S1: Tomb of Horrors

It's Sphere of Annihilation flavored.

This adventure module for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was the deadliest motherfucking adventure module. Gary Gygax has author credit, but it's pretty clear it was written by Eldrad because whoever wrote this is a complete dick.

It's used as the textbook example of an adventure that's meant to make players cry.

It was the first module to have an inset booklet with illustrations of key areas in the Tomb, so players could get a feel for what it looked like.

How bad is it?

This article contains spoilers! You have been warned.

Just to get INTO the damn thing, you have to probe a marshy hillock with that 10' pole every character buys. When you find the entrance, there's a 2-in-3 chance it's one of the fake entrances, which have either "Rocks fall, everyone dies" or a 10' thick airtight stone crushers blocking off the exit and needing a damn Wish spell to get through.

The real entrance has concealed pit traps with save vs. poison or DIE spikes, but a mosaic path will lead you around them, and has a poem engraved in it with clues for the tomb's traps you have to be reeeel close to read, and the path goes over all the pit traps in the hallway. Except one pit where the path leads you around it. What a dick move.

There's the glowy archway at the end of that path that you have to touch the archstones in the right order, otherwise it teleports you into an oubliette with a 100' pit trap if you try to get out. The path also leads into an engraved mouth large enough to enter; the mouth is actually a Sphere of Fucking Annihilation.

There's a gargoyle statue with three arms that are carved to hold gems. If you put expensive enough gems in the three hands, they get destroyed, and nothing happens. If you do this again, and again, you get a gem of True Seeing, but the gem itself is invisible so you don't know it's there unless you, cast a True Sight spell to detect it. Since so many illusions in this place are impenetrable without True Sight, you are doomed without this gem.

90% of the doors you see are actually fake -- they open on a blank wall and conjures a spear that jabs the nearest person in the chest. Even if you went straight to the demi-lich's tomb, you'd have to successfully detect 11 secret doors, including one at the bottom of a pit trap (still with the save-or-die spikes) and another is a fake door that has a secret door in it AND a secret trapdoor in the floor on the other side.

The there's the fake BBEG room -- which is shown in the illustration on the outside of the module just to fuck with people who saw it in the game store. The description for the fake BBEG room actually instructs you how to be a dick by telling the DM to count to 10 while a Rocks Fall illusion is going on, and tells the DM to put the game away without saying anything if they players think they defeated the real BBEG.

The real BBEG is a floating wizard skull that steals someone's soul every time someone touches it -- NO SAVING THROW -- turning their body and equipment into dust. Fighters need +5 magic weapons to hit it, thieves can throw gems at it, causing 1 hp of damage for every 10,000gp of value in the gem, clerics can dispel evil for 5hp of damage, and magic users have to be in the astral plane for any spells to affect it. After stealing eight souls, it teleports everyone else 100-600 miles in a random direction and curses them so that anyone that attacks you never misses (and you lose 2 points of charisma permanently if the curse is removed).

There are 20 pregen characters in the back, and it's recommended that players play two characters simultaneously because this adventure module is that deadly.

Versions

homebrew improvement on the original map... fewer "LOL SECRET DOOR" problems

• Adventure Module S1, Tomb of Horrors (1978)
• Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Tomes, Return to the Tomb of Horrors, 1998

Added a village of evil cultists outside the tomb, then you went through the Tomb itself (the original module was included in the box), but in the BBEG room you found instead a portal to the demi-lich's fortress anchored in the motherfuckin' Negative Material Plane, yet another module designed for maximum TPK. Came with an even bigger book of illustrations to show the players.

• novel, The Tomb of Horrors, by Kieth Francis Strohm (2002) Jebus, it is bad.
• 36-page pdf, Tomb of Horrors (Revised) (2005) You can download it for free.

This is a re-edit for D&D 3.5. It was less deadly with "save or die" instead of instant death, made the BBEG a tiefling lich, and added an extra room with a brain-in-a-jar.

• Tomb of Horrors 4e. Mentioned in preview and promo material. Anonymous reports it's actually four tombs, with a "broken, falling down" version of the original Tomb as tomb #2. It's been nerfed to match the 4rry "save or die sucks" attitude. HURP DERP