This was the final session of Elanath's Tower, and of the heroic tier in general. The party was faced with Ctenmiir the Cursed and his minions, and it was a hard battle (with 2 PC deaths), but in the end they were victorious.
They began by opening the way to the observatory, an enclosed dome with a slot for the telescope (closed at the start of the fight) - within, they saw Ctenmiir conversing with five distinctly-styled death knights, their images presented by large scrying pools. The death knights appeared to be the leaders of the Clawed Gauntlet, or at least higher-ranking members. There was a male of a humanoid race in red armor with a bull-horned full helm and black cloak; a female eladrin with solid violet eyes and white armor, face covered by a silver visor; a male drow in gray armor with a black hood shrouding most of his face; a male dwarf in gold armor, wearing a full helm with a visor patterned like a skull and a red crest; and their apparent leader, a male humanoid in black armor wearing a full helm with sharply-pointed horns, his eyes glowing green. Two of these death knights were referred to by name: the eladrin was referred to as Inastara, the eladrin princess who established the mixed elven/eladrin community of Silvershade in Whitebough Forest, and the apparent leader was referred to as Kas. They dismissed Ctenmiir from the Clawed Gauntlet, much to his chagrin as they had apparently promised to remove the curse that prevented him from leaving the tower, and left him to die at the hands of the party.
This proved to be a very difficult battle; Ctenmiir wielded a legendary dwarven warhammer known as Whelm, and he wielded it to great effect, crushing the party members with its every swing. To boot, his dread zombie knights proved to be un-killable (at least by any means the party discovered), returning to life nearly as soon as they had been put down. This battle took nearly the entire session, as Ctenmiir regenerated constantly, and had a very high Armor Class - 31, to be exact. Laz's Brain in a Jar was brought out to help the party about halfway through, but once it was in danger of being destroyed, it fled - its location is currently unknown. Cyrus was brought down despite all manner of healing effort being expended by Deckard, then killed outright when Ctenmiir's attempt to force the party's surrender was rejected - both Shivra & Vorgym went into dying twice, and Shivra failed 3 straight death saves to become the 2nd death of the encounter.
With Cyrus and Shivra both dead and Vorgym dying, the encounter was left to Deckard & Amnon. At this point, I threw them a bone and pointed out something that they had failed to notice to this point - this observatory, windowless and lit only by the magic of the scrying pools, had a slot in its wall for the large telescope within to look out of. This telescope had a switch on it which allowed them to open the slot and expose the room to sunlight - the great weakness of any vampire. Deckard rushed for the switch, flipping it and opening the slot - but the sunlight did not reach Deckard. Ctenmiir, confident in his victory, laughed and prepared to finish them off, when Amnon broke away from the dread zombie knight engaging him and used his beguiling strands power to push Ctenmiir into the light. Real fear crossed Ctenmiir's face for the first time as the sunlight incinerated him, wiping out what little health he had left.
With the battle over, the party took two consecutive extended rests to use Deckard's restore life power on Cyrus & Shivra, keeping the current party intact despite Ctenmiir's best efforts. Cyrus now wields Whelm, a weapon which is outside the spear style he learned to fight with and will take him some training time to get used to - perhaps a time skip is in order...
With the heroic tier finished and all of the party now at level 11, we are now looking at the beginning of paragon tier. There will be some story situations to resolve once the party sets out again; thereafter, I am currently unsure where we will go. We'll be discussing sometime before or after the one-off on Sunday what we want to do going forward.
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