Category: Doodles

Enchanted Pants

Steen usually ends up taking all her clothes off right in front of the enchanter

Enchanting in Morrowind is totally obnoxious and takes forever to get any good at it. And I never feel like making any enchantments except for the super awesome ultra the-professionals-will-charge-you-100,000-drakes-to-do-it sorts of enchantments. Sooooo I just go to the professionals. I’m also the sort of person that only ever captures Golden Saint souls (or better), because everything else I consider “not worth my time.’

Usually I visit Galar Rothan for my enchanting services, because I spend a lot of time in Sadrith Mora and also because it is a shitton of money so I need that Telvanni discount.

So any time I visit an enchanter, I usually end up taking off all my clothes and don’t even notice that I’m naked until hours later. It makes sense in a way, you got to give your item over to the enchanter for them to enchant it, so if you’re wearing it you have to remove it. But I wish there was more of an indication that you’re actually taking your clothes off when putting them on the enchanting screen – even if you just want to see how many charges your shirt can carry or want to get a quote, off it goes!

He charged me 50,000 drakes for those pants, by-the-way. This makes me wonder a lot about the economics of enchanters.

I mean, 50,000 drakes! You could buy, like, 10 houses for that on Vvardenfell! That is many orders of magnitude more money than anybody else gets paid for anything.

Do they usually not get any commissions for years, but then some wealthy eccentric Telvanni noble (like Steen) comes by and pays some astronomical fee for a super powerful enchantment? And then the enchanter lives on that for a few years until another wealthy noble comes by?

Or, like, are enchanters all super filthy rich? Like, do they just rake it in? In which case, I feel like if I lived in Morrowind, I’d be an enchanter. Because it is a low-risk occupation (no fighting monsters or bandits or anything), and the client has to provide all the materials and reagents for the enchantment themselves, so really the enchanter has no investment either. It is all pure profit. Of course it probably takes years to master enchanting, but once you do, you just rake in the dough.

OOORRR maybe enchanters mostly just live off of much simpler enchantments, commissioned by poorer folk, and it is enough to get by on, and since Steen is so filthy rich she doesn’t really have a grasp on reality, so she just thinks up the most extravagant and difficult enchantment possible and pays for it no matter the price, but this event is super rare (as there is only one Steen), and therefore this event is kind of like winning the lottery for an enchanter?

Yep, I think about the economics of enchanters a lot. And I still think that would be my occupation if I for-real lived in Morrowind. I would not be a travelling adventurer, I tell you, that is a very high-risk, high-mortality occupation. I mean, yea, it is the one way to rake in even more cash than enchanting, but adventurers also die allll the time. So, not worth it.

Vivec City Parkour

Vivec City is humongous and obnoxious to walk around. It has 8 neighborhoods, and each neighborhood is built up in layers, (up to) 4 strata per neighborhood.

FORTUNATELY, Vivec City has lots of gondoliers that you can pay to take you over to the other neighborhoods (which is a lot faster than walking). UNFORTUNATELY, the gondoliers are only on the canal works (bottom) level for obvious reasons, and it is a pain running down 3 flights of stairs (or even levitating down 3 flights of stairs) to get to them.

Sometimes I levitate down, but more often than not I just jump down when I see them. I do this because I am lazy, and because I know I will survive. But only just! A fall from that height ALMOST kills me and I am super damaged, but it doesn’t quite kill me! Still, I must look a wreck and the gondoliers must think I am super weird.

Recursion in Alchemy

Apparently it is always pajama party time in Tel Vos or something. I don’t know why, but whenever I write the scripts for these comics, people end up in their pajamas. I guess it highlights the fact that Steen never leaves Tel Vos and basically lives there. Also, I thought it would be hilarious if Master Aryon wore one of those nightcaps that you always see in cartoons but nobody actually wears anymore.

Right. Recursive alchemy. We’ve all done it, just to see what would happen, of course. And we’ve all taken it to an extreme. By the end of my experiment, my intelligence was astronomically high, and the potions wouldn’t wear off for a kabillion hours or something like that. It was really more of a curse.

I made a strength potion, and it made me super strong! But I was so strong that as soon as I would strike a monster, my katana would break. The monster would die instantly, of course, but I’d have to repair the katana. And as soon as I’d repaired it, some other monster would come by, and bam! One strike later, my trusty katana would be broken again. I was so strong, I could no longer meaningfully interact with objects hewn by mere mortals!

I made a levitation potion. But I would levitate so fast, that gently moving forward would launch me on a complete circuit of the planet in a second. So I couldn’t really move or go anywhere, there was no finesse or control.

I made a personality potion. But then everybody loved me, even bandits, and nobody would ever attack me for any reason so it was very boring. I’d go into some dungeon and all the ne’er-do-wells would look up in glee at my arrival. “Oh my gosh, it’s Steen! Oh wow, she is soooo cool, I want to hang out with her!” Come on, you can’t attack people after that!

Pretty much most of the potions I tried were disasters. But it struck me that shooting your intellect into the stratosphere – shattering your mind by forcing the transcendent awareness of a god into your puny mortal meat brain – sounded like a very Telvanni thing to do.