Daggerfall:Quest Related Hints

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The quests in Daggerfall outside of the main questline are varied in form, content, and complexity. These quests can be categorized in several ways. They can be categorized by the type of quest-giver (a guild or the nobles of a province, for example). They can also be categorized by the style of adventure that the character needs to undertake to complete the quest (dungeon crawls, deliveries and puzzle-solvers are examples of these styles). What is included here are various techniques for solving them.

Quest Sources

Besides the major storyline quests, there are a plethora of quests available in Daggerfall. These quests are available from a number of sources, and vary widely in tone, type, time required and style. The sources of these quests are the various guilds, factions, and various people of Daggerfall.

In general, the objectives of these quests will reflect the interests and goals of the quest-giver. The skills needed to resolve these quests are rarely too specific. However, a few, namely some Mages Guild quests, require specific circinate spells to complete.

• Guilds
  • Fighters Guild
  • Mages Guild
  • Thieves Guild

• Other Organizations
  • Dark Brotherhood
  • Knightly Orders
  • Temples
  • Witch Covens

• Other Quest-Givers
  • Merchants/Innkeepers
    These quests can also attained from any NPC that offers "talk" from their menu when clicked on.
  • Nobles

Reputation and Quests

When a character engages in a quest for any faction, reputation with that faction is impacted. What is less obvious is the impact various quests might have on reputation with other factions. Noble quests, for example, often involve smuggling, which adversely affects reputation with the Thieves Guild.

• Member Quests: Member quests are only given to the members of a given guild, temple, or order. Also, reputation within the Guilds/Factions determines which quests are offered to a character.

• Non-member Quests: Temples, the Fighters and Mages Guild as well as Knightly Orders offer non-member quests. Covens are not open to joining by characters, so their quests may be considered non-member quests in most ways.

Dungeon Crawls

Dungeon crawls are the most common type of Daggerfall quest. Most of the Main Quests, and many others, require a dungeon crawl of some length and various levels of difficulty. Here are some guidelines to dealing with Daggerfall's dungeons.

Maps

Daggerfall features large, complicated dungeons composed of inter-locking sections. Each section usually intersects with two or three other sections. Each section contains a separate combination of floor and wall textures (visible on the map view), and each usually has several vertical levels.

The map used to view the explored areas of these dungeons requires some getting used to. It can be used in both an overhead (straight-down) mode and an adjustable oblique-angle mode. Both modes can be useful. The map reveals things that are not always visible to the character, including secret doors and closed pits.

Similarities to Main Quest dungeons

Many of the above-mentioned sections have great similarities to sections of the Main Quest dungeons. The various walk-throughs may help exploration of these ares when encountered in other dungeons.

Doors

Dungeon doors can usually be opened simply by activating them. Others are locked or even magically locked. Some locked doors can be opened by various combinations of levers, wheels and/or other items that need to be activated. These opening mechanisms may or may not be in the immediate vicinity of the door itself, although they will be in the dungeon section. Additionally, when a formerly locked door is closed it will need to be unlocked again.

The lock-picking skill, spells and bashing can be used to open any locked door. Lock-picking or bashing does not work on magically locked doors. Effective open-effect spells can burn a lot of magical energy, and since a magically locked door may lead to little of value, their use is left to the players discretion. Bashing doors with a weapon wears the weapon in the same way out that combat does; having a heavy back-up weapon for this purpose is a possibility.

Some enemies automatically open doors, even some locked ones, if they detect a character. This can be useful, albeit potentially dangerous. In addition enemies can also close formerly open doors, previously locked doors will then be locked again.

If enemies are partially visible through the cracks around a door, they can be attacked with archery and some ranged spells. But enemies with ranged spells can also attack the player's character in that way as can humanoid enemies when they are equipped with bow and arrows.

Dungeon doors stay open unless the character closes them. This can aid in navigation, revealing to the player that a section has already been visited.

Trapdoors open in all ways mentionable, from merely walking over them to having to click on them and to finding their specific switch. Trapdoors that look just like the floor are easily spotted on the map. They can not be lock picked.

Hidden doors tend to look like normal dungeon walls that, when moved aside, reveals a normal door or a corridor. They can be lock picked or bashed open, though some secret doors have associated switches that will open them when toggled. Hidden doors are easily spotted on the map and can also be magically locked.

Portcullises can only be opened with a switch and are represented as a thin wider portion of a corridor on a map.

Obstacles

Dungeons have a wide variety of obstacles. There are areas that are drowned; entire sections that are under-water. Rooms and corridors have pit-traps; some open, some closed. Huge chambers contain massive towers that are complicated enough to be separate dungeons in their own right. Corridors can lead to life-sapping death traps. Doors can be blocked by cages, often containing monsters.

All of these obstacles can be overcome. Skills such as climbing, jumping and swimming get a work-out in dungeons. Spells, whether custom-created or Circinate, can also be used to deal with many of these obstacles.

Dungeon Dressing

In dungeons, one will often run across 2D images that visually appear to be random belts, iron maidens, bottles, and so on. Clicking on these items doesn't normally do anything, as they are just for mood and clutter, unless they have been specifically placed by the game or module.

Quest items disguised as dungeon dressing need to be picked up by being clicked on, whereupon you will receive a message about the quest and the item. They are most often found on the floor.

In dungeon teleports are most frequently disguised as free-standing torches, brick walls (which normally indicate a terminating dungeon connector; they may need to be walked into or clicked), and human skulls. Direnni Tower contains a unique teleport trap that the player will not even initially notice.

There are three kinds of obvious switches with 3D objects: wall-levers, ground-levers, and cranks. (Sometimes, these switches can vanish when viewed from a certain direction; if you think a switch should be nearby, look in an appropriate direction and sway the camera around.) Others are disguised as wall and free-standing torches, animal skulls (usually), and, in one case, a statue. Switches toggle and open otherwise locked doors, portcullises, trapdoors, sliding walls, rising floor regions, and such.

Traps are infrequent but can involve passing or walking over part of a corridor, and are typically connected to dungeon dressing such as the Orcish bust, the iron maiden, leaning coffins, and sometimes to free-standing torch fixtures. One special-mention trap is a hidden pit on the ground. Very seldom, a switch can be trapped.

Blue beams occasionally obstruct doors, but they can only be found in the Main Dungeons, and the switches that toggle them are usually nearby.

Attacking Quest Targets

Most quests where you shall either kill or capture a person or monster, use some sort of condition check, like when target is hit do this. However when you kill an enemy with just one strike, as is often the case when an advanced character goes after a weaker enemy, the condition will not be fulfilled. This results in a situation where you can't complete the quest, as the kill will simply not be acknowledged. To avoid this, you can simply us a weapon which does a minimum amount of damage when going after a weaker enemy. This condition will also be not fulfilled in case your weapon's material cannot harm the respective enemy or when you kill the target exclusively with magic attacks, in other words, without physical attacks.

Finding People

Often quests require you to find the location of a particular person. This can be done by going to the appropriate town and talking to a NPC. There are two methods which can give you information.

• Ask for Where -> Location -> General. This will give you the location of the palace, if one exists, and named houses.
• Ask for Where -> People. This will give you the location where a particular person can be found, like a tavern, store, house, etc.

If NPCs offer to mark a location on your map, check it to see where to go. If they don't give it to you, keep asking them and they will mark the building on your map eventually. If NPCs say they don't know where a location is, you must ask another NPC.

Delivery Quests

Many Noble, Thieves Guild, and other quests are basically of the form: take item A to such-and-such person and collect the reward. Permutations of this model include: having to go get the item; trading the item for another and taking it elsewhere; and having enemies trying to intercept the delivery.

Most of these quests can be considered as smuggling operations. Most of the time, trouble can be avoided by moving quickly; the enemies spawn at a certain rate, and can often be outrun. When such a quest originates from the Thieves Guild, city guards should be avoided unless the player wants to lose reputation with the Thieves Guild. Doing these types of quests for anyone but the Thieves Guild also lessens the character's reputation with that faction in most cases.

Rescue Quests

Several quests require the character to rescue an innocent. These are usually Noble or Merchant quests. These quests pose a hidden danger; success often means a drop in reputation with the faction that has taken the hostage, namely the Thieves Guild or the Dark Brotherhood. A character that belongs to either faction may lose reputation to the point that expulsion from the faction is the ultimate result. Expulsion from either faction is permanent.

Otherwise, these quests involve gathering information, tracking down developed leads, and a confrontation. Gathering information and tracking down leads involves dialog with "townies" (a high "Streetwise" skill can help here). At the confrontation stage, the character is usually offered a choice: ransom or fight. Opponents at this stage are humans, and are generally about the same level as the character.

Twisting Endings to Quests

Many quests can be done in several ways. In one quest, you are asked to fight a duel to solve a love triangle. Rather than fight the duel, you can find the woman involved and talk to her, and she will pay you not to fight. Though this method gives greater rewards, it will negatively affect your reputation with the questgiver's factions. When deciding how to settle a quest, make sure to consider all the pros and cons of each method.

Problems finding random quest locations in towns

Sometimes when you are asking for a certain location in town e.g. a meeting place, hide-out etc. you will only come up wit a topic named "(your characters 'first name) house".
The game engine often has problems when a quest uses more than one house in the same town. Cities on the other hand may be large enough so that this problem may not occure there. However this also means that the specific quest location does not exist which usually means you can't complete this quest. There is nothing you can do about this, either wait until the quest's time limit has expired or re-load a save game before you took this quest.
There are also a couple of quests containing bugs, that prevent quest locations from being revealed to your character. Just take a look here to learn how to get rid of these quest bugs.

General Quest Hints

• Quests that involve dungeon crawling are easily the longest, but provide the greatest opportunity for rewards and skill advancement.
• The Fighters Guild quests to kill giants or harpies in dungeons can be finished quickly by resting near the entrance and killing the monsters that interrupt the resting process.
• Some quests require you to drop a quest item in a certain location. Due to a bug, the quest items will disappear from the drop location once the quest is complete, but the treasure pile created where the item was dropped will remain, and each quest item in the pile will be replaced by another random item, which can often be quite valuable.