Gorak knows the breeding pit tunnels intimately. While in tunnel or cave terrain, he cannot be surprised and has advantage on Dexterity (Stealth) checks to ambush. Custom feature representing his mastery of the pits; balanced against a 6th-level ribbon/terrain feature.
Gorak prefers captures to kills. When he reduces a hostile creature to 0 HP with a melee attack, he may instead knock it Unconscious (stable). Custom, representing his battle plan of taking prisoners to trade.
You can see in Dim Light within 60 feet as if it were Bright Light and in Darkness as if it were Dim Light (colors appear gray).
Expend dice for Maneuvers: Disarming Attack, Menacing Attack, Trip Attack, Commander's Strike. Save DC 15 (8 + 3 + STR 4).
Take the Dash action as a Bonus Action, gaining 3 Temporary Hit Points (Proficiency Bonus) each use.
Once per turn when you hit with a weapon, roll the weapon's damage dice twice and use either total.
When you fail an ability check, expend a use of Second Wind to add 1d10 to the roll.
When reduced to 0 HP but not killed outright, drop to 1 HP instead.
Proficiency with Smith's Tools; crafts weapons and armor.
+1 AC while wearing armor (included in AC 18).
Regain 1d10 + 6 (Fighter level) hit points.
Attack twice when taking the Attack action.
Take one additional action (not Magic).
Behind the character
Gorak the Unbroken is a towering gray-green orc warlord, broad and heavy-set even by orc standards, with a scarred jaw, one broken tusk, and tired ember-dark eyes that miss nothing in the dark. He wears mismatched chain mail patched with pit-iron plates scavenged from the breeding pits' broken machinery, and carries a notched longsword and a battered round shield painted with a broken chain sigil — the mark he chose for himself the day he decided his people would not be captives again. His posture is weary but coiled: a warlord who has survived everything and trusts nothing.
He speaks bluntly and rarely, wastes no words on flattery, and measures every stranger by what they do rather than what they say. He is lawful to his own code — prisoners are taken, not killed; the old and young eat first; a promise made before the band is a promise kept — but he is not gentle, and he does not pretend to be. Beneath the iron is a man exhausted by three years of impossible bargains, furious at being used as a scapegoat by the very cult that promised him salvation, and quietly terrified that his people's survival rests on shoulders that have already broken once.
In the tunnels he is a different creature: silent, patient, and lethal, moving through the breeding pits' dark with the certainty of a man who has memorized every stone. He fights with heavy blade and shield, uses terrain and trained beasts to divide enemies, and prefers captures to kills when he thinks he can trade. He is CR 7 alone, but his true danger is the warband behind him and the tunnels above his head. Spared, he is the campaign's most valuable defector; slain, he is a martyr whose death the Choir will use to justify everything.
Before the adventure
Gorak was a line-breaker in the horde's third assault wave when the Warlords still lived — a soldier, not a schemer, who measured his worth in held ground and intact shields. He earned his name at the Battle of the Broken Accord, the campaign's final major engagement, where he held the breeding pits' western tunnel mouth for a full day against three Accord companies so that the horde's wounded and young could retreat into the deep tunnels.
The Warlords died above him. The Accord broke around him. And when the fighting ended, Gorak walked out of the tunnels into a world that no longer had a place for orcs — a world of burned camps, Crown patrols, and nations sharpening knives at each other.
He gathered what survivors he could find: perhaps three hundred orcs, half of them children or elders, hiding in the breeding pits his own people had built and been enslaved in. The pits are a bitter home — iron cages, ash, the smell of old blood — but they are defensible, and Gorak knows every tunnel, every collapsed shaft, every choke point. For three years he has kept the band alive on hunted ash-beasts, stolen supplies, and a discipline as hard as the pit-iron in his shield.
The Ashen Choir found him in the first winter, when the band was starving and the Crown's patrols were burning every orc camp on the surface. A gray-hooded priest named Malvrick offered a bargain: raid on schedule, make the raids look like a new invasion, and the Choir would buy the band safe passage out of the Scar. Gorak, out of options, agreed. For a year he obeyed — raiding caravans, taking prisoners to trade, telling himself each raid bought another month of life for the children in the pits.
Then he discovered what the bargains were really buying: the Choir had been sacrificing his captured warriors to the corrupted artifact in the deep pit, culling the band to keep it weak and controllable. Malvrick had smiled at him across a war-fire while feeding his people to a god-machine.
Gorak did not erupt. He is too old and too tired for eruptions. Instead he began keeping a tally — names, dates, rituals, every Choir crime he has witnessed — scratched on hide and sealed in a niche in the tunnel walls. It is his insurance, his weapon, and his penance. He still takes the Choir's orders when refusing would kill the band, but every order now passes through his own judgment first, and he has quietly begun looking for a way out that does not run through Malvrick's hands.
His escape plan is an old war-tunnel marked on a map he took from a dead Accord engineer: a passage running under the Ashen Scar to the mountain passes, collapsed in its middle section during the final battle and now held by Choir cultists who do not know what it means to him. Clearing it, stocking it, and moving three hundred orcs through it is the work of months — and the Choir is closing in. Meanwhile the raids continue, staged by the Choir to look like a new orc invasion, and every Accord patrol in the Scar hunts Gorak by name for crimes the Choir committed in his mask.
He fights with a notched longsword and a battered shield, as a Battle Master of the old horde school: Disarming Attack, Menacing Attack, Trip Attack, and Commander's Strike, all honed in tunnel warfare where a single stroke decides a choke point. His custom mastery of the pits — Tunnel Warlord — means he cannot be surprised in tunnel or cave terrain and ambushes from the dark with advantage. His code — Breaker of Chains — means he knocks enemies unconscious rather than killing them when he thinks they can be traded, a habit that has saved more than one party member's life and confused more than one Accord patrol.
He is CR 7 in open combat, but his real threat is positional: he will never fight where the enemy chooses, never commit his band to a battle of annihilation, and always keeps an escape route. He divides parties with tunnels and beasts, targets the healer first with Menacing Attack, and captures rather than kills when the odds allow. Cornered, he is relentless; offered a real bargain — food, safe passage, proof that the Choir's promises were lies — he is the campaign's most valuable potential ally, because his tally of Choir crimes and his knowledge of the pits can break the Choir's operation open.
His story can end three ways: killed as a scapegoat, captured as a war criminal, or turned as the warlord who led his people out of the ash and testified against the men who used them. Which ending happens depends entirely on what the party does in the tunnels beneath the breeding pits.
Threads to follow
Beneath the surface
What haunts them
What drives them
Personal quest · 1
Gorak's map of the breeding pits marks an old war-tunnel that runs under the Ashen Scar to the mountains, but the middle section collapsed during the final assault and is now held by Choir cultists who know what it means to him. Gorak must clear the tunnel, verify it can carry his people, and stock it with food and water before the Choir learns of the plan. The party can help, sabotage, or betray him, and each choice changes whether the orcs can ever leave the Scar.
Infiltrate the collapsed middle section held by Choir cultists and drive them out without collapsing the tunnel further.
Personal quest · 2
Karg Broken-Tusk, Gorak's finest tracker, deserted after watching a Choir priest sacrifice orc prisoners to the artifact in the deep pit. Gorak publicly calls him a coward, but privately he needs Karg's knowledge of the Choir's patrol routes and cannot admit it. Gorak must track Karg down, confront him, and decide whether to bring him back with honor, exile him formally, or execute him to keep the band's discipline — all while Karg holds the only complete map of the Choir's ritual chambers.
Track Karg through the ash dunes toward Scarfall Bazaar.
Personal quest · 3
Gorak earned his name at the Battle of the Broken Accord, where he held a tunnel mouth for a full day against three companies and walked out with his warband intact while the Warlords died above. But a human veteran — Captain Eldrin Voss's own brother — died in those tunnels, and Gorak was the one who ordered the collapse that buried him. Gorak has never told anyone. Now the Accord is investigating war crimes, and the truth of the Broken Accord could either damn Gorak or, told on his own terms, prove he fought with honor while the Choir's patrons committed the real atrocities.
Return to the collapsed tunnel mouth and recover the war-dead's banner and Gorak's own field orders from the rubble.
The Choir's high priest offers Gorak a vial of the artifact's corrupted ash: drink it and his people get safe passage through Choir-controlled territory tonight; refuse and the raids continue until Accord soldiers find the pits.
Accepting grants Gorak a corrupted power — his attacks deal an additional 1d6 necrotic damage and he gains one use of the artifact's fear pulse per day, but he becomes detectable by the Vial of Purified Ash and slowly loses himself. Refusing keeps his soul intact but the band stays trapped. Turning the vial over burns his bridge with the Choir permanently and makes him a target, but gives the party hard proof of the Choir's alliance with the Crown.
Cornered in the lower tunnels, Gorak holds Talia Voss's cage between himself and the party. The Choir's cultists are closing in from above to silence everyone — Gorak, Talia, and the party alike.
Hostage: Gorak escapes but permanently loses Breaker of Chains — his band sees what he became. Fighting alongside the party grants him the Commander's Strike mastery upgrade (two targets instead of one) and begins the alliance track. Surrendering hands him to the Accord, unlocking the trial and testimony storyline where his evidence against Vaelor becomes campaign-critical.
The escape tunnel is complete, but moving three hundred orcs through it takes three nights — and the Choir has discovered the plan. Gorak can move only his strongest fighters and abandon the old, the wounded, and the young, or he can wait and gamble everything on one moonless night.
Abandoning the weak: Gorak survives with a hardened veteran core and gains Action Surge a second time per short rest, but his band's morale breaks and half his people are lost. The gamble: success means everyone escapes and Gorak retires from the war entirely (redemption ending); failure means the band is destroyed. Fighting: Gorak becomes a full warlord again, gaining an extra Superiority Die and the band's fanatical loyalty, but he dies a warlord or lives one — there is no peace after.
First sight of the Choir sacrificing an orc prisoner to the artifact.
Gorak's obedience to the Choir's orders becomes quiet defiance; he begins keeping records of their crimes as insurance.
The party spares his life or his people's in the breeding pits.
Gorak's worldview — that only deeds matter — expands to include the deeds of enemies; he becomes capable of alliance.
Learning that Chancellor Vaelor's agents, not the Choir alone, orchestrated the raids that frame his people.
Gorak shifts from wanting escape to wanting justice; his testimony becomes a weapon worth more than his sword.
Ally
Karg was a pup when Gorak found him starving in the pits' outer tunnels during the horde's retreat, and Gorak carried him on his back for two days through ash dunes while Crown cavalry hunted stragglers. Gorak trained him as a tracker, and for three years Karg was the only orc Gorak trusted with the band's true tunnel maps. That trust shattered when Karg deserted after watching a Choir priest feed prisoners to the artifact in the deep pit — an atrocity Gorak did not stop because he was bargaining with the Choir for his people's lives at that very moment.
Karg sees Gorak as a good man who sold pieces of his soul one bargain at a time; Gorak sees Karg as the conscience he cannot afford. Neither has spoken the truth to the other, and both would die for the band the other is trying to save.
Enemy
Malvrick recruited Gorak in the pits' first winter, when the band was starving and the Crown's patrols were burning every orc camp they found. He promised safe passage out of the Scar in exchange for raids staged to look like a new invasion, and Gorak — out of options — agreed. For a year Gorak obeyed, raiding on schedule, taking prisoners instead of kills so they could be traded, and telling himself every raid bought his people another month.
Then Gorak discovered the truth: the Choir had been sacrificing his captured warriors to the artifact in the deep pit, and Malvrick had been culling the band all along, keeping it weak enough to control. Gorak's fury is personal and specific — Malvrick smiled at him across a war-fire while feeding his warriors to a god-machine. Gorak keeps a written tally of every Choir crime he has witnessed, hidden in the tunnel walls, waiting for the day he can use it. He does not trust words, only deeds, and Malvrick's deeds have made him the one enemy Gorak genuinely hates.
Faction
Gorak's relationship with the Accord Remnant is written in collapsed tunnels and buried soldiers. At the Battle of the Broken Accord, Gorak held the pits' western tunnel mouth for a full day against three Accord companies, and his order to collapse the entrance killed Captain Eldrin Voss's brother along with a dozen others. He respects the Remnant more than any other human institution — they fought clean, buried their dead, and never pretended the war was holy — but respect is not forgiveness, and he knows Eldrin hunts the warlord who killed his blood.
Gorak's raids, staged by the Choir to look like a new invasion, have made him the Remnant's most wanted target in the Scar, and every Accord patrol in the pits is hunting him by name. Yet Gorak keeps a folded copy of the old alliance's rules of war in his pack, taken from a dead Remnant sergeant, and he has quietly honored them: no killed prisoners, no burned villages, no wounded left in the field.
He believes that if the Accord ever learns who is really staging the raids, there is a version of the Remnant that would let his people walk out of the Scar alive — and he is gambling everything that he is right.
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