The Kingdom of Night, fin
The party gets the ministers on the porch yelling back and forth with the crowd in the street, with half the party behind one group and half behind the other, until finally fireworks erupt. One random roll for initiative ruins it all; the crowd wins, and rushes forward, causing the Minister's fireball to not hit the Wizard in the rear of the crowd, leaving him free to fireball the Ministers. After that much damage in the first round, the battle is already half finished. The entire affair ends in the few rounds it takes for Morpheus to show up.
And when he does, a well-placed and lucky Dispel Magic robs him of his best defense: the repulsion field that kept the Barbarian at bay. Absent that, the Barbarian simply ignores the Displacement effect meant to deflect half of all attacks, and chops Morpheus into bits in practically a single round.
The Bard spends the entire battle activating the Disk of the Sun, and complains about it bitterly for weeks afterwards. Even though the light cuts through the darkness, catching the gaseous vampires as they slowly flee to their graves, obliterating them utterly - it just wasn't glorious to spend ten rounds reciting ancient prayers while everyone else was slinging spells and swinging swords.
The party spends the rest of the day dispelling all of the darkness, and then uses magic to dredge the vampire's bodies out of the swamp. The reward is fantastic, and now the entire party has achieved the exalted 10th rank - the second royal rank, rendering them Powers in the world. However, the amount of magic gear is limited - a single Major item (a +5 Ring of Protection) is no longer sufficient to sate the greed of these roving brutes. They head back to Kek to return his borrowed artifact, wondering how much magic he has, or, failing that, where they can find a decent shop selling priceless artifacts off the rack.
