But they still can't challenge a relatively optimized party without significant buffing up.Two cranium rats swarms should be devastating. They're about to face the Envoy(s) of Lolth, along with two hammers, a Nalfeshnee, and 6 Vrocks.Дon't get me wrong, I love the flavour, and they do crunch relatively well (Vrocks are so much fun ). I planned that whenever a character would die in an encounter, I would level them up and then restart the encounter. I've doubled the number of monsters in each encounter and then added in two more monsters/groups of monsters, just to make things interesting. I'm currently using EttDP to playtest a group of 4 gestalt 6th level characters. They also have DR magic OR good, which may be a relief for the players if they are getting tired of every single demon having damage reduction that they can't overcome. Unarmed, they use their improved disarm to steal the PC's weapons and then use them to do massive amounts of damage. When armed, they do massive amounts of damage. Oh, and they get to choose between using an SLA twice in a round (while this is beastly as far as action economy goes, it does drain their resources a lot faster) or always having a counterspell readied. spider climb, fire ball, lesser globe of invulnerability, BLACK TENTACLES. They have a bunch of spell-like abilities, and what's great about their SLA's is that each Carnevus has a unique set (You choose one of about 3 options for each ability it has.) I can't decide if its woefully under CR'd or if it just represents what a CR 9 demon should be. It has a treasure of a monster, the Carnevus demon. I can't say anything about it as far as running the module, but I have been cracking open that book for a few monsters and rules and such. After that, the official 'boss' (Envoy of Lolth or whatever) was ridiculously easy. Most challenging fights we had were both homebrewed (one a level 15 Lich and another a Divine Companion Swiftblade in the 15s too). We got lots of good information, a subservient Glabrezu and all the good stuff with just few spells. Like I said, with the Ultimate Magus we got through it quite reasonably in spite of being a two-person party. It does underestimate especially the magic PCs of those levels can bring to bear. Our DM had to work hard to make it flow a bit more naturally without the PCs being the catalysts at every point. My personal simulationist gaming style does not fit with that at all. Removes all sense of urgency and the possibility of missing something important. Everything happens just when players get there, not a moment sooner or later. It's specifically designed to be different in that it's event-based. Overall, you gotta be able to think on your feet quite a bit in it. And if you see through the Rule of Three's disguise immediately, well, all the scripted discussions are kinda weird. We had none had to Dominate a random to get that job done. For example, a place needs a non-chaotic non-evil party member to enter IIRC. Some parts of it are quite confusing and poorly thoughtout. Maybe some staff for mages too (something that helps overcome SR and like restricts the creatures' dimensional movement) and some actually potent, shaping weapon that does not remain useless 'cause it's the wrong weapon (seriously, who the hell uses Bastard Swords?) Homebrew something worth the players' while in their stead. Our party had an Ultimate Magus and a Dervish nobody could use those even if we wanted to (no, we didn't). Basically, one is a stupid Bastard Sword whose greatest value is being sellable for a massive chunk of gold, and the other is a Weapon of Legacy Bow which sucks. It goes into some detail about the areas that most of the 3.X setting books neglect. That is, they tend to have spellcasting prowess and sufficient capabilities to challenge melee types (just about everyone on the Planes tends to have at least some degree of spellcasting prowess) Most of the opponents you face are somewhat respectable. Overall, the variety of things you need to accomplish is quite high and there's a lot of stuff to keep players interested. There's a lot of non-combat stuff in it. Planescape happens to be one of my favorite settings ever and it uses Sigil as the base of operations.

Expedition to the demonweb pits book