Update from Malturrim

Closing out the second week of Decembork, the Dread Lord is content.  His boys are really showing a lot of gumption out there.  His money-counters are also pleased with a total of 32,556gp donated to the cause so far.  The addition of 180 human slaves and 360 goblins to his forces is lighter than he hoped, but enough to keep him from throwing unpleasant energies down from his tower. If you ask me, if he really wanted things to move faster, he would have done something about the weather.  What's all that dark power for if not to grease the wheels for his loyal troops, eh?

To clarify some odd events and rulings from this past week:

The original rules said you needed one subchief at home and one with every raiding party.  This was to limit your ability to hare off in a thousand different directions and save my sanity which would be lost if I had to track more than fifty warbands.  That still pretty much stands, but a number of you wanted to leave your homes stripped of troops and made a good case for it.  As always, this game is about risks and rewards.  So you can leave your home undefended, but every day it sits there it risks a random encounter check (10%).  If that hits, and the encounter is capable of it, the encounter can move in uncontested and you'll have to fight your way back in.  Note that, unless you control a home hex, you cannot spawn troops.

This is what happened to Kris Karnhell this week.  Those stone walls don't look so good from the outside.  This partially explains what's going on with the last dregs of Lorem Ipsum - without a warlord, his boys have emptied LoremTown and gone rogue.  They are now murderhoborcs roaming the steppe in search of gold and glory for themselves.

If a chief does sack another orc's homehex and want to claim it as his new homehex, he can keep control over the old town provided he maintains that 20HD minimum force there.  But if he wants to make the newly sacked hex his homehex, he has to have the only orc force in that hex, and he has to spend a day rearranging the furniture and kicking out the old guy's mother-in-law and whatnot.  Them's the costs of moving day.

This is similar to the prohibition on raiding the same hex twice in a row.  You have to pull-back, gather your troops, and make ready for a second assault.  We've seen this a couple of times, but it might not have been clear, so I wanted to highlight that.