SkyrimProvement: Wrymstooth

Everyone's been running off to Solstheim, but I haven't gotten around to playing the Dragonborn paid DLC yet, because I've been entirely enamoured with a massive free quest mod called Wrymstooth. It sounds like a finished-in-an-afternoon adventure (a dragon's been interfering with some supply lines, and you've been hired to deal with it), but it's kept me occupied with memorable, D&D-like party dungeon dives all week.

A Whole New World

Made by Jonx0r, Wrymstooth first tasks players with assembling a party of adventurers, like yourself, to capture and slay a supply-line-cutting dragon and its minions. This amounts to a series of fetch quests, and to be blunt they're easily the most dull aspect of the entire mod. Most of them are just a matter of fast traveling from one location to another, and while that does add a sort of 'montage' feel to the proceedings, it's not particularly exciting.


Things heated up and the plot thickened in my first encounter with the fully voiced dragon itself, who escaped to an island off the shore of Skyrim called Wrymstooth. It's here that the majority of the mod takes place, and where it is instantly elevated above most community efforts to reach the lofty heights of something like Moonpath to Elsweyr.

Wrymstooth is an entirely new and pretty massive space of Skyrim to explore, complete with its own landmarks, environments and wildlife. While it's pretty much entirely there to support the story of the mod, it doesn't feel like set dressing. There are enough ruins, mountains and incidental detail to give it a strong sense of place. Bandits roam the hills, the entire place is built around a massive volcano (which would explain the presence of the island), and while you spend the majority of the time below ground in sprawling dungeons, the idea of there being a sizable mining settlement there gives you at least a little impetus to stick around and save the day.

Party Up

The setting is great, but Jonx0r has managed to do something even more impressive by twisting the standard Skyrim formula. All that time you spend recruiting a team isn't entirely for effect; these new characters accompany you throughout the quest, and as you delve deeper and deeper into the crypts, it begins to feel a lot more like a grand Dungeons & Dragons adventure and less like a simple Skyrim quest.


The team is genuinely useful, too, with each character filling a different role in the party. You've got your bruiser, your magic user, your rogue, your archer, and all of them are at least moderately competent. It's a shame that there isn't more time spent on really fleshing these characters out, but it's enough.

Even better is the descent into the mountain. You move from Draugr tombs to Dwemer ruins to a huge expansive cavern that equals the surreal beauty of Blackreach. By the time you get to the dragon's lair it feels like you've genuinely been on an epic adventure, which is an oddly rare occurrence in the world of Skyrim, where the majority of the game's main quests favor sweet brevity over depth and length.

When you finally square off against the dragon, it's a wonderful inverse of the beginning of the core Skyrim campaign, where we were all powerless as that first dragon laid waste to Helgen. Here you can fight the dragon, and here you can win. It's a brilliant finale to a great quest, and it managed to make me leave Dragonborn on the shelf for a few days, which is an impressive feat all by itself.

Download Wrymstooth