Guild Stories: Wayward Ogres

Hello, my still faithful (I hope) blog readers. Since we’ve started the guild, I’ve been writing up summaries of our stories there on the guild Discord, but I never published them out to the public. I figured people would be interested in hearing what happened to Krasha since, so I’m sharing the Discord summaries here. This first one was written as the events were unfolding, so it may read a little weird.

OOC

Verroak Krasha noticed a group of ogres that were always his clients had disappeared. He sent his new minions to investigate. They proceeded to stumble upon a deserted camp, with some trail left behind by a single ogre. Upon further investigation, a group of evil eyes appeared from nowhere and assaulted the group. Luckily, our adventurers dispatched them – only to see an ogre mage with strange markings walk out of a fire like it was a tent. When a harpy airdropped an arakkoa with a sword into the ogre’s back, Bul’lok the All-Seer – said ogre – walked right back into the fire and disappeared.

The harpy and arakkoa introduced themselves as Eidria Snowblind and Akrikot Yama, members of the Kabal and relatives of Verroak Krasha. They invited the group to their home to further discuss Bul’lok.

The pair explained they’ve been fighting Bul’lok and his Grimy Goons minions for a while, and they’ve come into possession of a staff he used. The staff was saturated with death magic, rotting every organic matter it touched. It acted like a siphon of souls, driving them somewhere else. It was destroyed when Calaara attempted to feed it a demon soul.

Akrikot was also in possession of a book that described one poor soul’s voyage to the afterlife, describing – among many realms of the Shadowlands – a “Maw”, led by a “dark warden”, meant to eternally punish the most vile of souls. Bul’lok appeared to be in league with a powerful entity from the Shadowlands, and the gathered adventurers speculated it might have been this “dark warden”.

They set out to find Bul’lok’s hideout in the Grimy Goons district of Gadgetzan, waiting for the pair to find them a time to air drop them.

Time passed and the two couldn’t manage a drop. So our adventurers set out on their own, sneaking into Bul’lok’s hideout. After distracting the two orcs left to guard it, they infiltrated the building and found… mostly rubbish. But something more interesting awaited them upstairs.

Next to Bul’lok’s bed was a warded bookcase. Upon discovering the ward, the minions of Krasha set up traps for whatever comes summoned. When March’all triggered the ward, two creatures named Bee Bopper and Rok the Steady appeared and assaulted the group, after falling right into the trap they set up. The quilboar and the ogre were killed, and the adventurers came into possession of more arcane books from Bul’lok, this time written in Old High Gorian.

Since the books were too hard to translate for even the most skilled mage with a linguistic spell, Hellbourne took the books back to the two birds, hoping for a translation.

Akrikot and Eirdria translated the books partially, but they proved to not be very useful. However, they did find notes made by Bul’lok, scrawled over the margins and one horrifically misspelled letter. Apparently Bul’lok and the ogre clan that used to trade with Verroak moved to an old fortress in Desolace, an orc fort built on top of a centaur burial ground. Its warlock and death-related past gives it a unique focus for Bul’lok’s magic. While we have found the missing ogres, we still need to deal with the ogre mage who took them… hostage? Or did they willingly follow his power?

The group would later arrive at the fortress in the badlands of Desolace. What they found was a fairly peaceful ogre village, and a group of ogres protesting Bul’lok’s treatment of them. The minions of Krasha attacked the ogre and successfully eliminated him before he could unleash the full brunt of his dark master’s power. In the process, a strange, monstrous creature emerged from the Shadowlands and although it was dispatched after taking a few scrapes, it threatened to return “in a more powerful body”.

Nevertheless, the threat has been dealt with and Bul’lok’s dead body was delivered to the Tower and the ogres who followed him promised to return to their old base in Feralas under the leadership of a new king, Leer.