The Second D&D Tarak Campaign - Cooling Off, Cantrips and Council

Welcome to the ongoing saga of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign I ran a little while back. It started off using The Sunken Citadel module from the Tales From The Yawning Portal source book, but was then fitted into my Homebrew setting and moved on from there.

In the last post, the party overthrew the mayor of the small town they were based in. Even though they were outsiders, they had definite support from most of the townsfolk.

I hope you enjoy my D&D campaign write-ups, and the commentary I add to them. Questions, comments and feedback are welcome !

"Rocks fall, everyone dies." Image created by AI in NightCafe Studio

With the former mayor of Oakhurst, Vurnor Leng, safely overthrown and imprisoned in the Watch Tower, the party needed to work out how to defend Oakhurst from the orc army that was arriving in the vicinity. They'd driven a bunch of them away, but that was clearly just an advance party.

Vurnor Leng wasn't quiet about his situation, and could be heard shouting and raving trough the bars of his cell window. The party (well, mostly Erioch) solved the problem in a pragmatic although slightly shocking kind of way.

Deciding that the former mayor's symptoms could be down to withdrawal symptoms (he was a functional alcoholic), they instructed the guards to give him all the wine he wanted. That seemed to do the trick, although it was unclear whether it was by curing his withdrawals, or by just rendering him catatonically drunk.

For a little while they kind of all did their own thing. A couple of them co-ordinated villagers in emplacing stakes around the perimeter and constructing palisades.

Garnet, the aasimar sorcerer, turned out to be a particular problem from a DM perspective. They tried to play the "rules as written" card on me, and were very vociferous in trying to enforce it. The problem was the Mold Earth cantrip from Xanathar's Guide to Everything.

For those who don't play D&D, a cantrip is a very simple spell, so simple that it doesn't use up any of the limited number of spell slots and can be repeated as often as wished.

The Mold Earth cantrip allows a 5 foot cube of loose earth to be moved and shaped. Creating complex shapes (that almost act as minor illusions) is limited to a duration of an hour and only two at a time, but simply picking up a cube of earth and plonking it back down next to the hole is permanent.

Garnet announced that they were casting the cantrip once a turn every turn through an 8-hour day. With a turn lasting 6 seconds, that meant 28,800 5-foot cubes. Enough to put a 10 foot wide and deep trench all around the town with a ten foot bank of earth behind it.

That was silly, and a clear exploitation of a loophole.

So I invoked DM privilege. I pointed out that if any low-level sorcerer could really do this, why wasn't the land covered in massive defences ? I avoided getting into an argument along the lines of "it breaks the plot so I'm just banning it." That's just too arbitrary.

So I used the "rules as written" card right back. The spell description states it works on loose earth. So I just said that apart from a hundred yards next to the river, the rest of the town was built on dense packed earth or rock, not the lose earth the spell needs.

The discussion became fairly heated, but was finally resolved. Mostly by one of the other players reminding Garnet's player that while discussion is okay, once the DM makes a ruling it's time to stop arguing. Otherwise the ultimate DM weapon of "rocks fall, everyone dies" could happen, and the sky was starting to look dangerously overcast and heavy.....

After that, we then got things back on track because the notable people of Oakhurst invited the party to a council of war.

Both Felosial as head of the Watch, and Kerowyn Hucrele, the newly appointed interim mayor, made it clear that they would prefer not to see orcs attacking the town a second time. Especially as a second attack was likely to be a lot more determined and by a much larger force of orcs.

They therefore asked if the party could take the fight to the orcs, trying to distract or drive them off before they came into range of the town.

Yusdrayl the kobold shamaness might have been a new presence in town, but her clan had long experience fighting the goblins of the Durbuluk tribe in the Sunken Citadel. She'd been keeping scouts out to watch what the orcs were up to.

They'd spotted the orcs making themselves at home in the Sunken Citadel, making slaves of the remaining goblins who had originally called them for help. The orcs were also starting to dig themselves a powerful new stronghold in the mountains nearby.

Most interesting was that the orcs had also set up a watch post on a steep hilltop halfway between their new delvings and Oakhurst. It was a no-brainer; the party decided to take out the watch post, and then move on to attack the new stronghold before it could be completed.

Next time: the orc watch post.....