Session 13C: The Tale of Itarek
This is not the first time that I’ve shared the Tale of Itarek here at the Alexandrian. Several years ago it appeared as a Tale From the Table. I was motivated to pluck this particular story out because of the great impression it had made on both myself and my gaming group. It was a truly significant event, and one which still lives large in our shared memory of the campaign more than a hundred sessions later.
I’ve been asked, in the past, about what the story behind the Tale of Itarek was. Sometimes these queries come colored with a clear subtext: Why did you plan for this to happen? And how did you manage to actually make it happen at the table?
If you’re familiar with literally everything else I’ve ever written about running a game, you probably won’t be shocked to discover that the answers are (a) I didn’t and (b) I didn’t.
There’s not really anything “hiding” behind the events depicted in the campaign journal: Elestra’s desperate need to save her python gave birth to the Tragedy at the Door, which saw the party get absolutely brutalized by Morbion’s area effect spells. (It’s pretty rare in classic D&D for me to see an enemy spellcaster get a chance to dump their entire spell list into the PCs; Morbion did it before taking any damage himself.) Poor skills mixed with unfortunate skill checks turned the rope into an impassable barrier, preventing the group from retreating. Their panic caused their communication and coordination to fall apart, allowing them to be picked off one by one.
When Dominic was the only character left, it wasn’t because I’d put my thumb on the scale. It was because everybody else had lost all their hit points. The campaign really was a hairsbreadth away from ending in a TPK, and the whole table knew it. You could have cut the tension with a knife.
So, no, I didn’t plan this.
I also wasn’t the one who came up with the idea of healing Itarek. That was Dominic. Dominic knew he had no chance at winning a duel with Morbion and no path of escape. He needed a champion, so he picked one from the limited options he had available to him.
I will take credit for having Itarek issue a formal challenge to Morbion. Without that particular point of inspiration on Itarek’s part, Morbion would have simply snuffed out Dominic and Itarek wouldn’t have lasted long.
That’s how these things work, right? Emergent narrative from the unexpected interstices of independent creative impulses.
(Couldn’t I have just decided to not have Morbion attack Dominc? Technically, yes. But in every important way, no.)
Once Itarek issued his challenge, the outcome still wasn’t certain. Dominic barely managed to keep Itarek on his feet from round to round by outpacing the damage Itarek was dealing out. (If Morbion still had his most powerful spells it would have gone differently; of course, if he still had his most powerful spells the party wouldn’t have been in this situation.)
Intriguingly, I have had two different people with reactions to this story ranging from irate to outright anger that I would “do this” to my players. “Bad form in any system”as one of them said.
Intriguing because, as I noted, my own players consider this one of the true highlights of the campaign. (And there are plenty of other people who can read this story and seem to appreciate what an awesome moment it was.) I think this reveals a fundamental difference in perception between players who have taken (and have had the opportunity to take) ownership of their actions versus those who are force fed material by the GMs. I’ve talked in the past about the penumbra of problems created by railroading techniques – the literally crippling weight that a GM is forced to carry when they take on sole responsibility for everything experienced by the PCs. This is an example of that: When faced with a situation that has gone pear-shaped, players who have taken responsibility for their own actions will become ecstatic and feel a great sense of achievement when they manage to work their way out of it. Those who have been conditioned to believe that the GM is feeding them pre-packaged content are likely to instead become upset that the GM has miscalculated and given them something “too tough” which knocked them all out of the action.
There’s some other version of this campaign where these two rooms and the handful of bad guys keyed to them are largely unremarkable. And that’s okay, because in that other version of the campaign there’s almost certainly some completely different moment which those other-dimensional versions of my players remember as being an incredible, never-rending crucible which, in this dimension’s version of the campaign, passed in a fairly pedestrian fashion.
One final peek “behind the campaign journal” here: Dominic doesn’t speak Goblin. Since everyone else was unconscious, the players did not initially know what Itarek was saying to Morbion. Their exchange – clearly portentous and meaningful – was a mystery to them. It wasn’t until I wrote up the campaign journal (and a dramatic re-enactment of the scene at the beginning of the next session) that the full story of what had happened was revealed to the players.
I think that enigma may have played a small, but significant, role in why this particular moment lived large in their imaginations. Always leave them wanting more, right?
(Although the electric thrill of surviving a near-death experience shouldn’t be undervalued.)
Was there a tactical reason for why the priest healed up the goblin npc, instead of one of the pc champions?
Real, close tpks are cool moments. It’s always tempting to help the party though, even though it’s only through bad tactical (roleplay) decisions…
Bad guy was between Dominic and the other PCs. (See Session 13B.)
The whole Tragedy at the Door incident, to me, looks a little weird on paper. From what I gathered, it boiled (fireballed?) down to one guy healing a GMPC who was engaged in an epic duel with the villain. Meanwhile, everyone else in the party had flatlined and was just spectating this. I know that if I had to run that situation, it would just annoy everybody. What am I missing here?
I’m not making this post to criticize your GMing ability; your words are proof enough that whatever happened ended up being epic, I’m just unable to learn from it from how it’s been presented.
We may need to come at this from the other direction, FutureOreo. If this situation occurred during play, what would you do as a GM?
It depends on how far into “the situation” we go. I wouldn’t like to have a DMPC ready to hand when the players got into the climactic battle (either because something about “An NPC gets the glory of killing the final boss” rings alarms in my head, or because I’m a railroader who won’t admit it to himself), so unless the players made clear that they wanted the option of a strong NPC to go fight the battle for them, Itarek wouldn’t have been around.
If “the situation” was the very end point, in which everyone was down except the healer, who was willingly healing up a strong NPC combatant to gain an ally, short of some serious railroading (either in the form of prohibiting Itarek to get his health, or negating the player’s endeavor by having the villain leave/spare them/trip into the goo and die) I guess I’d have no choice but to let the fight play out.
Couple things to note: When the adventure was prepped, Itarek was a nameless goblin with a generic stat block. See this post for more discussion of how he got a name. He wasn’t a “strong NPC”; he was a mook designed with the expectation that he would be stabbed through the eye by the PCs.
You can see here that the PCs did, in fact, request goblin allies to accompany them. (And would have liked more.) I find the characterization of what are functionally low-level hirelings as “strong NPCs to go fight the battle for them” a strange one.
There’s just a fundamental difference of perception here: You’re conditioned to believe that if something like this happens, it must have happened because the GM somehow forced it to happen. A group who’s conditioned to believe that (most likely because their GM is routinely forcing things to happen) would be annoyed, because the whole sequence of events that culminated in this moment would be a testament to how utterly powerless they were and how much the GM had prevented them from having any impact on the game.
When you’re NOT playing in that sort of campaign, however, the impact of this sort of event is exactly the opposite. Look at what happened here:
– The players made a choice which improbably got them access to the goblins.
– The players chose to negotiate with the goblins.
– The players chose to help the goblins.
– The players chose to have the goblins help them.
– The players made poor tactical choices (some born out of intense roleplaying), and suffered the consequences.
– Dominic’s player made a bold, desperate choice that saved them all.
You’ve been conditioned to expect that player choice is meaningless, but this entire series of events is, in fact, a testament to how incredibly powerful and meaningful player choice is.
My players remember this as an epic victory that they were responsible for because it WAS an epic victory that they were responsible for.
Yes, I could have stepped in as the GM at any one of these points and prevented them from making those choices. I could have:
– Stopped them from accessing this part of the dungeon.
– Forced them to kill the goblins instead of talking to them.
– Forced them not to help the goblins.
– Refused to let the goblins help them.
– Fudged die rolls or lobotomized the bad guys in order to prevent the PCs from being put at real risk.
– Refused to let Dominic’s player put their plan into action.
But why would I WANT to do any of those things?
The impact of the choices the players made here continue to have an impact on the campaign: As you’ll see shortly, Itarek ends up marrying Crashekka. The PCs remain engaged with the tribe, helping them to rebuild, recover, and expand. Dominic’s involvement with Itarek has a long-lasting impact by bringing the goblins to the attention of the Nine Gods, the consequences of which are still playing out a hundred+ sessions later.
All of that would have been lost if I’d decided some preconceived idea of what “should” happen was better than what was actually happening right in front of my nose.
Thank you for your explanation. I will no longer be wary of the NPC taking up the fight, as it seems that whenever this goes wrong, the issue is the context of the NPC fight, rather than something inherent to NPCs in the battle – all the horror stories of the GMPC I hear about have the circumstance of the GM absolutely rubbing it in the face of the players that they are powerless. Thank you for revealing this; if I should ever GM again, I will try to take the same attitude towards getting NPC help that I try to for every other PC action that happens.
My question would be, did you fudge the rolls at the end to keep Itarek alive? I’m guessing not (or you would have done it for the PCs). What would have happened if they had all died? Wouldn’t it end the campaign, and in a really depressing way? And everyone would be so pissed at Elestra’s player.
If the GM isn’t going to fudge the rolls, they do need to keep the encounters somewhat balanced. That’s where the wheels always fell off for me as a GM. But fudging the rolls is like the first step towards railroading, when the GM starts deciding what the outcomes should be.
@Janette: No fudging. IIRC, I actually rolled the dice openly for this section of the fight.
If they’d died, it would, in fact, be the end of the campaign. That was a little scary. A little weird to think about from the perspective of today (100+ sessions later), but if it had happened back then we’d most likely be playing something else today. And possibly one of the reasons the campaign is still going a decade+ later is because of the strength forged through intense moments like this.
I discuss this in a bit more detail in The TPK Gamble.
I’m fascinated by this table story also. I think I would like to articulate the issue of line drawing.
Your entire website being about emergent game play, I fully grant that story is entirely the product of the PCs. And yet I still feel this is off, somehow.
When you decide for Itarek to issue the challenge, that is something made up on the spot (I assume). Also, the need for Morbion to accept the challenge is also improvised. Maybe goblins in your world don’t have this challenge, maybe Morbion is so corrupted he does not see himself as part of the tribe, therefore beholden to those oaths anymore.
So in a sense this is still DM fiat. I can imagine another universe where a DM might instead have the fireball roll min damage (secretly) therefore allowing a tense but still climactic battle where the PCs are almost dead but cling to life and are snuffed out one by one until the last PC gets a single shot and saves the day.
Is that less valid than doing this through creative RP? The time at the table certainly works in a veteran DM’s favor in that case. I’m not sure I would have had the creative inspiration to roleplay this encounter in such a way as to allow a climactic battle.
I guess it boils down to where is the line drawn between being creative and having a flair for the dramatic and forcing good/entertaining/climactic outcomes?
When you start questioning whether or not it’s okay to roleplay NPCs, you’ve lost your way.