Shigamori's page

Act 1: 1 Clay golem and 2 Fire Projectors. For EL 4 that was listed for the turrets, 6d6+1 seems far too high, especially for a touch attack and no limit on how many times they can use it (once per round, sure, but its not a spell, and there isn't a limit for times per day, and has a 30 foot range, far enough to hit everyone that is in the combat unless the run away and corner themselves. As for the clay golem, the Cursed wounds were very hard to deal with, especially only having a 7th caster level healer available. This dropped one characters effective max hit points to 11 for the remainder of the session. I did end up rolling a failed berserk check (round 8 of combat for the golem, rolled a 4 on the percentile) which caused it to attack the turret, being the closest thing that was smaller than him (nothing living was in reach) and spared the characters for 2 rounds. The PCs defeated him by throwing alchemist fires and running away, taking no more than 1 hit per round, killing him JUST as they were cornered on the other end of the ship.

Act 2: It was interesting, but coming out of act 1 with one PC with effective max of 11, and taking 1 con damage from the horrific gaze, it almost ended in a PC death, had it not been for the cleric's turn attempt that had it flee and return, provoking AoO's from 2 of the party members 2 times.

Act 3: Since there were no tactics written for the Xill, I originally had them planewalk into 2 flanks, attack the PCs and try to subdue them this way. Eventually I had them think that grappling would be quicker, so they can get a bite off and hopefully paralyze so that they could be taken prisoner, but this ended up helping the PCs in the end, as they were only attacking in the grapple at a +1 for all of the attacks in the grapple, and the PCs were succeeding the fort saves. Not a bad combat, and for having something in store should they fail this act, I was pretty happy with it.

Act 4: This puzzle stopped the party, they ended up leaving with no way to solve the puzzle, leaving them with no way to move on. The DC 20 Knowledge(Arcana) or DC 25 Int check was BARELY possible by the party, by way of the int check, and that was only if the rogue rolled a 18+ and the rest of the party succeeded on assisting him. With this failure, they only suffered the vortex, which they had a close call with, and had determined that they would not be able to succeed without major risk of death or other hazard. The disintegrate ray was especially worrying for me, as it would take out 2 of the party members, save or not, due to reduced hit points from the clay golem, and 2 of them would be hard pressed to live through it.