You might've forgotten about it since they mention it waaaaaaaaaaay back at the start either in the tutorial or the first mini-confession which is shorter than the rest, but the more regions you go through and the closer to the mountain you get the higher chance enemies can be an ordained version which has the little crown icon by their health bar. There is a degree of level scaling, it's ordainment.

Gut feeling is that you'll often have more money than items you actually want to buy (Though this also could be because I'm a pancake fiend now since that saves a lot of money on food) so stockpiling some goodies just for the mountain seems good. I've been doing that myself lately, especially with stashing away healing salves and good shit like that.

Buying relationship boosting stuff like alcohol, decks of cards, etc and keeping them in the wagon to use that the inn just before the mountain is within your control. Relationships do seem to reset (And I think relationships decay/grow somewhat toward neutral 10 between inns but I haven't paid super close attention, but I know there's at least some change to that since I've had runs (Notably the flagellant shithead run) where I've had massive amounts of negative reputation that lasted a single region and then normalized, similarly I've had fantastic relation that cools) to a degree and it is important to have it good at the mountain, but you as the player can play around that. Hearing about that makes me want to try to kill the general more often if I've got a highwayman specifically for that, now.

Especially if you give him either the rogue (If he's in front place +25% damage to all skills) or whatever the ranged (+25% damage to ranged skills, which point blank shot is even though it's front row and targets front row) subclasses. Congrats! And that's a super cool synergy with that trophy, I haven't even seen that one yet but turning highwayman into a point shot machine gun is nice.

Flagellant sucks now darkest dungeon