Difficult Premade Adventures [3.5]

[Olo Demonsbane]

Does anyone have/know about any adventures that actually hold up to their CR for a relatively optimized group? Either official WotC ones or ones that people on this forum (or others) have created?

Barring that, does anyone have any relatively quick and easy solutions for increasing a module's difficulty? My current one is simply doubling all enemies in each encounter, except replacing the doubles of unique individuals with equal CR demons.

[Dumbledore lives]

Well there is always the tomb of horror, but that's not really fair.

From what I've heard the red hand of doom is a fairly difficult but good campaign, I believe Saph has a campaign journal around here somewhere. Here it is (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=94243)

[Jair Barik]

I think some of the good ones are the following.

-Red Hand of Doom. Some of the encounters are nasty enough normally and it adapts pretty well for higher op as a lot of the enemies have class levels. So obvious examples are things like replacing NPC monks with swordsages and fighters with Warblades/swordsages, rejigging spell lists and feats and so on. There is a very good handbook on these boards for adapting RHoD for high op play.

-Expedition to the demonweb pits. Am running this myself on the boards at the moment. A lot of the encounters seem pretty nasty, especially if you rejig some horrible feats/spell options a few of the creatures have but even without that it is pretty decent. Two points in the adventure in particular explicity state that they are TPK's if the PCs try fighting them straight up. Similarly the first encounter of chapter 2 is quite easily a TPK if things go wrong. (when I ran it the creature hit two party members with slow in the surprise round then won initiative and stunned 3 of the party for about 3d4 rounds).

-Age of Worms courtesy of dungeon Issues 124-135 with supplements in dragon issues 333-344 (available from paizo publishing) is pretty nice. Reading through it all the indiviudual adventures seem pretty decent difficulty wise and tend to through encounters where the PC's are outnumbered and/or against enemies with a CR of 2+ more than their party level.

[LaughingRogue]

Shackled City >>> Age of Worms >>> Savage Tides

[Gwendol]

I have a tendency to look at earlier edition adventures and convert the enemies, but it is a bit tedious. Slapping on class levels is efficient in order to increase CR, especially caster levels.

[Saintheart]

I think some of the good ones are the following.

-Red Hand of Doom. Some of the encounters are nasty enough normally and it adapts pretty well for higher op as a lot of the enemies have class levels. So obvious examples are things like replacing NPC monks with swordsages and fighters with Warblades/swordsages, rejigging spell lists and feats and so on. There is a very good handbook on these boards for adapting RHoD for high op play.

I do concur on this one assuming you have a relatively inexperienced party with the standard meatshield+rogue+cleric+Batman. If they know about targeting casters first and how to dominate the action economy, it's underpowered, but simple enough to remedy.

P.S. Shameless plug, check my signature for a handbook on how to run RHOD. :smallsmile:


-Expedition to the demonweb pits. Am running this myself on the boards at the moment. A lot of the encounters seem pretty nasty, especially if you rejig some horrible feats/spell options a few of the creatures have but even without that it is pretty decent. Two points in the adventure in particular explicity state that they are TPK's if the PCs try fighting them straight up. Similarly the first encounter of chapter 2 is quite easily a TPK if things go wrong. (when I ran it the creature hit two party members with slow in the surprise round then won initiative and stunned 3 of the party for about 3d4 rounds).

-Age of Worms courtesy of dungeon Issues 124-135 with supplements in dragon issues 333-344 (available from paizo publishing) is pretty nice. Reading through it all the indiviudual adventures seem pretty decent difficulty wise and tend to through encounters where the PC's are outnumbered and/or against enemies with a CR of 2+ more than their party level.

Concur. The undead opponents in particular on Age of Worms are a lot tougher than the mean WOTC undead creature, and this path has a killer reputation for good reason.

[Runestar]

Age of worms. The foes are generally more optimised (for example, one of the undead dragons has unholy toughness and stat-enhancing items/tomes) and willing to use better tactics overall.:smalleek: