I have tried to tell this story many times, in many different genres. Each time, be it essay, facebook post, or oral recitation, I have felt like the story was incomplete. It’s hard to capture an event in words, and especially an event that occurred only in the imaginations of 7 people sitting around a pingpong table playing the D&D 4e starter adventure entitled “Keep on the Shadowfell.”
October 9th, 2010:
A group of total novices to the game Dungeons & Dragons gather for the second time around an improvised table surface in Jesse’s attic. I have been elected to be the Dungeon Master, and have half-heartedly scanned the campaign that I’m supposed to be running. I thought that I got the gist of it, and that was all that seemed important to me. The characters started on a road and were ambushed by a group of Kobolds (short lizard-men). It was only our second time in combat, and it took quite a while to look up the rules that we didn’t know (to this day we’re still finding basic rules that we’ve been breaking for years, so we clearly didn’t do a very good job). The battle took a long time, and I believe we set the forest on fire, causing devastation to the local ecosystem and the nearby village’s economy.
After the fight the party went to the local town, made their first shoddy attempts at role-playing their characters (to be fair, none of us really got good at this for a few months), and bought some items. They then resolved to track down the Kobolds to their home to discover why the ambush had been set in the first place.
The Kobolds operated out of a cave, with a spring flowing from its center into a wide stream through the woods. When the arrived outside of the cave a number of Kobolds were stationed without as guards. Notably, a Kobold wielding a short sword and a shield with the emblem of a dragon’s head on it stood within a circle of glowing blue runes to one side. Statistically this Kobold was a normal Kobold Dragonshield, a level 3 enemy, but because he was the only one of his kind and because he stood within the circle of runes the party attributed special significance to him. (The runes simply gave anyone standing inside of them some trivial combat bonus.) The battle was hard-fought, especially because one of the party was knocked unconscious and very nearly dragged away, but eventually the party triumphed over both the Kobolds outside of and within the cave. Within the cave they fought a Goblin named Irontooth, the leader of the Kobolds and the true reason that the party was ambushed. They got what information that they could off of Irontooth’s dead corpse, and then returned to the one prisoner that they had taken: the Kobold Dragonshield from outside of the cave.
They tied him up and began to question him. Jesse’s character, an elven ranger name Quarion, took the lead role in this inquisition.
“What is your name, Kobold?”
At this point I realized that I didn’t have a name from him. Desperate, I used word association: Kobold… starts with k… KARL!
They laughed for a solid three minutes when they discovered that their reptilian prisoner had such an ordinary name. When then finally settled down, the real interrogation began. Quarion drilled their prisoner for information about Irontooth’s master, but Karl legitimately did not know anything. At this time though I was unaware of how Kobolds are typically role-played as sneaky, timid, cowardly creatures, and I made Karl stubborn and defiant. Rather than admitting his ignorance, he refused to answer, prompting Quarion to perform the most gruesome torture that I have ever heard described.
Quarion slit the webbing between Karl’s fingers and toes with an arrow, and poured salt into the wounds so that they burned. He lit rope from his backback on fire and shoved it into Karl’s eyes, scarring his vision. He cut off Karl’s ears (at the time we didn’t realize that Kobolds’s ears are basically holes in their heads anyway), and finally he amputated Karl’s left pinkie finger, also salting that wound.
At this point I’d sat through enough gruesome torture. I felt that the world we were playing in couldn’t allow this to continue and still be considered a remotely just world. On the spot, knowing practically nothing about Kobolds, I invented that thousands of years ago Kobolds were the ruling force of a mighty empire, and empire whose power was founded upon formidable magic. While their power broke and they eventually fell to their current status of pathetic rabble, each Kobold carries within himself the potential to tap into that legacy and awake the ancient arcane might of their race. The sheer trauma of Karl’s torment caused just such an awakening, the first of its kind in thousands of years.
The ropes binding Karl ignited and disintegrated. With blinding green light shining out of his eyes he struck at Quarion with his good hand, clawing him across the chest through the leather armor that protected the ranger. His wound left three parallel claw marks, and a curse. When Quarion was healed of his wounds the three scars still burned green, filling him with debilitating pain whenever he smelled blood so that he could never torture a living being again.
As Quarion reeled from this blow, Karl leapt into the stream and disappeared.
The party didn’t hear from him again for a long time, but nobody laughed at the name “Karl the Kobold” anymore, especially when Quarion collapsed to the ground at the scent of his own blood.
Where's Waldon? 