WIR S1 Tomb of Horrors [SPOILERS!! SPOILERS EVERYWHERE!!]‏

[pemerton]

I’m not saying this all is impossible to figure out one way or another, I’m just saying that things are not nearly as clear cut and apparent to a party taking in all the clues available.

I assume that this is where liberal use of divination spells is meant to come into it. Although Augury and Divination both have a non-negligible failure chance in AD&D.

Which isn't meant to contradict your point, just elaborate what makes it "not impossible to figure out".

As Loincloth of Amour said, a playstyle for which you really have to be in the right mood. (Not all that often, in my case!)

 

[Stoat]

Bullgrit's point comparing the archway and the GDD is a good one. There's a lot of similarity between the two. On the other hand, the archway looks like a door. The GDD doesn't. Acererak's riddle explicitly says to go "through the arch," which is the best way to proceed. And anybody planning to go through either the Arch or the GDD should be prodding ahead with a pole, sticking an arm in first or whatever. That should reveal the dangers of the GDD. All in all, I'm willing to say that the module does a fairly good job of pointing the party in the right direction.

But yeah, there are four numbered encounters in the Entrance Hall. Areas 3 and 5 reward players who investigate them. Areas 4 and 6 punish players who investigate them and should be left alone. Area 5 rewards players who make a leap of faith. Area 6 kills players who make a leap of faith.

As for the riddle, I'm inclined to agree that putting "shun green" (probably the GGD) in the same sentence with "night's good color" (probably a reference to what, Area 10?) seems a little like dirty pool. As I said initially, it's a pretty opaque clue.

 

[Ultimatecalibur]

Shun Green if you can, but night's good color
is for those of great valor.

Those two lines are what a lot of contention is based around, the second part especially.

While the first part is still relatively easy to understand, avoid messing with things that are colored green unless you have to, I think the general ability to understand the second part of this clue has atrophied. During the time this was originally written 33+ years ago there was not nearly as much light pollution as in modern times and so a clear night sky was much easier to see. Without excessive light pollution, a star filled sky appears blue-black and a cloudy sky appears grey-black. And even those in urban inner city locations most likely had familiarity with a color that had appeared in boxes of 48+ crayons for the past 20 years, Midnight Blue.

 

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

Bullgrit's point comparing the archway and the GDD is a good one.

Shun Green if you can, but night's good color
is for those of great valor.

Those two lines are what a lot of contention is based around, the second part especially.

Reading through the comments on this module, especially the above statements, reminds me of a late-night riddle / game that was posed to me by two former Girl Scouts who had learned it at camp. Maybe the group here is familiar with it. And keep your mind out of the gutter!

Essentially, it involves picking up two sticks (or pencils, etc.), and handing them around either crossed, one over the other, or not. When doing so, the person doing the handing off says, "I hand these to you [crossed / uncrossed]." The person receiving holds them in their hands, either taking them in the state that they were offered or switching it, and then says, "I take them [crossed / uncrossed]." Then, the person who knows the game's rules (in this case, they both knew the rules and I was ignorant) indicates whether the hand-off was done correctly. Play proceeds until everyone figures out the rules.

The trick, of course, is that the status claimed when handing or receiving does not necessarily match what the sticks look like - holding them separately (not crossed), handing them over while saying "I hand these to you crossed," the recipient taking them, crossing them, and saying "I receive them crossed," could be[/b] a valid play. The goal, then, is to figure out what the real rules are.

About 5 minutes in, one of them looked at me and said, "You're a D&D player, aren't you?"

In my head I'd started simple, and when that rule didn't work, I'd been moving towards more and more complex rules - starting with things like, "The first passes can be whatever, subsequent passes are done with the sticks in the position they were last claimed to be in but are claimed as whatever you want," to "crossed = true; not crossed = false; every pass must be XOR true and every reception must be XOR false" to "the passer makes a two-character binary number from the claim (crossed = 0, uncrossed = 1, or maybe reversed) and actual pass (or maybe in reverse order), and the receiver has to switch odd-vs-even using the same logic." Etc.

The rules are actually ...
[sblock]... that the position of the sticks doesn't matter at all. Your claim - crossed or uncrossed - has to do with the position of your legs; whether you are sitting Indian style or not.[/sblock]

In short, a lifetime of D&D-style riddles had ingrained in me a kind of tricksy, three-levels deep thinking that was nigh-immediately apparent to one of the referees, and it seems to be a hallmark of this particular dungeon that you shouldn't be thinking like that - except when you should, of course.

EDIT: The fact that the rules are supposed to figured out by 7-to-10-year-olds should have also clued me in to the fact that I was getting way too complicatd in my rules.

 

[Beginning of the End]

Well, now, keep in mind how sometimes blind persistence is rewarded in this tomb. For instance, say the party properly activates the arch, (right beside the GGD), and someone goes through it properly. That first PC disappears with no clue or evidence for what happened to him. He could be destroyed forever, no save, and none of his compatriots would know it. But in order to proceed further into the tomb, the other PCs should follow the first through the arch.

It takes very bad play to get a TPK on the devil face. You say the arch requires "blind faith", but in fact neither the devil face nor the arch should be tackled with "blind faith".

Things I've Seen Done:

(1) Take a 10' pole and stick it into each portal. You can draw the whole thing back from the arch; you pull back a sheared off end from the devil face.

(2) Throw an object through the arch and devil face. Then cast locate object.

(3) Have someone go through the arch and/or devil face with the intention that they'll cast whispering wind from the other side (or similar methods). They will from the other side of the arch; they won't from the demon face. (Bad for that guy; but prevents the TPK.)

(4) Don't go through either one; find one of the other egresses out of the hall.

(5) Use an augury spell to determine the weal-or-woe of each option.

It's true that you can get away with having very bad play while interacting with the arch, but can't get away with similarly bad play while interacting with the green devil face. That doesn't change the fact that the root of the problem is very bad play; not the fact that one is a hazard and the other isn't.

(And, yes, I feel comfortable describing "we all walk through an unknown magical effect that may or may not be a portal without investigating its properties in any way" to be "very bad play".)

 

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

(1) Take a 10' pole and stick it into each portal. You can draw the whole thing back from the arch; you pull back a sheared off end from the devil face.

Can you? If you haven't "solved" the arch's riddle correctly, anything entering the arch is irrevocably sent to the Forsaken Prison. Couldn't that shear off the end of the 10' pole just like the orb of annihilation?

(2) Throw an object through the arch and devil face. Then cast locate object.

I don't recall the range of locate object from 1E, but in 3E+ it's fairly limited. A 10th-level caster gets you only 800' of range (and is foiled by a thin sheet of lead). So a "no result" on one or the other or both could be possible (especially since the arch is actually a teleporter, right?).

(3) Have someone go through the arch and/or devil face with the intention that they'll cast whispering wind from the other side (or similar methods). They will from the other side of the arch; they won't from the demon face. (Bad for that guy; but prevents the TPK.)

Again, no experience with the 1E version, but the 3E version of whispering wind includes the limitation "The whispering wind travels to a specific location within range that is familiar to you, provided that it can find a way to the location." If the two areas are discontinous - e.g., there isn't a walking or flying path between the two, and this is probable given that the arch is a teleporter - then you could have fails for both passageways.

(5) Use an augury spell to determine the weal-or-woe of each option.

This is probably the best option.

 

[Ultimatecalibur]

Can you? If you haven't "solved" the arch's riddle correctly, anything entering the arch is irrevocably sent to the Forsaken Prison. Couldn't that shear off the end of the 10' pole just like the orb of annihilation?

The wording used is "passed through" implying that just sticking your hand, or better yet a 10' pole, in does nothing.

 

[Stoat]

FWIW, the play report that Gentlegamer linked to summarized Areas 5 and 6 this way:

At the end of the passageway there was a devil mouth- with an open, black mouth. Things shoved in did not return. On the left there was a door with a blue haze covering it. anything that went partway in came back, Things that went in all the way did not.

 

[Bullgrit]

Just adding information to the discussion:

Sphere of Annihilation:
...
Any matter which comes in contact with a sphere is instantly sucked into the void, gone, utterly destroyed, wishes and similar magicks notwithstanding!
...

Does this mean the end of a 10' pole is "sheared" off, or is the whole pole sucked into the hole? (Might a RBDM say, "make a save to avoid being pulled in holding the pole"?)

...it is about 3' in diameter -- plenty of room for those who wish to leap in and be completely and forever destroyed.

So the idea of leaping in wasn't an unexpected one for the designer?

Locate Object:
Range: 6" + 1"/level

The archway teleports to areas 3, 7, 11 -- 120', 70', 150', requiring 6th level, 5th (min for spell), 9th level. So using it on something tossed through the arch would probably work. But using it on something tossed into the GGD, the PCs wouldn't know if it was destroyed or was just teleported beyond 200' (14th level). The Tomb is 330' wide, 430' long. (The hill containing the Tomb is described to the PCs as 600' wide, 900' long at the beginning.)

Augury:
The base chance for correctly divining the augury is 70%, plus 1% for each level...

A 14th level cleric has an 84% chance of getting it right.

Bullgrit

 

[Bullgrit]

By the way, does anyone else see the title to this thread on the main forum page with the number of pages reversed?

WIR S1 Tomb of Horrors [SPOILERS!! SPOILERS EVERYWHERE!!] 3 2 1)

It's been reversed for me since it went to 2 pages. This is the only time I've seen this reversed page numbering on ENWorld.

Bullgrit