Game Report: The lamia

The players wait patiently in the corpse room for the floating teeth of the Margrave to appear, and he does, taunting them and guiding them to the next and final room, the Devil Room, which is on the other side of the mansion. They step into the hallway only to walk into an ambush, where a drow arachnomancer and two driders were waiting. The drow cast a web in the hallway to slowdown the character, and they managed to get split in the hallway, the cleric and the doppelganger getting trapped in the corpse room while the casters find themselves right next to the enemies, with only the swordmage to protect them.

The fight drags, with no way to dispel the magic web and the forces split. The party does eventually burn down the enemies, and exhaustedly truck it to the next room, to complete this level of the quest as soon as possible. They find the devil room, which appears to be a suite of some kind. The first room is empty, but in the main area they find a bone mongrel dragon - a hastily put together collaboration of dragon bones – and a pain devil guiding it.

The players charge in, fending off the mongrel’s bone shard volley and dodging the pain devil’s triple flail. Further enforcement found its way into the room, more lower-ranked pain devils and a couple of cambians, humanoids twisted by devils. The doppelganger took enough hits to convince her to leave the combat for a bit, and the swordmage found herself tapped of energy near the end, but after defeating the mongrel they had little trouble clearing the area.

Further in the suite they find a contract to provide forces to the Margrave from a devil named Tarnil, which only remained useful if the Margrave possessed it. They steal this and wait for the teeth to come again. They wait for about ten minutes until it finally arrived, at which point it congratulated them for managing to get all three items, and demand that they give the items to him. The party isn’t keen on it, and manages to fluster the teeth just enough to cause it to offer them one more stop on their quest, further down the hallway.

They continue down the hall to find a small ante-chamber near the back. Inside it is dirty and trashridden, but behind a secret door in the room they discover a lavish little room where a thin, long-haired man sits, who greets them in the same voice the floating teeth spoke in. They also notice that he has a bit of a skin problem, as it would occasionally pulsate and crawl.

It was a lamia, who had taken up residence inside the Margrave’s palace and whiled away his time causing mischief and tormenting the Margrave. He had been the one who was guiding them to steal those three items from the Margrave’s forces, with no real motivation besides the fact that it would be funny. He informs them on facts about the mansion, such as the lich’s missing phylactery, which makes him vulnerable but also relatively unkillable in his current state, and various other forces around the mansion. For a small fee of a 1000 gold coins worth of residuum, it lets them sleep in the opposite room to regain their strength.

After they get rested, and with a few cursory glances back at the creature, they return to the main hall to discover that the skeleton army they had bypassed had taken up guard duty. The phalanxes of skeletons were led by a pair of skull lords, who ordered the minions to attack. The wizard used his walls and area attacks to handle the majority of the army, but some stronger skeletons still managed to slip through the party’s defenses and deal major damage. Combined with the pushing effects of the skull lords, the players had a little trouble keeping the casters alive, but otherwise came out alive. They take a short breather before charging into the central chamber.

Lessons Learned: A good deception is a lot of fun, especially when it goes unnoticed for as long as this one did. They didn’t catch on that the Margrave they were talking to wasn’t the real one until the final moments, making this fun. Also, the doppelganger was proving more and more useless with each combat, and needed a bit of an upgrade if the players stood a chance against the lich.