An Old Friend and an Epic Quest

Finally ascending to the top of the tower, the heroes entered a room that looked exactly as it had 15 levels ago, when they first met Stephen. There, he was, once again waiting for them. He offered up the following information and quests.

• After our defeat in the Feywild at the last war council, I took the badly injured Sephora to the Lady Tiandra’s palace. There, after much nursing and healing, she recovered enough to tell us everything she had found out.
• No ordinary demon or devil is behind the Darkness. Acererak and Vecna have joined forces to plug the whole of creation into eternal darkness. Acererak wants the bodies of the dead and Vecna the souls. We should have seen this, as long, long ago Acererak was Vecna’s apprentice.
• As things stand now, a stalemate exists on most planes. The forces of light have risen and made inroads, but only because the Darkness was caught unaware. Things are again begun to shift toward Darkness, after all, how do you fight an enemy that uses your own dead against you?
• The plan is simple if you agree to continue to help us.
• Defeat Acererak and Vecna. While it sound simple when you say it fast, both have been thought defeated in the past.
• Acerarak is the more easy of the two to destroy. Find his phylactery, destroy it, and then defeat him in combat. Through much divination, we believe there are three massive gemstone statues, in the base of his tower, that together act as his phylactery. It will likely be easier to destroy him first, then the statues, as it will take him several days to reanimate from them.
• Vecna, being a god, is far more complicated. To truly defeat him, you must recover and destroy his hand, eye, and heart, before confronting him.
• His hand is attached to the stump of your oldest adversary, Damakos.
• The eye is lost deep in the Underdark. The Goddess Lolth and the God that Crawls, Torog, search and battle for it.
• Finally, the heart of Vecna lies in the chest of Osterneth, the Bronze Lich. The very one that escaped from the prison from which you rescued Rard.
• To destroy them will require you to first obtain an extremely dangerous artifact, The Bag of Annihilation. Placing any magical item in it will completely destroy it, releasing all of the magic contained within the item in a massive arcane blast. The Githyanki Lich Queen Vlaakith has it in her possession. She is a vile creature who hopes to become the Goddess of the Githyanki. She has built her palace in the Githyanki capital, Tu’narath, in the Astral Sea, on the corpse of a long forgotten god. She uses the magic released from each artifact to wish herself one step closer to Godhood.
• The final step will be to discover a way to infiltrate Vecna’s domain, Z'ha'dum and defeat him there.
• It was my intent to send you against Acererak first, but I have been informed your little friend, Fordham, has gotten into trouble with the Githyanki and is now their prisoner. I understand loyalty to ones friends, it’s what makes us so different from those who languish in the dark.
• To that end, I have contacted the Githyanki Warlord Zetch’r’r. He is a member of the Sha’sal Khou, a radical group that seeks to reunify the Githyanki and Githzeria races and create a united nation of Gith. He is making arrangements to sneak you into the city.
• You will have several days to rest/train/research here at the Tower. I suggest you make good use of it.

Level up to 20
All magic items are upgraded to be level 20 or lower. Since most of the players are unimpressed with a lot of the magic items available to them, this was an easy way to get their items up to the level they should me.
More information regarding Vlaakith and the Githyanki will be posted shortly.

I will add, when writing up the information above, which pretty much outlines their entire epic tier, I consulted 2 hard cover books, an old dungeon magazine, this blog, and the Internet, all in less than an hour.