Blood on the Ice breaks if you talk to the wrong person first

[TamrielTactician]

I'm stuck on this quest and I think I softlocked myself. I talked to Calixto before doing the whole investigation thing with the guard, and now nobody will give me dialogue options to progress. The quest marker just points at Calixto but he won't say anything new.

Is there a console command fix for this or am I reloading a save? Playing on PC so I have options but I'd rather not lose like two hours of progress if I don't have to. Also if anyone knows the exact trigger I should have hit first, let me know so I don't brick it again on my next playthrough.

 

[DragonbornVet]

Yeah, Blood on the Ice is notorious for this. The quest has a pretty strict dialogue sequence - you're supposed to talk to the guard (Weylin, I think?) first to get the investigation rolling, and if you skip that and go straight to Calixto, the quest flags don't set properly and you're stuck.

Console command wise, you could try looking up the quest ID and using setstage to bump it forward manually, but honestly that's risky if you don't know exactly which stage you need. More reliable is probably just reloading to before you talked to Calixto. I know two hours sucks, but a broken quest is worse than losing the progress.

For next time: talk to the town guard first, do the investigation steps in order (talking to the right NPCs when prompted), and don't skip ahead to Calixto until the quest naturally points you there. It's one of those quests where Bethesda's dialogue system falls apart if you deviate at all from the intended path.