In the year that the dragons returned, the year that Ulfric Stormcloak killed High King Torygg and plunged Skyrim into civil war, a unprepossessing fellow named Nordrick traveled this harsh and dangerous land in search of the ultimate reward--an ordinary life, free of adventure and heroic deeds. Unfortunately, he failed to realize these modest ambitions, as his life was tragically cut short when his weirdly psychotic pets insisted on dragging him into an overwhelming fight. Nordrick’s travels were chronicled by Chris Livingston in The Elder Strolls. (Chris is also responsible for Living in Oblivion, the tale of the non-adventures of Nordrick’s predecessor, Nondrick. If you’re unfamiliar with these blogs, both are well worth your time.)
And this? This is a shameless copycat blog, in which I create my own humble non-player character attempting to pursue an utterly unremarkable existence in Skyrim. The idea is to avoid adventure and feats of derring-do; Skyrim is full of ordinary people doing ordinary things, and my character desires nothing more than to be one of them. I won’t be saving innocents, acquiring powerful artifacts, or slaying dragons. To avoid sliding down (up?) the slippery slope of heroism, I’ll be following some ground rules:
• I’m not a hero. I won’t do quests unless they seem utterly innocuous--anything more exciting than feeding someone’s pets while they’re on vacation is probably beyond me. (Sadly, I don’t think there are any pet-feeding quests in Skyrim.) I’ll do my best to avoid danger and find some way to make a living without adventuring.
• I’m not a criminal. I won’t steal, and I won’t do anything that seems like stealing, even if the game doesn’t think it’s stealing. That includes taking vegetables from gardens, tools from mines and mills--it includes taking anything that isn’t mine, basically, unless it’s lying around in the wilderness where there’s clearly no possible owner nearby. I won’t even loot bodies, for the most part--taking stuff from dead people is still taking stuff, in my opinion. Plus, it’s icky. The idea of stripping off a dead person’s clothing or armor so I can sell it is just gross, so forget that. I will use animals for meat and pelts, though. That’s something that normal people do.
• I’m not an automaton. I need to eat and sleep regularly, and I have to move at a relatively modest pace. (That means that I walk everywhere, as NPCs do, unless I have some pressing reason to run, like a troll tearing off my face.) I won’t use fast travel.
• I’m not destined to succeed. I will accept the consequences of my decisions, and, for that matter, the consequences of my own incompetence. That means that I don’t reload a previous saved game when things go wrong. If I die, I die, and it’s over.
These are very similar to the rules that Nordrick lived by. Note that they aren’t totally inflexible: I’ll break them if there’s a compelling reason--if I’m starving, I might search a dead body to see whether it’s carrying a freshly made sandwich, for example. And I’ll reload a save if the game screws up for reasons that aren’t my fault (such as obvious bugs). But these will be my guidelines.