So, occasionally when I kill a dragon in Skyrim Miraak will appear and just straight up steal my dragon's soul.

I'm wondering if this is because I haven't been in Solstheim trying to stop him.

Yes. He steals them no matter where you are. He stole one from me on my front porch one time.

Seriously though, once you get so far in that quest line, you have to finish it for the theivery to go away. I've read that it's random whether he steals them or not, but for me it's been anything but random. He steals MOST dragon souls that you earn, but not all. It's definitely not random.

It's probably a wee bit late now, but next time you do a run through...save a couple dragon souls for some of the words on Solstiem, I generally have at least 4 or 5, because some of those words their... very...very nice.

This is SO true!!

For me it's been random - some runthroughs of DB it feels like every dragon, other runthroughs he hardly shows up.

For me it was every other soul, except for one time when I managed to get two dragon souls in a row before he came back.

On the bright side...

Yes. If you have under three souls, he will steal all of them no matter where you are. Why three? That's how many you need to unlock Bend Will and continue the DLC MQ. If you have at least three, then it will happen less often on the mainland than on Solstheim.

It's not in the programming, but is a cruel caprice of the Random Number God. Do not delve into that book in the Temple of Miraak unless you have at least three dragon souls stored up. Six if you want to unlock Dragon Aspect too.

That's nice to know. No wonder he kept stealing EVERY SINGLE ONE. I was like, "Ok. I need 3 souls to get this. No big deal - I'm the dragon slaying master. I will have these collected in just a few minutes." It took me forever. I had to kill like 9 - 11 dragons just to get the three that I needed.

I think I fell for this 'gotchya' the first time I played the DLC as well. I guess the game designers thought it would be more fun or challenging? Don't know, but the next time I played it, I knew better than to start without several extra souls. Kinda feels like cheating to change game play based on knowledge of future events but what can you do? I've learned to keep lots of reserves in Skyrim, including perk points.

I always end up like this as well. My latest iteration is lvl 59 and I have 8 perk points and about 13-15 dragon souls saved up.

I had them extra, cause I hadn't went after many word walls... but I was glad I had when I realized what might have happened.