Between the Sea and a Vampire Cult

[weckar]

Me and my party are in a bit of a bind. I'm a player in this scenario. We seem to have no way out.
We have several interested parties after us requiring us to retrieve a certain corpse from a cave. As far as we can tell, there are two entrances into said cave: One is deep underwater, the other in a mansion that is apparently infested with vampires. Considering NONE of us are built for swimming, and we have a single potion of waterbreathing among us, that option seems out. The fact that we are level 2 seems to exclude the latter option. Bailing out would end up with us angering the interested parties which would likely spell TPK regardless.
Is there any non-obvious way out we are missing?

Party makeup:
Beguiler 1/ Binder 1: Could potentially breathe underwater for 10 minutes.
Swashbuckler 2: Handy in a fight, or for a Search check.
Marshal 1/ Warlock 1: Has the Dex Buff Aura, otherwise has by far the best social skills in the party.
Archivist 2: Does the standard healmonkey thing, thus far. Carries a crossbow. Has Knowledges.



Please, if this adventure seems familiar to you: No spoilers.

[Pyon]

Some people here will teach you how to build a submarine out of rocks and wood. I don't know how so my guess is try for the mansion. Either try to capture a high leading vampire as a hostage to go through, or just sneak your way past. Or just summon a giant bird and fly to top of the cave then minecraft dig your way in =/ Seems easy enough.

[weckar]

A minecraft dig would take several days towards what we presume to be hostile territory. Taking a vampire hostage would be a bad idea, since the DM has let on that the vampires inside are of around CL25.

[Pyon]

Well would you rather drown? :P Plus your DM wouldn't fill it with something IMPOSSIBLE. Either way oyu go there will be a solution.

EDIT: Also minecraft dig was a joke.

[weckar]

Thing is, the DM is running this from a book, and apparently we've already missed out on the INTENDED solution. Initially we had 4 waterbreathing potions, but three of those got spent on an initial scouting missing to the underwater entrance to the cave. Which is exactly where we learned just how bad at swimming we are.

[Pyon]

Well... Use one of the potions of water breathing and the guy that can breathe underwater for 10 minutes to go to the cave if you can reach it, and then find another why for your other companions or simply leave them to die! :D

[BaronDoctor]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diving_bell
Used as long ago as the 4th century BC, so if you can hire one or make one, it would give you a fair shot at making it work. It's not a perfect solution, but it's a start. If you weighted it right, you might be able to have people walk on the bottom of the lake until they got to the cave.

[Phelix-Mu]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diving_bell
Used as long ago as the 4th century BC, so if you can hire one or make one, it would give you a fair shot at making it work. It's not a perfect solution, but it's a start. If you weighted it right, you might be able to have people walk on the bottom of the lake until they got to the cave.

This is what I was going to suggest. There should be some ways of making sure that you have air with you, even with a minimum of magic and other resources. The main issue is that carrying air usually creates buoyancy, which you don't want. Solved by carrying ballast until you get to the right depth, then taking a deep breath, ditching the air bladders, and the ballast, and making for the destination. Still tricky, but much better than the alternative.

Will the DM allow the potion to be shared to split up the duration?

Was there anything in particular that made the swim hard aside from depth and length?

[Baldin]

When you first went to the underwater entrence, how long did it take for you to reach it? And how long would it take with a decent swim speed?

[weckar]

Reaching the cave will only take about 5 minutes, but it seems most of the interior is underwater as well, if not all of it.
On our first trip there we were ambushed by Sharks and Sahuagin who obviously have a major terrain advantage.

I should probably mention that most of us have a +0 to swim, with one of us having a -2. I think only one of us has a small positive modifier.

We thought about splitting up the potion, but the DM thought that allowing that now might get weird if we wanted to split other potions with a more instant duration later.

[Baldin]

The best solution I can come up with is to let the party-face go up to one or all of the interested parties and ask for help. Telling them you need x potions of water breathing.

Luckely you got multiple interested parties (if I understand correctly) and thus you can ask each of them for a little donation (though start asking for the max you need).

[Heikold]

Have you considered setting the mansion on fire from the outside and during the day? They'll have a choice of burn to death (re-death?) in the mansion or fight you in bright daylight (which won't end well for them). Do it at dawn so that they can't just wait out the damage until it gets dark obviously.

After that you just step over the charred vampire remains and into the tunnel.

[weckar]

Baldin, that's basically our current best plan. :)

Heikold, we considered that, but we fear that the vampires themselves may just flee into the tunnel. That eventuality would put us no closer to our goal, if not further from it as we have just increased the hostility density.

[Inevitability]

Sounds like rather poor planning from the DM, if I may say.

However, how about bargaining with the vampires? Even if they are CL25, there should be some things they need minions for. In the worst case, you may have to sacrifice one of your own in exchange for the body, but that seems unlikely.

Maybe you could kill a bunch of animals, drain their blood, and offer a giant barrel of blood in exchange for a stupid corpse they probably don't care about anyway?

[weckar]

Thanks for all the advice thus far. Session is tomorrow evening, so I'll let you know what we decide to go with. Right now I'm still hedging about a 50/50 on TPK.