Increasing the Challenge


Mummy's Mask

Silver Crusade

I've been running Mummy's Mask for a table of five very experienced players on a 15-point buy. They are about to start Part 3 of Secrets of the Sphinx and they are just having a very easy time of it. No deaths, the crypt-breaker alchemist has found all of the traps, very few failed saves. Their ACs are high enough that enemies have a hard time hitting them and the enemies have low enough AC that they are very easy for the party to hit. No one has even gone unconscious yet. I don't necessarily want to kill any of the characters, but I would like to feel like I am at least challenging my players.

I usually run in PFS, so I have never tried altering combats before. Has anyone else run into the same problem? Does anyone have any advice for how I can (fairly) increase the challenge for my players?

Thank you!


Use templates on the creatures. This is usually the easiest way to get more bang for your buck. I don't recommend more monsters most the time, more easy monsters are still easy.

Move the traps so they are inside encounters with enemies. A Trap in an empty hallway, off what's the point. With undead crawling around you it makes a different stroy, and there's a good chance they won't stop to look for it.

They do have 5 players so the party's acl is about one higher than it should be. They are experienced players so that's another 1 - 3 on the acl scale. You should probably slow their XPgain, they sshould be at least 1 possibly 2 behind what the book says. Are they at book level right now or below?

Silver Crusade

Rebuild some things, apply templates, and limit choices at character creation. I limited them to core classes plus APG ( no witches/summoners), and limited feats/archetypes from other sources.

Though we are in book 2, I changed the forgotten pharaoh cultist s to level 3 maguses, and I am changing the cult leader from bard 6 to summoner5/ bard 1.

Aside from that, I made skeletal champions level 2 fighters ect, fast zombies instead of staggered, ect. Little things. Push your cr to the limit, and up them as needed.

Silver Crusade

Thank you both very much! That's very helpful.


When I was running CarrionCrown with 5 players and 25points I used to do the following EASY way to scale up the encounters.

I would MAX the HP of each creature from the average given to the max the HD can offer. Example BAYKOK (page 8) has HP97 - Looking up in Monster 3 it says 15d8+30 -> 150 HP

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