After getting the instructions from Harkon to talk to Garan Marethi -- Garan doesn't have any dialogue other than a generic mortals aren't allowed to roam the castle and to go talk to Harkon. I do not recieve any option to tell him "it is time."

Below, in spoilers, is my current mods list from plugins.txt.


Has anybody else had this happen?

I would classify this one as severe.

I suspect this is the random piece of the dialogue bug at work.

yes, got the game via steam gift, now cant continue the quest -.-

The http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:The_Bloodstone_Chalice has the quest stages if you want to try consoling through. I haven't tried that yet. I did successfully play through the Dawnguard side of this.

i did this, yes it worked but when i got back it started all over again -.-

come on beth.. fix the bloody thing!

The problem at this point in the quest is that no one in the castle recognizes that my character is a vampire. Something is definitely not firing with this quest for that to happen.

yea that seems the problem, you arnt added or the game doesnt do an add faction to player etc.

I found a reference to this issue in thehttp://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Bloodlinei bug section on the quest page.


I haven't tried the suggested fix yet. This may or may not be related to the dialogue bug.

it halfworks... i transform outside and its fine but you cant talk to npc's in vampire form, if i revert then talk he does the whole mortals crap again and your stuck.

Yeah. That did not work for me either. Based on at least one other thread I was reading here, we are not the only two this is happening to.

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1404739-dawngaurd-issue-after-accepting-gift-of-vampire/

I'm suspecting this is the dialogue bug showing up here.

Lots of people on Steam are reporting this problem. Some of the people there think that it's caused by having a nonvanilla race for your character. I have not tested this, but I am playing with a character I created myself.

im using a default nord how vanilla can you get? O.o

Not much more vanilla than that.

Here is one http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?p=32531404 on Steam

So... I finally took the plunge and turned my archmage Breton guy into a vampire and started the vampire side of Dawnguard. Well, wouldn't you know it, the same quest Ysne mentioned in August has blocked me as well, only at a different point and for a different reason I can't make out yet.

Upon trying to return to Castle Volkihar to complete the quest (I assume anyway) the game simply dumps to desktop. No Windows error, no warning, just BAM. CTD. So I reload. Get back to the outside of the castle, and save this time. BAM. CTD. Reload, try two more times with the same result, and once more after that with an endless hang.

Papyrus put this into the log all 5 times when the game choked, so I'm going to assume it's somehow to blame:

Needless to say, door to castle is not a bed. So WTF?

Arthmoor, that's one of those annoying "debug.trace" messages, not indicative of an error.

If I had to guess, I'd say another mod's script (or a Dawnguard script) that runs constantly has choked on itself and crashed the game -- I've had a similar thing happen over mismatched arrays.

Sometimes such things are tricky to pinpoint -- I thought at first, for example, that my crash has something to do with the cell I was entering or exiting, but now I believe it was just unhappy coincidence: the script crashes the game at roughly the same time interval, so reloading just caused me to relive the first crash over and over again.

***

Is it possible to COC into the castle (DLC1VampireCastleGuildhall)?

Unhappy coincidence that it fires that same debug message off 5 times in a row? I didn't bother trying to COC because I was rather angry at having to put up with the CTD to begin with.

It just seems that, right before the crash, it printed the debug message. So reloading brings you back to before the message was logged, so it logs it again and then it crashes, et cetera.

COC-ing would tell us if it's an issue with the cell or the transition, and that could further tell us if it has to do with the transition at that point or the transition in general.

And if the cell and not the transition, what has been enabled or what the actors are doing that causes the crash (since you could get in before).

And of course, don't rule out mods. Papyrus is versatile and all, but sometimes it's like playing with an explosive house of cards...

Well I have no idea what the deal is/was but the game decided to cooperate and let me in without doing anything other than open the door. Ah, Skyrim, your intermittent bugs are so much fun to play with.

I've been getting a bunch of crashes on transitions, as well -- it always loads the cell I'm entering and then right to desktop.

I also had two implosions (no CTD, just an unresponsive freeze), two.

I want to blame it on a mod I'm working on, but all papyrus errors were silenced long ago, and this is a new game... Ah, well.

***

Well, Arthmoor, at least you can continue on.

Off the top of my head, I know the vamp radiant quests are triggered at the end of "...Chalice"; maybe setting those up is just really twitchy?

Wish I knew, but yes, I was able to continue on. I've had plenty of implosions myself, as well as outright CTDs elsewhere, but none had ever insisted on hanging around like that. All because of Dawnguard. My game was 100% perfect stability before that came along. Damn deleted records.