You’re walking into a new town, and the first thing that happens is you have to stop the first guy you see from stabbing some random woman. Then, after that some random guy comes up to you and tries to bring you in on a massive conspiracy by slipping an ominous note into your hand. Then you walk for a bit because first thing you always do is make your way to the town’s main building to pick up a fast travel point and make friends with the local king. On they way, the armed thug of the richest guy in town says something that sounds like a cryptic threat, and then when you enter the palace, you see some asshole yelling at a priest about honored dead, or whatever. You decide to see what’s up, and next thing you know, you’re bringing said priest to a remote cave to wipe out the local cannibal cult that consists of like a half dozen people in town.

You go back, decide to see what’s up with that other guy and his cryptic-ass note, and next thing you know, the half of the town that you didn’t kill clearing out the cannibals are part of a giant conspiracy between the local flavor of bandit and the richest guy in town to accumulate wealth and power. The guards are giving you thinly veiled threats, someone’s hiring armed thugs to dissuade you from looking into anything, and you show up to question the rich asshole just in time to witness another assassination attempt, as apparently, the bandit leader got sick of being manipulated. You go back to tell the guy all the crazy shit that just happened, only to find that the guards killed him and are framing you for the murder. Wake up in a private forced labor prison camp, meet some new friends and wind up having to stab them all to get out. After nearly getting a Golden Robot Orb’s spike up the ass, you escape, only to be told you’ve been cleared of all charges by the asshole who set you up to begin with. Then you prove he was right to throw you in jail when you promptly slit his throat while you’re both in that isolated corner of the town.

Then, you see a guy asking about an abandoned house and wind up having to kill him after he goes batshit crazy after like literally three seconds to escape the murdery fun house, and never do the rest of the quest because you don’t really want to make a deal with someone who calls himself “The King Of Rape”.

And just when you think shit couldn’t get any weirder, you finally go back up to the castle and talk to the court mage, who yells at you for bothering him and makes amends by telling you to go kill a spider in his basement (I actually do like Calcelmo a lot), so after bringing out the Bug Bomb, you discover that giant spider was the only thing holding back the tide of Subterranean Gollums, and half to instead swap that out for turning on the creepy robots because that’s somehow better I guess. Then he compensates you with a nice pile of gold and showing a MASSIVE amount of trust to someone who just booted up Skynet in his archaeological site by giving you the key to his office.

This was my first experience with Markarth. It was my least favorite Hold in Skyrim for a LONG time. It’s a beautiful town aesthetically, and I eventually grew to like it when I realized that by the time all these quests were completed, I had wound up solving most of the town’s problems by just stabbing all the bad guys. Markarth and Riften both do a pretty good job of giving you a place in the game world where you can just show up and either solve every problem the town has or make things substantially worse.