Dwarven Mercenaries, Adventure 2

[Xeviat]

Hi everyone. None of my players frequent here, so it should be safe.

The current campaign I'm running has the party playing as elite members of an all dwarf mercenary band operating independent of the region's Mountain Dwarf kingdom. In the area, the humans and dwarves don't get along, but they're not yet at open war. Both sides are posturing, and the band the PCs belong to is profiting.

The first mission the players went on turned out to be different than what they expected. It was supposed to be simple: they were hired by a village to clear some goblins out of a forest that the village used for boar hunting. It turns out that the forest was full of goblins because human miners felled a dryad's Oak and the forest spirits had turned angry (in my setting, goblins are dark fey). The party was pressed into fixing the mess by reconsecrating the other sacred oaks by a band of eladrin (outsider style; elves in the setting are powerful fey, and player "elf" races are all various half-elves). They may have earned a favor (the players and the eladrin were being jerks to each other), and were also offered substantial payment of they brought back the ones who cut down the dryad's oak.

What was really going on is that the humans were in search of a new mine. They were pointed to the small wood as a place to dig a new iron mine, but the forest would need to be cleared first. That meant the guardians of the forest needed to be taken care of. The humans needed a new mine because the dwarves stopped selling iron to them.

Now that the PCs have returned to their camp, they've found that their captain has gone missing and his lieutenant is concerned. The captain often comes and goes, but his lieutenant is always aware. The players have decided to go after the captain ... but I'm at a loss of what he got himself into. I want it to be tied in with the growing hostility between the humans and dwarves. I kind of want to tie it in with the human's attempt at clearing the woods and starting a mine. Maybe there was more to it? Maybe they took something, or they were purposefully trying to set the eladrin against the dwarves (immortal eladrin aren't known for differentiating members of a race and can be wide spread in their distribution of justice).

Any thoughts? My idea seed mill has gone dry.

[LoA]

If you want to take it in an interesting direction, maybe the captain is working with a small band of humans to keep the Eladrin from getting uppity and causing mass destruction.