Just a note. You all have months to do this. You are NOT going up to 7th level yet. It was put here because Mailes is going to add a character to the game at some point that is not an ogre.
I presume Nep meant we aren't' going up to 8th......?
I'm guessing that's what he meant, but Miales (and maybe me) might be joining the party before that milestone, thus we are CG'ing at 7.
Aquadyne is correct.
There's a thought process whereby this party splits in two temporarily (we could have 10 pc's which is actually optimal). Unlike when we started Lost Mines of Phandelver, in this case there would be two parties on separate paths (LMP began with two parallel groups). There's actually some direction as to how exactly the split would work and story-related justification. You wouldn't be leveling to 8th for a while now. You just got to 7th after Yartar and you needed to accomplish a lot to achieve that level.
Hey all! Your DM pro tempore and future DM of half the part with a small request.
I've realized as I have been running this current combat encounter that I don't have copies of your current character sheets after you leveled up from 6 to 7. I've been trusting on you all to know what you've got and occasionally looked up what's different when the sheet hasn't matched the pdf at the top of the forum.
It's not a big deal, but your path from 7 to 8 will involve a bit more combat (sorry) which I'll be running (muahahaha) and it'd be exceedingly helpful for me to have everyone's L7 sheet available.
This is still a couple months away, so there's no rush. I know some of you have started this, and I'm happy to help anyone out who needs to do it... it's pretty easy to set up and if you already have your sheet from before it shouldn't take you very long to match it up... and the new sheet auto-updates the pdf link too.
So sometime in the next several weeks or so... say August-ish... it would be really helpful for me if most of you could get a sheet up on DnDBeyond that I can reference. If it's too confusing, let me know and between me or Nep or other helpful folks that have done it, we can probably get you sorted.
When I worked in our techie company it was so nice having techie people around! I mean I know I still have Tusk but he is not exactly firing on all cylinders ATM! 
