This session started up right after we destroyed the lich. Being the crusaders for truth and justice that we are, our first thought was, "did it drop any loot?" Checking its remains turned up robes, a staff, a crown, a book (all of them registering as magical), and a mithril, runecarved box. Naturally, we all thought, "phylactery!*" The wizard tried to detect magic (got nothing) and then dispel magic (bounced back on him). At this point I rumbled, Gimli-esque, "well, what are we waiting for?" And had Allistair (the devil) not won initiative and tangled my pick in his rope, I would have indeed taken a swing at it (the DM later told me that I would probably have gotten the Gimli re-enactment in full). Someone else in the party (I forget who) tried opening it, but Allistair kicked the lid shut immediately. Good thing he did, because I (the player, not the character) correctly guessed what was on the inside: a Mirror of Opposition (magic item that creates a murderous clone of you). At this point we decided to take it back to the ship for analysis and destruction. Returning to the water's surface, we found the ship under attack by huge, flying zombie beasties (more of the windghosts we met in the first session). We finished them off (lost a few crew members in the process), and presented the box we suspected to be a phylactery to the captain, who agreed that it was certainly dangerous. The wizard crafted a timed disintegrate bomb, and we took it onto one of the icebergs to set it off. The spell bounced, and the box sprouted legs and started running away. The devil and the wizard quickly recovered it, the devil holding it on the way back. By the time they returned to the ship, Allistair had a bit/lot of a "my precious" mentality about the box. We tried to talk him into letting go of it. He repeatedly refused and tied it to his waist. Here's where my low wisdom kicks in (not counting the Gimli moment, which was intentionally so). I (via a telepathic conference with the officers and the rest of the party) decided that Allistair had to be restrained and the box forcibly removed from him. Cue the wizard hitting him with Otto's Irresistible Dance and the cleric and me trying to grapple him. Not only did we roll horribly, but a couple dozen clones of Allistair suddenly appeared on the deck, mimicking his movements. After a few rounds passed, during which I tried and failed to sunder his rope, the archivist was hit with some voice-wrecking effect, Allistair kept asking what in the Nine Hells was going on, and we had a flood of out-of-character debates about the rules and real-world naval law, we backed off and tried diplomacy again...until the discussion was cut off by one of the clones backhanding the captain overboard. Fatally. They then ordered us all to turn the ship around, head home, leave the box, and leave Allistair. In the ensuing quasi-schizophrenic conversation, Allistair began to warm up to the idea that the box wasn't so nice after all...until his clones possessed him en masse and forced him to flee with the box. The ship's commander and the archivist tagged him with wand blasts, but to little effect. Here's where my intelligence kicks in. I suggested the cleric (remember when I said we had a paladin? He's a cleric now) cast a small miracle to throw an antimagic field around the box. The result? *KA-BOOM* No more box, no more possession. Hopefully, that was the phylactery. The session ended with a very battered devil under arrest and attempts being made to resurrect the captain. The DM said that we had defied his expectations at every turn.
*If the word is foreign to you, it's basically a Horcrux. If you don't read Harry Potter, a phylactery is a lich's key to immortality. If you kill the lich but don't destroy the phylactery, the lich comes back.
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