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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Psion" data-source="post: 119215" data-attributes="member: 172">Well it might be worthwhile to post a micro summary of what actually did happen.The party boarded the ship, and discovered the letter that planted most of the seeds. One of the slaves on board mentioned a creature near his hometown that could help them with locating some of these ancient lairs.The party went south through the major mountain range of the setting and one of the lookouts notices a mountain hovering in the air. They go to investigate and notice more of these floating mountains growing out of peaks. They also spot a valley beneath them with a flurry on inhabited floating mountains in it.The party sends their invisible elven rogue with boots of flying to investigate. She quickly discovers that the Asherake and the Drakarians have pretty well scoured these mountains and this seems to be their base of operations. The rogue retreats.The party continues bearing south in search of the dwarven keep that they learned of when they used the soul magic in the vault of the high mages in the elven city. They find it, but the Dwarves initially mistake them for Asherake, and are on the defensive. They eventually convince the dwarves they are not allied with the Ahserake and learn that the portal that they seek is, in fact, within an ancient human temple that was carved out of one of the mountain peaks.They explore the cursed temple, and complete adventure idea 6 as described above. They explore the temple, figure out that there are seven shrines dedicated to various deities, many of which have helpful magic. The paladin has an intelligent sword inspired flashback that relates how the temple was lost -- a paladin slew a lich and took its phylactery, and returned it to the temple as a sign of his deed. However, the lich brought death and mayhem to the temple and corrupted it. The paladin said a prayer to his deity that his mistake would not endanger the world, and embedded his sword in the altar, which became a holy ward that trapped the lich within. The catch was that if the players took the sword, the lich would be released... and it just turns out that this lich is a clerical lich devoted to none other than Idan, the evil deity of Drakar. Letting him get loose would be a bad idea.The party solved the riddle and did a very good job of making sure that the lich was erradicated (the lich was a 13th level cleric / 4th level warpriest half-fiend lich.) They took out his physical form, but had enough sense to check to see if the magic holding the lich there was still in force... and it was. It turned out that the lich's phylactery was in the hilt of a sword the party found, and he hoped that would be his key to escaping the temple. But they managed to destroy the phylactery.Anyways, after that, they found that the gate they sought was the arena of the temple, but it required a ritual by a priest of one of the attached shrines to open. This seemed to satisfy them, and they moved on to find such a priest (they didn't think about the fact that this in no way impeded Drakar's intent to use the gate... if they need to transport the kaiju/pantaguron using this gate, they still can.)After that, they teleported back to the ship, and accompanied the free slaves back to their homeland to see if they can get more information. They parked the ship, and moved on to the village where the kid mentioned the creature that could help them. It was an Amberjuron, an ultra-intelligent owl with a memory like a steel trap; it filled them in on some missing facts about the pit of souls and the Kaiju/PantaguronWhen they went back to the ship, it was gone. One of the remaining crewmembers was on the make (and is, in truth, a Verman Corrupter from Mythic Races) and tried to sell it.The party didn't know what was up. They headed to the local city, something which I did not expect them to do. They saw two airships (one which looked suspiciously like their own, but they didn't make the connection) moored floating next to a tower on cliffs overlooking the city. They started to look to see if they could find a priest that would help them, and ran into a Drakarian guard in town who recognized him. They chased him down and got some information out of him.So they teleported to the ship and where surprised to see one of their former crewmember talking to a robed man holding a staff with two fairies improsoned in a container on the top. The paladin detected evil on the robed man and his staff, so the party charged him. The former crewmember turned around and stabbed the guard.(The robed man was a biomancer, a prestige class with a penchant for using living creatures as components; he was carrying a staff of frost that used frost faeries as fuel. I meant to make this class but didn't have time; it turned out not to matter as they aced him before he could act.)They where suspicious of their former crewmember (and rightly so). The plopped him on their rug of truth that they found in the shrine of a god of honor and questioned him. He explained that after they left, the Drakarians arrived and took over the ship; he played along for his survival. The party bought it.In truth, the crewman (as I mentioned) is a Verman and was offering to sell the ship to the biomancers; he made his save versus the zone of truth effect. The other ship the party saw their WAS a Drakarian / Asherake ship, but the Biomancers rebuked their advances (unbeknownst to the party.) But the other ship had since departed.The party gathered a crew and headed towards the pit of souls. That's about where we put up.I'm thinking when they get to the pit of souls, I'll try to make it a race against a similar Drakarian team to get the books from the pit of souls, somewhat like Indiana Jones in the Raiders of the Lost Arc trying to get the arc before the Nazis did. I was going to rob some encounters from the Demon God's Fane (considering my distaste for time travel, I will never run it as it) and throw your Demon Locust idea in for encounters.If they party is unlucky, they may even run into one of the three imprisoned demon lords that live there. After beating a lich, I get the idea that I am going easy on them. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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