Soul Engine - Elegy for a Bard

Our heist commenced as planned. Darren and Justine infiltrated the deepest vault and successfully incapacitated Patrice, impersonated her and allowed us to call the bard's forces in for the main distraction. After giving that signal, Penelope and Jeeng proceeded to take out one of the sentry cannons. Once they secured that tower, I unleashed a major image of our friendly ghost dino to draw the other cannon's attention as Darren threw wide the gates, creating mass panic across the camp in tandem. Penelope got off a few good cannon blasts, destroying the other tower and it's cannon. Unfortunately the dino could not run distractions against the aggressive sahagin reinforcements for long. Once they saw through the illusion they raged against Darren and Red while more intimidating creatures made up the cavalry. One flying mechamanticore eventually ripped poor Penny from the tower and dropped her from the sky while the rest of our group struggled to hold back the remaining guards. Just then, a familiar fireball scorched the majority of enemies as well as the arms/supplies building nearby. We took this as Justine's signal to hurry to the engine. Unfortunately Red and I were pinned against the south wall. When Penny recovered from her fall, she came to our aid and trapped the bigger baddies to give us a chance. This also came in handy as the armory exploded in a big ball of fire roasting the remaining roaming guards (minus the hell hounds) As she made her escape, I signaled Red to follow suite. In fact I couldn't have cleared the path without his extra push. To slow the remaining pursuers, Justine flung an ice storm to cover our retreat toward the HQ. Slowly but surely we made our way to the main entrance and planned to finish the trailing enemies in a bottleneck. Dispatching the remaining guards in the vault, we escaped with the engine.
 
We stopped by Lady Maria's dominion for her aid in disarming some souls from the engine, a task which proceeded late into the night with some close calls but by extracting them at a steady pace we were able to leave just a reserve of evil souls trapped within. Knowing the bard would not accept a tampered engine, we asked the lady for additional means to help us subdue him in the inevitable struggle. She provided a single dose of anti necropotency which we planned to inject in him during the exchange. Meanwhile Justine maintained her guise as Canith's Patrice for the meeting and during the conflict but the devious bard had a ruse of his own. We failed to notice a seeming disguising Jeeng's father who switched places with the Bard during the trade and thus did Darren stick the wrong foe with the serum. We stumbled from that rough start as the bard overwhelmed us with a horde of corpses and wil-o-wisps which exploded in our face and healed his zombie dinos. I noticed the wisps trigger and worked with Justine & Darren to destroy it, then repelled the remaining zombies while Jeeng and Penelope handled the puppet master and his colossus. Finally, with the bard on the ropes, I ended him with a holy beam after Penny prevented his escape & Darren prevented him healing again. We made a swift retreat to town to treat the survivors including Jeeng's father and a long lost Connor. After they rested a bit, we gleaned more information about the Bard's most recent dealings, learning that Lea was long dead and replaced by the Scarf leader...