Skyrimcan be a pretty serious place. You start the game moments away from getting your head chopped off, and from there you get embroiled in a rebellion, take the top positions at the most important guilds in the land, and eventually stop an immortal dragon to save the world. On top of all of that, the world is teeming with bandits, undead monsters, evil necromancers, and all manner of beasts that are all too eager to attack you and take your stuff.Yes, I bet even the bears will loot your body. This isSkyrimafter all - everybody loots everything.
Obsession with treasure is just one example of howSkyrimcan also be a pretty weird place. Talking to vengeful ghosts, communing with insane daemons, or bartering with a kid keen on eliminating his school teacher are all in a day’s work for a wandering Dragonborn. And that’s just a taste of all the weird stuff you’ll have to do on an average quest.
Here are a bunch of the more alarming and downright scary quests you can do in the world ofSkyrim.
Updated April 30th by Russ Boswell: Skyrim offers up one of the largest maps in all of gaming and when it was first released, the sheer size had players discovering things for the first time years after the game released. There are tons of NPCs to meet, loot to found, storylines to unravel, and quests to tackle.
But not all of Skyrim is Sweetrolls, there are some seriously seedy and dangerous areas that players will have to navigate through. These areas were expanded upon with new and exciting DLC. Because of this, we wanted to revisit the journey through Skyrim and look at even more quests that might send a chill up your spine. Here are some of the scariest Skyrim quests.
20 A Night To Remember
Horror films and shorts have had a field day exploring the trope of "trusting someone you shouldn't." You meet a strange man in a bar, he challenges you to a drinking contest, one thing leads to another, and you eventually wake up in a bathtub full of ice and missing a kidney.
So it comes as no surprise that there’s a night like that inSkyrim. In the quest, A Night To Remember, you meet a nice man named Sam whom you spend the night drinking with, and then you wake up in Markath at the Temple of Dibella with a splitting headache and a very angry priestess shouting about how you trashed their temple in a drunken stupor.
The rest of the quest basically reads like aHangovermovie script as you trace your steps of the previous night. Highlights include stealing a giant’s goat, proposing to a Hagraven, and having an awesome night on the town with the Daedric prince Sanguine. It's all pretty strange but it's scary to imagine blacking out for that long and "doing things on autopilot."
19 Innocence Lost
When it comes to the Dark Brotherhood questline, things get pretty dark pretty fast. It’s almost like the assassin’s guild is named that for a reason.
While wandering around Skyrim, the Dragonborn will eventually hear some people whisper about a child in Windhelm who’s trying to summon the Dark Brotherhood. Doing so involves performing the Black Sacrament, a ritual whereby the summoner creates an effigy of the intended victim usingactual body parts. How the kid came across a human skeleton, heart, and stomach is anybody’s guess, but it certainly must have raised a few eyebrows.
Breaking into the kid’s home will cause him to mistake you for a Dark Brotherhood assassin and task you with killing the cruel orphanage matron he ran away from. It's definitely one of the most alarming ways to start a quest in Skyrim.
18 The House Of Horrors
There are a ton of players out there that will eagerly seek out this quest as soon as possible in order to obtain the strong unique weapon, The Mace of Molag Bal. It's a powerful one-handed mace that deals magicka and stamina damage to anyone struck with it and will also cast "Soul Trap" on them for three seconds. It's a great way to farm souls and will exhaust tougher enemies, making them easier to defeat.
Power aside, the quest to get the mace is definitely a bit unsettling. Anyone roaming through Markarth will find Vigilant Tyranus outside of an abandoned house, one he claims was a site for Daedric worship. Not only is inspecting the location a bit creepy, but players will soon find themselves imprisoned by Molag Bal himself. The Daedric Prince will inform the Dragonborn of his frustrations with a rival and their followers and will order players to seek out an NPC and slay them in cold blood. It's definitely one of Skyrim's most evil of quests.
17 The Silver Hand
This one’s kind of like "A Night To Remember," except this time you get to experience the whole thing. And also you remember it. And there are no consequences to anything you do when you eventually wake up covered in all manner of things.
In order to complete The Companions questline, you have to become a werewolf, which is a little different inSkyrimthan in popular mythology. Instead of being bitten, you drink a punchbowl full of werewolf blood before passing out. When you wake up you’re a werewolf in the middle of Whiterun, tearing through the place like an angry tornado.
This one is perfect for any classic horror fans out there.
16 The Mind Of Madness
In Solitude, there is a nice homeless man wandering around and asking passersby if they can help him return his master “from vacation.” He’ll then give you Pelagius’ Hip Bone and tell you to break into the Imperial Palace.
Normal people would probably freak out and call some nice men to put this guy away in a padded room, but not the Dragonborn. Instead, our hero busts into the Pelagius wing of the palace, and then into Pelagius’ mind wearing nothing but pajamas and a nightcap. There to greet you are two fancily dressed dudes having a tea party, where one will ask the Dragonborn to use a magic stick to beat the crazy out of the other.
It's like a very alarming, eerie, and scary version of Alice in Wonderland and stands as one of the weirdest Skyrim quests.
15 Kyne’s Sacred Trials
Some of us have a pretty intense fear of the Ocean. It's just as foreign as Space, featuring massive undiscovered areas that are too dangerous to explore. Who knows exactly what's hiding down there?
Some of the creatures of the Ocean can be pretty scary too, so it's understandable if Mud Crabs give some people the willies. After all, the giant creepy crawly crabs attack on sight whenever you wander a bit too close to rivers and lakes.
The normal ones are already the size of a large dog, but Kyne’s Sacred Trials quest kicks it up a notch by having you hunt down a mammoth one.
14 Waking Nightmare
There are a lot of powerful, influential, and downright scary characters found throughout the world of Skyrim. Vaermina is perhaps one of the most unsettling, due to her position as a Daedric Prince. They call her the Dreamweaver because she's capable of imposing nightmares, stealing memories, bringing upon evil omens, and creating great psychological torment on her victims. Her powers are creepy enough but the dial gets knocked to eleven when players stumble into Dawnstar.
At the Windpeak Inn, you'll find Erandur, a Dunmer healer that will inform you about the wicked stranglehold that Vaermina has on the town, causing all of its population to lose sleep and deal with near-endless nightmares. The only way to stop it is to find the Skull of Corruption. It's a dark quest with some classic horror themes.
13 The Only Cure
One of the more bizarre aspects of Skyrim is the number of alchemical ingredients to be found. Nearly everything can be crushed up into powder and stuck into a potion to give some kind of effect, either beneficial or harmful.
In The Only Cure, the Dragonborn has to gather a silver ingot, vampire dust, a deathbell flower, and a flawless ruby, crush them up, and then inhale the fumes. Doing so will give the Dragonborn a psychedelic trip as well as a quest to go eliminate some wayward devotees of the Daedric Prince Peryite.
12 Unfathomable Depths
Meandering around Riften's docks is From-Deepest-Fathoms, a very disturbed Argonian who desperately wants to get rid of a book. It’s called the Lexicon, and accepting it will task the Dragonborn with returning it to the ruins of Avanchnzel where it was taken. As the Dragonborn voyages deep underground, ghostly apparitions of an ill-fated expedition will show how From-Deepest-Fathoms came across the book, and the terrible price she paid for it.
What’s most disturbing is what happens if you don’t accept the book. Returning to Riften later will reveal that From-Deepest-Fathoms took her own life rather than live with the memory of the Lexicon and its horrors.
11 With Friends Like These
After you eliminate that cruel orphanage lady in Innocence Lost, you pocket what little pay the kid can give you and be on your merry way. A few days later you’ll get a note featuring a black hand with “We Know” written beneath it. That’s a little weird, but not too out of the ordinary forSkyrim.
After you go to sleep is when things go from weird to crazy. You wake up in an abandoned shack instead of the bed you slept in, and in the corner is some crazy ninja ordering you to eliminate one of three hooded people in front of you. The ninja says she’s from the Dark Brotherhood and you need to repay them for the mark you stole when you complete the quest for the kid.
Initiation into the Dark Brotherhood is definitely one of the darkest aspects of the game. Another evil Skyrim quest.
10 The Taste Of Death
This quest starts off with a woman walking up to you in a crypt, telling you she likes to eat decease people, and then asking you to eliminate a bunch of Draugr. Again, just the average Tuesday for a Dragonborn. Things take a turn when she asks you to bring a holy priest to her underground cannibal coven to destroy and eat him.
The quest ends either with you ending and eating the priest or butchering the coven. A grisly finish, either way. This isn't a quest with a happy ending.
9 Blood On The Ice
Waking Nightmare isn't the only quest in Skyrim to feature some classic horror elements. Blood on the Ice introduces players and the Dragonborn to someone known as the Windhelm Butcher. This classic horror trope will lead gamers down a path of darkness, playing out like a disturbing detective's tale, in which an unknown, deranged force is targeting people and leaving them in lifeless pieces all over town.
Searching nervously around Windhelm and discovering all manner of horrible crime scenes and demented journal entries will put anyone on edge.
8 The Heart Of Dibella
There’s a bunch of gods and daemons in the world of Skyrim, and you’ll do quests for both sides. One of the more holy quests you go on is for the goddess Dibella, which is the Elder Scrolls goddess of beauty and love. There’s a bit of overlap with the goddess Mara, who is more into the whole motherly love and marriage thing. Dibella herself is much more interested in meeting and loving as many people as possible, rather than marriage.
This makes it all the more interesting when the priestess of Dibella asks you to go find the next Sybil of Dibella. The Sybil is basically like the Dalai Llama, except she’s the leader of a "love" cult instead of a bunch of Tibetan monks. Also like the Dalai Llama, she’s taken from her parents at a young age and trained in the ways of her faith, which if you remember, is "love." It's a seedy-feeling quest and it's easy to be uncomfortable with it.
7 A Daedra's Best Friend
Dogs are a man’s best friend, but in the world of Skyrim they’re also a daemon’s.
Passing through the town of Falkreath, you’ll eventually meet a guard who says he met a talking dog. If you then walk not too far out of town, you’ll run into that dog, who does indeed talk. He also has a New York accent, for some reason, and will never miss an opportunity to spike the Dragonborn with wit and sarcasm.
Eventually, it turns out the dog is an agent of Clavicus The Vile, the Daedric Prince of wishes, and despite his constant sass is generally the voice of reason for the crazy demon. He was banished for being too helpful, and asks the Dragonborn to help him get back to his master.
Unfortunately, "getting back" means slaying a bunch of people. This quest starts out cute and fanciful but gets dark pretty quickly.
6 Touching The Sky
Sometimes it's not the quest that's unsettling, but the location it sends you to. In Skyrim's Dawnguard DLC, the Dragonborn will meet a recruitable follower named Serana. She sets off the entertaining but lengthy penultimate quest for the DLC's main storyline. Players will be tasked with locating a powerful bow, which doesn't seem like anything out of the ordinary for battle-hardened Skyrim veterans.
Unfortunately, the first place she sends you, Darkfall Cave, is downright scary, especially for anyone who may suffer from arachnophobia.
5 Death Incarnate
At the end of the Dark Brotherhood questline (which need I remind you began with a child asking you to assassinate someone), the guild is betrayed from within, and the Imperial Guard show up to torch the place. In order to survive, you have to spend the night in a coffin with a thousand-year-old mummy, who seems to think it was the perfect setup to get fresh with the Dragonborn.
After a night neither of you will forget (and once the fires go down) you’re released back into the world where you’re immediately confronted with the betrayer. Overcome by guilt, she performs the Black Sacrament on herself and demands you eliminate her.
4 Under Saarthal
This one really doesn’t start off all that weird. You show up at the College of Winterhold where you’re immediately assessed as being magically gifted and given the robes of apprenticeship.
The weirdness begins just after you get your first lessons. You learn the basics of wards and spellcraft in your first lecture, and then it’s off to the dangerous ancient ruins in order to find even more dangerous ancient artifacts! Nevermind the fact that there are Draugr everywhere and the ruins are littered with deadly traps - the only way to learn is by doing!
It's scary how fast things ramp up in the world of Skyrim.
3 Forbidden Legend
Forbidden Legend is also a pretty standard quest as far as Skyrim goes: wander around, dive into some dangerous dungeons, destroy things, get the magical amulet, repeat a few times. Basically the fantasy hero equivalent of getting your oil changed.
Things get bizarre around Geirmund’s Hall, though. If you’re coming from the South, you may run into a novice necromancer who will immediately attack you. Even at low level, you should be easily able to dispatch him, especially since the creature he summons in his defense is a chicken.
That’s right - you have to fend off an undead chicken zombie in order to escape this evil necromancer’s clutches. Truly a weird Skyrim quest.
2 Stumbling Into Blackreach
The first time players enter one of Skyrim's seemingly normal "dungeons" and then end up in the sprawling underground maze of Blackreach is actually pretty alarming. This isn't necessarily a quest, but there are some interesting things to do in Blackreach, as well as some ingredients that can be collected. The area is beautiful from a visual standpoint but it sheer size and complexity can fill even the most seasoned adventurers with dread.
There is something supremely unsettling about making your way through Blackreach and the encroaching feeling and realization that you're miles underground. Although the area is wide-open, it's hard not to feel "trapped." All of this is made even more terrifying by the fact that some players will, at some point, accidentally summon a dangerous dragon.
1 Every Quest That Ends Up With You In Charge
Let’s be real here - if you spend any amount of time in Skyrim and do all the main quests and the faction quests, you end up in charge of literally everything. You’re the leader of the Assassins Guild, The Thieves Guild, The College of Winterhold, The Companions, and Thane in all 9 major cities.
What’s most bizarre is how you, as Dragonborn, can immediately ignore all responsibility that comes with your title and just bugger off to go slay giants, or go spelunking in caves, or get whisked away into a madman’s Alice in Wonderland fantasy, and absolutely nobody calls you on it.