Dragna's Devblog: The Death of Izek Strazni

Problem: How do I turn Izek’s assassination mission into a real quest?

In the original Curse of Strahd module, the Fiona Wachter’s Wish special event provides them with a simple task: kill Izek Strazni. The players are given no guidance as to how to accomplish this, and no follow-up. Their sole responsibility is to find Izek (though it is unclear how) and beat him up until he dies.

Izek’s death is, in most contexts I’ve run and seen, the capstone to Vallaki—the finale that releases the tension that’s been building since the players first arrived.

It’s also, as-written, little more than a random encounter.

Set Pieces, Dungeons & Random Encounters

Curse of Strahd—the original module—is largely defined by its preference for set pieces over dungeons. Where a “dungeon” is generally a large area composed of several smaller “rooms” that must be traversed to reach a final end, a “set piece” is a small, well-defined area with only one or two “rooms” that the players must actually visit. Any additional rooms in a set piece are, in general, present only to provide verisimilitude.

Berez, Old Bonegrinder, the Abbey of Saint Markovia, and the Barovian Church are all great examples of set pieces—most of the action takes place in one or two particular spaces, and the surrounding area exists only to provide context. By contrast, the Werewolf Den, the Amber Temple, (arguably) Argynvostholt, and (of course) Castle Ravenloft are all dungeons.

One of the impacts of focusing on set pieces instead of dungeons, as a campaign, is that it’s very hard to give players a rigorous adventuring day. When players face only one or two major gameplay challenges per day (e.g., combat, social encounter, obstacle, puzzle, skill challenge), a DM is artificially restricted from consuming player resources because (1) combat encounters can only go for so long and players can’t use more features than they have actions; (2) many player features recharge on short rests; and (3) DMs can’t truly push players to their limits without consuming hit dice, which requires the use of short rests. Keep this in mind.

There is, however, a level below the set piece—a gameplay challenge that is so completely divorced of context that it is, functionally, bereft of emotional investment and verisimilitude. This is (you guessed it) the Random Encounter.

The problem with random encounters is that they have neither rising nor falling action—they have no narrative context, and therefore no narrative weight. The best thing you can say after a random encounter is, “Well, that happened.”

Such is the way of the RAW Izek assassination mission. Though the players can create their own complex plot to kill him, I’ve neither seen nor heard of any group bothering to actually do so. In general, this “quest,” as I’ve seen it, tends to unfold in the following order: (1) players wander around Vallaki to do random things; (2) players eventually stumble upon Izek or decide to go check out the burgomaster’s mansion; (3) players fight Izek and kill him.

Matters go further unhelped by the fact that Izek, a single CR 5 enemy, will consume less than half of the party’s maximum hit points and less than a third of their daily resources. Given that Curse of Strahd (and especially Vallaki) is a set piece-driven adventure, the players have no need to construct an ambitious plan to take Izek down—he won’t do much to make them sweat, and even if he does (e.g., because the DM jacks up his CR), the players won’t have too much else to spend their spell slots on that day anyway.

This lack of mechanical tension only further diminishes the impact of this arc. Izek Strazni is supposed to be an everpresent, fearsome foe whose presence has an indelible mark on Vallaki while he lives. And yet, until the moment of his death, he (largely) doesn’t exist.

The Metaphorical Dungeon

If we want to upgrade this adventure from a random encounter and give it real weight and tension—to add in the rising and falling action that it’s missing—we need to turn the circumstances of Izek’s death into either a set piece or a dungeon.

There is, admittedly, a set piece already existing that we could repurpose for this quest: the Baron’s mansion. Izek sleeps here, drinks here, and stares creepily at dozens of Ireena dolls here—what’s not to love?

The problem with using the Baron’s mansion as the set piece is threefold:

• First, the players already spend lots of time here during other quests (e.g., The Missing Vistana, The Lost Soul, etc.); we don’t want to make it a pivotal part of this quest as well.
• Second, from both a Watsonian perspective and a Doylist perspective, having a big, messy brawl in the middle of the Baron’s mansion is a Bad Idea. (Fiona won’t like it—the whole point of the assassination is to dispose of Izek quietly. Plus, we want the players to stay on good terms with Victor later, which means that they shouldn’t have a big fight right next to his bedroom.)
• Third, there really isn't much gameplay here aside from the obvious (try to slit Izek's throat while he's sleeping), which doesn't resonate with the goal of the quest (since Izek will just wake up when he's attacked, and since Fiona is the one who wants to show Vargas that Izek is dead, which is the whole thing that allows her to carry out her little coup offscreen, where it won't bore the players with constant NPC politicking).

That means we need to use a dungeon instead. But wait - does Vallaki even have any dungeons?

Here's the twist: a dungeon doesn’t actually need to be a physical space. A physical dungeon is just one particular implementation of a campaign arc or (more frequently) a chapter within an arc. Remember: a dungeon is just a bunch of spaces that contain distinct gameplay challenges that the players must pass between to complete their goal. Those spaces don't have to be physically adjacent! They just need to be narratively adjacent.

Now, you can design a dungeon in two ways: you can either start by creating the challenges and then create the rooms later, or start with the rooms and make the challenges second. You can also mix up the order—create some challenges first, then some rooms, then back-and-forth until you’re done.

But what to create? Well, as I was writing out the dinner with Lady Fiona Wachter at which she gives the players this mission, I recalled the players very frequently ask quest-giving NPCs for items or assistance that will make the mission easier. You can do this in two ways: either by lowering the difficulty of the challenge or by increasing the strength of the players.

I didn’t want Lady Wachter to give the players any magical items or other combat-worthy buffs, so I decided to make the ultimate challenge—killing Izek—easier by having Fiona give them a bottle of poisoned wine. Izek, RAW, is a heavy drinker, so it made perfect sense that he might, in turn, be undone by his own addiction, and that a schemer like Fiona might prefer an indirect way of softening up her target first.

I didn’t want the bottle to actually kill Izek—just make it easier to kill him (e.g., by inflicting the poisoned condition)—but I figured that “figure out how to get Izek to drink the wine before trying to kill him” would be a great overarching challenge to set off the quest.

From there, I had to figure out how and when the players might be able to get Izek to drink the wine. It’s a popular belief that players are ultimately the ones to devise solutions to the problems the DM creates. This is, at a very basic level, true, but the DM must also clearly hint at the default solutions to the players, as well as the full context that can allow the players to come up with new plans.

Why is this? Unlike a video game, a DM’s ability to convey information about the characters and world is limited—the players can observe and investigate only the things that the DM tells them about. In a video game, a player can just wander around a town until they “see” Izek; in a game of D&D, there’s really nothing for the players to do until and unless the DM says, “you see Izek.” As a result, the DM has to do at least some work to figure out what the players might do and how they might do it—because, paradoxically, the players likely won’t have any idea of what to do otherwise!

So, my next step was to figure out Izek’s full schedule for the day, starting with one—preferably two (to give the players some meaningful choice)—default opportunities for them to slip him the poisoned bottle of wine. I decided that the Baron’s cook, Tereska, hand-delivers Izek his lunch every afternoon in the town square, along with two bottles of wine (one for day-drinking, and one for later). That meant that the players had at least two chances to make the swap: once as Tereska was preparing his lunch, and once as Izek was eating it.

As a side-benefit, this process also gave me Izek’s schedule for the rest of the day—with each discrete task (e.g., “inspect the gates” or “talk to snoops”) functionally serving as a distinct room in the dungeon I was slowly building. I could have, of course, left these rooms empty and limited the gameplay to “swap the wines” and “kill Izek”—but I wanted to bring in more of that rising action, both to build the tension and to create opportunities to deepen Izek’s narrative.

That meant that I needed a new gameplay challenge for each room along the way—specifically, Izek eating lunch in the town square, Izek speaking to one of his spies at their home, and Izek inspecting one of the gates on the edge of town.

Crafting the Challenges

The overarching dramatic question was straightforward: Can the players keep Izek from getting suspicious of them by staying out of sight until he drinks the poisoned wine—without losing track of him? That overarching dramatic question meant that I had to create a few different gameplay challenges whose stakes risked alerting Izek to the players’ presence.

(Why “without losing track of him”? In an earlier draft of the arc, Izek’s schedule was originally very predictable. However, I realized that a savvy party would likely just swap the wines, then skip out on him and wait for him to eventually arrive at his ultimate destination. I wanted to prevent this—it’s a huge tension destroyer—and so made sure that the party couldn’t predict Izek’s ultimate destination without just following him there.)

When it comes to Stealth missions, there’s something critical that I’ve always believed to be crucial to the process: skill checks must be made actively, not passively. You can’t make a Stealth check to generally “be stealthy”; any Stealth check must be made as an active effort to avoid a particular and imminent threat of detection. Otherwise, there’s no tension to the roll—it’s just a dice tax.

That meant that every room’s gameplay challenge needed to have two steps: in the first step, the players must do something to stop Izek from being alerted to their presence; in the second step, the players must escape Izek’s gaze before he can spot them once he’s already been alerted to their presence. (Think of the guards in Skyrim who shout, “Halt, who goes there!”, look around for a few moments, and then mutter, “Must have been the wind” before returning to their posts.)

My challenges wound up as follows:

• In the town square, the players must stop Bluto the fisherman from raising a drunken ruckus if they decline to buy his fish.
• Outside of Izek’s snoop’s home, the players must stop an angry guard dog from raising the alarm.
• Near the Vallakian gates, the players must avoid alerting a town guard looking to retrieve a fresh supply of silvered crossbow bolts.

(Both of the latter two scenes also allow the players to overhear discussion of Morgantha and her addictive dream pastries, setting up her nature as a night hag, which will be relevant later on in Victor and Stella’s arc.)

From there, there’s a last little moment of tension and revelation—watching Izek make his way to Blinsky Toys instead of one of his preferred haunts (to pick up the Ireena doll). Izek then travels to Lake Zarovich, where he proceeds to get drunk and—if the players have done their job properly—poisoned, giving the players a prime opportunity for an ambush.

Campaign Advice Roundup | July 2, 2023

• Remember to always give your players fair notice of and a reasonable opportunity to avoid any permanent negative consequences to their characters, NPCs, or the overall narrative.
• There’s nothing wrong with taking the simple approach when trying to solve a problem of game or narrative design. Question your assumptions, and remember at all times that the NPCs and worlds you’re presenting to your players aren’t real—they’re paper dolls to be moved and changed freely to serve your purposes. Don’t be afraid to “cut the Gordian knot” and change an NPC’s underlying personality or the rules of the game itself (e.g., a monster’s lore or statblock) if doing so will make your life easier.
• Remember that failing an encounter doesn’t have to cause the players to fail the entire quest; so long as the players feel that their efforts were mostly unsuccessful (i.e., they failed to progress, they suffered some narrative consequence, but they can try again later), the dramatic weight of their failure will feel preserved.