WRITTEN RECAP
Eldoria — Episode 3: Run Away!
Episode Three begins with the Old Dudes doing exactly what the title promises.
They have the Jade Fang of Zarn Quill. They have escaped the lizardfolk shrine. They have also seen the strange black ichor coating some of the lizardfolk, and there is no desire to stay in the Slobbering Glades long enough to learn how many more corrupted warriors might be coming after them.
So the party keeps moving.
The immediate chase is behind them, but the trip back toward Stonebridge is still dangerous. The group retraces the same road where bandits attacked them on the way out, and this time they decide not to simply hope the surviving criminals have moved on.
The trail leads to a bandit camp.
What follows becomes the major fight of the episode.
The Old Dudes approach with the sort of tactical planning that sounds very organized right up until everyone starts moving. Zewor looks for height and cover, eventually making use of a tree. Other characters find rocks, corners and anything else that might stop arrows. Garth Maul and the heavily armored front line move toward the people with sharp objects, because that part of the plan is at least easy to understand.
Fars discovers that Hideous Laughter can turn a dangerous opponent into somebody lying on the ground laughing while the rest of the battle continues around him.
The table immediately appreciates the value of making one bandit useless through comedy.
The enemy has numbers and prepared positions, however, and this fight is substantially uglier than the roadside ambush from Episode One. Crossbow fire and melee attacks pile up. The party's “meat shield” strategy becomes an actual topic of conversation, along with multiple variations of “meat buddy,” because nothing helps a dangerous combat like assigning everyone a meat-based tactical role.
Wenende takes the worst of it.
He is battered down hard and ends up unconscious on the battlefield. With Chris absent for the session, Jay makes the merciful ruling that Wenende is staying unconscious rather than letting somebody else's dice accidentally kill his character.
That does not stop everyone from making jokes about his condition.
The rest of the party keeps fighting around him.
Zewor fires from relative safety. Fars uses magic and insults. Garth Maul and Zayon work through the enemies at close range. The laughing bandit remains an ongoing problem mostly for himself. Eventually the balance shifts and the camp's defenders start falling faster than the Old Dudes do.
By the end, the bandit camp belongs to the party.
That does not mean anyone looks particularly heroic.
They are bruised, low on resources, and standing in somebody else's camp with Wenende still laid out after being nearly killed. But they are alive, and the people who tried to rob them on the road will not be setting up another tollbooth anytime soon.
The party searches what the bandits left behind and begins sorting out what can be carried, what might be valuable, and what is probably going to trigger another argument over who gets which piece of loot.
More importantly, the encounter reinforces something that has been building since the Slobbering Glades: the roads around Shade Karn are not simply suffering from random monsters. Bandits are organized enough to maintain camps. Lizardfolk are being changed by an unknown black substance. Strange artifacts and old warnings keep appearing in places Bravaro sends them.
The Old Dudes are starting to accumulate evidence without yet understanding what any of it means.
For now, though, the immediate objective is much more practical.
Get Wenende back on his feet.
Get everybody back to civilization.
And, if possible, stop nearly dying before they even return the artifact they were hired to retrieve.
Episode Three ends in the captured bandit camp, with the party victorious but battered and the road to Stonebridge still ahead.
Running away worked at the lizardfolk temple.
This time they stayed and fought.
Both strategies, it turns out, have their uses.