Originally Posted by
CapnWildefyr
Finally if the threat already took out standard troops (villages), why would sending more of the same help? Youd be better off sending 1-2 scouts, or adventurers, to find out more info before doing anything more.
This is an element in a lot of D&D (and D&D like) modules: you hear of Problem X and your party goes out there and discovers that what seemed to be problem X is actually problem Y, Z, or Ɵ. (Secret of Salt Marsh being but one case of this).
Spoiler: digression into "not what it seems" stuff
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The way I ran Forge of Fury a while back for our group was that the initial reports of orcs raiding from the stone tooth was tied into a nasty little deception going on by the Succubus/Incubus near the end of the module.
She had been traveling back and forth to the local village (using the ethereal plane) and appearing as a male dwarf (mostly humans and dwarfs in the mountain village) trying to talk folks into creating half dwarf (half elf analogue) to better unify their peoples. She/he was also the (male) dwarf who planted the "there's this loot deep in the caverns" idea in the PCs heads.
The succubus had convinced the local life cleric (Priest(ess) NPC) that this was a great idea, and two acyolyte NPCs were pregnant with the first two successful "dwarf human" - kids to soon be born (except they were actually little fiends gestating in the womb of the two acolytes).
Succubus had also made a deal with the young black dragon at the deepest cavern: they had a certain detente as long as succubus lured occasional food and loot (adventurers) into the caverns. That twist informed what the party had to deal with once they came out of the caverns after taking on the duergar and such...made for an interesting epilogue after they'd figured out how to defeat the dragon