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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sbodd" data-source="post: 6281620" data-attributes="member: 6710971">Thanks for the link, that's precisely what I was looking for.The whole party did survive the Digging for Lies capstone, though it was a close thing (and there could've been 1-2 deaths easily if I'd been playing bloodthirsty).Felix and Pearce barely managed to survive their showdown with the worm.  I had Sijhen hanging back, trying to talk them into letting him leave (and not breaking his invisibility by attacking).  Felix channeled to keep them up, the Thing tossed the golden seal at Pearce (thereby freeing Felix), and then Pearce spent his time trying to track Sijhen with his catfolk scent while Felix occupied the Thing's attention (and started attacking the lanterns).  In the RHC, Elhaida (whose PC was absent) was deemed to be tending to the other RHC members.  Doc fled down to his basement laboratory (mostly shrouded in deeper darkness by the Obscurati assassins), luring the last of the flashing orbs after him; Doc's lab is somewhat legendary in our game, and one of his favorite aspects is the "fire hose of acid".  The orb got a couple of good tentacle whacks in, but the acid hose did it in in just a couple of rounds.  (My made-up-on-the-spot house rule was that the acid hose basically functioned as a free alchemist bomb that dealt only acid damage.)The rest of the PCs in the RHC (this rather baffled me) took off running towards an access tunnel to the rail line (that had been previously established to be ~240 feet away), instead of waiting the 2-3 more rounds for reality to become permeable again.  I was kind and quietly reduced distances so that they only lost a single round of extra time compared to waiting (since "I'm running to get from A to B" is a really boring way to spend combat rounds).Once they got there, events quickly turned in the party's favor.  Tec had his rat deliver a light spell on the still-invisible Sijhen (in hindsight, since Sijhen had no gear, this probably shouldn't have worked.  Ah well.), since his rat could use scent to pinpoint him as well.  This prompted Sijhen to enter combat, but Pearce sneak-attacked him and knocked off most his HP in one blow; it only took him another couple of rounds to down Sijhen.  Felix eventually got taken down by the Thing; Hannah raced in to give him a potion, and got knocked out herself for her trouble.  Felix was conscious again, though, and used his last channel followed by the Yerasol Veteran ability to get them both back up.The rest of the party focused on shattering all the lanterns first (I was narrating each one as causing increasing instability in the "starfield" effect, but was very clear that the net vector of the streaking lights was still the same.)  They were disappointed when shattering the last lantern did not instantly close the portal <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />  Doc finally arrived after the next round of phasing reality, and critted the Thing with an acid bomb; for his trouble, he got grabbed and eaten.  The rest of the party quickly knocked the Thing most of the way through phase 3, and on Doc's next turn he used his last bomb of the day to blow an escape hole out of the Thing, finishing it off.Xambria's consciousness found a willing "roommate" in Hannah (after a brief conversation to establish some ground rules, namely that it's Hannah's body!), which briefly interrupted her efforts to get the rest of the party to put the seal into place, but they were able to lever the golden seal into place with ~3 rounds to spare.  I'd gotten distracted by introducing Xambria's consciousness, and forgot about the explosion that should've happened - Felix was the only party member in real danger from it, and our house rule of "the rest of the party has 1 round to get you above the death threshold" would've kept him alive anyway.Afterward, they tried to trace Saxby's footsteps immediately (her path led to the Strand, then vanished in bloodstains and Bleak Gate energy); there was Delft's promotion, and then Delft's "go get on the train" speech and we called it a night.A few notes:As usual, I buffed basically every enemy, mostly by adding HP; I brought the Thing all the way up to 200 HP, and it worked out pretty well, I thought.The players weren't used to being quite so thoroughly depleted - Felix was totally out of channels, Tec had nothing but cantrips left, Doc and Hannah had both used every bomb they had.  The museum encounter plus the finale is easily the longest set of encounters thus far.  (This was not a complaint, on my part or theirs.)I accidentally skipped the bit with Delft in the final scene; and didn't bother with the 2nd+ waves of Gidim (if I'd had them attack the RHC, there were no PCs left; if they'd gone after the party while they were engaged with Sijhen, it probably would've been a TPK.)I was disappointed that they went straight to "shatter the lanterns".  I'd mentally refluffed them as a bit of a Stargate reference - I removed one lantern so that there were only 7, and each would've been marked with a rune recognizable from the Ancient star map.  Ah well.I was also slightly surprised that they skipped raiding the evidence locker or quartermasters' supplies, but the way things played out, there really wasn't time for them to do so.  They were laser-focused on Sijhen from the get-go, and really only stopped to address the Ob or the other Gidim when they got in the PCs' way.The 20-round timer wound up being tighter than I'd initially guessed it would; it's rare for an encounter to go more than 5 rounds, IME, but the way the party got split up (and the amount of time they spent letting the Thing rage while plinking down lanterns) really increased the duration.All in all, I had a great time running Digging for Lies, and the players had an excellent time as well.  Always on Time will, I think, be a bit of a stretch for me to run - that's a lot of NPCs to keep straight, and a lot of social encountering, but I'm looking forward to it!</blockquote>

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