I did it!

No deaths, one level drain.

I shuffled around Jan's spellbook, changed his level 2 spells to three detect invisibilities, two resist fears (in case the beholder dispelled one), and one blur.

Prior to the fight, Jan successfully sets two snares where the lich will teleport. My halfling tries really hard to do same, but is merely lucky to not hurt himself in the attempt. Resist Fear (with a tasty 1 hour duration) is cast on the party. My mages put on whatever spell protections they have (blur, stoneskin, shield, minor spell turning). My sorceror plants four skull traps where the beholder will come out. Let's dance.

I trigger the lich and immediately cast spider spawn where the male fighter comes out. Oops, I wake up the vampire, too. The Beholder wakes up, eats somewhere between 24 and 48 d10 damage (depending on how he made his saves), promptly keels over. The lich hurts himself a bit on Jan's two snares when he teleports right on top of them, then does his mislead/simulacrum dance like always. Cernd hooks the fighter with insect plague and it spreads to the lich and his simulacrums. Oops, the vampire finished off those sword spiders and is now flanking me and attacking the halfling (managed to hit him once, which required Jan to burn a restoration scroll). Barbarian activates the sun ray on Daystar with both the lich and the vampire in range. Jackpot. Vampire gets toasted with a 1050 damage shot, and while the lich doesn't get it quite so badly, he does take somewhere between 100 and 150 damage since he managed to bungle his save vs. spells and went down (what sort of lich was he if he bungles a save vs. spells? I didn't even malison him! The funny part was, his simulacrums survived the blast). The fighter takes some damage from it, too, then takes some more when my barbarian turns around and chunks him. The simulacrums are taken care of in a similar manner.

Now it's six relatively healthy and prepared adventurers versus one mage (a very good mage, granted, but there's only one of her versus six of us). As soon as I wake her up, she goes invisible, tosses up spell protections, and meteor swarms my halfling. I managed to run everyone out of the area of effect with only minimal damage, breach off the protections, and beat her like a rented goalie. Game over, Runies.

This was the first time that I managed to do it, and I managed it without anybody getting killed. I think Daystar made all the difference when it toasted the lich and the vampire at once, I certainly have played and replayed that fight enough to realize how lucky of a shot that was. This was also the first time that I tried it without any summons besides that initial spider spawn. I tried taking care of the other guy that wakes up near you with skull traps like the beholder, but I can't ever get him to trip them even though he spawns well within 20 feet of the skulls, and I couldn't count how many times those extra skulls flying around have come back to bite me in the ass (nice mental picture, eh?), so I decided I'd rather engage him with summons.

-CC