The Legend of Karl, Part the Second

If you haven’t read Part the First, please do so before proceeding. Otherwise, this will make no sense.

The group, known by the immortal moniker “The Charismatic Waffles,” adventured for weeks, slowly uncovering a dire plot to release the minions of the Demon Lord Orcus into the world via a strange ritual in the bottom of the ruins of an ancient keep. There, as they battled the leader of the local cult, they were joined by a mysterious half-orc named Lark. Lark fought alongside the party, helping them to bring down the scheme of the cultists, and joined their party from that point forward.

Here I stepped down as Dungeon Master, replaced by my friend Michael. As we swapped roles, I took him into a side room and revealed to him the secret of Lark: He was missing his left pinkie finger. Karl had not been idle during his time away from the party. He honed his skills in illusion and conjuration magic until he could construct the fake body of Lark to disguise himself amid the party.

The party travelled alongside Lark for months of real-time, years within the world of the game. They gained levels, saved one another’s lives, and swapped magical items. Every once and a while they would receive a threatening message from Karl, promising to make Quarion pay for his torment, and their fear of Karl slowly grew. When we finally came to the conclusion of Michael’s campaign, the party foiled an ancient wizard’s spirit as he was about to use the power of an unlimited wish locked within an ancient staff. The battle was easy, over before some of the party even had a chance to move. Everyone started in surprise when the wizard crumpled to the ground. It may have been the most anticlimactic moment in D&D history.

Casually, Lark moved to pick up the staff. None of the party thought anything of it, looting corpses was standard procedure. But they were all confused when Lark began to laugh. Their confusion doubled as his body began to shrink, slowly coming to resemble the hideously scarred form of a terribly familiar Kobold: Karl.

The majority of the party (everyone other than Quarion) sprinted out of the chamber and back along the hallway leading into it, leaving the ranger to face the Kobold alone.

Quarion was decapitated by a thrown greataxe. Afterwords his body and soul were seared into oblivion with summoned hellfire, so that he could never be raised from the dead. After ensuring the eternal annihilation of his greatest foe, Karl turned his attention to the rest of the party. With Quarion dead they were sneaking back into the room, hoping to take Karl unawares. Unfortunately, they couldn’t be stealthy enough to escape his notice, it was mathematically impossible.

A truly epic battle ensued, the true “boss-fight” that they had all been expecting, and the loss of Quarion was devastating to their offense. After finally weakening Karl to the brink of death, they all groaned when he used a magic item that they had helped him to acquire to restore himself to full fighting-fitness. Defeating him a second time was even harder, as they had exhausted their repertoire of advanced tactics and abilities while trying to kill him the first time. They did, eventually, succeed in again bringing him to the point of death.

Clutching the wizard’s staff with the last of his strength, Karl wished himself to become a god. The party, horrified, watched as a blinding pillar of radiance smote the ceiling, clearing a path between Karl and the heavens. He disappeared in a blinding flash of light, leaving behind the expended staff and the axe that had slain Quarion. The party expected him to descend any moment as a virtually omnipotent foe, and Karl fully intended to fulfill their expectations, but as he willed his new and imperishable body back towards the mortal world he was stopped by Bahamut, the Lawful Good deity of Justice. Bahamut warned Karl that it was forbidden for the gods to directly intervene in the mortal world. They were bound by an oath made to the Spirits of the World in the aftermath of the Dawn War, and Karl was now charged to keep to the oath. He could only act on the material world through mortals bound to his service. Enraged, Karl eventually yielded and began establishing his identity among the pantheon: god of vengeance, patron of the tortured and oppressed. Even as he shaped his own realm within the astral sea he watched the Charismatic Waffles, forever hoping that they would be foolish enough to venture into the Astral Sea where such petty oaths did not bind him.

Eventually the adventuring group known as the Charismatic Waffles disbanded, and its members lived fairly generic lives (at least for heroes) from then onwards. None of them ever entered the Astral Sea, and Karl had the hollow pleasure of watching age claim each of them over the course of several centuries.

The worship of Karl spread among the peoples of the world, obscure but not hated. The defender of the tortured was respected by nearly all faiths of the world, and his penchant for vengeance was forgiven because of the many innocent lives that his followers rescued from torment.

Slowly the world grew accustomed to this addition to their pantheon, and the status quo returned to a new equilibrium. It was believed that Karl was here to stay, that he was just as unassailable as the other gods, until the discovery of Quarion’s Tomb…

 

The Legend of Karl, Part the First

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.

Part the Second