In my GURPS "An Orc's Lot" Campaign, I wanted to include as many aspects of what an orc typically does in most fantasy literature, excluding the typical "mook existence." I should say that Orcs by Stan Nicholls was in part a great inspiration for me in preparing this campaign. One of the tropes of orcish existence is finding employment by ugly non-orcs with a lot of wealth and little conscience -- and generally a psyche mostly fueled by vengeance to a perceived unforgivable slight. I had the idea that the PCs should be enlisted to work for some unscrupulous monster (a human, but likely less ethical than the orc PCs) and likely have to fight against comical bands of demi-human adventurers who enact their own tropes. I never really got to the part where adventuring companies started raiding their boss's stronghold of evil and dread, though.
So, with that idea in mind, I started looking through some D&D modules that included orcs so I could invert it. A helpful tool was the website that was Matt Colville's brainchild and was built up and coded by his fans -- a wonderfully collaborative project with a great purpose in mind -- was the Adventure Lookup website. In the end, I chose a D&D 3.5 module from Alderac Entertainment Group -- "Against the Barrow King" from Adventure I. I had read through this adventure before and decided that the gruesome details in the module perfectly served my purpose. I fleshed out the map of the dungeon, converted the NPCs into GURPS and developed their personalities, and clutched Mass Combat close at hand for preparation for when the orcs and their monstrous co-workers would attack and subjugate the village.
I started the adventure by having the PCs be hired off by their Orc Chief to some strange evil human cultist. The human cultist had them, and a few other orcs who'd been hired, brought to through the desert and plains that is the Orclands, and then they passed into West Chetsia, a human empire modeled after the West Germans (Saxons, Franks, etc.). During the travel, I have the PCs chat and get to know each other (it was still a little early in the campaign and there were a couple new characters) and get to know the Orc NPCs who had also been hired by this evil employer. I had counted the orcs present in the module, subtracted the number of PCs, and set half of the orcs as other hirelings of the evil employer and the other as devout members of his evil cult.
Wonder of wonders, upon meeting the rest of the evil cult in the Barrow in which they'd setup their temple to their god of slaughter, they discovered the village of Glenn Hollow. This is the village that the PCs would have found in distress had they been a regular adventuring company. Instead, it was the village that the PCs were paid to distress. The group did a mass combat with the poor villagers and bested them pitifully. After the group dominated the village and attempted to keep any villagers from escaping to get help, the PCs continued their duties of helping their evil employer of guarding the Temple as well as the village. The evil employer set about gathering villagers to either sacrifice to his evil god of slaughter, Voodrith, or to remake into his nasty Chirurgeon monsters (basically flesh golems that served as "new" monsters for the adventure).
Long story short, the PCs did exactly what I was hoping they would do: betray their evil employer and steal his treasures, while one of the stranger PCs (who wasn't raised among orcs, himself) ran off to the humans to warn them about the cult. The PCs and the other orcs who'd been hired by the cult ran off from the evil temple of Voodrith while the PC who'd surrendered himself to the humans brought a sizable (at least compared to the cult which had now diminished due to the orcs' desertions) force to both liberate the village of Glenn Hollow as well as the root out the cult from their barrow-temple. The evil employer and his evil friends all died, and the PC who'd surrendered himself to the humans wound up escaping them with both a power-stone as well as the spellbook of the necromancer.
I would recommend that another GM who's running a campaign that allows grey morality try this out. Including adventuring hooks for both the typical and the inverted forms of a module is a great way to add some dynamism to those adventures and the campaign world. If the quivering villager asks the Party "mysterious bandits are isolating our village and kidnapping us! Please help us! We have 40 gold pieces among all of us, as well as this cow" while the well-spoken cleric promises a fairly well-paying gig guarding him against opportunists and marauders (adventuring parties), who might the Party likely side with? It's the perfect way to have the PCs begin wondering if they're working for the bad guys and to deploy your rival NPC adventuring party. Besides, all those mooks that the adventuring parties would be killing in most any other campaign that uses the module were hired and promised some good old-fashioned gold and glory, too.
I started the adventure by having the PCs be hired off by their Orc Chief to some strange evil human cultist. The human cultist had them, and a few other orcs who'd been hired, brought to through the desert and plains that is the Orclands, and then they passed into West Chetsia, a human empire modeled after the West Germans (Saxons, Franks, etc.). During the travel, I have the PCs chat and get to know each other (it was still a little early in the campaign and there were a couple new characters) and get to know the Orc NPCs who had also been hired by this evil employer. I had counted the orcs present in the module, subtracted the number of PCs, and set half of the orcs as other hirelings of the evil employer and the other as devout members of his evil cult.
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| A Chirurgeon from the module. |
Long story short, the PCs did exactly what I was hoping they would do: betray their evil employer and steal his treasures, while one of the stranger PCs (who wasn't raised among orcs, himself) ran off to the humans to warn them about the cult. The PCs and the other orcs who'd been hired by the cult ran off from the evil temple of Voodrith while the PC who'd surrendered himself to the humans brought a sizable (at least compared to the cult which had now diminished due to the orcs' desertions) force to both liberate the village of Glenn Hollow as well as the root out the cult from their barrow-temple. The evil employer and his evil friends all died, and the PC who'd surrendered himself to the humans wound up escaping them with both a power-stone as well as the spellbook of the necromancer.
I would recommend that another GM who's running a campaign that allows grey morality try this out. Including adventuring hooks for both the typical and the inverted forms of a module is a great way to add some dynamism to those adventures and the campaign world. If the quivering villager asks the Party "mysterious bandits are isolating our village and kidnapping us! Please help us! We have 40 gold pieces among all of us, as well as this cow" while the well-spoken cleric promises a fairly well-paying gig guarding him against opportunists and marauders (adventuring parties), who might the Party likely side with? It's the perfect way to have the PCs begin wondering if they're working for the bad guys and to deploy your rival NPC adventuring party. Besides, all those mooks that the adventuring parties would be killing in most any other campaign that uses the module were hired and promised some good old-fashioned gold and glory, too.
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| & here's a token |
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