For anyone interested, we finished up the Sloobludop sacrifice/Demogorgon encounter today. It went well, I think. I think the potential for a TPK was there.I used a Deadly X 1.5 XP budget for the enemy, plus the two archpriests (one to each side). So it was a monitor (700), a whip (200) and 4 guards (50 each) for a 2,200 XP encounter.
The PCs were a barbarian, paladin and arcane trickster (level 3) and a light domain cleric (level 2...he's a PC of a player that abandoned the game so I run him as a cohort of sorts).
The party faked their bounds (sleight of hand check) to try to gain surprise. The arcane trickster used disguise self to hide the party's weapons. It was decided the cleric would start the fight with a faerie fire spell and the paladin would attack the archpriestess. He decided at the last minute he'd try to palm a dagger (there was some arguement here after the fact).
The cleric pulled off enough of a slight of hand check to not alert the guards but the archpriestess noticed the paladin's dagger so she was not surprised.
The party lucked out in two big ways: All four kou-toa failed their saves against the faerie fire spell (the archpriestess, monitor, whip and one guard) AND the friendly archpriest beat his daughter's initiative and managed to get off a 4th level hold person spell that got her for two rounds and the whip for one.
Over the next two round the party lit up the enemy archpriestess with a series of crits. The paladin went down to a crit from the monitor and one from a guard. The light cleric wrecked havoc with a Radiance of the Dawn channel divinity and then the friendly archpriest got off a spirit guardians spell, wiping out the guards and then charging in. His spell was disrupted by the monitor but a couple more crits from the barbarian and rogue pretty much ended things.
All in all, I thought it was a blast.
Now my players are dealing with the aftermath. Half of them failed their madness check and they left most of the NPCs in a camp outside the village (and a lot of them failed their madness check).
You can read it here if you want but it goes for about 70 posts in all:
http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...of-the-Abyss&p=7002707&viewfull=1#post7002707
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