Spoilers!!
Derulbaskul said:
Actually, I would ditch Deep Horizon and replace it with Queen of Lies, a far, far superior adventure.
This is true.
That being said, I can explain why this may seem to be the case. My impression is that Skip Williams expects PCs to be *really* optimized. I ran Deep Horizon at GenCon, and the 13th lvl PCs were one level less than the recommended... and despite this, had little trouble holding their own. How is this possible, you ask? Here's the equipment and min-maxing level expected by the author, using Regdar's magic items as an example:
Belt of Giant Strength +4
Quiver w/20 m-work arrows
Greatsword+5
Full plate+3
Gloves of Dexterity +2
Mighty comp lbow+1
4 pots of cure moderate wounds
Cloak of Resistance +3
Amulet of Natural Armor +2
Ring of Protection +2
That's 109,995 gp worth, right under the mark.
If I were running it, I'd keep the first encounter the same, keep most of the slave situation the same (nerfing a bunch of the extraneous monsters by completely removing them), keeping the post-Desmodu village fight the same, and removing about a third of the monsters at the volcano.
Running it I had a blast, but we had two or three PCs die in the final fight... and those were really min-maxed!
Incidentally, gfunk, how did you teleport to somewhere you had never seen? That's generally impossible, even with tport w/o error.