Adventure Hooks: Orc Slave Mine

I've decided to publish an intermittent series of adventure hooks and adventure ideas. I'll be keeping things as generic as possible so that you can use them in any system you want. I do have a fair few ideas for adventures floating around (mostly fantasy), but some of them are being kept under wraps incase I want to run them myself!
Anyway, here's the first - the Orc Slave Mines. This formed the basis of a play-by-forum RPG I ran with the kids from my school wargames club for a few months. This one is a good starting adventure for a new party because it helps to explain how all the characters met up, but you can run it just as well with an established party. Anyways, on to the adventure!

The players have been captured by Orcs and thrown into the Slave Mines. I started it off with everyone regaining consciousness and finding out they were in the dungeons, but you can have some of the characters already there when the others turn up. Anyway, they start locked into a dungeon cave, deep under ground. They have had their equipment taken away, and each of them is wearing shackles. These shackles contain Null Stones - strange black stones which drain magical energy, thus preventing mages from casting while wearing them. Also in the dungeon with them is a wizzened and ancient kobold. Outside the dungeon they can hear what seems to be a battle going on between Orcs, and some other species with higher pitched voices.

Obviously the first order of business is to break out. Depending on your party there are a number of approaches - they can try to smash the door down, but without axes that'll be pretty hard. If they talk to the kobold, they'll find out something rather interesting and useful. The Kobold is Krt'K, leader of the Kobold Revolutionary Army. The noise they can hear outside is the Kobold slaves in open revolt against the orcs, and coming to bust him out.

That green stuff is luminous fungi. Not orc flatulence.

The KRA team are armed and armoured, but the slaves are just using what they can find - shovels and picks mostly. Their attack has caught the Orcs by surprise, and given time they will be able to get to the dungeon and bust out Krt'K. They'll probably be pretty happy to see a bunch of sturdy heroes with a grudge against Orcs locked in with him and bust them out as well.

So now it's a matter of escaping the maze-like mine itself. Do the players go it alone, or do they decide to side with the KRA? Do they try to use the KRA to their own ends in a bid to cause even greater havoc upon the Orcs? Do they try to stir up a revolt amongst the other races which the Orcs are lording it over? How do they find their weapons and gear (when I ran this, one of the players had a pet Dragon which the Orcs were keeping in a cage above ground - finding the dragon was one of his primary motivations)?

Of course, the Orcs will regroup soon enough and come back into the slave mines in force, so time is limited and the party will need to think fast.

I used this adventure as the starter for a whole campaign, so I also had some adventure hooks set up in the slave mines themselves. There was a second dungeon cave, which contained some NPC adventurers who had also been captured. They were on a quest of their own and would try to recruit the heroes. There was also a Dwarf cleric in a cage in the torture chamber (it's just not an Orc dungeon without one!) who was seeking a powerful artefact when he was captured and his companions slain. He was near death, but if the heroes healed him he would try to recruit them to his quest (of course, they didn't know he was actually a villain seeking to use the artefact against his people).

Okay, so that's the first instalment of Adventure Hooks. I have intentionally not gone into great detail about the quest since you'll probably want to change it around a bit to fit in your setting. I've used Orcs and Kobolds (with the odd Goblin and Troll thrown in) but you can use anything you like. You can make the slave mines as large or as small as you like to make the adventure last longer, and you can make it as easy or hard as you like for the heroes to find their stolen equipment (in my version they had to actually get out of the mines to find it - it was in a store hut above ground).