Jester David
Hero
This past weekend, I ran the Tomb of Horror for my group. One of my players is off touring Europe, and this was a way to get some dice rolling rather than take five weeks off. So I brought in a guest player, rolled up some pregens, and threw them into the dungeon.
I've been hard on this adventure in the past, and wanted to actually run it to see if the problems in how I read it were as bad in play. Plus, I'd wasn't thrilled by Tales from the Yawning Portal and using it justified the purchase.
TL;DR
Trap damage is okay, but could be higher in a couple places. However, the monsters could be much tougher. Most didn't last more than a round.
Make the pregens yourself. The problem with player-made pregens is you make a character with 10+ levels of combat powers and then put them in a dungeon that is combat light. You have a giant toolbox of hammers and a project that is mostly driving screws. They'll want to use all their cool class features but not have a chance. Which will make them antsy through the experience.
The poem is handy, but an explanation for the DM would have been nice. It's not the most useful set of clues.
Finding the secret doors is probably the slowest part of the module, and potentially very tedious.
Oh, and don't let your players bring a monk into the Tomb of Horrors.
Characters & Setup
The table was two pregenerated 11th level characters and two previously played PCs increased from 9th to 11th level. There's a investigator rogue (homebrew from my Heroes of the Mists document), a revised beastmaster ranger. Because I designed the first pregen, I could "stack the deck" for the players and include a magical ring and a wand of magic detection. Both of which are useful in the adventure. Joining those two were a shadowdancer monk and a lore bard, previously played in my Madness at Gardmore Abbey mini-campaign.
Because 5e characters are so formidable, I opted for lower than the baseline. Had I to do it again, 9th or 10th level would have probably also been fine.
I opted to use my "time loop" hook, as I expanded in this blog. Basically, I removed the fear of death. This encourages experimentation and hesitation (since you can respawn). After all, the best parts of this module are the horrible ways you can die, and if you never trigger them the adventure is a whole lot of poking at walls and floors. Plus, the alternatives are one player sits around bored when they die (not a good option) or brings in another pregen (which also trivializes death).
As it turned out, I almost didn't need the loop.
Entering the Tomb
I established the tomb by describing the time loop, explaining that their investigation led them to the barrow of a long presumed dead lich. And then I dumped them at the hill of the tomb. It's a one-shot, they're on the clock, let's skip the exposition.
I carefully used words like "crypt" and "barrow" in my descriptions, not telling my players that I was running the Tomb of Horrors. They had no idea what was coming. Eventually, after poking and examining the entire hill and exploring the stones on the southern side, they eventually decided to dig. Where? "Eh… the middle, I guess." False entrances avoided.
I snapped a pic of the first hallway from TotYP and showed that while describing that corridor. They quickly decided to follow the red path and examined the chest. "Why is there there?" they asked. And then they tried to consider reasons. "If this was a religious crypt, this might have been a donation box of some kind? Tributes and collections?" Silly players; there's only one reason the brass chest in the wall is there: a trap for curious adventurers. Like everything else in the dungeon, it exists to kill trespassers, because Acererak is an internet troll who made his dungeon for the lulz.
The rogue triggers the trap and he and the ranger both fell. Injury. Poison.Climbing up, the bard and rogue continue to debate the chest and its purpose. "There has to be more…"
The ranger (with slippers of spider climb) ran ahead along the walls. His panther followed and fell in a couple pit traps, leading the group to wonder what the point of the path was, given both on and off are unsafe. (After 3e/Pathfinder, they also were surprised there was no Dexterity save for pits. Checking this book and the DMG this seems to be the case.) The ranger found the archway of mist and the devil face, calling the rest of the group over. I'm pretty sure had he not gone ahead, the rogue and the bard would have spent the entire session on the damn chest.
This amused the Dark Souls obsessed rogue, who chuckled at the archway full of white mist and the potential to respawn.
Reading out what they see (and showing a pic of the Green Devil Face found on the internet) the bard and monk realized what it was instantly. And then guessed what we were playing. Looking at the poem on the ground, the ranger recognised the name "Acererak" and also guessed. The expression on his face was priceless.
While the rogue knew Acererak, he was unaware of the true nature of the Green Devil Face. The bard and monk remained silent. Using his ball of yarn (provided by the dungeoneer's kit) the rogue tossed that in and tried to pull it back. Nope. So that trap was avoided.
Reading the poem on the ground, the bard decided to check the interiour of every pit in the hallway, as two are "fortuitous". (I count only one in the actual adventure...) They also had a *long* conversation about if "night's good colour" was black or dark blue or the white of the moon.
Deciding then to tackle the poem in order, they tried to find the "tormentor". (They never realized they could push on the archway's glowing stones.) This led to some awkwardness, as so few of the frescos are described. When they wanted to examine them in detail, I had to invest and elaborate the scenes, hoping my spontaneous details wouldn't lead anyone astray. But I also didn't want to draw *too* much attention to torture chamber as one of the few explicitly detailed. They eventually decided the torture chamber might be the tormentor and checked the wall for secret doors then focused on the pit, since they were to "return to the tormentor". The clue didn't suggest the tormentor itself was an exit.
They never thought to attack that wall or otherwise damage it, revealing the plastered-over door.
Meanwhile, the monk and ranger went through the arch of mist.
Chests and Balls
The monk and ranger very quickly found the trapdoor leading to the crawl space, allowing them to get out. Then they returned through the arch to test more. The ranger affixed himself to the walls with his slippers as the monk triggered the trap. She dropped 100 feet all the way down. And took no damage. Because monk.
Yeah… don't let your players bring a monk into the Tomb of Horrors.
From there, they found the hidden plug in the crawlspace ceiling and emerged into the room of chests. With a new path discovered, they called the rest of the party over. They got lucky and opened the safe chest, and found a new magic ring. Then they opened the next two chests? Fights ensued.
There the party moved onto the Hall of Spheres. They wrote down the colours and decided black was a good choice. There was the fun moment at the end of the descriptions, when describing the archway that a player asked "yeah, but what are those colours in English?" Gygax certainly broke out a thesaurus for colours in the Tomb...
But they also poked each sphere to see what would happen, and found the passage to the three-armed gargoyle. But they only had three gems of 100gp value, so that didn't work out well for them. Had I to do this again, I might have specified some treasure for the group.
Beyond the black sphere, the chapel slowed them down for a period. It was big and had a lot of things to touch, like the candelabras and the urns (mentioned but not detailed). The monk touched the altar twice, but evaded both blasts, taking no damage. Then the monk opened the front pews, but was unaffected due to immunity to poison. Don't let your players bring a monk into the Tomb…
Eventually they started searching the walls.
Chekov's Pit
Moving along, the party sacrificed their newly recovered ring of protection and entered the long hallway of doors. Slow due to checking every square for traps, every door for traps, and every wall for secret passages. They found all three pits and searched the first two before moving on to the Locked Door.
This lead to one of those moments that every DM experiences where the players forget to explicitly state they were doing something they've said they've done a dozen times. I don't want to ask if they check in the third pit trap, but they'd checked in every other one so it *could* be assumed. They said they checked the walls though. If I give them no prodding, they could get upset later because I held things back. But I don't want things to be too easy. I took the middle ground and summarized where they've done as a quick catch-up, presenting it as part of a narrative description of what they're doing. They poke around a little bit more and one of them opts to check the pit.
*whew*
Meanwhile, they're still wondering about the line "if shades of red stand for blood".
Down they go to the poisoned corridor, which isn't an issue for the monk. Or the rest of the party really, as they've guzzled some antitoxin by this point. Really, even if they fail, there's no real penalty beyond "wait for the rest of the party to catch back up".
(Nitpicking: This is one of those places that show how early this was in adventure design. A better designed dungeon would have had a combat occur here, when the party might have been isolated. Or a damaging hazard the fleeing character might have had to run through.)
The group advances to the false crypt where they smack the eff out of Acerfake. They grab treasure and bail. But the group decides there must be more, and quickly find the magically sealed secret door.
The DC for the magically sealed door is high, which makes this a potential wall. When I established the door was magically sealed, I explained that because the enchantment was unknown, a dispel magic would not function. Extrapolating and justifying the hoops Gygax placed for me. The bard didn't have detect magic known, so this easily could have been an unsurmountable barrier. This module *really* expects you to have certain magical spells (like disintegrate) which is awkward when there are so many more classes or potential spells. And some classes are limited in spells known.
But, I anticipated! The rogue had his wand of magic detection. I could have also had detect magic be of the scrolls found in Acerfake's lair. Knock would also be a good one to include there, for backtracking to the gargoyle's lair.
Acids, Molds, and Slimes
The party went to the mummy preparation room and stuck their hand immediately in the vat of acid. So they skipped the rest of the room and went ahead.
They fell for the sneaky trick of the wide spiked pit. But it's really an incidental amount of damage. The spikes should be poisoned.
At this point in the delve, the ranger's player was super antsy from three-plus hours of poking walls and checking floors. So went they got into the heaving floor chamber he immediately pulled one tapestry down (AGH!!) and then set the other on fire (DOUBLE AGH!!) just so something would happen. Literally the two things you were not supposed to do.
Regretting not exploring the vats, the monk returned to the mummy preparation room and soloed the ooze there. Then recovered the first half of the First Key. Then, laterally thinking through the acid vat problem, she just broke the vat and let the acid drain out.
Beginning of the End
From there the party made a B-line to the siren room. Or rather, the monk and rogue did. The monk saved against the magical mist, but the rogue didn't, so the ranger and bard opted to remain back. I found the siren super awkward to roleplay. She's just there and doesn't attack and the whole scene is just weird. And when you think about how long this siren has been sitting around a large featureless room unable to leave… how is she not insane beyond words? The players just have so many questions, and there's only so many ways of being evasive. Plus, it doesn't even give her name!
The party explored north next, but missed the secret trapdoor beyond the secret door.
(There's a mistake on the TftYP map here, as the false door isn't on the map. And it's not keyed with the "12" of a false door either. Which made this section super awkward and confusing. Be warned.)
They continued ahead and the whole party fell asleep to the poison gas, except the monk. Because don't let your players bring a monk into the Tomb. She dragged the group out of the way just in time before they could be crushed…
(Really, it's probably a good thing they didn't get to the adamantine door: I'm uncertain the party had three swords between them. Which is odd: non-standard 5e parties are more likely to have three swords, but what 1e party of 3-5 people would have extra swords? And there hasn't been any extras lying around that I recall.)
At this point, the players looked at the map and felt they'd explored all the obvious places. They checked the walls of the stone juggernaut's chamber and backtracked, but didn't check the floor where they passed. (It didn't help that the rogue was mentally a potted plant.)
Feeling like they'd hit a dead end, they returned to the locked door and slowly bashed that open. The floor shifted and slanted. The bard dimension doored to safety, the monk shadow stepped, and the ranger was already spider climbing on the walls. This left the Int 1 rogue, who tumbled to its death in fire. The first and only casualty.
At this point, we'd been playing for a little over five hours and needed to wrap things up. So we called the dungeon there.
Final Thoughts
I still don't like the Tomb of Horrors.
Half the time, my players managed to look in the right place to move forward or muddle through a solution. A few other times they said they were searching roughly in the right area and I said "close enough" and gave them the roll. Just to keep things going. But there was still more than once when there was no obvious path forward, and they just tried everything until something worked.
The annoying bits aren't the death traps or weird puzzles, it's the secret doors hidden in unexpected places that require 5-25 minutes of "is there anything on this wall?"
Some of the deadliness remains. But there's a lot that just isn't deadly. A lot of very minor hit point atrophy (false door spears, low spell slot lightning bolt or fireballs, launching spikes, the monsters). I'm not sure these were ever deadly, as high level 1e character had just as much if not more spells for hp recovery overnight.
Often, what made things easier wasn't the hit points and healing of the characters, but the avoidance mechanics like Evasion. To say nothing of Purity of Body. And the availability of low level teleportation magics make certain things easier.
More ongoing poison damage and poisons that aren't poisons might have helped.
I've been hard on this adventure in the past, and wanted to actually run it to see if the problems in how I read it were as bad in play. Plus, I'd wasn't thrilled by Tales from the Yawning Portal and using it justified the purchase.
TL;DR
Trap damage is okay, but could be higher in a couple places. However, the monsters could be much tougher. Most didn't last more than a round.
Make the pregens yourself. The problem with player-made pregens is you make a character with 10+ levels of combat powers and then put them in a dungeon that is combat light. You have a giant toolbox of hammers and a project that is mostly driving screws. They'll want to use all their cool class features but not have a chance. Which will make them antsy through the experience.
The poem is handy, but an explanation for the DM would have been nice. It's not the most useful set of clues.
Finding the secret doors is probably the slowest part of the module, and potentially very tedious.
Oh, and don't let your players bring a monk into the Tomb of Horrors.
Characters & Setup
The table was two pregenerated 11th level characters and two previously played PCs increased from 9th to 11th level. There's a investigator rogue (homebrew from my Heroes of the Mists document), a revised beastmaster ranger. Because I designed the first pregen, I could "stack the deck" for the players and include a magical ring and a wand of magic detection. Both of which are useful in the adventure. Joining those two were a shadowdancer monk and a lore bard, previously played in my Madness at Gardmore Abbey mini-campaign.
Because 5e characters are so formidable, I opted for lower than the baseline. Had I to do it again, 9th or 10th level would have probably also been fine.
I opted to use my "time loop" hook, as I expanded in this blog. Basically, I removed the fear of death. This encourages experimentation and hesitation (since you can respawn). After all, the best parts of this module are the horrible ways you can die, and if you never trigger them the adventure is a whole lot of poking at walls and floors. Plus, the alternatives are one player sits around bored when they die (not a good option) or brings in another pregen (which also trivializes death).
As it turned out, I almost didn't need the loop.
Entering the Tomb
I established the tomb by describing the time loop, explaining that their investigation led them to the barrow of a long presumed dead lich. And then I dumped them at the hill of the tomb. It's a one-shot, they're on the clock, let's skip the exposition.
I carefully used words like "crypt" and "barrow" in my descriptions, not telling my players that I was running the Tomb of Horrors. They had no idea what was coming. Eventually, after poking and examining the entire hill and exploring the stones on the southern side, they eventually decided to dig. Where? "Eh… the middle, I guess." False entrances avoided.
I snapped a pic of the first hallway from TotYP and showed that while describing that corridor. They quickly decided to follow the red path and examined the chest. "Why is there there?" they asked. And then they tried to consider reasons. "If this was a religious crypt, this might have been a donation box of some kind? Tributes and collections?" Silly players; there's only one reason the brass chest in the wall is there: a trap for curious adventurers. Like everything else in the dungeon, it exists to kill trespassers, because Acererak is an internet troll who made his dungeon for the lulz.
The rogue triggers the trap and he and the ranger both fell. Injury. Poison.Climbing up, the bard and rogue continue to debate the chest and its purpose. "There has to be more…"
The ranger (with slippers of spider climb) ran ahead along the walls. His panther followed and fell in a couple pit traps, leading the group to wonder what the point of the path was, given both on and off are unsafe. (After 3e/Pathfinder, they also were surprised there was no Dexterity save for pits. Checking this book and the DMG this seems to be the case.) The ranger found the archway of mist and the devil face, calling the rest of the group over. I'm pretty sure had he not gone ahead, the rogue and the bard would have spent the entire session on the damn chest.
This amused the Dark Souls obsessed rogue, who chuckled at the archway full of white mist and the potential to respawn.
Reading out what they see (and showing a pic of the Green Devil Face found on the internet) the bard and monk realized what it was instantly. And then guessed what we were playing. Looking at the poem on the ground, the ranger recognised the name "Acererak" and also guessed. The expression on his face was priceless.
While the rogue knew Acererak, he was unaware of the true nature of the Green Devil Face. The bard and monk remained silent. Using his ball of yarn (provided by the dungeoneer's kit) the rogue tossed that in and tried to pull it back. Nope. So that trap was avoided.
Reading the poem on the ground, the bard decided to check the interiour of every pit in the hallway, as two are "fortuitous". (I count only one in the actual adventure...) They also had a *long* conversation about if "night's good colour" was black or dark blue or the white of the moon.
Deciding then to tackle the poem in order, they tried to find the "tormentor". (They never realized they could push on the archway's glowing stones.) This led to some awkwardness, as so few of the frescos are described. When they wanted to examine them in detail, I had to invest and elaborate the scenes, hoping my spontaneous details wouldn't lead anyone astray. But I also didn't want to draw *too* much attention to torture chamber as one of the few explicitly detailed. They eventually decided the torture chamber might be the tormentor and checked the wall for secret doors then focused on the pit, since they were to "return to the tormentor". The clue didn't suggest the tormentor itself was an exit.
They never thought to attack that wall or otherwise damage it, revealing the plastered-over door.
Meanwhile, the monk and ranger went through the arch of mist.
Chests and Balls
The monk and ranger very quickly found the trapdoor leading to the crawl space, allowing them to get out. Then they returned through the arch to test more. The ranger affixed himself to the walls with his slippers as the monk triggered the trap. She dropped 100 feet all the way down. And took no damage. Because monk.
Yeah… don't let your players bring a monk into the Tomb of Horrors.
From there, they found the hidden plug in the crawlspace ceiling and emerged into the room of chests. With a new path discovered, they called the rest of the party over. They got lucky and opened the safe chest, and found a new magic ring. Then they opened the next two chests? Fights ensued.
There the party moved onto the Hall of Spheres. They wrote down the colours and decided black was a good choice. There was the fun moment at the end of the descriptions, when describing the archway that a player asked "yeah, but what are those colours in English?" Gygax certainly broke out a thesaurus for colours in the Tomb...
But they also poked each sphere to see what would happen, and found the passage to the three-armed gargoyle. But they only had three gems of 100gp value, so that didn't work out well for them. Had I to do this again, I might have specified some treasure for the group.
Beyond the black sphere, the chapel slowed them down for a period. It was big and had a lot of things to touch, like the candelabras and the urns (mentioned but not detailed). The monk touched the altar twice, but evaded both blasts, taking no damage. Then the monk opened the front pews, but was unaffected due to immunity to poison. Don't let your players bring a monk into the Tomb…
Eventually they started searching the walls.
Chekov's Pit
Moving along, the party sacrificed their newly recovered ring of protection and entered the long hallway of doors. Slow due to checking every square for traps, every door for traps, and every wall for secret passages. They found all three pits and searched the first two before moving on to the Locked Door.
This lead to one of those moments that every DM experiences where the players forget to explicitly state they were doing something they've said they've done a dozen times. I don't want to ask if they check in the third pit trap, but they'd checked in every other one so it *could* be assumed. They said they checked the walls though. If I give them no prodding, they could get upset later because I held things back. But I don't want things to be too easy. I took the middle ground and summarized where they've done as a quick catch-up, presenting it as part of a narrative description of what they're doing. They poke around a little bit more and one of them opts to check the pit.
*whew*
Meanwhile, they're still wondering about the line "if shades of red stand for blood".
Down they go to the poisoned corridor, which isn't an issue for the monk. Or the rest of the party really, as they've guzzled some antitoxin by this point. Really, even if they fail, there's no real penalty beyond "wait for the rest of the party to catch back up".
(Nitpicking: This is one of those places that show how early this was in adventure design. A better designed dungeon would have had a combat occur here, when the party might have been isolated. Or a damaging hazard the fleeing character might have had to run through.)
The group advances to the false crypt where they smack the eff out of Acerfake. They grab treasure and bail. But the group decides there must be more, and quickly find the magically sealed secret door.
The DC for the magically sealed door is high, which makes this a potential wall. When I established the door was magically sealed, I explained that because the enchantment was unknown, a dispel magic would not function. Extrapolating and justifying the hoops Gygax placed for me. The bard didn't have detect magic known, so this easily could have been an unsurmountable barrier. This module *really* expects you to have certain magical spells (like disintegrate) which is awkward when there are so many more classes or potential spells. And some classes are limited in spells known.
But, I anticipated! The rogue had his wand of magic detection. I could have also had detect magic be of the scrolls found in Acerfake's lair. Knock would also be a good one to include there, for backtracking to the gargoyle's lair.
Acids, Molds, and Slimes
The party went to the mummy preparation room and stuck their hand immediately in the vat of acid. So they skipped the rest of the room and went ahead.
They fell for the sneaky trick of the wide spiked pit. But it's really an incidental amount of damage. The spikes should be poisoned.
At this point in the delve, the ranger's player was super antsy from three-plus hours of poking walls and checking floors. So went they got into the heaving floor chamber he immediately pulled one tapestry down (AGH!!) and then set the other on fire (DOUBLE AGH!!) just so something would happen. Literally the two things you were not supposed to do.
Regretting not exploring the vats, the monk returned to the mummy preparation room and soloed the ooze there. Then recovered the first half of the First Key. Then, laterally thinking through the acid vat problem, she just broke the vat and let the acid drain out.
Beginning of the End
From there the party made a B-line to the siren room. Or rather, the monk and rogue did. The monk saved against the magical mist, but the rogue didn't, so the ranger and bard opted to remain back. I found the siren super awkward to roleplay. She's just there and doesn't attack and the whole scene is just weird. And when you think about how long this siren has been sitting around a large featureless room unable to leave… how is she not insane beyond words? The players just have so many questions, and there's only so many ways of being evasive. Plus, it doesn't even give her name!
The party explored north next, but missed the secret trapdoor beyond the secret door.
(There's a mistake on the TftYP map here, as the false door isn't on the map. And it's not keyed with the "12" of a false door either. Which made this section super awkward and confusing. Be warned.)
They continued ahead and the whole party fell asleep to the poison gas, except the monk. Because don't let your players bring a monk into the Tomb. She dragged the group out of the way just in time before they could be crushed…
(Really, it's probably a good thing they didn't get to the adamantine door: I'm uncertain the party had three swords between them. Which is odd: non-standard 5e parties are more likely to have three swords, but what 1e party of 3-5 people would have extra swords? And there hasn't been any extras lying around that I recall.)
At this point, the players looked at the map and felt they'd explored all the obvious places. They checked the walls of the stone juggernaut's chamber and backtracked, but didn't check the floor where they passed. (It didn't help that the rogue was mentally a potted plant.)
Feeling like they'd hit a dead end, they returned to the locked door and slowly bashed that open. The floor shifted and slanted. The bard dimension doored to safety, the monk shadow stepped, and the ranger was already spider climbing on the walls. This left the Int 1 rogue, who tumbled to its death in fire. The first and only casualty.
At this point, we'd been playing for a little over five hours and needed to wrap things up. So we called the dungeon there.
Final Thoughts
I still don't like the Tomb of Horrors.
Half the time, my players managed to look in the right place to move forward or muddle through a solution. A few other times they said they were searching roughly in the right area and I said "close enough" and gave them the roll. Just to keep things going. But there was still more than once when there was no obvious path forward, and they just tried everything until something worked.
The annoying bits aren't the death traps or weird puzzles, it's the secret doors hidden in unexpected places that require 5-25 minutes of "is there anything on this wall?"
Some of the deadliness remains. But there's a lot that just isn't deadly. A lot of very minor hit point atrophy (false door spears, low spell slot lightning bolt or fireballs, launching spikes, the monsters). I'm not sure these were ever deadly, as high level 1e character had just as much if not more spells for hp recovery overnight.
Often, what made things easier wasn't the hit points and healing of the characters, but the avoidance mechanics like Evasion. To say nothing of Purity of Body. And the availability of low level teleportation magics make certain things easier.
More ongoing poison damage and poisons that aren't poisons might have helped.
