Help me write an interesting encounter or three for my next session.
The level 6 PCs are stranded on Nishrak and are on the run from a couple of orc patrols. The players have never adventured on Acheron, so I figured they should do all the landmark things like meet orcs, see some battles, watch cubes fly around.
1) What happens? Do they get away? The orcs wouldn't want to let interlopers escape. How do they chase after them? Can they outrun them?
2) At what point is fighting a cube-world full of orc soldiers too much?
3) Where is the portal back to Sigil? The plot kind of needs them back in Sigil by tonight or tomorrow (game time). How do I get them home besides plopping a portal in front of them and say, "Oops, I guess something in your pockets turned it on"?
Heres how I would run it:
Have the orc patrols keep following them, but have the PC's come across a more or less ruined outpost. If you feel like it, have a few orcs or goblins stationed there from some army or another.
Let them know that the patrols have found them there, but that this is clearly the most defendable area they have to work with. Let them fortify it in any way that they can in a couple minutes (pretty much whatever keen uses of spells they can come up with, "Grease those stairs!"). After a bit, have more than the simple patral of orcs show up and attack. Set a time limit that they have to hold the building for, before theres a horn or something and all of the orcs start to run away. Spot check to notice that there is a large metal object in the sky that is getting closer by the minute. Their only hope is to hide in the deepest part of the outpost, which is little more than a few ditches and trenches, no basement to be found.
Scare the pants off of them by convincing them that they are about to be crushed to death, then have them end up being sucked up by the other cube as it bounces away, effectively being jostled onto the cube by the impact.
That part isn't exactly required. What is important is that after the collision, they find a mine where people are mining acheronian metal. They have a portal to a refinery in the outlands, which has a portal to the foundry in Sigil.
---------------------------------
Hows that?