S1: Tomb of Horrors

It's Sphere of Annihilation flavored.

This article or section is about something oldschool - and awesome. Make sure your rose-tinted glasses are on nice and tight, and prepare for a lovely walk down nostalgia lane.

This adventure module for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was a source of considerable Rage. Gary Gygax has author credit. It's used as the textbook example of an adventure that's meant to make players cry.

(If you kids had any grey in your neckbeards, you'd know the Tomb is nothing compared to Gygax's Isle of the Ape. Now get off my lawn!)

It was the first module to have an inset booklet with illustrations of key areas in the dungeon, so players could get a feel for what it looked like. The better for them to picture how they die brutally of course.

How bad is it?

It's an old school module, so if you're not used to that play style, expect culture shock. The introduction also carries a warning that it is a module for thinking people, destined to frustrate kick-door-fight-orc gamers. If you prefer adventures that challenge your problem-solving abilities, then this will be a very difficult test and good fun.

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 a rigged cave-in for 5d10 damage or a 10' thick airtight stone crusher blocking off the exit. If your DM mentions a rumbling sound and starts counting at 1 1/2 second intervals, run out of there as fast as you can.

The real entrance has concealed pit traps with save vs. poison or DIE spikes. If you somehow lost that 10' pole you used to find the entrance and you do your probing for traps with your feet, you have about a 15% chance of getting spiked, not that the pole will be completely useful since there's a decent chance (1 in 3) that you don't trigger a pit while checking for them. A mosaic path will lead you around the pits, and has a poem engraved in it with clues for the tomb's traps you have to be reeeeal 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 glowing 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 guess incorrectly with the unmarked release levers. The path also leads into an engraved mouth large enough to enter; it's the exit point of a few teleport traps elsewhere in the Tomb. The mouth is actually a Sphere of Fucking Annihilation. Just in case the players think they can climb back in to return to the trap they triggered, the mouth helpfully detects as evil. Lastly, the main exit can be found by breaking away a relief of a door to find - a door.

There's a gargoyle statue with three arms that are carved to hold gems. It's likely that this will be encountered after fighting a four-armed gargoyle wearing a collar studded with ten gems. If you put expensive enough gems in the three hands (like the ones from the collar), they get destroyed, and nothing happens. If you use ten gems in this way, 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... or listen to the Magic Mouth that tells you where it is. Since so many illusions in this place are impenetrable without True Sight, you are doomed without this gem.

Many of the doors you see are actually fake, opening on a solid wall, and two of them conjure 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 boss-fight 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 boss-fight 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, after asking if the module was too hard.

The real end-boss monster 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). Fighting him is entirely optional, since the skull only reacts if someone's stupid enough to touch it. The awesome treasure on the floor is protected by a phantasm that will threaten, but can't actually do anything unless the players attack it enough to give it enough juice to turn it into a ghost. If the players are still in 'touchy-touchy' and 'hack-and-slash' mode by the time they got this far, they get what they deserve.

Don't even think about jumping into the ethereal or astral planes at any time, there's a 1 in 6 chance that you'll run head first into a type I-IV demon every round you remain in them.

There are 20 pregen characters in the back, and it's recommended that players bring two characters each if there are less than six players.

Funny thing is that the module actually isn't really directly unfair as such, it just challenges the players assumptions about how the game is played. While there are some obviously dickish parts, the problems you need to solve aren't shockingly abstract, you just need to be really really careful.

Versions

homebrew variation on the original map; fewer dead-ends

• Adventure Module S1, Tomb of Horrors (1978)
• Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Tomes, Return to the Tomb of Horrors (1998): Actually gave a reason to go there other than graverobbing. 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 final 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) holy shit, it is bad.
• 36-page pdf, Tomb of Horrors (Revised) (2005) You can (Dead Download Link, no longer available) 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 end-boss a tiefling lich, and added an extra room with a brain-in-a-jar.
• Tomb of Horrors 4e. This is actually a series of four tombs, designed to build a campaign around (although the tombs vary in difficulty from 9th to at least 25th level, so it'll be a looooong campaign): a Feywild graveyard, the wreckage of the 2e negative-material-plane module, the wreckage of the original tomb which now hosts a bunch of evil squatters, and a tomb to dead gods in the Astral Plane. The plot of the adventure concerns the demilich who built the original tomb coming up with a plan which will allow him to ascend to godhood by draining power from various planes It's been nerfed to match the 4rry attitude ("instant death" is now encounter powers with "fail three saving throws then die"), but it's still pretty deadly with encounters that have endless streaming monsters and boss monsters you're supposed to run away from instead of pwn outright. The fourth tomb has plenty of those 'Aspect of [God's name here]' monsters for extra fun. Players are supposed to return to the original tomb to fight the demilich final boss -- /tg/ highly recommends making them go through the full old school Tomb.
  • It should be noted that the intro to the module specifically says that if you're the old-school kind of DM, use Rule Zero to turn those "three saves" into "one save" or "no save". Remember, gaming is about fun for everyone!
• There's also another 4th Ed version of the module, which is closer in spirit and content to the original O/ADnD Module (as in, you can actually die easily. In 4th Ed. What the Christ.)
• In Act I of Calendra's Legacy, a fan mission for Thief II, there's an easily missed mini-version of the Tomb.
• A Neverwinter Nights version of the original Tomb is available if you want to see your savegame characters get killed repeatedly.
• A Minecraft version of the original Tomb can be found. No monsters, no save-or-die, but it's a nifty first-person perspective on the Tomb.
• The adventure rears its ugly head not once, not twice, but thrice in 5th edition. During the playtest phase (under the goofy "Next" moniker), the adventure was converted for issue # 213 of Dungeon Magazine. Nearly 4 years later, Tales of the Yawning Portal features the module as the grand finale to its 7 module list. While not as killer as the original, its bound to axe off a few foolish adventurers. That same year WotC announced that their next storyline would feature Tomb as the endgame, as a curse starts affecting everyone in the Forgotten Realms who has died and come back to life (albeit modified to not be completely identical to the Yawning Portal one).
• The novel Ready Player One heavily features the Tomb in it's first act, ending in the Chapel which apparently is stocked with an arcade cabinet for Joust.