The two fighters immediately engaged the apes and ignore the "Fighter in the face" rule for dealing with casters. Daen decides to soften them up first, so he dispel magics the giant dwarf.
Poof! All of the dwarf's potions stop working. The sorcerer (who doesn't fight liches, and thus doesn't know their weaknesses) throws a cold orb. The lich catches it in his hand, laughs (I made him sound like Skeletor, if you're old enough to know whom I'm talking about), and casts...
Dispel magic on the sorcerer. Now the sorcerer's protections go down, except for protection from energy (cold).
Chain lightning from the sorcerer doesn't do much to the lich, but hurts the zombie apes.
The fighters are now focused on the two remaining apes.
Daen casts Evard's black tentacles. Now everybody's stuck.
Daen then continues to soften up our heroes with crushing despair, wave of fatigue, and even bane. Then, for kicks, he casts cloudkill around himself.
The PCs finally manage to make it out of the tentacles and finish off the apes in the interim. But they can barely move, having become exhausted from getting out of the tentacles. In the mean time, the sorcerer keeps trying and failing to use dispel magic against Daen to get rid of his lesser globe of invulnerability.
The human fighter breaks free first and goes straight for Daen. Daen hits the fighter with his animate blood touch attack and SPLAT! The human fighter becomes a tomato smear on the ground as his blood explodes out of his body.
The dwarf fighter rushes in next, but he suffers Constitution damage every round he's near the lich. With a handful of hit points remaining, he hightails it out of the room.
Psywarrior shows up (just in time!). Daen decides this is a good time to unleash his cone of cold, which the remaining two PCs survive (while the dwarf is jugging potions outside). Then he animates the fighter's corpse for kicks, which the psywarrior quickly puts down.
Daen adds antilife shell to his defenses. However, the sorcerer gets his own Evard's black tentacles off.
Now Daen's stuck there. They can't hurt him, but Daen can't move. He struggles to break out of the tentacles, screaming and cursing them and promising horrible deaths.
Finally, Daen breaks free. It's now been so many rounds that his 1 round/level spells are dropping. He decides to "go get" his artifact, the Bell of Leviathan, that will allow him to bring more minions in, who are obviously far too stupid to find their way into his sanctuary on their own (the vampire caused several strategic cave-ins and Daen's minions were slowly digging their way to their master).
At this point, we started making jokes that this battle would become a knife fight between two spellcasters. The sorcerer is now out of spells: he can't use cold, he can't use electricity, he can't cast anything lower than third level that will work. The psywarrior isn't about to engage the lich and can't get near him anyway while he's in his cloudkill.
But the (re) enlarged, healed dwarf is back and ready for action.
The sorcerer stands before the lich at the edge of the cloudkill radius. Then, and only then, does the lich use his touch attack. He grabs the sorcerer by the throat, paralyzing him.
But Evard's black tentacles were in effect long enough to get rid of Daen's stoneskin. His defenses are down!
The dwarf dropped the lich in one shot.
