A Skyrim player shared a clip of a Riften guard flying out of a tavern at cannonball speed

Physics in Bethesda games has followed its own rules for almost a decade and a half, and players have seen pretty much everything by now. Giants send heroes into orbit, baskets turn into invisible helmets, and wheels of cheese roll down mountainsides. But sometimes the game still manages to produce something new, like a guard leaving a tavern not on foot, but as if fired out of a catapult.

That's exactly the kind of clip one Skyrim player posted on Reddit. The footage shows Riften and the Bee and Barb tavern, out of whose doors a city guard comes flying at breakneck speed, scattering mugs and plates along the way. The cherry on top is the reaction of the clip author himself, who freezes in confusion, trying to figure out whether he actually saw what just happened.

Theories about what the poor guard did wrong started flying in immediately, and almost all of them lean on the lore. The tavern owner, an Argonian named Keerava, is known for her tough temper, and Riften has long been under the thumb of the Black-Briar family. One commenter offered the most plausible explanation:

Probably said something nasty about Maven and she found out.

Technically, there's nothing supernatural going on here. Skyrim runs on the Creation Engine combined with Havok physics, and NPCs switch into ragdoll mode in certain situations, essentially turning into a rag doll controlled purely by physics. If a model gets stuck in a wall or falls through the textures, the engine shoves it back out with unpredictable acceleration.

This is also where the famous mammoths falling from the sky after fast travel come from. When a location loads, a creature sometimes spawns before ground collision is in place, falls through, and gets automatically teleported upward, from which point it makes a dramatic dive back down. Add to that physics tied directly to frame rate, and with the 60 FPS cap removed, objects in Skyrim start literally flying around rooms.

Interestingly, some players don't just tolerate this kind of chaos, they actively add more of it. The JS Rumpled Rugs and JS Immersive Tripwires mods make NPCs trip over rugs and tripwires, with an adjustable activation chance and an option to disable the effect for the player character. One fan straight up admitted installing them just for the fun of watching Skyrim residents fall flat on open ground.

The Elder Scrolls 6 still hasn't come out, and Riften guards keep finding new ways to fly.