The Wrathbreakers were attacked by a large force of deepfolk as they approached what they thought was a human camp and worksite by the Farunae Inland Sea. Itzel and Bao Tap were captured during the battle and Xu and Ella forced to flee. Now Itzel and Bao Tap need to escape from the camp before they become breakfast.
The Goblin’s conversation
Itzel and Bao Tap woke after several hours of unconsciousness. They were completely naked, all their magic items and weapons gone, their hands bound behind their backs, legs tied, and gagged so they could not speak. They lay their for a while recovering their wits, and then heard people approaching their tent. Outside, they heard one deepfolk giving another orders.
Fortunately Itzel had spent time studying and now understood a little deepfolk. She was able to eavesdrop a little, and so learnt that they were not to be eaten, but to be “used” in a few days. She also learnt that the camp’s forces had been badly depleted in the battle. They also learnt that the deepfolk had looted their magic items and had determined that the strange white ceramic-like plate they had picked up in the Valley of Gon was of great value and had to be returned soon to the deepfolk’s underground kingdom. They decided to wait a little, recover some of their fatigue, and see what happened in the camp. They assumed that the deepfolk knew they were magic users, and had bound and gagged them to prevent them using magic. However, it was unlikely that the deepfolk knew that both Itzel and Bao Tap had been given regenerated arms by the healer Aragan in Kei, and these arms granted them the special talent of needing no free hands to cast magic. So any time they wanted they could use magic, but without their items and heavily exhausted by the battle, they thought it might be wise to wait and see what happened. As they lay there waiting a goblin captain strolled into the room, yelled abuse at them, and sat calmly on a chair on the far side of the room, axe in hand, to act as their guard. Truly their situation was desperate.
Xu and Ella return
While they waited Ella and Xu had retreated to the edge of the forest, where they spent an hour recovering their strength and taking the last of their healing potions. Xu was injured but not seriously, and Ella was relatively unharmed but exhausted and stressed. Even though night had fallen by the time they finished resting they decided not to risk waiting longer, in case their friends were scheduled to be on the evening’s menu, and headed back towards the camp.
They moved carefully and quietly, but with Xu in his armour and the deepfolk operating at night they soon stumbled onto a group of scouts. They emerged into a dimly lit stretch of open ground to find the goblin shaman they had fought earlier, accompanied by a squad of strange, lizardlike humanoids they had never seen before, and the reanimated corpses of some of their earlier deepfolk casualties. Ella hid in a sniper position as Xu rushed forward to engage. He was immediately struck with a storm of spit by the lizardlike creatures, which penetrated his armour and staggered him so that he could not attack. Reeling from the acidic blast of the poison dripping in his eyes, all he could do was defend himself as the zombies attacked him, clubbing him slowly into insensibility.
As Xu collapsed under a horde of slow and inexorable attackers Ella opened fire on the goblin shaman, killing him with a single shot. She then took her sole invisibility potion, and slipped away to the deepfolk camp, leaving Xu to fight the lizard creatures and zombies.
Reunited
Ella slipped invisible into the camp and searched quickly until she found the tent where Itzel and Bao Tap were hiding. Near this tent there was a small open pavilion in which the surviving Grigg scouts – just 8 – were settling down to rest. She slipped into the prison tent, drifting in in such a way as to make it seem like the tent flap had simply stirred with the wind. Then, without much pause to think, she shot the goblin with her crossbow. The bolt hit him in the shoulder, shattering his arm and pinning him to the chair. Suddenly revealed, Ella began working to free Itzel and Bao Tap. The battle began.
The goblin’s screaming woke everyone and drew the remaining forces in the camp. From a nearby tent the Ogre champion emerged to fight, along with two goblin captains. The Grigg scouts roused from their rest, but following the goblin captain’s orders they moved to the edge of the camp to stop anyone else coming in. The Ogre champion charged to the tent and ripped it out of the ground, revealing a naked but free Itzel and Bao Tap, and Ella trying to put distance between herself and her enemies. Bao Tap summoned another nature’s champion. More of the lizardlike creatures joined the battle, and things were looking dangerous for a few seconds until Xu emerged from the forest, having successfully defeated the lizard creatures and zombies, and joined the battle. With Xu there to turn the tide they were able to escape, and fled into the forest.
Cleaning up
They rested for the remainder of the night and in the morning, when Itzel flew into the air with a telescope to spy on the camp, they saw that the remaining deepfolk forces were breaking camp and preparing to leave. No doubt with their leaders dead and a single goblin champion remaining, they had decided it was best to flee the scene before their attackers returned. The Wrathbreakers decided to ambush them, and moved quickly to a stream to the west of the camp. They set up an ambush, Bao Tap using his magic to dig a channel in the stream and Xu and Ella positioning themselves for battle. Itzel hovered above the scene, and they prepared.
The ambush was savage and effective. Bao Tap’s nature’s champion attacked the goblin champion when it slid into the trap they had dug in the stream, and while it was occupied they killed the remaining deepfolk fighters quickly and without mercy. The large group of non-combatant deepfolk broke and fled, abandoning all the camp gear and scattering into the forest.
The Wrathbreakers gathered up what they could and returned to the abandoned campsite. They were badly hurt, exhausted and at the end of their strength, but they had prevailed. Now they simply needed to try to understand why they had been forced to this battle – what were deepfolk doing here, and what dark secrets had they been searching for in that worksite?
Compromise and Conceit 
May 24, 2022 at 5:49 pm
Reads like there was some heavy plot-armour worn.
May 24, 2022 at 7:47 pm
Haha it does sound like that doesn’t it? Actually I set up this camp with a fixed force, and they tore through half of the force during the first ambush. At this point the PCs are pretty legendary in their powers, and I’m having difficulty providing them with opponents that can test their mettle, so it’s not surprising they got out. Also not written here is the huge amount of damage they took to get this far, which has them running away from even minor follow-up raids by any reinforcements that might approach the camp. So it wasn’t plot armour I think!
May 24, 2022 at 9:35 pm
I think games degenerate when the PCs get too high. We dealt with this by dying frequently, and later by just starting a new game with different characters, accepting that at some point the PC just wants to take the loot and get out.
May 25, 2022 at 9:19 am
I agree with this. It was a big problem in D&D, and also in Cyberpunk. Not so much in Coriolis, where the powers and challenges seemed quite balanced. I think part of it is the escalating role of armour and gear, the role of magic items, and the way hit points in some of these systems work. In this case it’s partly because I changed the rules to make combat difficulty scale the same way everything else does, so the PCs are harder to hit, but this doesn’t apply to missile weapons or magic, so it’s not entirely that. The PCs don’t even have the best armour yet, and they’re whaling through minions. We partly fixed this by changing the rules so the fighters kill multiple minions with a single blow (like AD&D haha), which makes combat more focused on the big boys, and it’s also worth bearing in mind that the way the campaign works they often get to choose the context and setting of battles, and they spend a lot of time in between fights repairing. For example after this escape they spent 7 days healing and desperately hoping that even a small force of deepfolk wouldn’t retaliate. But it is a problem in most systems and I think it’s a problem in Genesys too. For my next campaign I’ll return to Coriolis or try out the Twilight 2000 system (another Free League release), which is relatively gritty. But at this point this campaign is becoming more investigative, with occasional big set piece battles.
I guess we have solved the problem of degeneration by making it primarily about a story, with the battles as surmountable obstacles in the path to uncovering whatever shit is happening in the background, and we have streamlined the rules to make sure the battles don’t become huge exercises in accounting.
May 26, 2022 at 9:46 pm
Agree. That’s the way it worked (became more a story). Also, we evolved a combat system where the risk of a one-shot death was ever present. Put a premium on planning, but also tended to eliminate players by sheer chance over time. I read somewhere that even without ageing, the average age of death would be around 800 just due to accidents and other incidental causes.