

Once inside, I encounter a ragtag mixture of Lady Thorn’s lowly recruits: clawing Bloodfiends (“starved vampires”) and snarling death hounds, which give my clicking finger a healthy warm-up for the baddies ahead. The result is a tough but hilarious fight in which the Stonethorn team and I shed all semblance of finesse

I saddle up for a demo run of Castle Thorn alongside creative director Rich Lambert, lead content designer Jeremy Sera, lead encounter designer Mike Finnegan, and senior content designer Shane Slama. But what lies within these dungeons goes beyond ‘stock’ gothic fare, and brings new and invigorating challenges to the MMO. Castle Thorn is an ancient fortress lodged in the hills of western Skyrim, ruled by a megalomaniac vampire lord, and packed with more beasts and pointy buttresses than Bram Stoker’s dreams after a cheese board. Stone Garden plays host to a “mad alchemist, hidden deep within a secret, mysterious laboratory” in Blackreach, whose “horrifying creations” you need to put down. The new pack centres on two dungeons that bask in the gloom and grotesque of the gothic genre. Where the adventure’s first chunk, Harrowstorm, was all about Nordic burial grounds, the Icereach dungeon, and supernatural storms – basically, what you’d recognise as quintessentially Skyrim – Stonethorn is gothic.

His suspicions were correct, but he never returned to report his discovery. Vigilant Adalvald believed he found the location of an ancient vampire artifact in Dimhollow Crypt.
