Sterling said he would be able to make it for this one, albeit 2 hours late - never showed up, so we NPCed his character for the duration. Had a lot of lag problems as well. To the recap...
The party got into combat pretty quickly, finding themselves facing a number of troglodytes at the end of the gray stone door wing of the vault. The room also contained a platinum-embossed pouch on a pedestal. The party fought the troglodytes, and things went rather well at first - until Vorgym was struck with the troglodyte curse chanter's dead-eye gaze, and fell unconscious, leaving him open to coup de grace attacks from the troglodyte thrashers. This was the first in a series of horrible dice rolling incidents: Vorgym failed multiple attempts at saving against the unconscious effect, and despite the party's efforts to keep him alive, he nonetheless went into dying and only managed to escape the unconscious effect by being revived after going into negative health. The rest of the party wasn't too severely injured, but a number of saving throw failures painted a foreboding picture of what was to come...
With Vorgym's healing surges depleted and not enough time having passed since their last extended rest, the party soldiered on - I gave them a break, due to lag concerns, and moved them past the trap room without incident this time. They used the pouch, which turned out to be a Pouch of Platinum, a magical item allowing the party to convert any amount of gems or coins placed into it into an equal value of platinum pieces, to get past the steel door they'd found last session. On the other side of the steel door, they found a great hall with a number of dwarven statues carved into the walls, and a number of stone thrones guarding another pair of smaller gray & yellow stone doors. In this room were more troglodytes: a temple champion, two deepscourges, a number of grunt minions, and an otyugh which emerged from a hole in the center of the room - likely the entry point the troglodytes had used, though no one knows what exactly made the hole. The encounter began immediately.
This encounter, unlike the previous one, was designed to be brutal, and normally it would've been rough, but not a party-killer - unfortunately, a combination of the party's bad luck on the previous encounter, and continued bad luck in this encounter, led to what probably would've been a TPK without a healthy bit of "divine intervention". More saving throws were failed, particularly death saves - I gave Vorgym an extra chance, and he still managed to die. The rest of the party probably would have joined him, had it not been for my decision to relent and stack the odds in the party's favor, to the point of turning a critical failure on an attack into a successful attack. It's something I will likely not do again, and I'm not proud of having to do it this time, but with how horrible the dice were in this session something had to give - either we were going to have our third TPK or I was going to have to pull a number of life-saving DM decisions out of my ass. I opted to go with the latter this time.
So this is where we stand: I've allowed the party to extended rest under the pretense that they were so utterly beaten up last encounter that they more or less passed out, and Vorgym is dead, though the intention is to resurrect him. Our session for next week is still scheduled to happen as normal, though this may be subject to change as holiday plans are made - keep me posted on your availability please, everyone. Either then or the next week we have people available, I have a few ideas for how to approach keeping Andrew involved:
1) If Sterling does not show, Andrew will play Seamus.
2) If Sterling does show, Vorgym may become a "ghost" for the time being, and be allowed to help the party in a limited fashion.
3) Keeping with the ghost theme, I may have Vorgym possess Misha, if Deckard finds this permissible.
4) Alternatively, if Andrew would be interested in playing a new character instead of resurrecting his old one, I may be able to figure out a way for this to be worked in.
Those are the possibilities I'm currently considering, let me know what you think guys. See you all next Wednesday (hopefully)!
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