1xp A lich chilling next to an unsupposing village. Kinda like the nightmare cave near yoda's place. My biggest question here is why only a cleric? I mean, a mage made the place, couldn't another mage shore up the defenses or add some more? Could a theif add some mundane mechanical traps to the affair to provide a new first line of defense? Couldn't some warriors stand watch over it?

My guess at an answer to this is that the repeated attempts at grave robbing have put small cracks in the defenses of the mausoleum and some small influence of the lich can now get out. Possibily animating the dead surronding him and attacking the town. With only limited influence, the lich could only animate a handful at a time, but if they're destroyed, he's surronded by ammo. Since the traps where magical in nature, he couldn't just have a zombie start hacking away at the walls to free him, so the attacks on the town are to see if he can bait some powerful suckers, err adventures, into coming to the town's rescue by leveling the graveyard. And since all adventuring parties have this honorable vow of poverty, they wouldn't be interested in the richly appointed crpyt, no, no, no.

"Odd how those undead never rose up again when the party was next to the mausoleum, isn't it? We must have moved from the fighting section of the adventure to the mage's work. After that will probally be some traps for the thief. Boy, have we sure got the DM figured out. We'll just have the cleric use all his spells to heal us while we wait for the mage to finish."

Try not to give away the plot with too much diabolical laughter.