Last session, the party I'm DMing through SCAP decided to enter the Cathedral of Wee Jas after being subject to the assassination attempt and tracing it back to Ike Iverson.
They entered the temple and battled the first batch of guardians in the main hall. Being the "naive" tacticians they are, they attempted to bring down the giants with ranged weapons and spells. Of course the giants were more than happy to stand in the rear and to demonstrate them how well versed they were with thrown boulders, one of which made a rather elegant circular mark 5 inches deep into the chest of the party sorcerer, leaving him stone dead on the ground.
In the end the party managed to kill all the opponents, included the cleric which was trying to run toward Ike in the upper floors, but they were down one member and quite low in both HPs and spells, so they decided to call it a day and ran away from the Wee Jas cathedral toward the cozy safety of Jenya's church.
Now, I'm expecting them wanting to recuperate and assault again the following day, and I'm wondering what should I setup for them.
The first obvious choice is having Ike to replace the dead guardians with some others (assuming he can manage to find them so quickly). The sorcerer assassin escaped alive the battle against the PCs, so he could be a prime choice.
However, I was thinking of some other more indirect ways to hamper the PCs. For instance, Ike could raise loud complaints about the assault with the city guard and try to have it to go after the PCs.
Ideally, I'd like to have the PCs sweat a lot to recover from their error (assaulting the Cathedral with almost no preparation at all), without derailing the story too much from its planned path.
What could you suggest me?
Thanks,
Marco