Q: The Pit Fiends seem a little too easy to defeat. Can you suggest a way to toughen them up?

A: Yes. Just implement the following optional rule: Since the Lord of the Pit (Reaper Expansion) departed from his Inner Region realm, the Pit Fiends have resorted to fighting amongst each other to see who will become their next ruler. As a direct result of this sustained fighting, each Pit Fiend now has 8 Strength in battle instead of 4. This increase of Strength will force a character to consider the alternative Strength route through the Inner Region a lot more often.

This rule only comes into effect, if the Lord of the Pit has been drawn from the Adventure deck, otherwise the Pit Fiends have 4 Strength each as normal!

Give it a blast guys.

Ell.

What about if you have killed the Lord, but haven't traded him in yet, could you show his head to the Pits to make them scared of you, dropping them back to 4 ?

Also, somehow bumping Pits to 8 makes that path harder than the Crypt path (assuming you're packing 2 Fate, 1 for Crypt, 1 for DwD), which would only really help the already powerful Str-based chars like Knight, Troll, Assassin, etc.

The difficulty (or lack of) of the Pit Fiends' space was one of the reasons why added in a new version in my homebrew expansion.

Another option that offers unpredictable variety (the nature of the Game) is to roll a six-sided dice at the Pit Fiend square indicating the number of fiends to be defeated and treat them as you would combining Adventure cards on the main board. So if you roll a 3, there's three with a strength of 4, meaning you must defeat a strength 12 battle. Many variations can be derived from this as a starting point, e.g. defeat not only loses a life, but causes a retreat one square, a standoff means you must battle the same combination again, etc...

Other ideas for the six-sided:

1-Treat the square as you normally would in the game.

2-Pit fiends rally like jackals and eat one follower before battle begins.

3-See above. Roll to find number and combine strength.

4-Pit Fiends summon mutiny. Any/all trophies not turned in turn against you.

5-Fiends in fury. All are strength 8.

6-No battle, but fiends scurry off with a random magic object.

And so on...