Karg deserted Gorak the Unbroken's band after witnessing the Choir sacrifice orc prisoners. He will guide the party through the breeding pits only if they swear to spare noncombatants. If the party breaks that promise, he turns hostile and will try to warn Gorak.
Karg spent years in the breeding pits and knows their collapsed shafts, hidden passages, and Choir patrol schedules. He has advantage on Intelligence (Investigation) or Wisdom (Survival) checks to navigate or map the breeding pits and their connected tunnels.
Knows 4 maneuvers: Trip Attack (knock target prone), Menacing Attack (Frightened 1 turn), Precision Attack (+die to attack roll), Rally (grant ally temp HP = die + Cha mod).
When you fail an ability check, you can expend a superiority die, add it to the check, and reroll if still a failure.
Take the Dash action as a Bonus Action and gain temporary hit points equal to Proficiency Bonus (3).
See in dim light within 60 feet as if bright, and in darkness as if dim (grayscale).
When reduced to 0 HP but not killed outright, drop to 1 HP instead.
Attack twice when taking the Attack action.
Take one additional action (not Magic).
+1 to AC while wearing armor.
Regain 1d10 + 6 hit points.
Behind the character
Karg Broken-Tusk is a weathered orc fighter in his middle years, his green-gray skin crossed with old scars and one cheek smeared with faded war-paint he no longer has the heart to renew. His left tusk is broken at half length, snapped by a spear he took for a shield-brother in the war's final year — a wound he wears like a question he cannot answer. He wears a mismatched chain shirt over a patched leather jerkin, a battered round shield slung across his back, and grips a stolen human longsword whose crossguard clearly never belonged to an orc hand. He carries no banner and no colors; he deserted the last one he had.
Karg speaks little and watches much. He has the flat, patient voice of a soldier who has heard every speech war can offer and believed none of them. Beneath the silence is a sharp, practical intelligence about tunnels, patrols, and the habits of desperate men — and a conscience that ruined him. When he saw the Ashen Choir sacrifice orc prisoners in the breeding pits, singing their corrupted hymn over the dying, something in Karg broke that had survived three years of war. He walked out of Gorak the Unbroken's band that night and has been a fugitive from his own people ever since.
He is not gentle. He is capable of sudden, brutal violence and does not apologize for it. But he has drawn one line and will not cross it: noncombatants are spared, always. He will guide the party through the breeding pits he knows like his own scars — the collapsed shafts, the hidden passages, the Choir's patrol schedules — but only if they swear to his line. Break that promise, and the orc who guides you becomes the orc who warns Gorak.
Karg is Chaotic Good, a Battle Master of the pits, and a man looking for one act that proves his desertion was the beginning of something rather than the end.
Before the adventure
Karg was born in the breeding pits themselves, in the generation the orc warlords raised to be soldiers. His childhood was cages, ash, and the drum-beat of the pit-shamans' hymns; his education was the spear, the shield-wall, and the tunnels beneath the Spine of the World's foothills. He learned the pits' every passage as a child runner, carrying messages between war-chiefs through shafts too narrow for adults — knowledge that later saved his life and now makes him the party's most valuable guide in the Ashen Scar.
He was never a believer. Even as a cub he noticed that the shamans' hymns changed whenever the warlords needed a new omen, and he learned early that faith in the pits was a leash.
The war against the alliance gave Karg what the pits never had: brothers outside his bloodline. He fought at Burning Ford, at the trenches around Accord Hall, and in a dozen nameless skirmishes, and he was good at it — good enough that Gorak the Unbroken named him a shield-brother, the highest honor a common orc soldier could earn. He took a spear through the jaw for Gorak at the ford and broke his tusk on the shield-rim that saved him. For three years Karg believed in the horde, or believed in Gorak, which amounted to the same thing.
Then the warlords died, the horde broke, and the survivors retreated into the only home any of them had left: the breeding pits. The Ashen Choir was already there, waiting. At first the gray-hooded strangers seemed like salvation — they brought food, weapons, and promises of a new empire where orcs would rule beside humans. Karg was skeptical but silent; Gorak needed the supplies, and starving orcs do not interrogate their benefactors. For six weeks Karg ran patrols and mapped the Choir's occupation, telling himself the rumors of disappearances were war-camp gossip.
They were not. Karg saw the sacrifice himself: three orc prisoners, taken from the cage-block where his own sister Uzma was held, marched to the glowing crack in the deep pit and given to the hymn while the god-machine fragment below drank their ash. His shield-brother Drengh was among them. Karg had planned to desert that night anyway; Drengh had begged to come. Karg told him to wait for the next moon, and Drengh waited, and died. Karg has never forgiven himself for the moon he chose.
He fled north through tunnels only a pit-child could know, nearly died in an ash storm, and was sheltered at Iron Vein Mine by Grask Ironjaw, an old war-band comrade turned mine foreman. From Grask he learned that orcs could work beside dwarves and humans, that the war was over for some people, and that the pits still breathed. He has been circling the Scar ever since, gathering his courage, hunting for a way back in that does not end with him in a cage — and when Captain Eldrin Voss's neutral investigators came asking about the Choir, Karg decided they were the way in.
He is a Battle Master in the old pit-fashion: a fighter who thinks in terrain, timing, and the enemy's fear. His maneuvers are the tricks of tunnel fighting — trips in narrow passages, menacing displays in the dark, precise strikes when a miss means death. He has four superiority dice' worth of cunning and a lifetime of knowing when to spend it. He asks for almost nothing: a promise kept, his sister freed, and one day, a piece of ash-soil where an orc farmer can grow something green. He knows the last wish is probably a fool's wish. He keeps it anyway.
Threads to follow
Beneath the surface
What haunts them
What drives them
Personal quest · 1
Karg's younger sister, Uzma, was left behind when he deserted Gorak's band. She is still held in an iron cage in the breeding pits' upper level, marked for a Choir ritual. Karg asks the party to help him slip past the patrol schedules he knows by heart and free her before the next hymn-night. The mission tests his tunnel knowledge to its limit, forces him to face the pits he swore never to re-enter, and risks Gorak learning that a deserter walks his tunnels again.
Infiltrate the upper cages during a Choir patrol rotation using Karg's knowledge.
Personal quest · 2
The longsword Karg carries belonged to a human sergeant, Aldric Vane, who died defending orc prisoners from Gorak's raiders in the war's last year. Karg took the blade as a debt he intends to repay. He asks the party to help him find Aldric's widow in the Crownlands and return the sword — or explain why he kept it. The journey forces an orc defector to walk human roads, face soldiers who killed his kin, and decide what honor means for a man with no banner.
Trace Aldric Vane's unit records through Accord Hall's archive.
Personal quest · 3
Karg knows Gorak the Unbroken will never forgive a deserter, and Gorak's starving orcs are being strung along by Choir promises. Karg wants to face Gorak not with steel but with proof: the Choir's broken promises, written in their own hymns and ledgers. He asks the party to help him gather evidence of Choir sacrifices of orc prisoners and bring it to Gorak's lower tunnels, hoping to turn the warlord against the Choir before Gorak's people are spent as scapegoats.
Recover Choir sacrifice records from the ritual chambers.
When the party descends into the breeding pits, they discover Choir cultists herding orc prisoners toward the ritual chamber. Karg can hold the tunnel alone while the party rescues Talia Voss, or abandon the prisoners to guarantee the rescue.
If Karg holds the tunnel, he gains the temporary feature 'Last Stand of the Defector': until the end of the scene, he adds his proficiency bonus to damage and cannot be frightened, but he starts the next encounter with 2 levels of exhaustion. If he abandons the prisoners, his Broken Oath feature inverts — he loses advantage on pit navigation (shame clouds his memory) and refuses to speak for a day.
Gorak offers Karg a place at his side again if Karg betrays the party's route through the pits — the only way, Gorak says, to save the rest of the band from the Choir's wrath.
Refusal grants Karg the permanent feature 'Unbroken Will': once per long rest, when he fails a saving throw against fear or charm, he succeeds instead. True betrayal makes Karg an NPC traitor who must be fought or redeemed. Feeding false information gives the party an ambush advantage but, if discovered, costs Karg any chance of turning Gorak later.
When the corrupted artifact is recovered, its god-machine whispers to Karg in the old tongue of the pit-shamans, promising strength to 'the broken-tusked one.'
Accepting grants Karg a corrupted gift: +2 Strength permanently but he becomes a target of the Choir's hymns and suffers 1d6 psychic damage whenever a Choir hymn is sung nearby. Refusing grants 'Ash-Clean Soul': advantage on saves against the artifact's corruption and the Vial of Purified Ash works doubly well for him. Studying it grants Karg advantage on Arcana checks to identify corrupted relics despite his low Intelligence — hard-won practical knowledge.
Completing The Chains of the Pits
Karg sheds his deserter's shame and begins wearing a crude token of Uzma's cage-lock, reforged into a clasp.
The artifact whispering scene
Karg must decide what kind of orc he is: the old kind who takes power where it offers, or the new kind who refuses it.
Ally
Grask Ironjaw and Karg served in the same orc war-band before the horde broke at the Ashen Scar. When the warlords fell and the survivors scattered, Grask laid down his axe and picked up a foreman's whistle, taking work at Iron Vein Mine with a mixed crew of orcs, dwarves, and humans. Karg, drifting half-starved through the Scar after deserting Gorak, nearly died in an ash storm before stumbling into the mine's outer camps.
Grask fed him, vouched for him with Hilda Coppervane, and taught him that an orc could work beside dwarves without shame. It was Grask who first told Karg that the breeding pits still breathed — that humans in gray hoods were hauling cages into the old tunnels. That rumor drove Karg back toward the pits, where he witnessed the Choir's sacrifices and deserted Gorak's band for good. Grask does not know the full truth of what Karg saw, but he harbors no deserters' judgment; he buried too many friends on both sides of the war to care about banners.
Grask has asked Karg, more than once, to bring word if the saboteurs ever strike the mine again, and Karg considers the mine the one place in the Scar where an orc can stand upright.
Enemy
Gorak the Unbroken was Karg's shield-brother and shield-mate both — they broke the alliance line at Burning Ford together, and Karg once took a spear meant for Gorak's throat, the blow that broke his tusk. When Karg deserted after witnessing the Choir sacrifice orc prisoners, Gorak named him oath-breaker before the whole band and swore to break the other tusk. For Gorak, Karg's desertion is not principle but betrayal: the band is starving, the Choir promised them safety, and a deserter's whispers could shatter the last discipline holding his people together.
Gorak has sent hunters after Karg twice; both times Karg escaped through tunnels only he knows, which deepens Gorak's fury. Karg, for his part, does not hate Gorak — he pities him, and fears that pity will make him hesitate when Gorak finally corners him. The personal stakes cut both ways: if Karg can bring proof of the Choir's broken promises, Gorak might turn; if the Choir gets to Gorak first, Gorak will spend his last orc lives as scapegoats for a war he never chose, and Karg will have to face the only orc who ever carried him out of a burning trench.
Faction
The Ashen Choir knows Karg's face and his crime. Karg spent six weeks inside the Choir's occupation of the breeding pits before he fled — long enough to memorize patrol schedules, hymn-cadences, and the layout of the ritual chambers, and long enough for the Choir to mark him as a loose end. He witnessed a Choir priest, the one the cultists call the Gray Cantor, sacrifice three orc prisoners on the glowing crack in the deep pit, singing the corrupted hymn as their ash fed the god-machine fragment below.
Karg deserted that night, and the Choir has quietly hunted him since; two Choir thralls died in the tunnels trying to take him, and the Cantor now considers Karg's silence a threat to the entire pit operation. Karg understands the Choir better than almost anyone outside it: he knows they recruit desperate veterans of every race with promises of order, that they use coded hymns as both cipher and weapon, and that their true faith is in the artifact sleeping beneath the pits.
This knowledge is Karg's chief value to the party and the reason the Choir will never stop hunting him — every hymn he hears sung near him tightens the noose, and every Choir cell he helps the party destroy is a debt partially repaid.
Faction
Karg has no formal place in the Accord Remnant — an orc deserter carries no papers and earns no salute — but Captain Eldrin Voss's people have learned of him through the refugee grapevine at Accord Hall, and a few of the old alliance veterans remember an orc with a broken tusk who pulled wounded humans out of the ford's mud during the last year of the war. That memory buys Karg cautious tolerance rather than welcome: Remnant clerks will not seat him in the archive, but Remnant soldiers will share a fire with him.
Karg respects the Remnant more than any banner he ever carried, because it is the only human institution that ever tried to bury orcs and humans in the same grave. He quietly hopes that if he helps the party expose the Choir, the Remnant might grant him and Uzma a parcel of ash-soil to farm — a place where a broken-tusked orc and his sister can be farmers instead of fugitives. Eldrin, for his part, sees in Karg a living answer to the question the whole war asked: whether former enemies can stand together when the real enemy wears gray.
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