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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9481427" data-attributes="member: 6877472">To my surprise, my two prodigal players showed up early...but more on that later.With the full party on deck, they went into the penultimate encounter of the main quest, to recover the stolen treasure of the town of Sturnheim.  They first encountered some ghouls and a few traps, which made them, perhaps, overly cautious. They used more spell slots than they needed to, which was a good sign as it would make the next encounter properly challenging. As it was, a poison gas trap, a ghostly bandit with a spectral handgun, and a dual-wielding ghoul rogue (with a few more random ghouls) turned into an epic three hour battle with lots of ups and downs.  But in the end, they prevailed despite a few close calls, and burned through the last of their healing potions.Then, to my surprise, the players suddenly decided instead of taking a short rest and moving on to wait until they could long rest!  I hadn't anticipated this, but thanks to Leomund's Tiny Hut and the fact that they had cleared out all the other encounters in the mini-dungeon.  In the end this turned out ok, but when 4/5 of your party are spellcasters, this shows that I am going to have to try and put more pressure on the party in the future- I wanted to use less epic battles to move the adventure along, but if they're going to insist on taking on every fight with full power, I don't see how that's going to work out.  I don't blame the players- if you can get an advantage, you should take it, after all.At that point, the two players who had been absent the session before suddenly said they had to go.  One had made plans with his gf, and that player was the other player's ride, so with 75 minutes left on the clock, I was down to three players again.Hence why the long rest turned out to be a non-issue.  The players continued to explore, encountering a Water Naga that they managed to persuade to help them, and she provided a lot of information about the dungeon and the area- information they should have gotten a long time ago, but despite being in a central part of the dungeon, they'd basically managed to avoid her completely.  They found a shrine to Orcus, that long ago had been the focal point of a ritual to transform a Wizard into a lich, that had gone wrong.  Destroying the shrine, they claimed a crystallized dragon heart brimming with necromantic power.On the way out of the dungeon, they faced the last encounter, a zombie dragon surprisingly possessed by the spirit of the ancient Wizard, much to his chagrin.  Instead of fleeing, they faced the creature down.The battle was somewhat lopsided- the physical power of the dragon was immense, but it was very slow moving.  The Wizard could recall a few random spells to make up for this, but in the end, the trio were able to exploit the zombie's weak points and eliminate gobs of hit points in short order, earning a huge chunk of xp.Which now has 3/5 of the party a full level ahead of the others.  Time will tell if that's going to be a problem.With the lost treasure recovered and returned to the town, the players got their cut, and next session will have to decide if the remaining side quests are worth their time or if they should continue to the next town in search of new challenges.</blockquote>

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