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You wake up in the back of a cart. You were arrested for crossing the border. Apparently immigration laws have gotten rather strict in the Empire as the punishment is death. Anyway, first you meet Rolof, a nice Nordic man who helps you escape, Ulfric "I'm a bloody main character, of course I'm going to live" Stormcloak, and Relof (or something like that) "The Red Shirt" from Rorikstead.

So as you wake up, you’re informed that you’ve been taken into Imperial Custody by Rolof, really nice guy by the way. You roll into Helgen, and are greeted by none other than the General of the Imperial Army. Well you’re not greeted by him so much as you briefly see him, and he expresses satisfaction of completing his job (his job being to kill Ulfric). You get off the cart, Ulfric is taken toward the execution square almost immediately (they really want to kill him it seems). Then, Relof fulfills his epithet to the letter by bravely running away. And by run away, I mean run towards a bunch of armed guards who were going to kill him anyway after voicing his intention to do just that. He dies, if you didn’t get that.

So you’re called next, you create your character (Default name “Prisoner”. Your parents had high expectations for you), and then you’re sent to go get executed! You may be saying to yourself “But I just started playing two minutes ago, how the hell did I screw up this badly already?!?!?” If you’re saying that, then you’ve obviously never played an Elder Scrolls game. Right before you’re beheaded, suddenly dragons! Dragons just tear up the entire village. It’s awesome. With the executor distracted by dragons (it’s just fantastic by the way), you bravely run away! Seems to be a bit of a pattern developing. You, Rolof (really nice guy by the way), and Ulfric run to a nearby tower to save yourselves, a dragon causes a bit of the wall to explode with fire, and you jump through the hole to continue your escape.

After showing that you’re as graceful as a drunken cow, you and Rolof (Ulfric disappeared) make it to a giant Imperial Keep. He cuts your binding, you get armed, kill a few soldiers, read a book, pick a lock, search a container, practice with a bow, have Rolof provide some background info, kill more soldiers, kill spiders, kill a bear, and then run towards the exit to Skyrim proper.

You were supposed to stealth past the bear, it's not just a giant melee (as it seemed from the description). The person who was playing is just terrible at this game. Seriously, I've yet to play it and yet I already know that I'm much better at this then they were. They couldn't even fire the bow right. Really sad.

While I have to say that this was nothing more than a tutorial after a while, it did do a good job setting up the game. One thing I particularly liked was the background characters, especially the father and the son. You see, the kid doesn't know that they're just going to execute all of these people (without a trial by the way), so his father just tells him to go inside. I can't describe it very well, something about that scene just struck at me for some reason.