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Message: <blockquote data-quote="monboesen" data-source="post: 3095218" data-attributes="member: 4647">I have run the Sunless citadel as well and I'm fairly certain the adventure assumes that the PC's level to 2 before that last encounter. You are facing is a party with twice the number of characters compared to what the adventure assumes. And some of the characters a level higher than assumed.In order to make it a challenging encounter you need to up the opposition. Your options are:1. increasing levels of opponents. This can easily throw things out of order, particularly with spell casters. I would not recommend that. 2. increase the number of opponents. This would be my suggestion. Essentially you need more mooks to prevent the PC's with an easy win by swarming the Druid and kill him by superior numbers. You could easily add more twigblighs (which I did) and also advance some of them 1-2 HD (which I also did). That makes them a little harder to deal with. Another option is to include the two last members of the group the PC's are searching for to the opposition (thats a Rogue 1 and Ranger 1 I would guess). For a group as big as yours (you actually almost face two standard groups of 1 fighter, 1 cleric, 1 rogue and 1 cleric) I would do both. To make the battle climatic it must be dangerous enough to provide real risk of loosing PC’s and the fight in general. To insure that danger, you must often make the opposition stronger than the PC's,  as the players will tend to use/know their powers better than you, the poor dm. With 8 characters on the players’ side I'll say you need 8 comparably capable opponents, preferably more or a significantly larger number of individually less powerful enemies.If I was running that battle with your group I would:1. add more "tree'fied" npc's and increase them to level 2 (So Ex-paladin 2, Wizard 2, Rogue 2 and Ranger 2). These should be the druids bodyguards and stay near him to prevent sneaky/fast PC’s from taking him out to quickly.2. up the number of twig blights to 20 (or even let there be potentially limitless number, with 0-2 new twigh blighs arriving each round, not stopping before the druid is dead at which point they stop fighting and flee). These are your stormtroopers who charge in and menace all the PC’s, including the soft juicy mages.3. let the Druid use Entangle, Cure light wounds, Produce flame, Flaming sphere, summon swarm and Heat metal to maximum effect (and likely change the fire aspect of those spells to some corrupting/decaying effect just for coolness). So an early Entangle followed up by Heat metal on armor wearing PC’s and Summon swarm on spellcasters. The deal closes with Produce flame and Flaming sphere to kill of those who break free of Entangle.Be aware of Entangle (and Web). It is a spell that can break the game and should always be heavily modified according to the actual vegetation. I consider the spell as written to be the rules for the optimal situation, which happens to be in a forest of young trees (many roots, low vegetation and branches that can reach those affected). In that cave I would reduce the DC’s of breaking free by 5 to DC 15. With that scenario I would expect at least half the PC group to end up in negatives (hp) and rejoice and remember their hard fought victory for weeks to come.Hope this is useful and good luck <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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