GoCorral

This session was attended by everyone! Hurray! Held over Google Hangouts using Roll20 as usual.

The Time is Now!

With the phylactery destroyed the next step was obvious, defeat the lich another time and kill him forever. The party thought a little bit and then realized, the lich had probably not recovered his spells from their previous fight yet! He’d had no opportunities to rest or to peruse any backup spellbooks he might have. Right now was the best time to strike!

Hektor loaded up his only scrying spell and prayed that it worked. It did! Hektor located the lich in the giant room that the party kept teleporting past every time they went into the Lich Shade. The room filled with wights that turn people to stone, gigantic pillars made from skeletons, and huge monstrosities formed from dozens of zombies slapped together. There had also previously been some sort of undead lieutenant commanding the zombie monsters and the wights, but the party had killed him during one of their previous battles.
The lich was in that room talking to the wights. The scrying spell did not reveal the zombie monsters, but was there any reason to think they weren’t there?

Now, how to engage the lich tactically? Surprise via teleportation would be best, but you can’t teleport into the Lich Shade from outside. Only once you are inside can you teleport around within it. They could walk in through the front door as they have in the past, but that would undoubtedly be guarded.

But what about a recently created hole in the Lich Shade’s defenses? One that the party carved out with disintegrate spells just this morning? Smiling, the party knew what their plan would be.

They teleported to the edge of the Lich Shade’s teleportation interdiction zone. Tagenadi summoned his nightmare mount to make the party ethereal. They floated up to the hole they’d made previously in the side of the Lich Shade pillar. They willed themselves to be corporeal once more. Then Hektor grabbed everyone and teleported down to the corridor just before the bone pillar room.

Showdown in the Lich Shade

The Bane was indeed surprised. He stood in the middle of the room talking with three wights. He held a black foot long crystal in his hand that the party had never seen before. Tagenadi started things off by moving into the room and taking a defensive position next to the giant zombie monsters. Torin threw a fire storm into the room, lightly roasting all the undead. Aldarian moved in for his part of the plan, get swallowed by a zombie monster and die, then kill it from within with his fiery phoenix rebirth. Eathirilu began summoning some dinosaur allies. Amalius was too low on power points for extended offensive firepower. He settled on a big risky play instead. He moved into the room and readied a retrieve to hit the black crystal the Bane held whenever it began to leave his sight.

Tagenadi gave one of the zombie monsters a good smack, but they were simply too large to take down with normal weapons. The zombie monsters moved to engage. Tagenadi’s defenses stonewalled them and Aldarian was grappled just as he planned.

Something unexpected happened. The Bane shouted out, “EVERYONE! TAKE THEM DOWN!” As he did so, the two bone pillars in the front of the room detached from their positions and moved towards the party. A great shaking could be heard from the back of the room and two more pillars moved into view. The room collapsed behind them as they no longer held the weight of the Lich Shade up over that section of the room. Cracks appeared in the ceiling and sand began to pour in.

The closer two pillars flanked Tagenadi. From their skeletal masses extended giant spears composed of hundreds of leg and arm bones sharpened to a wicked point at the end. The points jabbed through Tagenadi, severely wounding him, then retracted back into the pillars.

The party realized that fighting the lich with his army at his side may have been a mistake.
Torin threw up a wall of stone to block out one of the further bone pillars from engaging. The Bane’s response was to trap Torin within a maze spell. The Bane then moved to take cover behind the newly created stone wall. As he left Amalius’s line of sight, Amalius activated his readied spell. His psionic energy coiled around the lich’s dark crystal trying to take it away from its master. The crystal defended itself, sending a telepathic shock back along the psionic connection. Amalius lost his focus on the world around him and took a few seconds to recover.

Eathirilu’s summoning finished. Four tyrannosaurs materialized in in the midst of their undead enemies. Eathirilu moved into the room and took on the form of an ankylosaurus. He cast animal growth on himself and his new pets and then ordered them to attack. Three of them engaged the same zombie monster, weakening it. The fourth was in range of the Bane. It chomped down on the lich and snagged it in its toothy maw.

The undead converged on the party and the dinosaurs. The dinosaur holding the Bane was slain and dissipated. Another dinosaur could not resist the calcifying effect of the wights and began to turn to stone. Tagenadi retreated against the undead onslaught. Hektor used an acid fog spell to lock two zombie monsters out of the combat.

The Bane struck back. He cast a high level version of dispel magic on Eathirilu. Thirteen of Eathirilu’s fifteen buff spells were stripped away from him and reformed themselves on the Bane. The Bane was now all but impervious to elemental damage, immune to grapple, had thicker armor, faster movement, and took on the form of an ankylosaurus. Feeling naked, Eathirilu backed off and started another summoning spell to create a living wall between the party and the undead.

Meanwhile, within one of the zombie monsters, Aldarian had pulled out his dagger and slit his wrists in order to die faster. Surrounded by zombies that tore at his flesh, his life blood poured out. He felt the familiar darkness come on. Soon he could return. But then a black hand reached out and clutched his soul. There would be no return from this death. The corpse gatherer had him in its grasp and only the end of its unlife would free Aldarian now. Aldarian’s soul screamed as he became part of the beast attacking his friends.

Amalius felt his friend’s anguish through their telepathic bond, but he could do nothing. With only enough power points left for a dimension door he readied the spell to get anyone out of danger or for a hasty retreat if necessary.

The Bane and his three wights left the party’s vision for a different part of the room. Eathirilu summoned a triceratops to block the undead advance. Now, the party’s only hope for victory was the return of Torin from the Bane’s maze.

Torin did not come back through the maze. He found his own way out by summoning a coutal to shift him back to the material plane. From there he teleported to the edge of the Lich Shade. He walked inside the teleportation interdiction zone, then chanced a teleport to the steps of the dungeon underneath the giant stone pillar of the Lich Shade itself. It worked! He ran down the steps and rejoined his allies. Torin’s heals kept the triceratops alive, but were too late to save the last three tyrannosaurs. Eathirilu, Torin, and Hektor began blasting the undead horde while Tagenadi and the triceratops held the line.

The Bane remerged and pointed his dark crystal at Tagenadi. A spiraling ray of necromantic energy came out of the crystal and wrapped itself around Tagenadi’s head. He felt the lich’s thoughts invading his own and Tagenadi feared he might lose control. Remembering his training, he used his moment of perfect mind maneuver and repulsed the lich’s invasion.

With the Bane revealed, Hektor took his chance. He quickened a true strike and let loose with a disintegrate. Luck was with the party and the attack worked. The lich turned to dust when the green ray struck. The black crystal fell to the floor and rolled out of sight.

The Bane was defeated! But his horde of undead giants continued to assault the party. Fortunately, a good defensive position had already been established. The undead could not break through the triceratops and Tagenadi, and Torin possessed the means to destroy the undead using spontaneous mass cure spells. After a few minutes of channeling positive energy, the monsters were destroyed.

Aldarian returned himself to life and the party surveyed the battlefield. The black crystal was absent along with the three wights. There was some additional creaking and collapses after the bone pillars were defeated. Exploring further into the room makes it clear that the back two thirds collapsed entirely. The cracks in the ceiling continue to emit sand into the building, making a few large piles upon the floor. The structure seemed to be holding together, for now.