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Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="StalkingBlue" data-source="post: 1634455" data-attributes="member: 645">Thanks for more comments, guys! Cool stuff.  Dark Jezter - Cheers! Cool thread, yup, thanks to everyone contributing! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  More clarification and thoughts from the poor orcs.   For those of you who insist on taking the keep <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> :  We're downriver from it, not upriver.  I don't want to go into too much detail here, but due to the keep's location and general terrain around it, getting upriver would be quite a feat.  Easier to take the keep than work around it, possibly.  Dam-building:  The river has been dammed at the forest border for about 50 years, turning an area of many square miles just upriver of the forest edge into a lake-swamp terrain with dead and rotting trees.  That's a good place to be if you're an orc.  Many nice slimy underwater thingies to help you out if any elves venture out here to cause trouble.  Unfortunately, we're also fighting our way miles and miles further in, with no strategically good place to bui8ld further dams.  Not to mention the keep is far too high up to be flooded by any amount of damming.  (But our siege fortifications aren't.) Special forces:  Missions deep into the forest seem to suffer from that accursed elven forest-defence magic, with troops getting turned around on themselves and never finding their way back to base and all that.  So, sneaking to their homes and killing young (yum, young elf!) is an expensive enterprise.  Too expensive in lives since we've got rid of the more obvious settlements around us and some others have been abandoned and trapped.  Spreading monster terror:  We've got Fell (sorta-intelligent undead), yup, plenty.  Who doesn't, these days, in a battle zone? Trouble with them is, you never know whose side they are on.  Letting bands of expandable monsters loose works ok to spread terror and discourage guerrilla bands from camping just a mile from our camps - we've got gray renders, we might get some findish dire apes if we beg and wheedle (rare they are these days, can't seem to get a resupply of them), can get some ettins, trolls etc.  The elves have monsters too.  Horrible watery things lurking in the cataracts just below the keep, for example.  We had been promised someone would be dealing with them before we came in, but nope.  Deception:  Can work if we make it look good, but those long-eared nasties are quick to adapt.  Shiny new ideas always welcome!  Haven't noticed elves trying to free human slaves btw.  Wrong race I guess.  You hardly see any humans around where we are, although we occasionally get assaulted by ragged human renegade bands closer to the forest edge.  Some of those imitate us, can you believe it!  Use our equipment and shave their manes. Contrary to what some people would want to make you believe, communication between human renegades and elves seems limited btw, so there we have an advantage.  Poisoning water supply:  We're downriver from what we're fighting and our most powerful fortress in the region controls the big dam at the forest edge, so poisoning the river (which is one of the biggest on the continent btw, so it would take one cold hell of a lot of poison) would mean poisoning not only the forest, but our own troops.  There's also some other problem with contaminating the river further downstream because there's humans living on those plains who are to be kept alive because they are said to be producing food for us.  If you ask me, butcher them and give us good meat instead of that soggy, maggoty bread we get from them! Not that anyone listens to what I say.</blockquote>

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