The Second D&D Tarak Campaign - Kicking In The Orcs' Back Door

about 3 hours ago

Welcome to the ongoing saga of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign I ran a little while back. It started off using The Sunken Citadel module from the Tales From The Yawning Portal source book, but was then fitted into my Homebrew setting and moved on from there.

In the last post, our party of heroes tried to storm the front entrance of the stronghold the orcs were building. They fought hard, but it became clear that although they could win their way through the entrance they'd be too weakened to go further, so they withdrew to a safe place to consider their options.

I hope you enjoy my D&D campaign write-ups, and the commentary I add to them. Questions, comments and feedback are welcome !

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Safely back at the recently captured orc watch post, the party licked their wounds and wondered what to do next.

I must admit there was a certain amount of out-of-character complaining about "why would a DM design an encounter we can't win ?" My response was twofold. First, not every encounter should be easily winnable, and second, that it encourages lateral thought to find alternative solutions.

It didn't take them that long to think up an alternative solution. I think it was Erioch who first asked the question. "I wonder if there's a back door ?"

Now they had a possible plan, the party went a-scouting. Soon enough, they found that the orc stronghold did indeed have a rear entrance.

I've pasted in below the map I included a couple of posts back. As you can see, at the point marked "14", there's a rear entrance. Orcs might be chaotic and evil, but they aren't stupid, and they only created a rear entrance because they had little choice.

The entrance was hidden from sight by an old corrie, a hollow in the mountainside. The corrie was used as a pen for the worgs (large evil wolf-like monsters) the orc cavalry rode; the beasts were not going to be comfortable being kept permanently underground, which is why the orcs needed this rear entrance to their stronghold.

Despite being a squishy vulnerable sorcerer type, Garnet used Invisibility and Message spells to scout ahead carefully, get a closer view and report her findings back to the party.

What she saw was too good an opportunity to miss. There were ten worgs, but they were contained within a pen. Looking after them were three goblin handlers.

Swiftly using Message to get the rest of the party to come up in support, Garnet cast Scorching Ray. Flame leapt from her outstretched fingers and the three goblin handlers turned into three smoking corpses.

When the rest of the party arrived a few moments later, all they had to do was stand back and bombard the trapped worgs with missile weapons until they became a heap of furry bodies.

The rear entrance itself was relatively well hidden simply because the area was mountainous. What looked like one among many natural crevices in the rock turned into a passageway, widened by the orcs once their workings couldn't bee seen from outside.

Just within the passage, at the point marked 14 on the map, was a covered pit. Without an actual scout in the party, Griff found it the "traditional" way, failing a dexterity save and plummeting 30 foot down to land with a sickening crunch. It wasn't enough to kill him, but it alerted the guards in room 13.

This was the point where Erioch (the party's battle priest) did something thoroughly heroic (read.. risky). He jumped the pit and took on the guards single-handedly as they came down the corridor. There were two orogs and five orcs, but the passage was only wide enough for two at a time.

This gave Griff the chance to climb back up out of the pit. While Fartacus applied healing, Garnet used her wings to fly across the pit without risk. Landing behind Erioch, she leaned forward and cast a Burning Hands spell.

Erioch had already weakened the orogs, and this spell filled the corridor with enough flame to kill both them and the orcs behind.

A theme was starting to emerge and there was some discussion about whether a sorcerer can specialise in fire magic in the same kind of way an Evocation wizard can.....

Next time... Orc Kitchens. Ewwww....

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