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 the deadliest motherfucking adventure module a source of considerable Rage. 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, although Isle of the Ape - written by the same author - is much, much deadlier.

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?

It's an old school module, so if you're not used to that play style, expect culture shock. In particular, remember that in oD&D, 1e and even 2e, you could just about get a new character rolled up before your old guy's dead body hit the floor. The introduction also carries a warning that it is a module for thinking people, destined to frustrate hack-and-slay gamers. If you are looking for a module to challenge your problem-solving abilities, then this will be a very difficult test, but probably good fun. But just saying that means that people who hate this module are dumb - that's why this was clearly the work of Eldrad.

What a dick.

Wait, am I a hack-and-slay gamer?

No offense, but you probably are one. 3e, Pathfinder, and 4e are all designed to let you bash your way through most problems. Actually a lot of people played that way back in the old school, too, and got mad as hell when "Gary" used this module to show them what he thought of their play style.

OK, so how bad is it really?

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 crushers blocking off the exit and needing a damn Wish spell magical solutions to stone walls (Disintegrate, Phasedoor, Stone-to-Flesh, Transmute Rock-to-Mud, or - as a last resort - Wish) to get through.

The real entrance has concealed pit traps with save vs. poison or DIE spikes. Assuming just the sensible precaution of using a pole to probe for traps, you have about a 15% chance of getting spiked. 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 (left to right), otherwise it teleports you into an oubliette with a 100' pit trap if you try to get out decide to pull down on the release levers, rather than up. Note that you can press the stones as many times as you want, and the archway is filled with mists until they've been properly activated. The path also leads into an engraved mouth large enough to enter; the mouth is actually a Sphere of Fucking Annihilation. In case your group were unsure about the wisdom of climbing into the mouth of a devil, it helpfully detects as evil. Lastly, the main exit can be found by breaking away a relief of a door to find - a door. (The poem from the mosaic helpfully recommends this route.)

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.

90% Four 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 boss (the dungeon owner has no nefarious agenda for the PCs to stop, so he's not exactly a BBEG, is he?) 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 after asking if the module was too hard, if the players think they defeated the real BBEG decide they've had enough.

The real BBEG boss 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. The demi-lich is not threatening the world, the kingdom, or even the village idiot's shack. You're just fighting him for the right to pick treasure out of his skull.

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 do not play more than two characters. The designers also suggests one character each for groups of six or more players.

Versions

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

• 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. Also includes an optional (read: unavoidable because the DM hates you) city full of high-level cultists and worshipers of the wizard-skull. By the way, he's NOT in tomb #2.