Ah, The Empire...
It's not what it once was.
Long gone are the days of The Septim Bloodline, glory of The Blades and ceaselessly committed Guards who'd follow you to unbelievable lengths to maintain the law...
No. In Skyrim, effectively, The Empire have become The Thalmor's bitch...
As the Thalmor Justicer in Markarth takes such pleasure in telling you 'The Empire only exist because The Thalmor allows it to be so'. Who'd have thought that as you helped force back The Daedra in Oblivion you were NOT actually ending The Empire's problems, but merely helping start 200 Years of new ones.
This is what happens when a Legendary Bloodline of Emperors comes to an end. The Elves get their way...
Still, the Imperials ARE still here. They look pretty much the same, and Redguards and Nords fill their ranks in Skyrim, if the tutorial sequence is anything to go by.
You see, I've never done a playthrough siding with The Empire. It was about time I did.
The boring option, and plainly obvious option for an Imperial, what have been to have created a character who was purely a soldier. But I'd kind of had enough of that. All of my new characters so far had been warriors or thieves, and all of them exclusively using weapons as their only attacking option. I wanted to use magic for a change. But I did also want to play along the Imperial side of the Civil War quests. So, I struck upon a compromise...
This is Cassius Loran, an Imperial Battlemage.
My plan from the outset was to build a magic user, but one which could actually hold their own in a fight. As a Battlemage I was going to tank Cassius out in Heavy Armour but principally have him wielding Magic, occasionally supplemented by a Sword (Enchanted if possible) or a Staff to conjure a particular spell, if necessary. A magical Hood would be okay, but this guy wasn't going to be wearing actual robes, that was certain.
And as you can see from this post-Helgen image that approach went REALLY well...
Because what I did not take into account was that if you follow Hadvar The Imperial out of Helgen, as opposed to Ralof the Stormcloak, then you only fight Stormcloaks along the way.
Stormcloaks do not wear Heavy Armour. At least none of those in the Tutorial sequence. Plenty Heavy Weapons to loot. No Heavy Armour.
So that was the first order of the day upon reaching Riverwood. Hadvar tells me that as far as he's concerned my actions at Helgen have more than gained me a pardon, but until I he can speak with General Tullius up in Solitude I'm going to have to lay low. Luckily, while Hadvar may be with The Imperial Army he is actually a Nord, and his Uncle is Alvor the Blacksmith (Of 'Strong and Simple' fame...) . I at least have a roof over my head for a while, and access to the Forge outside.
Which resulted in this:
Iron Banded Armour and a Novice Mage's Hood. It's the best armour I can Smith myself, right now, and the Hood gives me 30 extra Magicka points. But the majority of money raised by selling my Helgen loot went on buying Spell Tomes at the Riverwood Trader. Every character starts the game with at least the spells 'Flames' and 'Healing'. There's also a Spell Tome of 'Sparks' to be found in the Torturer's Chambers in Helgen. Having chosen the Mage Stone and having been dual wielding fire and electrical damage since leaving the Tutorial I shelled out for the defensive spell 'Oakflesh,' destruction spell 'Frostbite,' and illusion spell 'Clairvoyance'.
A lot of longer term Elder Scrolls players dislike Clairvoyance intensely. It is, after all, a magic spell which creates a stream of light covered mist which guides you to your next objective. They consider that to be far too much hand-holding for their liking. But frankly, by now, I know exactly where I'm going. Far too well, in fact. And Clairvoyance is a really useful early way of raising your illusion skill level, with pretty much minimum effort. Just follow the trail... :)
My follower choice this time around was Sven, having now had enough time and space from the idiot to have forgotten quite how annoying he was. I had no money left after purchasing those spell tomes to get him any specific armour, so I just let him use whatever random loot I stripped off Bandits on root, and left him to do his own thing.
But as I found, leaving Sven to DO his own thing is not always a good idea.
I had a pretty solid magic combination going - Flames in one hand, Frostbite in the other. Eventually I got the spell perk giving me a dual casting Bonus for doing that. It was actually quite potent. I could take down a Draugr, providing it was only one at a time. It would pretty much wipe out all my Magicka to kill one Draugr in a row. Clearly I was going to be going through a LOT of Magicka potions in the long run.
The problem was that every time I started throwing Magical attacks AT an enemy NPC, Sven (in his infinite LACK of wisdom) would engage the enemy by standing directly IN my line of fire! Seriously, 8 times out of 10 Sven would end up deliberately (Or so I'm, calling it) getting himself set on fire while I tried to take down our foe.
And he'd complain about it.
Constantly.
"I'm supposed to be on YOUR side!" he'd say.
Yes, Sven. You ARE. So why do you keep standing IN MY WAY?!! :)
Granted, playing the game without weapons DID feel really alien at first. I kept wanting to go for my back-up Sword. But once I got properly into it, I got over that hurdle, and into using magic as intended. Going through the Ranks of Destruction magic should be more effective now that I'll actually be specialising, and if I can enchant some of that Armour or some jewellery with enchantments which lower the cost of certain schools of magic I'm sure I'll be able to strike a pretty solid balance.
For now, I've upgraded Cassius' armour to Steel and am getting ready to head into Whiterun. It'll be interesting to see how he fares up against the challenge of a Dragon. I suspect he'll get his ass kicked, but who knows...?
From there, it'll be a bit of a toss-up as to which direction he'll head - Up to Solitude to join the Army or over and up to Whitehold to the Mage College. Decision, decisions. But it's nice to have some choices to make which my other characters won't logically be having to make. I think I'll be sticking with this one for that reason.
Next Time: Redguards and Swordsplay. A natural mix?
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