UESP Forums

The Fighters Guild in Glenumbra asked me to kill a lycanthrope in The Cult of Elolda. I've explored every nook and cranny, and clicked on everything, but I can't find a werewolf, wereboar, or grizzly bear anywhere.

There are a couple of locations where I can hear a Daedra Lord laughing, so presumably there is at least one other section of the dungeon that can only be reached by porting to it, but there are no portals anywhere and nothing I click on (torches, etc.) seems to do anything-- with the exception of an iron maiden in one room, which injures me when I click on it.

While searching online to see if anyone else has ever asked for help with The Cult of Elolda, I found the following page on the UESPWiki:

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall:Dungeons

The information on that page is making me wonder if I've been given an impossible quest. Namely, (1) The Cult of Elolda is a "coven," as indicated by the messages that pop up when you're outside of it; and (2) covens apparently do not contain lycanthropes of any type (wereboars or werewolves), nor do they contain any grizzly bears (which sometimes turn out to be the quest objective in these "go kill a werebeasty" quests).

So now I have three questions:

(1) Does anyone know whether The Cult of Elolda in Glenumbra Moors has any areas which must be ported to? And if so, how do you port to it?

(2) Do quest givers occasionally give impossible quests which are guaranteed to end in failure? I know that certain quests can end with a twist where it turns out that things were not as you were told, such as being sent to rescue a lost child who is not actually in the dungeon you were sent to. And once I was given a quest where I needed to go to someone's house but the person turned out to be an innkeeper who never left the inn, and my quest objective was nowhere to be found inside the inn, leading me to believe that he did have a home somewhere but there was virtually no way to find it. But what I specifically want to know is whether it's possible that the Fighters Guild guy sent me on an impossible quest to kill a lycanthrope in a type of dungeon where none exists?

(3) Or is it possible that there is indeed a quest objective (wereboar, werewolf, or grizzly bear) somewhere inside The Cult of Elolda, even though covens don't normally have those in them? In other words, is it possible for quest objectives of a type not normally found in a given type of dungeon to be in such a dungeon-- namely, some type of actual or presumed lycanthrope in a type of dungeon where such creatures aren't normally found?

(1) the inaccessible enemies you hear might be in the "endcaps" of the dungeon, which are all along the edges of the dungeons that cap off the dungeon blocks. Quest enemies are NEVER in the external blocks, but normal enemies can be placed there.

(2) The werewolf is probably just tucked in a corner somewhere and you haven't gotten close enough to hear it. Your hearing isn't super wide (unless you take my favorite special advantage: acute hearing!) so it is very possible to be in the same general area of an enemy and not hear it. Or you were bursy fighting something and didn't hear the thing over the racket!

(3) Quest targets are not limited to the normal enemy types of a dungeon. So this is not an issue.

If you mean quests that are designed to be unwinnable, no, at least none of the official quests are such. And very certainly the werewolf quest from the Fighters Guild has nothing to deceive the player, except for the chance of the bear being spawned instead of the werewolf.

You can get an unwinnable quest if the game mucks up something, like picking an impossible location to generate a character.

As @Jormungandr noted above, quest monsters can be of any type, regardless of what the dungeon type generates as its regular inhabitants. In fact, it is much more realistic to have only one werewolf/giant/mummy/lich or whatever in a dungeon, rather than having to slaughter a bunch of them, hoping that the next one will be the one you need. Although of course you can imagine that the target werewolf has become the progenitor of an entire clan of loups inhabiting that dungeon, or whatever.

From what I gleaned from Donald Tipton's quest scripting documentation, dungeons are picked completely randomly for a quest like this, and the game generates the specific monster in a random quest location, out of several in the dungeon.

Apparently, there is a possibility that the dungeon you're in has a disconnected area as a flaw of procedural generation. TBH, I've never encountered dungeons like that, or at least there was no way to verify if such areas existed in any of the dungeons where I had any quests. Although I do remember hearing monster noises in certain places after completely exploring a dungeon, which might be indicative of the presence of a disconnected area. However, these are likely buffer zones and not quest locations.

Have you considered cheating a bit? The latest version of Daggerfall added the option to teleport between quest locations by pressing the square bracket key (IIRC) when the cheat mode is enabled. That way, you'll be able to find out if there are indeed any areas that are not accessible normally, and if the quest monster was spawned at all.

I've fully explored the reachable portions of the dungeon twice, and clicked on everything I could to see if it would teleport me to another section (see below) or slide a hidden passage into place (see below), but nothing did anything.

There are at least two different areas where I can hear a Daedra Lord laughing, but I've experienced that in other dungeons and I'd always chalked it up to the monsters having been randomly spawned outside of the dungeon somehow, but that was before I discovered ways other than secret doors (which can be seen on the map) and magic portals (bricked-up doorways) to access other areas.

In at least one variation of the "big stairway" dungeon module which appears in Privateer's Hold, there's a turn dial (IIRC) that's hidden inside a closet or on the wall of the room with the closet (I forget the details) and activating the turn dial will transport you to another section of the dungeon. I've looked in that room in The Cult of Elolda, but no matter how much I turn this way or that, there is no now-you-see-it-now-you-don't turn dial or switch anywhere. The room I'm referring to is in the area through the doorway at the bottom left of the stairway (if you're at the foot of the stairs looking up), or down at the right side of the stairway (if you're at the top of the stairway looking down), and in at least one variation there's a statue in the way of the doorway that must be slid out of the way using another now-you-see-it-now-you-don't turn dial, but in the variation in The Cult of Elolda there is no obstructing statue. If you go through that door there's a corridor which goes to a dead end with a campfire to the right, a short passage to a door straight ahead, and another bit of corridor that sort of dog-legs around to the left. If you take the dog leg to the left, there are two doorways, one with a door and the other without an actual door but with a short flight of stairs going up to a room with a closet. Inside that room with the closet is sometimes a switch or turn dial (I forget the specifics) which transports you to another section, and you typically arrive inside a room with a gallows on top of a block, or else in a corridor just outside that room (I forget). So that's one possibility I've considered, except I can't find anything in that room with the closet.

Another possibility I've considered is a torch on the wall which slides a hidden corridor into place, turning an apparent dead end upward-sloping corridor into a corridor with a small room or intersection with two short corridors going off to either side, one which curves around to the right to a pair of joined rooms, and one to the left which ends at a doorless doorway with stairs going down to either a short deadend corridor (in some variations) or a longer corridor leading to another sizable area of the dungeon. The Cult of Elolda doesn't have that particular dungeon module in it, but I know of two other modules with torches that either slide an obstructing bookcase out of the way of a red-brick portal or slide an obstructing cage out of the way of a doorway. None of the torches in The Cult of Elolda do anything.

By the way, I saved a copy of my game for posterity, so I can keep trying to find the lycanthrope threat, but decided to just reload from before I accepted the quest and ended up moving on to Daggerfall to begin working on the Main Quest. Right now I'm in Shedungent-- which I explored last year on a different character-- and realized that Shedungent has a variation of the dungeon module where the torch on the wall slides the hidden corridor into place, revealing a bit of dungeon which is otherwise hidden behind that apparently-deadend corridor sloping upward.

Getting back to The Cult of Elolda, the two areas where I can hear a Daedra Lord laughing are as follows:

If you go left from the entrance-- or really straight, since the entrance/exit is in the corner of a corridor-- it goes down and around to a section where there's a pair of crossed corridors, one of which has a pile of skulls or bones in it, with a hole in the ceiling to a short corridor with another hole in the ceiling that goes up to a room with a torture chair and a hole in the floor. That room can also be accessed by going up a steep ramp and opening a hidden doorway on the left at the top of the ramp. Inside that room with the torture chair, I can hear a Daedra Lord laughing and I can't rest because there are enemies nearby, but I can't find a way to reach wherever the Daedra Lord is.

The other place where I can hear a Daedra Lord laughing is in a section down near the room with the big staircase. If you go down the big stairs, there's a door straight ahead to a small section, and another door to the left that goes to a room with three cages in it. That room with the cages has a door that goes down to an area a bit similar to your arrival location inside Privateer's Hold, with a cave that has a campfire in it, a room with a pile of heads and another head on a stick, etc. Down in that general section, there's a place where I can hear a Daedra Lord laughing, but it's actually not near the cave, it's near an empty gray-brick room.

If I ever decide to reload my saved game to try to figure this out, I'm planning to use the little minimap schematic in the upper left corner of the map to see if I can work out whether the apparently-inaccessible areas with the laughing Daedra Lords are endcap modules or central modules.

So I gather you decided to not use the cheat to check out all possible quest locations to see if you missed something in that dungeon?

No, I haven't tried using the cheat. I'm playing vanilla Daggerfall, not Unity, so I'm not sure if that makes a difference? But I did save my game while I was still inside the dungeon and had already explored every nook and cranny, so I can still go back to it whenever I want to figure it out. Not that I would give up all of the progress I've made since then, but I can still benefit from finding out what the answer was.

As far as using the little map for figuring out how many dungeon modules there are and which ones I can access, I'm in the middle of doing a dungeon in Glenumbra Moors which made me realize that what I thought was one module was actually two modules connected together. The reason I thought it was a single module is because up until now it's always been the same two modules connected together, but in this dungeon when I go through two of the doors they lead to something completely unexpected-- nothing I haven't seen before, just different modules than I'd grown accustomed to seeing.

I'm beginning to suspect that the dungeons in a given county tend to have certain configurations. That is to say, suppose we have four particular modules-- A, B, C, and D. It seems like the dungeons in Daggerfall county tend to have modules A and B joined together if those modules are present, and have modules C and D joined together if those modules are present. But in Tulune county they might tend to be paired together as A and C, or as B and D. And in Glenumbra Moors they might be A and D, or B and C.

The cheat I described above is for vanilla DF. As far as I know, Unity cheats are accomplished through console commands.

Ah, so I should be able to reload my saved games and use console commands to see all the possible quest target lications? I haven't tried using any console commands in Daggerfall yet, and didn't even realize they existed.

I've now got two saved games to investigate, because I ran into a similar issue with a quest from the Daggerfall Mages Guild-- go find some fairy dragon's scales in a dungeon, but the only ones I found were on the corpses of my enemies and didn't count, yet I could hear additional enemies nearby in certain areas of the dungeon even though I could never find a way to reach them.

Ironically, I accepted a quest from the Genumbra Mages Guild to go find some Lich Dust in a dungeon I'd already explored for a Glenumbra Fighters Guild quest, and because I was feeling grumpy about the failed Daggerfall Mages Guild quest I decided to just randomly speed through the dungeon, bypassing numerous turns as I raced along without a plan. I quickly found myself in a room with two doors plus a small closet with crates in it, and on top of one of the crates was the Lich's Dust.

Daggerfall is such a crazy game. Sometimes it seems impossibly difficult, but other times it's a breeze.

So...

I activated cheatmode, loaded my save from the "kill a lycanthrope" quest in The Cult of Elolda, and used the [ and ] keys to cycle through all of the quest locations. None of them were places I hadn't already been to, so if there are any additional areas that I hadn't fiund then they must not be central dungeon modules. More importantly, there was NO lycanthrope or ordinary grizzly bear anywhere in the dungeon.

I then loaded my save from the "find some fairy dragon's scales" quest in The Web of Vermerog, and cycled through all of the quest locations. One of them was in an underwater room and there, on a torture chair, were the fairy dragon's scales. There was also a living slaughterfish, so I knew it was a location I hadn't been to yet. I explored the rest of the area but could find no hidden doors or magic portals, and clicking on everything imaginable produced absolutely no results, so it would appear that this other section of dungeon modules is completely separate from the rest of the dungeon and cannot be accessed without resorting to the cheatmode codes.

Interesting! So indeed some dungeons do have inaccessible areas isolated from the rest of the dungeon layout.

As for the werewolf quest, I suppose that maybe it just fell through the floor into the void somehow? Unless the timer actually ran out and it was removed from the dungeon once the quest ended? I have certainly never run into this kind situation, quest areas might have been tricky to discover but the quest item or character/monster was always there.

Do you use DOS/32A? it seems to help a lot with memory issues in DF -- at least, I've had no crashes since I started using it (and also edited Z.CFG to increase item and texture cache).

I still had plenty of time to complete the lycanthrope quest, so it wasn't a case of running out of time.

I can't be sure whether or not the quest objective fell into the void somehow, but later I'll load my saved game, exit the dungeon, reenter it to reset everything inside, and use the [ and ] keys to see if I can find a grizzly bear, wereboar, or werewolf anywhere.

I ran into another quest that seemed impiossible to complete-- rescuing a kidnapped lover from a dungeon so she could convince soneone to go into hiding to avoid a prophesy from coming true. Again, I hadn't run out of time, but the quest objective could not be found anywhere, not even by using the [ and ] keys. I even left and reentered the dungeon to reset it, then used the cheat again to be sure.

I really think the game just randomly generates "bad" or impossible quests sometimes. Arena occasionally did the same thing by not giving you enough time to travel to a dungeon or city and then back to the questgiver, even if you were to just go there and back without spending any time at all trying to do the requested task.

Oddly enough, with the Acolyte's quest I ended up liading back to an earlier point to request a different quest from the Mages Guild, and got another Acolyte quest that sent me to the same residence, but this time the genders of the imperiled noble and their lover were reversed, I had slightly longer to complete the rescue, and the lover needed to be rescued from a different dungeon. I found them rather easily that time.

Sundas the 15th of Sun's Dusk:
The Fighters Guild of Glenumbra has hired me to kill a troublesome werewolf, wereboar, or whatever, in its lair, The Cult of Elolda. The beast needs to be dead in 26 days time for me to collect my payment.

You are in The Cult of Elolda.
It is 9:59 on Sundas the 22th of Sun's Dusk.
In the eyes of the law of Glenumbra Moors, you are a common citizen.

So I still have 19 days to complete the quest, hence the werewolf, wereboar, or grizzly bear should not have despawned yet.

I left the dungeon and reentered, then immediately used the [ and ] keys. The wereboar was there, in a room with bookcases in it. I made a note of where it was on the map.

I reloaded again but did not reset the dungeon, then made my way to the room with the bookcases in it, which I had already explored. There was no werewolf or wereboar there, and no corpse either in the room or outside in the corridor. I can't tell if it had been there but fell into the void, or if it had just never been spawned for some reason.

I've encountered one case several months ago of a quest objective (a mummy) that spawned but did not give me the requested quest item (mummy wrappings) when I looted its corpse, yet when I reloaded the game from just before I entered the dungeon and went to where the mummy was, I was able to get the mummy wrappings off of its corpse. It seems like the game just glitches out on a quest once in a while, although it doesn't happen often. To be honest, as much as I've heard other players complain about how buggy Daggerfall is, I've not run into very many bugs-- some, yes, but not as many and not as often as I had feared I would based on what I've read.