In a Hostile Country: The Saga of Cahmel (Let’s Play Morrowind, Part 14)

When we last left our hero, he was facing a personal crisis of epic proportions. Here he was—adrift in a sea of blasting sand and industrial sabotage—powerless to carry out his given objective, clueless as to how he should proceed. He was in a friggin’ pickle, is what he was in.

Possibilities flickered through my head as I stared at that door, that demon door through which I dare not tread. Fighter’s Guild? Yeah, not in this lifetime. Thieves? In my heart of hearts, I’m a fighter, not a plunderer. Join another house? Yeah, so, should I go with the Boy Scouts—make that Girl Scouts–or the Sith Lords?

Keep in mind, for those of you playing along at home, that it was also nearing midnight in realtime. In part, I think this little detail accounts for the genius, the brilliance of my inevitable decision. It was a stroke of inspiration, really—a brain-crazed epiphany that frothed to the tip of my skull like a fly that had stumbled into a fryer.

I was going to pick a direction. And I was going to walk in it until I couldn’t walk anymore.

There was no way this could possibly go wrong.

So, yeah…that’s what I did. I turned vaguely eastward—the coast was only a few miles away—and began walking. Running, actually. It was during this period in which I slew most of my cliff racers.

Really, composing a detailed account of this period would be folly. If you want a reasonable facsimile, here it is: I ran for a while, came to a cliff, walked around it, fought a cliff racer, fought his buddy, fought his buddy’s girlfriend, and then walked to the next cliff to repeat the process ad infinitum.

Actually, tell you what—let me just give you a montage of screenshots. That should do the trick.

Well, I'm not saying I'd like to build a summer home here, but the trees are actually quite lovely.

And now we have ashen wastes, punctuated by bursts of steam coming from...lava! Never let it be said the topography of Morrowind is bland and samey!

I'm just gonna come out and say it: this game is still really damn pretty.

This was one of my more pleasant morningsduring my journey through the wastes.

The first thing to break up the tedium was the discovery of an Ashlander camp.

Okay, here we go. See, this whole time I’ve been dealing with snooty, worked-up city folk—people who’ve been in their crowded (sorta) metropolitan centers too damn long, to the point where they’re rude as hell and proud of it. Those arrogant city slickers, going around and insulting me—they’re not half as nice as these decent rural people, these salt-of-the-earth tribesmen with their ancient cultures and their hones religions. Simple, pleasant folk, removed from the stresses and inhumanities of decadent society. Friggin’ society.

I walk into camp, extending to them the traditional Outlander’s greeting of saying absolutely nothing while rapidly invading their personal space. They responded with a traditional Dunmer greeting, “S’pittetaut o’ritdar Oad,” which I believe translates to, “May your days be

Oh. Wait. No, he was actually just telling me to spit it out or hit the road.

…in a charming, folksy way, of course.

I mean, I could feel it. I really could. They might act all harsh and xenophobic at me, but I could tell they really cared. It was in the little things: like how, since I had only a few hitpoints left, one woman expressed concern by telling me to “Find a healer and get out my sight!” See, a coal-hearted city femme would probably, like, tell me to go and die in a gutter instead.

Also, there was the interested way in which they stood back and watched me almost get killed by a giant beetle that’d wandered into their camp.

Hey, man, just running from a magic beetle. I only bring this up cos, you know, I mean, you've got a sword and all, and...well, I'm kind of almost dead here, and I could...maybe, just since you're in the neighborhood, and this is your...camp...no? Okay, that's cool too.

Myself, I blame hat envy.

Another bit of texture arrived when I came to a den of Daedra-worshippers.

I really, really don’t want to get into a lecture about the tangled clusterfudge that is the Elder Scrolls cosmology. I’m not a fan, myself. Don’t get me wrong, the games are fantastic, but the actual mythology of the setting is pointlessly, unarrestingly complex. Suffice it to say, the Daedra are kind of like…gods, but not really the pleasant ones. They’re the ones whose followers aren’t exactly eager to stick up cutesy bumper stickers. They’re the ones who don’t have any daycares named after them. They’re not all evil, per se—in fact, one of them is sort of your primary questgiver—but they’re just that little bit shady.

In Morrowind, worship of the Daedra is sort of doubly taboo, since the locals worship three pseudo-gods called…you know what, I’ll come back to this stuff later. Suffice it to say, there’s a lot of good reasons Daedra-worshippers would set up shop in these isolated, ruined temples, and none of them have to deal with evangelizing the local scribs. There’s a lot of these sort of cult centers you can stumble across while exploring.

Now, I’ve been around the block a few times, and I know what I can expect in Daedric ruins. At the best, I can expect priests and warriors, ones who can probably send my guts home in a kitschy tribal basket. At the worst, I can expect high-level demonic baddies who wouldn’t take the trouble to pick my charred organ bits off of the floor.

These facts in mind, I of course decide to go exploring. Yay!

I go through several creatively-laid-out rooms, swimming through a flooded section to get to the altar room. When I got there, I was beset upon by two honest, genuinely surprised, and probably well-meaning cultists. To everyone’s surprise, I managed to take them out. Go Team Housebreaker, I guess.

On the altar, there’s some offerings. A couple gems, specifically, worth quite a bit.

Now, momma didn’t raise no fool. When you see valuable offerings just lying there on a sacrificial altar to a forbidden god, taking them will not work out well for you. Like, if you take a shiny quarter from the collection plate at church, you might get a dirty look from your grandma. If you take Dagoth Ur’s bling, he will end your ass.

And yeah, before you dash off to the comments section, I know it's Malacath.

So of course, being prudent, I use a speed buff before I steal the stuff and run for it. I just manage to escape a summond baddie.

My path of theft, destruction, and being uncomfortably eyeballed comes to an end when I wash up on anisland just off the coast…an island home to a little city I like to call…

…Sadrith Mora.
I call it that because that’s what the city is named. In case it wasn’t clear.