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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9782546" data-attributes="member: 27780">4 players present. They continued on debating the details of the heist for the first half an hour before finally getting into the action, taking the time to jump some low-level thieves guild members, stash their bodies and put their cloaks on as part of their efforts to make sure someone else took the blame. The binder's chief follower Rei the Sha'ir went in the front way and started Karenning to occupy the receptionists, while the winged kobold (one of the players who wasn't here, once again giving me room to run a solo session elaborating on what happened up here later while the rest were going for gold) stealthily kept an eye on things from just outside. The other 5 PC's managed to wait until there were no guards patrolling around the back, slip over to the wall and passwall through it without any problems. That was as far as things went completely smoothly though. As they headed down the stairs, they passed through the portal to the elemental plane of fire where the actual vault is set, which meant they quickly lost the telepathic contact with the people on the surface that they'd set up. (although they still didn't know the exact cause. Knowing that time was now of the essence, they pressed on anyway, coming to their first challenge, the cave with the pair of pyrohydras in it. The first one fell before it could even react to the Binder's full set of sneak attack-enhanced strikes even without counting the fire damage. The others laid into the second hydra and that was gone by the second round. Meanwhile, the sniper started his usual schtick of invisibly blinking ahead of the rest of the party to scout out the area. He did notice that the border ethereal was uncomfortably hot when he did so, but since they'd already packed magical shielding to deal with the hydras, didn't take any damage. He blinked through to the bottom of the pit with the teleportation circle in, peeked out the top and spotted the cornugons, who had heard the hydras being shredded and were already on full alert, but didn't manage to spot him. He blinked back and told the others, who prepared accordingly, then rushed forwards. Even prepared, this was a significantly tougher fight, as the priestess got stunned in the first round and the combo of DR, fire immunity and acid resistance was exactly what's needed to put the Binder's attacks down to plinks, letting the githyanki shine again with his heavy-hitting demonbound maul. While the others were occupied with this, the sniper was once again sneaking ahead around the awkward vertical tunnels leading down to the main vault area. He managed to roll well on his trapfinding, and avoid triggering the trapdoor with the greased chute dumping everything in the elemental plane of fire, getting to the point where it turned into a downward spiral with lots of little vaults on the outward side. He then headed back to the others, who had mostly finished subduing the cornugons and were running into the same problem they did last time - that none of them had good aligned weapons that dealt with their regeneration, so they could knock them down, but couldn't finish them off for good. They used the same method of explaining to them that they were going to cast Disobedience on them, so if they waived their save they would be released of all bindings and free to go. However, unbeknownst to them, these cornugons are not magically bound, merely being paid a fair wage for their employment, so they pretended to accept the spells and teleport away once back up to positive hp, but instead simply headed to the vault rooms to alert the rest of the guards, making the rest of this mission harder than it would otherwise have been. Once they thought they were alone again, they used their various means of flight to get down the tunnels to the vaults. The sniper activated his ring of feather fall and floated down the greased pit to make sure there was nothing down there, only teleporting back up when he neared the bottom and realised this whole complex was inside a floating rock thousands of feet above a magma sea on the elemental plane of fire, neatly explaining why they'd lost contact with the others and even the border ethereal was a little toasty here. Meanwhile the binder took the lead this time, triggering the boulder trap, but with blink still active this was a trivial challenge and she just reappeared behind it and they all watched it roll into the depths. She then blinked into the first small vault. Finding it was underwater, she blinked back again, shook herself off like a dog and told the others, who used disintegration to open up a hole and send the water gushing downwards to wherever the boulder went and retrieved the decanter of endless water from inside. She did the same with the second one, which was empty, but had the anti-magic effect from a preserved beholder eye inside activated by motion, which deactivated a very large part of her buff effects and prevented her from blinking back out. Fortunately, they heard her scrabbling on the door and the sniper still had enough spell slots left for another disintegrate. Realising that going through each of these little chambers systematically would be a dangerous distraction from their true goal, and being reminded by the glove that the main vault was through another tunnel in the ceiling concealed by an illusion, they started heading up there, with the sniper in the lead again. He peeked down into the main vault and promptly became visible, as Vlindarian the beholder mage and one of his minions were just below, eyes trained on the opening ready to blink off the anti-magic eye and unleash hell with all the rest since they'd already been informed trouble was on the way. Somehow, he still managed to evade their sight with just his mundane stealth roll (they got a natural 1 on their spot check) and duck back to inform the others by sign language that they'd be going into the big fight here. This once again seemed a good time to call an end to the session, knowing things would go straight into action next time. (and make sure everyone had versions of their characters both with and without all their magical buffs calculated so that wouldn't slow combat to a crawl.) We'll see if the beholders manage to get any lucky shots in with their save or die effects before being annihilated and what challenges they'll face trying to get out again next session.</blockquote>

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