Night of the Gray Death Encounter (Spoilers)

[MaxAstro]

Is it just me, or is the guillotine golem absolutely terrifying?

I ended up making a couple adjustments to its abilities on the spot, but if I had run it as written 3/4ths of the party would have gotten decapitated. +36 to hit means that its first attack has a roughly 50% or higher chance to crit a 17th level character, which then triggers a DC 40(!!!) save or die. That is a "very hard" DC for a 17th level character. To not instantly die.

What was other people's experiences with this creature?

[andreww]

The golem is very dangerous but can be managed by triggering its slow and staying away from it as much as possible.

The encounter with 4 lesser deaths is much more dangerous as those things are way under levelled.

In general this part has several sections which can disrupt the entire adventure given its all happening in a very short time period. Instant death effects are a pretty terrible idea when the group is stuck at a party and its a bit weird to have them pop off and try and find someone to raise a dead ally mid party.

There are several other massively debilitating to game ending effects in the adventure as well.

[MaxAstro]

Yeah, the lesser deaths encounter came very close to a TPK, partly because unlike the guillotine golem I didn't realize at first how dangerous it was.

The golem I instantly went "oh heck no" and spot-reworked it as a grapple monster only able to use the decapitate ability on a creature it has restrained (fluffed as restraining the creature by locking it into the stocks). The trap I ran as written but the party handled it intelligently.

The lesser deaths just kinda came out of nowhere with how deadly they were.

[Perpdepog]

My party were able to sneak past the guillotine golem, thankfully. At first I was slightly bummed, I was looking forward to running it, but then they walked straight past it into the vorpal executioner, and the investigator instantly went down.

It's possible I misread the trap, but it looks like it'll crit most of the party around 75% of the time, and when it does they take double damage and have to roll a save or die, which our investigator did. They got up again, mostly because I allowed some impromptu use of Regenerate, but I am now glad I didn't run the golem.