Hello!
Question for all you amazingly helpful people. I'm running Kingmaker, and we're on Book 3 at the moment. My party have just entered Vordakai’s Tomb.
My party consists of a Fighter, a Ranger, a Paladin, and a Wizard, but we have a guest joining us for the next few sessions who is a Monk (a previous player who left for college, but is back for Christmas break and wants to play with us). All level 9.
They have been able to handle just about everything I've thrown at them with little difficulty, and I've done a few things to make the encounters harder by tweaking the monsters and situations a bit, but it's still mostly a breeze for them. I understand that Kingmaker is like that do to there being mostly just one battle a day thing.
However, they're about to go though Vordakai’s Tomb, which is supposed to be difficult, but I have the feeling they'll push past it, especially with the guest Monk. I would like to make the tomb harder without upsetting the balance.
Are there any tips for making this dungeon more difficult? Should I just throw a few more enemies in the rooms? Tweak stats? What do you suggest?
Thanks in advance.
A couple of generic ideas:
Add or adjust class levels to key encounters. It is amazing what 1 or 2 class levels on a monster will do.
Add a support, adding a bard or skald for example raises the difficulty of the entire encounter. At 9th level, the support character may well spend the entire fight invisible.
The monk is not going to be so useful against the zombie cyclopses. But if you must, add 1 more here and there.
Thanks.
Vordakai's one of the tougher fights of that adventure path. Have you checked the Kingmaker forum, especially the thread on PC deaths?
You can add more opponents, but you can also have the creatures in the tomb coordinate their response to the PCs. Running Vordakai and the other inhabitants more intelligently, having them team up and use sound tactics, goes a long way.
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Linda wanted to make this place terrifying for our overtreasured group, so she upped the encounters by a lot (for instance, the room with 1 plesiosaurus in a lake, she changed to four advanced hydrodaemons and the lake was Styx water that caused negative levels by immersion, no save and no death ward). I think she added the boss of the 10-11 subtier of the scenario Below the Silver Tarn to the fight with Vordakai and gave him Staff of the Master (Necromancy), though the latter came back to bite her because we then had that staff, and it was really really broken before the lastest printing of UE. I'm not familiar enough with what the normal encounters are to know exactly which ones she altered, but I think she changed an encounter with soul eaters into an encounter that summoned a set of daemon deacons for each of the four horsemen (including a Thanadaemon!); we had to run from that one.