Adventurer's Guild--Party 3
Backstory
Several months ago, the Lord Warden of Fallcrest contacted the Diogenes Society for help with the area’s local orc population. Starting in early summer, the Orc King Gruuck sallied forth with his army from the Ogrefest Hills and began raiding trading caravans. It seemed to the Lord Warden’s scouts that the orcs were searching the forests for something, but no one knew what that something was. In the meantime, the orcs’ very presence was playing Hell with trade and with whatever forest settlements happened to be located in their way. And though the Lord Warden had hired the Society initially just to carry messages between Fallcrest and its outlying towns, with one thing leading to another your group quickly got pulled into a rapidly escalating three-way war. It started with a simple roadside ambush—by lizardfolk of all people!—but soon became an utter disaster.
It turned out that Gruuck had not intended to go to war with the Men of Fallcrest. In fact, he viewed the Men as quasi-allies in a wider conflict that raged under the very heart of his kingdom—a conflict with the drow! And though Gruuck had managed a victory against the drow by using a combination of orc shock troops and dinosaur cavalry, the battle had left his forces, especially his heavy cavalry, decimated. This led Gruuck to scouring the forests around Fallcrest for the behemoth eggs he needed to replenish his dinosaur herd. This, in turn, led him into conflict with the forest’s lizardfolk, who were hunting behemoth eggs for their own nefarious purposes.
For better or worse, the Diogenes Society dropped into this stewing cauldron of intrigue, deception, and war like a comet falling from the Far Realms. First you slew the lizardfolk, then you slew a host of drow agents in Fallcrest, and finally, you set off to confront the Orc King in his very lair. As the heat of summer gave way to autumn’s breezes, you raised your banner in triumph over the very capital of a once proud orcish kingdom.
All told, it had been a profitable but also a costly campaign. You walked away with almost ten-thousand golds worth of arms, armor, and treasure. You also buried a close friend and ally. Immeral, cleric of the Raven Queen, gave his life to see Gruuck’s reign in the Ogrefest end. That in itself was a major victory for the Men of the White River Valley. However, you never caught up to the drow who started the war, and in fact, you never learned why they had agents working in Fallcrest in the first place. Instead, the drow vanished without a trace, leaving in their wake many more questions than answers.
Starting Point
Seeing as how you’ve just come off a major victory, you are now 3rd level PCs. You start with 2,000 gp worth of money and treasure per man, which seems like a lot but is, in fact, exactly 1/5th of the value of all of the money and treasure you would have earned if you’d actually played the appropriate levels, decremented by 84 gp per man, which represents both the value of a few nights of fine dining and lodging as well as the cost of the mundane equipment you would have by now discarded.
You may buy at most TWO magic items with your loot. The rest must go to consumables, rituals, mounts, or anything else you happen to want to purchase. Also, I would encourage each of you to save at least some money because I’ve never actually seen a party of PCs spend every last cent on consumables in an actual ongoing game. I’m not going to be hard-headed about it, but I will ask that you think about what you would do were you planning to continue on indefinitely with your current character.
