In your case, with the Sea Hags I'd have the party roll up secondary characters and then have the adventures turn out to be a rescue mission. Maybe the Sea Hags do a tarantula wasp thing where they lay eggs on stunned victims and the Sea Hag larva eat the victim alive. Or maybe the Sea Hags are raising pet monsters that do that.
I'm not overly familiar with the ToA but I know the Death Curse is a thing - so party TPKs, get rescued & resurrected by a friendly, high-powered cleric & team and now is EXTREMELY motivated to complete the adventure - quickly.
Cleric & Team are too death-curse rotted to be able to challenge Acerak, but still have access to their rituals and shit.
MAybe have some of the Cleric's buddies be a highlevel undead punishment added to later encounters.
Well, that wouldn't work exactly due to the mechanics. The Death Curse has two parts to it: nobody who dies can be resurrected, and anyone who already was resurrected prior to the curse beginning is slowly withering away (mechanically, losing 1 max HP per day). So even if our party could be rezzed, given the fact that we're only level 2, we'd be dropping dead again within a couple weeks, nowhere near enough time to lift the curse even if we could survive everything in between.
From what I've read, it's basically expected that you're going to end up with dead adventurers along the way, especially since you can apparently get any random encounter at any level. Considering it's inspired by Tomb of Horrors, I guess it's supposed to be a meatgrinder. It's certainly different from your average campaign where you start off with small-scale threats and gradually work up to bigger ones, but I'm not sure how fun it is exactly just yet. Maybe we just got unlucky right off the bat, but if this becomes a habit, I think it might feel more like a slog than a campaign, especially with the rules on encumbrance and disease and dehydration and the like (wish I could've made an artificer, an alchemy jug and bag of holding would have trivialized much of that).
I'm also a tad worried that our DM wanted to run this specifically
because of the likelihood of TPKs. Thus far in the various campaigns we've run, we've been fairly lucky about avoiding deaths, though there have been a couple of close calls. As a player, he was very much the "push the obvious red button" sort that could be counted on to go and do something without thinking, which certainly drives the plot forward but also makes things more hectic. I'm starting to get the feeling he really wants to kill off some characters just for the hell of it, but I wonder if he'll find that a lot less enjoyable than he thinks it is.
But hey, that's okay. I intend on running him and the others through Tomb of Horrors at some point, so we'll see how long he lasts down there. I give him literally five minutes before he gets himself killed, 50/50 odds he ends up taking the rest of the party with him.
