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Another thought for a rescue mission. How did your group manage with the Bone Shards? Are Sahreg and her toughs still alive? Perhaps now that they’ve had a chance to lick their wounds, they’d be up for joining your rogue and aiding in a rescue mission – and an opportunity to ‘stick it to’ the Three Fingered Hand.

Another possibility is Dakramat, the Empty Threshold congregant that provided Ortagar the information about the Bone Shards lair. To me there’s a possible continuity error with Dakramat’s information. He knew about the poisoning plot, which suggests that he went with Kepgeda to join the Three-Fingered Hand at the brewery, but he gives Ortagar’s interrogators the location of the Bone Shards lair instead of the brewery. In my game I’ve rationalized this that the torturing process made him somewhat incoherent and in his fog of sublime pain provided the location for the Bone Shards.

At any rate, for the purposes of your story, Dakramat could have now recovered enough to realize that he gave Ortagar and the acolytes the wrong location. He might even know the basic layout of Kepgeda’s lair and where prisoners might be located. If recovered enough, he might also volunteer for the rescue mission (as part of his painful absolution) – presenting other rescuers as new recruits to get deeper into the facility and break the other PCs free.

Thanks for the advice, I wanted the dust to settle to see how it would play out before I replied.

So first things first: Here’s what I did; the rogue left with the body of the wizard and basically ran straight to Berline’s. I’ve been playing Berline as kind of happy-go-lucky, plucky, overly excited to hear of the adventurers exploits. But she doesn’t abide failure. I’ve been playing Majordomo Mhyurk as reserved and snide. A ghoul with pride. He doesn’t miss a chance to off handedly insult the party but always with deference to Berline and the party as her employees.

The Tyrant, Thaumaturge and Bones Oracle went down. I added just basic zombies as additional troops that were the ruffians and servers of the bar: so 4 more zombies.

So we jump to the party being tortured, all of them unarmed and unarmored. Chained to Pesgahi’s wall in his room. With the front entrance being now unguarded (book says Kepgeda will just lock herself in and ignore anything, while raising more zombies everyday to guard her)

Pesgahi interrogates the thaumaturge mummy first. And he asks them who they’re working for. It must be one of the factions seeing as Osiriani burial rites and raising is unusual in and of itself. The thaumaturge wanted some payback so mumbles. Pesgahi can’t hear him so the mummy in his gravelly voice tells him to come closer. On a successful diplomacy check he does so. And gets close enough, not thinking the former gnome dhampir mummy is a threat, to bite him. I allow it. And the thaumaturge Crits, while restrained. I have him bite Pesgahi’s ear off. As he prepares to torture them for real.

I had a poison for the thaumaturge mummy that when stabbed would inject a poison of a land he wasn’t bound to make him clumsy and flat footed for 10 minutes.

For the tyrant stupefied 2 so he couldn’t iron command.

And for the bones Oracle paralyzed so she couldn’t perform somatic components for spells. If it got that far.

Jumping back to Berline, I had the Majordomo, carrying the dead wizard up to Berline’s office. She has already revived one player, and they are in debt to her already. I asked the wizard if he wanted his character revived. He came up with a psychic and wants to play that, so Berline has the rogue throw the body onto a tarp laid out in the office so the blood doesn’t get on her rugs. The rogue lays the body down and Berline snaps about following commands to the letter of her instruction. She said THROW the thing down. Not set it. Berline decides to raise the corpse as a zombie to work the estate. To remind the players should they return the price of failure.

Now at the end of the book it makes note of Glorinsa’s lack of aptitude at being a charge hand and her now being a brand new zombie. I accelerated that. And had Berline lead the rogue to the windows overlooking the estate yards and point out Glorinsa the very fresh cut across her throat and the stitching Job done to seal it, with the new charge hand leading Glorinsa in tending to some flowers telling the rogue, “as lenient as I’ve been with you, I think you sometimes forget who I am. Remember, failure has its own price. To play in the great game you must be ready and able to sacrifice anything. I expect, this time, you will take me much more seriously when I say ‘do not return until you’ve corrected the problem of the poisoning of my city’.”

She gave them 5 vials of “exp potions” that will let them just hit 4 right before Kepgeda. I don’t allow spell slot taking and “full resting” in this way. It’s simply slightly more HP and more AC.

Berline states the potions are extremely expensive and came from some of the greatest alchemists in Absalom. This is essentially what my Edgewatch GM did. So I thought it a nice tie in to that campaign (we rotate books off so GM’s get to play).

Berline states that she now owns them, any faction play, espionage and all that, any jobs for anyone else, that information will be fed to the Exporter’s guild.

Jumping back to the others I continue them being tortured. Wearing down the bones Oracle, taunting the tyrant with his weakness. Offering to let the bones Oracle go, telling her he’d allow her to help them in perfecting the “formulae” if she’ll only give up who she’s working for. As he begins to prepare the poisons for each - this part is dependent on how fast the rogue and new psychic can get back after a long rest.

Right before he stabs the land-based poison into the mummy they’ve snuck back and cracked open the door. The 3 are still chained to the wall.

Rogue and psychic bust in grab the key, the rogue holds off Pesgahi, and the psychic begins unlocking everyone from their manacles (grabbing keys was interact, striding and 2 actions 1 for each set of manacles). Pesgahi gets to half health and flees and begins to form up the zombies from his lab to defend him. Everyone grabs their weapons, having no armor stride in and start getting busy. They came out victorious without armor.

And and so, tl;dr to make a very long post short: they said they liked it, it was thematic, they had to work for it, it wasn’t given to them and felt like an “appropriate” punishment given the lack of planning but was much better than just wiping them out.

To answer your previous questions about backstory weaving in:

The thaumaturge’s mom was a servant of Urgathoa. I was beginning to weave that in, she performed a ritual to imbue the child with monstrous undead power. With his dhampir bloodline the hope was to create a truly living undead. All of the vampires strengths none of its weaknesses - of course it failed. She died. He became a living vessel from dark archive. An eldritch horror now possesses him from one of the outer realms of which they only have the name “The Endless” very much stolen from Daeran and WoTR.

The Wizard, now deceased, has his family from a northwestern silver mine. Minor aristocrats. He was being groomed to take over, but was betrayed and essentially accused of Pharasma worship. He received a letter early in the story telling him to take care, that, “they know you’re in the city, but Berline’s protection should still their hand for now.” And it was signed “The Gravebound.” I had decided pretty early on to have a group of quick Pharasma worshipping dissidents essentially trying to manipulate the great factions behind the scenes. He received a broach pin made of silver, in the worked form of a silver mine entrance covered in blood with a numerical code on the back. It of course unlocked another closed lock box in the bank. It contained a contract detailing half the sale of an unnamed silver mine in exchange for lucrative grain trade deals across the inner sea. The problem was the money doesn’t add up. Nor did the weights of every 5 shipments. Further investigation revealed that the deal was really a way to smuggle powder arms from alkenstar into Geb. The buyers of said weapons are unknown. The sellers of the mine of course, are the wizards family. Additionally, in tylegmut’s writings I included the pharasmin dissidents, specifically called out as the Gravebound as secretly manipulating all the factions.

The Oracle I had roughly outlined as her lineage originating from what is now Oprak. Her family having fled to Geb for serving Tar-Baphon explaining her powers and why a Hobgoblin farmer with necromantic Oracle powers lives in Geb. I was going to tie that in later on with a Plot among the blood lords…somehow.

Tyrant and Rogue are relatively new and haven’t had much of a chance to tie them in yet.

Sheesh. Sorry for long post. But all things turned out well. No hard feelings among the group I don’t think and everyone lived besides the one who wanted to roll up a new character.

Looking for a bit of help on what to do.

I’m running book 1 as is, but have been tying background lore and character arcs in things as I go along to be more fully explored in the next 2-4 books.

Well, the party entered the tavern. The barkeep was able to survive long enough to warn the back room (says female ghoul flees and attempts to warn back room if two of the tavern ‘front’ enemies go down). Party moves into the brewery area. And the zombie brutes broke the gate down since combat was occurring within line of sight of them.

So they had to fight the brewery ghoul and two ruffians AND all the zombies out of the weakened gate.

They did that. The last ruffian went and warned Pesgahi and Pesgahi attempted to flee. Before I could use his first action on the next turn (he strided out of his rooms twice, got to the entrance to his door and threw a bomb) the party had cleared out the zombies. So now it was essentially the time to end combat. For them to regroup, maybe understand they were running low on resources and decently hurt.

The wizard however walks up and attempts to gouging claw, even when I asked, “are you sure? Pesgahi is a named enemy.” Said, “f@*# it, we ball.” And walked up point blank to him, missed the gouging claw, and then it cycles through the initiative.

Now at this point I could’ve probably stopped it, but I also told the group I’m running most of these combats straight. They know, given how easy the farm was, and how easy the hideout was (I have 5 players not 4) but they struggled in the bank and had to retreat from there twice (unlucky trap perception/stealth roll instagibbed and killed our thaumaturge - who, for him, luckily enough had been working for the corpse tenders. And his father was high ranking. The party was able to persuade berline to resurrect him as a mummy and not zombie benefitting his osiriani beliefs on death). So the bank was difficult.

Pesgahi goes, paralyzes him with a bite, and Crits him on that. Drops him. The thaumaturge and others begin to move in to save the wizard. Instead of attempting to grapple or shove or drag the dying wizard away they walk into the room and attempt to engage Pesgahi.

At this point, I have to played it straight. The rogue realizes this is all f@*!ed and has been playing her character (ruffian racket) as survival at all costs, succeeding the mission at all costs.

Pesgahi fights to the death, he begins to get surrounded and backs off to unlock the dirge Piper zombie while he orders the last remaining ruffian to essentially die for him. Pesgahi orders the plague zombies in his workshop to move forward and act as a wall.

The wizard has died due to another crit, he can be resurrected at this point by berline but he will owe her even more favors. But everyone else is up. But they continue to fight. The thaumaturge gets surrounded by zombies and they’re fighting them off. The rogue has drug the dead wizard back far enough, to where she can get into combat after hitting Pesgahi once. Instead of turning on her, I have him keep attacking the downed wizard to kill him. Eliminating the intruders that have so brazenly attacked the Three fingered hands hideout.

Long story short, they could have all retreated a bit, even losing the wizard, but they do not, now I’ve downed the thaumaturge and tyrant and the bones Oracle is about to go down with the rogue retreating with the wizards body.

What should I do?

I was thinking about having the rogue take the body to berline, having him revived as a ghost possibly, or zombie. Having Pesgahi torture and experiment on those who are now downed and having the rogue run a rescue mission to at least free them, and they’d have to fight a 4v1 against Pesgahi unarmored and unarmed. But they could do it. They just chose to keep walking in. They didn’t play it smart but I want to avoid the TPK if possible.

It definitely caused some tension, because the rogue assumed everyone else saw this going south and would back out with the Champion tyrant holding the line. I was going to make Pesgahi slam and lock the door even when the wizard went down initially. But the others strided into the room. Basically guaranteeing their deaths if that happened (the key is in his bedroom). Book says he spends half the day in his bedroom on bodies, other half in his laboratory. So I decided morning afternoon bedroom/ afternoon night in his lab. They went and did shopping to prep for the incursion but it was still early enough to have not rolled over and him moved.

I’m feeling like a bad gm, but I did say, “are you sure? This is a named enemy” and “you could always drag wizard away and attempt to end combat” hoping they wouldn’t stay in the room. But they did. I don’t want the TPK and I could tell by the mood and partially blaming the rogue for fleeing with Wizard’s body that they are not happy.

And rescuing/1v4ing Pesgahi is the best I can come up with