Short Circuit's Journal: D&D madness and logic

First the madness. We had nine people in my group tonight. And I got an unexpected PK.

I'm not going to try to explain the whole session...It was incredibly chaotic, the party split into four active units, and a town was left in ruins. I'll tell you how that went, though...

The first active unit basically waited outside the town. The characters stayed out of trouble, but it meant the players were pretty much sitting there doing nothing for most of the session.

The second active unit was a ghost PC that decided he was going to haunt the (quite occupied) jail. We use the damage-dealing variant for turn undead. He had 12 hit points. The cleric had extra turning. And he failed his check to regen at his body in 1d4 days...So I got a PK because the player was an idiot. (In his defense, he was a 13-year-old kid who'd only been playing for three weeks. But that doesn't mean he wasn't an idiot as a player.) He later told me that what he'd done was incredibly stupid...

The third active unit is a character played by a guy known around here as Jinto Linn (or kilocmdrlinn). He investigated the cliche mysterious old abandoned mansion and found some key plot/quest items, getting torched by a trapped chest in the process. Then he hung out with the first active unit.

The fourth active unit raided the magic/weapons/armor shop in town. They told one of the characters (who was a bit unstable) to set fire to a couple houses at the outside of town, so the police and the mage who ran the shop would get drawn into efforts to put out the fire. That character (controlled by me, because the player was rolling up a more mellow character) went on an arson spree which included burning down the jail. The rest of the unit broke into the shop, set off a couple traps, and made off with a coffin full of loot. So now I have to figure out how much they got away with. And how much of it is traceable.

Incidentally, the coffin was being carried on the back of the party tank. It held the corpse of the ghost (as a place for the ghost to return to after 1d4 days) until they dumped it out and left it in the shop.

Now the logic. The group is splitting. I'm getting at least five of the players, one of my former players is going to run a Shadowrun campaign with at least two of the players, and another player is on the fence as to which campaign he'll go to.