My D&D group got themselves out of Maladomini this weekend in a long, exciting session.

There were lots of great spots of story and role-play before, during, and after these encounters, but, I won't get into them now.

I was really surprised that I didn't kill one of the PCs, and I'd mentally prepared myself for whatever reactions might be forthcoming when one of them died.

The party is level 10, but there are five of them, a cohort, and I had a level 10 and level 8 NPC with the group. So really, it's more like a party with an effective level of 12, but would lack the power to take on certain types of single foes that a group of 4 L12 PCs could take out.

Encounter 1
A night hag spied out the PCs and brought a force against them. No surprise on either side due to listen/spot/knowledge.

Night Hag
Thaskor
Khumat
2x Achaerai

All intelligent, evil outsiders, the Thaskor and Khumat stood guard near the Night Hag at first while she picked away with Magic Missiles and the spring attacking birds came in from the sides.

The Hag focused constant attacks on the hardest hitting PC, the barbarian. The barbarian and favored soul were also subject to the Achaerai's black cloud in what would have been an encounter changing event if they'd failed their saves. Nice thing about the Hag in this fight is that the party was tooled up to fight Devils, and the Hag has DR Cold Iron.

I tried to kill the L10 NPC, a lowish HP older rogue, with the Khumat's improved grapple bite...

...the party JUST managed to save him, and this made some of the other fights in the evening less deadly.

Party wins a tough fight, lots of HP loss and Thaskor stuns, but no PC death.

There were a few days of rest and RP after this encounter.

Encounter 2
The party is storming an old mine/caverns occupied by devils.

I have a huge cavern system built out of master maze, and once all the devils become aware of the PCs through telepathy, I offer that we can do the entire cave in initiative order, even if the devils go away for a few rounds and come back (since they can go out of sight, teleport elsewhere, come at you from a new angle, etc.)

Once the party alerts a bearded devil to their presence, the bearded devil alerts 3 chain devils, torturing pour souls, and they alert a bone devil.

The chain devils fall back down the hallway and the bone devil throws walls of ice in front of the PCs, sacrificing the bearded devil and some lemures.  Walls of Ice are nasty cold damage, even after they are shattered.

The PCs know they can't wait around for the devils to bring reenforcements, so, they press on.

The Bone Devil, out of sight, teleports behind the PCs, and JUST MISSES cutting off a few weaker rear party members with a Wall of Ice the next round. (They get a reflex save to disrupt the wall).

The Chain Devils take a stand in front of the PCs while a Barbed Devil starts firing Scorching Rays at the PCs from outside their Darkvision/Torchvision.

The Chain Devils go down, the PCs are hurt, but the Barbed Devil and Bone Devil are cowardly, as they don't want to "die" in Baator, where it's permanent.

The two bigger threats fall back, trying to draw the PCs down a narrow, trapped passage (where I would have killed a PC or two).

The PCs take the other cavern route instead, recognizing one of my evil traps, and circumnavigate a slippery climb and jump over a 60' deep pit without running room to start a jump.

The Bone and Barbed Devil set a trap for the PCs near their "petty cash" treasure chest (a chest the devils pay into and take out of as one of many means to tempt mortals when the devils visit the Prime Material).

Again, the PCs have healed up a bit, but their buffs are wearing off as the devils had hoped.

The PCs do a good job of focusing on the Bone Devil, killing it while taking a ton of damage from Order's Wrath, Scorching Ray, and even braving the Fear Aura and Poison attacks.

The Bard cohort had memorized "Remove Fear" this time, so, even though the Fear Aura worked, she was able to negate it's effects.

Once the Barbed Devil had lost his entire force, he decided that discretion was the better part of valor and left the battered PCs alive and saved his revenge for another day.

The PCs didn't want to wait too long for the Barbed Devil to return, so, they healed as much as they could and went through a portal and right into...

Encounter 3
2x Redspawn Firebelchers
2x Bluespawn Thunderlizards
1x Greenspawn Razorfiend

The party moved to Avernus, into Tiamat's old lair, and ran right into a batch of dragonspawn that were part of the group slated to hit Faerun in 1374 during the "Lightning Storms".

Already battle weary, the PCs had to fend off charging, lightning chaining Thunderlizards, fire belching Reds, and a spring attacking Green.

This fight would have been fairly easy if it hadn't been tacked onto the end of a harder fight.

Also, the spawn all hit pretty hard.