Today I witnessed someone’s Skyrim character die in one of the most Monty Pythonesque ways possible: by eating all the food in all the land and bursting like a stuck pig.
User amelix34 took to the Skyrim subreddit just the other day to reveal a little experiment they’d been saving up for in the form of a heavy gorging fest (via GamesRadar).
You’ve seen the jokes. “Wait one second,” you say to your enemy, mid-battle, as you pause to look at the menu and consume everything in your inventory in an attempt to heal up. But what would happen if you ate 20,000 gold’s worth of food all in one go? Would it still heal you, or would it send you spiralling into a food-induced coma?
As it turns out, this player’s character died horrifically because of it, but not for the reason you might think. It wasn’t the overeating that actually brought them to their untimely demise. It was, as the comments section makes abundantly clear, the Jarrin Root they had unwittingly left in their inventory.
If you’ve played through the Dark Brotherhood quest in Skyrim, you’ll have encountered this particular herb. It’s given to the player by Astrid during the To Kill an Empire questline. She makes a point of telling you how potent it is, so to forget its existence altogether is a real slip-up on the player’s part. The Jarrin Root deals 1,000 points of damage in one go, which no one’s going to come back from. Not even if they had healed themselves on all the food from every store across Skyim.
Although, one user in the comments section claims to have scarfed the Jarrin Root as soon as Astrid handed it to them, and just walked away. “I immediately ate it as well but my character had so much HP it didn’t even halve it. I would have loved seeing Astrid’s face as she tells me to use this rare root to kill the emperor, handing it over, me immediately shoving it down my gullet and being totally fine”.
I don’t think I’ve ever accrued that much health in any of my playthroughs, but at least I can say I’ve now witnessed Skyrim’s own Mr Creosote scene from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life.