Text by Paul O'Connor, Dungeon Master
The party made their most critical save yet, resuming the campaign after multiple cancellations led to a gap of more than a month since our last game!
But it wasn't long before the lads were back in the swing of things, arguing plans while Khostov muttered darkly about eight-minute timers (when packet loss didn't make it sound like he was at the bottom of a fish tank). At least they managed a short rest. (They'd need it).
A horn shatters their reverie! No, not THAT horn ... not the one Arthur so wants to sound. No, this was a hunting horn alerting the (now humiliated, naked, and dead) guard to open the main gates already!
And who has a hunting horn but a hunting party? A savage scene greeted our heroes as they peered from the parapet. A grouchy orc chieftain, astride a vast wooly mammoth, dragging a travois laden with carcasses and animal skins, and six orc soldiers, balancing poles on their shoulders, from which depended dead yetis and (it seemed) a pair of human slaves thought to have safely escaped.
The boys set an ambush while Blah parlayed with the chief, and very nearly bluffed the orcs into going after the rest of the escaped slaves, but orcs being orcs negotiations quickly broke down, and before you know it the chieftain was trying to bust down the doors of the castle with his mammoth.
And this proved his undoing! The orcs forced the gate, but packed themselves into the gatehouse, where Sarkagan's Thunderwave wrecked havoc, killing half the orcs outright, rendering the rest insensible, and panicking the mammoth to throw its rider and book it back off across the snow.
All of which had approximately no effect on Hakkon, the orc chief, who had a good-old exchange of blows with Blah before being born down by superior weight of numbers, his own pigheaded stupidity, and a timely intervention from Dee Dah.
Thinking quickly, Blah gathered up Hakkon's gear, with an eye toward impersonating the chief, and the crew elected to bunker up on the top floor of the ogre barracks for a long rest ... which they managed, given the snake was happily snoring away with several ogre-shaped bulges in its body, and the giant spider was no match for a determined party. They were joined by Radshard, the lone escape slave who survived being brought back to the castle, given new life by one of Sompher's spells.
With a long rest in the bank, the party awakes to the sound of the alarm being raised across the castle -- the bodies or the freed slaves (or both, or something else) has been noticed at last!
