Hi, in my campaign a scenerio calls for somebody "Getting rid of" High Mage Aelies and the pc's over many adventures will be given opportunities to investigate and uncover the plot.

Now, the primary villian who would do such a thing is an epic Ftr/Wiz/Rog with a lot of Charisma. His MO is appearing very very good in public, but in the background forgeing an empire mainly through assassination and charasmatic power plays. He's about 37th lvl and prestiged out the wazoo, but only up to lvl 7 in wiz. His underlings consist of his daughter who is a lvl 30 Ftr/Rog, a lvl 16 deathknight, a lvl 14 lich, a lvl 12 ancient dead priest, and a lvl 9 vampire theif. (obviously you see the progression of villans to be uncovered).

Now, my big question is even with this support, how does he "Disappear" a lvl 22ish wizard (thats Aelies in my campaign) and do it silently and sneaky? I can look at the numbers and realize it would happen, but for the life of me I can't imagine the details. It would seem that a spellcaster that can cast 9th lvl spells would be almost all knowing, all connected, and prepared for almost anything. I don't even know if the villian will kill him or just imprison him, or braindamage, soul capture, or whatnot. To me having killed a mega-mage would almost be worse than imprisoning him. People of that power magnitude would certainly have contingencies and ways to strike back from the dead. I mean some one could just speak to the dead and find out what happened right? It would almost be better to drain him to 1 int and make him your gardener, right?

but back to the question, how do I do it? and how do I do it so it will be believable and I won't have PC's saying "well why didn't he just" and not have an answer for them.

Oh, and about the levels of the villians and such, I'm not giving the whole breakdown because I'm trying to keep this reletively short and primarily convey the flavour and general capability.

Thanks in advance everyone. I hope to come up with something really clever. Most of the npc's involved in this scenerio have wis and int scores well above 18 and I'm pretty sure mine in real life as a DM are probably only 14 at best. :lol:

Take Care,
Ausrick