viktor_haag | Assaulted by Orcs! (Reply)

Session 4: Assaulted by Orcs!

Our heroes have delivered their gift to the Wizard of Thurmaster and did him a favour on the way back to Milbourne: take this letter to my friend the Ranger!

While at the Ranger's farm house, a visitor arrives: a strange lady druid-of-the-woods with a pair of companion wolves.

She reports that a young boy has run off into the woods south of the river, and she fears for his safety: first because he's a young boy in the midst of a dark and dangerous woods, and second because she saw him turn into a bear as he ran off! She wants the Ranger and his new friends to help her find this boy and return him safely to his family.

Our heroes search southwards into the woods, travel for a whole day and are making progress; as it gets dark, they make camp. In the early hours of the pre-dawn light they are set upon by a scouting party of Orcs and their ferocious pet creature! Desperately they try to defend themselves, and in the end, manage to dispatch the creature and elicit surrender from the Orc sergeant.

"I will give you gold for the bodies of my fallen comrades!" he cries.

Legend: I have now fully switched to the coloured tile system for NPCs. While the large creature was supposed to be a Dire Boar, I had not yet made a tile for a Dire Boar, so a large red subterranean lizard did double duty. Bah. Flipped over tiles are the bodies of the Orc party (mostly minions) that had already fallen (including, as it turns out, the handler of the large creature, the only one capable of really controlling it!)