Given how child enemies are off the menu now, Max is never coming back so he may as well be retconned out of existence.

And as for Gorgash, he was never even meant to be in this encounter. Hell, his name was never even meant to be Gorgash. He was an unfinished NPC that I hastily finished to fill the role that the new arrivals to the party would have filled back when I though there weren't going to be any new arrivals after all, only to be proven wrong once I had already set things in motion.

Honestly, this whole encounter is a mistake I would rather just erase all together.