Greatsword — Graze: on a miss with a melee attack, deal your Strength modifier in damage to the target. Handaxe — Nick: when making an Extra Attack with a Nick weapon, you can make one additional attack as part of the Attack action without using a Bonus Action (relevant at higher levels).
As a Bonus Action, move up to your speed toward an enemy of your choice you can see or hear. You must end this move closer to the enemy than you started. (Custom: optional trait for tables using the 2014 orc; not used in official 5. 2 orc kit — remove if the DM prefers strict 5. 2.)
When you hit with a weapon using Strength that has the Two-Handed or Versatile property, you can reroll any damage die showing a 1 or 2, and you must use the new result.
See in dim light within 60 feet as if it were bright light, and in darkness as dim light (shades of grey).
Take the Dash action as a Bonus Action and gain Temporary Hit Points equal to your Proficiency Bonus (2).
Proficiency in Perception (granted via species — reflected in skills).
When reduced to 0 HP but not killed outright, drop to 1 HP instead.
Regain hit points equal to 1d10 plus your Fighter level (1d10+1).
Behind the character
Gorza Ironvow is a broad-shouldered orc woman in her late twenties, built like the doorframe of a hillfort and about as easy to move. Her skin is deep moss-green, her lower tusks are yellow-white and slightly chipped from biting things she should have hit with a sword instead, and her black hair is braided tight in Warden style with a strip of faded blue cloth — her mother's clan color — woven into one braid. A notched iron Warden's token hangs at her throat on a leather thong, and she has not taken it off in three seasons, which says more about her than any oath she could swear aloud.
She wears chain mail dulled with road dust and patched at the shoulder with boiled leather, and her boots are worn through at the heel because she refuses to replace them until this is finished. She carries a greatsword that is slightly too heavy for her, which she insists is a feature. When she is not fighting she is loud, warm and impossible to embarrass — she laughs hardest at her own mistakes and never at anyone else's, which makes people trust her faster than her Judgment warrants.
She is blunt in a way that lands like a dropped anvil and stubborn to the point of foolishness. She keeps her word with a ferocity that unnerves people who were only being polite, and she will walk into a burning building to keep a promise she made three days ago to someone she barely knew. She is not clever, and she knows it, and she has made peace with it — she would rather be reliable than right.
What she cannot make peace with is the burned caravan, and the driver who will not meet her eye, and the fact that she was there and did not stop it.
Before the adventure
Gorza was born in the lower gate quarter of Ironjaw Hold, the fourth child of a clan that had more honor than coin and never once treated those two things as a contradiction. Her mother, Zurga Ironvow, rode road patrol for the Wardens for twenty years and taught all four of her children to read wagon tracks before she taught them to read letters, on the grounds that letters lie and tracks do not.
Three of the four children left Ironjaw Hold for the coast and never came back. Gorza was the one who stayed, and she joined the Wardens at sixteen because it was the only work in the Reach where keeping your word was the job description.
She spent six years riding the Ashen Road. She learned the Redstone Draw the way other people learn their own hallways — where the narrows were, where the water was, which overhangs could drop a rock on a wagon. She held a canyon against nine salt-raiders at twenty with nothing but a notched short sword and a very loud voice, and Warden Sergeant Vol Ashfell told her afterward that she fought like someone who had already decided she was going to win, which was the kindest thing a superior ever said to her. She was good at the work. She liked the work. She believed in the work.
Then the caravan burned. It was her mother's caravan, carrying her mother's blade and eleven other people, and it went up in the Redstone Draw on a day Gorza was riding point two miles ahead. She saw the smoke and turned back, and by the time she got there there was nothing to fight and nobody to save. The Wardens' report called it bandit activity and closed the file in four days.
The next morning Gorza handed her token to Sergeant Ashfell, who told her that leaving was the same as deserting, and she told him that the difference between leaving and deserting was whether you were running from something or running toward it, and she left anyway.
She has been on her own since, working caravan escort and bounty work out of the Skullgate Bazaar, and she is very good at both and quietly miserable in both. She still wears the token. She still braids her hair in Warden style. She still stops at every burned wagon on the road and looks for tracks, because the Wardens stopped looking and somebody has to.
Thokk Brightsteel forged her first real sword — a greatsword, because she told him she wanted something that could hold a canyon narrows alone and he told her that was a stupid way to spec a blade and then built it anyway. He has been telling her ever since that she swings it like a smith who is angry at the anvil, which she has come to understand is both an insult and a compliment and possibly the truest thing anyone has ever said about her.
She is not looking for revenge. She is looking for the thing that comes before revenge, which is an answer — who burned the caravan, who bought the iron, and whether the Wardens she gave six years to knew about it and said nothing. If the answer is what she suspects it is, she will have to decide what to do with the rest of her life, and she has been avoiding that decision by staying very busy on the road.
She keeps her word because it is the only inheritance her mother left her that cannot be stolen or burned, and she will be keeping it long after everyone who gave her reasons to has stopped expecting her to.
Threads to follow
Beneath the surface
What haunts them
What drives them
Personal quest · 1
Thokk Brightsteel forged a masterwork blade that went east on the caravan that burned, and the Redband has reforged it with something that leaves a red sheen. Gorza must follow the trail from Thokk's forge through the burned wagons, the Skullgate Bazaar fence stalls, and the raider camp in the Redstone Draw, where the blade turns up in the hands of a Redband officer. She must choose whether to return it to the anvil for re-tempering, or carry it as it is, marked by what it did.
Every step teaches her what the Redband is doing to good Ironjaw steel — and what her own word is worth when keeping it costs her something she wants to keep.
Gorza examines the burned wagons in the Warden's yard with Thokk's description in mind and finds drag marks toward the Draw, plus a smith's punch mark only a Brightsteel blade would carry.
Gorza finds out that Warden Gruma Ashfang already suspects the raiders are led by Gorek Blacktusk, an exiled Warden, and is hiding it from the clans because the shame would split Ironjaw Hold apart. She also realizes that Gruma's silence has cost wardens' lives.
If Gorza forces the truth out, the clans split briefly and the Wardens lose two companies of fighters, but the hold rallies with a common enemy and the Wardens' morale actually improves because someone finally said it aloud. If Gorza keeps the secret, the Wardens stay whole and she gains Gruma's absolute trust — including access to Warden intelligence for the rest of the campaign — but she carries the weight of knowing a Warden burned her own mother's caravan and said nothing.
At the raider camp in the Redstone Draw, Gorza finds a tally-stick counting prisoners taken for 'the deep works' and recognizes the name of her own Warden patrol partner from six years ago, now listed as taken. The prisoner pen holds twelve people and the ogre enforcer sleeps twenty feet away.
Freeing the prisoners first means the raiders scatter and the orders are destroyed, costing the party the clue chain that points to Saltmarch Landing and the Salt Ledger — but one of the freed prisoners is her old patrol partner, who joins her as a follower and gives her the Battle Master maneuver style when she reaches level 3. Taking the orders first keeps the campaign's clue chain intact but her partner is shipped east before she can reach him, and Gorza carries the guilt permanently, taking a -1 penalty to all Wisdom saving throws against effects that exploit guilt or duty.
In the Deadvein Deep, Edric Vane offers Gorza the thing she came for: he has found her mother's blade, taken from the burned caravan, and he offers it back in exchange for letting the seam stand for one more season — long enough for him to forge three hundred blades and break Moonharbor's harbor chain.
Accepting gives Gorza her mother's blade — a masterwork greatsword with her clan's blue-cloth braid wrapped around the hilt — and permanent +1 Strength, but Vane's army reaches the coast, Thornwatch falls, and the campaign's epilogue is a broken Reach where Gorza is a legend and a liability. Refusing collapses the seam on schedule and wins the campaign's clean ending, but Gorza loses the last physical thing her mother left, and she takes a permanent scar along her left forearm that reminds her, every time she draws steel, that some promises cannot be kept and some losses cannot be paid back.
Gorza recovers the Brightsteel blade and sees the red sheen for the first time
She stops treating the Redband as common raiders and starts treating them as something that corrupts the very iron of her homeland, which hardens her resolve and makes her willing to go into the Deadvein Deep when the party hesitates.
Shifts from Lawful Good toward Lawful Neutral in specific situations involving the Redband — she becomes willing to break Redband prisoners' fingers to get information, something she would never have done at level 1.
Gorza finds her old patrol partner's name on a prisoner tally-stick in the Redstone Draw
She realizes the Wardens she left are not the Wardens she remembers — the institution is failing its people, and her leaving was not cowardice but clarity. She stops apologizing for it.
Replaces 'I laugh loudest at my own mistakes' with 'I do not explain myself to anyone who was not there.' She becomes blunter, less warm, and more willing to lead by example rather than by argument.
Ally
Thokk forged Gorza's first real sword when she was seventeen and had just joined the Wardens, and he has been telling her ever since that she swings it like a smith who is angry at the anvil. She spent three years bringing him road-iron to reforge and he spent three years telling her what was wrong with Warden-issue steel and how he would do it better. When the caravan that carried his masterwork blade burned, he told no one but her — not his uncle Gruma, not the armory clerk, nobody — because a smith whose best work is in a raider's hands is a smith nobody hires. He trusts her with the one thing that could ruin him, and she has not yet decided whether that is an honor or a burden.
Ally
Brakka was a Warden scout on Gorza's own patrol for two years before the burned caravan, and the two of them learned the Redstone Draw together — where the water was, where the narrows were, where a body could be hidden in forty feet of red rock. When Gorza left the Wardens, Brakka did not, and the silence between them has lasted three seasons. They meet again in the Draw, tracking the same raiders from opposite ends, and the reunion is awkward enough that neither speaks for the first hour.
Brakka's brother was taken by the Redband and she believes he is alive in the deep works, and she will follow Gorza anywhere if someone promises to look for him.
Enemy
Gorek was a Warden of Ironjaw Hold when Gorza was a recruit, and she remembers him as the Warden who once carried her eleven miles on his back after a flash flood took her horse. He was exiled three winters ago for killing a caravan master who had cheated his clan, and Gorza has spent every season since wondering whether the Wardens chose coin over blood — which is exactly the question Gorek wants her to ask.
He does not hate her. He wants her to join him, or fail trying to stop him, and either result proves his point. The black-tusked orc burned her mother's caravan, took her mother's blade, and considers the whole thing a fair price for a lesson the Wardens refused to learn. Gorza cannot decide whether she wants to kill him or ask him why.
Faction
Gorza served the Wardens for six years and left them the morning after the burned caravan that took her mother, because staying would have meant taking an order she could not keep — specifically, the order to ride on to the next patrol post instead of turning back to search for survivors. The Wardens have never formally expelled her, which means she still carries her iron token on a leather thong and every Warden she meets must decide whether that token still means something.
Gruma Ashfang remembers her as a good soldier who quit at the worst possible moment, and treats her with a wary respect that Gorza cannot decide is kind or insulting. The rank-and-file Wardens split between those who think she abandoned her post and those who think she did the only honest thing a Warden can do when the order is wrong.
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