Capellan said:
Which is why I am the only survivor of the mission.
This is actually what happened:
We gained access to the front door by cleverly disguising ourselves as bad green guys and using the halfling as a "prisoner". Once they let us in, we discovered that there was a portcullis past the front door with lots of bad green guys behind it who fired at us. We got through the door and killed them. Kull was convinced that a messenger was sent out and proceeded to leave. Brodnak called him a big wuss to no effect, so we decided to hastily reconoiter the top floor leaving the Saltmarsh contingent and Zalichs raven Poe to guard and act as a warning.
We succeeded in clearing out the top floor pretty quickly, but were slightly injured so decided to hole up in a secret room that hadn't been discovered by the bad green guys. We assumed they hadn't found it because it was full of exciting loot, which they surely would have taken otherwise.
It was while we were holed up in the secret room that Poe the raven started empathically letting Zalich know that he was scared. Zalich ran off to "save" his raven, and not wanting the little tike to get snotted, we went with him.
We arrived in the front room to be confronted by a lot of dead Saltmarshers and a lot of live bad green guys. Brodnak was held by the shaman and rendered useless throughout the fight as I had to watch my compatriots die one by one. He was a very angry and very still barbarian.
For the record, Poe flew away and survived.
If we stayed in the secret room and waited for the furore to die down, we probably would have been fine.
There is some good to come out of this though... We will be getting another point of view from my new character, Gnorric the Wizard!