Is there any other way to start the quest, A Daedra's Best Friend?

I'm working on the Oblivion Walker achievement. I was in Falkreath going to get the quest for the mask and as I went to talk to Lod, a dragon attacked and killed him. Is there another way to start the quest? Because I have 11 out of the 15 artifacts.

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2 Answers

From this Steam post:

Changing quest stages through the console isn't going to bring back dead characters. Resetting quests to a state where they can actually be repeated often isn't possible.

I would expect Barbas to be missing from Vile's statue if you killed him.

When one of the relevant quests awards you an artifact, a counter goes up. This counter is what's used to determine when you should get the achievement - the game doesn't care what happens to the artifacts themselves, so selling them isn't a problem.

If you don't really care "how" you get the achievement, then the easy way is to just borrow someone else's save:

I can think of at least four options, three of which will only work on PC, and the fourth may be... dissatisfying to hear. I have not tested this, but at least one of these methods should work.

1. Open the console and run the following commands to bring Lod back (and then speak to him as normal):

prid 3A19F
enable
moveto player
resurrect

You might also need to run setstage DA03Start 5 to trigger the quest if a guard has not yet given it to you.

2. Open the console and run the command setstage DA03Start 10. This will skip the need to talk to Lod altogether, and the quest log will prompt you to go find the dog (on the road just outside of town). The quest should continue normally from there.
3. Run the command setstage DA03 20 to directly start the quest proper (rather than the "go find the dog" pointer quest). I would not recommend doing this unless you've already tried both of the above methods, because the pointer quest is much simpler and (probably) less likely to break if you manually advance it with the console, as compared to manually advancing the real quest.
4. Reload a save from before Lod died (sorry!).

You should always save before running any console commands, and immediately reload your save if anything seems wrong. Supposedly, the Special/Anniversary Edition disables achievements if you use "some" commands (the classic one does not do that), but I cannot find any evidence of this actually being true, and I found several threads on Reddit with people saying that they tried a ton of commands without any problems.

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