Who Will Save the Orchids?

By Eldrad Wolfsbane
Self Published
BA
Levels 1-3

The party meets a weird young messenger boy who tells the party a team of weird foreign diplomats are heading into the recently conquered Orc lands and are offering a whopping 1000 Gold EACH to help rescue some Orphaned Children. Being that the evil Orcs were completely routed and slaughtered last week, this should be an easy adventure!

This sixteen page adventure features a seven room orc cave lair, full or orc kids. It is absurd in a way that only I could love. Seriously. A total fucking mess and absofuckinglutly wonderful!

Ok man, Eldrads got my number. This adventure is full of charming hand drawn maps and illustrations, as done by an eight year old. (Which is still better than I could do.) It’s an absolute disaster in terms of formatting. Just single column paragraphs of text with nothing else to break things up. A whole lot of “and then this happens …” goes on. Even the monster stats, inline, are nothing but a wall of numbers. And I don’t give a FLYING FUCK.

The conceit of the adventure is Orc Babies.

On our charming hand drawn map we have the humans lands, and then a line demarcating The Orc lands. Right nearby is an orphanage, just outside of The Blood Forest. Did I mention The Gore Fields just over the border in the orc lands? After all, the orcs were just comp[letely wiped out, so there must be gore fields, right? Whoever the fuck put tha orphanage there … man. 

The actual orc lair is a kind of mini-Tucker. It’s full of orc kids, only. The door slams shut and is smeared with carrion crawler poison to paralyze. The kids throw jars of rot grubs at you if you fall in a pit. They have greased up a slope and wear spiked shoes so they can walk … and set their spears against you. They release an Owl Bear (!) at you. They jump in to hidden cubbies and throw jars of paralysis gas. And if they capture you they take you to a room and torture you to death over four rounds.  So, yeah, a little absurdist. I love the “and then they torture the fuck out of you and kill you” bit. They are fucking evil. It’s going a little hard down the “too prepared” path for my tastes. Make them little shits in another way. Maybe keep the rot grubs though. 🙂 Shanking and biting out throats, maybe? Whatever. I get where dude is going. The fucking cave is shit. Formatted to shit, shitty descriptions and too prepared orc kids.

How Now Brown Cow? Why fore liketh this thing, Bryce? Cause of the absurdity of the premise. And while I loathe comedy in an adventure I LUV the absurd!

Normally, I want the world to be the straight man. The party is a group of fucking morons engaged in some power fantasy shit and the world around them reacts logically. This SHOULD be Paranoia: a straight world with the fucking morons adventureing in it. ZAP sucks ass. There is, however, room in my heart for the absurd in the world. The village where no one looks left. Or, perhaps better, The City of Ankh-Morpork. Something taken to its logical extreme.

What we got right here folks are some foreigh diplomats! They are paying 1000gp to EACH party member for a journey in to the orc lands to save the orphans! The orc orphans. 

Three fops in outlandish dress. Our primary diplo states “Who will rescue the orchish children left from the imperialist invasion of their lands? Is it not dishonor to leave orchish children to die of starvation? We lovingly call them Orchids! Special flowers yes? After all, are they not people too?” Diplo two states “These lands of men are so ignorant! We know Orcs are intelligent humanoids with fashion, feelings and dreams! Your foolish leaders should have started a discourse to see if they had been harmed by your nation. Yet you sent armies forth to kill them. Did you not see if your simple, stupid and primitive farmers didn’t first draw first blood against a normally peaceful race? Orcs can be a good and peaceful people if just given a chance!” 

Oh holy fuck, I am in LUUUUUUUVVVVVVVVVVV! The dress outrageously. They are insanely wealthy. They have servants, waxy skinned, that when killed “a 2ft giant green worm scuttles out of the skull and spine area screaming and disappears into the dirt.” That’s how you bring the fucking specificity! You KNOW how to run this shit. You KNOW how to push it!

And, the best part? They have a bag of 7000gp and have 1 HD each. BRING THE NOISE!

If they diplos manage to survive the adventurethey charge the characters for everything they did for them, the food, the parties, etc. “If the party refuses their pay, the surviving diplomats will bring them to court and sue them for 2000+ gold each person plus another 1000-6000 gp in emotional damage.” YESSSSSS!!!!!  DId I mention the text that says, after a very special encounter with a raiding orc band: “If the party doesn’t kill the Diplomatic team, they continue down the road.” Uh huh uh huh. Da Da Da!

Yes folks, LE foppish diplomats. The best choice is to just murder them and take their loot and avoid the orc lair entirely. Murder hobo’ing at its finest!

This is a shit adventure. It is formatted like shit. But god, how I love those diplomats and their retainers! This could almost be a starter adventure for players transitioning from 5e to OSR. “This is how you play …”

This is $1 at DriveThru.  Check out pages four through six of the preview! It doesn’t show the caves, so bad preview, orthe overland that is a FUCKING MESS, but the diplos, man, that’s FUCKING GOLD!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/401502/Who-Will-Save-the-Orchids?1892600