Well, we get down into that room that faces the lake ... in the lake we had 4-6 naga + "Big Fatty" + 2 knight-things and a lich. Off to the side were three SLA-typed casters. Off to the other side another knight and three more naga. At this point, though, it's pretty much over. TPK-Situation.
Post-Mortem and Age of Worms spoilers below
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From the begining of "The Issue": My character got hit with a TDM in the shaft room and lost half his spells, stepped and took a full attack and killed the naga that cast it ... next round hit Mirror Image and walked into the lake where 5 more naga popped up (scorching rays and TDMs) and a melee "knight" stepped up and full-attacked, taking out half the mirror images and getting a few big hits in. The Cleric/Rogue rolled in (losing most of his spells to TDMs), grave strike/SA the knight and I hit him a big one, dropped it as our fighter moved in.
The big worm popped up, went for me, missed on a Mirror Image. We decided that the big worm wasn't something we wanted to play with while 5 TDM guys stripped us to our underwear so we tried to retreat ... Wall of Force blocking retreat. Luckily the rogue has a dwarven earth-master theme and rock-to-mudded the hall so we could squeeze out around the wall.
Take a breath, another knight appears from a side hallway to threaten the cleric and three casters from the other hall. Our cleric seems to have the casters in-hand and the rogue and fighter are on the knight, so I take two rounds to cast Righteous Might and Disrupting Weapon so I can lay about with the hurt (since the only spells I have left up are Wind Walk, Stoneskin, and Heroes' Feast). Next round, three TDMs, one hits the last Mirror Image, another targets the Disrupting Weapon, the last hits me and literally removes every ... single ... spell on my character. The two rounds and 10 spell levels I spent are now wasted and the knight is tearing our melee to pieces, so I run in and lay smack on the knight. (This is where we break, so we decide that we're going to finish off the knight then Recall out and come back prepared to counter the dispel naga on the next session. Next session starts, though, and everything falls apart:
Three naga appear behind the knight and TDM myself and our rogue (but I'm spell-free already by this point). Our fighter pulls back 5' to heal, the knight moves 5' and full-attack drops the rogue, I 5' step, Rage, and full-attack drop the knight. Our fighter moves to engage the caster-undead, the cleric blows one of them away with a Maximized Searing Light.
Then a lich shows up through the wall-of-force (dismissed, I guess) and Power Word Stuns our cleric. WTF, mate, etc. With him is yet another knight. I try to get into the room, but there's a new WoForce between me and the cleric now. I drop out of rage instead and make an Intimidate check against the naga ("You're next.") and pull a Holy Storm to discourage them from rendering me into dogmeat. The GM, at this point, is already feeling a bit of remorse, I think, because the naga pull back from the storm. Our fighter charges the lich and knight and gets 3/4 of his HP blown off by the knight for his trouble.
At this point, we're hosed, welcome to TPK land. I'm all but out of spells, the cleric is stunned for 6 rounds, the rogue is out, the fighter is down to 20hp or so. But the GM role-played it out and the fighter sacrificed himself to become a Knight if the rest of us were left alone.
Half of that happened after I started the thread, since we ended one session before the lich showed up and turned a bad situation into a TPK situation. Right now, the players are up in arms. Logically, in-character, there's nothing on earth that will get us back in there without an army at our backs. Meta-game, we know that this is "the module" and unless we "win" for whatever reason we're not going to finish the campaign.
We need arcane magic, but these are the characters everybody has been playing from 1st level. I volunteered to retire my character and bring in an arcane caster, but the players are already tired enough of the "Video Game Mentality" of this and the last module of constant dungeon-pounding monster-fighting and nobody wants to continue if we have to retire characters we've nurtured for 14 levels because the module "demands" a certain character load-out.
It's become a serious problem. The last module, by the end, we were just going through the motions: "Oh no, another trap, oh no, more monsters that mysteriously appear, oh no, another trap with attendant monsters ... oh ... more traps and monsters ..." this one doesn't seem to actually have any sort of real ties to the plotline ... as far as the plot goes, it's akin to being dropped into a room full of monsters and saying: "We'll let you out when you kill all the monsters." and that's it. No recourses. The whole world is open as our oyster, but all plotline doors have been closed until, apparently, some video-game-styled trigger is hit by our "winning" the dungeon.
We could have got a caster, but the GM decided to take our fighter off to the side to Role Play the encounter of self-sacrifice, so the rest of us figured he'd been Dominated. We launched an ethereal rescue mission ... snuck in through the walls, touched the body and got out. So we've got a fighter again, but now he's a level behind everybody, which is going to exacerbate problems.
But, oh well, we probably won't be needing to put Silence in a tanglefoot bag now. One player wants to spend a month of game sessions role-playing out building an army to crush the dungeon. For my part, I figure we could go in and assassinate the lich and be done with it and maybe that'll "trigger" the next module, which I've heard from my old group is pretty different from these two.
--fje
