D&D 5E Against the Black City (Homebrew Campaign) Post-Mortem

[Retreater]

Thanks, I'm on the way to buy it, also any idea if it's suitable for extension to lvls 1-20 (we like high levels and using the full range of the game possibilities) ?

Sure. The original plan when I wrote the first draft of it for my home group was to go directly into Gary Gygax's Necropolis, which was a pretty epic Egyptian-themed adventure (at the time it had been converted to 3rd edition). However, just recently, Frog God Games/Necromancer has released a 5e update of Necropolis, so it's ready to go into right after Coils of Set.
However, the original adventure as published does not link directly to Necropolis. There are a few "continuing the adventure" sidebars provided at the end, should you not want to do Necropolis.
Coils of Set is now located in Frog God Games' Lost Lands campaign setting, if you'd like to expand it with the current world building.

 

[Voadam]

In the earlier playtests, the younger son (Harrumah) relied on the cheap labor of orcs to bolster the dying numbers of the dwarves, but this always ended up a problem where every group (rightly) wanted to free the orcs and kill off the “good” dwarves. It probably took me 10 years to realize that you can’t make slave labor something the good guys practice.

Can you clarify this part? Cheap labor seems qualitatively different than slave labor.

I'd expect most people would think minimum wage or low paying jobs can be pretty terrible, but not something they'd think imposed a moral duty/license to go kill the bosses and non-poor elements of the society over to free the working poor, while I can see doing that for a slave society in D&D.

Ptolus in 3.5 for instance has legal but not common slavery and I remember as a player specifically rescuing a bunch of slaves and killing some slavers when playing through The Banewarrens. The slavers were bad guys and slave owners were not portrayed as good guys though so this seemed consistent with expected good guy adventuring behavior.

When incorporating Ptolus, which I like a lot of, into my homebrew mashup campaign I have specifically chosen not to focus on legal slavery. If it were to come up I might use it to show that the evil noble Vladaam family are both evil villains and politically connected enough to block legal condemnation of their perfidity. I would not have intended good guys using slaves, particularly with the setting aspect of it not being common.

 

[Tonguez]

PGtF page 23:

"Orcs
Freeport also has a large orc population. Used as cheap labor during the construction of Milton’s Folly (the city’s lighthouse), the orcs never left once the work was finished. Brutish, crude, and violent, orcs largely live in Bloodsalt these days. Freeporters aren’t exceptionally warm to these folk but tolerate them all the same. The orcs defended Freeport during the recent barbarian invasion, earning them some goodwill from the rest of the populace."

thats not slavery, its a low wage ghetto but thats not enough motivation to label their employers evil unless your PCs are marxist

 

[Retreater]

Can you clarify this part? Cheap labor seems qualitatively different than slave labor.

Yeah. The orcs were paid, owned their own homes (in their district), and were free to leave the city. So they were paid low wages, looked down upon by the highly stratified dwarven society (who also looked down on humans and gnomes - anyone not a dwarf). But they were given physical jobs (miners, stevedores, etc), paid poorly, etc. For every group I ran through this campaign in the past ten years, that was enough to overthrow the dwarven establishment, blow up their city, etc., while ignoring the coming threat of actual corrupted dwarves with an army of demons.