CER: Mirror of the Fire Demon

The second picture never stops being hilarious.

In Pyramid 3/77, an article was published that introduced Combat Effectiveness Rating, CER, a concept to begin objectively defining combat difficulty (with an aside on traps and social encounters). As a helpful reference, it gives the CER of many enemies in the Dungeon Fantasy series. For some reason, it seems to have skipped over Mirror of the Fire Demon, so I decided to attempt to rectify that below.

This article has almost no editorial content. It is simply meant to be a reference of the CER values of the monsters from the back of the book. Maybe in a later article, I'll go over the NPCs as well. This article may somewhat be spoilerish if you are a player who might play this adventure, but not that much. Just a few numbers and names.

Enemy Name	OR	PR	CER
Basic Archer	20	8	28
Basic Barbarian	22	14	36
Basic Dwarven Warrior	22	14	36
Karateka (Nunchaku)	14	15	29
Karateka (Staff)	15	19	34
Artillery Mage (Earth)	20	9	29
Artillery Mage (Fire)	17	9	26
Artillery Mage (Ice)	21	9	30
Healing Cleric	11	18	29
Support Cleric	18	8	26
Support Mage	13	7	20
Basic Thief	15	7	22
Pixie Thief	17	1	18
Angry Sands	20	25	45
Bounding Turtle, Greater	37	48	85
Bounding Turtle, Lesser	9	12	21
Burrowing Serpent	18	24	42
Dehydrated Horde Zombie	4	22	26
Dire Vulture	18	5	23
Flame Servant Demon	43	35	78
Flame Wasp (10 HP swarm)	14	14	28
Nest Scorpion (11 HP swarm)	20	15	35
Ogre (Great Axe)	32	22	54
Ogre (Maul)	27	22	49
Orc Sergeant (Axe)	32	22	54
Orc Sergeant (Shortsword)	27	22	49
Orc Shaman (Support Only)	19	12	31
Orc Shaman (With Projectile Package)	27	12	39
Orc Soldier, Common (Axe)	18	11	29
Orc Soldier, Common (Shortsword)	15	11	26
Orc Soldier, Tough (Axe)	24	14	38
Orc Soldier, Tough (Shortsword)	21	14	35
Skeleton	13	12	25
Skeleton, Large	25	23	48
Speeding Blade	33	23	56

Editorial Anyways

That took longer than I expected. Much longer. So, looking at this list we have encounters in one campaign that range in difficulty from 18 like the Pixie Thief on the low end, to the Greater Bounding Turtle at 85. Interestingly, when looking at these numbers, I feel like they don't tell the whole story. While the demons and the turtle are far and away the strongest enemies in the entire adventure, and their numbers show that, I think force multipliers like the Support clerics, mages, and shamans are undervalued. By themselves, they *might* be weak-ish, but there is no accounting for increasing DR and ST of brutes protecting them. Ah well, even the original article recommends that one shouldn't place metrics above common sense when choosing encounters.