S1 E8: Who's Staying for Dinner?

General Summary

In which a dangerous foe is defeated and the enemy routed - for now - by solid team coordination.
After spending some time at the cookfires of the civilian Orcs of the Dark Warden clan, and finding more out about their predicament from the commoner classes still living here - the stonemasons and carpenter folk of the Orc clan who already had only a tenuous relationship with the warmongering gods of their species - the party decided to try one last time to overcome the reluctance of Clan Shaman Voshagul to show them the secret passage the party knows is there, giving direct entrance to the halls of the betrayed White Spears where the corrupted Warchief was laired up without needing to dig through the completely blocked cave opening if they had to go around. Having talked about far more personal and private matters with them already than Voshagul was likely expecting, after some additional convinging and a pact by the party to eliminate Malbyish and his corrupted warriors, eventually she did relent. But before she led the way, she appealed to their sense of empathy for how desperate times had been, and what extremes they had been driven to. Xi Shi and Lorfel reassured her that what was in the past was in the past and best forgotten, but she just shrugged. "Yeah, well - maybe. But don't say I didn't warn you."
They headed up a hall north from the main room, to a hallway heading west. She led them to a large door not on Willow's map, barred on her side, preventing anyone from coming through without an identifying passphrase. Xi Shi provided the passphrase agreed upon for the party, though she was a bit unsure what to say about halfway through and Voshagul used it anyway: "Shargaas the HmhmmhMhmHm..." So before she could land on exactly which sort of Shargaas, the password was set. The first obstacle was getting through the door - the size of the bar was far too heavy for Voshagul to lift herself, and the guards who normally did it had been slain in the fight eariler; eventually the combined efforts of Lorfel, Blizzard and Rongo were enough to lift the massive beam and open the door. The Shaman then left to find some Orcs from her side strong enough to put the bar back in place. All these things suggested that if the party was every running back in a hurry to escape a foe, this door could not be opened quickly, even if their lives would depend on it.
A bad smell reached them immediately, and a short distance down the hall took them to the entrance of a 20x20 or so throne room. The first thing to catch their attention before the decor were the visible legs of five bodies - three humans, a dwarf and a halfling - clearly from the Keep, dead, and partially butchered for eating. Once through the door into the room they could see them, still clothed and with most of their items intact. They had been left here in the throne for some time, with decay severe enough to obscure the features, creating an eye-watering stench. Each of the bodies had some kind of small personal item or trinket that the party felt certain they could use to identify the dead to any loved ones back at the Keep, though this would surely be a grim business, and naturally they would need to answer for why they didn't slaughter these vile Orcs. Though the party could assume this was all the work of the corrupted War Chief, Malbyish, that sin had been cannibalism, and these weren't Orc bodies; that had happened in the winter and though these weren't fresh bodies, they weren't rotted down to bones yet and they still had the stink of decay. The Shaman was long gone by this point and unavailable for further clarification, but the reason she had hesitated to take them to the secret door was at least perfectly clear now.
Beyond the five dead people on the floor, the throne room was richly decorated with fine furniture, tapestries and carpeting, ostentatious even for humans and certainly for Tribal Orcs. Searches began for the secret door that Willow had marked on her map, and which the Shaman has never questioned their knowledge of.  Keebler at first located a small alcove leading to a walk-in storage area with a few suits of armor and serviceable though not magical weapons, as well as an iron jewelry box containing healing potions and some gold. He continued to search around after this with the help of the others and soon they found a passage in the south corner behind the drapery that covered the walls.
The room beyond had a musty smell with an undertone of rubber or petroleum. The floor was bare stone, the walls hung with natty trophies and weapons, and most of the surfaces had cuts and gouges from where a fight had clearly been. A telling piece of decor were a pair of crossed white spears, one snapped off at the haft, over the place where the secret door was eventually found to be located. Keebler noted small metal eyehooks, which might have suspend a wire or some kind of trap components, but they were now empty. Other than a simple table with two battered chairs, the room contained a large metal bucket full of black oily water. Lorfel for a time fiddled around with the water, trying to separate the tar from it, but when the pail fell over a pair of centipedes the size of sheep boiled up from the space below, clearly angry and probably hungry. These were not difficult to dispatch through one did give Xi Shi a nasty bite; luckily she shrugged off the poison effects with her natural affinity for venoms.
The party then found a couple of pouches in the hole the centipedes had been trapped in, each containing 40 silver, 20 gold and a small gem. These seemed identical enough to be some kind of pre-set payment, and were taken by the party. They continued looking around and eventually found a doorway that was not exactly hidden, but worked into the decor so effectively that it would have been missed without careful scrutiny.
Steeling for a fight on the other side, the party opened the door and found it led to a hallway with a door to the right in the north wall, and a bend to the left at the end 80 or so feet away to the left. A group of angry-looking Orcs were clustered there, and one of them in front was exceptionally large, with big black bat-wings folded at his shoulders like some kind of nightmare Orc-Aasimar. Neither group was doing anything to hide themselves, so a round of catcalling, bragging and flexing ensued with the inevitable fight coming quickly after that.
A pitched battle ensued, mostly between the favored Orc of Shargaas who was unaffected by the strange curse the other Orcs had been, and luckily for the party, continued to be in this fight. The Shargaas-Orc was a deadly opponent even alone, leaping to land on Blizzard and deliver a brutal weapon slash and bite that took him to the floor, unconscious. Perhaps Gruumsh intervened to save him, as the other warriors were stuck in place, not attacking when they likely could have killed Blizzard outright. The party leapt to his defense, ensuring the Dagger of Orc Slaying given to them by Orbal, the shaman of the Lizardfolk, was moved to the front. The first attack was a miss, But Lorfel's magical attack left the Shargaas Orc incapacitated. Keebler attacked with the blade, aligned with Lorfel's divination of the future so that it did maximum damage to the Shargaas-Orc, who dropped, bleeding out, to the stone floor. Rongo and Xi Shi moved in to overpower and destroy the remaining Orcs who initially were more interested in eating their own fallen foes than in fighting, though they understood that Blizzard was on the knifes edge of death and a little dragonborn meat would be a special treat. Nevertheless, with well-thought-out tactical moves they were able to drag Blizzard behind the front line of the fight and stabilize him as the last of the enemy orcs were finally cut down.
They fell back to the relative safety of the secret room, knowing there are more cursed Orcs in the White Spears' former home, possibly more of the Shargaas-Orc variety; and certainly the war chief Malbyish is no slouch either. They saw no sign of the Wizard Willow Candler in their brief foray, but they did see the high likelihood that this Shargaas was somehow related to, in cahoots with, or the same being as the Camazotl bat-demon that Parson Naphan had waned them was coming.

Rewards Granted

XP

380

• Ring of Protection +1
• 4 x handmaid religious totems (bat effigies)
• 7 x Shortswords
• 2 x chain mail (human and dwarf-sized) 
• Leather satchel containing 2 x health potions
• Bag of holding (with bat-themed decorative flourishes)

Missions/Quests Completed

• "Tip of the spear"
• "The Red Fangs of Shargaas"

Character(s) interacted with

• Voshagul
• Albagetch, the Third Red Fang (deceased)

Report Date

17 May 2022

Primary Location

The Caves of Chaos

Secondary Location

The Borderland Marches