I was a PC in the City of the Spider Queen adventure a little under a year ago, and I have to say that the two most completely unreasonable points in the entire adventure were the Balor in Mermidria, and that freakin' Keening Spirit! WHAT THE HECK?! It waits until everyone's in the room, and then just pops out and uses Wail of the Banshee. Without any warning. And no way to stop it without knowing it's there, and no way to know it's there. Here's what happens when that encounter takes place:
The rogue (probably the first person in the room) is dead.
The wizard is dead.
If the wizard had a familiar, it's dead. If the Wizard somehow manages to survive, he's going to lose a ton of experience from his familiar dying.
Any NPCs in the room are probably dead. (Our group had 3 lower-level NPCs when we went through this adventure, but we never had them follow us into any of the rooms until we KNEW it was safe.)
Pretty much anybody who's in the room (basically, the whole party) is killed. For no reason. And without provocation. Or any way to avoid it, aside from reading the adventure ahead of time. There's absolutely no way to know it's coming. Unless the Cleric ALWAYS jumps into every room and blasts his Turn Undead, there's no way to avoid it. And even if he does, he's probably still dead.
When this happened to our party, two of the three people in the room were killed instantly, the only one surviving being me (the Barbarian, who only made it because I rolled really high). And after making that save, I didn't make the Will Save against the Keening Spirit's Fear ability. Our campaign gives every player 1 free True Ressurection, however, and that was the only thing from keeping the campaign from ending right there.
And then there's the Balor. If it weren't for an absolute Fluke, and complete and total luck on our part, we never would have made it out of that city. We beat the Balor by having the party's Cleric (a Cryptlord at the time) use his secret weapon- he had a Bag of Holding with ten Shadows inside of it under his control- and he sent them all to "distract" the Balor while we made a break for it. We were absolutely lucky in that although the Balor saw them coming, and although the Balor hit them with a Firestorm instantly, we remembered that- being incorporeal- they had a 50% chance of not being affected. So the DM rolled once for all of them, and they were fine. So all of them were able to get one attack off- so all of them went at it, and all of them hit (since Balors have horrible touch AC, and all of them at once managed to kill him with their Draining Touch. The Balor then exploded, killing all of them.
And we didn't even go through the castle at all. The Cleric managed to sneak in by impersonating one of the Drow, and once he found out what we were up against, he convinced that big fire genasi Blackguard guy to go out and kill everyone so that he could have control. (This Cleric had a Bluff and Diplomacy through the roof by this point.) Once that happened, the Cleric and the party's druid summoned several earth elementals and had them collapse the building. The we jetted out of there, only to have to come back when we were all a much higher level to finally take these people out.
