The Burnt Spriggan is the ash-blackened cousin of the ordinary spriggan, added with the Dragonborn DLC. Instead of guarding quiet groves, these wood spirits stalk the scorched south of Solstheim, and they bring fire to the fight rather than poison and bugs. Even in their home terrain they are not a common sight, which is probably for the best.
The source material links their fiery nature to the eruption of Red Mountain and the ash that has burned them ever since, but that explanation is not backed by a citation, so treat it as a plausible theory rather than settled lore.
How they differ from normal spriggans
- They have none of the poisonous qualities of regular spriggans.
- They show resistance to fire, which their forest kin do not.
- They are far more aggressive and keep chasing a target well beyond the distance a normal spriggan would give up at. The open ash wastes give them much better sight lines than a dense forest, which may explain the persistence.
- They do not leave Taproot behind; their body yields Burnt Spriggan Wood instead.
- When a regular spriggan collapses at low Health it recovers and gains extra defence. A Burnt Spriggan instead bursts into continuous rolling flames, much like a dying flame atronach, and if left alone it stands back up after a few seconds – without the defensive bonus.
Where to find them
Burnt Spriggans live in the ashlands of southern Solstheim. Their numbers there are small, so you are more likely to stumble across a single one than a group.
Notes
Neloth has an opinion on them, as he does on most things: according to him they do not twitch as much as their cousins, suggesting they feel pain less keenly.
