S1 E9: The Tragedy of Malbyish

General Summary

In which Orcs are fought off, a tragic tale comes to light, and a long rest is finally, technically, had...
The heroes try several times to manage a good long rest to restore some of their energy and abilities, but are repeatedly interrupted. The first time took less than fifteen minutes from when they had closed the door on Keebler's watch. A group of three Orcs, making threats, started banging on the door and demanding that the party send them a tribute, just one party member who would be slain and eaten, but in return the others would be guaranteed safe passage. None of the heroes took this particularly seriously, and when they opened the door it surprised even the Orcs, who had assumed the door was barricaded. One fought with a greataxe, the other two with crossbows, and the fight spilled into the hall, but ended fairly quickly as the three Orcs had no tactical advantage to force a retreat or pin the heroes down, and so they were unable to sustain much of a threat for long.
Again the group returned to the secret meeting chamber, and again they tried taking a longer rest, but this time Rongo took the watch. Despite his focus on the only door, the night was long and he became distracted by his own thoughts, only snapping out of it when he realized someone had just gone out of the room into the other area behind them, where the Dark Wardens had come from. Being attacked through both doors at once would have made things much more difficult than a fight against three Orcs in a hallway, so Rongo awakened the group and pursued the enemy into that other room, finding it empty at first, but after a brief search coming face to face with another 'Red Fang', elite Orc of Shargaas, a winged uber-Orc like the one that had nearly killed Blizzard less than an hour before.
This time, despite an initially difficult position one-on-one with the creature, Rongo was able to get in several hits and move with it in a way that others could help - Mae, for instance, charging in wild shaped into a Dire Wolf, and Blizzard having healing from companions and from his own healing abilities turned inward; Lorfel's divination magic again was able to interfere with the enemy's success at a critical moment, and though it took a significantly higher amount of damage than a normal Orc to take it out, this Red Fang also succumbed to the unified offensive, going down squealing and cursing to a psychic blade literally blowing its mind.
For a third time, the party barricaded itself in, going to the trouble of resetting an old net trap over the main door. Lorfel took watch, and a few hours in, heard the distinct sound of rocks tumbling to the ground - a satisfying sound to be sure, rocks clacking into other rocks, but a harbinger of trouble. The first assumption was that the remaining Orcs were seeking a way out through their own blocked passageway while the party rested, but Claude making a quick reconnaissance showed that was not the case - someone was trying to get in. Claude waited around a bit and then clambered up the pile to spy on a pair of Hobgoblins, lightly armed and armored for scouting, pushing their way into the passage. Realizing that these interlopers would have no reason to even know they were there, Claude hightailed it (highcrabbed it?) back to the barricaded room.
The group closed the door tightly, leaving the next series of events muffled behind stone walls, but the plotline was easy enough to figure out from what could be heard - Hobgoblin scouts came, expecting something other than what they found. They didn't go in to the open Orc cave entrance at B, they purposely came to check out C, perhaps as a back way into the Orc lair, or perhaps simply to raid it after not seeing the White Spears for a couple of months. Either way they seemed incredulous at the poor condition of the lair and the lack of anything of particular value in either storeroom they visited. They banged on the Orc's remaining door, making sly boasts and threats - "The age of Orcs is over," and things like that. Then a fight broke out, the door getting broken off its frame, and several more Orcs evidently falling to Hobgoblin attacks before the Hobgoblins skittered off, complaining as they went. Claude watched them walk almost straight across the canyon and into a cave on the opposite side.
Finally, the party thought, they could get some freaking rest! Except after a couple of hours, suddenly the room was perceptibly getting hotter from the doorway; and the door itself, when checked, was uncomfortably hot. They cautiously brought down the net trap again, this time opening the door on a magic circle and a flaming bat-humanoid-shape in the middle. Momentarily panicking that this was the bad demon they had kept hearing about, they watched the flames drop off like flakes of eggshell and the creature flap-screeched through a bit of mostly fruitless conversation with them, talking about the failure of Malbyish and the payment due, the return of power to the one who had given it. Then it flapped its way through the broken door into the room where the remaining Orcs were evidently still remaining. Then screams, and in seconds a massive flood of bats came pouring out of the doorway, along the ceiling, and out of the gap at the top of the rubble pile the Hobgoblins had left. Claude watched it leave the cave and turn sharply west, diving into the cave entrance marked as K on the map.
The open door beckoned, and the party went into the last room of complex C, where they had yet to go; they found a double-lobed sort of room that had clearly been something else once, repurposed into a throne room. On the floor lay several dead Orcs though it was not possible at a glance to tell if they had been killed by the bat creature or the Hobgoblins, as well as one shell-shocked but very alive Orc who made a token attempt to defend against, and then to surrender to, the party. The Orc gives his name as Garmas. When asked for details, he was forthcoming about what had just happened - the Harbinger of Shargaas had come in and taken back the power Malbyish had been given, causing the leader and his remaining Red Fang to transmute into a swarm of bats and fly back to the ancient altar. He had never been there, but he said that Malbyish had gone there in the winter to pray for a solution. He said he believed the temple had once been a Yuan-ti shrine of some kind, ages ago, but was now a dark shrine of Shargaas, of the Orcs. Certainly this piqued Xi Shi's interest. Haphazardly he recounted the whole tale of the corrupted Orc warlord, who had lost his infant daughter to starvation in the Long Winter and given himself over to corruption with Shargaas in return for power to save his tribe, though it cost him his wife and three year old son. They tricked the White Spears into thinking they had extra food to spare from a snowbound caravan, when instead they not only stole all the White Spear's supplies, they turned on their brethren, cutting every man, woman and child of the White Spears tribe down and compounding the sin of fratricide by eating them in order to survive. Voshagul, the Blade Warden's high priestess, told them that Gruumsh surely had turned his back on all of them now; the tribe respected her words, and Malbyish took most of his men over to what had been his cousin's tribe's home, but then Voshagul had eaten the orc meat, too. 
When asked about the missing wizard, Willow Candler, he didn't know the name but had some details that made it seem much more likely she had not been kidnapped, or perhaps had in a manner of speaking, kidnapped herself; she had been powerful enough not to be threatened by Malbyish, perhaps offering him something in return for his help, and she had been very keen on finding two things, he recalled - a red ruby amulet and a big shiny staff with a purple stone on it, neither of which Malbyish had or evidently knew about. She had asked other things too, crazy things about the weight of their gear and the strength of their ropes, if they had ever been lost in a labyrinth, if they had ink and paper. She hadn't been asking him directly, he had simply been there for it, and it had been several weeks before so his memory was unable to produce more details with any accuracy than that.
Garmas decided there's no point in staying here in the caves, since everyone is dead or turned into bats, so he's going to go in to town and try his luck at making a living there. The party could escort him into town, but there's that matter of five dead townspeople and the Orcs who did it going unpunished, and the fact that the missing Wizard is still missing - even if she did kidnap herself. A couple of competing ideas are floated - go directly to entrance K, the part of the complex where the altar is, since it seems connected to a lot of other caves

Rewards Granted

• +1 Greataxe
• Suit of Plate Mail Armor
• Blackstone Amulet

(Throne Room not looted yet...)

XP

540

Missions/Quests Completed

• "Hobgoblin Scout Encounter"
• "The Harbinger Varcolac"
• "The End of Malbyish"

Character(s) interacted with

• Garmas, Throneroom Guard
• Atulok, the Second Red Fang (Deceased)
• Lonlug, the First Red Fang (Deceased - Repossessed)
• Malbyish, Warlord of the Dark Wardens (Deceased - Repossessed)

Report Date

24 May 2022

Primary Location

The Caves of Chaos

Secondary Location

The Borderland Marches