In the College of Winterhold questline, Ancano attempts to shortcut this process using the Eye of Magnus, and is such an unusually competent antagonist that he nearly succeeds.
• Ominous Latin Chanting: A rare heroic version in the Dragonborn's theme songs, "Dragonborn" and "One They Fear," as well as "Watch The Skies" which alternately plays when a dragon attacks.
• One-Hit Kill:
  • Easily performed by the player character with sufficiently high abilities and/or if playing on lower difficulty settings, usually accompanied by a flashy execution sequence. Meanwhile, Legendary difficulty is notorious because of how easy it is for certain enemies to do this to you.
  • Giants can smash you with their clubs so hard that you fly into the atmosphere, and dragons have an attack where they break your neck with their teeth if you're standing too close.
  • Using the Alchemy/Enchanting exploit, it's possible to craft weapons with an attack power of over one million, making very easy to kill anything in one hit.
  • The Wabbajack, Sheogorath's Daedric artifact in this game, is a staff that casts various random spells on its targets. Two of its possible effects are turning enemies into sweetrolls and transforming them into a shower of coins, from which targets obviously do not recover. It also has a chance to just make targets drop dead on the spot.
• One Size Fits All: Armor and clothing has separate versions depending on whether they're worn on a male or female character, sometimes drastically (e.g. the Ragged Trousers are just that if equipped on a male, but on a female it also includes a full shirt), but this has no effect on a character's ability to equip it. Interestingly, when looting/pickpocketing armor off of an NPC, the version shown on the menu is that of the player's gender and not the item's owner. It gets even worse playing a beast race. Somehow, they can squash all of those horns, long ears and muzzles into a human head-shaped helmet.
• One-Time Dungeon:
  • Skuldafn, which the Dragonborn cannot reach after the first run through it because one needs to be able to fly to reach it, and the friendly dragon who let you ride him there won't do it again. You can't even return after you gain the ability to tame and ride dragons from the Dragonborn DLC.
  • Skyrim also has Sovngarde, which is only accessible through Skuldafn, and, by extension, cannot be returned to.
• One-Winged Angel: In the Dawnguard DLC, if the Dragonborn sides with the titular Dawnguard against the Volkihar vampires, the final battle against Lord Harkon sees him immediately transform into his Vampire Lord form.
• One-Woman Wail: "Night Theme 6,", AKA "Aurora", combined with some Ominous Chanting and bits of Drone of Dread.
• Only Flesh Is Safe: The Adept-level Alteration spell Telekinesis cannot be used on living targets. It can be used to throw objects at them.
• Only Smart People May Pass: Subverted with the combination locks on the claw-operated doors in draugr barrows. One of the books you can read in-game contains speculation as to why these puzzles were made so easy (the combination is engraved on the key itself). The answer, according to the author, is that the combination is there in order to ensure that the door is being opened by a sentient being, rather than a mindless undead. In other words, the doors aren't there to keep people from getting in - they're there to keep things from getting out.
• On-Ride/On-Foot Combat: Played with, bizarrely. While the Dragonborn is capable of using ranged and melee weapons against their enemies while riding on horseback, they cannot use any of their spells or Shouts; as such, a Dragonborn with a mage-focused build must always dismount before fighting. Ironically, the inverse is true instead if the Dragonborn is riding a dragon (courtesy of the Bend Will shout); while they cannot use their ranged or melee weapons, they can use their spells and Shouts, with the dragon using its own abilities as well against any targeted enemies.
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: Erandur slips between an American and Australian accent. This may be deliberate, as he's hiding a Dark and Troubled Past.
• Opening the Sandbox: Lampshaded by the Dragonborn after escaping their execution as well as the sudden attack from the first appearing dragon. Once they set foot in the overworld, the player is free to explore it in detail.

"I have escaped both my execution and a dragon attack at Helgen. I now have my freedom to do as I see fit in Skyrim."

• Opium Den: Redwater Den. It's a Skooma bar that, while being patronized by otherwise innocent addicts, is run by sadists who drug their personal brand, then take any unconscious victims into a jail below to be turned into Vampire Thralls.
• Opposed Mentors: In Skyrim, you have the choice of being backed by the Greybeards (who are Actual Pacifists) or the Blades (who want to slay every single dragon in existence). In the end, the Blades ask you to kill the dragon who serves as the mentor to the Greybeards, forcing you to choose one side or the other. Siding with the Blades gives you access to dragon-hunting potions and skills, and the option to fight a dragon whenever you want, while siding with the Greybeards allows you to skip the Civil War questline (making you not have to side with either the Stormcloaks or the Legion) by negotiating a temporary truce along with getting to meditate on certain Words of Power. It's also an argument of based practicality/caution versus idealism/loyalty: Despite being a generous and helpful ally who has done nothing to slight you, Paarthurnax still is a dragon, and even though he tells you that he's reformed, he also makes it clear that he fights to retain control of his aggression every single day, it's wise not to trust him, and he almost certainly deserves death for the numerous atrocities he committed against mortals in the distant past.
• Optional Boss: Only one Dragon Priest is actually required to be killed in order to complete the game's main quest, and that's assuming you don't simply sprint past him before he closes the path. For good reason too - Dragon Priests are easily some of the most deadly enemies in the game, even more than Dragons themselves, but you really have to go out of your way to find them.
• Optional Stealth:
  • During the tutorial, you and your companion come across a sleeping bear. The NPC will advise you to sneak past it (thus teaching you the Sneak mechanic), but he also hands you a bow and suggests you could just try and kill it.
  • The Thieves' Guild will dock your pay if you get caught or kill someone during Delvin and Vex's side missions; but for the purposes of the main quest, no one minds if you choose to hack or blast your way through the areas where you're supposed to be stealthy.
  • Boethiah's quest is stated by the Daedric Prince herself to be a stealth mission, with her telling you to kill all the bandits in the mine without them seeing you; but it doesn't matter if they see you or not, as once you get the Ebony Armor, the quest ends with Boethiah using the same dialogue.
  • Subverted during the Companions' questline when you and Vilkas storm the Silver Hand's hideout; good luck sneaking up on anything with him around, since he just runs in and attacks as soon as he's aware of the enemy's presence.
• Orchestral Bombing: The themes "One They Fear" and "Watch The Skies", which play every time a dragon shows up. The former in particular is an insanely epic reworking of the main Elder Scrolls theme featuring Ominous Dovahzuul Chanting and bombastic brass.
• The Order:
  • The Imperial Legion. And you can join it again!
  • The Blades, too - though unlike in Oblivion, you can't join them, as the Order proper has long since fallen apart and almost entirely died out. Plus they are nominally supposed to serve you, as their purpose is to serve a Dragonborn and you are the last one (not that this oath of "service" stops them demanding that you kill Paarthurnax, and refusing to talk to you or help beyond a certain point unless you do). However, you can help rebuild the Order by recruiting new members for them after a certain point, and have them accompany you on Dragon-slaying missions.
  • The Dawnguard, an order of vampire hunters headed by an ex Vigilant of Stendarr.
  • The Companions also qualify, at least to an extent. Flavor Text on one of the Loading Screens even points out that the Tamrielic Fighters' Guild has no presence in Skyrim, but the Companions make up for it.
  • The Vigilant of Stendarr, although if you have Dawnguard installed, they get wiped out once you reach level 10. Whether the DLC is installed or not, they - like the Blades - cannot be joined by the Dragonborn.
• Order Reborn:
  • The Blades were hunted to near extinction by the Aldmeri Dominion. With the Dragonborn's help, they can recruit new members and begin to rebuild.
  • The Dawnguard, an ancient order of vampire hunters, has been resurrected by Isran, a former Vigilant of Stendarr, to combat the rising Vampire threat in Skyrim.
• Orichalcum: Primarily used by Orcs. Because... they start with the same letter? It makes very good weapons and armor regardless.
• Orphanage of Fear: Honorhall Orphanage in Riften, run by Grelod the Kind until/unless she gets killed by the Dovahkiin.
• Orphanage of Love: Once Grelod is out of the way, the much kinder Constance Michel (herself another poor soul who chafed under Grelod's tyranny) takes over tending the orphanage.
• Orphaned Etymology:
  • At the end of the wagon ride during the intro, Ralof will say "end of the line" upon arriving in Helgen. Tamriel has no trains.
  • The Song of the Dragonborn has the phrase "to keep evil at bay." The idiom originated from keeping enemy ships out at bay, but since dragons don't use ships...
• Our Demons Are Different: The Dremora. And they are hammy! They're not all warriors and mages however; in Dragonborn you can find a spell to summon a butler (who talks like a posh Altmer) or a merchant (who talks like a suave Dunmer) to help with the weight of all the crap you carry. And Velehk Sain is, of all things, a pirate.
  "A CHALLENGER IS NEAR!"
• Our Dragons Are Different: Dragons, rather than having the usual Breath Weapon, speak their abilities into reality. So they say the Draconic word for "fire," and fire appears.
  • You've got a regular rainbow of dragons running around, too. There's your standard garden-variety Black Dragons; blue Frost Dragons, which are more sinister-looking; green Blood Dragons, which kind of look like iguanas; bronze-colored Elder Dragons, which look bulkier than the other dragons; and the most powerful of all, red and black Ancient Dragons, which have thick armored plates instead of scales. Dawnguard adds two more classes even more powerful than the Ancients: Revered Dragons (which look almost snake-like with rows of spines, empty eyes and shiny pink skin) and Legendary Dragons (like the Ancient Dragons but with a more intense black-and-orange color scheme and having four eyes in one socket). Rounding out the rainbow are Paarthurnax, who is whitish-gray, and Alduin, who is black; the game never specifies whether they belong to any of the known categories of dragon or if they occupy a category/categories of their own, though it is clarified that they are the two oldest dragons in existence.
  • Beyond the visual, Dragons are like Tolkien's Elves, who will live for as long as Time itself lasts, to the point where the very idea of mortality is incomprehensible to them. That very inability to understand mortality was weaponized into a Thu'um, Dragonrend.
  • Rather than have 4 legs and 2 wings, they have just 2 legs and their wings have clawlike hands, making them more wyvern-type dragons.
  • Inverted during a conversation with Paarthurnax:
    Paarthurnax: Do you know why I live here, atop the mountain you call the "Throat of the World"?
    Dovahkiin: I don't know. Dragons like mountains, right?
    Paarthurnax: Hmmm... True.
• Our Dwarves Are All the Same: Played with, as per Elder Scrolls norm. While the Dwemer were reclusive master smiths who lived underground, did not get along with most elves, and had long beards, they are also currently extinct, were master steam engineers - a trait more commonly associated with gnomes these days - and were actually a subrace of elves themselves. They also weren't particularly short; they got their moniker of "Dwarves" from giants, not men.
• Our Elves Are Different: To start, they're not called 'elves' at all. 'Elf' is a nickname Men gave them; they're actually called Mer. Aside from the Altmer (High Elves), Bosmer (Wood Elves) and Dunmer (Dark Elves), there's also the Orcs/Orsimer. They still act like regular fantasy orcs, though.
  • In addition to the four playable Mer races, there's also the Falmer (Snow Elves), Maormer (Sea Elves), Dwemer ('deep ones', the Dwarves), Chimer ('changed ones', ancestors to the Dunmer), and Aldmer (the precursors to all Mer races). The Dwemer disappeared after the War of the First Council, all at the same time. Theories vary wildly on just what happened. The Falmer were slaughtered en masse by the first Nords to arrive in Tamriel, which drove them to seek sanctuary with the Dwemer, who enslaved and blinded them. After the Dwemer disappeared, the Falmer took their cities as their own, becoming mutated, twisted versions of their former selves (essentially they are now the game's version of goblins). The Chimer became the Dunmer after Azura cursed them at the end of the War of the First Council, due to the Tribunal betraying Indoril Nerevar (possibly killing him) and using the Heart of Lorkhan for themselves. The Aldmer, of course, became the various Mer races. Only the Maormer remain as they ever were, on a continent to the south of Tamriel.
  • Each Mer race has their own little quirks, as well. For example, the leaders of the Altmer, the Thalmor, want to unmake the physical plane entirely, and the Bosmer are cannibals^note In lore, they eat only meat, due to the Green Pact forbidding them to eat the plants of Valenwood, and so they fast before wars to be ready eat the slain.
  • Due to their pointy ears and bony protrusions on their foreheads like the Osimer, the Giants of Skyrim are possibly descended from a race of Mer, but this is disputed in-universe.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: After a certain point in the Dark Brotherhood questline, the ghost of Lucien Lachance from Oblivion becomes a summonable companion. He has been dead for a little over two centuries, but apparently he fully retains all of his memories. This is likely an attempt to please the fanbase, given the fact that he's an immensely popular character, especially among fangirls.
• Our Giants Are Bigger:
  • Giants are enormous humanoids about three times the size of humans. They are roughly comparable to cavemen, and form camps with mammoths, which they apparently use as pets, guard animals, and a source of milk and cheese. Giants are generally peaceful unless you intrude into their camps, though you periodically get bounties on giants that have been stealing cattle or raiding farms; if you have Hearthfire installed, random encounters at the homes you build may include a giant showing up to kill your cow. (Even if you don't have a cow, they sometimes show up anyway, and stare at the empty cow pen in utter confusion.) Otherwise, anyone provoking a giant gets exactly what they deserve.
  • In the lore, it is speculated by some scholars that the giants are descended from a race of Men called the Nedes from Atmora. The Nedic peoples came to Skyrim and eventually split; one group became smaller but still as smart (leading to the ancestors of the Nords, Bretons, and Imperials/Cyrodiilis) while the other became bigger and dumber. Their pointy ears also lead some to assume that they are a race of Mer, but there is little other information. Alternately, they may be descended from the Ehlnofey, the progenitor race of both Men and Mer, and as such several explanations might have some element of truth.
• Our Liches Are Different: Dragon Priests, ancient Dragon Cultists who sided with the dragons in ancient times in exchange for power and cool magical masks.
• Our Orcs Are Different:
  • The Orsimer or "Pariah Folk" are a race of Mer (elves), who live in Skyrim in tribal Strongholds led by a chieftain and worship Malacath, Daedric Prince of the spurned and ostracized. Those who don't live in Strongholds usually live as smiths or mercenaries, though some are bards, one's a librarian, and one is a master chef. Their racial bonuses give extra points to heavy armor, one- and two-handed weapons, and blocking, as well as smithing and enchanting. Their Berserker Rage greater power lets them do double damage and take half as much from weapons and stacks with potions that do the same.
  • The Falmer, meaning "Snow/Ice Folk," are basically the game's answer to earlier goblins and Tolkien orcs; they're savage, violent, and use crudely made but very strong weapons. They used to be intelligent before the Nedes pushed them out of Skyrim and into the Dwemer cities, where they were enslaved, experimented on, and mutilated into their current forms.
• Our Vampires Are Different:
  • In this game, Sanguinare Vampiris is a contracted disease that, if left untreated, eventually turns you into a traditional blood-sucking fiend; but in an inversion from the typical rules, the strength of your powers is proportional to how hungry you are. This results in a careful balancing act as you become more conspicuous to townsfolk as your hunger increases. Vampires in Skyrim also show a marked preference for ice magic and cold environments. Being undead and thus having an increased weakness to fire will do that to you.
  • Dawnguard introduces a new version of vampirism, Vampire Lord, which is much more powerful than in the standard game; both Harkon and Serana give you the option of acquiring it. Unlike regular vampirism, it will cure your lycanthropy if you're a werewolf.
  • While most, if not all vampires seen in game are adults, Dark Brotherhood Sister Babette was bitten around age ten and uses her looks and skills to aid in her contracts. She also survives the sack of the Sanctuary. Being flagged as a child, despite being over 300, you can't kill her outside of mods.
  • As per the lore, Molag Bal, the King of Rape and Daedric Prince of domination and enslavement, created pure vampires (read: not bitten) and allows them to transform into Vampire Lords. By entering Lord Harkon's court, you are turned into a pure vampire. Harkon made a pact with Molag to not only become one of these himself, but also to have his wife and daughter turned into them. Harkon's court view vampires turned by a bite to be mere half-breeds and thus lesser than a true vampire blessed by Molag. Despite vampirism being Molag's trick, Clavicus Vile, Daedric Prince of Tricks and Deals, has a group of followers that he turned into vampires to grant them immortality (possibly by having a vampire bite them) and lets you kill them to grant their wish for death. Vile's a real dick like that.
• Our Werewolves Are Different:
  • As with Morrowind, they're the man-wolf variety. If you become one by accepting the Companions' offer, you can transform regardless of the time of day, but the transformation only lasts for 210 seconds, plus 30 for every human you eat while transformed. Dawnguard adds a skill tree mirroring that of the Vampire Lord, and there's an achievement earned by unlocking all of the perks on one or the other.
  • Dragonborn adds werebears, which are essentially shorter, stockier werewolves. They're also universally hostile and, unlike lycanthropy, the condition causes insanity.
• Our Wights Are Different: Wights and Wight Lords are magic-using variants of Draugr who can sap your stamina and health with Frost spells.
• Our Zombies Are Different: No, they're not zombies, they're Draugr. And they're cursed with undeath for having served Alduin the first time around - at least, some of them are; others may have origins closer to what was indicated in Bloodmoon, the game that introduced them. (In this series, "zombie" usually refers to corpses which are magically revived by necromancers.) Draugr are closer to mummies than zombies in many ways, as they are artificially preserved and haunt cursed tombs, and many have magic powers of their own (including Shouts). They also bear many similarities to the Draugr of Norse mythology.
• Outcast Refuge: Following the collapse of the Cyrodiilic Empire to vestigial status in the 200 years since Oblivion, the Imperial protections on the Orcish home city-state of Orsinium were gone and the city was sacked by their ancient neighboring enemies in High Rock and Hammerfell. The Orcs who remained became more-or-less a servant class while many others self-exiled elsewhere in Tamriel. Those in Skyrim have founded several Orc "Stongholds" where they can live in relative if rather rough peace. An Orc Dragoborn can gain entry right away, while those of other races must first prove themselves useful to the Orcs within by completing a quest.
• Outlaw Couple: Astrid and Arnbjorn are a Happily Married pair of killers who run the local chapter of the Dark Brotherhood. In a variant, Arnbjorn explains that his wife doesn't usually tell people that they're married because as the Matron of the Brotherhood, she doesn't want to give the appearance that she plays favorites. Doesn't in the least stop him from talking about his "beautiful wife."
• Outside-Context Problem: Nearly everyone is blindsided by the return of the dragons. Supposedly rendered extinct following a concerted hunting effort thousands of years ago, they are now suddenly returning in vast numbers. Naturally, all of the parties involved in the Skyrim Civil War blame one another for the sudden reappearance of the dragons. The only group to have any idea where they came from are the Greybeards, and that's only because their mentor is a dragon.
• Outside-Genre Foe: Alduin. Skyrim was in the middle of a long and bloody civil war when the World-Eater and lord of all dragons showed up out of nowhere and began resurrecting long-dead Dragons from their burial mounds. Justified in that we later learn he was sent through time from the Merethic Era to the Fourth Era via an Elder Scroll.
• Outside-the-Box Tactic:
  • The "Raise Zombie" spell reanimates an intact dead body and makes it your minion for the next sixty seconds (longer with certain perks) until it turns into a pile of ash ^note The "Dead Thrall" spell, however, allows you to reuse the same dead body over and over again without having it crumbling into dust. The zombie, by itself, is fairly weak, since it fights only with the armor and weapons it had when it died (that is, if you haven't already looted them). However, since you looted their items, it's only logical that you can put items back. Raise a zombie, put some good armor and a strong weapon on it, and send it in from a safe distance to rip apart foes (for extra Video Game Cruelty Potential, said foes might have been its former allies!) Once the spell runs out or your zombie re-dies, you can collect its equipment from the ash pile it leaves behind. Said zombie can also function as a handy pack-mule: give your heaviest items to the zombie until you get under the Critical Encumbrance Failure limit (300 lbs. with no perks or Stamina boosts). Fast-travel to the nearest town, and your zombie will follow! However, it will crumble to dust the moment you arrive, but that's fine, you can just pick your stuff up and drag it to the nearest store; you'd rather walk 200 feet with a over-heavy load than the three miles it probably would have been without the zombie.
  • In a similar vein, the Dremora Merchant is more often than not used as a garbage dump rather than an actual Shop Keep as he was intended; not only can you summon him anywhere in the world, you can also just wait for his gold to replenish in a day or two. On top of that, he takes nearly everything you can sell him, unlike most other traders who only take specific types of items. It gets to the point that various guides have to remind you that he actually has higher spawn-rates for high-level gear that other shop keeps don't!
• Overflow Error: It is possible to abuse the alchemy/enchanting loop to enhance gear so far it acquires negative armor or damage ratings.
• Overhead Interaction Indicator: NPCs associated with the active quest have an arrow above their heads.
• Overly Narrow Superlative: "Welcome to Markarth, traveler. Safest city in the Reach." It's also the only city in the Reach.
• Overrated and Underleveled:
  • Ulfric Stormcloak, should the player pursue the Imperial questline. The game practically treats Ulfric as a king-slaying, Thu'um throwing, Memetic Badass, if dialogue is to be believed. Yet when an Imperial-Alligned Dragonborn storms his castle, his own Dragon is harder to kill than him. The meta reason takes this trope literally. Up until patch 1.6, all NPCs were leveled based on when the player first encounters them. And Ulfric is the 3rd character you see in the opening sequence. So, you were essentially fighting what would be a challenging enemy, if you were at level 1. Even with the patch to buff his health, his outfit possesses a whopping 7 armor rating (the weakest item in the weakest armor set in the game gives an 8), so any decently-skilled character will wipe the floor with him. Humorously, if one uses the console to spawn Torygg (the king he murdered) and set them to attack each other, Torygg will win most of the time, even if Ulfric shouts him down.
  • Lord Harkon, Big Bad of the Dawnguard DLC, claims that the Vampire Lord transformation will make you "a lion among lambs". Regular city guards can defeat you easily in this form, and you're often better off as your normal self, as the Vampire Lord cannot use equipment (other than certain rings) and doesn't have access to your regular set of spells. It can be useful in areas where you're deprived of your regular equipment, such as Cidhna Mine. If you manage to get it as early as you can, it can be extremely useful early on for caster characters, who in the early game struggle to hurl more than one or two firebolts before running out of Magicka - the Vampire Lord form gives you a decently powerful projectile with a low mana cost that also heals you. It's only later on in the game, when you properly level up your crafting skills, that its usefulness falls off, but then again, Destruction magic in Skyrim is underwhelming in general due to the lack of an enchantment to increase its damage. Werewolves suffer the same problem in the lategame, where their claws no longer compare to a good blade and their lack of armor cripples them severely, considering that they are melee-oriented.
  • Several of the Daedric artifacts are talked up as world-shakingly powerful, which they don't live up to. For example, the Rueful Axe is described by its creator as "incredibly powerful" and guards will remark on how it could cut through gods. While it's got good base damage, it's far from the most dangerous of its type, and its enchantment adds stamina damage, which is hardly that exciting. Adding to the problem is the fact that most of these artifacts, for no discernable reason, do not benefit from smithing perks, meaning that you can upgrade them by only half of what you could do with a regular weapon. For that reason, the most useful Daedric artifacts are ironically the ones that are not combat-oriented at all.
• Overt Operative: You may occasionally get Dark Brotherhood assassins sent after you, all of whom don't even bother trying to be discreet and just charge straight at you swords already drawn.
• Oxygen Meter: There's a meter that indicated how much oxygen the player's character has left when swimming underwater. Unlike before, however, this game makes it invisible — so the only indication that you've been underwater too long is when your health starts draining. Water Breathing is a spell effect to boost the duration, and it also comes in the form of enchantments and potions. While under the Water Breathing effect, your breath meter will not decrease. Argonians, who canonically possess gills, have Water Breathing as a racial ability. In series' lore, they will use this as an Exploited Immunity. Renowned for their prowess in guerilla warfare, Argonians are known to ambush enemies from underwater and will often drag them into the water in order to drown them.

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• Painfully Slow Projectile: The game has retained the slow arrows and now they cut both ways as enemies are slightly Crosshair Aware (unless you're hidden...but sometimes even then) and will strafe to avoid your shots. Fortunately, enemies are still completely unable to adjust for movement. Slow projectile spells also remain for the most part, though "Shock" spells are now instant.
• Panthera Awesome: Sabre Cats (both the normal brown variety and the tougher Snowy Sabre Cats) can be found in the wilds of Skyrim... if they don't find you first.
• Paper-Thin Disguise:
  • A quick look around the room and it's pretty obvious which of the corpses lining the walls are going to stand up when you pass by. Hint - the ones wearing armor and carrying weapons. Bow-wielding players can frequently take them down before they wake up.
  • You in the Dark Brotherhood storyline. Because the chef you're impersonating is an aloof mysterious figure whom no one has ever seen (because he's an orc), you can show up as any race, dressed in anything from Daedric Armor to a Jester's outfit, and no one will question it. Your assistant will only ask that you put on a chef's hat to cook (even though you're just telling her what ingredients to add).
  • One of the possible random encounters in the outside world is a group of thieves that killed Imperial guards, stole their equipment, and are now pretending to be them while trying to charge taxes. Not only are the naked corpses of the guards still nearby, the hesitant way they speak is very easy to see through. If you've joined the Imperial side of the war, there's even a dialogue option where you tell them that you know they're not soldiers.
  • Related to this is an encounter in which vampires pull a similar stunt with some Vigilants of Stendarr (killing them, donning their clothes, and then asking the player character to come near). As described below, Dawnguard makes vampires easy to spot; and even if you don't face-check them, they're still standing right next to the naked corpses of their victims, and the abrasive voice calling out "You there! Traveler! Over here!" sounds nothing like any of the real Vigilants in the game.
  • "Captain" Valmir is a Thalmor agent posing as either an Imperial or Stormcloak soldier (depending on the player's standing with either faction). The latter is especially egregious since he's obviously an Altmer, and the Stormcloaks are not known for being the most tolerant of other races, especially elves. This gets even funnier if you read Valmir's Orders, wherein his boss/commanding officer says that nobody in Skyrim could possibly be clever enough to see through the disguise.
  • With the Dawnguard DLC, vampires become incredibly obvious, with glowing yellow eyes and twisted faces, while somehow maintaining their ability to pass as normal. This can lead to hilarity when the local Jarl demands proof that the visiting advisor with glowing yellow eyes, wearing what the game calls Vampire Robes, Vampire Gloves, and Vampire Boots, might possibly be a vampire. This also completely blows the cover of resident Friendly Neighborhood Vampire Sybille Stentor.
  • This can be pulled by the Player Character during the quest Diplomatic Immunity if you attempt to disguise yourself as a member of the Thalmor. Although this works fine for most races, particularly Altmer, you are instantly spotted as an impostor if you chose to play as a Khajiit or Argonian due to your rather obvious tail. The trope is especially obvious if you pull this stunt as a Redguard, Dunmer, or Orc, who all have skin color very different from the natural tone of the Altmers and should logically be spotted immediately spotted as intruder.
• Parabolic Power Curve: The game borrows the Level Scaling system from Fallout, which helps to Downplay this trope especially when compared to Oblivion. Most enemies simply get replaced by tougher variants in high-level areas, and while some do directly scale with player level the curve is now a lot less exponential with many enemy types having a level bracket with a minimum and maximum level (i.e. Sabre Cats have a minimum of lvl 5 and a maximum of lvl 11). Random loot also scales, as do many pieces of unique equipment (which makes it advantageous to wait to collect some of them, lest they become less useful later on). It is still possible to grind non-combat skills and end up facing very difficult opponents relative to one's combat ability, although almost every skill has some combat utility if applied with creativity. Failing that, dungeons are locked to the level you were at when you first entered, so if you do find an area too difficult you can simply leave and come back later when you're more powerful, meaning the game never becomes straight-up unwinnable. Though, due to how magic works in this game (doing a set amount of damage and having very little in the way to squeeze out more damage), spell slingers can find themselves being outmatched by tougher and tougher foes while doing the same damage they were doing levels ago.
• Parental Incest: An intrepid player can piece together some very naughty hints about the Black-Briar family: Maven has three children, Hemming, Sibbi, and Ingun. She calls them her children, they call her their mother. However, Hemming will also refer to Sibbi and Ingun as his children, and peeking at the character files shows that Maven is designated as Sibbi and Ingun's grandmother. It's possible that this is just an oversight, but they've yet to clarify the issue and thus the implications remain, whether erroneous or intentional.
• Pelts of the Barbarian: The default male Dragonborn depicted on the cover wears heavy fur armor (and a horned helm), just to drive a point home that the eponymous setting is a Grim Up North.
• Peninsula of Power Leveling: While they can be difficult to tackle for a new player, Dwarven ruins are some of the best places to level up your crafting professions. Even one run through a Dwarven ruin can yield enough scrap metal to smith into hundreds of Dwarven metal ingots, making these more plentiful than any ore in the game and basically your only chance to progress your Smithing skill at any kind of reasonable rate (most ores are found very rarely and in small amounts, with mines being infrequent and slow to respawn). Dwarven automatons also frequently drop both empty and filled Soul Gems, used in Enchanting, as well as Dwarven Oil, a valuable ingredient for Alchemy.
• Pensieve Flashback: After viewing an Elder Scroll, the player is transported to the moment a few Nord heroes banished the dragon Alduin, thousands of years ago. However, the player can only observe the battle take place and is unable to move around without the use of bugs.
• Penultimate Weapon: The game has many legendary weapons with cool names and unique effects, but more often than not they pale in comparison to weapons you can craft and enchant yourself. For example, you get Miraak's Sword by defeating one of the toughest bosses in the game at the end of the Dragonborn main quest. It has the highest base damage of any one-handed sword in the game and it only weighs 3 units as opposed to 19 for a Dragonbone Sword, and it has a cool (purely cosmetic) effect where it turns into a tentacle when swung. However, its only enchantment is a mere 15 points of stamina absorption, and it has so few charges that it can be fully recharged with a Petty Soul Gem. Chances are good you'll have used a more powerful weapon to kill Miraak.
• Permanently Missable Content:
  • Before the 1.4 patch, one of the Stones of Barenziah was placed in the Thalmor Embassy, which can only be visited once as part of a quest. This could be pretty obnoxious, as the stones don't stack if you've had them identified, and the quest can't be completed without the whole set (aside from cheating to clip your way back inside). The patch shifted the stone to the Reeking Cave, a short tunnel that you travel through during your escape, and which can be entered at any time.
  • Conversely, if you find all of the Stones of Barenziah before getting them identified, the quest won't properly progress, so you still can't turn them in. At least then they only occupy one line in your inventory.
  • A Word Wall containing part of the Storm Call shout is located in the final dungeon of the main quest. If you didn't get it before entering the portal to Sovngarde, too bad; there's no way to get back to the dungeon.
  • The Nahkriin Mask can also be lost if you forget to loot it from Nahkriin's remains or if you rushed to the portal and entered Sovngarde before he removed the staff since, again, the dungeon becomes inaccessible after the main quest. To further add insult to injury, if this happens, it will also become impossible to obtain the ninth mask, Konahrik, since getting it requires you possessing all eight Dragon Priest masks.
  • Related to the entry above. Any of the Dragon Priest masks you've collected can become this if you remove them from your inventory and store them inside a chest/wardrobe/other container in one of your homes. This is a known glitch which was never patched. The masks can be safely stored on mannequins; but if placed in containers, they sometimes disappear after a time.^note Because of this glitch, the Creation Club offers a couple of residences the player can acquire, whose contents include storage busts explicitly designed to keep the Dragon Priest masks safe.
  • If you summon the ghost of Lucien Lachance after joining the Dark Brotherhood, be careful against enemies who can use the Disarm shout. If you drop a weapon which is better than the one Lucien is using, he'll take it - and since he cannot be looted after death, there is no way to get it back.
  • The second part of the quest centered around Potema the Wolf Queen is triggered by your character leveling up. Until the patch which removed the level cap, doing the first part of the quest at level 81 (the maximum level) would stop the courier from visiting you and prevent you from finishing the quest.
  • It's possible to lose access to the Waterbreathing enchantment, as there are no guaranteed drops or loots with it, and because of the way the game scales possible loot (whether dropped, looted, or stolen), the odds of finding an item enchanted with Waterbreathing steadily decrease as you level up, eventually rounding down to zero. Fortunately, Dawnguard adds one instance of guaranteed waterbreathing loot drop.
  • It is still possible to miss the Muffle and Fortify Barter enchants for the same reasons, the former much more than the latter. While the enchantments themselves are available on quite a few items, none of those items can be disenchanted to learn the effect. Moreover, each one works on precisely one type of apparel (boots and necklaces, respectively), meaning finding one is extremely rare. If you haven't found these by the time you're ~level 67, you never will. Check the general stores often.
  • In the Dawnguard DLC, each faction has content that cannot be obtained if you side with the other, barring exploits. On the vampire side, the spell Heal Undead and the amplification artifacts for the Vampire Lord form are lost if you side with the Dawnguard. Conversely, siding with the vampires costs you access to the Dawnguard-specific spells (though you can get around this by using calm spells on the sellers), all enhanced forms of the crossbow, and all forms of bolts except Dwarven (which are craftable), a unique shield, and the ability to hire armored trolls.
  • The Vampire Lord form can be rendered unobtainable through certain decisions. If you kill Harkon, send Serana to get cured of vampirism, and get cured yourself (or never accept it in the first place), there is no way to (re)acquire the Vampire Lord form.
  • Curing Serana of vampirism is itself missable; if you approach the subject carelessly,^note citing selfish reasons, or bringing it up at all before killing Harkon she'll hold it against you and refuse to discuss it with you again.
  • The Werewolf form can only be acquired twice. The first time is part of the Companions questline. If you cure yourself of Lycanthropy (either by the ritual or by becoming a Vampire Lord), Aela will offer to restore it, but only once. There's no other way to obtain it after that.
  • The Master-level trainers for the Alchemy and Light Armor skills are respectively Babette and Nazir, who can only be approached if you join the Dark Brotherhood. Choosing to destroy the faction instead turns Nazir hostile and removes Babette from the game.
  • Dragon or vampire attacks can kill quest givers, merchants, potential followers, etc. It's especially bad in Dawnstar, Falkreath, Morthal, and Winterhold, since all four are small towns located in the open instead of inside protective walls like the other five capitals. It's even worse for Morthal and Winterhold, given how low their populations are. Also, premature NPC deaths prevent you from accomplishing their small tasks, and thus make becoming the local thane harder. This is especially bad for Morthal, since the quest required to access thanehood includes a scripted scene in which five local citizens (including the local alchemist and a potential regular follower) venture out of the town.
  • Bloated Man's Grotto is a small cave located between Whiterun, Falkreath, and Rorikstead, and which is notable because 1) it contains the unique sword Bolar's Oathblade next to a shrine of Talos, and 2) it's the place where the Daedric quest "Ill Met By Moonlight" ends. Venturing inside the cave once the quest has been started removes both the sword and the shrine, making Bolar's Oathblade unobtainable unless you visited the cave before and picked it up. Note that completing "Ill Met By Moonlight" by killing Sinding allows to cave to eventually resets after 30 days, which respawns the sword; however, Bloated Man's Grotto never resets if you side with Sinding.
• Pet the Dog: You can do this for Braith, the brat in Whiterun who always remarks, "What're you lookin' at? I'm not afraid of you, ya know. Even if you are my elder." If she should become orphaned for whatever reason, you can adopt her in the Hearthfire DLC. Be warned, however that she sometimes lies. A bug in her script will sometimes have her present the option of adoption while her parents are still alive. If you take her up on it, not only does she not come to live with you, but she breaks the adoption quest script, preventing you from adopting any other children. So if she says her parents are dead, check for corpses.
• Physical God:
  • Alduin, the World Eater is an aspect (or son of, it's complicated) Akatosh, the Aedric Dragon God of Time. Fittingly, he is the most powerful dragon you'll fight in the game (besides the legendary ones you encounter in Dawnguard) and is totally invincible until the Dovahkiin learns to foist mortality on him using the Dragonrend shout.
  • The Dovahkiin is also implied to have the potential to become one: Clavicus Vile, the Daedric Prince of corrupted wishes tells the Dragonborn that they are about half as powerful as He is (although Clavicus is in a greatly weakened state at that point), in a quest that becomes available at Level 10 - the level Cap is 81, by the way. There is also a line in the Dovahkiin song (the one you hear in Sovngarde), "Voth aan suleyk wah ronit faal krein", which translates to "With power to rival the sun". In the cosmology of the setting, the sun is no celestial body, but actually a gaping hole in Aetherius created by Magnus, the God of Magic, when he created the mortal plane and ran away, and the hole is believed to be the source of all magic in Nirn.
• Physical Heaven: Sovngarde.
• The Place: Takes place in Skyrim, natch.
• Piñata Enemy: Magic Anomalies, rare enemies that spawn during a few Winterhold-related quests. Their high magic resistance and endlessly scaling health can make them annoying to deal with, especially for mages, but they compensate for this by always dropping random filled Soul Gems. If the Dragonborn is high-level enough, their own soul may also be Greater or Grand, making them the only enemy that can potentially yield two high-quality souls with a single kill.
• Pixel Hunt: Of a sort, and likely not deliberate. It's entirely possible to knock items off of tables, shelves, etc, either physically, by means of explosive spells like Fireball, or by utilizing The Voice. It's therefore possible to knock a quest item, for instance, between a table and a wall without realizing you've done so (sometimes from a considerable distance) making it extremely difficult to find as your quest marker will still show that the item is in its original location. Worse still, it's not uncommon to get a graphical glitch wherein the item appears to be in its original location when it actually has been displaced, while its true location is invisible.
• Placebo Eureka Moment: Talking to Wylandriah, the Riften Court Magician, shows that she's having trouble developing a soul extraction apparatus. By acting like you know what you're talking about through the use of "metaphors," she quickly Magi Babbles her way to a solution. She promptly forgets what you were discussing.
• Plant Person: Spriggans are a hostile, bear-summoning variety. They're often found in certain wooded groves, can turn nearly invisible (or turn into swarms of bees), and when near death, revive themselves to full health with magic. (They did that back in Daggerfall, too. "Spriggans die three times.") In this case, at least if you kill them quickly you avoid the revivification.
• Platonic Declaration of Love: If the Dragonborn joins the Companions, Farkas may tell him/her about how he and his fraternal twin brother Vilkas came to be part of the group. Should the Dragonborn then speak to Vilkas about what Farkas said, Vilkas makes some corrections to the story — but he prefaces his remarks with the stern assertion that "I love my brother." Vilkas is the more abrasive of the twins, but his devotion to Farkas is uncontested.
• Playable Epilogue: You can keep playing after you've beaten the main quest. In addition to completing Faction questlines and sidequests, each game also typically offers some new quests and special items to acquire that are only available once you've beaten the game. Most NPCs also recognize your accomplishments and comment accordingly, though don't expect much more than that from them.
• Playing Cyrano: There is a sidequest called The Book of Love, where you must reconcile people's love problems. The second part of the quest involves commissioning a bard/mercenary to rewrite (ghostrewrite?) an old poem of his for a several-centuries-old Altmer to woo his (human) Redguard love interest.
• Playing Possum: Some Draugr like to hide in alcoves with the (completely) dead Draugr, only getting up after you've walked past them. It works if you aren't paying attention, but the only ones that do this are the ones wearing armor and it's easy to catch them in the act. Then you get free hits until they stand up or, with a bow/crossbow, you can take them out before they get the chance.
• Playing with Fire:
  • Sunderstone Gorge, a cave/Nord barrow in eastern Falkreath Hold, has fire as a motif. Inside, you find a myriad of Fire mages, fire pots, oil slicks (which light up when subject to fire), fire salts here and there, varying stock alchemy potions and poisons related to fire resilience, a flamethrower soul gem turret, a flame atronach summoning circle, and most importantly, a Fire Breath Shout word wall.
  • The general gameplay seems to encourage this. Most of your enemies will be undead or vampires, so they’re weak to fire, necromage makes the damage further efficient, and aspect of Terror has a glitch that adds extra fire damage in most case (making flames actually viable later in the game).
• Point-and-Click Map: Provided you've visited that location before, you can click on any icon to fast travel there.
• Point of No Return: Entering the Skuldafn temple near the end of the main quest storyline. The only way to get there is by riding a dragon, and he tells you he can't stay there. You'll only be able to return to the mainland of Skyrim after defeating Alduin in Sovngarde (and players who intend to achieve 100% Completion are advised to get the Shout skill and Dragon Mask before clearing the temple, as it doubles as a One-Time Dungeon).
• Poison Mushroom: Due to the way Alchemy works, an inattentive player can make their own Poison Mushrooms. Alchemy ingredients have four effects each, and mixing them will make a potion which includes any effects which any two of the ingredients share with each other. If the ingredients share both a positive and negative effect (say, they both cause Restore Stamina and they both cause Damage Health) the potion will do both those things, but only be named after the most prominent effect, potentially producing a "Potion of Stamina" whose Small Print reminds you that it also drains your health. Fortunately, such potions' value increases with each effect, even if they cancel each other out.
• Police Are Useless: In regards to you, at least, there may as well not be any guards in town.
  • As long as you don't commit any major crimes like murder, guards can be bribed through use of a perk or your membership with the Thieves' Guild; and if you're Thane of the settlement, you can pull rank to get them to leave you alone (but only once). If you've committed a minor crime, like trying to break into a locked house or stealing a potion, you can just convince them you aren't worth the time. Walking around town while you have a small bounty will prompt mutters of "wait, I know you" from guards you pass, but none of them will actually try and apprehend you.
  • And then you find a lone thief in Riften cowering in the corner of the blacksmith's cellar surrounded by twenty armed guards, all with bows raised and arrows nocked...
  • The guards would be able to defeat most, if not all, intruders in town - including thieves, vampires, werewolves, bandits and even dragons. At high levels when a powerful dragon attacks a city, you can usually find a large number of steel arrows on the dragon's corpse, all fired from the guards' bows. They level to 50, higher than most enemies, but are equipped with poor weaponry and mediocre armor. The Redoran Guard in Raven Rock have better (elven) weapons and a full set of bonemold armor.
  • Exaggerated in Riften, where everyone knows the city guards are corrupt and in the Black-Briars' pocket, and they will easily forgive you of any crimes for just half the bounty you incurred if you're in with the Thieves' Guild. If you're doing the miscellaneous quest for Dinya Balu and distributing pamphlets about Mara's love, she even advises you not to bother trying to give one to the guards, since "they follow their own path."
  • The mine in Shor's Stone has become infested with spiders, but the guards apparently can't be bothered to do anything about it (despite the fact that they'll gladly draw steel against much nastier things that might wander into town, up to and including freakin' dragons). Filnjar the blacksmith lampshades this, stating that there's no point in defending the place if they can't get anything out of the mine. Probably not coincidentally, this town is located in Riften hold.
  • Played straight when you are pursued by hired thugs. The guards will just tell you to kill them and do nothing, even when you are the Thane of the hold.
• The Pollyanna: Shahvee, despite living in the docks of Windhelm, with the Nords being intensely prejudiced towards her race and being paid a pittance for her work, is very cheerful and upbeat. In her own words, "There's nothing to be gained by being miserable."
  "Sometimes life puts you in difficult circumstances you didn't choose, but being happy or unhappy is a choice you make, and I've chosen to make the best of things that I can."
• Porn Stash:
  • The Rieklings in Benkongerike have numerous copies of The Lusty Argonian Maid, Vol. 1 & 2 collected in a disorganized pile, along with some rolls of linen. The porn stash itself is used as concealment for the Telekinesis spellbook found underneath it.
  • Copies of the books are also found in numerous bedrooms of Skyrim - most notably under the bed of Joric, the prepubescent son of the Jarl of Morthal.
  • Saadia also has a copy of Thief of Virtue under her bed. Thief of Virtue is a raunchy pulp romance novel featuring an encounter between a dashing Imperial master thief and a Redguard noblewoman.
• Port Town: Solitude and Windhelm (Dawnstar was one according to previous lore, but by its appearance has been retconned or for unexplained reasons degenerated to a port village).
• Power Copying: A variation. You learn a Word of Power simply from hearing someone speak it or reading it on Word Walls, but you can't "decode" them without using the knowledge in a dragon's soul. So it's a two-part deal: steal their voice weapon, then steal their ability to use it.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child:
  • All active Dwemer automatons in Skyrim are powered by filled Soul Gems. And it turns out the souls in Soul Gems are still conscious, and in constant agony. And might only be necessary to power the weapons, with the actual motion being powered by some other mechanism.
  • Enchanting items is a third of the game's Item Crafting, and always uses Soul Gems. Enchanted weapons need to be recharged with fresh souls, and there's a perk to make them take in bits of the souls of the animals they kill. The local Nords, for all their distaste of magic, sell Soul Gems by the bucketload and enchanted items of all kinds. The means to enchant are fairly common and displayed openly in the Jarls' halls, due to their court mages (a necessary position no matter how they feel about magic). It takes more doing to find Black Soul Gems to hold human or elf souls, but those are precious, tied for the position of the most powerful gems. Players are known to save them for particularly unpleasant NPCs. Basically, should you ever find yourself in Skyrim, kill yourself immediately.
• Power Glows: All enchanted items have a colored glow around them, and these auras are generally visible even outside your inventory. The Dragon Aspect shout gives the Dragonborn themselves a glow of power.
• The Power of the Sun: With Auriel's Bow and sun-hallowed arrows, you can fire arrows directly at the sun itself, causing it to ignite and rain fiery bolts upon all your enemies. Alternately, you can use this same bow to squelch the power of the sun with bloodcursed arrows.
• Power Perversion Potential:
  • There is a dungeon called Yngvild where a shunned necromancer named Arondil has taken refuge. After he starts resurrecting the bodies in the crypt he finds that all of them are female, and he slowly realizes the advantages of having an army of reanimated women that bend to his will. Then it gets weird. He discovers it feels a lot better to feel up the ghosts than have sex with the bodies, and proceeds to have his zombies go kidnap more women from the town he was shunned from so that he can murder them and bind their ghosts to his will. And yes, this is exactly as creepy and disturbing as it sounds.
  • If you level up your pickpocketing skill to 100, you can get the Perfect Touch perk, which lets you steal people's equipped items. Like their clothes. That they are currently wearing. This leads to many of Skyrim's women suddenly losing everything but their lingerie and continuing their daily lives while almost naked^note or literally naked if one modded the game, all thanks to one lusty Dragonborn.
• Power-Up Letdown:
  • Gaining access to the Master level spells of the Destruction school requires a lot of grinding, including through low levels where using spells as your main damage-dealer results in a much harder game, then finding and completing a special quest. When you finally get them, you find that they require two hands instead of one, take an insanely long casting time during which you're very likely to get interrupted by an enemy attack, and even if you do get one off, they do less damage for the magicka and less damage per second than lower-level spells, and - since Destruction damage doesn't scale with level - Can't Catch Up to archery or swordplay. There is one exception in Lightning Storm, which sends out a sustained lightning bolt that does high damage over time for an acceptable magicka cost, with extreme range and hitscan speed that make it perfect for destroying enemies like dragons at long range. Compared to spamming the lower tier thunderbolt, it deals somewhat less damage for a whole lot less magicka... which makes it great up until the point when your character can achieve -100% magicka cost and the formerly prohibitively expensive thunderbolt trumps it. Unfortunately, for many characters the free casting comes before achieving the master level destruction spells, relegating Lightning Storm to the same heap that Fire Storm and Blizzard reside in.
  • The reward for turning in the Skeleton Key in the Thieves' Guild storyline. While the powers given for turning in the key range from situational to very good, they can all only be activated once per day and require you to give up the only unbreakable lockpick in the game. The only reason to actually turn the key in would be because of the achievement/trophy, or because they have 100 Lockpicking and don't want to legendary^note reset the skill to fifteen and refund all perks the skill.
  • The Disarm shout. The ability to knock your enemy's weapon out of their hand, then kill them with it or chuck it away with Telekinesis sounds useful until you discover that, even with all three words, it has no effect on anything above level forty. This also applies to the player, and should one encounter the Draugr Deathlords and Death Overlords who can and will use Disarm to toss away your weapons before breaking fortieth, heaven help you if your one-of-a-kind Dragonbone Sword of Ultimate Chaos is blown out of your hand and clips outside of the map and you can't use the console to retrieve it.
  • Dragonriding with the "Bend Will" shout you gain in Dragonborn.

  Expectation

  A controllable Dragon that you can use to fly across skyrim and spray Dragonsbreath at your enemies, essentially a flying flame/frost/other-spewing horse.

  Reality

  Glorified fast travel, which is slower than real fast travel and can barely hit anything because it automatically attacks instead of allowing you any control.

  • The Aetherial Staff from the quest "Lost To The Ages" is thankfully not the only reward from that quest (the other two being the Aetherial Crown, and the Aetherial Shield, which has some use for crowd control purposes), but is an absolute noob trap. Summoning Dwarven automatons sounds cool and all... but even at the highest possible level variation of the staff, even the better outcome - the Sphere - absolutely pales in comparison to the Dremora summoned by the much easier to acquire Sanguine Rose. Oh, and no matter the level, there's always a chance that the automaton created by the staff will be literally dead on arrival.
  • The Skull of Corruption, the reward for the "Waking Nightmare" quest. It requires charging by stealing the dreams of sleeping people to reach its full power, and even at full power, it's still barely superior to a common Staff of Fireballs (possibly even worse, as it doesn't even scale with Destruction perks). This is particularly hurtful because of two factors: first, the Staff had a much more potent and useful effect in Oblivion (summoning a clone of the target to attack it), and second, to even obtain it, you need to sacrifice a potential follower.
  • The game allows you to gain a bonus from one Standing Stone at a time, which range from passive benefits like increased experience gain or damage resistance to powerful, once-per-day abilities like a mass Animate Dead effect. Then there's the Tower Stone, which has the formidable effect of... letting you open one lock per day, in a game where any pickable lock can be brute-forced with enough patience and lockpicks, which are very easy to hoard because they're weightless and commonplace (to say nothing of the Skeleton Key). The Tower Stone might have been useful for Master-level locks, which have little margin for error and thus tend to eat through your lockpick supply, except it can't even open those.
• Pragmatic Villainy:
  • Members of the Thieves' Guild tend to abstain from murder and strongly encourage you to do the same in their quests - not because they have anything against it, but because it's bad for business. They leave that sort of thing to the Dark Brotherhood, unless it's an in-house issue.
  • In one quest, they send you out to intimidate a wealthy estate for cutting off the honey to Maven by destroying some of the beehives. If you destroy too many hives though, your superior will chastise you for it because now you're responsible for no honey.
  • The Caller, the main antagonist of "Hitting the Books", is unique in that she does not need to be fought. The Dovahkiin can try to simply convince her to give up the books they need, and if they have high enough Speech, she may accept so as to avoid further bloodshed. (Alternatively, if the player is accompanied by Orthorn, they can trade him for the books.)
• Pre-Character Customization Gameplay: The game opens with you in a cart taking you towards your execution by beheading. You cannot move freely, but you can look around and trade a few phrases with fellow prisoners, before an Imperial official in charge of the execution asks you about your race and name for the records.
• Pre-Final Boss:
  • Before facing Alduin in Sovngarde in the main quest, the Dragonborn must first do battle with the Nord god Tsun in front of the Whalebone Bridge in order to be granted entrance to the Hall of Valor.
  • For the Dawnguard expansion, the last proper boss fight before doing battle with Lord Harkon is with the Falmer vampire Arch-Curate Vyrthur in the Forgotten Vale located between Skyrim proper and High Rock's Western Reach.
• Prehistoria: In many ways, a standard fantasy setting with a specifically Scandinavian flavour, but nonetheless inhabitant by caveman-like giants, woolly mammoths, and sabre-toothed cats. And there are lots of caves, and Dinosaurs Are Dragons.
• Pressure Plate:
  • Skyrim has a perk which prevents the Player Character from setting off pressure plate traps, but said perk doesn't apply to your followers, meaning that, if you're not careful, you can still die a horrible, spiky death as a result of your follower haplessly stepping on the trap trigger you presumably deftly avoided.
  • A cave-dungeon in the Dawnguard DLC introduces a variant: several pressure plates must be triggered together to open a particular gate, while a bridge and a couple of other gates must be triggered by somehow setting off pressure plates mounted vertically on targets some distance away.
• Previous Player-Character Cameo: The Hero of Kvatch has had plenty of time to 'grow into the role' of Sheogorath, as Jyggalag put it, and fondly notes that the Dragonborn reminds him of him/herself at a young age. However, there are several hints that the Hero hasn't been completely subsumed by the mantle, since s/he still remembers the adventures s/he had in Oblivion. Curiously, s/he looks and sounds like Sheogorath did in Oblivion, but a Daedric prince can look and sound like whatever s/he wants.
• Pride: A central motif in Dragonborn is how pride influences people with regards to enemies and power, and ultimately whether or not they can look past it. The player character is attacked and further insulted by people who claim they are not the true Dragonborn, and is later able to recognize that they need Hermaeus Mora's help; Bujold is reluctant to acknowledge her own shortcomings and weaknesses; the Riekling Chief isn't and both supplicates the Dovahkiin and considers them a threat; Storn is willing to look past his pride as a Skaal (who have resisted Hermaeus Mora for eons) for the greater good. On the villainous end, Miraak shows more arrogance and hubris than possibly any other character in Skyrim, simultaneously plying the Dragons and then Hermaeus Mora for power, only to immediately thereafter act as if the alliance is beneath him and that he shouldn't need to honor it. He even claims that Alduin is nothing more than an annoyance to him, in spite of it being extremely unlikely he knows how strike at Alduin. On the other hand, Hermaeus Mora shows himself to be extremely humble, giving the Dovahkiin rewards in exchange for their efforts, encouraging them to search his realm for tomes of power and later, in spite of Miraak's treachery, displays a willingness to work with whichever Dovahkiin comes out alive and, in this conversation at least, barely even taking notice of Miraak's loathing for his present situation.
• Primal Polymorphs: If you spare the werewolf Sindig during the "Ill Met By Moonlight" quest, he promises to live as a wolf, away from civilization, in order to avoid repeating the incident where he transformed involuntarily and murdered a young girl in the town of Falkreath.
• Prison Episode: When you first enter Markarth you get to witness an innocent woman (potentially - you can stop it if you're quick) being murdered in the middle of a crowded city square. If you work with a local miner to investigate, the corrupt guards eventually pin the murder on you and throw you in prison. You're stuck in there until you find a way to escape.
• Protectorate:
  • The Companions guild treat the entirety of Skyrim, particularly Whiterun hold, as being under their protection. They are also fiercely protective of one another.
  • Housecarls are a deliberate invocation of this trope. The primary function of a housecarl is to loyally defend the life, property, and loved ones of the person to whom they are pledged. The Jarl of each hold has one, and the Dovahkiin is assigned one every time they are declared thane of a hold where they can own a house.
• Proud Warrior Race:
  • The dragons, without exception. While crueler and less noble than most examples, they are all eager to battle and possess a bizarre but firm code of honor, and admire strength above all else. In the main quest, Salhoknir boasts of his prowess and taunts the Dovahkiin during their duel and Odahviing is quick to respond to the Dovahkiin's challenge. Durnehviir, who resides in the Soul Cairn in the Dawnguard expansion, is so thrilled to have met someone who can face him in combat that he formally introduces himself and strikes up an acquaintance.
  • The Nords are the most prominent example, the game being set in their homeland. Part of the tension between Skyrim and the Empire comes from the Nords seeing the Empire's surrender to the Thalmor as a cowardly betrayal.
  • The Orcs are like this, with special mention going to the old Orcish warrior you can find standing by the road, surrounded by dead sabre cats, waiting for someone to give him a "good death."
  • The Redguards are supposed to be one, although this isn't as thoroughly explored. Their pride in warrior ways seems more focused upon skill with weaponry than bravado or testing how much punishment they can take. There is, however, a Redguard known as the Ebony Warrior. He is the single hardest battle in the vanilla game, and he, like the old orc above, seeks honor in death, that he may journey to Sovngarde proudly.
  • The Imperials are a Proud Soldier Race. Rather than seeking glory in honourable combat, the Imperials use tactical savvy and discipline which lets them stand up to the individually stronger Nords and the magically-talented Thalmor. In fact, Bretons are noteworthy for being the only race of men who don't qualify as this trope (and even then a Breton Dragonborn will be the single deadliest thing in the world). In Tamriel, Humans Are Warriors, after all.
• Public Domain Artifact: The Jagged Crown is based on the Crown of Thorns. It even has a quest related to finding it.
• Punched Across the Room: Give your Khajiit character the "Fists of Steel" perk in Heavy Armor, the best gauntlets you can get (or make), and enchant them (and a ring) with Fortify Unarmed. Then watch what happens when you seek out low-level bandits or wildlife to wail on....
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!:
  • Fully upgraded dragon shouts have enough emphasis to send enemies flying through the air and even slow time.
    FUS! RO-DAH!
  • Mehrunes Dagon does not appreciate reluctance to kill Silas Vesuius:
    Dagon: Only Dagon can declare if a pawn is worth keeping. I. Have. Spoken.
  • Guards occasionally comment about Alik'r scimitars:
    Guard: You see those warriors from Hammerfell? They've got curved swords. Curved. Swords!
  • During the quest "With Friends Like These...", the player can talk to a few people taken captive by a Dark Brotherhood assassin, and ask if there's anyone they can think of who might put out a hit on them. When speaking to the widow, the player has an option to phrase the question as "Would. Someone. Pay. To. Have. You. Killed?"
  • One of Aela the Huntress's random combat taunts is an emphatic "I. Will. Destroy you!"
  • Almost every single word that comes from the mouth of a Dremora Lord. Nuff' said!
• Punny Name: Hearthfire is obviously named in reference to the home building and family building it allows the PC to do. Heartfire, however, is the in-universe name for September, the month in which the DLC was released. Some books (and previous games) even spell the month as "Hearthfire."
• Puppeteer Parasite: One of the dungeons in the Dragonborn DLC, Whiteridge Sanctum, is filled with bandits who have been taken over by magically-infused, mind-controlling spiders. After dealing with the mad mage who created the spiders, the player can use her imbuing device to create mind control spiders of their own, which they can chuck at enemies to turn them into temporary allies.
• Puppet King: The Jarl of Riften (the hyper-corrupt home of the Thieves' Guild) is pretty clueless about the state of her town. Her own advisor is in deep with the Guild, and the Guild gets most of its work from the local mead-brewing dynasty.
• Puppy Love: A one sided variant between the two children Lars Battle-Born (who is meek) and Braith (who is belligerent). In the latter's words:
  Braith: If only he'd kiss me, then I wouldn't have to beat him up so much.
• Purple Is Powerful: Legendary Dragons from the DLC Dawnguard are clad in purple scales and markings, and they have stronger stats than Alduin, making them the strongest dragon breed. Not only can they breathe fire or frost, they can drain the player's health, magicka, and stamina with the Drain Vitality dragon shout, which cannot be countered with spell absorption or spell resistance. Thanks to their high level of 75, Legendary Dragons have a chance to drop Daedric gear or other high-quality loot.
• Purposely Overpowered: The Dragonrend Shout. You get it near the end of the main quest by reading an Elder Scroll on the Time Wound, which causes you to flash back to witness the people who first created and used it. It only affects Dragons, by causing them to fall out of the sky and become more vulnerable. Without the ability to fly, Dragons become far easier to fight. Other Shouts include Storm Call, which creates a thunderstorm that hits everyone in the area except you with bolts of lightning; two different shouts that let you summon dragons to your aid, making nearly any humanoid enemy completely irrelevant; and the classic Unrelenting Force, which when fully unlocked ragdolls everyone in front of you and can even disintegrate them (that is, if you haven't already thrown them off a cliff with it).

Q

• Quest Giver: The Thieves' Guild questline can be initiated by someone coming up to you.
• Quickly-Demoted Leader: In a long-term subversion to an example from Oblivion, there is a book about what happened to that game's main character. History is a bit fuzzy on the details, but the Hero of Kvatch is remembered for a dizzying mix of heroic deeds, while Martin Septim is only really known for his Heroic Sacrifice.
• Quieting the Unquiet Dead:
  • An early sidequest in Whiterun involves this. The local priest of Arkay, the Divine of life and death, has misplaced the amulet that allows him to confront and bring peace to the restless dead. The Dragonborn is tasked with going down into the catacombs, fighting through the skeletons that have arisen, and recovering the amulet so the priest can do his duties.
  • A quest for the Temple of Mara, the Divine of love and marriage, also involves this. Most of the quest involves helping various separated lovers reunite or realize their feelings for one another, but the last pair are two ghosts who died far apart from one another. Bringing their spirits back together allows them to finally be at peace and move on to the afterlife.

R

• Ragdoll Physics: More so than in Oblivion. The physics engine can do some wonky things.
• Ragnarök Proofing:
  • The Dwemer have been gone for several thousand years, but their Death Traps and robots are still working perfectly fine. There is an explanation for that: the Dwemer bent/changed the laws of physics to make their materials impervious to wear, tear, and corrosion, plus some of them (specifically the little worker spider-bots) are designed to repair one another. Destroyed spiders sometimes drop ore, implying they collect new materials where necessary for upkeep.
  • Amusingly lampshaded if you help the Blades take back Sky Haven Temple. Both Delphine and Esbern will remark with amazement over the temple having stood up so incredibly well over the millennia.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: The titular Dawnguard from the Dawnguard DLC - a ragtag bunch of weirdos dedicated to hunting vampires. In fact, they were such a bunch of misfits that they split up years ago, and you (if you choose that path) have to help with Putting the Band Back Together if you want to have a shot at defeating the blood-sucking menace. Interestingly, the 'minor', low-ranking members of the Dawnguard, who don't play any particular role in the story, seem to be fairly normal people who simply decided to do their part in fighting the (genuinely dangerous) vampires. So apparently, being a ragtag bunch of misfits isn't a requirement for joining, it's just a requirement for advancement.
• Railing Kill: Extremely common due to the number of ledges, catwalks, and balconies and the physics engine. It can get slightly annoying having to jump down a mountainside or into a pit to loot the body.
• Railroading: While the world is indeed wide open and lets you do quests in almost any order, the quests themselves tend to be extremely linear Point A to Point B to Point C-style quests, with a few rare exceptions that allow you to do various objectives of the quest in whatever order you want. Finding the Sky Forge is one such example of the latter.
• Random Encounters: Broadly speaking, when travelling the overworld of Skyrim, the game randomly generates events in various places and each event plays out to its logical conclusion, regardless of whether it actually involves the player or not. Among these:
  • Dragons start randomly spawning after a while, their types and levels scaling with the player. These are usually recognized by a sudden shake of the ground, loud roar and giant shadow passing overhead, and the Ominous Latin Chanting kicking in.
  • Most of the factions can spawn on the roads in small groups. Imperials and Thalmor are usually escorting a prisoner, Stormcloaks are on patrol and may run into Imperials, bandits may try to shake down travelers, etc.
  • Dark Brotherhood assassins may try to kill you along main roads in broad daylight.
  • With Dawnguard installed, vampires can appear almost anywhere... even in towns, which is extremely hazardous to the health of the locals. (If you spot a black-robed figure identified simply as "Traveler," get out of town fast before he can attack you, or half the peaceful residents will get themselves killed trying to stop him. Best bet is to fast-travel to some spot in the wilderness; he'll probably follow, and then you can destroy him without endangering your neighbors.)
  • Dragonborn adds cultists attempting to kill the player, though they stick to the south near the mountains.
• Randomly Generated Levels: Some of the sidequests will randomly generate based on your playing style, like setting the target of the quest in a dungeon you haven't explored yet. Bounties, for example, just tell you go to to X location and kill Y. That means that a bounty quest given in Riften may have you traveling to Markarth to kill a Forsworn bandit.
• Rape as Backstory:
  • Talking to Astrid after joining the Dark Brotherhood reveals that her first kill was a Creepy Uncle who made "unwanted advances" on her, and it's implied he at least molested her.
  • If you ask Sapphire to reveal her real name after joining the Thieves' Guild, she'll tell you about how as a young woman, a band of bandits murdered her family and abducted her, how they repeatedly beat and raped her, and how, after gaining the bandits' trust, she got her hands on a dagger one night and killed them all as they slept.
  • In Dawnguard, Serana and her mother are "Daughters of Coldharbour" and became vampires during a rite to the Daedric prince Molag Bal. (Coldharbour is the portion of Oblivion which Molag Bal rules.) Molag Bal, known as the King of Rape, raped a girl to make the first vampire, and it's implied that the event is re-enacted during this rite. Neither of them like to talk about the details, and Serana herself calls what she experienced "degrading".
• Rare Candy: Scattered throughout the game are 90 "skill books" which, when read for the first time, cause one of the player's 18 skills to immediately level up by one (two with the Scholar's Insight perk added by Dragonborn). The game even keeps track of how many of these books the player has found in its Stats screen. Aside from this, some quests from NPCs reward the player with a level-up to a few skills (instead of gold or treasure).
• Rated M for Manly:
  • The plot goes that a prophesied dragon god of destruction returns and sends forth mighty dragons to eat the world. You play as a mythical dragonslayer who can gain powers by slaying them and then eating their souls. You exert these powers by shouting at reality, and it listens. And it's all set in a land of fantasy Norse where deadly primeval predators roam the wilderness, there's a civil war going on, and mankind is fighting a bitter war for survival against Nazi elves. The theme song features a male choir going "Hoo! Ha!" and singing a song about how the Dragonborn is awesome.
  • Honorable mention goes to the in-game lorebook Olaf and the Dragon, which is about an earlier Nord High King dueling a dragon, first with shield and axe, and then with Thu'um, and finally wearing it down and taking it prisoner. The book - which is a scholarly work that simply recounts various versions of the oral lore - mentions that "the only way in which this could have been even more of a Nordic tale would be if Olaf beat Numinex in a Drinking Contest."
• Real Men Love Jesus: The major cause for the Stormcloak rebellion is that The Empire caved to the demands of the Thalmor and outlawed worship of their native god-man.
• Real Is Brown: The game drops much of the bright colors of its predecessor. It takes place in Tamriel's far northern province of Skyrim, which is largely snow and tundra, so large chunks of the game world are washed in shades of gray, blue, and white. Even the greener areas tend toward darker and duller colors. The remastered edition of the game for PS4 and Xbox One is considerably brighter in many locations.
• Reality Warper:
  • Dragons (and, by extension, the Dragonborn) have the innate ability to use the Thu'um, or Shouts, a power that causes magic-like effects through speech alone rather than spells. Dragons in Skyrim don't breathe fire or cast a fire spell; they simply command fire to appear, and it does.
  • Actual-spell-wise, there's the Alteration skillset, which explicitly "involves the manipulation of the physical world and its natural properties." One practical example is Transmute, a Transformation Ray for Alchemic purposes.
• Really 700 Years Old:
  • Elves, naturally.
  • Vampires, with special mention going to a 300-year-old vampire assassin who takes advantage of looking like the ten-year-old girl she was when she was turned. Of particular note, Serana was put away during the Interregnum in the Second Era, before the Third Empire of Cyrodiil, at least 635 years before the game's time period. Probably even longer, as the Third Era was only declared when all of Tamriel was brought under Tiber Septim's banner, and it took the closing years of the Second Era for Tiber to achieve that. She and her parents are likely the oldest surviving vampires in Nirn.
  • Dragons, due to being biologically immortal. Paarthurnax, for instance, is one of the few to have survived unscathed from the Merethic Era. He might even be the only one, since all of the other dragons encountered in the game were resurrected by Alduin. Alduin himself has also survived unscathed since that time, but it doesn't exactly count because he was flung through time, so to him the Merethic Era was last week.
  • Knight-Paladin Gelebor and his brother, Arch-Curate Vyrthur, are the last known surviving Snow Elves. The Snow Elves are what the Falmer used to be - back in the Merethic Era. It's heavily implied that Auriel (Akatosh) himself is keeping the former alive.
  • Not quite as old as some of these characters, but Neloth is notable for being one of the few NPCs that appears in both this game and a previous one. Since Skyrim is set at least 200 years after the last game, and Neloth was already a high master even back then, he is pretty ancient by everyone else's standards. He even lampshades this, making you an honorary member of House Telvanni, but then immediately pointing out since that he won't be returning home anytime soon, you might not even live to see the benefits of the honor (or if you do, not for very long).
  • Dervenin, an unhinged Wood Elf found wandering the streets of Solitude, featured in the Shivering Isles expansion for Oblivion (set 201 years earlier) as a priest.
  • Nelacar, a High Elf mage researching the powerful artifact Azura's Star, appeared in Morrowind as a minor quest target who worked in a glass mine.
  • Avrusa Sarethi, Aphia Velothi, Teldryn Sero and Elynea Mothren are also over 200 years old, as they claim, or are established by in-game books, to have lived in Morrowind before the eruption of Red Mountain 204 years ago.
• Really Moves Around: The Player Character can own up to five houses (eight with Hearthfire) in different locations, and nothing is really forcing them to make any one of them their permanent residence. They can impose this upon their family, as well. The fact that each Hold is a different jurisdiction and the entire point of the large number of houses is to enable the player to have homes in different Holds makes this a viable means to escape law enforcement.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Many, many examples abound. On both sides of the Civil War, in various joinable factions, and even with one-note quest NPCs. Examples include, but are not limited to:
  • Ulfric Stormcloak, who is an effective military leader and is well loved by his hold and half of Skyrim. He takes into account the opinions of every member of his court, including his steward and mage, when making decisions. He takes a great many steps to tend to the security of his city in spite of being very short of manpower during the civil war. He is easy to approach during the campaign and shows on various occasions to believe very strongly in your capabilities. He is also regretful of having caused the civil war and wishes an end to it would come soon.
  • Ulfric's replacement, should the Imperial Legion win, is basically in the running for some "Best Human Being Alive" award. Brunwulf Free-Winter is kind, decent, and polite. Within hours of getting his new job, he's already met the dark elves of the ghetto-like Gray Quarter to work on plans to renovate that part of town, and is trying to find a way to let the Argonians into the city without increasing the town's already huge racial tensions. And that's along with his plans to rebuild Windhelm's economy and reputation following the war. He even keeps most of Ulfric's staff on hand since they know their jobs well enough, and offers lodging to the deposed Jarls who were supporting Ulfric.
  • Kodlak Whitemane, Harbinger of the Companions of Jorrvaskr, is an incredibly wise old man and a fearsome warrior well into his old age. His very job depends on him being a good leader and a good man as well. He fully endorses your entry into the Companions despite the protests of others, and is able to shut them up on that count (the Harbinger isn't actually the boss, more of a spiritual leader). Later, when you avenge a fellow member's death at the hands of a rival guild by slaughtering their members at large, he reprimands you for this, as it means to invite an even greater war in the future. Despite this, he still thinks highly enough of you to involve you in his far more important plan for ridding the Companions of their Werewolf curse.
  • Balgruuf of Whiterun is likely the first Jarl with whom you will have any meaningful interaction. He is well respected within his hold and would rather it be neutral in the civil war; he would prefer to deal with the omnipresent dragon problem, and takes tangible steps to combat it. He is also respectful towards the Dragonborn and rewards them generously for their services in his hold.
  • General Tullius is quite rough along the edges, but it's clear that he cares about his men (listen to his speech after the battle of Windhelm) and does not like to slaughter the Stormcloaks, fully aware that the only faction who will gain from the war is the Thalmor. And while he calls your execution at the start of the game a "slight misunderstanding," he at least recognizes the fact that you got dragged into it for no good reason.
• Reassigned to Antarctica:
  • The Thalmor posted to Solstheim in the Dragonborn expansion seem to fit this trope. They wear leather armor instead of expensive elven moonstone gear, and have seemingly been relegated to the island for not being ruthless enough - the quest involving them has a speechcraft option, in which you can convince them to leave rather than resorting to stealth or open combat, and if you meet them at any other time, they will not blow you off rudely nor attempt to lecture you about Elven supremacy.
  • It's implied here and there that the Thalmor forces in Skyrim are also this, albeit to a lesser degree. They're well-equipped, have decent infrastructure and wield a lot of power over the natives, but Skyrim is still considered anything but a prestigious posting by them (not really surprising, considering that even the Empire treats the province as kind of a barbarian backwater much of the time). Bonus points for Skyrim's climate making it a pretty decent stand-in for real-life Antarctica.
• Rebel Leader: Ulfric, the leader of the Stormcloak rebellion, and Madanach, the leader of the Forsworn rebellion in the Reach.
• Reclining Reigner: The default model pose for anyone sitting on a throne. It doubles as a Slouch of Villainy for Jarls of opposite factions, depending on whose side you're on; Elisif the Fair is the only Jarl who does not sit on her throne like this.
• Recurring Riff: Besides the obvious re-use of the "Elder Scrolls" theme (sung to a "Barbarian Choir," as Todd Howard described it to Jeremy Soule), an astute ear can hear several recurring riffs in the musical soundtracks.
  • "The Jerall Mountains" is heavily based on "Silt Sunrise" from Morrowind.
  • "Wind Guide You" uses riffs from "Ancient Sorrow" from Oblivion.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over:
  • Dremora Daedra and, by association, Daedric equipment. Also the Dark Brotherhood uniform.
  • In Dawnguard, the new vampire armors come in red/black, black, and grey, all with silver trim.
  • Alduin himself fits the description.
  • Sanguine takes the form of a Dremora in a simple black robe and, while not completely evil (sort of), does enjoy messing around with mortals, getting them black-out drunk and having them do ridiculous things in the name of fun.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning:
  • The Dunmer aren't evil as a race, but their red eyes are the result of evil. Long before the events of Skyrim, the Tribunal, a trio of Physical Gods, broke a sacred promise in order to obtain their divinity. The Daedric prince Azura punished them and their entire race by giving them the dark skin and red eyes they now have... however, if you ask Azura, it just happened without her interference.
  • As of Dawnguard, vampires and Vampire Lords have glowing red/yellow/orange eyes.
• Red Herring:
  • You'd think that Ulfric's ability to use the Voice would imply a stronger connection to the plot about Alduin and his dragons trying to eat the world, but it never really comes up. It's just something he used to get victory when he challenged the last High King to a duel. Though Imperials and Stormcloaks have the expected opinions on the matter, when met in Sovngarde, Torygg isn't too hostile about it; he's mostly angry that Ulfric took him away from Elisif.
  • It is worth noting that despite not being totally involved in the main quest, Ulfric will gladly tell you all you he knows about the Greybeards and your destiny as the Dragonborn if asked. This is significant when compared to how little information on them you can get from only other Jarl with some tangential involvement in the chain, the Jarl of Whiterun. Ulfric studied with the Greybeards for a number of years before leaving to fight in the Great War, so he naturally knows more about them than Balgruuf would.
  • Delphine initially suspects that the Thalmor are behind the appearance of the dragons. They're not, and after you find that out and rescue Esbern from them, they stop being important in the main quest.
  • In the "Blood On The Ice" quest, all of the clues points toward the Court Wizard as the main culprit. If you actually get him arrested before talking to him about it, the next day the real culprit will kill someone again while you sheepishly talk to the wizard about your screw-up. Once you present him with the evidence, he will point out how everyone you've talked to up to that point were all talking out of their asses. Except one of them, who is the real culprit.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Ulfric is brash, prideful, and aggressive, while Tullius is calm, caring, and defensive; this is ironic, since the Empire wears red and the Stormcloaks blue. Even then, the game makes strides proving they're not so different
• Red Shirt:
  • When you go to trap the dragon Odahviing in Dragonsreach, the people on the Dragonsreach balcony are you, the Jarl of Whiterun, his adjutant, and some nameless guard. No points for guessing which one gets snapped up and spectacularly flung into the distance on Odahviing's first pass.
  • The Vigilant of Stendarr are an entire faction of this in Dawnguard. The moment the DLC is installed, everyone at their headquarters is killed by the Volkihar Vampires.^note Well, almost the moment. If you have the DLC installed prior to starting a new game, the Hall of the Vigilant will remain intact until you reach level 10. Before Dawnguard is installed, the Hall of the Vigilant is a fully stocked home base for a sect of Daedra hunters. After installation, it becomes a burned-out husk filled with corpses.
• Red Sky, Take Warning:
  • Hircine's quest involves going to a valley where he's made blood-red moon appear, turning the sky red and compelling his worshippers to start Hunting the Most Dangerous Game. The quarry in question? The werewolf that gave you the quest, whom you can either fight alongside or hunt yourself. The sky returns to normal after either outcome is achieved.
  • The Dawnguard DLC revolves around an ancient vampire lord's plan to darken the sun forever so that his kin can walk the world without being Weakened by the Light. No matter which side you decide to join, once the quest line is completed, you can enact this plan yourself by shooting the sun with a special bow and arrows dipped in pure vampire blood. This results in the sky darkening and the sun turning into a black void surrounded by a blood-red corona for 24 in-game hours. It not only looks creepy as hell but also results in Death Hounds, gargoyles and vampire hunting parties spawning absolutely everywhere, which is most definitely not a good thing even if you're a vampire yourself.
• Reduced Mana Cost: There are enchantments that reduce Magicka cost for specific schools. With a maxed out Enchanting skill and all the relevant perks, a single enchantment will reduce the cost of that school by 25%, so if you equip four pieces of gear with that enchantment, the cost will be reduced to zero. The final Enchanting perk allows you to put two enchantments on one piece of gear, meaning you can have two free schools of magic at once. And that's without abusing Alchemy to create a feedback loop of potions that boost your Enchanting and enchantments that boost your Alchemy.
• Reed Richards Is Useless: Magical healing is commonplace enough that every player character starts with it by default. Every major holdfast has a court wizard who can teach the basics of it to anyone willing to pay a modest fee. For those too poor for that, any shrine of the Divines can heal virtually any injury or disease short of death itself, and most curses, perfectly and instantly for free, and there is, again, at least one shrine in every major holdfast and most minor ones. Despite this, a simple arrow to the knee is all it takes to injure a promising young adventurer so badly that they give up on their dreams for good.
• Regenerating Health:
  • Your health bar will slowly refill - emphasis on slowly. This is so you don't have to waste your precious health potions between battles; it's not really meant for recovery in the middle of one. This also seems to apply to all humanoid NPCs as well. Possibly a fix for the issue seen in Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, where caravans and traveling NPCs would slowly run out of health and eventually die due to fighting minor enemies over the course of several days.
  • The Argonian special ability, Histskin, multiplies their health regen by 10, bringing them up to Healing Factor levels.
  • There are also several enchanted amulets, rings, and the like which will boost the speed of your health recharge. And though you can only wear one example of each type of clothing at a time (i.e., one ring, one pair of boots, etc.), the game has no problem letting you wear multiple pieces/accessories that all have the same effect, thus making the overall percentage benefit a cumulative one.
  • Notably absent with werewolves. If a werewolf needs to heal, it needs to eat someone. On the plus side, one or two feedings is usually good enough to get back to full health. Also averted with vampires during day.
• Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain: There is a perk which gives a chance to perform a decapitation when power attacking while stationary. Corpses killed this way cannot be reanimated.
• The Remnant: Multiple.
  • The Dark Brotherhood has been reduced to nothing more than a remote sanctuary in a Skyrim forest, and they're short a Listener. Without a Listener, they don't know about any of the contracts that come from people praying to the Night Mother, the Dark Brotherhood's patron saint and bride of Sithis. They've had to abandon the five Tenets, the only rules the Brotherhood has ever had, and actively go out and look for people seeking their services, just to survive.
  • The Thieves' Guild is reduced to a leaky old tavern in falling-apart sewer ruins, surrounded by gutter-trash; they've lost every single resource and connection they'd ever had; they've lost the fear and respect they once had, instead being looked on as little more than thugs pretending to be civilized, and they're one flash of interest by the guards away from extinction.
  • The Blades have been all but wiped out in the 200 years since the Oblivion Crisis. During the Great War between the Empire and the Aldmeri Dominion, most of their members were hunted down and killed by the Thalmor. Only a handful managed to survive the war, and any remaining members live in hiding as they are still being hunted by the Thalmor. In fact, Delphine straight up acknowledges that it should come as no surprise that nobody knows who they are anymore.
  • The Empire itself is a mere shadow of its former glory, with only three provinces remaining under its control. Three (Summerset Isle, Elsweyr and Valenwood) have seceded and have become part of what is now the Third Aldmeri Dominion while the other two (Black Marsh and Hammerfell) have gone completely independent (Black Marsh has also expanded north, conquering a fair quantity of what is left habitable in Morrowind). Out of the three provinces that the Empire still controls, only High Rock has been untouched by either war or natural disaster. The Dovahkiin can further this decline by helping the Stormcloaks throw the Imperial Legion out of Skyrim and assassinating the Emperor.
  • The Forsworn are little more than guerrilla warbands while their king is imprisoned and used by Thonar Silver-Blood to control the Forsworn.
  • The Companions, the honor-based warrior guild in Whiterun, have been around for literally as long as Skyrim itself; they were founded by Ysgramor, who led the Five Hundred Companions across the sea to settle the land. Membership has dwindled down to a whopping dozen members by the time you join the ranks. Two more then die in the course of the questline. Unlike some of the other factions whose numbers have shrunk, however, the Companions don't seem particularly troubled by this; to judge by something Vilkas tells you, the membership count has a history of waxing and waning.
  • In Dragonborn, it's revealed that Great House Hlaalu has become this, being kicked off the council of Great Houses and being officially disbanded by the Dunmer after the Empire basically abandoned Morrowind following the Oblivion Crisis (and Hlaalu had been the Empire's biggest native supporters). The few Hlaalu members who still exist are basically little more than revenge-obsessed bandits, and there's a small quest chain where you deal with a Hlaalu revenge plot against Raven Rock.
• The Renfield: Vampires found in dungeons will usually have thralls on hand. You can make temporary ones with the Vampire's Servant power in Dawnguard.
• Renovating the Player Headquarters: As the player completes small jobs for Delvin and Vex as part of the Thieves Guild questline, the guild will slowly start to upgrade itself as it regains its reputation, including new fences and merchant stalls within the Guild headquarters and the Ragged Flagon.
• Repeatable Quest: The game uses the Radiant Quest system that uses base quest templates (fetch That Item for That NPC at That Place) to generate an infinite amount of tasks, most of which are fetch quests.
• Required Secondary Powers: There is a Dual Casting perk for every school of Magicka (save Enchanting). Dual Casting for Destruction in particular doubles the attack strength... but for almost triple the Magicka cost. To gain any use out of dual casting Destruction spells, you'll need Impact, which will temporarily stun enemies hit by dual cast spells.
• Rerouted from Heaven: Kodlak, Harbinger of the Companions, wants to go to the Nordic afterlife of Sovngarde, but since he's a werewolf, he knows that the Daedric Lord Hircine will claim his soul after death instead. Kodlak is killed when his home is attacked by werewolf hunters, but the Dovahkiin is able to break his curse after his death, freeing his soul from Hircine's realm and allowing him to go to Sovngarde. If this is done before the main quest is completed, his soul can be found in Sovngarde - he made it.
• Retcon: Hermaeus Mora's appearance (a dark purple vortex) in the vanilla game's main questline has been changed to reflect his Dragonborn appearance Yog-Sothoth Lite. He knows all, sees all, plans everything, and looks like a mass of eyes and tentacles. The aquatic nature of his minions and gothic look of the non-sunken parts further the Lovecraftian elements.
• Retirony: Players can invoke this - bandits and similar criminal NPCs will sometimes mention their hopes to buy a secluded island and retire.
• Revenge Before Reason: The Blades insist that Paarthurnax die, despite his role in saving Skyrim from Alduin, because of his past atrocities. Refusing this request causes them to stop helping you. They do this even after Esbern chides the Imperials and Stormcloaks for nursing petty grievances, if you hold the peace conference.
• Revenge Is Not Justice: Twice during the Companions questline.
  • When Skjor is killed by the Silver Hand before Aela the Huntress and the Dragonborn could meet up with him. Aela vengefully directs the Dragonborn in fighting the Silver Hand and word of their assaults reach Kodlak Whitemane. Kodlak summons the Dragonborn and calls them out on their revenge quest, stating their revenge ended when they killed Skjor's slayers and their actions have kickstarted a cycle of revenge from the Silver Hand. Something Aela takes to heart when Kodlak is eventually killed by the Silver Hand.
  • When Kodlak is killed by the Silver Hand, Vilkas demands The Dragonborn to accompany him in wiping out the Silver Hand and recovering the fragments of Wuuthrad. When Vilkas returns and goes to the Underforge, Aela reprimands him for his desire for revenge. When the circle enters Ysgramor's Tomb, Vilkas refuses to go any further because he felt unworthy, he agrees that he took things too far and let vengeance rule his heart.
• Revive Kills Zombie:
  • Not directly, but the Sunfire spell set only damages undead (for a significantly lower magicka cost than comparable Destruction spells) and are in the same school of magic as healing spells.
  • The "Necromage" perk of the Restoration tree increases the effects of spells on the undead, including the Dragonborn. If you became a vampire, your healing spells become more effective on yourself.
• Reviving Enemy:
  • Trolls and Frost Trolls will fall prone and appear dead when they have a small sliver of health, but continue regenerating their health... although the fact they don't get knocked back is a bit of a giveaway.
  • Spriggans are a much more noteworthy example; if brought down to low health without dying, the Spriggan will restore almost all of its health and continue fighting. See I Surrender, Suckers for some honorable mentions.
  • Any enemy can become this when there's a character who can raise the dead around, since unless you take steps to vaporise the corpse (e.g. kill them with lightning when you have the appropriate perk or raise them yourself) you'll have to kill them again (anything being raised this way collapses into ash when they or their "master" is killed). This makes necromancers and vampires rather annoying.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Civilised: The Forsworn, though they spend most of the game trying to kill you on sight, are still more sympathetic than their enemies in Markarth. They'd probably be even more sympathetic if their modus operandi wasn't "Murder everyone we don't like because we once ruled this place thousands of years ago." They also consort with Hagravens, conduct sinister blood rituals, and will attack the player on sight even if he or she has sworn to fight for their cause. All in all, not a nice bunch.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Vilified: Subverted; the game opens with the Empire appearing rather overzealous in their desire to execute members of the rebellion, and most of the PC's fellow prisoners are rebels, giving the player a far better initial impression of the Stormcloaks. However, as the game goes on, it becomes quite apparent that the Stormcloaks aren't as good as they seem, being rather racist, and there's several doubts cast on their leader, Ulfric Stormcloak, and his true goals in starting the rebellion; while the Empire is shown to be flawed, but not completely irredeemable. The situation soon turns into a Gray-and-Grey Morality situation.
• Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves: One of the late Dark Brotherhood quests has this. After you poison the Emperor, Commander Maro arrives to tell you that you just killed a Body Double. He then informs you that one of your own betrayed you, and had set up a deal with him to get rid of you while sparing the rest of the Brotherhood. However, because you killed his son (and framed him for high treason) in an earlier quest, he has no intentions of honoring his end of the bargain, and, while still trying to kill you, he's already sent a large group of soldiers to your hideout. The "traitor" turns out to be Astrid, who wanted to do away with you and the Night Mother so that her control over the Sanctuary would remain absolute. A later quest allows you to kill Maro, should you decide to take revenge on him for this.
• Ribcage Ridge: The plains and mountains of Skyrim are liberally dotted with the ribcages, spines and occasionally skulls of large animals (usually "mammoths", but there are a few troll and dragon skeletons lying around). Killing a dragon can cause this instantly (apparently eating draconic souls makes flesh disappear). The skeleton of a whale also serves as a bridge to the Hall of Valor in Sovngarde.
• Riddle for the Ages:
  • The Headless Horseman. Who is he? Why does he haunt the night? What does he want? The game offers no answers.
  • Why did Vignar Grey-Mane join The Companions? Even he can't remember.
  • Which side of the quest "In My Time of Need" is telling the truth? We never learn the answer. Ever. There aren't even any clues.
• A Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside an Enigma: The Dragonborn expansion has Neloth sending you on a Fetch Quest for a Black Book that he believes he has located:
  Neloth: Now, it's only a rumor of a whisper of a conjecture...
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: Rolff Stone-Fist has reached the conclusion that the Dunmer refugees of Windhelm are Imperial or Thalmor spies based entirely on his Fantastic Racism and Insane Troll Logic. However poking around in the back of the New Gnisis Cornerclub, you'll find a suit of Imperial armour and an Imperial sword along with other memorabilia on display, suggesting the Dunmer owners really are Imperial supporters after all (then again it is also possible one of them is a veteran of the Imperial Legion or simply a collector of Imperial memorabilia, but there is nothing said to suggest this).
• Roaring Rampage of Rescue: Thanks to the Hearthfire DLC, sometimes when the Dragonborn comes home, his/her spouse is not there and they will instead be greeted by a bandit with a ransom note. Apparently, Rochelle the Red thought kidnapping the Dovahkiin's spouse was a good idea. It can also happen with the Dawnguard DLC, in which vampires or bandits may kidnap the spouse or other NPCs with whom the Dovahkiin is friendly, prompting this response.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: The Dragonborn has the opportunity to go on several of these:
  • If you join the Dark Brotherhood, you get to do this on another character's behalf in the early questline, killing both a bandit leader name Alain Dufont and (optionally) a girl in Windhelm named Nilsine Shatter-Shield. This mission is a revenge scheme concocted by the client, Muiri; Alain used her to get close to and rob the Shatter-Shields, of whom she was a close friend, and then framed her for it, causing them to cast her out of their lives. She feels that both Alain and the Shatter-Shields need to pay for ruining her life, and contacted the Dark Brotherhood to do it for her when she lost the nerve to do it herself.
  • Near the end of the Dark Brotherhood questline, one of your optional objectives in the final mission is to kill Commander Maro, who intimidated Astrid, the leader of the Brotherhood, into betraying you, then went back on his word and orchestrated the destruction of the Falkreath Sanctuary and the killing of most of the assassins of the Sanctuary.
  • The Companions questline allows you to go on two of these, one of them against the Silver Hand for killing Skjor and later Kodlak Whitemane himself, and the other against the Glenmoril Witches for their role in turning the Circle into werewolves in the first place.
  • The Thieves' Guild questline turns into one of these after Mercer Frey betrays you at Snow Veil Sanctum, and really picks up when the rest of the Guild members learn the full extent of his treachery and join you in taking him down.
  • One of the quests in Solitude, "Lights Out!", involves you doing a job for an Argonian pirate by the name of Jaree-Ra, involving running a ship aground so that he, his sister Deeja, and the Blackblood Marauders can loot the thing, promising you a cut of the treasure. Turns out that neither of them have any intention of even leaving you alive, let alone giving you any cut of their haul — and as an added bonus, the Blackblood Marauders have murdered everyone on board the ship, despite Jaree-Ra's assurance that they would be left alive. The rest of the quest turns into an object lesson in why you do not betray the Dovahkiin.
• Robot Buddy: Dragonborn lets you pick up a friendly Dwarven Spider or Dwarven Sphere from a ruin on Solstheim, which will follow you around and help you fight enemies. If destroyed, they can be respawned by going back and pulling a lever.
• Rodents of Unusual Size: They're called "skeevers" and looks fuzzier to accommodate the colder climate. Despite its a bit smaller than Cyrodiil's rats, they're so big that people lay down bear traps to catch them. One crazy mage even tries to create an army of them in one quest. At least one NPC notes that the skeevers used to be smaller.
• Romance Sidequest: Skyrim is rather unique among western RPGs for allowing the player to actually marry NPCs - including characters that can accompany you on adventures. Called "The Bonds of Matrimony", the sidequest involves arranging and attending your wedding ceremony after proposing to an eligible NPC. Getting a character interested in you simply require you to wear an Amulet of Mara while talking with characters that have a positive opinion of you (usually involving doing a quest for them). The courtship/marriages are somewhat chaste, with no love scenes, but you gain a temporary buff by sleeping in a bed with your spouse nearby.
• Rouge Angles of Satin:
  • The game's conversations and book texts contain a number of errors of this nature. The "unofficial patch" mods list pages and pages of corrections.
  • In the fandom, one word in particular tends to be misspelled. The document signed by Emperor Titus Mede II in order to bring about an end to the Great War is called the White-Gold Concordat; many people mistakenly call it the White-Gold Concordant.
• Rousing Speech: There are several notable ones on both sides of the Civil War. For a specific example, try this early speech by Ulfric Stormcloak:

  "I fight for the men I've held in my arms, dying on foreign soil! I fight for their wives and children, whose names I heard whispered in their last breath. I fight for we few who did come home, only to find our country full of strangers wearing familiar faces. I fight for my people impoverished to pay the debts of an Empire too weak to rule them, yet brands them criminals for wanting to rule themselves! I fight so that all the fighting I've already done hasn't been for nothing! I fight... because I must."

• Royally Screwed Up: Sheogorath states that Pelagius the Mad was not normal in comparison to the average person, but he was pretty par for the course as far as the Septim royal family went.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: Ulfric fought in the Great War, put down the Forsworn Rebellion, and is now leading one side of the Skyrim Civil War. Balgruuf presumably fought in the Great War (or some other conflict) as well - he and his housecarl Irileth are old battle buddies - and he eventually picks up a sword himself during the Battle for Whiterun.
• R-Rated Opening: The game starts out with your character getting sent to the execution block, watching someone getting arrowed to death for trying to run and watching someone get his head chopped off. And then the dragon attacks.
• Rubber-Forehead Aliens: Less so than in previous games, though; elves look much less human than they used to, with elongated skulls and strangely shaped and colored eyes.
• Ruins for Ruins' Sake: Averted... mostly. Dwemer ruins show obvious signs of habitation from before the Dwemer race went poof in the First Era, and many of these ruins are still in great shape as the automatons still work and maintain them. Nordic ruins are more run down, but that is because most of them are ancient burial crypts - Skyrim is the oldest continuous human civilization on Tamriel and the Nords have bled and died there for millennia, and those fallen warriors have to go somewhere; unfortunately most of these dead are restless. Skyrim's history of warfare can also be seen in ruined forts that dot the landscape; some lie empty and forgotten, some have been re-purposed into lairs and hideouts by necromancers and bandits, and sometimes the Imperial Legion or Stormcloaks give the boot to the unscrupulous occupiers and clean and restore them for use in the war effort. Skyrim also has its fair share of mines, and while some are abandoned, many are still in use. Radiant quest allotment and interior design are also cleverly used to suggest these are real places that once had a use rather than just levels that exist for the player's amusement.
• Rule of Symbolism: In Snoveil Sanctum, where you discover the truth of the Thieves' Guild questline, the door has two birds and a snake on it. Two nightingales, and a venimous traitor.
• Rule of Three: Every shout consists of three one-syllable words, each one escalating the power of the shout as they're said. This is also true of dragon names.
• Running Gag:
  • M'aiq the Liar wanders the lands of Skyrim, telling tall tales as usual.
  • The Lusty Argonian Maid now has a second volume. And it gains a Spear Counterpart spin-off in Dawnguard, The Sultry Argonian Bard.
  • Your sweetrolls are still being stolen.
  • Fishy Sticks return, this time as a form of meditative stance used by... Sheogorath. Who is still obsessed with cheese.
• Running on All Fours: As a werewolf, the Dragonborn can do an extremely fast four-legged sprint.

S

• Sacred Bow and Arrows: Auriel's Bow appears again in the Dawnguard DLC as a major plot item. It has a relatively mediocre base damage, but a high "critical" value. It is also enchanted to deal "Sun" damage, and deals triple damage to undead. Over the course of Dawnguard's main quest, it gains the ability to fire "Sunhallowed" or "Bloodcursed" arrows. Sunhallowed arrows, when fired from the bow at the sun during the day, will cause the sun to deal damage to any nearby enemies for a time. Bloodcursed arrows, fired similarly, block out the sun for the rest of the day and prevent vampires from taking sun damage.
• Sadistic Choice: Multiple.
  • When the beggar Narfi asks you about his sister, you can either crush his spirit by telling him the truth of her death, or fill him with false hope by lying and saying she'll be home soon, which is likely to hurt him even more in the future. What makes it even more jarring is when you finally have to kill him because he happened to be a target of Dark Brotherhood contracts. You gained his trust, became his Only Friend, only to stab him from the back with your Ebony Blade and repeatedly resurrect and kill him 19 times with Dead Thrall... What?
  • Hearthfire adds four orphans to the game, who are living in equally miserable circumstances: Lucia, the homeless Imperial girl begging for coins in Whiterun; Blaise, a Breton boy working a miserable life as a stablehand at Katla's Farm; Sofie, the Nord girl selling flowers for a pittance in the freezing streets of Windhelm; and Alesan, a Redguard boy in Dawnstar who helps the miners in the dangerous mine outside town. Here's the harsh kicker you were probably expecting: You can only adopt two children. No matter which ones you pick, you know there are always two children left, somewhere in Skyrim, to whom you couldn't give a better life. And that's not even talking about the children suffering from Abusive Parents, such as Sissel, or the children from Honorhall Orphanage, though you can at least help the latter by taking care of Grelod "the Kind".
  • And in the backstory, the ancient Falmer, who had just lost their greatest hero and their civilisation in the Battle of Moesring, were faced with the choice of throwing themselves at the dubious mercy of the Atmorans (whom they tried and failed to exterminate), running the gauntlet and trying to hide elsewhere... or becoming a blind Slave Race to the Dwemer. Defying Face Death with Dignity, many of them chose the third option, but what the Dwemer didn't tell them was the process not only robbed them of their sight, but also of their minds.
  • Poor High King Torygg. A young man just stepping into his father's shoes as High King, when Ulfric Stormcloak, a war hero whose opinions and actions Torygg greatly respected, calls him out as an ineffectual puppet unfit to rule Skyrim and invokes an ancient Nordic right to a Duel to the Death for the right to rule. If Torygg accepts, he dies in a lop-sided battle against a man who is clearly ten times the warrior he is; if he refuses, then he lives but he is humiliated and proves Ulfric's point all the same. Torygg accepted, and he paid with his life. And in Sovngarde he claims he doesn't regret his choice, but he does regret leaving Elisif behind.
• Sarcastic Clapping: The game offers a particularly malicious one from Commander Maro after you fail to assassinate the emperor.
• Saved by the Coffin: A Dark Brotherhood aligned Dovahkiin needs to hide inside the Night Mother's coffin when The Penitus Oculatus raze the Falkreath sanctuary.
• "Save the World" Climax: Four times, two each split between the original game and the expansions:
  • The first chapter of the main storyline revolves around the mystery of dragons returning. Eventually you will have to defeat their leader, Alduin, the literal World-Eater.
  • In the College of Winterhold questline, you initially find a strange orb in a Nordic ruin. It later turns out to be the 'Eye of Magnus', an immensely powerful artifact. Then it gets into the hands of an insane Thalmor mage and guess who has to take care of that...
  • In Dawnguard, you have to stop a Vampire Lord from completing a prophecy that will darken the sun, letting vampires roam completely unchecked whenever they want.
  • In Dragonborn, you have to stop an ancient Dragon Priest (who is also Dragonborn) from escaping Apocrypha and brainwashing all of Skyrim, and even the rest of Nirn, under his command.
• Saved by the Coffin: A Dark Brotherhood-aligned Dovahkiin needs to hide inside the Night Mother's coffin when the Penitus Oculatus raze the Falkreath sanctuary.
• Scaling the Summit: This is done as part of the main storyline when the Dragonborn has to scale The Throat of the World in order to speak to the Greybeards and later their leader a Dragon named Parthunaax who lives on the peak.
• The Scapegoat: You in the "Forsworn Conspiracy" quest chain in Markarth.
• Scary Dogmatic Aliens: The Thalmor are a fantasy variant. See A Nazi by Any Other Name above.
• Scenery Gorn: The southern end of Solstheim. Everything is covered in dull grey volcanic ash, a jarring contrast to the fairly vibrant colors seen in the rest of the game. Of particular note are the remains of a forest near Tel Mithryn. The charred stumps are all bent away from the shore, knocked over by the pyroclastic flow when Red Mountain erupted in 4 E 5.
• Scenery Porn: Par for the course for a Bethesda game. Someone most definitely put a lot of work into the sky textures this time around. The water physics have also vastly improved. Case in point, this time lapse video. For a nice view, go to an iceberg in the middle of the northern sea, use Clear Skies, and marvel as you can see from Winterhold to Solitude. And if you've been delving into Dwemer ruins, you'll likely have come across Blackreach... it's a sight to be seen, for sure. Let's just say that there's a reason the game is currently the page image for the Video Games page of the trope. Specific examples include the Northern Lights and the breathtaking view of the sky at the top of High Hrothgar when Clear Skies is used, And in late 2016, the game was remastered for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. If you thought it was beautiful before, the Scenery Porn has been taken even further.
• Scenic-Tour Level: The game starts the player in chains on a cart where they are given some scene setting by fellow prisoners. The scene is notable for letting you know just enough of the setting to get by (there's a rebellion, these guys against these other guys), but telling you nothing about the history between the last game and this one (a span of two hundred years) aside from the fact that the Nine Divines are now the Eight Divines. You have to find out out the rest for yourself.
• Schmuck Bait:
  • Many dungeons have pedestals with objects on them. Picking them up triggers a Booby Trap. Subverted in one case where it opens a hidden treasure room, and in another where it unlocks a Word Wall.
  • One Dwemer ruin has a particularly amusing example - when you enter, all you see is a single room with a bright light floating in midair. Right next to it are a couple of dead bodies, and if you have a follower, they'll say, "I have a bad feeling about this," which is usually saved for boss rooms or horrible occurrences. Unsurprisingly, choosing to "Touch the Mysterious Orb" results in being caught in a trap (although it's mostly harmless, and is the only way to access the rest of the ruin).
  • Rannveig's Fast contains a Word Wall with a trap door rigged to send you plummeting down into an evil necromancer's lair. Sild the Warlock has set up a treasure chest in front of a trap door that leads to a cage where he can dispose of his victims and turn them into his unwilling servants. To add insult to injury, even if you avoid the trap door, the chest is empty.
  • Another dungeon reverses this equation by having a lethal spike trap guarding a chest which is revealed to contain only useless junk. And beneath the spike trap? A spiral staircase leading to a Word Wall. Luckily, your backstabbing partner for the dungeon will take the bait if not killed.
  • A stealth-oriented player can invoke this on the AI by firing arrows to draw their attention elsewhere in the room and causing them to investigate the sound... or use the Throw Voice shout. The player can then sneak by while they're distracted, or get an out of sight enemy to come into view for a proper shot.
  • In Blackreach, you will find several of the giant Dwemer Centurion animunculi, inactive in their storage rigs... and a lever switch right next to them. One guess what the switch does.
  • The Redwater Skooma den. A new type of Skooma? Awesome. Let's just ignore the dead bodies in some of the stalls and partake... why am I in a cell?
  • As you're taking your tour of the Dark Brotherhood's Lair, you encounter a monster spider you'll probably kill out of reflex like you have dozens of others. The Dark Brotherhood will then turn on you because that was Lis, the familiar of another guild member.
  • In the Dragonborn DLC, you just know that the Black Books are something special. They're much thicker than normal books. What could possibly be written inside them?
  • Again in the Dragonborn DLC, the likely first corrupted All-Maker Stone you encounter will be the one near Raven Rock. You may be inclined to see what happens when you find out it's manipulable with the "use" key. If you touch it while the inquisitive Neloth is still in the vicinity, he will have some commentary during your enthrallment and even when you shake yourself out of it.
  • In Dawnguard, while exploring Darkfall Cave in search of Auriel's Bow, you come to a chasm with a rickety rope bridge. You cross, optionally mine the ore deposit found there, and then realize there's nowhere to go. Thinking perhaps you missed something, you head back across the bridge... good thing you and Serana can swim. (This is supposed to happen, of course, but for a first-time player it can be especially startling.)
• School Setting Simulation: The College of Winterhold is located above a tall icy peak separate from the main body of Winterhold. Its biggest authority is the Arch Mage, Savos Aren, and the Dragonborn can join it and start a magic course by doing a spell demonstration. Doing so kickstarts the Sidequest Sidestory about the magicians and their conflict.
• Schrödinger's Gun: A very early one whose effects can be seen immediately at the beginning of the game. During the chaos of the dragon attacking the garrison at Helgen, you can run into the keep with either a Stormcloak lieutenant or an Imperial lieutenant. If you're with the Imperial, the keep is full of hostile Stormcloaks; if you're with the Stormcloak, it's full of hostile Imperials (including the female captain that ordered your execution without trial).
• Scolded for Not Buying: There are some merchants like this, but the most memorable is the armor merchant Grelka from Riften, who has an extremely aggressive manner and gives you a cold shoulder regardless of whether you buy anything from her or not, and even before you ask to see her wares.
• "Scooby-Doo" Hoax: Subverted in the Shroud Hearth Barrow sidequest. The "spirit" haunting the barrow is a treasure hunter who invented a potion to make him look like a ghost, so he can scare everyone away while he works out how to plunder the tomb... but after six months without finding a way in, he's gone crazy and thinks he really is a guardian spirit. ^note  It's heavily implied that most of his insanity is a result of getting amnesia from drinking too many of his potions. However, the barrow is actually full of Draugr and skeletons... but they're deeper in than where the treasure hunter was.
• Screw Destiny: An interesting example since no one is certain whether it's The Hero doing this or the Big Bad. Paarthurnax muses on the possibility that Alduin is the one acting against destiny by trying to end the world before its time. The vagueness of the prophecy concerning Alduin and the Dragonborn doesn't help matters. Throughout the game, the Dragonborn always has the option of saying s/he doesn't care about destiny whenever someone brings it up, despite being The Chosen One of destiny. There are certain individuals who are born who do not have destinies at all. These individuals are able to dramatically change history simply by existing. To date, all player characters in The Elder Scrolls series have been such. You can actually read a "Book of Fate" in Windhelm that is supposed to be a magical artifact that tells something about the future of whoever reads it, and that certain individuals only see blank pages because they have no fate. (It's not clear, however, if this is the truth or if the owner of the museum involved is just talking out his ass, especially as said owner is the insane serial killer haunting the streets at night.)
• Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: If you've worked your way through the Thieves' Guild questline, guards can be bribed to forgive your crimes and erase your bounty. It's a flat rate, too, which means they'll erase bounties far higher than the payoff.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: A mechanic common to the Elder Scrolls games. When trying to get information or assistance from an initially-reluctant NPC, the standard three dialogue choices are Persuade, Intimidate, and Bribe. Succeeding in Persuasion or Intimidation is dependent on the player having a high-enough level in the Speech skill, but provided the player has enough money on them, Bribery will always work.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: The reason for the Nords' rebellion? Outrage over the White-Gold Concordat, which outlawed the worship of Talos and basically made the Empire the Dominion's bitch.
  • Dragons will, on rare occasions, retreat when fighting the Dragonborn if they take enough damage. Also done by Alduin after the first fight at the peak of High Hrothgar; this causes the rest of the dragons to question his leadership, as dragons operate on Honor Before Reason and Asskicking Leads to Leadership - a dragon who loses a duel with another like should either submit to the winner or be Defiant to the End, not flee like a coward.
  • Having a high stamina meter will let you do this in a pinch. Especially useful for mages and in the event of a bear attack.
  • Can also be pulled off by the player if there's a nearby door or passage that transitions to another area, and the enemies are too dumb to follow.
  • It's a game effect as well: Fear effects on the living in the Illusion magic discipline, Turn Undead effects in the Restoration discipline, or using the Shout "Dismay" on anything. If an enemy has a low enough Confidence (a hidden stat, and what the magic effects work on), they may also turn tail and run as well.
  • Miraak tries pulling this after you defeat him for the last time, attempting to use Whirlwind Sprint to rush off the platform where you're fighting him. Too bad Hermaeus Mora has been watching the entire time, catches him and gives him what for.
• Screw You, Elves!: Neither the Imperials nor the Stormcloaks have much love for the Thalmor, and for very good reasons.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: The Dragonborn's defeat of Alduin is only temporary, as confirmed by Arngier. Alduin is, in fact, a god, and therefore will return at the end of the world, meaning all your efforts have only extended the time until the end of the world. The difference is that it will occur when the gods plan it, rather than according to the caprices of a power-drunk domineering dragon entrusted with the task.
• Sealed Evil in a Duel:
  • After inadvertently waking the Dragon Priest, Morokei, in the depths of Labyrinthian, Savos Aren contained him by enthralling his dead colleague's spirits in an eternal magical duel, preventing Morokei from being unleashed upon an unsuspecting Skyrim. He feels guilty about it to this day; the nature of the spell meant he couldn't sacrifice himself in their place.
  • The Nord ruin of Valthume is the tomb-turned-prison of the dragon priest Hevnoraak, who made plans for his own resurrection as a lich. A Nord warrior named Valdar discovered Hevnoraak's plans, however, locking himself inside the tomb and binding himself to the dragon priest to prevent him from returning for thousands of years. By the time the Dragonborn finds him, Hevnoraak is close to overthrowing Valdar, forcing them to team up and accelerate the resurrection and kill him again before he can escape.
• Second Hour Superpower: The Dragonborn gains the ability to use their first Shout only after completing one (relatively easy) dungeon and slaying one dragon (with significant NPC backup) in the storyline missions.
• Self-Deprecation:
  • In addition to telling off fans, M'aiq even takes cracks at the developers.
    "Nords are so serious about beards. So many beards. M'aiq thinks they wish they had glorious manes like Khajiit."
    "M'aiq carries two weapons, to be safe. What if one breaks? That would be most unlucky." ^note A reference to weapons breaking from use in earlier games of the series.
    "M'aiq is very practical. He has no need for Mysticism." ^note The Mysticism school of magic, a longtime mainstay of the series, was removed for Skyrim, with the spells mostly shuffled into Conjuration.
    "It does not matter to M'aiq how strong or smart one is. It only matters what one can do." ^note Before Skyrim, TES games used an attribute system in addition to skill levels.
    "M'aiq loves the people of Skyrim. Many interesting things they say to each other." ^note The highly repetitive NPC chatter of Oblivion drew quite a bit of criticism.
    "M'aiq saw a mudcrab the other day. Horrible creatures." ^note A reference to a much-parodied bit of Welcome to Corneria from Oblivion.
  • The scatterbrained court mage of Riften may babble that "once, you could find calipers all over Tamriel, but not anymore!" This is also yet another thing M'aiq can mention.
  • Isran says that "sleep is for the weak," and urges the player to avoid it, lest vampires sneak up on them. This pokes at how you can complete an entire game without sleeping, and also at how the only way to join the Dark Brotherhood is to fall asleep and be abducted by them.
  • Doubling as a Shout-Out, in 2011, PC Gamer magazine jokingly said that Skyrim will release a "Crab Armor" DLC for $5.99, in a parody of the infamous "Horse Armor" DLC for Oblivion. In 2017, they released the Dwarven Armored Mudcrab Creation for what would normally be 50 Creation credits, but it's always 100% off. In 2021, they also released a Horse Armor Creation, also for free.
• Sentenced Without Trial: Your character somehow starts the game in a cart of condemned prisoners. Your name isn't even on the list of prisoners, but the Imperial Legion Captain sentences you to death anyway; you're saved by a timely dragon attack.
• Sequence Breaking:
  • A very mild example can be found quite early in the game. After completing the prologue and traveling to Riverwood, instead of going directly to Whiterun, you can receive the "Golden Claw" quest from the Valerius siblings and head straight into Bleak Falls Barrow, complete the dungeon, and collect the Dragonstone from the chest at the end. When you do finally go to Dragonsreach and Jarl Balgruuf has you speak to his court mage, he'll task you with collecting this item - and admit to being somewhat impressed when you already have it.^note The only down side is that the Dragonstone has a carry weight of 25, and can't be stored in containers, so you have to lug it around with you. It doesn't alter the game in any significant way, but it can be fun to see Farengar's reaction to it.
  • One particular example exists for the quest "Lights Out!", received from Jaree-Ra. It's possible to get a random quest from Falk Firebeard, Jarl Elisif's steward, to take out some bandits in Broken Oar Grotto... which happens to be the lair of the Blackblood Marauders, the pirates for whom Jaree-Ra and his sister Deeja are working. You can then read Captain Hargar's journal and find out that they're looking for a fall guy to put out the lighthouse for them. You can continue with the quest anyway, and after dispatching Deeja, you'll find Jaree-Ra alone in the grotto with the dead Marauders you took out earlier; apparently he's unfazed by the fact that the crew he's been working with has been slain to a man and he just attacks you on sight. Unfortunately, there is no option to let Jaree-Ra and Deeja know you're wise to the fact that they're trying to set you up and rub it in their faces before you kill them without breaking a sweat.
  • While exploring the Dwarven ruin Raldbthar (either on your own or as part of the Dawnguard quest "Lost to the Ages"), you will likely fight a bandit named Alain Dufont. Turns out he's a Dark Brotherhood target, and killing him before his quest is actually initiated unlocks unique dialogue from your questgiver. It also prevents your from going after an additional target for an extra reward, though it's nothing special if you miss it.
• Sergeant Rock: Legate Rikke of the Imperial Legion.
• Serial Killer:
  • One of these is on the loose in Windhelm, although you won't learn about it until your fourth visit to the city. A quick count of the skulls in his lair indicates he has killed at least 14 victims before you got involved.
  • If you listen to the conversations between the various inhabitants of the orc stronghold of Narzulbur, you'll realize that sisters Bolar and Yatul have murdered all of Chief Mauhulakh's wives (their weapon of choice seems to have been poison) and plan on doing the same with any future ones.
• Series Continuity Error: The Creation Club added a few.
  • In the Divine Crusader download, you could find a couple random bandits wearing and wielding the Relics of the Crusader from the Knights of the Nine DLC from Oblivion. Now, if you have 2 or more points of Infamy in Knights of the Nine, which consists of killing in cold blood or generally evil choices, you are excluded from being able to equip the Divine Crusader armor and weapons. TheAnniversary Edition update updated it to add an explanation as to why bandits had them equipped: The two bandits were newbies and haven't killed anyone. Any other bandits in the group were unable to equip the armor, and if they were trying to wield the sword or mace "You try and swing one of the weapons, and you feel sick to your stomach."
  • In the release version, the unique mace Scourge, from the The Cause Creation Club would banish any Daedra that tried to wield it back to Oblivion in Battlespire. However, it's wielded by a Dremora that you have to defeat. The creators weren't aware of that particular Battlespire lore, and were only going by it's appearance in Morrowind and said they're going to update it. It has been fixed in Patch Patch 1.6.629, so that the Dremora is wearing special Daedric Gauntlets of Negation that allow him to wield it.
• Serious Business:
  • Mead in Skyrim is serious enough that there's a budding criminal empire based around it. Implying that someone doesn't drink mead (a.k.a. a 'milk drinker') is a fairly serious insult in Nord culture, to the point that you can get into deadly fights with random mercs on the road who call you such.
  • Played for Drama with the ban on Talos worship. In addition to being the main impetus for the Stormcloak Rebellion, it's the one thing that Nords on both sides of the conflict actually agree on and believe should be lifted. Indeed, many Imperial-aligned Nords are shown worshiping Talos anyway.
• Serrated Blade of Pain: The Forsworn weapons consist of hand-made weapons with loads of sharp bones and fangs to form serrated edges.
• Servile Snarker: The Dremora Butler from Dragonborn. Everything he says is dripping with sarcasm.
  Dremora Butler: I always dreamt of being a pack mule.
• Set Bonus: Both Light and Heavy Armors have perks that grant additional bonuses if the player is wearing all-light or all-heavy (and even a matching set). There are also a few special sets of armor that grant unique bonuses if the player is wearing all of them.
• Shapeshifter Baggage: You can put on a fair amount of bulk turning into a werewolf or vampire lord, which then vanishes when you change back. Vampire lords even have their clothes on when they turn back. You do get your powers from Daedric Lords (Hircine for the former and Molag Bal for the latter), so at least they have an explanation.
• Sheathe Your Sword: Literally, an option when guards are attacking you for committing a crime—if you put away your weapons they'll simply apprehend and fine or jail you instead of trying to kill you. Sucks, but given that the only other option is killing them all...
• Shell-Shocked Veteran:
  • Salvianus, one of the mentally unstable people living in the Ratway Warrens, was a Legion veteran of the Battle of The Red Ring, the climactic battle of the Great War that ended with the smashing of the Dominion army when Mede arrived with reinforcements to liberate the Imperial City. He's burned out pretty bad, and long since fallen into the Despair Event Horizon. The poor guy freaks out big time when the Thalmor come in after you trying to find Esbern.
    Salvianus: No! You can't be here! You're all dead! I already killed you over and over!
  • Skyrim is brimming with them. Poor Salvianus is the most striking example, but Brunwulf, Runil, Madena, Galmar, and Ulfric all qualify to some extent. Ralof/Hadvar (depending on whose side you joined) also displays a touch of PTSD after the Battle of Whiterun. Noster Eagle-Eye, in Solitude, lost an eye while fighting in the Great War and has been reduced to a wandering beggar; he seems more jaded and sad than outright shell-shocked, but he's clearly shaken by his current circumstances.
• Shield Bash: The shield bash is an incredibly useful move in the game, and some of the perks within the Shield tree allow it to be enhanced further, so it can actually deal reasonable damage, knock an enemy back, cause them to drop their weapon, or even perform a Foe-Tossing Charge. The main use of it, however, is to stun an enemy for a few moments, which if used at the right moment can interrupt their attacks and leave them vulnerable. There are even special shields that provide bonuses from a shield bash, from causing damage over time to 'literally' blowing an opponent away.
• Shining City:
  • Solitude, the Imperial capital of Skyrim, is this as far as Nord standards go. It's the seat of the High King/Queen, a place of wealth, culture, and power, and a thriving merchant hub.
  • Whiterun is large and prosperous due to its central location being ideal for trade, and it has some ancient wonders on hand to boot, namely the Skyforge and a keep built for imprisoning dragons.
• Shipped in Shackles: At the start, you and the rest of your party are all shackled in a cart, being taken to your execution.
• Shockwave Stomp:
  • Giants and frost atronachs will do this to stun people. Giants do it with their clubs. Frost atronachs do it with their club-shaped arms. In each case, they're trying to pound you into the ground, not slamming the ground just to stun you; the shockwave is merely the result of a near miss (and a reminder, especially in the case of giants, that you really, really don't want to get hit).
  • Karstaag is the ultimate example of this. The very same frost giant king that the player killed in Morrowind can be fought again as a ghost if you summon him by reattaching his skull to his body in the ruins of his castle found in Dragonborn. He has a ground stomp that will send you flying across the room. He also uses it often, so good luck getting into melee range.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog:
  • A remarkably short example: you find a roughly circular area where everything was torched. In the middle, a spell tome of fire cloak. Next to it, a burnt, doubled over corpse. This is one of four apprentices of the Mage College in Winterhold who recently left to perform experiments in the field. The other three can also be found - one as a corpse surrounded by skeevers, with a few scrolls of fury and calm (perhaps he tried one and found it too much a success to try the other), and the other two as (respectively) a frostbitten corpse and riddled with arrows, both as a result of failures to find ways to keep mead magically chilled.
  • In the icy, Arctic-like wasteland near Winterhold, there is a skeleton with its leg caught in a bear trap. Another skeleton is sitting next to it, looking towards the trapped one.
• Shoplift and Die: While shopkeepers will draw weapons and attack (and report you for crimes) if you do take stuff in front of them, they finally don't put steal-able items in front of them so you don't accidentally bump the mouse or the analog stick and the game interprets this as theft. On the other hand, if you do steal from them and don't pay with your life... they might send thugs after you to "teach you a lesson", telling the thugs on their contract they don't have to kill you but the hirer doesn't mind if they do. That's right, the victim may try even harder than just attacking you to ensure you will die for theft, even if it was something incredibly small and you paid off your bounty! Sometimes they'll even send thugs after you when there were no witnesses to prove it was you - or even when they're dead!
• Shop Fodder:
  • There are a lot of useless items scattered all throughout the game world that you can pick up and stash in your inventory. any object that you could realistically pick up with one hand, you can take along with you. You can sell them off to willing merchants, though the majority of these things are worth no more than a few coins (even if, realistically speaking, said items should be quite valuable, such as silverware).
  • You can also make shop fodder. Alchemy recipes that provide both harmful and beneficial effects are generally useless in combat (i.e., a potion that buffs a magical school but drains magicka) but still sell pretty well, and are generally just meant to level up the skill. Enchanting with anything less than a grand soul is similar, no matter how good your enchanting skill is. Even smithing is going to turn out dozens of copies of one item or another you're probably just going to sell to make back whatever you spent on the ingredients.
• Shout-Out: Numerous. No pun intended.
• Shown Their Work:
  • Skyrim is geologically accurate, with minerals most commonly occurring in regions where they would naturally form (i.e. gold in the Reach, where there's lots of compression and mountain building; iron in Whiterun, where there's lots of metamorphism; etc.).
  • Weather biomes are accurately depicted and affected by geography. For example, Morthal and Haafingar are much greener than Winterhold and The Pale despite similar latitude, due to the Karth River bringing warm water from the south.
  • The forts are usually found at important intersections of roads or at other important locations.
  • While some of the armors are unrealistically fantastic, most of the higher quality armors tend to have either gambesons (padded jackets) or chainmail under the plates, which is what real medieval armor usually had.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: Most of the time, when an opponent you're about to fight is monologuing before a fight, you are actually free to perform any action you want — including a pre-emptive strike (possibly leading to a Killed Mid-Sentence). For example, during the "Ancestral Worship" quest, the necromancer exchanges a few lines with the NPC accompanying you when you approach him, but you can actually snipe him with arrows the moment you enter the room. In another quest, either Ulfric or Tullius also drops a very satisfying one on Elenwen, if you let her stay during "Season Unending".
• Signature Move: The Unrelenting Force shout is the first the Dragonborn learns in the game. Given that it's also likely the only fully developed and strongest shout the player has in early gameplay, it's frequently used in combat.
• Significant Anagram: The father of one of the adoptable children in the Hearthfire expansion is named "Lemkil", which is an anagram of "Kill Me"; something quite a few players are quite willing to oblige with how he treats his daughter, who you can then adopt.
• Silly Reason for War: Played for Drama. One the surface, the Civil War is about religious freedom and humanity's fight for survival against evil elves, started by the Empire signing a peace treaty with the Thalmor that bans Talos worship. The Stormcloaks accuse the Empire of being oppressed elven puppets, while the Empire accuse the Stormcloaks of being racist elven pawns. The thing is, the Empire never enforces the ban except in the most flagrantly public of instances; practically every house in Skyrim has a small Talos shrine inside, and heck, even many of the Imperial high command still worship Talos in secret. And no matter how much they hate each other, they still hate the Thalmor more. So in practice, the war is being fought over who wants to openly worship Talos and fight the elves right now, and who wants to worship Talos privately to buy time and gather strength and fight the elves when they're ready, and everyone is so caught up in blaming each other and accusing the other of being wrong that they won't admit that the whole mess is utterly pointless and playing right into the Thalmor's hands.
• Silver Fox: All women(and all men) share the same body type, so the 70 year old lady or man will have the same svelte, unwrinkled body as a young person, making them a Butter Face at worst.
• Simple, yet Awesome: The one and only Unrelenting Force, which is simply a loud shockwave that either staggers enemies or sends them flying depending on how long you charge it. It's easily the most straightforward Shout, and it's the easiest one to get, but there's a reason why this ability has become so iconic - it's designed to make the player feel powerful any time they use it by reducing enemies to flailing ragdolls. Plus, it's both flexible and effective, meaning that it can easily last you the entire game.
• Sinister Deer Skull: The Forsworn (a terroristic sub-sect of Reachmen rebels) Headdress is a light armor helmet that is literally a deer skull adorned with feathers and furs. Forsworn encampments are also liberally adorned with deer skull ornaments.
• Skeleton Key: Such a key can unlock anything, including the limits of human potential. Mercer Frey uses it precisely for this purpose in the Thieves' Guild quest line. Unfortunately, in the hands of the player, it once again serves as just an unbreakable lockpick. And in order to complete the Thieves' Guild questline, you have to return it to Nocturnal, though you do get some good armor and a once-per-day superpower out of the deal. Granted, a Lockpicking perk gives you an unbreakable lockpick anyway and the minigame isn't hard.
• Skeletons in the Coat Closet: The primary material for Dragonbone equipment is, of course, bones acquired from slaying actual dragons. There's really nothing more appropriate than killing dragons with the bones of other dragons you've already killed. There's even unique dialogue for it from the final boss.
• Skewed Priorities:
  • Say you're a bandit, camped out in an abandoned tower in the middle of the forest. Some guy/girl walks up and you decide to rob him. Suddenly, a dragon flies by overhead and starts attacking! What do you do? Why, continue trying to rob the mysterious stranger, of course!
  • For whatever reason, enemy NPCs are absolutely fixated on your horse, and will target it instead of you or anything else. Dragons especially have a habit of going after things other than the Dragonborn, with their horse taking top priority. This sometimes results in you entering into a pitched battle with a dragon, only for it to decide to go fly off and fight some bears or mudcrabs hundreds of yards away.
• Skill Point Reset: The 1.9 patch allows you to give 'Legendary' status to any maxed-out skill, resetting it to 15 (from 100) and refunding any perks you put into it. This allows you to level-up indefinitely by re-training the skill over and over again. Completing the Dragonborn DLC campaign gives you access to a special location where you can reset all perks (but not levels) in any skill for one dragon soul per skill. The reset perks are fully refunded and can be spent freely right away.
• Slave Mooks: The Falmer have been shown to practice slavery. These "Falmer Servants" wear rags and are much weaker than most other hostile sentient characters, as well as compared to the Falmer that they accompany.
• Slave Race:
  • The Falmer spent many generations as slaves to the Dwemer before rebelling and warring with them until, for unrelated reasons, the Dwemer all disappeared. The Dwemer were so thorough in their enslavement of the Snow Elves, who turned into the Falmer, that now only two Snow Elves are known to remain... and one of those is a vampire whom you must kill.
  • The Falmer have no qualms with giving the same treatments to humans. Human slaves can be found in the Falmer stronghold of Blackreach. They are surprisingly loyal to their masters, and will attack you even if you kill the Falmer.
  • As of Dawnguard, Pure-Blood Vampires views humans as both free labor and a renewable food source.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Compared to its predecessor, this game leans heavily towards cynicism. Taking place 200 years after the events of Oblivion, the player soon learns how the empire they defended for the past four games is now a shadow of its former glorious self, with many of its former provinces either declaring their independence or having been conquered by aforementioned independent provinces. The atmosphere in this game is much more gritty, as most of the towns in Skyrim are either neglected by their rulers or, in bad cases, Wretched Hives full of crime, Fantastic Racism, and in one case, even a government conspiracy. And in many cases, there is nothing the player can do to stop these injustices. Compare this to Oblivion, where most of the towns were relatively safe havens ruled by Reasonable Authority Figures. Even the criminal Thieves' Guild in Oblivion was much more like an entire organization of Robin Hoods, who stole from the rich to give to the poor; in Skyrim, they are nothing more than thugs and enforcers working for the corrupt Black-Briar family.
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World: Most of the game's world is this. Especially the northern Holds of the province, which are filled with icy marshes and large glaciers. The southern parts of Skyrim avert this trope, as they are mostly covered in green forests.
• Slouch of Villainy: In the mission where you're vetted for the Dark Brotherhood, your observer Astrid spends the whole time lounging on top of a bookcase, lazily swinging one foot.
• Slut-Shaming: The promiscuity of Riften inhabitant Haelga is portrayed as largely negative, chiefly due to many of her conquests being married and one even implied to be drugged. There's even a little quest to humiliate her (although it also gives the option of just yelling at the quest-giver for trying this).
• Smash Mook: Giants. All they can really do is swipe at you, stomp on you and hit you with their clubs, but you really don't want to be on the wrong end of those clubs.
• Smoke Out: The Shadow Warrior perk allows you to create a puff of smoke when you crouch while in combat, causing enemies to lose track of you. This seems to have been meant to facilitate getaways from tricky situations, but it's also possible to crouch right in front of someone and get off a sneak attack for 15x damage right in their face. With Invisibility, Muffle (or muffled footwear) and Shadow Warrior, it becomes borderline impossible for enemies to corner you - just pop your invisibility, activate Shadow Warrior to drop aggro, and virtually no foe in the game will be able to find you again.
• Smug Snake:
  • Thonar Silver-Blood. Even his wife getting murdered makes him no less unsympathetic, and seeing him get explosively atomised by Forsworn magic is immensely satisfying.
  • The Thalmor in general. Part of what makes them such infuriatingly effective Hate Sinks is just how insufferably smug they are whenever they're talking to you or anyone else.
• Soft Water: Landing in water will generally prevent you from taking fall damage, but only if it's deep enough to swim in; don't expect a quarter inch of water to save you from a long fall.
• Soldier vs. Warrior: The Imperial Legion (Soldier) vs. the Stormcloaks (Warrior):
  • The Legion is the most disciplined and regimented fighting and police force in all of Tamriel. They are highly professional and expected to act with dignity and obey the laws they enforce as they represent Cyrodiil to most of the Empire's subjects. In peace or war, Legionnaires train every day in the use of standardised Imperial short swords and shields as well as archery, how to carry heavy packs on the march over long distances, and how to fight as a unit on the battlefield by using complex maneuvers, making them versatile and dependable. The Legion recruits from all the races of Tamriel, though Nord and Imperial males are most commonly seen in the game.
  • The followers of Ulfric Stormcloak are practically all Nords, though they are not exclusionary to other races and female fighters are actually a much more common sight than in the Legion. They are not as well-equipped or regimented as the Legion, as they use generally inferior equipment (swords, axes, maces, iron or steel, one-handed or two-handed - likely whatever the Stormcloak in question can afford or prefers) and lighter armour. They also make up for their lack of elaborate tactical acumen for cunning guerrilla tactics and sheer ferocity. Their faith in Talos and the righteousness of their cause, combined with the fact that many of them hail from the cold and inhospitable eastern half of Skyrim, mean they are usually stronger fighters than the average Legionnaire; to join, recruits must swim out across freezing sea to an iceberg and kill an ice wraith.
• So Long, and Thanks for All the Gear: On occasion, a quest will prevent a follower from tagging along. Sometimes, the follower will just announce that he/she will be waiting where you found them, but other times, the follower just won't be there when you go through a door or talk to a certain person. This can be maddening if you have them carrying something important for you, like a weapon too heavy for you to carry or specialized gear you bring for specific situations. Also, it's not unheard of for the game to "lose" them. In most cases you can simply find them by returning to their home (or wherever you recruited them), but it's also possible for followers to glitch out and/or "die" on the way back to the meeting spot.
• Solve the Soup Cans: As stated under Moon Logic Puzzle, the puzzle to unlock a specific quest item consists of four buttons that move elements of the machine holding the item, and initially only two of the buttons are uncovered and can be pressed. The solution is actually simple: press one button until one of the covered buttons opens, press the new button until the other covered button opens, and then press that button to open the machine. However, even though you can see what each button changes about the machine holding the quest item, the solution to the puzzle is very counter-intuitive. When the puzzle is done you can see the objective was to align the lenses on the floor with the ones hanging from the ceiling, but the final positions of them do not look like they're actually lined up; you only know that's the right positions because the fourth button opens. Additionally, the solution of just pressing one button over and over, and then pressing another button over and over, runs contrary to what most players will presume, which is that the buttons must be pressed in a specific combination. In short, you're more likely to solve the puzzle by just pressing random buttons than if you actually try to figure out what to do.
• Some Dexterity Required: While the game usually averts this on PC, in the original version one of the puzzles (the grates locked by proximity sensitive stones near the end of the Ustengrav dungeon) requires the Dragonborn to sprint and use a Shout at the same time, which requires the player to press Z at the right time while already using W + Alt, which is a somewhat uncomfortable position. In the Special Edition, sprinting is a toggleable command and the puzzle only requires to press W and Z.
• Sommelier Speak: During a mead inspection, the head of Honningbrew Meadery tells the captain of the city guard that this particular brew is his finest yet and the captain will find it pleasing to the palate. The captain calls him out on this, saying that "it's mead, not some wine to be sipped and savored."
• Sophisticated as Hell: At the end of Sheogorath's quest: "Feel free to keep the Wabbajack. As a symbol of my... Oh, just take the damn thing."
• Soul Eating: Alduin devours the souls of the dead in Sovngarde. The Dunmer mage Malyn Varen also does to the souls of those captured by his cult.
• Space Compression: With a little bit of Thriving Ghost Town. Major battles are fought by dozens of men rather than, say, hundreds, and the cities aren't exactly huge. These are mostly Acceptable Breaks from Reality, though, and pretty par for the course for an Elder Scrolls game by now anyway. Particularly noteworthy in Skyrim is the complete removal of about 4-5 small towns entirely from the world map, and 3 are now just random inns along the road. This wouldn't be so notable if it wasn't for the fact that one of towns reduced to an inn is Old Hroldan, which was the site of a major battle that would be the start of The Empire. The game even mentions that Hroldan should be a town and calls attention to it with a quest due to its historical significance with Talos. At least one of them, Heljarchen, was intended to be in the game, but was ultimately scrapped; the only remnants of its existence are the Nightgate Inn and some scrapped keys that used to belong to its inhabitants.
• Sorting Algorithm of Threatening Geography: You're first given free reign in the warm, wooded areas of the game, as opposed to the completely frozen parts you'll run into later.
• Sorting Algorithm of Weapon Effectiveness: Downplayed in relation to Oblivion. You'll never see bandits in Daedric armor, but the general level of gear found in the world does increase as you play. You can justify some of it if you try hard enough; the player is constantly delving into ruins that have lain untouched for aeons and bringing out priceless treasures which he turns around and sells in town. That's a whole lot of new wealth being pumped into the local economy, and with a war going, maybe it's not surprising that a lot of it goes into creating or importing high-quality armaments.
• Soul Jar: The insane necromancer Malyn Varen successfully managed to pervert Azura's Star into housing his soul, in his quest to live forever. Cleansing the star of his soul is a part of Azura's Daedric quest.
• Sound-Coded for Your Convenience:
  • There's a very distinct audio cue for knowing there's a dragon nearby. You'll be running through the wilderness or through an open town and there will be a sort of echo off in the distance, sounding as if it was carried in on the wind. Or just that straight up roar, rush of wind and dramatic battle music.
  • It's also usually pretty easy to tell what kind of enemy any particular dungeon will hold in store for you just by listening at the entrance. Frostbite spiders make a distinct shuffling noise as they scurry around. The smaller albino spiders make a crinkly, creeping noise. Skeletons creak back and forth like they need oil. Draugr make short, sharp, grunty growly sounds. And bandits and other people tend to talk to each other and themselves, at least until they notice you.
• Space Compression: Bethesda says the explorable area is comparable in size to Oblivion, though Skyrim also uses winding pathways as was done in Morrowind to give a greater sense of vastness. The way the world has shrunken down stands out when comparing locations featured in Arena to Skyrim, such as the town of Riverwood. In Arena it's a bustling town that contains 200 or 300 buildings, but in Skyrim it's a hamlet with seven houses.
• Spam Attack: If you time your castings right, you can put out an impressive volume of fire with two-handed non-dual-cast Destruction spells. Special shout-out goes out to a non-destruction-school attack spell provided by Dawnguard: Vampire's Bane, which charges up ready to cast even faster than the Destruction spells, allowing you to put out a blinding amount of area-effect Light 'em Up damage and emptying your magicka bar in very short order. Can also be done by dual wielding daggers with the appropriate perks from the One-handed tree. Exaggerated if combined with the Elemental Fury shout.
• Spanner in the Works: You. Multiple times.
  • To the Thieves' Guild: Mercer would have easily been able to dispose of Karliah and then leave the Guild high and dry while he made off with the loot if the player never came into the picture.
  • To the Dark Brotherhood, should you elect to destroy it rather than join it.
  • In the Civil War: The Thalmor wanted to stretch out the civil war to drain the resources from both sides so that they could eventually and easily conquer Skyrim, but the Dragonborn appears and brings a decisive end to the battle in favor of either side, allowing their defenses to recover and prepare. So now the Thalmor have to face a fully prepared army led by a Physical God.
  • Not you this time: Alduin ruined Tullius's clean capture and execution of Ulfric in the beginning of the game. It would likely have ended the civil war then and there.
  • Very annoyingly, dragons and vampires do this all the time by attacking you out of nowhere. Even if you survive the encounter, there's still the chance of an NPC you were trying to talk to/protect getting killed. The "Run For Your Lives" mod was created very specifically to force everyone who isn't a guard to make a beeline straight to the nearest door.
• Spear Counterpart: Thongvor Silver-Blood and Maven Black-Briar. Each is the head of a commercially successful family - who owes that success to shady and illegal dealings. Maven works with both the Thieves' Guild and the Dark Brotherhood; Thongvor employs mercenaries to bully mine owners and Forsworn assassins to silence his enemies. Both are replacement Jarls for their respective holds if said holds change sides. In both cases, they have so much influence in the hold and have bribed the local guards so successfully, they have more power over the town than the rightful Jarls do. Also, each of them have goons in town who will warn the player of their respective family's influence over the town (Maul for Maven, Yngvar the Singer for Thongvor), and said goons become Housecarls if Thongor/Maven become Jarl.^note For a dash of funny, the goons in question also have the same voice actor.
• Spell My Name With An S: If you have subtitles enabled, a lot of characters' names are misspelled. Special mention goes to Sanguine's mortal avatar, whose last name has been spelled "Guenvere", "Gueyenne", and even "Guinevere" when it's supposed to be "Guevenne".
• Spider Swarm:
  • While they aren't explicitly stated as collective creatures, and no Queen has been featured yet, you usually meet Frosbite Spiders in large numbers. They usually are met by group of five, but you can easily meet several groups in the same dungeon, as well as one giant one as an occasional boss.
  • Then Dragonborn gives us the Albino Spiders and their variants, which are all significantly smaller but much more numerous than the Frostbites.
• Spider Tank: Returning from Morrowind are the Dwemer-built Spider Centurion Mecha-Mooks, which are Fun Size Spider Tanks that appear in Dwemer ruins.
• Spikes of Doom: Spike traps are nearly everywhere. You can't swing a dead skeever without hitting a spike trap in some dungeons, unless you're paying full attention to your surroundings.
• Spikes of Villainy: The Daedra and Daedric armor. Falmer and Forsworn equipment are also pretty spiky and evil-looking; the Falmer don't seem able to make huts that aren't covered in spikes. But then, the Falmer do make everything out of chaurus chitin, and chaurus are spiky by nature.
• Spin Attack: You can do this with a power attack if you dual wield one-handed weapons.
• Spinventory: You can get a good look at the 3D model for any item in your inventory. It particularly comes into play if you need to find the combination that's on the underside of the Dragon Claws. Incidentally, this feature actually debuted in the earlier spin-off Redguard.
• Spirit World: Sovngarde is real, and you can go there.
  • Dawnguard features the Soul Cairn, a graveyard-like hell (well, Oblivion Realm) which houses victims of black soul gems. More accurately, the remnants of their souls go there after the main part of their souls are used in enchantments. Makes for a subtle Player Punch if you use them a lot.
• Spontaneous Weapon Creation: The Conjuration school allows you to summon daedric weapons for a short time.
• Sprint Meter: The game brings back a Fatigue-draining sprint (which drains faster than Morrowind sprinting), and is otherwise similar to Oblivion. The same meter also covers your ability to perform power attacks, and to zoom in while aiming a bow.
• The Squadette: Gender makes very little difference in most professions, but standard nameless town guards or Imperial/Stormcloak soldiers have about a 1:7 ratio of women to men. Generic female Imperial Legion soldiers are so rare, if you spawn one or find one out in the wild, they actually don't have any voice lines recorded. They're one of the few types of generic NPC that is entirely mute.
• Square Race, Round Class:
  • Urag gro-Shub, the Orc librarian at the Mages College.
  • Also, to lesser extent, any Nord mages, such as Onmund, Tolfdir, Farengar Secret-Fire, Wuunferth the Unliving and, possibly, a Nord Dragonborn who would happen to choose a Magic-oriented play style. Like Orcs and Redguards, most Nords are proud warriors who think that magic is for the weak.
  • However, many of the (ancient Nordic) draugr use magic, and indeed, another Nord character states that the ancient Nords had absolutely no problems using magic — the disdain and suspicion many Nords have of magic-users is a more recent development. Heck, if you decide you want to go on a crime spree in Whiterun, one of the (Nord!) guards will shoot icicles at you, while all the rest shoot arrows or simply chase you and try to stab you.
  • A lesser example would be Legates Fasendil and Sevan Telendas, an Altmer (High Elf) and Dunmer (Dark Elf) respectively who wear heavy Legion armor and belong to the "Soldier" class. Altmer are almost always mages, and while Dunmer are more versatile, they also tend to blend in more mage and/or thief-like skills.
  • There's a (terrible) Orc bard and a (not terrible) Orc master chef as targets in the Dark Brotherhood questline and Arnbjorn carries on the legacy of the Orc assassin from Oblivion. He's a Nord as well as a Werewolf.
  • Most of the Brotherhood members are sneaky assassin types as you'd expect, but then there's Festus Krex, a Destruction mage who very much believes There Is No Kill Like Overkill. Destruction magic tends to involve large, fiery explosions and loud, bright lightning bolts, not exactly prime material for discreet assassination unless you want to burn down the target's house and possibly the entire town along with it. One hopes he at least has the Illusion perk that makes all spells silent to others...
  • Falion, the wizard in Morthal whom nobody trusts, is a Redguard Conjurer. Redguards in Skyrim now start with small bonuses to Destruction and Alteration, but Conjuration is still seen as a wicked art for Daedra-worshippers and necromancers. Falion is a necromancer who has dealings with the Daedra, but he doesn't seem to be a bad person and will even cure you of vampirism if you ask him to.
  • Zig-zagged with Tsun, the ancient Nord or proto-Nord god who guards the path to the Hall of Valor in Sovngarde, who has unique dialogue depending on what faction you have risen to the top of. As expected, he salutes Harbingers of the warrior Companions and dislikes of any cowardly thieves or lowly assassins, but he is surprisingly approving of the master of the College of Winterhold. Apparently magecraft was far more respected in the old days, and he regrets that modern Nords have turned their backs on magic.
    "Well met, mage of Skyrim. The Nords may have forgotten their forefathers' respect for the Clever Craft, but your comrades throng this hall. Here in Shor's house we honor it still."
• Sssssnake Talk: Averted! Argonians have a slight rasp to their voices, but otherwise speak completely normally this time. They don't even mutter "The prey approaches!" anymore if they don't like you. They sometimes hiss in combat, but it lacks words. The males have a slight rasp to their voice. Females sound like they've been smoking three packs a day for the last ten years.
• Stamina Burn: There's things which attack the Stamina value:
  • The "Ravage Stamina" poison reduces the target's maximum stamina, instead of the current.
  • frost damage can cause the victim to lose stamina as well as health.
• Stance System: The Vampire Lord transformation works like this with two separate stances. The first is staying on the ground to make physical attacks with your claws. The second is levitating a bit off the ground to use special magical attacks - "night" magic with your left, and Blood Magic with your right.
• Statuesque Stunner: Altmer women are the tallest in the game, and several Altmer women are quite attractive, notably Faralda, Nenya, and Niranye. Can also apply to the Dragonborn, if she's played as a female Altmer.
• Standard Fantasy Races: There are ten races to choose from that run the gammot between races of Men, races of Mer (elves), and Beast races, and each of which have their own special abilities and starting stats:
  • Nords, the natives of Skyrim. They are gifted with resistance against the Cold, higher starting two-handed weapon-wielding stats, and the special power "Battlecry", which causes all nearby enemies to flee.
  • Imperials, the natives of Cyrodiil. They have a knack for finding more gold coins, high starting Restoration stat, and the special power "Voice of the Emperor", which forces all nearby enemies to stop fighting.
  • Bretons, the natives of High Rock. They have a naturally high resistance to magic attacks, a high starting Conjuration stat, and the special power "Dragonskin", which allows them to absorb magicka from enemies' magic attacks.
  • Redguards, the natives of Hammerfell. They have high starting stats for one-handed weapons and Destruction magic, and the special power "Adrenaline Rush", which accellerates stamina regeneration.
  • Bosmer (Wood Elves), the natives of Valenwood. They have a natural resistance to poisons and disease, a high starting Archery stat, and the special power "Command Animals", which makes all nearby animals fight for them.
  • Dunmer (Dark Elves), the natvies of Morrowind. They have a natural resistance to fire, a high starting Destruction stat, and the special power "Ancestor's Wrath", which cloaks them in flames that burn nearby enemies.
  • Orsimer (Orcs), the natives of the Wrothgarian Mountains. They have a high starting Heavy Armor stat, and the special power "Berserker Rage", which doubles the damage they inflict while halving the damage they receive.
  • Altmer (High Elves), the natives of Summerset Isle. They have a naturally higher Magicka pool, a high starting stat for Illusion, and the special power "Highborn", which accellerates their Magicka regeneration.
  • Khajiit, the cat-like natives of Elsweyr. They have claws that grant them high unarmed damage, a high starting stat for "Sneaking", and the special power "Night Eye", which grants them enhanced vision in darkness.
  • Argonians, the lizard-like natives of the Black Marsh. They have a natural resiliance to disease, the natural ability to breathe underwater, a high starting Lockpick stat, and the special power "Histskin", which accellerates their Health regeneration.
• Standard Royal Court: Each of the nine holds is governed by one which usually presides in the formal residence in the capital. Even though the fiefs appear to be monarchic-aristocratic in nature, they seem to be less formal or rigid than the counties of Cyrodiil or the Great Houses of Morrowind (let alone the duchies and kingdoms of the Iliac Bay), presumably because Skyrim is less densely populated than those regions and challenges to the local ruler's authority are apparently not exactly uncommon. Standard positions include:
  • The Jarl: The ruler of the hold. Every hold has one. Technically holds absolute power over all inhabitants of the hold, though how much this applies in practice varies. The title is apparently passed down by blood relation, although Klingon Promotion is seemingly not unheard of.
  • The steward: The Jarl's right-hand man (or woman), apparently acts mostly as a secretary and a treasurer, and is also supposed to stand in for the Jarl if they aren't available. In-game stewards can hand out bounty letters and the rewards for the same. All Jarls except the one of the Pale employ a steward.
  • The housecarl: A loyal bodyguard who in some cases seems to double as a captain of the guard and/or a field commander. Usually doesn't much partake in political matters, though in some cases the housecarl's presence seems to have superseded the steward's authority. All Jarls except Brunwulf Free-Winter have a housecarl.
  • Thanes: An informal title granted to certain citizens of the hold who have been recognized by the Jarl as particularly noteworthy people and for that are assigned their own personal housecarls. Because the title doesn't confer any particular responsibilities, Thanes are free to not attend court business and go about their liking. The Dragonborn themselves can become a Thane in all nine holds. Aside from them, only three NPCs are known to be Thanes.
  • The Jarl's family: The Jarl's spouse, children, siblings and other family members. They usually live in the residence together with the Jarl, and one of them is usually groomed as a successor to the title of Jarl itself. In some cases they can also overlap with one of the positions above (Steward, Housecarl, Thane), but if they don't, they don't appear to hold any responsibilities.
  • The court wizard: A mage who serves as a specialist and advisor on magical matters (which most Nords aren't particularly familiar with). Appears to be usually a very relaxed job, and most of them seem to use the position as an easy way to fund their own private research. Serves in-game as a spell merchant. Unlike other members of the court, the court wizard is never removed from their position if the opposite side of the civil war takes control of the hold. The Jarls of the five major holds (Whiterun, Eastmarch, Haafingar, The Rift and the Reach), as well as the Pale employ a court wizard.
  • A military advisor: A high-ranking member of either the Imperial or the Stormcloak forces sent to coordinate the local war effort and ensure the cooperation of the Jarl and his people. All Jarls except initially Balgruuf the Greater, who starts out neutral in the war, have one of these at their court.
  • Servants: Housekeepers, cooks and other minor employees of the Jarl. Usually not involved in court matters.
• Status Effects: There are too many possible effects to list them all, but when you access the Magic section of your inventory, a category called 'Active Effects' lists every last one that is currently in place on your character. Ones with a timer attached (such as spells and alchemical buffs) will wear off eventually, while ones without (e.g. armor enchantments, racial bonuses, even diseases) remain in effect indefinitely, unless you remove the enchanted gear or cure the ailment with a potion or shrine. They're also Color-Coded for Your Convenience: white for a Status Buff and red for a Status Effect.
• Stealth-Based Mission:
  • Ideally, most of the Thieves' Guild missions are set up to be completed by stealth and guile rather than brute force; enemies are often much stronger than you can take on in multiples at your current level and are better off backstabbed or avoided entirely. However, as Maven Black-Briar herself puts it, all that matters is the results, so you could run around in the open stabbing enemies if you feel like it.
  • In Dawnguard, one of the Dawnguard's radiant quests requires you to eliminate a vampire disguised as a civilian, but it must be done stealthily; otherwise, the guards will view it as a murder.
• Stealth Pun:
  • Dragons' powers, such as breathing fire, are powered by speaking words of their ancient language. The game describes this as "a deadly verbal debate", or in other words, a flame war. Their combat-by-words system also evokes a fantasy version of flyting, i.e. ancient Viking rap battles with all the personal attacks that entails. They're literally roasting each other.
  • In Norse Mythology, you must cross a rainbow bridge to get to Valhalla. To get to Sovngarde, you must instead cross a whale-bone bridge.
  • Khajiit come from the land of Elsweyr - pronounced "elsewhere." As in, they literally come from elsewhere.
  • The Flame Atronachs have been subjected to Art Evolution for this game, with them having Non-Mammalian Mammaries and strongly resembling feminine entities made of fire wearing a Chainmail Bikini made of either stone or metal. One could say that they look "hot."
  • The mode of attack of the Flame Atronachs is to throw fireballs at the enemies of whoever summoned them. Or, to put it another way, they provide fire support.
• Stealth Run: This is encouraged by the Thieves' Guild, but the Dark Brotherhood also encourage this to some extent, and a large number of quests can be completed this way, if the player so chooses. Boethiah demands you do this for her quest, though there are no consequences for being detected.
• Steampunk: Dwemer fortresses and their Mini-Mecha. Technically they're Magitek, so either the steam is entirely cosmetic, or the magic is just providing the energy, with the steam actually driving the machinery.
• Stock Shout-Outs: For Skyrim, arrow-in-the-knee references.
• Stone Wall: Shadowmere, the magical horse the Dragonborn receives while on the Dark Brotherhood quest. It has a massive 1637 health and an incredibly potent Healing Factor, which means that most of the time even dragons are not a threat to it (effectively, the only thing that can kill Shadowmere most of the time is an extremely long fall). However, it hits no harder than a regular horse, so it will in turn barely damage most foes at all. Oddly, most enemies will feel mysteriously compelled to attack the virtually harmless but Nigh-Invulnerable horse rather than the far squishier but way deadlier Dragonborn, so in addition to its obvious use as a mode of transportation, Shadowmere makes for a very good distraction in combat.
• Stop Being Stereotypical: This is the attitude of most non-Thalmor elves about the Thalmor, especially other Altmer (high elves). The Thalmor take all the most negative Altmeri beliefs and cultural aspects (such as Fantastic Racism against Men and other elves to a lesser extent) and absolutely run with them (they think the mere existence of humanity is a mortal sin), and have managed to take over the Aldmeri Dominion and used it to launch a genocidal war. Of course, the Thalmor's default response to Altmer who don't share their views is to declare them No True Scotsman and massacre them, so you can see where the hatred is coming from.
• Storming the Castle: The second main plotline (the Civil War) culminates in you doing this to your opposing faction. Also, the good path of the Dark Brotherhood has you pulling one on their Sanctuary. You also get to storm Castle Volkihar during the climax of the Dawnguard storyline if you've sided with the Dawnguard, or Fort Dawnguard if you've sided with the Volkihar following the overthrow of Lord Harkon.
• Story Branch Favoritism:
  • This time around, you can play as one of ten different races. However, because it explores Nordic culture, gives the Player Character the power of the Thu'um, which lore-wise has always been associated with the Nords, and depicted the Dragonborn as a burly Nord warrior on all the promotional material, there's no mistake as to which race the game is kind of expecting you to play as. Furthermore, some races, like the Argonians and Khajiit, are subjected to Fantastic Racism and not allowed into some cities, but the player is inexplicably free of such restrictions.
  • Inverted in the case of the Bretons. They are uniquely largely free of any racial pros or cons due to story or unique dialogue. No Non Player Characters hate them, but no one thinks anything special of them either, aside from two instances in the entire game: a quest where players replace a reclusive chef that is a master of Breton cuisine (the original is an Orc, but as no one knows this, your assistant for the quest casually remarks that it's too obvious for you to be a Breton because of their reputation.) and having average ability to disguise themselves as a Thalmor. Being humans with Elvish ancestors allows them to pass for an elf at a distance as long as their hood is up.
• Story-Driven Invulnerability: Alduin. Also happens with any number of NPCs who are necessary for certain quests (some keep this status only until their quest is completed, while others keep it permanently). This is particularly vexing after the civil war plot is resolved; you are directly instructed to find the remaining enemy camps and wipe them out, but each one will be overseen by an "Essential" enemy leader who cannot be killed.
• Stripped to the Bone: What happens to every dragon you kill, due to the effects of absorbing the dragon's soul. In Dragonborn, we learn that this effect even extends to Dragonborn as well, as the fate of Miraak proves.
• Stripperiffic:
  • Averted (mostly), since the female armor actually looks like it could protect vital areas in combat (also, it gets cold in Skyrim). There are some exceptions, however. One type of fur armor only has a bra on top if you're female, and if you're male it's fully topless. Also, PC gamers who miss this trope can find many mods which bring it out in force.
  • Played straight with the Golden-type armor added in the Saints & Seducers Creation Club add-on. The male version is a fully-covering breastplate, whereas the female version is essentially a metal tank top and skirt. Although since it is the armor of the Golden Saints, it kinda makes sense (for a Daedra).
• Stumbled Into the Plot: While you are The Chosen One for the main quest there are a few side quests that invoke this trope:
  • When the player enters the city of Markarth, they encounter a murder taking place, getting caught up in a conspiracy involving the Silver-Bloods and the Forsworn.
  • The player, as a student from the College of Winterhold, triggers a trap by picking up a necklace that eventually leads to them encountering an Artifact of Doom. It's even lampshaded by Ancano that under normal circumstances the College would not send a random student back to inform the Arch-Mage.
• Stupid Crooks: The various criminals and bandits you encounter rarely display any form of good judgement or self preservation.
  • The bandits who pretend to be Legion soldiers. Trying to squeeze "taxes" from either a Stormcloak or a real Imperial Legion officer (who also happens to be the walking divine intervention against giant fire-breathing god-lizards) is not a good idea.
    "I am in the Legion and I am damn sure you are not!"
  • The random Thieves encounter. Even if you're currently a werewolf, vampire lord, or member of the Thieves' Guild, or even just decked out in armor made from dragon bone and carrying a BFS, they'll still walk up to you and try to extort money with a dinky knife as a weapon. (Now, if you are a member of the Thieves' Guild and wearing the Guild armour at the time they try to rob you, you can point this obvious oversight out to them... and if you're the Guild-Master, you get the infinitely better option to shake them down for money for having the gall to try and rob their boss!)
• Stupidity-Inducing Attack: There are two diseases that affect Magicka: Witbane and Brain Rot. The former slows down Magicka regeneration, the latter reduces your maximum Magicka. They are contracted from being attacked by Sabre Cats and Hagravens respectively.
• Stupidity Is the Only Option:
  • One quest that involves tracking down the corpses of a fallen expedition into a Dwemer ruin includes the objective to find and activate the Dwemer defenses, namely their golems, which you then must fight to escape. However, justified - in a Nice Job Breaking It, Hero moment, the player killed the giant spider that was stopping the Falmer from invading Markarth from below, so reactivating the defenses is necessary to prevent this from now happening.
  • In both the Companions' questline and the College of Winterhold questline, you have to activate something that would lock you into the room with no way to get out without a scripted scene. There is absolutely nothing you can do to avoid this; the only way to proceed is to use the event flag to open the doors to go further.
  • Same with the Thieves' Guild/Nightingale questline, where you need to jump into a pit with no way out, and you can find the skeleton of the last guy who did the same and starved to death. Good thing you picked up that Skeleton Key, right?
  • This ties in nicely with Story-Driven Invulnerability for some questlines. In the Winterhold quest, you encounter Ancano, who has Thalmor spy written all over him in big glowing letters and is a pompous, arrogant Jerkass to boot. You can't kill him until he almost brings about the destruction of the college and the town of Winterhold. May also count as You Can't Thwart Stage One.
  • An in-universe example: the guards will regard the Dragonborn as being incredibly stupid for having released Odahviing after his capture at Dragonsreach. This is a subversion, because not only is this action necessary to advance the main plot, but it's a very useful thing to do in the long run since he allows you to summon him in the future to help with outdoor battles. Nevertheless, the guards don't get it, and you will Never Live It Down.
• Succession Crisis: The death of Skyrim's previous High King led to this. The new High King/Queen is supposed to be elected from among the nine Jarls, but with a civil war going on, nobody is willing to convene the Moot to hold the election.
• Suddenly Speaking:
  • Later the dragons speak English.
  • Played with the second time you meet Alduin. He starts talking to you in dragon tongue; then, when you don't respond (because you barely know you're Dragonborn at this point), he mocks you for not being able to understand, and being so arrogant as to claim kinship with dragons.
• Suicidal Overconfidence:
  • Every time you bring a humanoid NPC to very low health, they fall to their knees and surrender or beg for their lives. When you do nothing and let them get back on their feet, they resume fighting. Low-level enemies such as standard bandits also cheerfully ignore the fact that you may be equipped with Daedric armor and weapons despite the fact that you can kill them in one hit with a normal attack.
  • Skyrim is littered with NPCs who'll try to pick a fight with you, accepting which starts hand-to-hand combat. While all this is by no means unusual, said NPCs will pick fights with you even after it becomes known nationwide that you're the Dragonborn - which means you've killed at least one huge dangerous dragon. This doesn't seem to faze them. They're also perfectly fine doing this in rags while the player is wearing heavy armor, which not only renders punching a moot point but also boosts unarmed damage if a particular perk is taken.
  • They will also cheerfully offer to fight Khajiit characters in unarmed combat, even though Khajiit have a huge advantage in "unarmed" combat due to their large claws. Khajiit are so lethal when 'unarmed' that they do more damage with their claws than most of the standard one-handed weapons available, and this fact is not a secret to the residents of Skyrim.
  • The same goes for Argonian characters, who also have rather respectable claws. While their slashing ability is only half as powerful as a Khajiit's, they also have a racial skill that boosts their Regenerating Health to such a degree that it effectively makes them Nigh Invulnerable damage-soaking monsters for a full minute. Just as with the Khajiit, it isn't as though this is a racial secret kept from the region's inhabitants.
  • Maurice Jondrelle. He's an optional NPC follower who may join you during "The Blessings of Nature" quest and if he's with you at the goal you get an alternate option for finishing it. But good luck getting him there alive without cheating (or fast traveling). He is essentially a civilian monk, unarmed, unarmored, lacking in any of the control commands that normal followers have (i.e. "Wait here."), and utterly devoid of survival instincts or actual combat ability. None of this stops him from attempting to box anything that attacks the player: bears, sabre cats, giants, aforementioned huge dragons... He'll also attack the player if he is told the purpose of the trip was to wound the sacred tree of Kynareth. He's a very devout follower and couldn't just watch you casually desecrate one of his goddess' creations, but it's still pretty suicidal of him.
  • There's the player's horse, which usually runs away from combat. Every now and then, though, it will decide to go on the offensive and charge straight into a mob of bandits. Even if you've parked it half a mile away, it will still run in and get itself killed when the fighting starts.
  • When dragons attack towns and villages, the citizens of such frequently leap into the fray to attack said massive magic-wielding megafauna armed with nothing but their fists, shouting "Die, dragon!" Justified with the Guards, and maybe Nords, but everyone else...
  • If you're past a certain level of power when you do the Staff of Magnus quest, a Thalmor named Estormo ends up being this. He confronts you at the end of the quest and demands you surrender the eponymous staff. When you tell him to get out of the way, he sneers, "You fool, you don't stand a chance" about two seconds before you impale him on your sword.
  • Rochelle the Red in the Hearthfire DLC will kidnap the player's spouse for ransom. Sure, it can be a pretty impressive feat depending on circumstances (you can marry some really badass people), but all it really accomplishes is getting the Dragonborn really angry at her. An Intimidate check will cause her to realize exactly how bad an idea this was; otherwise, she's heading straight for a Curb-Stomp Battle at the hands of the PC and their spouse.
• Summon Bigger Fish:
  • Clearing out one Dwemer ruin of the Falmer that would invade the connecting city requires the player to activate the Dwemer golems, which will then wipe them out. The golems, at least, will stay in the ruin.
  • At the the end of the main questline, the player can do this at will in an open area with Odahviing, a dragon that has pledged to serve you until you die.
  • With Dawnguard installed, you also get to call the undead dragon Durnehviir from the Soul Cairn.
• Superboss:
  • In Blackreach, there's a dragon hidden in the artificial sun, which is released by using your FUS RO DAH on the orb. You can get away with only one word of the shout if you make your way to the platform overlooking the orb, which puts it close enough for the first word to reach it.
  • Dragonborn adds another notable example in the form of the Ebony Warrior, who only appears once the player reaches level 80. He has enchanted equipment which grants him 50% resistance to all elements, Life Drain, increased melee damage, and increased regeneration. He has Heavy Armor perks which may reflect damage back to you and paralysis perks for both his weapon types. He has both healing magic and potions. He is immune to falling damage outside of a possible glitch. Finally, he has access to the full-powered Disarm and Unrelenting Force shouts. On top of a mountain. It says something that even if you have a full set of heavy armor and weapons which you've enhanced to legendary quality and enchanted, he can still easily kill you.
  • Karstaag, returning in spirit form from Bloodmoon. This is the ghost of a frost giant, who has both powerful destruction spells and sheer physical size on his side.
• Super Breeding Program: The Thalmor seek to replace human dominance with elven dominance, so they pillage supplies from their annexed countries, breed like rabbits, and kill any babies they deem 'defective' in a bid for racial purity. And unknown to most of the rank-and-file Thalmor, the Thalmor's high council are planning to make this extremist breeding amount to nothing, as they believe they can reincarnate into perfect unchanging beings by starving the gods of belief and destroying the universe.
• Super Mode:
  • The Werewolf and Vampire Lord forms fit this mold, particularly with the Dawnguard DLC. Werewolf form, in particular, is time-limited, and you have to feast on the corpses of your fallen (non-undead, non-construct) enemies to maintain it, lest you revert to your original race... quite naked and unarmed.
  • You can craft your own Super Mode through Alchemy - the right combination of potions could vastly boost your regeneration of health, stamina and magic, heal you, make you more resistant to damage, do more damage with your chosen weapon, and a host of other effects - until it wears out.
  • With the Dragonborn DLC, the "Dragon Aspect" Shout sets the Dragonborn into overdrive. With all 3 words, it increases their armor by 100, Thu'um recharge time is reduced by 20%; power attacks and breath Thu'um attacks do 25% more damage, while effect Thu'ums last 50% longer, receive 25% more fire and frost resistance; and you can summon an Ancient Dragonborn if your health falls below 50%, as well as covering them in a set of ethereal Dragonbone armour.
• Super-Persistent Predator: The game keeps this tradition alive in the series. Predatory creatures including bears, wolves, and sabrecats will chase you halfway across Skyrim once aggro'd.
• Super Title 64 Advance: The Virtual Reality edition of the game adds the VR initials at the end of its name.
• Surplus Damage Bonus: Any damage done to an enemy over its total health will translate into physical momentum, to the point where hitting a nearly dead enemy with a strong attack will make it shoot across the room.
• Suspicious Video-Game Generosity:
  • The Dawnguard DLC gives you a quest to find a lost Aetherium Forge. There's a cache of potions at the door to the Forge itself, right before you face a rather formidable number of enemies and a particularly punishing boss fight.
  • There's a couple of prominently placed Resist Shock potions placed right before the door where you have to face Potema's council of draugr while a giant beam of electricity circulates around the room.
  • Darkfall Passage and the Forgotten Vale, in the Dawnguard DLC, have a number of rather conspicuously-placed Resist Fire potions, most notably two in the clutches of a skeleton near a frozen lake. You will need them for the dragons Voslaarum and Naaslaarum.
• Sword Beam: In the DLC Dragonborn, you can find part way through a dungeon a unique Two-Handed sword that launches Sword Beams with each power attack. Said beams are mainly used to solve a puzzle, and aren't all that strong, nor is the sword in comparison to higher tier equipment (although if you land power attacks at point blank distance, it does outclass Daedric Weapons), but still, SWORD BEAMS!!!
• Sword of Plot Advancement:
  • Nettlebane. It is the only weapon that can harm the Gildergreen, a sacred tree, and it is needed to clear a path to the Gildergreen and retrieve some of its sap. This is just part of a small sidequest though.
  • In the Dawnguard DLC, there is a Bow of Plot Advancement, Auriel's Bow, which you need if you want to defeat the final boss at the end of the quest line. Of course, said Bow is also very useful against undead.
• Sycophantic Servant: In the Dark Brotherhood questline, Cicero is this to the Night Mother and, later, to you if you spare him.
• Sympathetic P.O.V.:
  • The book The "Madmen" of the Reach is one for the Forsworn. Whether or not it justifies their long list of atrocities depends on the player.
  • The author of that book also wrote The Bear of Markarth: The Crimes of Ulfric Stormcloak, a creatively embellished account of how Ulfric dealt with the Forsworn and the Nords who wouldn't help him in his siege of Markarth.

T

• Taken from a Dream: The quest "Waking Nightmare" sees the people of Dawnstar plagued by unceasing nightmares when they try to sleep, so they ask the Dragonborn and a priest of Mara, Erandur, to investigate. They discover that Vaermina, the Daedric Prince of Dreams and Nightmares, is behind it. Working together, Erandur helps you to "Dreamwalk" through a ruin that can only be traversed by dream to get to the Skull of Corruption, a Magic Staff associated with Vaermina and source of the nightmares. Erandur seeks to destroy it, but Vaermina speaks to you and offers to let you take the staff if you kill Erandur. Take the latter option and you get to return from the "dreamwalking" with the staff in hand.
• Tail Slap: Dragons gains this ability after a patch, along with Wing Attack. This allows them to hit you even when you are not in front.
• Take a Third Option: A few quests have this as a possibility.
  • In the quest "With Friends Like These..." you are locked up in a cabin by a Dark Brotherhood assassin who will only let you leave when you kill either a Khajiit gangster, a Nord mercenary, or an insufferable old widowed mother. Or two. Or all three. Or the Dark Brotherhood member herself. Like she says... you may only leave when ''someone'' dies.
  • "No One Escapes Cidhna Mine": Either escape with Madanach and kill Thonar for the Armor of the Old Gods, kill Madanach and escape using the key on his body and get the Silver-Blood Family Ring from Thonar... or side with Madanach up until you get the armor, then kill him and escape...then kill Thonar yourself.
  • "The Taste of Death" has you clear out a cave so a group of cannibals can have a feast. You then have to bring them the local Priest of Arkay to be the guest of honor. They want him to be the main course. You can cooperate with this plan and be the first one to take a bite of him, or you can play along up to the point where they're about to kill him and then kill all of them instead.
• Takes One to Kill One: The only way to permanently kill a dragon is for another dragon (regardless of whether it has the body of a mortal or that of a dragon) to devour its soul.
• Take That, Audience!: M'aiq the Liar reappears once more. About a third of his dialogue is shots at the fanbase, another third is comments about gameplay, and the rest is comments about disliked parts of previous games.
• Take Up My Sword: The Harbinger of the Companions posthumously appoints the Dragonborn as his successor.
• Take Your Time: No matter what you're doing or how urgent it seems to be, you can put it on hold and go off and spend months of game time doing something else. Delphine will wait patiently for you to attend a party while you're busy working your way through the ranks at the Thieves' Guild or the Mage College. The only thing that seems to be time sensitive is how long your followers will obey your injunction to wait for you in one place before returning home (72 hours).
• Taken During the Ending: The College of Winterhold questline centers around an object of unknown origin or purpose called the Eye of Magnus that is found by the Dragonborn and Tolfdir beneath a ruin, which is then taken back to the College for study. Shortly after discovery and throughout the quest, a member of an equally-unknown organization called the Psijic Order reaches out to the Dragonborn to warn them of the great deal of trouble the Eye represents. A Thalmor representative to the college named Ancano takes an interest in the Eye and seeks to understand and control it for the Thalmor to use, leading the College to try and defeat him despite him being amplified by the Eye's tremendous power, which the Dragonborn and Tolfdir are able to do but at the cost of the Archmage's and Mirabelle Ervine's lives. Following this, the Psijic Order arrive to take the Eye somewhere it can be safely contained, implied to be completely outside of the playable plane of reality.
• Taking Over the Town: A group of Vampires plan to take over Morthal and turn its people into Thralls. Naturally, The Dragonborn stops them.
• Tattered Flag: A skeleton can be found in Winterhold clutching one, apparently from the last stand of the Knights of the Nine.
• Team Pet: Lis the frostbite spider, in the Dark Brotherhood sanctuary.
• Teleporting Keycard Squad: On a much larger scale. Due to the way quests work in this game, the item the NPC sends you to fetch may not necessarily exist in the dungeon to which they point you beforehand, especially if you've murdered your way through it once before. As such, if the NPC sends you to a dungeon you've already happened to clear, the game will repopulate it so you still have to fight your way through it. In some cases, there may in fact be more enemies than when you did it the first time.
• Teleport Spam:
  • Some Draugr bosses, such as Sigdis Gauldurson and Halldir. Jyrik Gauldurson also does this on his second encounter.
  • Orchendor, the priest of Peryite, at the end of "The Only Cure."
  • Mercer Frey appears to do this, but in fact he's just using invisibility.
  • Lord Harkon in Dawnguard.
• Temple of Doom: The various ancient Nord barrows qualify, being filled with booby traps and mummified tomb guardians. The Dwemer ruins also have a temple-like design, complete with several contraptions and setups that have to be dealt with during exploration.
• Temporary Party Member to Villain: In the Thieves' Guild questline, guild master Mercer Frey joins the Dragonborn in tracking down the traitor Karliah at Snow Veil Sanctum. However, right at the end of the dungeon, the truth is revealed — Mercer is the real traitor and Karliah was investigating him, whereupon, after Mercer attempts to kill the Dragonborn, who only survives due to Karliah planning ahead, the player allies with her instead. Mercer returns at the end of the questline, serving as the Final Boss for the Thieves' Guild.
• Temporary Platform: A sidequest in the Dragonborn DLC takes the player into an ancient Nordic tomb where floating magical platforms provide the only way across a deep flooded hallway with nasty undead creatures lurking in its depths. The platforms start to appear when you pull a switch, then form a sort of moving walkway, with new platforms appearing as the old ones vanish. They appear and disappear faster as you get deeper into the tomb, so you have to move faster to avoid being dropped into the pit.
• Tempting Fate:
  • When arrested by corrupt guards in Markarth and sentenced to life in prison, you're told, "No one escapes Cidhna Mine. No one." Care to guess what your next quest objective is?
  • Just inside the door of a Nordic tomb called Volunruud, you can find a journal, the last line of which reads, "It's not as if the thousand-year dead will mind if I take a look around." This journal is clutched in the hand of a picked-clean skeleton whose skull has been pierced by a dagger. Nearby is an ax embedded in the ground and a (different) skeleton which will attack if you approach.
• Terminal Transformation: The Wabbajack is a Magic Staff and artefact of the Mad God Sheogorath, which triggers a random effect when its magic hits something. These effects can include the target suffering a permanent Forced Transformation into an inanimate object, such as a sweetroll, a small pile of coins, some random books, or a large quantity of cheese. And there is nothing that can undo this transformation, nor is there any indication that the victim still retains their mind, making them effectively dead even if you don't eat the sweetroll.
• Thematic Sequel Logo Change: The Imperial Dragon logo returns, but it is now chipped and weathered, representing the fall of the Septim Dynasty, the Empire's slide into vestigial status between the games, and the Skyrim Civil War.
• Theme Music Power-Up: Fighting a dragon seems half as hard when you are backed by a barbarian choir praising your awesomeness.
• There Are No Tents: The game keeps the series' trend going. Once again, there are tents present in the game, mostly at permanent campsites and the like, but nothing portable.
• There Is Another: While the Prophecy of the Dragonborn heavily implies that you are the Last, Arngeir seems to suggest there might be another. Finally confirmed in the Dragonborn DLC, which deals with the First Dragonborn seeking to return.
• Thieves' Guild: Riften's proud Thieves' Guild is not doing well in this game; there's even a lore book about it (with the author joining up with them to investigate why). They've resorted to making threats, shaking down merchants, and even having people falsely imprisoned. Thankfully they still have the standard of not killing people, but it's mostly because it's bad for business ("A dead man can't pay...") and it only applies to targets (they don't want you killing hired muscle). They're only a remnant of what they once were with influence only in Riften by the time of the game, but the player can participate in jobs that can help spread their influence to the other holds, allowing them to bribe guards and gain fences for stolen goods. Ultimately, though, in order to reestablish the Guild to its former glory, the player has to break the bad luck curse that's befallen the Guild by recovering the stolen Skeleton Key and restoring the Daedric Prince Nocturnal's favor to the Guild.
• Third-Party Deal Breaker: Attempted when the Dovahkiin convenes a peace talk between the Imperial Legion and the Stormcloak rebels (assuming they haven't resolved the Skyrim Civil War by that point in the main quest). The Thalmor, who want the war to continue in order to keep both sides as weak as possible, send their ambassador Elenwen to gate-crash the talks and demand a seat at the negotiating table; if she's allowed to remain, she will spend most of the talks trying to antagonize the Stormcloak leader Ulfric in the hopes of collapsing the talks.
• Third-Person Person: A proud Khajiit tradition (though they will use first person for emphasis) once again, particularly with Mi'aq the Liar. Narfi in Ivarstead also talks in third person.
• This Is Gonna Suck: You know pain is coming when your follower utters a line like "I've got a bad feeling about this" or "Watch yourself." Farkas is particularly blunt about it, straight up announcing, "Get ready for a fight!"
• Threesome Subtext: You can marry and have your spouse (who can be of any race or gender) move into your own home, which is likely to have a housecarl (sort of a live-in security officer/armed servant) living there too. It's quite possible to be greeted happily by both of them when you return home… and there's a good chance they'll do that while sitting in your bedroom and eating together. It's also possible to catch your housecarl watching the two of you sleep, or watching just you or your spouse.
• Three-Stat System: Health, Magicka, and Stamina (which were derived stats in the previous games).
• Throne Room Throwdown: If the player sides with the Empire, the civil war questline ends with the Dragonborn, Legate Rikke, and General Tullius fighting Ulfric Stormcloak and Galmar Stone-Fist in the throne room of the Palace of the Kings.
• Tiered by Name: Many enemies in Skyrim have auto-leveled variants distinguished from the base mook by some power ranking slapped after the name. These include the Draugr Wight, Draugr Deathlord, and Reaver Marauder.
• Time Skip: By far the largest one so far, with this game occurring 200 years after Oblivion (whereas the previous games were set pretty close together; e.g. Oblivion took place only forty years after Arena, the very first game in the series).
• Time Travel: Alduin couldn't be defeated the last time someone fought him, only sent forward in time to a point when there was someone who could defeat him - namely, the Dovahkiin. The Dovahkiin travels the opposite way on two separate occasions.
• Title Drop:
  • Done for an individual quest. During peace negotiations in "Season Unending," Ulfric may warn Tullius, "Remember, evgir unslaad," which is Dragon tongue for "Season Unending." In other words, "This [war] isn't over". Arngeir also tells you that he hasn't much faith that these negotiations will produce lasting peace, as the ancient Nord words for war translate to "season unending".
  • Skyrim itself is title-dropped constantly, which makes sense since it's the location where the game is set. Still, people talk about Skyrim an awful lot. This is also true of the two major DLC expansions, Dawnguard and Dragonborn.
  • Before the quest "No One Escapes Cidhna Mine", one of the Markarth guards who arrest you will say, "You'll never see the sun again, you hear me? No one escapes Cidhna Mine. No one."
• Title In: When you first visit a new landmark, the game displays "Discovered _______" across the top half of the screen. The area name appears again (much smaller, of course) in the upper corner when you reenter a previously visited area.
• Tome of Eldritch Lore: The Black Books from the Dragonborn DLC.
• Too Awesome to Use:
  • Summoning Karstaag and then defeating him gives you a power that lets you use him as a summon in combat, and considering how powerful he is, Karstaag will absolutely demolish anything he goes up against. The catch is that this ability can only be used three times before it permanently disappears for that playthrough. Oh, and he also has twice as much health as the Ebony Warrior, is only 25% weak to fire, and can only be used outside. Good luck! At the very least you can use him against the Ebony Warrior - but the fact that you could kill this guy means you should be tough/crafty enough to beat the Ebony Warrior.
  • For the Dark Brotherhood quest to kill the Emperor, you are given one sample of Jarrin Root to do the deed. However, you can choose to not use it and instead use it to concoct a poison that will kill anything. This is also the only one you get in a single playthrough, meaning that you have to be very careful about what you use it on. Unfortunately, you cannot plant it even with Hearthfire installed. You can, however, luck out with a perk that lets you make two potions from one sample of the root.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • Many bandits and petty criminals who go out of their way to antagonise (or Shor forbid, pick a fight with) a legendary dragonslayer and borderline-Physical God (and likely also the mortal champion of a few real gods too) wind up dead very quickly. Rochelle the Red especially earns a Darwin award for kidnapping their spouse and children. The skooma/moon sugar dealers who try to attack you with only their fists can be explained as being high out of their minds on their own product.
  • Arvel the Swift, in Bleak Falls Barrow, is probably the first example of this trope you encounter. After you save his life and free him from the web in which he's trapped, he'll refuse to hand over the Golden Claw and run recklessly ahead into a cave which at this point has proven to house all sorts of dangers, potentially pissing off someone who was skilled enough to kill a Giant Spider. Even if you don't kill him, he'll inevitably awaken all the Draugr up ahead, who will happily do the deed themselves. And if he somehow survives the Draugr gauntlet, he won't survive the swiveling spike wall trap tied to the pressure plate switch which lies directly in his path. Swift in body, maybe...
  • In Ravenscar Hollow, you find a raider in a cage who begs you to free him from the Hagravens who imprisoned him. After you deal with the Hagravens and free him, he attempts to mug you. The one who just, you know, took on three Hagravens. And he wears nothing but rags. And he doesn't attack you without announcing it.
  • "I shouldn't have hired those sellswords in the first place. Perhaps there's no need. This place is just a tomb, after all, and there are no obvious signs of habitation. It isn't as though the thousand-year dead will mind if I have a look around." Extract from Heddic's notes in Volunruud, found next to his corpse. Obviously, they did.
  • Following the Thieves' Guild storyline, some bandits in the Pilgrim's Path come under this. Stealing from Nocturnal is not exactly recommended at the best of times, but they really couldn't have picked a worse place than her conduit to Mundus.
  • One of the wizards at the Mages' College, Arniel Gane, attempts to recreate the circumstances that led to the extinction of the Dwemer, who have vanished from reality. You find him the materials, he begins the experiment by swinging Keening in the general direction of his bargain-basement Heart of Lorkhan facsimile, and... he vanishes from reality. Uh, success?
  • Malkoran, a necromancer, sets up shop in Daedric Prince Meridia's temple. Meridia is a very powerful godlike being, and she passionately hates the undead - and those who would raise them.
  • During the College of Winterhold questline, an aide of Ancano's follows you to Labyrinthian and waits at the exit to try to take the artifact you've just collected. Because clearly, someone who can survive a trek through a centuries-old tomb filled with ghosts, Draugr, a freakin' Skeletal Dragon and an undead dragon priest is going to be a complete pushover. For extra stupid points, he's a mage when the purpose of this quest was to steal a staff that drains magic.
  • Shavari, the Khajiit assassin who attempts to jump you alone in the Riften sewers just after you and a badass old former Blades operative slaughter an entire Thalmor hit-squad single-handedly. Gissur the beggar/Thalmor stool pigeon also probably qualifies for the same reason, also for how he informs for the Nazi elves even though their supremacy and hostility towards the races of Men is common knowledge at this point.
  • Any dragon, thug, or other enemy who thinks it's a good idea to attack the College of Winterhold. Most of the people there are essential, and if you haven't done many quests for them, it will be full of powerful, essential mages.
  • Sunderstone Gorge is a cavern complex absolutely full of burning oil and other flammables. It is inhabited by a group of fire mages, who apparently cannot make the obvious equation.
  • Another great example is Saadia in the "In My Time of Need" quest. She says that she can't trust anyone because "Jarls and guards can be bought," then immediately offers to pay you for help, despite the fact that she knows nothing about you (the player could even be playing as one of the races with a reputation for being lowlives and thieves, or even wearing the Thieves' Guild outfit!). In fact, some random adventurer is a lot more likely to be bought off than the Nords running the city, who at least have a sense of honor ingrained in their culture and have already kicked the Alik'r out of their city once. Sure enough, you can betray her and get paid by the Alik'r instead.
  • The "Challenger" mage who appears after you've become sufficiently proficient in magic. He will often appear in a city (full of guards) and declare his intentions of fighting you (in front of the guards) and then, before you even raise your sword, toss a fireball at you (in full view of the guards). More often than not he dies because the guards dogpile him long before you even get a chance to whip out your sword.
  • In the very southeast of the map there's an unmarked cottage that you can find burning down. Upon closer inspection, this cottage contains a ring of candles and a burnt corpse holding a Summon Flame Atronach scroll. Apparently someone thought this was a sensible spell to attempt in a small, flammable wooden house.
  • In the middle of the map, around halfway between Whiterun and Ivarstead, there's a giant fallen tree spanning a canyon, with a river flowing about a hundred feet below. Some idiot bandit thinks it's a good job to mug people while standing in the middle. You can easily knock him off the log bridge, sending him down a drop long enough to break every bone in his body, even without Unrelenting Force.
  • Averted in the Dragonborn quest "A New Debt", where Raven Rock's resident Loan Shark Morgrul demands that you pay a debt a person you previously helped in a quest owes him. If you tell him that you could just kill him to erase the debt, he simply says that you're free to try, but the guards would put a bounty on you if you did, before walking away. And he's right! If he reacted to your threat by attacking you, you could kill him without the guards lifting a finger; but since he doesn't, killing him would be treated as a common murder, so you're forced to either pay the debt or find a way to kill him without anyone noticing.
• Took a Level in Badass: All races, especially Bosmer, Argonians and Khajiit.
  • Mudcrabs are bulkier, hardier, hide buried in riverbeds before bursting out to attack, and can inflict noticeable damage this time around.
  • Finishing moves and Dual Wielding make conventional combat significantly more brutal than before and offensive spells now include Sith-style Chain Lightning, setting yourself on fire to burn anyone who gets close, and hurling yard-long icicles that impale people!
  • Remember Netches from The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind? Those flying jellyfish with hitboxes twice their size that were fairly easy to kill despite their Informed Ability to be dangerous? Well, now, as of the Dragonborn DLC, they really are dangerous.
  • One of the random encounters on Solstheim is a group of hunters out to kill a netch. You can choose to simply wish them luck, and let them go to it without your help. They usually die in hilariously short order.
  • "I've played Daggerfall. Those giants shouldn't prove too much of a problem... uh, why am I suddenly on the moon?"
• Took a Level in Jerkass:
  • The Altmer (high elves) go from snobbish and stuck up to truly astounding levels of dickery, even before you include the Great War and the White-Gold Concordat. For example, they've annexed Valenwood and vassalized Elsweyr, making the Bosmer and Khajiit into servants. Also, if you kill one of their kind, just one, even if he just tried to destroy the world, they'll put out a hit on you.
  • This describes the Thalmor, the government of Alinor/Summerset Isle and the Aldmeri Dominion. Altmer not hailing from the Dominion tend to be slightly less dickish, if for no other reason that they aren't true Altmer to the Thalmor.
  • The Blades. There are only two in game, but for people whose purpose is to serve the Dragonborn they have an odd tendency to treat you as a lackey, making demands and presenting ultimatums unless you follow those demands. Delphine has dialogue where she explicitly and unequivocally states that the entire purpose of the Blades (and, by extension, her life's goal) is to find and serve the Dragonborn. And yet, she orders you around like a lackey, belittles you when you question her, and eventually gives you an ultimatum to kill Paarthurnax in revenge for his actions in the Merethic era, thousands of years ago, despite the fact that he had a Heel–Face Turn regarding that and was responsible for teaching the Thu'um to humans back then so they could overthrow their dragon overlords, and it is his actions and advice which make the final defeat of Alduin and saving the entire world from destruction possible - without him, you never would have gotten Odahviing on your side and been able to travel to Skuldafn to save the world. And no, you can't refuse; your choices are to kill Paarthurnax in revenge for deeds done so long ago they're part of myth and legend and in doing so earn the everlasting hatred of the Greybeards, or don't do it, and never have Delphine and the Blades aid you ever again.
• Torches and Pitchforks: When they learn about the vampire lair close to their town, the inhabitants of Morthal decide to form a mob and confront the vampires, complete with torches (but sadly no pitchforks). However, when you get to the lair the mob chickens out, sending you inside on your own.
• Torture Cellar: There is one built just for your needs in the second Dark Brotherhood sanctuary. If you thoroughly harm the four people chained to the wall in their underwear, not only do you gain a little experience as if you were fighting normally, but the prisoners also give you a treasure hunt clue to make you stop.
• Town with a Dark Secret
  • Markarth has several:
    • At least half of the townspeople are humanitarians. One of them even tends a meat stall, which has the slogan of 'Bloodiest Beef in the Reach'.
    • You've also got the Forsworn, who are totally not killing people in the street or anyone who opposes the Silver-Blood family, and are totally not working for Madanach, who's totally not locked in the Silver-Blood mine/prison.
    • The abandoned building involved in a quest called "The House of Horrors" turns out to have a shrine to Molag Bal.
  • Rorikstead also qualifies, though its secret is subtly implied rather than outright said. Talking to the residents will mention that Rorikstead's soil was infertile, and that many attempts to settle here failed. The residents claim they fixed this by hard work, and indeed, Rorikstead has some very fertile farms. However, astute players will note the village has children, but no living mothers. Villagers will reveal all the mothers died in childbirth, which is odd since the best friend of Rorik, the village founder, is a healer, Jouane Manette. Jouane in turn mentions that he's a follower of the Eight Divines... but his home contains books on Daedra worship, and a conversation with a child shows he has magic talents he'd rather no one knows about. It's easy to see the implication that Jouane has some sort of Deal with the Daedra going for his village's prosperity.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Mead, for most Nords. There's even a song about it.
• Training from Hell: If you feel like your Restoration is taking a long time to level up (and odds are you will, as it takes ages to level up organically), you can always go the route of getting yourself into a situation where you're taking constant damage, and heal it off ad infinitum until you max out. You can do this with basically any enemy with a decent damage output, but the snowstorm barring the path to Paarthurnax up in High Hrothgar is also a perennial favorite for its power and consistency. With the right spells and equipment, you can easily outheal a beast's claws or the wrath of the elements, but from your character's perspective, this is several hours of unrelenting pain spent at death's door.
• Transformation Is a Free Action: Averted (barring a few scripted exceptions). Transforming into werewolf Beast Form (or Vampire Lord form) takes about five seconds to accomplish, and you do take damage from any attacks incurred in the meantime. Plus, getting seen transforming into a werewolf or vampire lord automatically incurs a 1000 gold bounty (prompting city guards to attack on sight). On the other hand, for a less literal example, changing equipment is a free action that occupies no time (outside of navigating the equipment menu), though equipping a new melee weapon or bow will take about half a second to actually draw or unsling, which ranges from inconvenient to deadly in combat.
• Transmutation: The Transmute spell can turn iron ore into silver and silver ore into gold.
• Trash Talk:
  • Apparently a time-honored tradition in Tamriel - literally everyone in Skyrim will taunt you in a fight, including the dragons, and some of these taunts are race-specific (such as threatening to turn a Khajiit into a rug). The "Throw Voice" shout also allows you to mock and confuse your opponents with ventriloquism.
    Dragonborn, using Throw Voice: Hey, skeever-butt!
  • Alduin is particularly fond of it. This is not surprising, given that he's a ridiculously arrogant, semi-divine dragon. If you hear the word joor (mortal) come out of his mouth, it's a good bet he's mocking you.
• Trauma-Induced Amnesia: A cannibal priestess claims that the Dovahkiin has repressed memories of losing a sibling when they were children, and taking a bite of the corpse out of curiosity. Whether or not this is true is up to the player to decide. Her whole spiel runs into a faulty logic if the Dovahkiin is a werewolf running around eating people to stay in beast form, or even just a dedicated alchemist who ate some human flesh to find out what potions they could make from it. Or if they're a Bosmer, for whom cannibalism would be a normal and accepted part of their race's culture.
• Traveling at the Speed of Plot:
  • Time still passes when you use Fast Travel to go somewhere, but at least it spares you any potential Random Encounters that might crop up along the way. NPCs are none the wiser for it, too, and most followers fast travel right along with you.
  • During the quest "A Blade In The Dark", it doesn't matter if you follow Delphine on foot, or split up and Take Your Time to reach Kynesgrove; you'll get to the dragon burial site just in time to witness Alduin resurrecting another dragon.
• Travel Transformation: Transforming into a werewolf gives a great boost to both speed and carrying capacity, making it a viable way to traverse the world more quickly or simply to allow yourself to fast travel when you would otherwise be overencumbered.
• Treacherous Quest Giver: Many of them, like that Argonian in Solitude who has "a bit of work if you're interested", and insists it doesn't involve stealing or anything criminal. He's involved with a bandit group called the Blackblood Marauders, who murder the crew aboard ships that run aground and steal anything of value within.
• Treasure Map:
  • An optional side quest, which does not appear in your quest log, is what the strategy guide calls "The Great Skyrim Treasure Hunt." There are ten maps found in various locations throughout the country, each of which leads you to a chest containing some very good loot. It's a challenge because it can take a little while to recognize the landmarks being depicted on each map. Note that the chests will not materialize unless you have the necessary map (because You Shouldn't Know This Already). The Switch version makes this a bit more manageable by adding tool tips to the treasure maps that direct you to the general area they're depicting; from there, you'll have to work out the rest.
  • The "Deathbrand" sidequest in the Dragonborn DLC has you following a map to dig up pirate treasure around Solstheim. There are no quest markers, so you'll have to follow the "X" marks on the map; fortunately, almost all of the chests are surrounded by enemies that will most likely draw your attention to them when you get near.
• Trial by Combat: To get into Shor's Hall in Sovngarde, you first have to give your credentials to the guard, then fight him to half health. Depending on how high you get your level before reaching this point, it can actually be laughably easy, considering that your opponent is a demigod. Of course, technically, so are you.
• Trick Arrow: In the Dawnguard DLC, you get to find Dwemer schematics for enchanted crossbow bolts. Quite often, these exploding crossbow bolts are recoverable from the corpse of whatever was shot with them. An exploding arrow that rematerializes afterward is perhaps the trickiest of all.
• Trophy Wife: In the orc stronghold of Dushnikh Yal, Chief Burguk's latest wife, Shel, is all tarted up, and basically does nothing but be the Chief's arm candy. His other wives man the defensive walls and work the forge with their respective children by Burguk.
• Truce Trickery: In the run-up to the game proper, the Empire are a few years removed from a brutal war against the Aldmeri Dominion from the Summerset Islands, with the Aldmeri Dominion being the victor by virtue of forcing Emperor Titus Mede II to sign a crippling peace agreement called the "White-Gold Concordat", which every party knows is just a temporary ceasefire. The Empire were unprepared for this war and believed that the ceasefire would give them enough time to gather resources and properly strike back. The Thalmor are in the midst of enacting a plan to sacrifice every non-Mer on Tamriel to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence, so they're trying to hold off the Empire as long as they can to go through with this. To this end, to buy themselves more time and to cripple the Empire's attempts to gather power and resources, they bankroll a brutal and costly Civil War in the province of Skyrim to keep the Empire tied up as long as possible in putting it down, and to try and make it as painful a civil war as possible, they go out of their way to antagonize the local Nords, preventing them from worshipping their god and generally being dicks to them in order to encourage more of them to come to view the Empire as being full of opportunistic traitors and rise up in opposition.
• Try Everything: One of the two ways you find out an alchemy ingredient's properties is tasting it to learn the first property (the Experimenter perk makes this method more effective by revealing more effects — at rank 3, you only need to eat an ingredient once to learn everything about it). The other way is simply by combining it with whatever other ingredients you have on hand; the game even helps you with this by keeping track of every combination you've tried and greying out the unsuccessful ones. Successful discoveries go a long way toward leveling your Alchemy skill.
• Turning Back Human: In the DLC Dawnguard, it is possible to convince Serana the Friendly Neighborhood Vampire to seek a cure for her vampirism with careful dialogue choices (in which case she disappears after completing the DLC's main quest and returns a few days later as a human).
• Two-Keyed Lock: The vault of the Thieves' Guild has one of these, with the keys being owned by the most powerful members of the guild. No one realizes it's already been emptied by Guildmaster Mercer Frey, using a magical lockpick he stole from the goddess Nocturnal.
• Two-Teacher School: The Magic College of Winterhold, the only institution in all of Skyrim to teach and subsequently learn magic, has a grand total of 6 teachers. This may be justified because the Nords are notoriously antimagic, but considering how many subsidiaries the Mages Guild had in the previous game, it does come across rather silly.