Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 131 - Lore Series - Orcgate Wars

Episode Date: July 3, 2022

Gaming inspiration can come from published material from existing game worlds.  In this episode we talk briefly about the Orcgate Wars, its history, the aftermath, and more importantly, how you can use this dramatic event as inspiration for history and adventures in your campaign world.   Hope you tune in and listen!   #OrcgateWars #DungeonsAndDragons #DnD #DM

This week on the Taking20 Podcast. The Mulharandi recruited mercenaries and anyone who could fight against the Orc hordes and the war settled into a general stalemate where neither side really gained an advantage over the other. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to episode 131 of the Taking20 podcast, continuing the lore series this week about the Orcgate Wars. This week's sponsor, Optometrists. Every Optometrist I've ever met is so self-obsessed.

It's always I, I, I. If you haven't already, please like, rate, subscribe, and review this podcast wherever you found it. Every review promotes visibility, and it's a great way you can help the podcast grow, so I appreciate everyone who has done so already. Once again, thank you so much to the podcast's first real sponsor, 3D Crafts and Curios. Owner Brenton Galbraith has been 3D printing since 2019 and started a gaming-centric Etsy store with 3D printed dice towers, vaults, jails, GM screens, RPG drink coasters, and more available in over 30 different colors. Head over to 3Dcraftsandcurios.etsy.com or search 3D Crafts and Curios, one word, on your favorite internet search engine.

As a special just for Taking 20 podcast listeners, use the code TAKING20, that's TAKING20, during the month of July to get 10% off any item in the store. And don't forget that 3D Crafts and Curios are sponsoring a giveaway. They're giving away a copy of the beautiful Artificers Workshop Dice Tower in silk bronze color. It is absolutely gorgeous. It's designed by Kimbolt Creations and produced by 3D Crafts and Curios. To enter, all you have to do is send me an email to contest at taking20podcast.com with an answer to this question.

What is a favorite accessory that you have or would like to have 3D printed for your table? It could be a prop, a dice tower, a tracker of some sort, a dice holder, any number of things. But you have to send me in that idea to contest at taking20podcast.com to enter. Send it in and the deadline is July 17th, which is just two more weeks away from the moment this episode drops. The winner will be announced on July 24th episode, so get those ideas in to me soon. So this is another episode of the lore series. Occasionally, I do have series of episodes with a theme. I've done episodes detailing specific creatures in the monster series. I did some of the common RPG classes in a class series and so forth. So why do I have a lore series? First and foremost, because there's

a ton of rich history published in existing game systems that a lot of newer players and GMs may not know about. Which leads secondly to this concept being adaptable to your game, your game system, and your adventures. There are great ideas out there. Borrow, borrow, borrow. Steal, steal, steal. Previous entries in the lore series included the Blood War, Strahd, the Cataclysm of Kryn, and Earthfall and Galarian. In the future, I plan on talking about the Gap in Starfinder, the Death of the Guard Erodin in Pathfinder, and the imprisonment of Rovagug in The Destroyer. Also, I'm also thinking about doing one about the Time of Troubles in 5th edition. If there's other interesting bits of published lore that you'd like an episode on,

please send me a message to feedback at taking20podcast.com and let me know what you'd like to hear more about. But this episode is all about the Orcgate Wars. And what the hell are those, Jeremy? I'm getting to it and quit being so damn rude to me. The Orcgate Wars were a seven-year war between orcs and, well, everyone else on Faerun, where not only the mortals fought each other, but eventually the conflict escalated to the point where the gods on either side fought each other as well. It led to the death of large swaths of entire races and pantheons of gods. But I'm getting ahead of myself. This cataclysmic conflict started, as so many things do, with one person who was a touch too curious for their own good.

About 2,500 years ago in Faerun timeline, a wizard named Fade, who was an apprentice of the Emaskari wizards, was playing around with portals and accidentally opened a portal to a devastated land dominated by fanatically religious orcs who were just itching to find someone new to fight. Now, what does a normal person do when they accidentally open the door to something they're not supposed to? Oh, for example, if you open the door to a refrigerator in an abandoned house that hasn't been powered for 10 years and the inside smell like death. Or if you accidentally open your parents' bedroom door to find your mom dressed up like Ronald McDonald in a rubber sex suit and your dad spanking her with a spatula. You shut the door and you try to forget what you saw and you maybe go have therapy later. Faye did that, except he forgot to close the door.

Dumbass. Anyway, at the time, the nations of Mulharond and Unthur had been conquered by the Emiscari, and they were relatively weak since the Emiscari kept the nations really under their thumb. Thade, who remember was an Emiscari wizard, would later attempt to get Mulharond and Unthur to start a rebellion against the Emiscari.

He got caught and executed for his efforts, but he hadn't told anybody about the portal that he'd opened. Okay, so that's dumbass thing number two. We can only assume that Thade had high intelligence but low wisdom. So this portal sat forgotten, unprotected, and unguarded on Faerun, and ignored by the Grey Orcs on the other side for a good long while, until DR-1076, when they discovered that there was an entire world on the other side of this portal that

appeared weak and ready to be conquered, because Mulharrand and Unthar had been under Iskari's thumb, and so they really didn't have strong military. So Orcs started pouring through the portal like water through a funnel, and they conquered land almost at will. The Mulharandi recruited mercenaries and anyone who could fight against the orc hordes, and the war settled into a general stalemate, where neither side really gained an advantage over the other. Now, great orc clerics, again from the other side of the portal, had developed these powerful spells that gave them instant access to their gods, where they could call down extremely powerful avatars of their deities to the battlefields and do their bidding. So they started using this power on Faerun, and despite this,

the mercenaries and fighters of Faerun held their ground. The fight was bloody and vicious and protracted and pretty much a stalemate. In the year negative 1069, seven years later, the orcs brought not just the avatars of their gods to the battlefield, but convinced their gods themselves to take up their weapons and join the war. At this point, the gray orcs seemed destined to conquer Faerun. But the gods of Mulharrandi and the Untharians dropped their water balloon fight or garden orgy or whatever the fuck they'd been doing for a decade and started paying attention to Faerun again. They finally figured out, took them long enough, that if the orcs conquered their world, no one would worship them anymore, so they joined the fight. Countless mortals from every race were fought on every side and God clashed with God on both Faerun and other planes.

The Mulharandi god Ra, which is the rough equivalent of Ra in the Egyptian pantheon, was the leader of the gods and received lethal wounds by the orc god Grumsh. Before he died, though, he transferred his power over to the god Horus, who forged hundreds of powerful axes, together known as Ray's Redemption. These axes were distributed to the mercenaries and to the fighters on this side of the portal, and they were designed to be really lethal to orcs when they were wounded by them. So these new weapons were used, and the orcs were pushed back through the portal, and the portal finally closed with powerful magic. Kind of. God, I don't have

time to get into the number of adventures that this portal crops up again and again, but for simplicity's sake, let's just say for right now the portal is closed, and let's move on. So what was the aftermath? A good chunk of the orc deities lay dead on various planes of existence, nearly the entire roster of Mulharandi and Untharian gods died in the battle. Countless orcs, humans, dwarves, and other ancestries lay dead from years of fighting just to get back to where the portal was closed and return things to the way they were. Again, thank you, Wizard Thade. All of this happened on Faerun, where the nation of Fae is together, and I am making the bold assumption that it is not named for the dumbass wizard that opened the portal. Some orcs can trace their lineage back to these grey orcs that invaded from another plane of existence,

but these orcs are tolerated in the nation of Fae today. By the way, don't even think that that's because Fae has become this beacon of forgiveness and individuals being judged by the content of their character. No. Thay is a slavery-loving, humanocentric mageocracy where the strong rule by force of the weak and the entire economy is contingent on having tons of non-human slaves. These strong orcs, especially who can trace their lineage back to these gray orcs, make great enforcers for the arcane rulers. So in summary of the Orcgate Wars, a magic user with, I'm guessing, not a lot of good common sense or a lot of people around him saying, you probably shouldn't do this, opened up a portal to a plane where a brutal divine-focused race of orcs ruled, didn't tell

anybody about it, tried to start a rebellion, got killed for his efforts, and the portal just sat unused for years until it was used by the orcs to pour into the world. So because of one wizard's actions, millions died, including deities, and he'd probably just say, whoops, my bad. So what happened on Faerun after the portal cloaked? Well, the empires of Mulharrand and Unthur would limp along for hundreds of years until they were finally finished off by the spell plague in 1385. But that is a tale for another time. As you know, I'm a huge proponent of borrow, borrow, borrow, steal, steal, steal

ideas that you can, that if you can make them work in your campaign and give your campaign world a rich history or rich opportunities for adventure. So how do you use the idea of the Orkgate Wars in your campaign world? Imagine, if you will, a portal leading to another plane that's just left open and unguarded for more than five years. It doesn't matter where it leads. Anywhere vastly different from your world would work. Maybe it leads to the abyss. For more ideas about a raw, open plane to the abyss, opened for years, read up about the world wound on Galarian. That could be a lore series episode all its own, and it probably will be by the time I'm done recording. Or maybe it opens up to the

plane of shadow with the creatures that live there, or the plane of air, or that demiplane where all of our socks go when they get lost in the washer or dryer. What sort of effects would an abandoned, opened portal like that have on your world? Five years. Imagine how reinforced and stocked and staffed and incorporated into the nations on the other side that area of your world could become in five years. So let's play hypothetical. Suppose your universe has a negative energy plane where undead thrive. A wizard accidentally, or on purpose at the behest of a powerful necromantic entity, opens a portal to a remote corner of your world in the isolated prison of, I don't know, let's call it Cyclamere, where the worst of the worst criminals are sent to live out their days and to just forgotten. Think remote areas of

earth like Siberia, but maybe underground or a desert or hell, whatever Siberia is in your world. The portals discovered and low-level undead begin pouring through the rift in space and quickly overwhelm the guards at the prison, but powerful undead creatures like death knights or liches or vampires or other undead generals discover the unprotected entrance and decide to be a little creative and sneaky about it. They put their troops to work reinforcing the prison, turning the prisoners and the guards and the guard animals and the vegetation and the fruit bats and the breakfast cereals and anything close to the prison into undead minions, but they don't let it spread too far. Magic items and artifacts are used and stored here to preserve the portal,

and it serves as a beachhead for future attacks on your world by the Lich King that controls that plane on the other side. Meanwhile, your existing kingdoms? Completely oblivious to what's going on. They keep sending their monstrous prisoners to this gulag and their guards usually return. Sometimes a bit different or odd, but the leaders of dwarves and men and centaurs aren't that worried about it. I mean, seeing a hardcore prison like that changes people, right? Prisoners that get dropped off become underlings of the Lich King, either by swearing fealty to him or being converted against their will into undead servants. So the Lich King uses this beachhead and plans, plots, and prepares,

waiting for the exact right time to overwhelm a nearby kingdom, maybe of dwarves. Your PCs are guards delivering the Minotaur bandit leader Ruggedhoof to the Cyclamere prison, and after doing so on their way back home, they get a clue that something is up at the prison and not as all as it seems. After a little investigation, they discover the undead, the magic items, the open portal to the realm of death, and the Lich King preparing to enslave the dwarves in the Ashen Mountains. They must fight to seal the portal and save thousands of innocents Damn, that sounds fun. And I'm going to throw that on the pile of campaigns I don't have time to write. But it doesn't have to be a realm of undead.

It could be the Fae who are using an abandoned portal to have an incursion into the world. Creatures from one of the elemental planes, or if you're interested on some good-on-good kind of violence, it's a leader on one of the good-aligned planes who is using the portal to try to expand their kingdom. Maybe they're trying to bring about an apocalypse, but on their inquisitional terms, forcing everyone to change their alignment to worship his good entity or die for refusing to do so. You know, I seem to have strayed a little bit from the original Orcgate war premise, but you can see how it captured my imagination, and how the idea can be interpreted a number

of ways into your game world. Unlocked and unprotected doorways can be a huge plot point for an adventure in any game system in almost any type of campaign. You want a straight-up fight campaign? No problem there. The troops are coming through the portal, and you've got to rally the troops to push them back. Want something more stealth-based? Imagine the party has to disguise themselves as troops from the other side and infiltrate the portal, collect intelligence about the leadership hierarchy and their plans, and then return it to leaders on this side of the campaign world to help solve the threat and prevent the other side's plans from coming about.

Do you want a political campaign? The party has to work out what the new normal is with this new nation springing up from the great beyond through this portal. The possibilities really are endless given the simple starting situation of an abandoned portal. So think about how your campaign and your world could be changed by having an unguarded, unprotected portal to a vastly different land on the other side. Build an adventure around that. You know, I'd bet you and your players would have fun doing it. Next week, the episode will release on July 3rd, which is very close to both Canada Day for Canada and Independence Day here in the United States. So I'm going to talk about using democracies in your RPG world, both as shiny

examples of equality and ways that you can portray them as dark examples of power gone wrong. Fair warning. I'm going to say this very clearly this week and next week. This is not a politics podcast, so any similarities to any democratic nations on earth will purely be coincidental. Although we'll be using examples from history, but maybe not the ones that you'd expect. Once again, before I go, please send in your ideas for trackers or accessories or something that you'd love to see 3D printed for your game. You can win a beautiful dice tower. Please send that in to contest at taking20podcast.com. Thank you again, Brenton, for your sponsorship and for providing a 10% discount to my listeners on your Etsy store with the code TAKING20.

It's TAKING20. Go check out his available items on his Etsy store and buy something to support his wonderful company that has sponsored this podcast. But I also want to thank our other sponsor, Optometrists. If your eyes are hurting, you really should go to their office. This has been episode 131, continuing the lore series all about the Orc Gate Wars. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game. The Taking 20 Podcast is a Publishing Cube Media Production.

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