Lichhanger

Our last 4e session ended on quite a cliffhanger.  The short story - the party split up.  One member of the party woke up a lich precisely as the other two party members were breaking into the temple treasure room and triggering its magical guardians to spring to life.  And that is when we called it a night :)

Earlier in the evening Beautiful Bob bathed in the pool of light at the base of the radiant energy waterfall manifest between two colossal stone statues guarding the entrances to two temples.  One temple contained a peaceful new cult of the river god, worshiping the party's old friend Akili as a new incarnation of the river's spirit.  The party's stay there was more or less uneventful, although Beautiful Bob did plant a few seeds in Akili's head about learning to control and harness her new-found godlike powers.

Exploring the other temple proved much more exciting.  Right after a tense encounter that used some of the party's daily powers the party split up.  I should not forget to mention that a giant stone disc was slowly closing the entrance to the temple (the party triggered a trap in the entrance hallway), coinciding with the slow opening of a portal to a nightmare dimension populated by the Bati-Bati (orb creatures from another reality that warp the minds of all who behold them until they pluck out their own eyes).  I told the party they estimated about 10 minutes until the temple was sealed in completely.  There was some discussion of whether the party was still going to be able to teleport out of the temple if it was sealed and the general consensus was that no one knew.  They forged on ahead.  Bob had made a couple of tiny clones of himself earlier that were keeping an eye out on the long tunnel to Bati-Bati world and exploring the labyrinthine crypts below the temple.

 Tilia went down to the magically sealed iron door at the end of the long hand carved tunnel to the south-east of the crystal ritual chamber where they fought the animated giant-boar heart and entrail-mouthed abomination just a few moments earlier and opened it on her own.  Hammer and Bob were checking out the rooms to the north-west when Bob figured out that the large wooden double doors at the end of the hallway were magically trapped and wanted to explode.  Bob then scried beyond the door and saw the temple treasury, gems and gold and residuum.  This was all that Hammer needed to hear and he charged headfirst at the door.  Which happily exploded in his face.  Right about then Tilia had walked into a room lined with seven niches carved into the walls, six of which contained mummified bodies quickly identified as slumbering arch-liches (although from a divine tradition).  Two large ceramic statues of horned spear wielding temple guardians sprung to life like drunken bottom-heavy tops in the treasure chamber above exactly as Tilia managed to wake up one of the sleeping arch-liches in the lower chamber.

This should be fun!