Hello all,
I have been running a level 20 epic campaign where the party is trying to defeat a lich who has ruled over a land full of monsters for hundreds of years blah blah blah etc etc. Anyways to make things fun as they have been hunting for the lich's phylactery I also chose to send the Grim Reaper after them since we are using Pathfinder 2e and he has a stat block in that game.
So they eventually discovered a Sphere of Annihilation that I put in the game cause it seemed like fun and the players got an idea. They got a wonderful, terrible idea.
The Grim Reaper followed them to this sphere, then they ambushed him and managed to shift the Sphere over to him and annihilated him utterly. Unfortunately they also destroyed themselves in the process. It is a party of seven and four of them were fully annihilated, two are out of range and have survived, and one has attempted to use dimensional anchor on themselves and is hoping that in my benevolence I will allow him to survive. He is also the one who killed everyone by moving the Sphere in the first place.
Does anybody have any ideas on what to do now? While we are all fine with the party dying, I would like to reward them for this incredibly creative solution not punish them. We are also so close to facing the lich himself as they had just managed to destroy the phylactery, so I would like to finish the game. Should I have some god save them but at a cost? Maybe the one is tethered finds some way to pull the party out of the Sphere while the players in the Sphere fight the Grim Reaper on the edge of the Abyss or something? Happy to hear suggestions for fun ideas. Anything goes cause they are level 20 and we are a wacky bunch already.
I dunno, if the grim reaper dies, I think all rules about death are up for negotiation, and they died first.
Well the Grim Reaper is a death, but not THE death
Right, but if the bouncer to a bar steps away for a minute, all sorts of folk are getting through.
Hmm yeah you have a point
Or it us just the ferryman escorting spirits of the recently dead to the next place. With none to usher them forward the dead are left wandering. But Death will reform and gather up the lost souls. So the dead of the party now have to find something else to inhabit so they are no longer technically dead. Time to build a mechanical construct? A flesh golem? Or find a few unbaptised newborns to be born again in?
Well in Pathfinder there is a pretty clear delineation between psychopomps and the Grim Reaper so I think we are good there. The SoA actually makes it impossible to revive you so I imagine the soul does not take a normal path into the afterlife and instead gets sucked up by the sphere as well