Dampened Spirits

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Dampened Spirits
Quest Giver	Brynjolf
Location	Thieves Guild The Bannered Mare Honningbrew Meadery
Prerequisite	Loud and Clear
Next Quest	Scoundrel's Folly
Faction	Thieves Guild
Reward	Enchanted leveled sword, dagger or mace Mallus Maccius becomes available as a Thieves Guild fence
Type	Thieves Guild, Main quest
Quest ID	TG03

After completing the quest Loud and Clear, Brynjolf will say that Maven Black-Briar wishes to speak to the Dragonborn.

Objectives

• Speak to Maven Black-Briar
• Speak to Mallus Maccius
• Speak to Sabjorn
• Poison the nest
• Poison the Honningbrew vat
• Attend the tasting ceremony
• Identify Sabjorn's silent partner
• Return to Maven Black-Briar
• Return to Brynjolf

Walkthrough

The first step in the quest is to speak with Maven Black-Briar. She will be waiting upstairs in the Bee and Barb or in the Black-Briar Meadery. She asks the Dragonborn to shut down a competitor, newly opened Honningbrew Meadery, and to find out how its owner Sabjorn has managed so quickly to fund its opening.

Next, it is necessary to find and speak with Mallus Maccius. He will be waiting in the Bannered Mare in Whiterun. He tells the Dragonborn to ask Sabjorn for work clearing out pests that Mallus has lured into the meadery. The Dragonborn is to fulfill this job, poisoning the meadery vat in the process.

Sabjorn will give the Dragonborn a key to the meadery's basement with instructions to kill all the pests and to poison their nest. This presents the opportunity to poison the vats as well. Getting to the nest is straightforward, but there are quite a few skeevers and some frostbite spiders along the way. The real challenge is dealing with Hamelyn, however—a mage living next to the nest. He uses a fairly powerful magic attack (which appears to be random, but may vary depending on the Dragonborn's race). If the Dragonborn is a werewolf, transforming may be a good option: growling will cause him to enter a state of "fear", offering an excellent chance to kill him.

Sneaking past Hamelyn is also a possibility, by shooting an arrrow down the tunnel to the left of his alchemy lab. When he moves to investigate, the nest can be poisoned quickly, and then the Dragonborn can retreat and wait for him to return. After that, it is possible to go around him and enter the tunnel.

The area to poison the nest is the pile of hay to the right of the alchemy lab. The area where poison can be used is fairly small.

Going through the tunnel to the Honningbrew Boilery, it is possible to go up the stairs and pour the poison into the vat. The door's key hangs right next to it. Afterwards, Sabjorn needs to be told that the job is done.

Now it is time to attend the tasting ceremony. Commander Caius or Sinmir tastes the mead (depending on the Dragonborn's civil war allegiance) and is unhappy with it. He puts Mallus in charge and drags Sabjorn off to Dragonsreach Dungeon.

At this point, Mallus will help locate the books that identify Sabjorn's 'silent partner'. Upstairs, a promissory note is in Sabjorn's dresser. Behind the door to the right of the dresser is the Honningbrew Decanter (a larceny target), which can be sold to Delvin Mallory.

Upon returning to Riften, Maven Black-Briar can be given the note. She tells the Dragonborn to take the information to Brynjolf, who acknowledges the findings and sends the Dragonborn to Mercer Frey (who he feels will be able to identify the symbol on the note and shed some light on the Thieves Guild's anonymous adversary). The quest Scoundrel's Folly then begins.

Rewards

Upon returning to Maven Black-Briar, the Dragonborn is given either a leveled enchanted dagger, sword, or mace and Mallus will become available as a fence.

Trivia

• When going to Sabjorn's room in his office to collect his notes, under his bed in a bedpan, one will find a bottle of Black-Briar Mead. It can be assumed that Sabjorn disliked the competition's brew.
• On Sabjorn's desk, there is a note from Maven Black-Briar regarding his meadery. It can be assumed from the note that Maven has repeatedly tried to buy Honningbrew from Sabjorn without success.
• If Serana is brought in the Meadery after completing the quest, she will occasionally approach the barrel Caius drank from, pour herself and drink an invisible goblet of mead from it. She may also do so during the quest, stalling it indefinitely until the player moves away or tells her to do something.
• Caius will always appear for the tasting, even if the quest Battle for Whiterun, on the Stormcloak side, is completed, and Sinmir replaces him.

Bugs

This section contains bugs related to Dampened Spirits. Before adding a bug to this list, consider the following: Please reload an old save to confirm if the bug is still happening. If the bug is still occurring, please post the bug report with the appropriate system template  360  /  XB1  ,  PS3  /  PS4  ,  PC  /  MAC  ,  NX  /  PS5  ,  XS  , depending on which platform(s) the bug has been encountered on. Be descriptive when listing the bug and fixes, but avoid having conversations in the description and/or using first-person anecdotes: such discussions belong on the appropriate forum board.

Click to show

PC   360   PS3  If Maven Black-Briar is not spoken to shortly after being given the quest, the quest may bug out and the Thieves' Guild quest line cannot be continued.  PC  A not so elegant but effective solution is to open the console and enter the command "setstage TG04 1" (PC version only). That will allow the bugged quest to be entirely skipped and the Thieves Guild quest line continued.  PC   360   PS3  To complete Thieves guild quest "Loud And Clear", the Dragonborn must talk to Brynjolf. However, Brynjolf may not assign "Dampened Spirits" despite providing the necessary dialogue and task. Speaking to Maven as Brynjolf asks will not trigger any new dialogue on her part This may be worked around by saving before talking to Brynjolf, then talking to him.  PS3  Patch 1.4 fixes this bug. If the quest is bugged, downloading the patch and letting it run for 20 minutes will allow the quest to automatically start.  360   PS3   When going through the caverns, near some bear traps, there is an un-activated tripwire. If the Dragonborn dies sometime after tripping it, and respawns, the wire will appear broken as if already tripped, however it is indeed un-activated. After completing the quest correctly and continuing on with the Thieves Guild storyline, in some cases Mallus will never operate correctly as a fence. He has dialog options that correspond with the quest being completed correctly, and other dialog that indicates he will buy things, but he never opens up a merchant window. After Commander Caius escorts Sabjorn out, Commander Caius may not spawn in Whiterun anymore. Commander Caius will be Commander of the Whiterun Guards even if the Stormcloaks take control of Whiterun and exile him with Jarl Balgruuf the Greater. If there is a bounty for Whiterun, the game may freeze when doing part of the quest.  360  Sometimes Maven will not give a leveled weapon, instead giving an extremely low level weapon, such as an iron dagger.  PS3  After sneaking past Hamelyn, he will re-appear in the boilery and continue attacking. Sometimes after the quest is finished, when taking to Mallus the quest log will not reflect that he has been spoken to, making it impossible to progress. This can be fixed by reloading a save from before the quest.