Skyrim / Tropes D to G

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D

• Damage Discrimination: If you're fighting a bear when a dragon attacks you, there's a good chance the bear will start attacking the dragon instead. Bandits will also assist in bringing down a dragon even though they were trying to kill you just prior. Dragons may also attack other dragons.
• Damage-Increasing Debuff: The Marked for Death shout works by decreasing the armor rating of an enemy while also causing them to lose health for 60 seconds over the duration of its effect. It also gets stronger with each word used.
• Damage-Sponge Boss: Alduin, the Big Bad himself, is one. In the final battle against him, he has an obscene amount of health and 50% resistance to all types of damage. It takes a lot to bring him down, though thankfully, you have the ancient Nord heroes in Sovngarde to help you.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!:
  • The Equip, Take, Take All and Give buttons never seem to stay in the same place between different sorts of inventory management screen - for example taking things out of containers, putting things into containers, personal inventory, swapping with companions, and trading. It's not uncommon to forget this and accidentally take everything inside a container when you intended to put one thing away - and if it was the container you use as your main storage, this will probably mean enough weight to make you overencumbered several times over and enough items that it will take you a long time to get them all put back. In most cases you're better off reloading an autosave. This becomes especially annoying when dealing with ingredients: the key to take ingredients out of a container becomes, when trying to put them back, the same as the key that is used for consuming ingredients. So, whilst you think that you have put away all of your ingredients, what you have actually done is consumed them, and you will only realise your mistake when you close your inventory and suffer the effects, including severe poisoning.
  • The keys for changing from first-person to third-person view and drawing/sheathing your weapon are reversed. Ditto for jumping and interacting with objects.
  • And while simply selecting an item takes it out of containers, selecting an item while a container is open will use it (unlike Oblivion, where it put it away). This can range from a minor annoyance (wearing the armour you were giving your companion) to a major one (accidentally eating the daedra hearts you wanted to save for armour, without even noticing). This does not apply to the trade interface, even if you might want it to (e.g. you bought some spell tomes and want to use them, but also want to sell off some of the moderately-expensive skill books you've acquired, and you bought the tomes first so the merchant would have enough money for this).
• Darker and Edgier: The atmosphere of this game compared to Oblivion. To make a short list: the overall world design is much more Dung Ages than the high fantasy style of Oblivion, two large towns are Wretched Hives, there is much more Fantastic Racism going on, more Gray-and-Grey Morality, and more bloody/gory bits in dungeons.
• Darkness Equals Death:
  • In one area in Hermaeus Mora's realm, straying from lit areas causes damage that will boot you out in short order (as you can't actually die in Apocrypha barring one boss fight).
  • Inverted completely in one area of Nocturnal's Sanctuary during the Thieves' Guild quest. On brand with your occupation, you need to stick to the darkness, while the light will promptly kill you.
• Dark Reprise: The Dragonborn trailer is an entire trailer of Dark Reprise — the theme is a darker, more foreboding version of the original teaser trailer track, shows the new gameplay areas, and just like the original trailer it ends with a dying dragon having its soul absorbed... as the camera pans up its body to reveal that the absorption isn't being done by you. At the end of the trailer, we hear what initially sounds like "The Song Of The Dragonborn," but with changed lyrics and a darker tone: it's a version of the song dedicated to the First Dragonborn, and what will happen when he returns.
• Dark Secret:
  • Between Falkreath and Helgen, there's a place called Half-Moon Mill where you can find the local lumberjack Hert; she is extremely friendly towards you and even say that you can stay over for the night. Everything's all right, until you decide to look in a shack near the mill and find that there's a lot of bloody human bones in there. Some quests may reveal that Hert and her husband are vampires who pretend to be common folk to eat unwary travelers.
  • Downplayed, but, if you enter the cave in the Sleeping Tree Camp, you may find a note in the body of an Orc (killed by a nearby giant) which reveals that Ysolda, the friendly wanna-be merchant from Whiterun, has been buying Sleeping Tree Sap from him and selling it (and she also mentions a "Skooma trouble"). Considering that both are fantastic drugs, Ysolda may be considered to be a drug dealer in secret.
  • Even Jarl Balgruuf, one of the friendliest and most honorable people in the entire game, has one of these. Only he and his court wizard know that Mephala's sword, which is powered by the murders of people who trust its user, is locked in a secret room in his palace.
  • And there's also Markarth, which is a city full of those. See Town with a Dark Secret in the tropes list.
• Dating Sim: The Dawnguard DLC has this in the form of Serana. Throughout the questline, when her past and lineage are slowly revealed, you can be polite and understanding in your dialogue, or you can be forceful and rude. While you can't marry her, if you're polite enough, you can convince her to cure herself of vampirism if you ally with the Dawnguard.
• Day-Old Legend: A slight example. Items have several levels depending on the quality, the highest level being "Legendary". So with a high enough smithing skill, you can forge a weapon or piece of armour, then immediately take it to a grindstone or workbench and make it legendary, despite being literally seconds old.
• Daywalking Vampire: The Vampires can survive in sunlight with only minimal discomfort, although prolonged exposure to direct sunlight causes their skin to burn and their natural powers become heavily debilitated. As a result, Vampires prefer traveling at night as it's the best time to overpower their opponents. Vampire Lords are more resistant to the sun, but still do better at night. In-game, this translates to increased vulnerability to certain kinds of damage and no Regenerating Health' Regenerating Mana or regenerating Sprint Meter when outside during the day.
• De-aged in Death: At the end of the main questline, the Dragonborn pursues Alduin into Sovngarde, the Nordic Warrior Heaven. There, the Dragonborn can encounter the spirits of many great figures from Nordic history. Even those who lived to old age, such as Ysgramor, appear in their physical primes.
• Dead-End Room: In the final quest of the Thieves' Guild, the only way through to your objective, is by falling into a pit, with no apparent exit. This was played straight with the dead NPC you find at the bottom - fortunately, you avert this, because you have the Skeleton Key.
• Deader than Dead:
  • Malyn Varen has his soul destroyed by the Dragonborn to purify Azura's Star (or to corrupt it and turn it into the Black Star).
  • What happens to the dragons you kill... except Alduin. This also extends to when a Dragonborn takes down another Dragonborn, as Miraak threatens to do to you.
  • Presumably what happens to any mortal souls Alduin devours.
  • While necromantic magic can turn the dead into loyal undead revenants, getting killed again (or the expiration of the spell that raised them, or the death of the necromancer) will cause them to disintegrate into a pile of dust which cannot be re-resurrected. Decapitation also precludes any possibility of being raised.
• Deadly Environment Prison: The Chill, a prison in Winterhold, runs on this. They do not confiscate your swag, they do not guard your cage, but it is located in an icy cave on a small island in the middle of the local Arctic. If you beat the ice elementals on the island and swim through the frigid ocean to freedom, no one is going to object.
• Deadly Upgrade: As most prominently seen in this game, Reachmen warriors may choose to become "Briarhearts." A Hagraven will remove the warrior's heart and replace it with a Briar Heart, a magical organic object which looks something like a pine cone. The Briarhearts receive a massive power upgrade at the cost of free will and thought. They also pick up the Weaksauce Weakness that if the Briar Heart is stolen (say, by a skilled pickpocket) or damaged (say, by a skilled archer), they will fall dead instantly.
• Deadpan Snarker:
  • While the game largely lets you choose your character's personality, more than a few quest-related dialogue lines have single-choice replies that give the distinct impression that your character is a Deadpan Snarker; you can also purposefully play it this way.
    Jarl Baalgruuf: So you were at Helgen? You saw this Dragon with your own eyes?
    You: Yes. I had a great view while the Imperials were trying to cut off my head.
  • You, during a Civil War action: I've got a better idea. You wait here, I'll take care of it.
  • Corpulus Vinius.
    You: Why is this place called the Winking Skeever?
    Corpulus: Well, as it turns out, I had a pet skeever when I was a boy, and he used to wink.
    You: You kept a skeever as a pet?
    Corpulus: They were smaller back then.
  • Belethor in Whiterun. Try asking him why a Breton like him is in Skyrim.
    Belethor: "Isn't it obvious? Why, the wonderful weather, and the hospitable people, of course! Not to mention my great fondness for dragons and petty power struggles. Ah, but without a doubt, the most compelling feature of this frozen wasteland is the volley of inane questions leveled at me on a regular basis."
  • Nazir of the Dark Brotherhood. He comments on it himself.
    You: Narfi is dead.
    Nazir: Congratulations. You killed an emaciated beggar in cold blood. You are truly an opponent to be feared.
  • Marcurio, a follower-for-hire found in Riften, has a vague case of this.
    Marcurio: These ruins might be interesting... if I weren't already an expert on Nordic history!
    Marcurio: Don't make me wait too long... I get bored very easily.
  • Uraccen, one of the prisoners in Cidhna Mine, has almost all of his dialogue lines full of snarky comments.
    You: Skooma? What's that?
    Uraccen: Bottles of Moon Sugar. Khajiit use it as a... pick-me-up. Good way to pass the time. Prisoners smuggle the stuff in. Only currency we have down here.
    You: Borkul the Beast?
    Uraccen: Madanach's guard. Big, even for an Orc. Heard he ripped a man's arm off and beat him to death with it. He's old-fashioned like that.
  • And of course, Lydia. Her delivery of the line "I am sworn to carry your burdens" makes it pretty clear that she does not enjoy being your pack-mule, and she only gets snarkier in Dragonborn, especially if you start using the Black Books of Hermaeus Mora.
  • Dragonborn follower Teldryn Sero, from Raven Rock, is a walking fount of Deadpan Snark. It's one of the things which has made him extremely popular as a follower.
  • And two more from Dragonborn: the Dremora Butler and Merchant. The Butler in particular snarks about you asking him to carry things for you, drily commenting "I always dreamt of being a pack mule."
• Deal with the Devil: There are numerous pacts to be made with the Daedric Princes throughout the game. By the end, you can owe your soul to at least ten different entities, most of which are unquestionably evil and the least of which are dangerously amoral.
• Death by Childbirth: This is the backstory of twins Sissel and Britte in Rorikstead. Their mother died shortly after their birth, which is indicated to be part of the reason that their father horribly abuses them.
• Death of a Child: A few child deaths occur in the storyline. A man in Morthal has recently lost his child as well as his wife to a house fire; a man in Cidhna Mine was forced to watch his young daughter be executed before he was thrown in; and in Falkreath, a little girl was mauled to death by a werewolf. Modding in the PC version reveals that all the child voice actors recorded death screams as part of the base game, and there are Dummied Out scripts in the code that are triggered by causing children to die, all implying that attacking children was a What Could Have Been feature.
• Death of the Old Gods:
  • The Nordic pantheon is utterly ancient and includes several gods that were merged with the Aldmeri pantheon to create the Eight Divines. The gods in this pantheon were Shor (a Nordic War God version of Lorkhan and the chief god), Kyne (Shor's warrior-widow and goddess of storms), Tsun (a shield-brother of Shor who died defending him from the Mer gods, possibly the precursor of Zenithar), and Stuhn (the Nordic precursor to Stendarr), as well as Mara, Dibella, Jhunal (a Nord precursor to Julianos who fell out of favour with the rest of the pantheon), Orkey (Arkay or "Old Knocker") and Alduin (a grim and frightening version of Akatosh). By the Fourth Era there are very, very few Nords who worship the old pantheon; Froki Whetted-Blade, the elderly hunter, vehemently rejects the Eight, dismissing them as impostor gods.
  • This is also essentially what the Thalmor are attempting to do with Talos, and what the Stormcloaks are desperately trying to prevent - the Thalmor do not accept the idea of a human becoming a god, and seek to "starve" Talos of worship as stage one of their grand plan to unmake Mundus and Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence.
• Death by Childbirth: Happened to the mother of Sissel and Britte of Rorikstead. Their father treats them badly partially because of it.
• Death by Genre Savviness: Alduin is actually smart enough to try to kill the Dovakhiin at the start of the game, but runs into trouble because he doesn't know who that is just yet. Ironically, this actually ends up saving the Dovakhiin; if he'd just let the Empire do their thing, he'd have won (and the game would've been very short).
• Death by Irony:
  • In one quest, you meet a Dunmer trapped in a spider web. After killing the Giant Spider involved, he asks you to cut him loose in exchange for a MacGuffin. After you do, he shouts "You Fool!" and runs deeper into the dungeon. Should the player choose not to pursue and kill him, he wakes up draugr that kill him, or failing that, steps on a pressure plate and gets splattered by a booby trap. Players who know that he's going to betray them can also keep swinging after he's loose, often killing him before he even has the chance to run. He did say "cut me down," after all.
  • Ulfric Stormcloak supposedly started the Civil War by killing the High King with the Thu'um. If you join the Imperial Legion, at the end of the questline, when Ulfric lies at your mercy, you can execute him and end the war with your own Thu'um.
• Death from Above:
  • The Big Bad, Alduin, has a unique Dragon Shout which only he can perform. The effects are telling: the sky turns darker, a vortex of clouds appears in the sky, and meteors start falling down. This is so effective that, in a Fan Vid, 100 archers can easily kill three Elder Dragons, but all of them are annihilated by this move alone by Alduin.
  • The Dragonborn can call forth a thunderstorm with similar "cloud vortex in the sky" effect. The main difference is the fact that the effect's cooldown takes ages, while Alduin can cast his version back-to-back.
• Death Is Cheap: Dragons cannot be killed by merely slaying their physical forms. While anyone of sufficient ability is capable of doing this, the dragon can be resurrected by another dragon unless its soul is absorbed by another dragon (or Dragonborn). In fact, Akatosh, the "father" of dragons, specifically created the Dragonborn, rare mortals gifted with draconic Aedric souls, to serve as natural predators for the dragons.
• Death Mountain: The game sends you up the Throat of the World, the highest mountain in all of Tamriel. It is quite a bit easier to die from very long drops than what was the case with Red Mountain, which is rather encouraging, considering Red Mountain is supposed to be the other contender for highest mountain on the continent.
• Death Seeker:
  • There's an Old Orc who wanders around Skyrim surrounded by corpses who will ask you for a good death.
  • The Ebony Warrior, whom you will only be able to battle when you hit level 80. He tells you he has no more quests, no more battles, and only wishes to be sent to Sovngarde with honor in battle.
• Death Trap: You gotta watch your step in every dungeon if you don't want a spiky grate embedded in your face, or a side full of poisoned darts. There is a perk which prevents you from triggering pressure plates, but it does not stop trip wires or trapped chests and doors, nor does it apply to your followers.
• Death World: The Soul Cairn is a desiccated, desolate place littered with ruins, piles of bones, dead trees, animated skeleton warriors, and ethereal remnants of lost souls. The realm's lords, the Ideal Masters, will even try to take the souls of any who enter, and the essence of the realm seeps into the souls of all in it, even if they leave.
• Decadent Court: Apparently High Rock's aristocracy is like this, to judge by what Hadvar has to say if you choose Breton as your race.
• Decapitated Army: Downplayed and justified. Alduin is more than just the leader of the dragons; he's summoning them, as shown in the pre-Sahlokniir scene. Dragons are firm believers of Asskicking Leads to Leadership and Might Makes Right, so Alduin fleeing his battle against the Dragonborn and Paathurnax atop the Throat of the World instead of acknowledging the Dragonborn as both superior and morally right shakes some dragons' faith in his leadership. Most non-named dragons will still go after the Dragonborn as if nothing happened, though.
• Decapitation Presentation:
  • Prior to the events of the game, an ambassador from the Aldmeri Dominion presented Emperor Titus Mede II with a covered cart containing the heads of all agents of the Blades that were posted in the regions of Summerset and Valenwood, as part of an ultimatum for the Empire's surrender to them. Thus began the Great War, and, afterwards, the signing of the White-Gold Concordat (which kicked off the events leading up to Skyrim's Civil War).
  • A combat perk available for both one-handed and two-handed weapons allows the Dragonborn to cut (or smash, if done with a mace/warhammer) their opponent's head off, pick it up, and walk off with it. It only works on characters that belong to playable races though, most likely because higher-level enemies can do it to you too.
• Defeat Equals Explosion: Flame Atronachs die in a moderately powerful burst of fire. Given the immortal nature of lesser Daedra, they'll recover. Any mortals they take out with them, not so much...
• Defeat Means Friendship:
  • Most people you can beat in tavern brawls become considerably more friendly to you afterwards. Some can be recruited as followers. You can even marry one!
  • Dragons regard the Dovahkiin this way. Both Odahviing and Durnehviir join your side after you defeat them.
• Defector from Decadence:
  • Paarthurnax.
  • Serana from Dawnguard if you don't join the vampires.
  • You, from the Thalmor, if you play an Altmer.
• Deflector Shields:
  • The ward spells from the Restoration school block magic spells directed at you. It even forms a glowy hemisphere of light in front of you. It also disrupts a Fus Ro Dah shout by directing the force around the caster, so if you see a mage throw up a shield like that, don't bother with Unrelenting Force until they drop it.
  • The Spellbreaker is a physical shield that projects a Deflector Shield when defending. While blocking, Spellbreaker creates a ward that protects against spells for up to 50 points. At first, it may seem weak compared to other, more powerful ward spells, like Greater Ward (which can negate up to 80 points of spell damage). However, it stacks with the Elemental Protection perk, which reduces incoming fire, frost, and shock damage by 50% while blocking, and any leftover damage will be absorbed by the shield's ward effect. The best part is that it costs no Magicka. This makes the Spellbreaker one of the best shields to be used against mages and dragons.
• Degraded Boss: Dragons. At the beginning of the game, every time you encounter a dragon it feels like an adequately epic battle, especially with the music that accompanies it. By the end of the game (or some levels into it, considering that this game doesn't actually "end") you will be able to force dragons to the ground and kill them with a few hits in under 10 seconds before the music even has a chance to kick in. They become more of a nuisance than an epic battle... at least until you start meeting the Elder and Ancient Dragons (which, in turn, only lasts until you start outleveling them too). Dawnguard adds even higher-level Revered and Legendary Dragons to help balance things out.
• Deliberately Monochrome: The game's lighting engine desaturates somewhat during cloudy or rainy weather, and goes almost entirely grayscale during snowstorms (such as when climbing the Throat of the World).
• Dem Bones:
  • While most ruins are filled with zombie-like Draugr, you'll still run into walking Skeletons from time to time in various ruins. Their bones make a very satisfying clatter when they fly apart upon getting killed. Skeletons appear in various necromancer hideouts and Draugr crypts, though they're pretty pathetic overall, save for the really tough ones.
  • In the quest "The Break of Dawn" for the Daedric Prince of Life Meridia, the Dragonborn must clear her temple of Corrupted Shades, the ghostly skeletons of Stormcloaks and Imperial soldiers, commanded by the evil necromancer Malkoran (who himself turns into one after he dies). Being skeletons, the Unrelenting Force shout merely stuns them and they pack a serious punch, especially to the unprepared.
  • Skeleton Dragons too. These are encountered in Labyrinthian, or if you interrupt Alduin's resurrection of a Dragon at any of the dragon burial sites.
  • Dawnguard has a few tougher skeleton variants, such as ones dressed in Ancient Nordic armor or others that resemble the Dark Guardians from Oblivion called Corrupted Shades. The main quest of the expansion also involves a trip to the Soul Cairn, home of the Bonemen, Mistmen and Wrathmen. You can learn to summon all three if you find the spell tomes lying around.
• Demonic Possession: Boethiah, the Daedric Price of Plots (and Murder, Deceit, Betrayal, etc.) communicates with the player by taking over the dead body of one of her followers. However, Boethiah finds mortal flesh "distasteful", which could explain the rarity of this occurrence. (As seen elsewhere in the series', it is basically a Brown Note to immortal beings for them to have to experience limitation or mortality.)
• Departure Means Death: The dragon Durnheviir in the Dawnguard DLC was trapped in the Soul Cairn by a Deal with the Devil, and his body is now so attuned to the Soul Cairn's magic that trying to return to his home in Tamriel and live there permanently would eventually kill him. He can, however, survive being summoned to Tamriel for short periods of time.
• Depleted Phlebotinum Shells: You can find the schematics for enhanced crossbow bolts in the Dawnguard DLC. Basically, just mix a few bolts with some elemental salts, and you've got exploding fire, exploding ice, and exploding lightning bolts!
• Derelict Graveyard: An easily missed location is The Pilgrim's Trench. It's pretty deep so you'll need waterbreathing, either via magic (i.e. spells, potions, or enchantments) or a racial ability (i.e. play as an Argonian) to explore it.
• Destroy the Abusive Home: Aventus Aretino eventually calls the Dark Brotherhood against the abusive matron, Grelod the Kind. When the player character goes to seek out information on her, she's so utterly unlikable that the only question is how to kill her in the most horrific way. The player may decide to kill her even without ever running into Aventus, because she's so awful!
• Destroyer Deity:
  • Alduin, who has already eaten the world over and over. However, he isn't the Big Bad because he's trying to do his job, but rather because he decided to shirk it and Take Over the World instead of waiting until the right time to destroy it.
  • The series also has Mehrunes Dagon, the Daedric Prince of Destruction, who was the Big(ger) Bad of Oblivion. If the Mythic Dawn questline is followed in Skyrim, he puts in an appearance at its end.
• Destructive Saviour: The Dragonborn can save a town from a Dragon attack, but potentially leave half the population dead from the crossfire.
• The Determinator: If you have a high enough bounty (1000G or more), city guards will attack/arrest you on sight, and if you try to run, they will chase you all the way across a hold if they can. Some players have been chased by them all the way up the Throat Of The World.
• Developer's Foresight: See here.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: The Dragonborn does this by definition with their ability to kill reality-warping immortal abominations and eat their souls. In the main quest, you go to Sovngarde and have to beat Tsun, an avatar of Zenithar, to proceed.
• Did You Just Scam Cthulhu?: Mercer Frey stole an artifact from a Daedric Prince. There is no requirement for the player to return the key themselves, and it's perfectly possible to survive without the gifts you get from it, so you can use the key for the rest of the game, basically doing the same as Frey.
• Diegetic Character Creation: After the Dragonborn is taken prisoner and led to be executed, one of the soldiers notices that you're not on the list and asks who you are, at which point the character customisation menu comes up. Also, outside of mods or cheats, the only legit way to cosmetically alter your face and hair after character creation requires to visit the Face Sculptor, who is acknowledged in-universe to provide such a service.
• Diegetic Soundtrack Usage: A variation. The lyrics for "Dragonborn" can be found in-game in the book Songs of Skyrim, along with a translation. Ironically, the tune that goes with the lyrics has been lost to time in-universe. You know, that tune you have probably heard a hundred times over. It has been suggested by some players that the correct tune is the one heard in Sovngarde, where the song is effectively on continuous repeat.
• Diligent Draft Animal: Invoked by the Steed Stone, which increases the player's carrying capacity by 100 points, removes all movement penalties from heavy armor, and makes armor weightless when worn by the player.
• Dirty Old Man: Delvin Mallory in the Ragged Flagon has at least once attempted to peek at Vex taking a bath in the lake. He can also be seen swing-and-a-miss flirting with Vex in a random conversation.
• Disc-One Final Dungeon: After delving into the huge dungeon of Blackreach to find the Elder Scroll, you use it to learn Dragonrend from the warriors in the past, just in time for a climactic showdown with Alduin — as Dragonrend is the only power that could bring him down. This is it! ...then he flees, and you still have several more quests and another ancient dungeon to go through before you can even reach the place he retreated to, to say nothing of what needs to be done there before the actual final fight.
• Disintegrator Ray: Shock-based spells can be upgraded to eventually reduce their targets to piles of dust if the target is at low health. This is good for one simple reason: enemy necromancers can't revive a pile of dust!
• Disc-One Nuke: The series has its own page. In general, provided you know where to go and what to do, there's nothing stopping you from heading out and getting late-game gear the moment you leave Helgen.
• Disney Villain Death: Using Unrelenting Force on someone so that they fall to their doom is a very convenient way of getting rid of your enemies, including Mercer Frey. It also affords a bit of Loophole Abuse, if for some reason you want to kill someone but can't find a way to do it stealthily. Just get them into a place where you can blast them off a high-enough ledge to kill them; their death as a result of the fall will not be held on you. Thus, you can literally get away with murder as long as you don't mind paying a 40 septim bounty for assault. And the physics are a lot less forgiving than they were in the previous games. Remember how in previous games an enemy you knocked over a railing would suddenly teleport back up, or fall 3-5 stories and take only a sliver of damage? Not here. Now even a gently sloping path can mean certain death.
• Disproportionate Retribution:
  • People put a bounty on you similar to assault for killing a chicken.
  • People you steal from might send thugs after you; the thugs' contract says they don't have to kill you, but the person who hired them won't mind if they do, and they certainly do try. This can happen even if you just stole an incredibly cheap book from them and paid off the bounty.
  • The Dragonborn can respond to the clerical error that nearly resulted in your execution by joining the Stormcloaks and driving the Empire out of Skyrim. If you join the Dark Brotherhood, you can take it a step further and kill the Emperor.
  • If you're angry enough about the deaths of your 'family' in the Dark Brotherhood questline, you can take it further by not only murdering the Emperor, but also joining up with the Stormcloaks and kicking the Empire and the Penitus Oculatus out of Skyrim entirely.
• Disproportionate Reward:
  • Due to the way favors work, several can turn into this. You can do a menial task for someone such as chopping wood or giving them a drink, and from that point on, you can sleep in their beds and take almost anything not nailed down.
  • Occasionally inverted as well, when you are given a Herculean task with a disproportionately small reward. Jarl/Steward wants you to go kill an Elder Dragon on a nearby summit? That's fine... but the 500 gold bounty may not even cover the cost of the arrows and potions you used to kill it. (At least there's usually a Word Wall to somewhat make up for that, and Dragons usually drop decent loot.)
  • Due to the way rewards scale with you, sometimes you can do a simple task (such as fetching a few ores) and be rewarded with an Enchanted Daedric Battleaxe. Other times you could be asked to collect some gems for someone, only to have them reward you with gems or jewelry worth several times the value of what you turned in.
• Distant Sequel: Skyrim takes place several centuries after the events of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, following a number of wars, political upheavals, and a massive volcanic eruption that devastated Oblivion's setting.
• Divide and Conquer: A tactic of the Thalmor, and one that the Empire's secessionist movements risk playing right into.
• Does Not Like Magic: Distrust of mages is common among the Nords, for several reasons. Past wars fought against the magically-inclined Falmer and the current situation with the Aldmeri Dominion has led to magic being seen as the tool of cowardly and effete elves, whereas Nords rely on their martial prowess and valour. After much of Winterhold was destroyed and the College was left miraculously unscathed, many people believed that the mages were at least partly responsible. Jarls will often keep a Court Mage handy to advise on matters magical, but these experts are still accorded little respect. One student at the College mentions how his family disowned him for wanting to attend. However, Nords do usually show respect for healers (Skyrim being a place where Everything Is Trying to Kill You means their skills are often called upon) and enchanters (Nords scoff at spellcasters but have little issue with using magical weapons and armour), as well as practitioners of the Thu'um. Ancient Nords, on the other hand, recognised the importance of magic: their stories tell of "Clever Men", mighty Magic Knight heroes who supplemented their formidable swordplay with arcane arts, just as adept at hurling a shard of magic ice they were at summoning a magic blade into their hands and expertly carving through enemies. When you visit Sovngarde in the main questline, the heroic Nord afterlife is home to a fair few honoured dead wearing wizard robes, and one person even is clearly wearing the robes of the Archmage of the College of Winterhold!
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • The Thalmor's plan is nearly identical to that of the Time Lords - both plans were to destroy reality to ascend as gods, and the plans were mainly instigated by the higher-ups while most of the rest simply wanted peace.
  • The Dwemer were almost impossibly technologically advanced, lived in isolation from the rest of the world, and quite possibly poked the boundaries of reality just a little too hard, causing the disappearance of their entire race from the whole of Skyrim (if not all of Tamriel). They left behind a gigantic settlement which has become little more than a rarely-heard legend. Blackreach and the Dwemer are basically the Tamrielic equivalent of the lost continent of Atlantis and its people.
• The Dog Bites Back:
  • You can invoke this trope against Arondil, a necromancer who uses the undead spirits of women as sex slaves. If you steal the soul gem from the pedestal behind him, you can rob him of control of his undead servants, which results in two of his slaves murdering him.
  • There's also the advent of the An-Xileel Empire that took place in the 200 year gap between Oblivion and Skyrim, where the Argonians of Black Marsh invaded what was left of Morrowind in vengeance for the hundreds of years of slavery that the Dunmer had put them through.
• Domesticated Dinosaurs: Giants herd woolly mammoths. The relationship is said to be symbiotic, with the mammoths allowing the Giants to milk them and create cheese in exchange for the Giants' protection.
• Do Not Drop Your Weapon:
  • Averted. The Disarm perk in the Block skill tree allows you to bash weapons out of an enemy's hands. The "Disarm" Dragon Shout does the same thing — which is bad news for you when you face higher-level Draugr that can use that Shout. After being killed, enemies usually lose their grip on their weapons. You can still loot the corpses to get the weapons, but you can also just pick up the weapon itself.
  • Less logical is that an enemy will drop his or her weapon even if you killed them before they could draw it, like when killing them from stealth. It's as if the magnet holding their bow/greatsword/warhammer to their back died with them.
• Doomed Predecessor:
  • While exploring the abandoned Dwemer city of Blackreach, you can find the corpse of Sinderion, an alchemist who previously appeared in Oblivion. His journal indicates that he undertook an expedition into the city in order to investigate a new subspecies of nirnroot that had mutated within the caverns, and expresses his hopes that the monsters that now live in the city would allow him to gather samples unhindered.
  • During the quest "Darkness Returns", you explore the Twilight Sepulcher, a temple to the Daedric Prince Nocturnal, and learn that two of the last visitors were a pair of thieves named Anders and Nystrom, who posed as Nocturnal cultists while planning to heist some treasure. Nystrom's corpse is found near the entrance, with a journal advising you on how to proceed through the sepulcher safely, while Anders is found in a dry well near the sepulcher's end, along with a note revealing that he slit Nystrom's throat and starved to death because he couldn't escape the well without Nocturnal's artifact, the Skeleton Key (which your character has acquired during the previous quest).
  • The Dawnguard DLC adds the quest "Lost to the Ages" in the Dwemer ruins of Bthalft and the Aetherium Forge within. Inside, you encounter the ghost of Katria, an adventurer who died trying to locate the forge. She will act as a guide throughout the quest. Humorously, you can find her dead body in the ruin. If you take Katria's clothes when you examine her corpse for her journal, she will comment about her lost dignity.
• Door to Before:
  • A lot of dungeons have passages at the end of the dungeon that will lead back to the beginning of the dungeon. Sometimes it's a barred door or a false wall; other times, the dungeon simply takes you over a bridge or ledge overlooking the earlier chambers, and you can jump down as a shortcut. It's also occasionally inverted — in Kagrenzel, for example, the dungeon begins by dropping you deep into the center of the dungeon, then you have to fight your way out.
  • An overlook built into a Dwemer ruin seems to be made solely so you can fast travel afterwards, as it leads directly to a balcony overlooking the side of a mountain. Unless the devs expected you to slide down the side of the mountain (in which one slip could very likely kill you), there is no way to actually "exit" the balcony without going back inside and walking to the entrance.
  • A notable example is in Swindler's Den, where the "door" to before is actually an open, normally unreachable passage from the last room. However, one can abuse the rock wall beneath it to jump up, which makes the quest involving this dungeon a much simpler affair.
  • Normally, to fight the Dragon Priest Volsung in Volskygge and claim his Cool Mask requires you to make your way through the dungeon to the top of the mountain to reach his sarcophagus. However, you can bypass the whole ordeal by simply climbing the mountain from the outside, which doesn't even require any glitch exploits to achieve.
• Doppelgänger Spin: Sigdis Gauldurson in Geirmund's Hall has the ability to create two clones. The clones die in one hit, but all three can shoot arrows and use Unrelenting Force. If you destroy them, he teleports and does it again, forcing you to keep picking them off until he's dead. The second time around, he has three times as many, but the platforms are easy to reach so you can run up and melee them. The real one's helmet has different horns. This makes it easy to pick him off if you pay attention. Also, his health bar will show damage while the clones are always at full health.
• Double Standard: Invoked by a secessionist at the wedding of Vittoria Vici. He asks a loyalist what the difference is between the Empire's dealings with the Thalmor compared to Skyrim. She claims they had to fight back because the Thalmor were foreign invaders who threatened their way of life. His response? "My point exactly." He does gloss over the fact that Skyrim is still technically Empire territory, but he most likely means the way the Empire's ban of Talos worship is "invading" their way of life.
• Do Well, But Not Perfect: If you want to completely root out the cannibal coven from Markarth, you have to take a few "immoral" actions during the questline: you have to help the cannibals eradicate the Draugr from their hideout, agree to deliver Brother Verulus to them as a "dinner guest", convince him to follow you to Reachcliff Cave (which most likely will require either lying or bribery), allow Eola to hypnotize him, and then finally turn on the gathered cannibals and kill them all. By contrast, if you simply choose to kill Eola outright during your first meeting, the other cannibals will still be free to wander the city and there's no way for you to (legally) take them out.
• Downer Beginning: You awaken to find yourself on a prison transport with a few Stormcloak rebels, having been caught while trying to cross a border, and are on your way to be executed alongside the Stormcloaks. Then a dragon shows up...
• Downer Ending: Dragonborn. Sure, Miraak's defeated, but Hermaeus Mora, the true instigator of the conflict, not only gets away scot-free with his crimes, but forcibly makes the Dragonborn his "champion". The Skaal's leader is dead, the secrets they've spent centuries guarding from Mora are gone, and the Dragonborn is left with the knowledge that they were nothing but Mora's Cosmic Plaything all along and that they will likely end up suffering the same fate as Miraak once Mora no longer needs them.
• Downloadable Content: A high-res texture pack was released in February 2012. There are also two bigger expansions, Dawnguard (June 27, 2012; the Dragonborn is given the choice to join or fight a group of vampires), and Dragonborn (December 4, 2012; it involves the very first Dragonborn on the island of Solstheim). A more minor DLC, Hearthfire (September 4, 2012), adds the ability to adopt children and build houses. All the DLC was incorporated into the base content in remastered versions released in later years, such as the Nintendo Switch version.
• Down the Drain: The town of Riften has extensive sewers which double as the lair of the Thieves' Guild.
• Dracolich:
  • Skeleton Dragons. Subverted, though, in that they are a lot less powerful than their living counterpart, and incapable of flying.
  • Durnehviir is implied to be one, after staying in the Soul Cairn for too long.
• The Dragon:
  • Alduin's got a literal one in Odahviing.
  • Legate Rikke for General Tullius.
  • Galmar Stone-Fist for Ulfric Stormcloak.
  • Odahviing post Heel–Face Turn as another literal example for the Dragonborn.
  • After completing the Stormcloak quest chain up to right before the Battle for Solitude, Ulfric himself declares you the mightiest of the Stormcloaks and as close to him as kin. You are thus dubbed his personal champion: Stormblade. Fridge Brilliance: Due to the similarity between titles and Stormblade being a unique title, it might be the case that Ulfric granted you a cadet clan name that your descendents could use (even if you are not a Nord).
• Dragon Hoard:
  • There are often treasure chests near dragon dens.
  • On a metaphysical level, your inventory. Combine the fact that the Dragonborn is on a spiritual level a dragon, and the classic player propensity to have huge amounts of crap in their inventory...
• Dragon Rider: Dovahkiin, atop Odahviing to find the portal to Sovngarde. Expanded on in the Dragonborn DLC, where this becomes a game mechanic once one gets all three words of Bend Will.
• The Dragons Come Back: Dragons have been extinct for over a thousand years, and now they're being resurrected by Alduin.
• The Dragonslayer: The Empire's elite soldiers, known as "the Blades", got their fame from killing dragons. They, however, pale in comparison to the Dragonborn, who can kill a dragon and ensure it stays dead.
• Dramatic Choir Number: The soundtrack consists of the "barbarian choir" on many songs, particularly the theme song "Dragonborn" which is sung in the game's dragon language.
• Dramatic Irony:
  • There's a mission you accept from a boy who escaped from an orphanage. He hires you to kill the headmistress who is exceptionally cruel to the orphans. After you do so, the orphans cheer that the headmistress has been killed. After you visit the boy who escaped and collect your payment, a soldier might tell you about the murder (that you performed) and comment "The children must be devastated."
  • Jarl Laila Law-Giver assures you that her associate, Maven Black-Briar, is cracking down on the Thieves' Guild's presence in Riften. It doesn't take you three seconds of playing the Thieves' Guild questline for you to realize that Maven is the single biggest sponsor of the Thieves' Guild's activities.
• The Dreaded:
  • The Dragonborn is this to Dragonkind, for a very good reason.
  • The music that plays during Dragon-battles is titled, appropriately enough, "The One They Fear".
• Dream Weaver: As noted in the in-game book The Dreamstride, the potion Vaermina's Torpor allows people to enter others' dreams. You get to use it in Vaermina's daedric quest.
• Dressing as the Enemy:
  • You can do this during the "Diplomatic Immunity" quest, where you infiltrate the Thalmor Embassy. With the help of a Hooded Thalmor Robe, you can get through most of the Embassy without having to fight the guards. This obviously works the best if you're an Altmer yourself. Characters of other elven races, and especially human races must keep their distance from the guards, or they will realize the PC is an intruder. Characters of beast races can't do this at all. If you're an Altmer, you can actually order other guards around, making your job immensely easier.
  • Both "A False Front" and "To Kill an Empire" gives you opportunities to dress as an enemy soldier or a cook respectively. The only difference is dialogue options.
  • Even enemies can try this tactic, such as bandits impersonating Imperials to extort you or vampires posing as Vigilants of Stendarr to get you to drop your guard. This is a fairly obvious ploy due to the fact that the disguise will be wrong in more than one way and the actual owners of the armor are visibly dead nearby. In the former example, you can even call them out as fakes (if Imperial-aligned) or taunt them (if Stormcloak-aligned).
• Driven to Suicide:
  • Astrid. She sells the player out to Commander Maro in order to save the sanctuary, but he sends his forces to attack anyway. Badly burned in the attack, she uses the last of her energy to perform the Black Sacrament with her own body to put a contract on herself, acknowledging her failings.
  • Tova Shatter-Shield if you kill her remaining daughter.
  • Sudi, a member of the massacred Redguard family that owned Frostflow Lighthouse. She cut her wrists to avoid a Fate Worse than Death at the hands of the Falmer.
• Drone of Dread: The Soul Cairn world theme. Some of the Tamriel Night world themes, to a lesser extent; especially Night Theme 6, which combines droning with ominous chanting and moments of One-Woman Wail, yet still is more melodic than intimidating.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him:
  • Not really characters, but between The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and this game, both lands from the previous two games have changed for the worse. Vvardenfell, the main setting of the third game, has exploded, because it was a volcano and is hit by a huge floating rock (as a decades-later consequence of the game's events, no less). And Cyrodiil, the setting of the fourth game, is recuperating from being savaged by a war with Nazi elves. This can be a bit harsh to longtime players of the series, who helped save both lands and spent countless of hours in them, but it does well to prove that saving the world doesn't equate to saving the realm.
  • Skjor of the Companions and Mirabelle Ervine of the College of Winterhold are both killed off behind the player's back without much of an explanation; and in the latter's case, no one really seems to remember them later.
• Dual Boss: Naaslaarum and Voslaarum, the twin dragons in Forgotten Vale. Also possible if you accidentally get too close to the Word Wall at Shearpoint and wake up both the dragon and the dragon priest Krosis at the same time.
• Dual Wielding:
  • Any one-handed weapon can be equipped in either hand, allowing for dual wielding or left-handed swordfighting - both firsts for the Elder Scrolls series (though Daggerfall had a rough version).
  • This also extends to dual spellcasting as well: a spell in each hand. You can also use the same spell in each hand for a more powerful version of that spell, at the cost of a substantially higher cost in magicka - if you're worried about running out, using separate casts to machinegun the spells, without actually dual-casting, is more magicka-efficient, in some cases greatly so.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?:
  • You could be the Slayer of Alduin, Thane, a high-ranking member in the Legion or Stormcloaks, Archmage of the College Of Winterhold and a full-fledged member of the Companions, and there'll still be the occasional dick guard taunting you about reporting a stolen sweetroll; never mind the fact that if you did steal a sweetroll and someone reported it, that same guard would be on your ass in a second. Don't expect any parades in your honor after the main quest, either - though oddly enough, you do get recognition for finishing the Civil War quest. This is due to a programming quirk; as you progress up the ranks of various organizations and perform various superhuman feats, the NPCs will start to say more respectful dialogue, but they will never stop using any of older dialogue from way back when you were just starting out. So a guard would end up complimenting you and insult you immediately after.
  • Don't try assaulting Thalmor soldiers near any Imperial strongholds; they won't appreciate you attacking them purely out of spite due to an uneasy treaty declaration between them. (If you provoke them into attacking you first, though, the Imperial troops won't raise a finger, and if you're allied with the Empire they'll jump to your defense.) On the other hand, Stormcloaks will happily help you kill any Thalmor you come across if they are nearby; being allied with the Stormcloaks just makes them all the more enthusiastic to bash elven skulls.
  • Averted every time you kill a dragon, leaving any NPC witnesses to stand staring slack-jawed in awe... and then played straight once more when one of the guards picks up their jaw and tell you to "stop that... shouting", the very shouting you used to bring the dragon down. However, since those same bystanders will show the exact same awe if it happens again, they apparently don't find it all that memorable.
  • Also when joining the Companions, Vilkas always says to Kodlak that he's never even heard of you, despite the fact you could be Thane of Whiterun after having killed the dragon threatening the city, be Arch-Mage of the College of Winterhold, have destroyed the Dark Brotherhood, be a high-ranking member of the Stormcloaks/Legion, revived Whiterun's Gildergreen... and so much more.
  • The Thieves' Guild - you can be the Guild Master and there will still be those who treat you like a brand new recruit, and a completely unpromising one at that. In fact, during the ceremony of putting you in the position, Maven Black-Briar is there, and after you are awarded the position the first thing she says to you is "Now don't screw it up!". The roadside muggings are an exception — if you are a guild member, they'll actually apologize for threatening you, and if you finished the quest they'll recognize you as a Nightingale and give you a gift to thank you.
  • Averted in the theft/friendship mechanic. The NPCs might not be much friendlier, but if you do something for them, you'll find you're allowed to take things from their house/store that would have previously been considered theft.
  • In the Dragonborn DLC, when Neloth tries to treat you like a servant, you can actually call him on this and he'll respond. That being said, he's a lot better about handing out rewards in this game than he was in Morrowind.
    Neloth: If you were my servant, you'd have my apple stew, wouldn't you? Very well, I suppose you want to be asked nicely. "Oh great "hero" of Skyrim, please oh please would you do me this noble deed?"
  • Bounties are ridiculously small given the effort involved. Defeat an entire bandit clan? One hundred gold reward. Take down a giant? One hundred gold reward. Killing a Dragon? You probably got more gold from the Dragon's remains than from the Jarl that sent you.
  • Erikur in Solitude will snootily explain to you that he's a Thane, and why that's so wonderful and you ought to show some respect. Unfortunately, there's no option to respond to this with a list of all the holds across Skyrim of which you may have been made Thane by the time of your first conversation - which, if you don't speak to him until after it's done, can include Haafingar itself, meaning that you and Erikur are of equal standing in the Blue Palace court.
• Dude, Where's My Reward?: In the Dragonborn DLC, Master Neloth returns and is a major part of the DLC's main quest. While he is decidedly better about giving you tangible rewards, one of his offers is to make you a member of Great House Telvanni when he returns to Vvardenfell. He then makes a note that he has no intention of returning to Vvardenfell anytime soon and, if you're not one of the longer lived races, implies that this may very well be beyond your lifespan (thus making the gesture entirely meaningless).
• Duel Boss:
  • Late in the main quest, you must enter Sovngarde, the Warrior Heaven of Nordic mythology, alone in pursuit of Alduin. Here, you meet Tsun, the old Nordic god of "trials against adversity" and shield-thane of Shor. He tests warrior spirits for their worthiness to enter Shor's Hall of Valor, and the Dragonborn is no exception. Tsun will need to be defeated in single combat, and he is a tough foe with Contractual Boss Immunity to essentially everything but direct damage attacks.
  • In the Dragonborn DLC, the Dragonborn must face Miraak, the Evil Counterpart Big Bad of the DLC storyline, alone. You can only fight him by entering a realm of Oblivion which your companions cannot enter. However, Miraak is aided by two dragons — though you tame a third to even the playing field.
• Dug Too Deep:
  • There's a DLC quest where you help fund a mining expedition. Since it's under this trope, they awaken the local equivalent of graveyard zombies and get slaughtered, and you need to clear it out so another team of miners can be sent in. Then it happens again. The third time around, your partner hires mercenaries, but this means that only some of the miners are alive when you get there. The fourth time, you finally kill the Dragon Priest causing all these problems. Your partner's journal implies that unleashing the Priest was his goal all along. The miners were deliberately set up to be sacrifices in the Priest's name.
  • Two smaller examples appear in the settlements of Soljund's Sinkhole and Shor's Stone. In the former, the two miners inhabiting the area had dug into a draugr crypt build beneath and mine, forcing them to abandon it. In the latter, spiders have taken over the local mine in town. However, no explanation is given as to where the spider came from.
  • Liar's Retreat is a bandit lair that unfortunately happened to intersect a Falmer colony. Most of the bandits have been slaughtered, save one who barred himself in a room. Once you've cleared the place, the bandit chief and some flunkies show up, shocked by the massacre.
• Dump Stat: While Skyrim does away with the series' traditional attributes, it does have a few Dump Skills that would be inefficient to waste perk points on. In particular, there is Lockpicking. Picking a lock is a mini-game based more on player skill. A high Lockpicking skill makes it somewhat easier (and saves you from breaking as many lockpicks), but a skilled player can easily pick even the highest leveled locks with a minimum Lockpicking Skill and the typical player will easily accrue well over 99 lockpicks anyway.
• Dungeon Bypass:
  • It seems Delphine pulled off one of these in pilfering the Horn of Jurgen Windcaller. She could not have gone the straightforward route, as there is a speed puzzle that can only be completed by one who can practically use at least one Word of the "Whirlwind Sprint" Shout. There are subtle clues around the dungeon backdoor and the room that the Horn is in that she pried the backdoor open: there is a soul gem caster turret that is lacking any soul gem on the front-end of the backdoor, and a few draugr around Jurgen's tomb have already sprung out of their sarcophagi and have been cut down. And of course, the most obvious clue: she swiped the Horn.
  • Your search for an Elder Scroll in the main questline requires you to go to a Dwarven ruin called Alftand, from which you access Blackreach, through which you'll be crossing half of Skyrim to get to the place where it's held. Or you can access Blackreach from Mzinchaleft, which is much closer and lets you skip most of Blackreach.
  • A decidedly unintentional one can occur in Volskygge. The dungeon leads to the top of a mountain, where a unique Dragon Priest and a Word Wall are located. However, the mountain is not particularly steep, and due to Skyrim's wonky physics, if you know what you're doing, it's not hard at all to just climb the damn thing, bypassing the whole draugr-infested ruin and getting straight to the Priest and the Word Wall. If you just poke your nose into the ruin from what is supposed to be the exit, you can also loot its boss chest in the process (although you might have to deal with the draugr miniboss guarding it unless you're particularly sneaky).
• Dungeon Crawling: Lampshaded by Farengar, the Court Mage of Whiterun. Most quests seem to involve "delving into an ancient ruin" to defeat a particular enemy or to acquire an item for the Quest Giver.
• Dungeon Town: Helgen, where you first get control of the character, gets attacked by a dragon, forcing you to escape through caves accessed from the Keep. If you return to the ruins of Helgen later on, bandits will have set up camp there. Also, during the Civil war questline, depending on what side you fight on, the cities of Solitude or Windhelm will end up being the sites of the final battle. If you joined the Stormcloaks, you'll also have to fight through Whiterun to conquer the city.
• Durable Deathtrap:
  • The Nordic necropoles and Dwemer ruins are filled to the brim with these. In the latter case, this has been Justified with the explanation that the Dwemer were so ridiculously advanced that everything they made was impervious to aging, in addition to having maintenance robots still running around.
  • You find out that at least one Draugr infested barrow actually has enslaved all of the Draugr to awaken at set intervals to perform maintenance duties, before returning to their crypts. Unsurprisingly, the ones who hint at this are often filled to the brim with traps (usually the giant axe and poisoned arrow kind).
• Dwindling Party:
  • The final story mission of the Companions has the Dragonborn set out with the rest of the Circle to posthumously cure Kodlak Whitemane of his lycanthropy at the Tomb of Ysgramor. But as soon as you get there, Vilkas explains that he cannot actually enter the tomb with you because he is too ashamed of the actions he took at Driftshade when the two of you exterminated the Silver Hand as vengeance for Kodlak's death, but wishes you well. Then, after a few fights against the spirits of the original Companions further into the Tomb, Farkas decides he can go no further thanks to the way being blocked by giant Frostbite Spiders, of which he has a phobia, and he turns back, leaving only you and Aela the Huntress to finish.
  • During the College of Winterhold questline, as you journey through Labyrinthian, you see the ghosts of the former arch-mage, Savos Aren, and his group of friends reliving their exploration of the tomb from when they were young apprentices. The farther you go, the smaller their party gets, as they get picked off one by one by the dangers of the place. In the end, only Savos and two companions are left, and he sacrifices them by enthralling them to seal Morokei in the tomb.
  • In Avanchnzel and the associated quest "Unfathomable Depths," you can witness the ghosts of the explorer party going in there to loot the "treasure" at the end, which turns out to be a lexicon containing ancient Dwarven knowledge. Like the Labyrinthian quest, you slowly encounter the corpses of the explorers, usually being killed off by whatever is in the next room (although one died of a clumsy accident). Unlike the Labyrinthian one, though, not all of them are ghosts, as you get the quest from the one explorer who actually did escape (with it being implied that you are seeing her poltergeist more than anything else). Unfortunately, she's been driven mad by the lexicon, which is why you have to return it.
• Dying Town:
  • Winterhold was once a grand, vibrant city that rivaled Solitude and Whiterun in sheer glamor and splendor. Then an earthquake sent 99.9% of the city (and indeed, the Hold itself) into the Sea of Ghosts. No one knows what exactly caused what became known as the Great Collapse, but many people, including the current Jarl of Winterhold, believes that the College of Winterhold is connected somehow. Ironically, the College itself is now the only reason anyone still cares about Winterhold. The replacement Jarl (if the Imperials win the Civil War) recognizes the reality of the situation and wants to foster good relations with the College.
  • Ivarstead. The only real industries offer in the town are the lumber mill (which is mentioned as doing terrible business lately thanks to Skyrim's bear population), some small farms, and the local inn, and even then the whispers of the local barrow being haunted have only scared more people away from visiting the little hamlet. One man is reluctant to allow his daughter to go to Riften with her new paramour partly because Ivarstead will have no future if more of the younger generation leaves. The main attraction of Ivarstead is that it is the closest settlement to the Throat of the World, the mountain where the legendary Graybeards reside.
  • The town of Raven Rock on Solstheim also falls into this category. Previously a trading post set up by the East Empire Company during the Third Era, when the island of Solstheim was handed over by Skyrim to Morrowind to help with the latter's refugee crisis following the Red Year it became a boom town ruled by House Redoran based around its lucrative ebony mine. Unfortunately, as the ebony mine dried up, so did any real business, and what is now left of Raven Rock is a depressing shell of its former self. Even worse, the previously mighty Bulwark — a massive defensive wall constructed to protect the town from the ash covering the southern half of Solstheim — is breaking down from disrepair, slowly flooding the town with ash and choking out the town's attempt to switch to fishing for income. Oh, and there's also the slowly escalating attacks by the Ash Spawn and Miraak infiltrating the minds of the town's residents while they sleep to help him escape Apocrypha. However, the Last Dragonborn can help reverse the town's decline through investigating the town's mine (uncovering more ebony deposits), slaying the Dragon Priest infesting the bottom of the mine, and killing the resurrected Falx Carius in Fort Frostmoth, preventing the Ash Spawn from being organized into a legitimate fighting force.

E

• Early-Bird Cameo:
  • Anyone who played the Bloodmoon expansion for Morrowind two games ago will be in familiar territory. Solstheim, the island where that expansion took place, was basically a mini-Skyrim, full of Nords and mead with werewolves and deadly Spriggans running about. The actual Solstheim returns as the setting for the Dragonborn DLC, and its southern half is now a mini-Morrowind, with ash fall, netches, and Redoran and Telvanni settlements with their associated architecture.
  • The quest "Ill Met By Moonlight" is actually the Fourth Era's incarnation of the Bloodmoon event that made up much of the expansion's main quest (which is said to happen once an era).
• Early Game Hell: While the game tries to avert this by having dynamic difficulty that spawns level-appropriate enemies, it's extremely far from being fully reliable, especially when it comes to beast enemies whose base forms are already more than a match for a weak Dragonborn. You can expect to occasionally run into things such as hostile Sabre Cats and bears very early on, far earlier than you can reliably take them on, turning these beasts into Demonic Spiders that you'll probably do a whole lot of running away from until you grow strong enough to turn the tables.
• Easy Exp: The game will give you a free level in the Speech skill if you try to "persuade" the guard before entering Whiterun. You also get a free Speech level for pointing out the guard in front of Riften's scam. It's impossible to fail these speech events.
• Easy Levels, Hard Bosses: Most of the enemies in a particular dungeon will be spawned as "easy" encounters, with a few stronger but not impossible foes mixed in here and there. Bosses, however, will usually be marked as hard or extremely hard enemies, and will often have ten times as much health as their minions, along with resistances and inflict massive damage with their weapons.
• Eaten Alive: Dragons tend to have pieces of armor when you loot their skeletons. Mirmulnir in particular will always carry a full set of Whiterun guard armor after being slain. No points for guessing where the armor came from.
• Eat the Summoner: Occurs in the in-game book A Tragedy In Black, wherein a child uses a spell to summon a Dremora to help him enchant a dress for his mother's birthday. The Dremora offers him a Black Soul Gem (in the Elder Scrolls universe, enchanting is done by trapping and using the souls of other creatures), which the boy accepts. It turns out that accepting a gift from a conjured creature breaks the binding spell that forces it to obey the summoner's will. Fate Worse Than Death of a Child ensues.
• Easter Egg: Of the undocumented feature variety. If you click and drag with your mouse (or move the sticks on the console versions) during the loading screens, you can move the model around. Doing this with inventory is actually vital to using dragon claw keys, as they have the combination to the door on their palms. This is a case of Guide Dang It! for many players.
• Elaborate Underground Base:
  • The game continues the tradition of having countless smuggler/bandit/necromancer/etc. hideouts in the form of underground caves and ruins. Once again, many get extremely advanced. This is especially true of the old Nordic burials, which are complete underground ruins that can reach the size of full-blown cities.
  • The Dwemer ruins return in full force with plenty of great examples, many of which have been taken over by their former Slave Race, the Falmer. The Falmer are also shown to be capable of constructing elaborate networks of suspended bridges and platforms. Blackreach used to be an entire city, spanning three surface holds, but it fell into disuse when the Dwemer disappeared. Traversing them can take the better part of four hours even if you're trying to pass as quickly as possible, and you have to fight your way through a small army of Falmer, Automatons, and other nasties on the way. Easily five times as big as any of the regular barrows you'll see, they're positively packed with items, and have three different access elevators plus three more through various Dwemer ruins. There's a reason why Blackreach might have been the Dwemer capital.
• Eldritch Abomination: In the DLC Dragonborn, we finally get a look at the real Hermaeus Mora. Or at least (as the loading screen text sometimes points out), how he chooses to appear.
• Eldritch Location:
  • In the DLC Dawnguard, there's the Soul Cairn, a kind of limbo for creatures and people who have been trapped in soul gems and then used in enchanting. It is a place of eternal night, full of tormented and/or confused ghosts, piles of bones, ruins, strange fungus, giant floating crystals that absorb your health if you get too close to them, and unique and hostile shadow-like creatures everywhere.
  • In the DLC Dragonborn, we've got Hermaeus Mora's realm of Apocrypha. Aside from the Alien Sky filled with enormous tentacles (which may or may not belong to Mora himself), it's flooded with acidic green water, all the structures are either made of a vaguely organic-looking webbing or gigantic stacks of books so old that they seem to have petrified, and, thanks to several tunnels and rooms that can move/contract/rotate, it can get really disorienting. Additionally, the shadows found throughout Apocrypha will kill you if you stray into them for too long without a light source.
• Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors:
  • Subverted in Sheogorath's quest. At first it looks like you're supposed to win such a battle with the help of an atronach (Fire Atronach beats Ice Atronach, who beats Storm Atronach, who beats Fire Atronach) but then it turns out that the battle will actually go on infinitely until you turn Wabbajack on Pelagius's guards.
  • Various enemies have resistances to one type of elemental spell damage, but are also weaker to another. Flame Atronachs and Dragons that use Fire Breath, for example, have a resistance to fire spells, but are also weak to frost spells, while the opposite is true for Frost Atronachs and Dragons that use Frost Breath.
  • A more specific version of destruction magic is it each element is designed to overwhelm a certain class, Archers and thieves can be easily dispatched by fire due to the fact they like to get into shooting matches and are thus ripe for being burned alive for additional damage. Warriors should be kept away with frost spells which reduce their movement and stamina while shock spells excel at killing mages with mana burn and the off chance to hit nearby enemies in the rear.
• Elephant Graveyard: There's a mammoth graveyard due west of Loreius Farm. It's an unmarked location where the Mammoth Guardian Spirit is fought.
• Elite Mooks: Forsworn Briarhearts and Draugr Deathlords, who can take off a good 60% of a mage's health with one melee hit. If you meet one of the latter early on and you don't have a follower, expect the worst.
• Elopement: You can find a journal at a campsite near an inn on the road to Markarth. The journal belonged to the daughter of the head of a rich mining family who fell in love with one of the workers in her father's mine. She noted her father would never approve of her relationship, not only because of the class difference, but because her lover was a Dark Elf. They decided to save up some money and run away together after meeting up at the campsite. Unfortunately, they were both killed by a saber cat at the campsite. If you come back to the campsite later, you'll find a Shrine of Dibella there with various tributes strewn around it.
• The Empire:
  • The Aldmeri Dominion; they've taken over territories and have their eye on the rest of the world.
  • The Cyrodiilic Empire once again. A great deal of conflict in the game comes from the fact that a foreign power controls Skyrim, and that they can and will make decisions that the provinces don't like. But much like in Morrowind, the Empire is shown as being more tolerant than the provinces.
• Empty Levels: The removal of stats actually makes this much less of a problem, as the leveling-up system in previous Elder Scrolls games made these in combination with the Level Scaling, easily resulting in characters with a couple ridiculously high stats and others that Can't Catch Up. It still happens with the Level Scaling (making stronger opponents appear when you may not have the gear to face them). This usually only becomes an issue if you level up several times by power-leveling non-combat abilities while your combat abilities are still below par when the stronger opponents start to appear. Take note, however, that this is still played straight with some enemies that actually level up with you and has no level limit, such as Forsworn Briarhearts.
• The End of the World as We Know It: Considering the main villain is also known as 'the world eater,' many people make the obvious assumption.
• Enemy Chatter: It seems the bandits of Skyrim mostly share a common tragic backstory in which their Da told them to go to a college but they were too dumb to figure out which college, and now they need skooma—the imported stuff—just one last time. Or how after just One Last Job they'll be able to pay off their bounty and walk into the city a free man. Occasionally one comes across more unique chatter, such as a disgruntled mage in Morvunskar complaining about having to work a forge.
• Enemy Mine:
  • Can happen when fighting dragons. Since they're free-roaming and hostile to everything that moves, the player can happen across them fighting anything from bandits to mudcrabs to giants (which have a good chance of killing a low-level dragon on their own!) and team up with the dragon's prey to kill the marauding beast. Though once the dragon's dead, all bets are off...
  • In Blind Cliff Bastion, you are able to team up with a hagraven to kill another hagraven who took over her tower. All she wants is to reclaim her tower, and will reward you with a nice magical staff if you insist upon being rewarded.
  • In some areas, the player can find enemies holding other enemy types captive, such as hunters that have trapped a wolf, hagravens holding a spriggan captive, and pyromancers experimenting on vampires. Releasing the captives in such instances will often have them help you kill their captors, after which they will be non-hostile.
  • This can happen when fighting almost any type of enemy in the overworld, and not inside of a dungeon that is populated solely by that enemy type. Since there are so many different enemy factions (mages, bandits, animals, vampires, draugr, giants, etc.), just leading one type of enemy to a group of another will often make your job considerably easier. Special mention goes to the plains area west of Whiterun due to the great prevalence of giants and mammoths there. If you get jumped by a sabre cat, no problem; odds are there's a giant/mammoth in sight from wherever you are that will gladly kill it for you.
• Enemy Summoner: In the Dragonborn DLC, Seekers are a Cthulhumanoid form of lesser Daedra in service to Hermaeus Mora, the Daedric Prince of Knowledge. Seekers can summon a weaker clone of themselves to aid them in battle, and the clone will disintegrate if the Seeker is killed first.
• Enter Solution Here:
  • There are doors which have 3 symbol combination locks in addition to a claw that acts as the key. You cannot open the door without both, which would be more difficult if every single one didn't have the same method of finding the solution: Examine the back of the claw in your inventory. After you do this in one of the early story missions you will find the same method works for literally every other such door in the game, of which there are a decent number.
  • There are similar puzzles involving three to four pillars, each with three sides displaying images of animals, using the same images as on the claws. Each pillar must be rotated to show the correct image. In nearly all cases, there are statues in an arrangement mirroring the pillars, indicating the correct images to show on the pillars. Sometimes they're directly above the pillars.
• Epic Fail:
  • While doing contracts for the Dark Brotherhood, you get one for a bard who is apparently so bad, and so many people want him dead, Astrid had to use a lottery to pick a client. At least, that's what Nazir tells you when he gives it to you. Keep in mind, at this point in the Dark Brotherhood storyline, they're still relying on word of mouth to get contracts due to being down a Listener.
  • Can also happen to you if you get in Killer Camera mode but (due to low magicka or something throwing your aim off) fail to kill the enemy: a few seconds during which you'll be shown missing the shot or failing to cast the spell will allow your enemy to get a couple free hits on you.
  • Because they are taught and unlocked directly by the Greybeards, Unrelenting Force and Whirlwind Sprint are usually the first two shouts a player learns, and will be two of the most frequently used after that. Imagine, now, that you've got a tough enemy lined up along the edge of a cliff and it's a steep drop down to the bottom. You go to "FUS RO DAH" him off when suddenly, "WULD NAH KEST!" Whirlwind Sprint was the selected shout, you've zipped past the enemy, and now it is you whose corpse is tumbling to the bottom of the cliff...
  • If you insist that Chief Yamarz should be the one to defeat the giant instead of paying you to do so, he will run up to it, warhammer in hand... and promptly get sent into low orbit.
  • In one of Skyrim's many caves, you can find a unique staff called Gadnor's Staff of Charming, which by its name implies that it's supposed to cast a Calm spell or something similar. Given that you find its owner lying dead in the same cave surrounded by wild animals, and that the staff actually casts a Fury spell, it's safe to say that the staff didn't work as intended.
• Epic Hail:
  • After you slay your first dragon, the Greybeards call you up to their mountaintop temple by demonstrating the power of The Voice: even from dozens of miles away it packs enough force to be accompanied by deafening thunder!
  • Later, you can do this yourself, to summon either an undead Dragon from the Soul Cairn, or one of Alduin's former allies from his mountain home
• Equal-Opportunity Evil:
  • Just like in Oblivion, the Dark Brotherhood is by far the most evil organization you can join in the game, and the second most diverse, after the College of Winterhold. Its members include a Nord, a Dunmer, an old man, a child vampire, a former Shadowscale Argonian, a Redguard, and a werewolf.
  • In a more mundane sense, randomly-generated NPC enemies (most notably bandits) have a roughly equal chance of being any gender and any race^note though there are exceptions, namely bandits never spawning as Altmer or as female Khajiit or Argonians.
• Equipment Upgrade:
  • Series standard enchanting returns. Equipment including weapons, armor, and accessories can be "enchanted" to provide a magical effect. Weapons, for example, can be imbued with a magical element to increase their damage upon striking.
  • Skyrim expands the "Armorer" skill present previously in the series into the "Smithing" skill, which allows for the improvement of weapons and armor. Depending on your skill level and perks, you can improve a basic item through six levels of improvement from "Fine" all the way to "Legendary", drastically improving the items effectiveness as well as value.
• Escort Mission:
  • There is one as part of a quest in the village of Dawnstar. Unlike most people you travel with, he will walk at a deliberate and slow pace, will require you to stay with him or he won't continue, and he likes to stop and talk a lot. However, you need him to open a few doors and dispel a magical barrier protecting a quest-related artifact. Thankfully, he's invulnerable and can handle himself in a fight, but the pathfinding can glitch.
  • The other problem with this and some of the earlier escort missions is that Friendly Fire is in play and the escortee will turn on you. Erandur's quest is particularly susceptible to this with the tight corridors. Thankfully, later escorts (such as Serana in Dawnguard) are much more tolerant of accidental attacks.
• Establishing Character Moment:
  • Almost any time you enter the lair of a major faction leader, like a Jarl or the Thieves' Guild or Ulfric or Tullius, you find them involved in conversation with their advisers and can get a good idea of what they're like by hanging back and eavesdropping.
  • After accepting Aventus's quest to kill Grelod the Kind, you might be questioning how a child would define "evil" at their age. Then you enter the orphanage and hear her lecturing the kids that if any of them shirk their chores, they'll earn an extra beating.
  • Upon arrival in several (though not all) of the major cities, you're treated to a scene that establishes the troubles of that city. In Solitude, it's the execution of an otherwise good man who allowed Ulfric Stormcloak to escape the city after killing the High King. In Windhelm, it's racist Nords harassing a dark elf. At the Riften gates, a corrupt guard tries to shake you down and a mob tough just past the gate lets you know that the Black-Briars own the city. In Markarth, you witness the Forsworn murder a woman (and get a frigid reaction from the guard if you try to help them). In Whiterun, everything is on lockdown following word of a dragon being sighted, and when you get inside, you see a microcosm of the civil war itself: a smith unable to meet the intense economic demands of the war, demands which are caused by two feuding families' inability to reconcile their differences in the war.
  • That the first major mission for the Thieves' Guild has you performing a bit of Extortion By Vandalism upon a sympathetic shopkeeper, who barely has any cash anyway, helps establish right out of the gate that this iteration of the Thieves' Guild is a far darker, pettier, and more desperate beast than the Robin Hood-like Thieves' Guild you worked for in Oblivion.
• Eternal Engine: Dwemer ruins are full of robotic golems, pumping pistons, hissing steam and scrap metal. It probably helped that their power sources were soul gems.
• Eternal English:
  • When you read the Elder Scroll at the Time-Wound, you see a vision of a couple thousand years back, only to find that everyone speaks the same sort of English they speak in the Fourth Era (albeit much more poetically). Of course, it's possible this is an effect of the Elder Scroll, and you should be glad that reading the thing at a place called Time-Wound didn't do worse to you.
  • Serana in Dawnguard was imprisoned for centuries, yet somehow is perfectly capable of speaking modern Cyrodiilic/Nordic/whatever. Given how much time the Dragonborn spends in her company, however, this one probably qualifies for Acceptable Breaks from Reality.
• Eternal Recurrence: The Nords believe in this. Alduin eats the world, and the next cycle begins.
• Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas:
  • One tribe of bandits has the leader's uncle as a guard at the entrance to their cave, even thought he's blind and not that bright. One of the bandits outside has a note on him from the leader lecturing his men about playing tricks on his uncle and threatening them with imprisonment if they don't leave him alone.
  • Another bandit leader sends money and letters to her father, even though he always sends the money back while urging her to leave banditry before it gets her killed.
• Even Evil Can Be Loved: Serana the Friendly Neighbourhood Vampire does her best to humanize her father, the omnicidal vampire Lord Harkon. Her tragedy is that even she realizes that the parent she once loved has long been consumed by his hunger for power, and there is ultimately no way of redeeming him.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • Thrynn, one of the Thieves' Guild members, was once a bandit. He said it was good life until the day when he raided a caravan, his leader ordered him to kill the defenseless women and children For the Evulz, and he refused and killed the leader instead.
  • Mjoll the Lioness, when asked about the Thieves' Guild, denounces them soundly as a bunch of lawless crooks, while noting that even the Dark Brotherhood has rules that they abide by. If you've actually been through the DB story arc, however, you'll know that this isn't true - it's supposed to be, but the Skyrim branch has gone somewhat off the rails. You will also know this is complete BS if you've actually played the Thieves' Guild questline, as Brynjolf repeatedly impresses upon you that killing is not allowed. Of course, not being affiliated with either group, Mjoll only has common knowledge on which to base her opinions.
  • The elder Bolag of Narzulbur has been poisoning her nephew's wives together with her sister Yatul. If the Dragonborn happens to eavesdrop around them at the right moment, Bolag will reveal in conversation with Yatul that she refuses to harm a pregnant wife, and both of them seem to care about the chief's two children. Of course, that doesn't stop them from murdering the wives once their children are born...
• Everyone Is Bi: All eligible marriage candidates can be wed regardless of sex and/or race.
• Everything's Deader with Zombies:
  • Draugr are Skyrim's version of zombies: entombed ancient Nords who rise up to defend their crypts.
  • You can revive anything killable as a zombie with the various Undead Raising spells. However, they look exactly the same as how they died, the only difference being how their corpses dissolve into dust upon death (the Master version of the spell, Dead Thrall, prevents this, effectively giving you a second, immortal follower).
• Evil Is Deathly Cold:
  • Vampires in Skyrim usually make their home in icy caverns and/or ice-covered fort ruins, and are fond of using frost magic. Draugr are also known for hitting you with a frostbite blast from their hands. Of course, the native Nords are all highly resistant to cold damage; they're used to dealing with this crap, apparently. This is a Call-Back to existing canon, which established the clan of vampires living in Skyrim as having an affinity with frost. They also have the power to phase through ice and frost, though it's never demonstrated in-game.
  • Dragons can use ice breath in addition to the more traditional fire breath. The higher level dragons seem to prefer the former, such as with Frost Dragons.
• Evil Is Hammy: In addition to slicing up your foes with their big ole daedric greatswords, conjured dremora will slice the ham.
• Evil Is One Big, Happy Family: Played straight by the Dark Brotherhood and the Thieves' Guild, who both know of each other and will contract with the other when they need something done.
• Evil Laugh: Molag Bal's laugh is especially sinister and frightening.
• Evil Orphanage Lady: Honorhall Orphanage in Riften is run by a terrible old woman called Grelod the Kind. She constantly gives speeches to the kids about how worthless they are and that they won't be adopted, ever. The kids themselves tell you that beatings are frequent, and snooping around the building reveals that there is a cell with shackles on the wall. The kind normally seen in prisons. Grelod also starves the children by giving them only one meal a day in the afternoon. She even keeps them from being adopted — she's that much of a power-hungry Control Freak. It's so bad that, when one of the kids escaped, he tried to recruit the Dark Brotherhood to kill Grelod. You can pretend to be from the Brotherhood and kill Grelod yourself. The children will cheer and praise the Dark Brotherhood. Needless to say, the Dark Brotherhood is not happy about this.
• Evil Pays Better:
  • While the reward money for choosing to destroy the Dark Brotherhood rather than joining it is impressive, it just can't match up to a unique mount, dagger, and summon, plus the huge amounts of gold you will acquire from completing the questline. For reference: destroying the Brotherhood nets you 3000 gold. If you join them instead, their final quest alone earns you 20000.
  • For a certain perspective of evil, you can choose between two rewards at the end of the Azura's Star questline. The canonical "good" path gets you a follower but gives you a soul gem that can only hold White souls. The "evil" path gets you a soul gem that can hold both White and Black (i.e., humanoid) souls, which is significantly more useful, if you accept that you are literally torturing the souls of sentient beings.
  • Compare the rewards from the Companions' radiant quests to the Dark Brotherhood's radiant quests. For clearing a dungeon to retrieve a family heirloom, the Dragonborn will be rewarded with 300 gold. For killing one single contract target who is nigh on defenseless, the same-level Dragonborn will be rewarded with 1200 gold.
  • There's also the nigh-limitless amount of money to be made by just stealing everything in sight. If you're willing to break into and clean out the valuable possessions of all the homes and assorted other buildings in the game's cities and towns, then pickpocket as much as you can from the inhabitants on top, you'll never want for cash. The only limit is your patience (and your skill).
  • Seems to be a bit of a running theme with the Daedric artifact quests. Some of them require you to do immoral things (usually murder) to earn the artifact, but you're allowed to take a less horrible course of action if you want, depriving you of the unique piece of equipment in the process.
    • To obtain Mehrunes' Razor, you must kill the guy who gave you the quest. If you don't, he'll give you 500 gold as thanks for sparing him, which is literally less than the value of the Razor itself.
    • Namira's Ring requires you to kill a priest of Arkay and eat his flesh. If you instead kill the leader of the cannibal coven as soon as you meet her, you only get whatever loot she has on her person. Subverted if you Take a Third Option and play along with the cannibals' plot up until the very end, at which point you can kill them all and loot their stuff. You'll also get a decent sum of leveled gold from the priest whom you just saved from becoming cannibal chow and the keys to a few houses in Markarth, including the general goods store, allowing you to rob them with impunity if you wish.
    • One notable inversion is Clavicus Vile. If you choose to ignore Clavicus's demands and spare Barbas, you'll be rewarded with the unique Masque of Clavicus Vile. On the other hand, if you accept his offer and kill Barbas, who had previously trusted you to get him back safely, you get stuck with a crappy axe that doesn't even count as a Daedric artifact. Then again, did you really expect Clavicus Vile to not try and screw you over?
• Evil Sorcerer: Arondil the Necromancer is a perverted creep who was exiled from Dawnstar because he became a Stalker with a Crush to the village's milkmaids. He went into hiding in some nearby ruins to perform his practices in secret, and when one of the adventurous girls went exploring in the ruins, he killed her and raised her as a thrall to sleep with her. Now he sends undead draugr to capture Dawnstar's women and bring them back to Yngvild to create his own undead harem. If you ever go into Yngvild, please do waste him.
• Evil Sounds Raspy: The Draugr, undead Ancient Nord warriors that dwell in tombs and ruins, speak with a fierce, coarse voice that fits their monstrous form aptly.
• Evil Versus Evil:
  • The Silver-Blood/Forsworn conflict. On one side, a family of murderous, filthy rich scumbags with their fingers in the city government and a penchant for having those who disobey them executed if they're lucky, and sentenced to forced labor in the mines if they're not. On the other side, a group of black magic-practicing terrorists who will not hesitate to kill anybody who gets in their way, even if they have nothing to do with the fight, and who are believed to both cannibalize their victims and use their skin and bones to make weapons and armor.
  • The contract to kill Hern, a vampire who feeds on wayward travelers. He will lampshade this if you tell him you're there to kill him.
  • Given how easy and lucrative playing a villain protagonist can be, often the player character versus any of the evil factions qualifies.
• Exact Words: After you kill Grelod the Kind, you will be kidnapped by Astrid and taken to a cabin out in the wilderness. Before you are three people: a cowardly Nord sellsword, a feisty Imperial housewife, and a Khajiit murderer, thief, and rapist (self-professed). Astrid tells you that for you to leave, "someone in this shack has to die". Refusing to play Astrid's game by killing her and pilfering the shack key from her body is a perfectly valid (and sweetly ironic) option. She'll even lampshade it as she dies.
• Excalibur in the Rust:
  • Mehrunes Razor is this once again, this time having been broken into pieces and the pieces placed in the care of members of a group dedicated to opposing Mehrunes Dagon. After liberating the pieces, you will travel to Dagon's shrine with a servant of Dagon. Dagon will reforge the blade, but only if you kill his servant. (Then, just For the Evulz, he'll sic two Dremora on you.)
  • The Mace of Molag Bal is initially found as a rusty piece of scrap. However, Molag Bal (Daedric Prince of Domination and Corruption) forces the player to kill a priest of Boethiah (another Daedric Prince and rival of Molag Bal) before he'll restore it.
• Expansion Pack: There are two major DLC expansions, the first being Dawnguard. It adds small new areas to the ends of the world map, and new vampire and werewolf content with a quest line where you can choose to join the vampires or Dawnguard (vampire hunters). The second major expansion, Dragonborn, adds Solstheim, the Nord-ruled island north of Morrowind from the Bloodmoon expansion, as well as side trips into the realm of Hermaeus Mora, the Daedric Prince of Knowledge. The Special Edition includes both of these expansions out of the box.
• Expecting Someone Taller:
  • When you meet Delphine for the first time in her room under the inn, you can say, "I was expecting someone... taller."
  • One of the Companions also says that he expected the new Harbinger to be taller, once you finish the Companions questline.
• Exposed to the Elements:
  • You can find bandits wearing little more than a loincloth in the middle of a snowstorm. The PC can also fall under this trope by wearing skimpy Forsworn or fur armor in screaming blizzards – if they're female, it's little more than a fur loincloth and bra; if they're male, it's little more than a fur loincloth. NPCs will, however, comment on this if a character is walking around in their underwear.
    Random citizen to naked PC: Ysmir's beard, you're going to freeze to death!
  • Averted if you use the extremely popular Frostfall Game Mod, which adds a cold weather survival element to the game. Skyrim's cold will kill you long before the monsters and bandits do if you are unprepared. Travelling at night is risky, being caught in a blizzard can easily spell your doom, and Talos help you if you fall into freezing water and can't dry off. The Survival Mode option available from Creation Club does something similar, by forcing you to worry about elemental conditions as well as getting sufficient food and rest.
• Expository Gameplay Limitation: The game features almost no cutscenes (in fact, the only real ones appear at the very beginning of the game and right before the final dungeon, and in the first case you still have control of the camera). However, during certain important questlines (such as the Companions questline) the game will at specific points disable all movement or interaction for the player except camera movement as a scene unfolds nearby.
• Et Tu, Brute?: If you side with the Stormcloaks during the Civil War questline, once you take Whiterun, Jarl Balgruuf will finish his verbal beatdown of Galmar by turning to you and saying, "And you, a Stormcloak? I thought better of you than that."
• Expository Theme Tune: "The Song of the Dragonborn" (the song at the main menu screen) is this, if you can understand the Dragon language. The full lyrics, with translation, are included in one of the in-game books, but it has more lyrics and verses than are included in the official rendition of the song. Instead, it actually matches up with the track heard in Sovngarde - the original version of the song, perhaps. "Dragonborn, Dragonborn, by his honor is sworn, / To keep evil forever at bay. / And the fiercest foes rout / When they hear triumph's Shout / Dragonborn, for your blessing we pray!"
• Expy:
  • Notably, there's quite a few for characters from previous Elder Scrolls games who can't make appearances here due to both the two centuries-Time Skip and this game being set in Skyrim.
    • Commander Maro is one of Adamus Philida from Oblivion, right down to both being Imperial commanders that threaten the Dark Brotherhood.
    • Personality-wise, Babette is one of Vicente Valtieri from Oblivion's Dark Brotherhood, who was also a snarky vampire assassin. Unlike Vicente, though, she doesn't give you any quests and never offers to turn you into a vampire like he did.
    • Sybille Stentor, the court mage of Solitude with the Open Secret of being a Friendly Neighborhood Vampire, is essentially the Distaff Counterpart to Janus Hassildor from Oblivion.
    • Haelga, a rude innkeeper in Riften who Really Gets Around, is one to Mirabelle Monet from Oblivion, who was a rude innkeeper in Anvil who Really Got Around.
  • The overall conflict between Clans Gray-Mane and Battle-Born paints them as basically being the Skyrim version of the Capulets and Montagues.
  • Hemiskr is one for Confessor Cromwell, the Children of Atom preacher in Fallout 3, who was likewise encountered singing the praises of his god in the center of the first major town you'll likely visit (Megaton in Fallout 3 and Whiterun in Skyrim). However, Heimskr is even louder, and what he preaches make a lot more sense In-Universe.
  • Grelod the Kind shares a surprising number of similarities with Miss Hannigan from Annie.
  • Both Mercer Frey and Cynric Endell in the Thieves' Guild are clear Expies of Garret from Thief, though the former is far more of a Jerkass than Garret ever was.
  • The returning Lucien Lachance is essentially an evil Obi-Wan Kenobi, with a bit of Darth Sidious on the side.
  • Lurbuk, a Dark Brotherhood target and Dreadful Bard with a major case of Small Name, Big Ego, is quite similar to Cacofonix from Asterix.
  • From what we see of her after her resurrection and also how she's described in The Wolf Queen, Potema Septim was basically Cersei Lannister with access to witchcraft.
  • Isran is a pretty clear one of Blade, to the point where he even sounds like Wesley Snipes' version of the character.
  • And after several reveals in the Dawnguard DLC, the Falmer turn out to be one for the Morlocks. Like the Morlocks, the Falmer are a subterranean race that were forced into a technologically advanced underground world where they maintain and care for the land's ancient machinery, have a pathological hatred for the surface world, are barbaric and primitive, and are also far smarter than they appear, having regained the ability to use magic and craft armor, weaponry, and potions, much like how the Morlocks were cultivating the Eloi as cattle without them being any the wiser.
  • Speaking of Dawnguard and Morlocks, Arch-Curate Vyrthur is both the spitting image of Kain and his physical appearance and role in the story with regards to the Falmer both paint him as being an Expy of the "Uber-Morlock" from The Time Machine (2002).
• Extreme Omnivore: One way you can discover one of an ingredient's uses in Alchemy (more with a Perk) is to eat it. Fair enough when the ingredients in question are plants and berries. Bug parts, weird-but-technically-edible animal parts, and potentially poisonous mushrooms are strange and slightly risky, but the effects wear off and don't really hurt you in the amount you use. Teeth and horns of various animals, the toe of a dead giant, the oil that lubricated ancient Dwemer machinery, even pearls?
• Eyeless Face:
  • Flame Atronachs have no eyes, as the top of their head above their facial armor is a mass of fire.
  • Falmer have patches of skin growing over where their eyes should be, rendering them looking like tumorous lumps of flesh. Notably their helmets only open up from the nose down (however that does not prevent you from seeing when you wear it).
• Eye Scream:
  • One of the finishers for one-handed swords on dragons is to climb onto the head of the thrashing dragon, and then stab them right in the eye.
  • Noster One-Eye, a homeless veteran in Solitude, lost one of his eye during the Great War.

F

• Face Death with Dignity:
  • A Stormcloak soldier at the beginning of the game volunteers to be the first to be executed and uses his last words to condemn the Imperials. The other Stormcloaks probably would have followed in his footsteps if a dragon hadn't shown up.
  • Also at the beginning of the game, Ralof says this almost verbatim to the luckless horse-thief, Lokir of Rorikstead. Lokir disregards this advice, and gets a few arrows in the back for it. If he'd just gone along, he might well have survived after all...
  • At the end of the civil war quest chain, if the player supports the Empire, Jarl Ulfric will initially go down swinging, but once beaten he will calmly accept his defeat and ask for the Dragonborn to finish him off, because it would "be a better song."
  • Topping them all, though, is the Emperor himself, whom you must kill at the end of the Dark Brotherhood chain, if you choose to join them. After welcoming you warmly and saying that this is just how things work, he then calmly turns his back towards you, ready for his fate. He does ask for a final request, which you can fulfill or not: to kill whoever it is who commissioned his death. Even then, he does not expect it of you; he asks it as a favor, nothing more.
  • The Old Orc. He is too old to take a wife or become chief, but not too old to serve in battle. He refuses to die of old age (saying that to keep something past the point it is useful is unseemly, even more so if it is one's own life), and thus sets out across Skyrim to find a good death. He says he has received a vision from Malacath that he would die a glorious death at a certain point in Skyrim, and waits there for someone (possibly you) to deliver it.
  • The Ebony Warrior. He's done it all. Done every "quest," fought in almost every battle, to the point where everything is trivial to him. But when he hears of your exploits (when you hit 80), he seeks the opportunity to be sent to Sovngarde with honor.
• Face–Heel Turn: The High Elves, who not only seceded from the Empire, but also forcibly conscripted the Wood Elves into their new nation, manipulated the Khajiit into becoming vassals, and threatened to destroy the Empire unless they banned the worship of Talos because, partially due to their believed superiority, they don't like the idea of any human ascending to godhood - much less the particular one that ran roughshod all over their last nation.
• The Faceless: Miraak's face is never shown. Even after you kill him, you eat his soul, so his flesh dissolves, meaning you still can't see his face even after looting his gear. Console commands, however, reveal that he's a Nord, with receding hair and Black Eyes of Evil. The latter is presumably a side effect of either learning too many of Hermaeus Mora's secrets or spending too much time in Apocrypha.
• Faceless Goons: The common Stormcloak soldiers wear face-concealing helmets; the same as most Hold guards. Averted with their Imperial counterparts, who wear open-face helmets.
• "Facing the Bullets" One-Liner: The Stormcloak soldier that gets executed at the beginning quips, "My ancestors are smiling at me, Imperials. Can you say the same?"
• Failed a Spot Check:
  • It's perfectly possible, as a stealthy assassin, to headshot a guard with your bow and hide, leaving his friend to have a brief look around before deciding he must have been hearing things. He will then go right back to his post, standing by his deceased buddy, and leaving himself open to another shot. Spoofed in this video.
  • A less serious example with Hadvar and Ralof. If the player follows one of them to Riverwood, they will make a pit stop at the Guardian Stones, where the player may choose their starting sign - Warrior, Thief or Mage. They will approve of the warrior and be indifferent if the player chooses Mage, but will be outright disapproving if they choose the Thief stone. Of course, it's perfectly possible to choose the Warrior and then simply change to the Thief. Ralof/Hadvar will not comment on this, even if they're watching you while you do it.
  • During the Companions quest "Proving Honor," Farkas may drop his Skyforge Steel Greatsword when he transforms into a werewolf, then pick up the Silver Greatsword dropped by the Silver Hand afterward, allowing the player to pick up and acquire a Skyforge Steel weapon earlier than normal. When sending you to Eorlund Gray-Mane to legitimately acquire a Skyforge Steel weapon, Kodlak will comment about the poor quality of whatever weapon you are holding, even if it is the Skyforge Steel Greatsword acquired from Farkas. Put off the Companions quests long enough, and it's entirely possible for Kodlak to dismiss a Dragonbone weapon as "whatever that is." Doubly amusing if you're using a silver sword looted from the Silver Hand.
  • During the "Cursed Tribe" quest, Chief Yamarz turns against you should you or he succeed in killing the Giant. If you happen to have the Calm spell from Illusion school and keep him alive, he follows you, and you can tell the rest of the tribe that Yamarz is dead... when he's still standing right next to you.
• Fairy Ring: Two mushroom circles can be found in Falkreath Hold. One of them appears to have been the site of a Human Sacrifice.
• Fake Crossover: An official mod places the Space Core into the game as an item. When you put it into the game, the poor guy falls from the sky (guess where he was before), which makes one wonder if this really is a Fake Crossover...
• Fake Longevity:
  • Almost every quest requires you to run a tremendous distance which in turn has a probability to meet randomly spawning dragons, or clear a cave, keep or tomb full of random enemies that mostly aren't even related to this quest's story. There's a chance to kill an enemy with a finishing move forcing you to wait for the animation to end. It also requires you to grind lots and lots of ingredients to level alchemy, which is done by combining those ingredients correctly, thus meeting the criteria for Item Crafting, Grinding and Combinatorial Explosion. Since you've discovered all of Skyrim in a short period of time, running through it again may be considered Back Tracking. Most enemies have a Fake Difficulty, killing the player with two hits unless he's got lots of health potions. While its dungeons are more variable than Oblivion's, they still often look and feel the same, especially if it comes to claw riddles. It's overall promise of 500 hours of game time are only to be achieved by this trope. Thank Arkay for fast travel. It's most noticable in any quest where a fellow faction member offers to show you to your "quarters", which is usually down a long hallway that they've decided to slowly walk to. Or if a scripted scene has all the essential characters talking and marked "busy". "Waiting" usually doesn't help since these are scripted events.
  • It's especially bad in the Dawnguard expansion, where your faction's base is always situated in one of the corners of the map, requires you to travel to the opposite corner — literally the longest Euclidean distance in the game — at least twice, and requires visiting specific quest locations on the far west, far north, and far east sides of the map as well. With "needs" mods installed it can become extremely tedious to spend several in-game days' worth of travel time just running back and forth. The storyline is actually pretty decent, particularly for anyone who loves the Elder Scrolls lore, although it is probably lost as meaningless on anyone who just wants to have a fun time.
• Fake Ultimate Hero: The eponymous "hero" of the ballad "Ragnar the Red" is an oafish drunk and lying braggart of a man who continually boasted to everyone he met about his accomplishments and the gold he had made through battle. A plucky shieldmaiden named Matilda steps up to shut him up, and then Ragnar literally loses his head!
• Fake Ultimate Mook: The sleeping bear found near the end of the escape from Helgen, the tutorial level. Your companion will hype up the beast as a powerful enemy and suggest you either sneak by or attempt to snipe it from afar with a bow. However, you can easily take the bear head-on, and tear it apart just as easily as any other Mook in this level. This is a particularly treacherous example, as all Skyrim bears but this tutorial one are indeed Demonic Spiders, with a lot of health and hard-hitting attacks that will do a number on an inexperienced adventurer. So if you mess around with a bear in the wilds expecting it to fold like a house of cards, you will get horrifically mauled.
• Falling Damage: There is a small distance you can fall without taking damage at all, but once you pass that, the damage increases dramatically. Once you pass the cutoff distance for fall damage, your only thoughts will be "just reload the save before the death animation plays".
• Fanservice Pack: Nocturnal, the Daedric Prince of night and darkness, was just a woman wearing a cloak that covered her entirely in Oblivion. Come Skyrim, her statue is depicted in a scanty cloak with a Navel-Deep Neckline that opens up at the side of her thighs, fully exposing the legs.
• Fantastic Drug: Skooma is still around, though it doesn't have negative effects like it did in Morrowind and Oblivion; it's not even really illegal! One quest also features the more potent "Balmora Blue", which is illegal — and is supposedly priceless, what with there not being a Balmora anymore.
• Fantastic Racism: The Elder Scrolls was always unsubtle with this, but for Skyrim, it's taken even further.
  • Most prominent is racism between Men and Mer. The Thalmor view the human races of Tamriel as inferior upstart savages. And the men aren't exactly fond of the elves either, especially the Thalmor, who have forced the Empire to ban the worship of their patron god.
  • If someone ever gives a reason for siding with the Imperials over the Stormcloaks in the civil war questline, this is often the main reason given. The Stormcloaks have very strong racist tendencies and they do not hide this fact. This darker side is easiest to see in the Stormcloak capital of Windhelm - Dunmer are forced to live in the filthiest, poorest part of the city, and abuse from the local Nords is an almost daily occurrence. The Argonian dock workers are paid a tiny fraction of what the Nord workers are paid; they are also not permitted to live within the city walls, and are physically beaten if they try. Ulfric Stormcloak will send guards to root out bandits if a Nord village is attacked, but won't lift a finger to help Khajiit caravans when they're harassed. On the other hand, they tend to make exceptions if it would be beneficial - non-Nord characters can ask when joining the Stormcloaks, and be told that it's loyalty that matters rather than blood.
  • The two beast men races get this the worst, by several lengths. Argonians are oppressed and hated throughout Skyrim, and if you choose to play as an Argonian, you can be sure that they won't call you by that name, preferring less charming terms such as "lizard". Khajiit will also be subjected to racial slurs, often stereotyped as thieves, drug-addicts and generally lowly scum (ironically forcing them to become these things to survive). This makes clawing the offenders to death much more satisfying.
  • As for Orsimer, they're regarded as little more than disgusting, ugly brutes. The in-game book The Pig Children gives a rather nasty example of this.
  • Even though the Player Character is the Chosen One, they don't entirely escape the racist abuse. This is sometimes intentional and sometimes unintentional, but always very awkward. For example, playing as an Orc, to hear Lydia swear undying loyalty to you in one breath and then say, "Die, you Orc filth!" to an opponent of yours in the next sort of makes one wonder...
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture:
  • The four main human races have real world counterparts:
    • The Imperials of the Tamrielic Empire is heavily based on the Western Roman Empire; the Imperial Legion armor has even taken on a much more Roman-like appearance this time around to reflect this, comfortably familiar to players of Morrowind. However, the naming conventions have become far more Italian-sounding since the time of Oblivion (presumably reflecting the real-life evolution of the Latin family of languages), with names like "Vittoria Vici" not being seen as uncommon.
    • The Bretons of High Rock are an eclectic mix of medieval England and France, though their home province actually being a loose collection of feuding city-states is more reminiscent of Renaissance Italy than anything else. Meanwhile, the Reachmen are firmly Celtic in terms of animistic beliefs and clashing with the "civilized" invaders of their ancestral lands, though their naming conventions oddly seem to predominantly be pseudo-Native American in inspiration (i.e., the King Arthur figure for the Reachmen was named "Red Eagle").
    • The Redguards of Hammerfell are a mix of Persio-Arabic and North African influences in overall design, to the point where the wandering Redguard soldiers met during "In My Time of Need" look like they've been essentially lifted straight out of Arabian Nights. However, their oft-mentioned curved swords are actually based after the famed curved scimitars used by the Islamic peoples of Central Asia.
    • And, of course, there's the Nords of Skyrim itself. Most obviously, they're Horny Vikings based on the ancient peoples of Scandivania, but also take inspiration from the Mongols in their veneration of the sky along with their ancient empire across most of Tamriel quickly spreading before collapsing within one generation. Intriguingly, the ancient Atmorans (the Precursors to the Nedes, who themselves are the Precursors to the Nords) embalmed their dead in a manner similar to Egyptian mummification and believed in a cyclical view of time paralleling Hinduism.
    • In Dragonborn, the Skaal are like standard Nords mixed with the Inuit peoples, though interestingly their faith in the "All-Maker" makes them one of the exceptionally few monotheistic cultures on Tamriel.
  • Three of the elven races have real life counterparts:
    • The Altmer are based on Nazi Germany; the Thalmor treat anyone not Altmer as inferior beings, and are mentioned as ruthlessly practicing eugenics in their home provinces. They hunt those that worship Talos, and the dissidents either are being hunted by them in their homeland, help the persecuted secretly, or immigrate to other provinces to help stop the Thalmor. The Thalmor Justiciars — a Secret Police found wandering Skyrim hunting down and capturing Talos worshippers — is also evocative of the Spanish Inquisition, particularly with the very clear religious overtones given to their persecution of Talos worshippers (i.e., Ondolemar, their leader in Skyrim, will outright refer to their presence in the province as a "religious matter") and the hideous forms of Cold-Blooded Torture they subject their "heretical" prisoners to.
    • The Dunmer have some broad similarities to the Jewish peoples in that, having lost their homeland, they are now scattered throughout Tamriel with some areas making them forced to live in ghettos where they are brutally oppressed and treated as second-class citizens.
    • The Orcs, weirdly enough, have more than a little in common with Native Americans and the First Nations this time around. They had their land of Orsinium stolen from them under the threat of violence by more technologically advanced neighbors, and now live in rather limited and often barren communal dwellings in the form of "strongholds" — all of which resemble something more than a little similar to the reservation system practiced in the United States and Canada. The internal politics of their strongholds, meanwhile, are a weird mix of ancient Slavic clans (with their non-nomadic strongholds being inhabited by patrilineal clans) and lion prides, of all things (both Orc strongholds and lion prides consist of one male, arguably in charge of the pride, a number of mates, and all of their offspring; the male must fend off rivals, often meaning that he won't live very long past his prime, the females do much of the hunting, and any males who don't wish to compete for mates must leave the pride and establish their own life elsewhere).
  • The Khajiit are pretty clearly based on medieval views of the Romani people, as further emphasized with their similar vocal patterns and trade caravans. Their cultural ties to the "Moon Sugar" drug (which can be refined into the infamous Fantastic Drug of skooma) also has some parallels to the culture that sprang up around opium in China during the height of European imperialism.
• Fashion-Based Relationship Cue: Wearing an Amulet of Mara, the goddess of marriage and romantic love, signifies that you're looking for a spouse. Characters who are eligible for marriage will comment on the amulet if you speak to them.
• Fastball Special: Played with in the Dragonborn DLC. You can use live or dead spiders as thrown weapons; some of them even explode!
• Fast-Forward Mechanic: There is a wait function, allowing you to wait for a number of hours of your choice. The current time should be somewhere at the bottom-left corner of the box. It's useful for getting the shops to open (wait until after 8:00 am) and letting followers catch up. Sleeping, if available at the time, accomplishes the same thing and adds the Rested bonus besides.
• A Father to His Men: General Tullius of the Imperial Legion. If the player sides with the Legion and captures Windhelm, he compliments his soldiers, doubles their pay, and also doubles the compensations to the widows of the dead soldiers. He seems to be based on Julius Caesar. Ulfric Stormcloak and Galmar Stonefist are this as well, as they love their men dearly and are deeply respected in return.
• Fauxshadow:
  • Maurice, from the "Blessing of Nature" quest, practically screams sinister with his appearance, voice, and mannerisms. Not only is he a genuinely good guy, but keeping him alive actually makes the final part of the quest much easier.
  • Likewise, Mara and former Vaermina priest Erandur in Dawnstar is a dark elf who seems to know a lot about nightmares and expresses genuine admiration when confronted with the ingeniousness of a Daedric Lord's work. You even get a message warning you that he plans to betray you. He actually is truly redeeming himself, and stays true to his word to destroy the Skull of Corruption, becoming a rather powerful follower afterwards. The warning was a lie from Vaermina trying to turn you against him.
  • Between his sly voice, deep interest in the Mythic Dawn cult, and the excited, even reverent way he speaks of Mehrunes' Razor, Silus Vesuius definitely feels less like a man trying to come to terms with the sordid past of his family and more like a barely-closeted Daedra worshiper. He really doesn't have any ill intentions, only turning against you if you try to murder him, and only seems to want to reforge the Razor to complete his museum. If you spare him during the quest, he is grateful to you and perfectly content to just have the broken dagger on display.
• Fetch Quest:
  • The Radiant Quest system consists of a large number of fetch quests, particularly the mini-quests given by the Thieves' Guild and the Companions (which are largely "go here, kill/rob X, bring back sword/necklace/gold statue/etc. to quest-giver"). There is also the "No Stone Unturned" quest, which sends you seeking the stones of Barenziah all over Skyrim, and the "A Return to Your Roots" quest, which is a retread of the above "Finding Your Roots" quest from Oblivion, though at least this time you're collecting crimson nirnroot in one giant cavern instead of all over the world map.
  • "No Stone Unturned" is considered by many to be the most infamous of all Skyrim fetch quests, if not all quests in general. The stones are numerous, quite small, and almost always hidden away in some nondescript dungeon or sitting on a desk in some random NPC's house amongst various bits of junk. And once you pick up a stone it can't be removed from your inventory until you've found all 24 of them and completed the associated quest, which is a problem since the stones each have a 0.5 weight value (most other quest items are weightless). Worse still, one of the stones was placed in a spot that becomes completely inaccessible after a certain point, rendering it Permanently Missable. Until the stone was moved by the 1.4 patch, it wasn't uncommon for players to reach the end of the game with up to 11.5 pounds of dead weight taking up space in their inventory. And unlike most quests in the game. You don't get map markers for them, so you have to travel the entire country completely blind searching every single nook & cranny in the entire game... Well, unless you just use a walk-through or a map marker mod. ^note It's worth noting that the map marker mod for the stones is one of the highest-rated Skyrim mods on the Steam Workshop
• Fictional Document: As per Elder Scrolls tradition, there are hundreds that can be picked up and read. These range from potion recipes to a Tome of Eldritch Lore.
• Fighter, Mage, Thief:
  • The three archetypal builds are present even without classes, as each skill is one of six in each purview. In the astrological lore of the series, these three are the names of three "Guardian" constellations in the zodiac which "watch over" lesser constellations devoted to these three builds. The new skill tree system's visible appearance and overall set-up is a direct Call-Back to this, with the three "Guardians" as huge nebulae over the warrior, mage and thief skill trees that appear as constellations in the night sky. The old constellations like "The Atronach" and "The Shadow" have been moved to the standing stones dotting Skyrim. As such, each of the three nebulae represent one of the three aforementioned archetypes, with the respective skill trees branching off from "beneath" them.
  • The four main guilds of Skyrim that are not involved in the Civil War also broadly fall into this set-up, with the Companions as the Fighters, the College of Winterhold as the Mages, and both the Thieves' Guild and Dark Brotherhood as the Thieves.
  • Many of the Jarls have one of each archetype (though "thief" may be a bit of a stretch, as it is here just the nebula containing the Speech skill tree constellation) for advisors: The Housecarl for the more strength-at-arms-tinted advice, the Steward for the voice of discretion, and the Court Mage for advice on any arcane matters.
  • The three heroes of ancient Skyrim also fit into this trichotomy, with the Barbarian Hero Hakon One-Eye as the Fighter, the wily Dual Wielding Blood Knight Gormlaith Golden-Hilt as the Thief, and the powerful wizard Felldir the Old as the Mage.
  • The three patricidal sons of Archmage Gauldur. Mikrul is a Warrior Flunky Boss with a life-draining sword, Sigdis is an archer with Doppelgänger Spin, and Jyrik is a mage and also Barrier Change Boss.
• Final Boss, New Dimension:
  • The final boss battle takes place in the Nordic afterlife of Sovngarde.
  • The final battle against Miraak in Dragonborn takes place in Hermaeus Mora's realm of Apocrypha. The final quest is even called "At the Summit of Apocrypha".
• Final Boss Preview: The dragon that so handily interrupts your beheading at the start of the game is actually Alduin, trying to kill you. The third encounter subverts the usual expectation of getting curb stomped. You actually have him on the run and news of his refusal to submit to you after defeating him and instead fleeing shakes the confidence the other dragons have in Alduin's leadership.
• Find the Cure!: Getting cured of vampirism requires working with a Conjurer who will cure you in exchange for a filled Black Soul Gem. "Black" souls are those of sapient beings, and the Dawnguard DLC reveals that sapient beings who have been soul trapped are doomed to spend eternity in the bleak Soul Cairn. Essentially, you are dooming someone to a Fate Worse than Death to cure yourself of the disease. Alternatively, if you are a member of the Companions, you can choose to become infected with Lycanthropy, which clears the Vampirism. That may or may not be considered better depending on the circumstances.
• Finishing Move: Born from the popular Oblivion Game Mod "Deadly Reflexes" and as an extension of the predecessor Fallout 3 engine's VATS kill-cam function, we have Finishers - flashy animations where characters kill others in a spectacular manner. Every weapon in the game has at least two finisher animations for every enemy type in the game, and projectile weapons have a few as well. Particularly satisfying is one of the unarmed Finishers, a chokeslam. Have an axe? Your character doesn't need it as they're quite happy to headbutt a foe to death.
• Fireballs: The game promotes Fireball to a Adept level spell and adds a glorious explosion upon impact. There is a lower level, non-exploding "Firebolt" variant that behaves similarly to Oblivion's fireball.
• Fire-Breathing Weapon: While its predecessor Oblivion only featured spells that fire a single bolt of elemental energy, Skyrim also features spells that fire a stream of energy. These tend to require less magicka than the other variety, but deal less damage. In addition, the player can learn to breathe fire (and frost) in the same way the Dragons do.
• Fire, Ice, Lightning: Destruction magic has you covered for all three. Tactically, they have different uses: fire is cheapest and does after-burn damage, ice drains stamina and slows enemies, and lighting drains magic and is a hitscan attack.
• First Town: This role is shared between two locations:
  • Riverwood fits the classic version. Its a small sleepy village with a few minor quests available and, depending on how you got there, an NPC who will hook you up with some free starting gear.
  • Whiterun is the first hold the player likely goes to, being the first place the player will become a Thane in addition to having the cheapest player home.
• Fishing for Mooks: This strategy is part of what makes the "Stealth Archer" build so devasating. Bow strikes from stealth deal extra damage, which when combined with the right perks and enchanted equipment, can lead to them dealing many times their base damage. And because the NPC AI is so eager to dismiss arrows sticking out of their bodies or their dead buddies next to them as "the wind", it's laughably easy to temporarily withdraw after a shot, wait for any other enemies to lose aggro, then return for another stealth shot over and over until all enemies have been wiped out.
• Fishing Minigame: Initially part of the Creation Club before being added to the main game in the Anniversary Edition update.
• Fission Mailed:
  • There's a minor example in the "Season Unending" quest. When attempting to write a temporary peace treaty between the Stormcloaks and the Empire, no matter what actions you take there will always be a moment where one or both of the factions will call the whole debate pointless and a waste of time and then threaten to storm out. This can make the player think they screwed up... until Esbern suddenly steps in and gives a scathing speech to both factions about the fact that Alduin will kill them all if they don't put aside their petty differences. The peace treaty negotiations then proceed from where they left off.
  • Another example happens at the end of the Thieves' Guild quest "Speaking with Silence," when Karliah shoots the Dragonborn in a scripted cutscene. You're lying on the floor, vision blurring and darkening, unable to do anything, and then Mercer tops it off by stabbing you - all of that from a lovely first person POV. When the screen goes black, you could be forgiven for thinking the Dragonborn just got Killed Off for Real. Nothing of the sort happens, however, and the quest line proceeds one loading screen later.
  • There's also the moment in the "Dawnguard" questline when the Dragonborn and Serana cross a bridge only to have it collapse under them, sending them plummeting to a river far below. Like with the Thieves' Guild example, the player could be forgiven for thinking they just made a terrible mistake.
• Flash Step: The Whirlwind Sprint shout lets you do this. The Vampire Lords also have this ability, by turning into a cloud of bats.
• Flight, Strength, Heart: Inverted with the bonuses provided by the Masque of Clavicus Vile, in that the "heart" is the relevant part while the combat-oriented part is completely incidental. The Masque offers a +10 boost to Speech in general and a 20% improvement in buying and selling prices specifically (which stack with each other), making it fantastic for any playstyle, especially at lower levels where Adam Smith Hates Your Guts. It also grants a whopping +5% magicka regeneration. For reference, even the most basic mage robes you can find provide +50%. It's such a weak and inconsequential boost that it's almost weird that the item even bothers giving it at all.
• Floorboard Failure: While it doesn't happen to the player, one of the in-game notes both describes and implies an example. A "Scrawled Note" found in Bloodskal Barrow in the Dragonborn expansion is written from one bandit to another, and reads, "Look Meryn I'm not arguing that these towers are falling to pieces, but I think you are exaggerating about the planks falling ou————"
• Fluffy the Terrible: Grelod the Kind.
• Foe-Tossing Charge: The top level tier for the Block perk tree allows you to go baddie bowling if you sprint with your shield up.
• Forced Prize Fight: There's the quest "The House of Horrors" in Markarth, in which the player character and a Vigilant of Stendaar are locked in a house together by a Daedric Prince and forced to fight to the death.
• Forced Tutorial: There's one interspersed throughout the opening segment of the game as a dragon attack saves you from the executioner's block. You initially learn the movement commands, then get tips on how to use certain items as you pick them up. Like in Oblivion, you can save right before leaving the tutorial area where you get a last chance to change your character, allowing you to skip it in future play-throughs.
• Foreboding Architecture:
  • Gets especially obvious in Nordic ruins. Yes, the sarcophagi will bust open dramatically the moment you try to take the loot or the MacGuffin, and yes, the Frostbite Spider will drop down through the giant hole in the ceiling.
  • In Dawnguard, many of the Gargoyle statues contain living Gargoyles.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Right at the beginning of the game, Ralof says exactly where the main questline ends up:
    "I don't know where we're going, but Sovngarde awaits."
  • When you start a new game, the loading screen to the intro displays Alduin with a quote of one of the in-game books, "The Song of the Dragonborn"
    "And the Scrolls have foretold of black wings in the cold, That when brothers wage war come unfurled! Alduin, Bane of Kings, ancient shadow unbound, With a hunger to swallow the world!"
  • Bethesda loves to use this trope regarding in-game books.
    • You can find a copy of The Book of the Dragonborn in the dungeons while making your escape from Helgen - quite some time before you learn that you are the title character.
    • There's a copy of Nightingales: Fact or Fiction right next to Mercer Frey. If you follow the Thieves' Guild quest line, you find out he is one. And you get the chance to become one yourself.
    • There's a copy of Wabbajack in the Blue Palace bedrooms. Then you can receive the same weapon yourself in a closed wing of the very same palace.
  • Certain dungeons have the spirits of people who've explored the dungeon before you (most notably the Labyrinthian). Their corpses and subsequent "visions" show you just how not to approach the next room.
  • Near the beginning of the main questline, the Greybeards call out to you using the dragon word "Dovahkiin." You shout in the same manner to call a dragon, Odahviing, to you in order to chase after Alduin near the climax.
  • When you have your first fight with Alduin, he decides The Battle Didn't Count and flees, sending shockwaves across the dragons and causing many of them to openly question his ability to lead them: being firm believers that Asskicking Leads to Leadership, dragons believe that you should either be Defiant to the End or submit to the winner. Later, you capture a dragon named Odahviing and he swears loyalty to you.
  • Vilkas of the Companions says, "I think I've killed one of every living thing in Skyrim. May be time for a trip to Morrowind." Fast forward to the Dragonborn DLC; while not in Morrowind, it does take place in Solstheim, the location of the Bloodmoon expansion.
  • Upon escaping Helgen, when facing Frostbite Spiders, Hadvar says, "What next? Giant snakes?" Guess what new monster they introduce in Online.
• Forest of Perpetual Autumn: The Rift is a hold located in the southeastern portion of Skyrim and covered by an extensive forest. While the evergreen trees are fairly unremarkable, the deciduous trees (mainly birches and larches), bushes and grasses are in constant autumn foliage, painting the Rift in red, yellow and gold. Drifting, falling leaves fill the air in most places, and there are also squash-like gourds growing wild. While Skyrim is a cold, wintery land overall, the non-snow covered deciduous trees we see elsewhere have full sets of green leaves.
• Forged Letter:
  • There is an early quest from Sven and Faendal that involves giving a fake letter and giving it to a girl they both like. The player can then choose to tell the rival lover about the letter, and can choose to deliver a similar letter from the rival.
  • Another example serves as the MacGuffin in one Civil War quest regardless of faction when the Dragonborn is tasked with acquiring a letter containing war intel from an enemy messenger. Their commanding officer then proceeds to... adjust certain details of the intel before returning the letter to the Dragonborn, who then delivers it to the enemy officer for whom it was intended.
• Fork Fencing: Downplayed but possible with rare, Easter Egg versions of the common fork and cutlery knife that can be picked up and used as the worst two weapons in the game. They're semi-functional joke weapons but you can enchant them to make them a bit more lethal.
• For the Evulz: The ghost of Lucien LaChance acts like this, often advocating murder for petty reasons.
• Fourth-Date Marriage: All that's required for marriage is having completed a quest for a given (and marriageable) NPC and then speaking to them while wearing an amulet that signifies you're available and looking. Some require you complete whole questlines, which presumably would give you time to get to know each other (not much, but some time) while others require only a simple fetch quest, and some require only that you beat your potential spouse in a bare-knuckle brawl. The priest of Mara who explains this to you points out that this is not unusual at all in Skyrim, as, well, it's freaking Skyrim, one of the most dangerous regions in the world, and people don't involve themselves in long courtships when death is literally right down the road.
• Friendly Fireproof: In the corner of Apocrypha in the Dragonborn DLC accessed by the black book Winds of Change, one of the "Insights" you can choose is Companion's Insight, which is this trope.
• Friendly Neighborhood Vampires:
  • The Circle of the Companions are Friendly Neighborhood Werewolves.
  • Nice vampires are few and far between, including only Babette (kind of), Sybille Stentor, and in Dawnguard, Serana.
  • The guests at Namira's feast might count as Friendly Neighbourhood Cannibals if you choose to join them.
  • Any player character who becomes a vampire and remains a nice person.
• Friend-or-Idol Decision:
  • The only way to gain all fifteen Daedric artifacts for the "Oblivion Walker" achievement involves stabbing your ally in the back in most of their associated quests, or else losing the chance to gain the artifact involved. Understandable, since the Daedric Princes are, for the most part, a collection of Jerkass Gods. The most brutal decision is probably the one in the quest for Vaermina, the Daedric Prince of Nightmares. If you want her artifact and the achievement, you must kill Erandur, an incredibly Nice Guy who is also one of the few followers in the game to actually level up with you. By saving this as the last Daedric quest you do, you can, through Save Scumming, get the achievement and keep Erandur alive, but you lose out on the artifact.
  • The quest for Clavicus Vile is a particularly dark example of the trope, because Vile himself tells you to use the Rueful Axe and kill Barbas, the talking Big Friendly Dog who has accompanied you on the quest. In a clever twist befitting a quest involving the Daedric Prince of Bargains, doing this is actually the wrong move, because the Rueful Axe is not his true artifact. Instead, you have to replace the Rueful Axe in the statue, enabling Barbas to return to his rightful place as Vile's conscience. You are then rewarded with the true artifact, the Masque of Clavicus Vile.
• Friend to All Children: It's impossible^note outside of mods for the player to harm children. Also, you can play games like tag and hide & seek with the children that you meet. Even the dead ones.. With the Hearthfire DLC, the player can even adopt children, although you're limited to just two. However, just because the player character likes kids doesn't necessarily mean that they like you back.
• Frigid Water Is Harmless: The Dragonborn suffers no harm from swimming in the icy northern oceans. While this may be justified in the case of Nords, who have a 50% racial resistance to cold damage, the other Player Character races have no such excuse. The popular Frostfall Game Mod averts this, as getting into cold water, especially in the northern regions, is extremely dangerous and potentially fatal, depending on the mod's settings. At best it hits you with serious penalties to speed and skills, and by default it renders you unconscious in a matter of minutes, even if you get out of the water quickly.
• From Bad to Worse:
  • According to the plot, things in Tamriel have indeed gotten worse during the 200-year gap between Oblivion and Skyrim. Keep in mind that Oblivion involved an invasion from a hell realm with demons erupting out and causing mass death and destruction... those are now seen as the good old days.
  • An invoked example: Gunmar of the Dawnguard got the idea of putting armor on his trained trolls after he began to wonder what could be even worse than an ordinary troll.
• From Zero to Hero: You pick a bad time to cross the border into a wartorn Skyrim and come within a hair's breadth of being executed after being mistaken for an enemy. You turn out to be The Dragonborn and must prevent The End of the World as We Know It, as well as decide the outcome of the civil war.
• From the Mouths of Babes: The first Dark Brotherhood quest has you killing the vicious woman called Grelod the Kind who runs the orphanage. The children cheer you after the deed, but one girl very calmly acknowledges that killing one person can solve a lot of people's problems and that she is "wondering at the possibilities".
• Fungus Humongous:
  • Blackreach has glowing mushrooms that reach all the way to the top of the cavern.
  • Tel Mithryn in Dragonborn is an absolutely enormous mushroom that serves as the home of the Dunmer wizard Neloth.
• Fur Against Fang: Mentioned in passing by Lord Harkon in Dawnguard. If you're a werewolf when he offers to make you a vampire lord, he regards it as filth in your blood, and his tone suggests he's genuinely disgusted by it. If you refuse his offer to join them, this applies as well.
• Fur Bikini:
  • The female version of Forsworn Armor.
  • The common Fur Armor looted off bandits has four variants (full-body with sleeves, sleeveless, barechested, and topless). When the minimal version is worn by a female character, this includes a strapless bikini top to replace the cloth brassiere they would otherwise be wearing.

G

• Game-Breaking Bug: And what Bethesda release would be complete without them? It's to the point that the most downloaded mods are unofficial patches which do nothing except fix bugs. To wit:
  • A patch that made the DRM for Skyrim actually require Steam to be running to play (as intended from release) also unleashed a host of stability problems and fan rage.
  • The 1.2 patch that was released broke all elemental resistances, allowing, for example, Flame Atronachs to be killed by fire attacks. This also applied to players, meaning those who relied on their resistances to tank damage such as melee warriors, mages or unsneaky thieves... are now magical Cannon Fodder. Disease resistance has been screwed too, so you'll get diseases even if you're a werewolf.
  • The 1.2 patch made dragons fly backwards.
  • At launch, the PS3 version had a save issue that would cause the game to bog down the more you discovered and larger the save got. When the majority had been discovered, the game was nigh-unplayable. This still has yet to be rectified, though a patch was in the works; it's unknown whether such a patch was ever released, however, or ever will be given that the game was later ported to the PS4 which had more processing power to handle the saves anyway.
  • Numerous glitches exist that may lock a player out of an entire questline. Sometimes the glitch can be fixed with a patch (assuming one has an Internet-enabled PS3), but sometimes simply visiting a location prematurely is enough to disable a questline permanently.
  • 1.3 had an unintended effect in that Werewolves' Beast Form now essentially has no armor value, making the form basically useless.
  • Patch 1.5 tried to fix the infamous NavMesh bug that caused NPCs to stop moving in custom made areas. Instead of fixing it, it made the game horrendously unstable for mod users. Bethesda released another patch afterwards that reverted these changes.
  • A rather annoying bug that hasn't been fixed involves the cutscene with Meridia. After talking with you, she might just drop you, leaving you to fall to your doom.
  • The fight against Miraak in Dragonborn can be rendered unwinnable if you're too aggressive. Miraak is scripted to heal after taking enough damage, for a total of three times, and for the duration is rendered ethereal so you can't attack him. The problem is, each healing session is designed to only restore most of his health, the assumption being he'll have enough left upon going ethereal to cover the distance and restore him to full. If you damage him enough, though, the healing session will leave him at close to full health, while Miraak will only attack if his health is at full. Miraak will thus stay permanently ethereal, and the battle will be stuck. The only way to correct this problem is either to get him to leave combat (which not all character builds can do); otherwise, you're forced to reset and watch your damage output more carefully. However, if you do get stuck in this manner, you can frequently fix it by shooting Hermaeus Mora (who floats above the battle in the center of the area, though often invisibly) with spell or arrow. Oddly, instead of getting peeved with you for nailing him, this triggers the stalled "death sequence" for Miraak and ends the fight.
  • While this one doesn't break the game, it does make several quests unwinnable. If you have Barbas with you and enter Dragon Bridge, you may trigger a rare glitch in which Barbas might, for no reason, become hostile and attack the townspeople, eventually attacking a kid. Since Barbas and the kid are both immortal, he will end up chasing him forever.
  • Dawnguard is terribly buggy in general, but some of the more notable ones are: Dimhollow Cavern not triggering properly, leaving you unable to even properly start the DLC story; being unable to speak to Serana after rescuing her; and either not being able to place the Soul Cairn ingredients in the bowl, or Serana never adding her blood to the mixture. All of those bugs render the player unable to progress, making the entire DLC being completely unplayable. There's also a bug that cause random crash on the Visual C interpreter (and thus, the game) due to a major scripting bug on Jiub's quest in Soul Cairn, it can either solved by completing the tedious paper-collecting quest before exiting Soul Cairn or using console commands to complete the quest directly.
  • Serana's leave/wait commands can get bugged, causing her to never offer the option to get her to stop waiting or become a follower again, which can only be fixed by resetting parts of her character script using the console.
  • The block perk "Quick Reflexes" can get you stuck in bullet time. Fortunately there are unofficial patches that fix it.
  • Quicksaving during combat is a game of Russian Roulette in that it doesn't always save right away. Sometimes it takes several seconds, long enough for the game to sneak in a cheeky death blow. Even in an advantageous position when you save, die before another save (but not right away,) and then load, five times out of six you will be lucky for the game not to change the script and stick you in an endless death loop from which you cannot escape. When it does happen, your only recourse is to load an earlier save.
  • A rare bug adds two firewood logs for each ore when you work on an ore vein (instead of the ore from said vein); once it starts, each ore vein is affected. It doesn't break the quests or render the game unplayable, but, beside making crafting harder due to lack of resources it quickly becomes annoying, since firewood is rather heavy and its uses are limited (either to build a few things in your homestead, to craft arrows, or to gain low amount of money by giving them to specific traders).
  • Sometimes, the guard who is supposed to unlock Whiterun's gate the first time you got there doesn't spawn, locking you out of the main quest early.
  • One particularly annoying bug can cause the cutscene at the end of the Miraak fight in Dragonborn to not properly progress, leaving Miraak stuck on Hermaeus Mora's tentacle and locking up the final quest. You can escape Apocrypha by reading the Black Book that got you there, but you won't be able to have any meaningful conversations with the Skaal for the rest of the game, and you also get screwed out of the quest rewards, including the ability to reset your skill points. Using console commands to fix the quest and clean up the aftermath is possible, but you still won't get the ability to reset skill points (although console commands let you do that too).
  • Completing "Blood on the Ice" before completing the condition to be allowed to buy the Hjerim house of Windhelm (conquering Falkreath if playing the civil war as a Stormcloak, or conquering Windhelm if playing the civil war as an Imperial) can result in Windhelm's steward refusing to sell the house once it is normally supposed to be available. It also prevents you to become thane of Eastmarch, as buying the local house is one of the conditions.
  • Entering Bloated Man's Grotto prior to progressing to the end of "Ill Met by Moonlight" may later result in the area not loading the Video Game Setpiece it needs for the quest (no Sindir, no hunters, and no chase), which in turn makes the quest uncompletable without using console commands to flag it completed and receive the reward. This bug is especially frustrating for collectors or completionnist players, because the area contains a unique sword (Bolar's Oathblade) which disappears from the game once "Ill Met by Moonlight" sends you to Bloated Man's Grotto.
  • The beheading killcam animation has been reported to crash the game if the player character is the victim.
  • The Hearthfire houses have a number of annoying bugs.
    • When it's time to furnish a room you've built, the carpenter's bench gives you a list of items you can build, much like the blacksmith's forge, but after you build an item it disappears from the list. Sometimes, the list will randomly repopulate with things you've already built. Given that there are often several items with the same name (e.g. "shelf" or "chest"), it's impossible to tell which of them you still need to make. Complicating matters further, some items populate to the list based on what you've already built (e.g. after you build a shelf, you can build a lockbox to put on it), so it's impossible to tell which items on the list are legit and which are bugged. The only solution is to collect a massive amount of resources and fully furnish a room in one go, or you'll end up wasting money building things multiple times.
    • The fish you've stocked at the Morthal house's fishery will sometimes disappear, but it won't let you stock the same species of fish more than once even if it has disappeared, rendering the fishery all but useless.
    • The bookshelves in the library are horribly bugged. Each shelf has a set number of books it can hold (usually 11), but the limit will start increasing after a while, while at the same time the number of books visibly rendered decreases. Eventually it will start eating the books outright, causing you to lose the tomes you've painstakingly scoured Skyrim to collect.
    • Not quite a game-breaker but still annoying: glass display cases and weapon stands will sometimes discharge the items you put in them after you leave, meaning you'll come back home to find your items on the floor.
    • NPCs going through the Falkreath house's entrance sometimes get stuck in the out-of-bounds limbo surrounding the playable area inside the house, and are then stuck unless you bring them back with console commands, which can only be done on PC. Since it's a house, you can lose this way potential party members or your spouse.
• Game-Favored Gender: Males have slightly faster movement speed - only slightly, but enough that it's noticeable if you try to travel alongside an NPC of the opposite sex. However, in a completely different area of gameplay, since there tend to be slightly more male enemies than female, female players will have the advantage when it comes to abilities that allow you to deal more damage to the opposite sex. Overall, the differences are so slight that most players would never really notice them.
• Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • As the Dovahkiin is tutored by the Greybeards and kills more of the dragons, s/he understands more of the Dragon Tongue, so this extends to the player as well. It is also likely that dragons understand some amount of the language spoken in Skyrim and switch between this and their own language when speaking to humans, as many people unfamiliar in a language often do. Dragons which actually speak to you - Paarthurnax and Odahviing - will swap midsentence; Alduin and a few of his named lieutenants will also do so, depending on to whom they're speaking.
  • A lesser example involving Alduin himself. The first time you see him resurrect a dragon is at Kynesgrove. Afterwards, if you're quick/lucky and haven't completed too much of the main quest, you can stumble across him raising other dragons at various burial mounds.
  • Ingun Black-Briar is an alchemist with a fascination toward poisons, and gives a misc quest consisting in bringing her twenty Deathbells, twenty Nightshades, and twenty Nirnroots to replace ingredients she wasted during previous experiments. Ingame, mixing Deathbell-Nightshade-Nirnroot is an actual poison recipe.
  • The "Rare Gifts" misc quests consist in bringing a specific item to a NPC. Lami asks for a copy of the book Song of the Alchemists, which she used to learn alchemy long ago, and Captain Aldis asks for a copy of The Mirror to help him training his troops. Ingame, both books are Skill Books training a relevant skill (respectively Alchemy and Block). Similarly, the "Skilled Apprenticeship" misc quest has the blacksmith Ghorza gra-Bagol asking for the Smithing Skill Book The Last Scabbard of Akrash to help her teach her apprentice.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • The seemingly infinite number of dragon spawns over time, either as random event or when a cleared dragon lair resets, is justified in-story by Alduin raising them. Vanquishing Alduin stops the random dragon spawns for good, but dragon lairs still reset, despite Alduin being no longer present on Tamriel.
  • When the Dragonborn absorbs a defeated dragons soul, it's supposed to be permantly killing them. Doesn't stop most dragons from eventually respawning like other creatures.
  • The player's race very rarely affects an NPC's dialogue, even though racism against non-Nords is a major theme in the game. For example, the Khajiit traders are forbidden from so much as stepping inside city walls, but a player Khajiit can buy a house and get married without anyone so much as raising an eyebrow - and you can do this even before you are acknowledged as the Dragonborn.
  • Characters who are wounded in gameplay combat can be healed back to full in an instant with your "Healing Hands" spell. Characters who get wounded as part of the plot... not so much. Apparently you're just lucky none of those arrows you heal away so easily hit you in the knee...
  • Certain plot threads are handled separately, which leads to odd situations where doing quests in certain orders leads to facepalm-worthy dialogues. For example, while doing Thieves' Guild quests, the player is told by Maven Black-Briar that she has Dark Brotherhood contacts and she'll sic them on you. Thing is, if you completed the Dark Brotherhood questline before doing the Thieves' Guild, you know exactly who her contact was - Astrid, through Delvin. And Astrid is dead. And you are the head of the Brotherhood. If you've done both the Dark Brotherhood and Thieves' Guild storylines, Maven's threats and posturing take on a new level of absurdity, because she's threatening you with yourself, seeing as how you lead both organizations. Another example is in the Civil War questline - Hadvar acts as if you escaped with them at Helgen if you join the Empire in the Civil War... even though it's possible to escape with Ralof and then immediately turn around and join the Empire (and vice-versa).
  • When you use the Thu'um in an area with NPCs, you're liable to receive an anonymous letter from a "friend" remarking on your usage of it at that location and the letter carrier lets you know where a Word Wall can be found. You'll receive these letters even if the location in question was a bandit lair where you murdered everyone, or your own home in one of the cities where the only people who would hear it are family members and personal friends, or even the Soul Cairn.
  • Skooma and Moon Sugar are narcotics. You will even meet addicts to the stuff. But in game, consuming them has no negative effects on you, even in large quantities. They also are supposed to be illicit drugs, but any merchants will buy them, as long as they accept potions and alchemical ingredients.
  • At a certain point in one quest, the player gets stabbed and passes out. An NPC will tell them that a certain paralytic venom kept them from bleeding out. In combat, the player never "bleeds out" at all, and in fact regenerates - and the player may very well be immune to poisons in the first place!
  • A lot of the Jarls are worried about dragon attacks, namely due to the fact that a lot of the structures in their city are flammable. In the game itself? Not so much. In fact, the structures are apparently so sturdy that they can withstand the force of a dragon landing on it... the same dragons that shake the earth otherwise.
  • Children cannot be killed in gameplay, in spite of the fact that there are several instances of minor storylines that involve children being murdered (offscreen, of course). This particular example is justified; Bethesda was worried about possible complaints from irate parents if children could be killed in-game, so they made the children immortal. This can be particularly ridiculous in Windhelm, where the local serial killer can, at the conclusion of the quest, shank a child who suffers no ill-effects.
  • The Skeleton Key. When Mercer Frey uses it, it can open anything, including the sliding puzzle doors you need claws for, the Thieves' Guild treasure vault, which requires two keys to open, and his own inner potential, allowing him to become inhumanly strong, fast, and clever. When you use it, it's just an unbreakable lockpick. Of course, he's had the key for years and has learned how to use it.
  • Several NPCs will give you sidequests that involve doing something underhanded or correcting a mistake of theirs against another person. This gets a little funny if the questgiver is "whispering" this to you while said other person is casually walking by (due to the game engine, said other person will also be looking straight at you, completely transfixed, but not saying a word). A notable example is the quest involving collecting ingredients for Ingun Black-Briar, who accidentally destroyed her master's collection of rare herbs and is trying to replace them before said master finds out. Since she works at her master's shop, she can be telling you all of this while said master walks right in between you two.
  • Speaking of vampires - Meridia, Daedric Lord of Life, is a very powerful godlike entity with a burning hatred for the undead. Her Daedric quest revolves around press-ganging the Dragonborn into cleansing her temple from a necromancer who's set up shop inside. The segregation occurs when she doesn't give a flying f*** about the Dragonborn's own position in the lineup. You can be a fully leveled Vampire Lord riding a skeletal horse you summoned from a graveyard dimension, with a gaggle of undead thralls shuffling after you, an undead dragon watching your back, and a whole friggin' castle full of ancient vampires at your beck and call - Meridia couldn't care less in her interactions with you.
  • Nearly every supernatural entity (such as Molag Bal, Alduin, Hermaeus Mora, and others) refers to you as a "mortal" too, ignoring your status as a vampire completely. It's somewhat explained by Dawnguard being a DLC and most of these being in the vanilla game (where you can't be a vampire lord); but even in vanilla Skyrim it's possible to be a regular vampire, and this gets completely ignored.
  • In the live-action trailer for the game, a dragon is shown attacking a city with the crowd, guards and civilians alike, running in panic for their lives. In the game proper, as soon as a dragon lands inside a populated area, everyone in the vicinity will immediately stop what they were doing... and run straight towards the dragon to attack it, sometimes with their bare fists. The results are predictable...
  • The alchemist Elgrim has a greeting where he asks you whether you come to his store as a customer or to receive alchemy lessons, implying he's an Alchemy trainer ingame. He isn't.
  • The smith Balimund asks if you came for weapon repairs, and is involved in a miniquest to bring back to its owner a sword he just repaired. Also, broken steel swords and axes are some of the clutter you may find. Contrary to its predecessors, Skyrim doesn't include Breakable Weapons as a feature.
  • Throughout various parts of the game, especially an Imperial-sided playthrough of the civil war quest, we're told multiple times that Ulfric killed Torygg with a single shout- which suggests he is going to be a very formidable opponent. In actual combat, however, he's not particularly difficult to beat (while he has a single assistant, you have two assistants who may even down Ulfric before you get to him) and his shouts are more annoying than deadly, if he even uses them at all.
  • To gain thanehood in Winterhold, the NPCs you can help include teachers and students from Winterhold College. It only makes sense if the imperial-oriented Jarl Kraldar is in charge instead of the starting Jarl Korir (Kraldar has good relations with the college, Korir doesn't).
  • To gain entry to the Soul Cairn, you need to have Serana either turn you into a Vampire Lord or partially Soul Trap you. Either way, she tells you that now that the Soul Cairn knows you, you'll always be able to get in and you won't have to go through the ordeal again. But in practice, if you chose the vampire option, getting cured blocks you from the Soul Cairn until you get turned again. Fortunately, Serana is happy to oblige and as long as you have a Black Soul Gem handy, you can get turned and cured as many times as you want.
• Gangsta Style: A sneaking archer will hold, draw, and fire their bow sideways.
• Gang Up on the Human: The dragons seem to have this as part of their AI. There have been reports of dragons luring players into the aggro radius of other creatures and hostile NPCs, bringing them into the fight against the player while the dragon circles and attacks from above. This is particularly noticeable when a dragon attacks while you're already fighting something else. You'd think that anything that isn't another dragon would perceive the dragon as a bigger threat than you, and temporarily team up with you to take it down (although sometimes this can happen - giants aren't automatically hostile to the player anyway, and are notorious for killing low-level dragons with ease, although they'll typically stay aggroed once it's dead).
• Gargle Blaster:
  • The player can enter into a drinking competition with a man who turns out to be Sanguine, the Daedric Prince of Debauchery and Hedonism. The brew is apparently strong enough that the Dragonborn wakes up on the other side of Skyrim with no memory of the previous night, having experienced all manner of wacky adventures.
  • Talen-Jei, the waiter at the Bee and Barb inn, dabbles in making cocktails. The Cliff Racer, a blend of Firebrand Wine, Cyrodiilic Brandy, Flin, and Sujamma, fits this trope closest, but the Velvet LeChance deserves an honorable mention for being garnished with deadly Nightshade (albeit a nonlethal quantity).
  • The Dawnguard DLC introduces Redwater Skooma, in a Skooma house. It immediately knocks the drinker out, so they can be dragged down to the basement to become a Vampire's Thrall. Interestingly, if you drink some, your companion is locked up with you, despite not drinking any.
• Gay Option: You can marry any marriage candidates, regardless of what character you're playing as. None of the prospective love interests care about race or gender either. An attempt at handwave mentions how harsh the Nord style of life is in Skyrim, and people don't have time for nonsense such as "romance".
• Gendered Outfit:
  • Every outfit in the game has a male and female variant. Armor becomes a Breast Plate when fitted onto a female character, and regular clothes have vastly different appearances between the sexes.
  • Because you're not technically supposed to be able to wear it, Nocturnal's robe has no male variant; males are simply made female (appearance-only), which reverts once the robes are removed.
  • At the very least, most of the armors avoid becoming a Chainmail Bikini. The only exception is Forsworn armor, but then it also looks very skimpy on the men too, and has pitiful armor rating.
• Gender Is No Object: You might occasionally hear otherwise, but gender makes very little difference (with the sole exception of the Imperial Legion, which has an oddly small number of female NPCs in it) when it comes to profession in this setting, both for the player character and for the non-player characters. The Companions, the manliest men in the game, have some womanly women with them; the Stormcloaks have both ranking-officer and grunt-level women; Jarls can be either men or women, as can their personal bodyguards; and so on. There are plenty of other, more important things to be bigoted about in this setting (usually Fantastic Racism).
• Genius Bruiser: Galmar Stone-Fist, Ulfric's right-hand man, a giant Nord berserker with a Beard of Barbarism and a huge axe across his back. Also possessed of a sharp mind capable of elaborate deception strategies and an impressive knowledge of Skyrim's folklore and history.
• Genre Blind: The situations in which you stumble across dead bodies often suggest that this trope is the reason why.
  Heddic's Volunruud Notes: I should 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.
  Elf's Diary: I thought I just saw something moving beyond the barred door. It looked vaguely humanoid. I wonder if it could be an undiscovered automaton? I'm going to move my bedroll down here to see if I can catch another glimpse of it. This is all so exciting!
• Gentle Giant: Subverted. Giants aren't immediately hostile, but they are fiercely territorial and won't hesitate to crush anyone that gets too close to them or their mammoths.
• George Washington Slept Here: The Old Hroldan Inn is said to be where Tiber Septim slept on the night before fighting the battle in which he earned the name Talos Stormcrown. Sleeping there summons a ghost who sends you on a quest to grant him peace.
• "Get Back Here!" Boss:
  • When Dawnbreaker causes an explosion, any draugr that isn't killed by the blast will usually run away.
  • The dragons can be this to a melee Dovahkiin until they get Dragonrend to force them to land.
  • Some enemies (especially high-level Draugr) will suddenly remember that they're 800 years late for work and take off towards the exit of the dungeon you're currently in.
  • Anytime you have to fight a enemy near a body of water. If they flee or take a wrong step, they will end up in the water. While unable to attack you due to not being able to draw their weapons, the same goes for you unless you have some sort of ranged weapon.
  • Most of the boss fight with Harkon consists of trying to chase the obnoxious Vampire Lord down as he pelts you with Drain Life spells and summons gargoyles and skeletons to harass you, occasionally turning invisible to hide or into a swarm of bats to dodge your blows.
• Get It Over With: Rather than wait for last rites, one of the Stormcloaks waiting with you to be executed at Helgen interrupts and claims, "I haven't got all morning!" He is immediately executed. Literally a minute later, a dragon attacks and the rest of the prisoners flee. If he had just let the priest finish talking...
• "Get Out of Jail Free" Card: The game allows you to become thane of all the holds in the region. This in turn allows you to commit a crime and demand to be let go because you are the thane, even if that crime is multiple murder. However, you can only use this one time in each hold, or at most twice if the ruler of a hold changes and you become thane to the new Jarl.
• Ghibli Hills:
  • Falkreath Hold. The only settlement there (besides the ruins of Helgen) is the hold capital itself. The primary industry seems to be logging, and the land itself is unspoiled, teeming with forests and trees, and sparsely populated.
  • Whiterun. The surrounding country side is tundra, but it's grassy and snow-free. The people in the city itself are mostly pleasant, as is the Jarl, and even the guards after you complete a few quests, so the place feels like Arcadia. Perhaps not coincidentally, that is the name of the city's resident alchemy merchant.
• Ghostly Animals: The Dragonborn can complete the optional side quest "Kyne's Trials," in which they must fight with the ghostly spirits of a number of animals, including a bear and a giant mudcrab. These ghosts are not malevolent in and of themselves, however, as they will not attack nor even appear to anyone who is not actively attempting Kyne's Trials. They merely serve Kyne, who is one of the Old Gods of the game setting, in testing the mettle of someone seeking her favor.
• Giant Enemy Crab:
  • Mudcrabs, but not just the ones that annoy you every time you come near a river. Just southeast of Rorikstead, there is a mudcrab-infested pool of water that appears to be ridged on all sides with rocks. On closer inspection, it turns out the "rocks" on one side are the corpse of a mudcrab bigger than everything except mammoths and dragons! And you can fight the ghost of said giant Mudcrab in a quest!
  • A truly massive crab (coincidentally also a ghost) was added as a boss fight at the end of the Fishing Creation, which has since been added to the main game in the Anniversary update.
• Giant Mook:
  • Played with it in regards to Giants. While there are mentions of historical and Off Screen Villainy, the Giants in-game are typically Gentle Giants who will not attack unless provoked. That said, if they do attack, they make for very formidable and hard-hitting foes.
  • Dwemer Steam Centurions return, and are even larger and more powerful. They also now possess a ranged attack of concentrated steam.
  • In the Dragonborn DLC, Lurkers, a type of fish-like lesser Daedra in service to Hermaeus Mora, the Daedric Prince of Knowledge, are this. Lurkers stand much taller than even the tallest of the playable races, roughly as tall as Giants, on average. They have powerful physical attacks, can use a Shockwave Stomp, and have Acid Spit.
• Giant Spider: Though they appear to be based on solfugids rather than true spiders, the appropriately named frostbite spiders are one of the more common enemies you'll encounter underground, varying in scale from the size of a dog to the size of a small elephant.
• Gilded Cage: In the Dawnguard expansion, Serana observes that Castle Volkihar was essentially this for her as she was growing up. She was never able to go anywhere or have any real friends, mostly due to her family's status (her father was an extremely high-ranking noble, almost a king in his way) and the fact that her parents were Daedra worshipers who eventually became vampires, and forced her to become one as well.
• Give Me Your Inventory Item: The game continues the grand tradition of two-bit thugs demanding money from unstoppable world-saving demigods. Hilariously, if you become leader of the Thieves' Guild, you can actually chastise them and take their money instead. More sympathetically, you will sometimes run across Stormcloaks taken prisoner by the Thalmor. Once you slaughter the Thalmor and free the prisoner (which you inevitably will) you can give the prisoner any items from your inventory. The guy probably won't survive long without some gear, but fortunately you've got 3-4 dead Thalmor you can strip for their gear.
• Glamour Failure:
  • Several dungeons have you fight spectral enemies that appears as ghostly blue apparitions. However, they're just normal enemies with a particular visual effect applied to them. It often glitches up, particularly when they die, revealing their true nature.
  • In vanilla Skyrim, a vampire Dovahkiin would suffer this upon becoming Blood-Starved, with all NPCs becoming hostile until you fed again. This was removed in Dawnguard, but it's still possible to suffer a Glamour Failure by accidentally triggering the Vampire Lord form instead of some other power (say, Whirlwind Sprint) in the middle of a populated city. The same can happen to a werewolf.
  • One minor glitch in Dawnguard can leave the Dragonborn still sporting a halo of purplish glimmering light after returning from the Soul Cairn. Although pretty, this is extremely annoying, as it makes it difficult for the player to see (especially in first-person view). The only way to fix it is to go back to the Soul Cairn, find one of those life-draining purple crystals, and let it zap you briefly.
  • Also in Dawnguard, Serana is a very powerful necromancer who will frequently raise the things you kill as her undead thralls. It's incredibly easy to mistake her thralls for actual enemies and kill them, unless you get close enough for the interface to identify them as "Serana's [whatever]." To make this even worse, killing one of her resurrected followers may turn her hostile towards you.
• Glass Cannon:
  • Werewolves. They cannot wear armor, use potions, or perform restoration spells while in beast mode. Their health does not regenerate over time either, although they can regain some by eating the hearts of their victims They can, however, paralyze and stagger any enemy, rendering even ancient dragons helpless, if they enter melee range. Outside of melee range is where one good archer will do them in. Subverted if the player puts in the work to raise the Dragonborn's health to levels high enough that even dragons need time to whittle it down; then the Dragonborn as a werewolf is an unstoppable death machine.
  • Dual-wielders. Potentially double the damage output of a sword-and-board fighter and can take perks that increase their attack speed, but are incapable of blocking.
  • A variant on Dual Wielders are Dagger-wielders who use the Dark Brotherhood's ancient robes to massively increase damage. As expected of assassins, a stiff breeze will put a dent in your health, but you can murder dragons in just a few hits.
  • Skeletons have roughly the same damage potential as rank-and-file Draugr, but are one of the most fragile enemies in the game.
• Global Currency: Windhelm, the seat of the Stormcloak rebellion, will still accept the Septim coinage at the exact same prices as everywhere else. Perhaps justified in how Jarl Ulfric Stormcloak is not the kind of guy who would want to mess with the economy.
• Glorious Death:
  • One of the random events the player character can run into while exploring outside is an old orc. Sometimes he is surrounded by beast corpses and he'll explain that he's seeking a good death, because dying in battle is better than dying of old age. You can offer to grant his wish and he'll fight you to the death.
  • The Dragonborn DLC adds The Ebony Warrior, a Redguard warrior who seeks entrance in to the otherwise Nord-exclusive Warrior Heaven of Sovngarde by dying in combat with the Dragonborn.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: The vampires in Dawnguard have these while human, and the Dragonborn can acquire them as well if they contract their strain of vampirism.
• Glowing Flora:
  • Glowing mushrooms can be found growing in some caves. If you have Hearthfire installed, you can also raise them in your gardens.
  • Nirnroot glows and also chimes, making it easy to spot at night.
  • In Dawnguard, some caverns in the Valley of the Falmer are lit by glowing flowers, which can retract themselves to their shells.
• A God Am I: It's eventually revealed that Alduin is actually Akatosh's firstborn, but he pretends to be an aspect of the Dragon of Time after he decided to exploit a misunderstanding. Well, maybe - given other available facts, it is possible that being firstborn doesn't mean he isn't an aspect of the Dragon God of Time...
• God Save Us from the Queen!: A quest you can get in Solitude has you stopping the revival of Potema the Wolf Queen.
• Gods Need Prayer Badly: This is a motivation of the Thalmor. The Aldmeri Dominion, led by the religious extremist Thalmor, a faction of elven supremacists, have forced the Empire to ban the worship of Talos, leading to the Stormcloak rebellion. The "official" reason for this ban is that the Thalmor believe that they descend from the Aedra and refuse to accept that a human could join their ranks. The unofficial reason is because they play up Altmeri religious beliefs which state that the creation of the mortal world was a cruel trick which robbed their ancestors of pre-creation divinity. They believe that Talos is one of the last things keeping the mortal world extant, and if he is destroyed, the mortal world would be destroyed as well, allowing them to return to a divine state. There is also evidence that they aren't completely wrong about this. Furthermore, it's possible that Talos isn't quite a god in the same way as the other Divines are, and he may have even surpassed them (and the Daedra as well). It's quite possible that he no longer even needs prayer.
• God Was My Copilot: Your drinking buddy in the quest "A Night to Remember" turns out to be none other than Sanguine himself.
• Godzilla Threshold:
  • Relying on the Dragonborn to save the world can become this: your character can be the leader of the Thieves' Guild and/or the Dark Brotherhood, have completed every Daedric quest that involves betrayal, torture, murder, and cannibalism, and have slain hundreds of innocent people before slaying even one dragon and being summoned by the Greybeards. And they'll still teach you to use the Voice, despite the fact that you're evil enough to be be measured in Kilonazis and will obviously abuse the power, because you are the only hope the world has.
  • Lampshaded by the Greybeards in conversation. Whilst they are constrained by the Way of the Voice to use their Shouts only for divine purposes, the Dragonborn is under no such constraints. Since your power is directly granted by a gift of Akatosh himself, any use to which you choose to put it must therefore be divinely ordained. No matter how depraved your actions, in the end you're on a Mission from God.
  • Paarthurnax likewise helps the Dragonborn learn the Dragonrend shout to help defeat Alduin, despite the fact that it could be used to kill him instead - especially since the Dragonborn is known to be allied with the Blades, who explicitly want him dead. Despite this, Paarthurnax trusts the Dragonborn; and his trust is usually justified, as most players will immediately tell the Blades to shove it and remain friendly to Paarthurnax rather than give him a You Have Outlived Your Usefulness moment.
• Go for the Eye: Overlapping with Eye Scream, one of the finishing moves against dragons is for the Dovahkiin to jump onto the dragon's head and stab or slash it in the eye.
• Gold and White Are Divine: The driving force behind the Civil War between the Imperial-supporters and the secessionist Stormcloaks is the White-Gold Concordat, the name given to the peace treaty that was forged between the Imperials and the Thalmor, which, as part of the agreement, stipulates that the Imperials needed to outlaw the worship of Talos. The Thalmor do consider themselves to be a superior, divine race, charged with the extinction of every other race, be they human, elf or beast.
• Gold Fever: Bandits can be fooled into killing one another if you drop a gemstone into the area they patrol; they squabble over it, then come to blows. Another case of Developer's Foresight. Hilariously, this can occasionally also create a dispute between the Dragonborn's spouse and housecarl, depending on whom you marry and which house you're currently occupying. It's strictly a verbal argument, but it still counts, and the item they both want doesn't even necessarily have to be anything valuable.
• Golem: With the barriers between Nirn and Oblivion restored by Martin's Heroic Sacrifice at the end of Oblivion's main quest, the elemental Atronachs are one of only two types of daedra that can be summoned in this game.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: The dragon Numinex slowly went insane after being defeated and imprisoned by King Olaf. According to Paarthurnax, who used to visit him, he eventually even forgot his own name.
• Gone Horribly Right:
  • Arniel Gane in the Winterhold college wants to recreate the circumstances that led to the Dwemer being erased from existence. Once you help him set up the experiment, he tries it out and is erased from existence. Success! He then ends up in your spell list as a summon.^note However, a glitch can cause him to also be a case of Gone Horribly Wrong - he will still appear in the spell list as a summon, but if you summon him, he doesn't actually do anything.
  • If asked about the previous group of apprentices before yourself, Phinis Gestor mentions an apprentice called Yisra who was working on making the Flame Cloak spell work better in Skyrim's cold environment. If you know where to look, you can find her burned to a crisp, indicating that... well, it worked.
  • If the Stormcloaks win the Civil War, this means the Thalmor's plan to fatally fracture and weaken the Empire worked... except it has also given rise to a rogue independent Skyrim with a Physical God on their side. Ulfric will use his victory speech to reveal he fully knows the real war is coming soon, and he has big plans to fortify the kingdom's defences, expand the Stormcloak army and build a navy.
• Gone Horribly Wrong:
  • In the Dragonborn DLC, a team of Necromancers went into Fort Frostmoth to revive Falx Carius with a new form of Necromancy, which restores his flesh. But the process is messed up - he is successfully revived, but cannot be controlled by the Necromancers as he has total free will. Worse, the process warps his mind. He murders the head Necromancer, gains control of the Ash Spawn, and wages war on Raven Rock assuming they're enemies of the Imperial Legion (as he thinks it's still 200 years prior).
  • Near Dayspring Canyon, around the edge of the game map, is a small cabin which apparently exploded and is still burning. Nearby is a burnt circle of candles, and a burnt corpse holding a "Summon Flame Atronach" scroll. One can safely assume he tried to use it, but couldn't control the Atronach, which either exploded or burned his house down and fled. Of course, the Dragonborn will never know why this person was doing so in the first place.
  • Similarly, on the northern shores between Windhelm and Dawnstar, the Dragonborn can discover a burning path of land with a scorched corpse kneeling in the middle. This is actually one of the missing mages from a bugged quest at the College of Winterhold, but since the quest doesn't work, it's left unexplained as to what she was attempting to do and why it failed.
• Gone Swimming, Clothes Stolen: In the volcanic springs of Eastmarch is a small band of hunters bathing, their clothes neatly set aside should the player choose to appropriate them. On the other hand, should the player drop^note (not just unequip, but actually drop from their inventory) their armor before taking a swim, nearby NPCs may pick up the items in the meantime (actually part of a standard NPC response to the player dropping valuable items — they will ask if the player wants the item back, or if it's free for them to keep).
• The Good King: Well, Jarls:
  • Balgruuf the Greater, Jarl of Whiterun. He’s well loved and respected by his people and is always courteous and grateful to the Dragonborn, regardless of their race. He’s also the only Jarl who desperately tries to remain neutral during the Civil War, not wanting the war to destroy his hold or his people. When Whiterun is attacked by the Stormcloaks during the Civil War quest line, regardless of which side you've joined, Balgruuf himself leads the defense of the city. He won't go down without a fight.
  • Brunwulf Free-Winter, the nicest guy in Skyrim, who replaces Ulfric Stormcloak as Jarl of Windhelm if the Empire wins the civil war. Within hours of assuming his post he meets with the local dark elves and promises to develop and renovate the ghetto-like Grey District they've been forced to live in, as well as working on a way to allow Argonians to live in the city instead of the single, drafty, cramped building on the docks. He also retains most of Ulfric's court staff since they know their jobs well enough and offers lodging to the Jarls that were deposed for supporting the Stormcloaks. He then takes charge of Windhelm and doesn't lose that sense of modesty or approachability.
• The Good, the Bad, and the Evil: The Imperials and Stormcloaks are the Good and the Bad. Which one is which depends on which side you join, but one thing both sides agree on is that the Thalmor are the Evil.
• Good Old Fisticuffs: You can choose to "brawl" with some people in lieu of persuading, bribing or threatening. A few NPCs will only become your follower if you can beat them up!
  • Khajiit are the only species that get a +15 boost to unarmed combat, because they're cat people and have claws. Argonians get a much lesser boost - they have a higher base unarmed damage, as do Khajiit, but not the additional damage boost from the Claws passive.
  • The Heavy Armor perk "Fists Of Steel" boosts your unarmed damage by the default armor rating of worn gauntlets. If you're a Khajiit on top of that, your fists are lethal weapons.
  • On top of all of that, there is a unique unarmed damage-boosting apparel enchant effect out there that you can disenchant and apply to your own armor. Combine with the Khajiit unarmed bonus and the Fists of Steel perk...
  • Unarmed Badass Viking!
  • Combine the "Fortify Unarmed" enchantment with the "Fortify Restoration" glitch mentioned above, and you can sucker punch Alduin into submission with ease.
  • And of course, fists also qualify for the speed boost provided by the Elemental Fury shout, and with 3 words, the speed is only limited by how fast you can click. Combine that with any or all of the aforemnetioned buffs, and you're practically playing as a Dragonborn who knows Hokuto Shinken.
• The Goomba:
  • Skeevers are essentially nonthreats at any level and the only thing making them even remotely annoying to deal with is that they carry a disease that makes it slightly harder to pickpocket and lockpick. Wolves are also effortless to deal with, but the disease they carry is slightly more debilitating (unless you're a pure mage build).
  • Basic bandits don't pose much of a threat at any level, and unlike the abovementioned animals, they can't even inflict a disease on the player as compensation.
• Gotta Catch Them All: In the sidequest No Stone Unturned, one must collect multiple Stones of Barenziah, with absolutely no indication of where they are. It is frequently considered the game's That One Sidequest because of this. Your reward is an active effect that causes you to find loads of precious gems all over the place, but by the time you find all the stones, you're not likely to find this useful anymore.
• Gotta Kill Them All: Eight powerful Dragon Priests are scattered throughout Skyrim, each one bearing a mask with special perks. There's a shrine that can be decorated with each mask as well. Naturally, you must hunt down and kill all eight of them to restore the shrine. Your reward for this is another mask.
• Gratuitous Latin:
  • Subverted for the first time in the series. While Cyrodiil and the Imperials are still expies of the Roman Empire, their names are no longer always Latin-sounding, but also Italian-sounding (Adrianne Avenicci being an example). This shows that the language of Cyrodiil and the Empire has changed in the last 200 years.
  • "Penitus Oculatus" means "inward-eyed" in Latin ("penitus" can also mean "inside", "deep within", or, perhaps most appropriately, "thoroughly"). It's one of the few times that the actual language is used.
• Grave Humor: Many of the word walls that you get your words of power from are epitaphs of some sort in the dragon language. A lot of them say something about some hero who died in battle, or some sort of ancient Nord proverb, but some of them say something like this:

  Here lies Fjolmod Foul-Air who

  stank as much on earth as

  his body does now in the ground.

• Gravity Barrier: The game makes it a hat trick for the series. However, the super-tall mountains can be scaled fairly easily with a horse, leading to the "Physics? Bitch, I'm a horse"◊ meme.
• Greater-Scope Villain: The Thalmor-led Aldmeri Dominion is the enemy of all of the factions in the Civil War and their actions are the cause of most of the problems in the setting. Unfortunately, the opposing sides are tied up in their war with each other and the Dominion's victory in the Great War gives them enough power and leverage that even a victory for one side isn't likely to hinder them much. While there are quests where the player can defeat the machinations of individual Thalmor, the Dominion considers their agents in Skyrim to be Reassigned to Antarctica and didn't send anyone truly important to their plans for world domination.
• The Great Exterminator: You can meet Saint Jiub "the Eradicator" in the Soul Cairn in the Dawnguard DLC. The fellow prisoner of the Nerevarine in Morrowind, he goes on to wipe out the much-reviled Cliff Racers in Vvardenfell and becomes canonized by the Tribunal Temple for his efforts. He was killed and soul-trapped during the Oblivion Crisis, but you can help him recover the pages of his "opus" to tell his story back in the world of the living.
• Great Gazoo: Sanguine, the Daedric Prince of Debauchery and Hedonism. He mostly plays with and, at worst, annoys mortals while attempting to drag them into sin with various vices. He is definitely one of the less serious Daedric Princes. His "Myriad Realms of Oblivion" constantly reform to become the pleasure paradise of whoever is visiting. In this game, his idea of having a fun time is going out on a pub crawl with some mortal he just met and getting them stuck in more and more stupid scenarios until they wake up with a splitting headache, a brand new wife, and their old wife lying dead with her skull split open like a watermelon. The Dragonborn got off lightly in "A Night To Remember", having stolen a goat to sell to a giant to pay for a ring to marry a hagraven in Markarth, and wreck a temple to Dibella.
• Great Offscreen War: The recent Great War against the Thalmor provides backstory and motivation for much of the game.
• Green Hill Zone: The game appears to begin in Falkreath Hold, a relatively peaceful region home to a vibrant arboreal forest, as opposed to the harsher tundra, swamps, and glaciers of northern Skyrim.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality:
  • The Imperial Legion and the Stormcloaks, though the latter's Fantastic Racism admittedly paints them as a darker shade of grey in comparison to the Legion.
    • The Legion's trying to hold the Empire together in the face of a great evil and treat non-human races with far more respect than their Stormcloak counterparts on average, but they're willing to kill unlucky bystanders (i.e. you), oppress several Nord customs including their primary religion^note which is given further weight in that according to the developers, Talos worship is actually a Cosmic Keystone and if Talos goes without worship for too long, reality will cease to exist , justify their occupation of Skyrim with a range of controversial excuses including Appeal to Fear ("The Empire is the only thing keeping the Dominion out of Skyrim!") and straight-up Cultural Posturing ("Without the guiding light of the Empire, the people of Tamriel will fall into barbarism and anarchy, including Skyrim! Especially Skyrim!"). Some of their members also engage in war crimes, according to more than one testimony. The Stormcloaks want to be independent and restore their native customs without fear of persecution, but their leader killed a young and innocent king to begin the war (although he claims this was a lawful challenge according to Nord custom, which not everyone agrees on), and have a disturbingly reactionary and exclusionary attitude against any non-Nord races, with the Stormcloak capital of Windhelm being by far the worst offender. This racism also spreads with them — if Whiterun is taken by the Stormcloaks, the Cyrodiilic blacksmith there bitterly notes that she'd probably be out of business if she wasn't already married to a Nord.
    • There's an added element of importance to the civil war that goes beyond simply whose beliefs will dominate in Skyrim. If the Empire wins, the political situation re-stabilizes and the Empire can resume rebuilding to face the inevitable Thalmor aggression more effectively, and possibly repel a second assault and ultimately reestablish the old pantheon. But if the Stormcloaks win, free and open worship of Talos can resume immediately in Skyrim. The Stormcloaks then might be able to reunite fractured elements of the Empire like Hammerfell and Morrowind, and reforge the Tamrielic Empire under Skyrim's leadership into a stronger force than the current Empire. Regardless, however, Ulfric does make it a point to take immediate steps to ensuring Skyrim is self-sufficient by increasing the power of its army if he wins.
    • Both sides also have a relatively even amount of "corrupt Jarls" (Siddgeir and Maven Black-Briar for the Empire, Skald the Elder and Thongvor Silver-Blood for the Stormcloaks) and "good Jarls" (Brunwulf Free-Winter, Balgruuf the Elder, Kraldar, and Brina Merilis for the Empire, Dengeir of Stuhn, Vignar Gray-Mane, Korir, and Sorli the Builder for the Stormcloaks). Most of the Jarls for either side have their merits and flaws, however, driving this trope even further.
  • On another front, there's the Forsworn and the Silver-Bloods (and the rest of the inhabitants of the Reach by extension). The Forsworn are bloodthirsty and cannibalistic Reachmen guerrillas who esteem Hagravens, make pacts with and worship the Daedric Princes, practice Human Sacrifice, and murder anyone unlucky enough to run into their patrols... and they've also been enslaved and persecuted by the rulers of Markarth and the Silver-Bloods for at least the last few generations, with many Forsworn being pushed into their current extremism by the actions of their oppressors (who in turn see the brutal enslavement of the Forsworn as the best option possible for civilizing the region). As one Forsworn says, "There are no innocents in the Reach - just the guilty and the dead."
  • If you eavesdrop on some of the random bandit tribes you find, it turns out some of them are normal, rational people. One cave is full of vampires leading to the shrine to one of the Daedric Princes, who laughs when you get there and explains that the vampires came to him seeking a cure for their condition, and he thinks it's poetic irony that you happened by to kill them. Generally speaking, you will find yourself questioning the morality of your actions a lot the deeper you go in this game.
  • The Blades and the Greybeards. The Blades want to defeat Alduin and the dragons, but they aren't very nice to the Dragonborn, while the Greybeards are kindly mentor figures but invoke You Are Not Ready to explain why they don't just teach the Dragonborn every Shout they know when the player first meets them. The two are also not fond of each other - the Blades order you to kill Paarthurnax for being a dragon, and Delphine says the Greybeards fear the Shout's misuse and so do not use its power for good, but ignore how all power risks being abused and their knowledge is worthless if it isn't being put to use. By contrast, the Greybeards consider the Blades meddlers in things they don't understand, and claim that their mission to serve the Dragonborn is a lie they use to hide the fact they want to control the Dragonborn.^note This actually has some element of truth; you're basically forced to join the Blades as Delphine took the horn and you need to get it back, and throughout the whole questline, Delphine remains dismissive towards you. For instance, when you first meet her, you can ask "Why should I trust you?", a valid question since she stole the horn and is yammering about Thalmor conspiracies; she replies, "If you don't trust me, you were a fool to come here." What exactly does she expect as a non-foolish response, then? Show up and murder everyone in the Inn to get it? Shrug and walk away from the main quest? Ultimately, you can be loyal to only one of the two factions, depending on how you feel about killing Paarthurnax. Overall, it's 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^note and the devastation he could cause to Skyrim if his control were to slip and he were to rampage across the land would be too horrible to even contemplate, 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 prior to his Heel–Face Turn.
  • The Dark Brotherhood will come off as an antagonistic force and none of the quests you do for them are anything close to good; but some players can't help but feel sorry for Astrid, who seems to just want to hold together and provide for her surrogate family (the implication being that their primary means of income is death) and is initially horrified by the Night Mother's decree to go assassinate the Emperor.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: A Vampire Lord special ability, Vampire Grip, allows you to levitate enemies in the air and throw them at walls/hazards/each other/off cliffs.
• Grim Up North:
  • About half of Skyrim fits. The city of Windhelm wins the award for grimness, being plagued with Fantastic Racism, slums, and a serial killer in the streets. The further north you go, the more dangerous things become, with the wilderness around Dawnstar and Winterhold best being described as an endless parade of irate polar bears, hungry frost trolls, pissed-off horkers, and terminally idiotic bandits. However, the northernmost city in the game, Solitude, is actually fairly nice and not snowy at all, apparently due to warm water currents in coming through the northern sea. Its grim enough that Nord culture has the Fourth-Date Marriage as the norm. Skyrim is such a harsh and dangerous land even within the civilized areas that Nord culture in general frowns on lengthy courtships, so if you care about someone enough to love them or want to marry them, you wear an Amulet of Mara and just tell them, and if they're favorably inclined they'll accept, you get married, and then everyone can go back to keeping the bear, vampires, trolls, bandits, and dragons at bay.
  • Solstheim makes a return in the Dragonborn DLC, and seems to be even more grim than it was in Bloodmoon. Raven Rock was abandoned and is now a massive refugee city for the Dunmer who were forced to flee Morrowind following the Red Year. The southern end of the island is blasted with ash from Red Mountain's eruption and the northern parts are still full of Reiklings and dangerous wildlife. The Skaal still survive, but the return of the dragons has brought even greater threats to Solstheim.
• Groin Attack: This is one of the finishers you can perform on a Dwarven Centurion. It's also one of the finishers for unarmed combat.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy: Pick any humanoid opponent, not even necessarily a guard. From stealth, shoot them with an arrow, then avoid being detected when they come looking for you.
  Guard: (with an arrow sticking out of his arm) Huh. Guess I was just hearing things.
• Guest-Star Party Member: The game overhauls the "follower" system in a similar vein to Bethesda's Fallout sister series, making them markedly more useful. Quite a few are extremely powerful and can function as Disc-One Nuke companions if you recruit them at early enough levels. Some can be hired at any time, while others will only follow you as part of quests or after certain quests. A particularly powerful example is Mercer Frey, the leader of Riften Thieves Guild who turns out to be a traitor and the main antagonist of the Thieves Guild questline. Mercer will follow the Dragonborn during one quest, and although you cannot command him, access his inventory, or sneak with Mercer in tow, nothing stops you from leading him around away from the quest and letting him nuke your adversaries for a few hours.
• Guide Dang It!: Skyrim is very large.
• Gut Feeling: At the onset of the quest to find Thorald Gray-Mane, the quest giver, Thorald's mother, displays this heavily when told her son is dead, insisting that he's still alive (and he indeed is). So does Thorald's brother when you talk to him.