Wheeeeeewwww! Tore through about half of the fourth level.
I'm thinking trolls make good foot soldier types for dungeon dwelling evilness. They're turning into speed bumps for the players.
Let me back up and start from the beginning. The PCs were fleeing from the bandits on the second floor. They had beaten a fighting retreat back across the unfinished tunnels in the second level. I had the bandits give up the chase at the stairway going back into the third level.
The team then found a room of gargoyles (almost too easy) and got lost again. The mapper actually made one tunnel too short and so he had two of the same area. He didn't notice until they hit the steps again.
They found the big dragon lair but pretty much just turned around and went the other way. The scenery scared them off.
Then we start onto the fourth level. A new mapper had taken over and the team found their way along to the sarcaphagus room. The troll was a speed bump but the temple guardian thingy was a good fight, mostly because it was new and they didn't think it would go *fwoosh* like it could. Also, it started flipping those sarcaphagus lids off, making the fight interesting.
But, interesting was still rather light for the team, and they pressed on. They made it straight ahead to the big temple room. Here they had trouble. They got bottlenecked at the end of the hallway by the wraiths. Then when they went into the room they hit the dread wraiths (immune to the trap's magic effects for the most part). The dread wraiths were a nice surprise for me because the team started getting lax mentally thinking this was going to be an easy fight like the previous room.
Boy, those dread wraiths knocked them out of that frame of mind! I had the spectres move through the walls to box the team into the room threshold. Then I had the Angall priestesses move up in formation. Hit the entire party with shatters, wrecking all kinds of potions and alchemist's fires.
One other thing they blew up was the fire elemental gem that the paladin was carrying. I think that surprised the spectres more then anybody else, as it tore right through them and the last of the dread wraiths.
That was my cue to step up with the head priest dude and start spell casting on the PCs while they tried to get around the priestesses (I changed most of the cult of Angall's gender as it seemed more sinister to have a feminine cult of destruction). I didn't get off as many offensive spells as I might have liked, but I killed two PCs with that maximized flame strike (the cleric and the barbarian).
So without a cleric the bard is almost crippled (Con drainage down to 4 with 12hp). No one can raise the barbarian (and obviously that applies to the dead cleric as well). The two other survivors are the paladin (can't cast restoration) and the fighter.
And all the riches they can carry. They are taking a break in this room for the night. The patrol was killed off a long time ago and they made some traps along the hallways.
They need a plan to carry all this loot past the hornit's nest they stirred up on the top side. They have gathered up a few clues from here and there to discover the tome of Skelos (the object duQuest) was given to someone called "the librarian" who dwells in the library (of course

). They have not recovered this tome and are actually really tempted to abandon quest. (Especially now that they discovered what the throne was made out of). The paladin and the fighter have split the vote with the bard's player taking the week to mull it over.
I also have to figure out how to insert two PCs into the dungeon to replace the guys who died last night. I'm thinking the monk (whom the PCs have not yet encountered) can be replaced with a PC monk and finishes his meditations early. But that still leaves one out. Maybe an escapee from the bandits above?