Rate S1: The Tomb of Horrors (corrected poll options)

[Numion]

It punishes them for thinking;

That walking into a lich's tomb is going to be a good idea.

That traps won't kill you.

It punishes them for thinking;

That walking into a D&D game is going to a fun evening.

Enjoy

 

[Pants]

Fair enough. Why fly spells though? What if the trap was that the ceiling would collapse, or walls close in, or poison gas, or any of a thousand things?

Then they'd have been screwed.

Elf was what I figured. Like you say though, luck, not skill. Also, only a 1 in 6 chance per elf, so 5 out of 6 super-skilled parties (with one elf) will miss this one. Does in a pit count as passing by?

I ran this under 3.5 so the Elf made a lucky Search check.

That does seem like a lucky, specific guess to me. I guess I'm just a skeptic by nature. Honestly though, I've never had 3 swords all in one party. I suppose that was more likely in 1E with bigger parties and swords having few weapon competitors, but even then I never had 3 sword carriers.

Yeah, it was a lucky guess. The veteran players had tried everything and the new player just said it outloud. To be fair, they didn't have enough swords so they opted to leave and go buy some. This is where we left off.

And thats only 3 of the must pass hurdles.

Yeah, I can't quite remember how the others played out, but I suspect it was due mostly to trial and error and guessing.

 

[Numion]

Well, not exactly an endless supply of NPC's.

See, we had preperation. At roughly 11th level, we each put on the ring of regeneration, severed our pinky fingers, and gave it to a trusted (but retired) henchman. We also connected our souls to a gem, that would shine if we died, allowing the henchman to raise us from the dead.

We begged, borrowed and just plain took by force three rods of resurrection, used wishes to "reset" our Resurrection limit, and hoped for the best.

And I sometimes wonder why the third edition is blamed for bringing "video gameyness" into D&D. Sounds like you got yourselves a save-reload action going on in there.

 

[froggie]

The best and the first of its kind

I gave it a 10. This was the first "thinking person's" dungeon. Like many of Gary's works, if you do stupid stuff (like jump through a demon mouth) you die. If you are not careful, the trap will kill you. I will never understand why anyone would make a trap that would not kill (or trap w/ no chance of escape) you. If I were a lich, I would not make a trap w/ poison that made someone sick for a day or two, I would make it so it killed the fool disturbing my tomb! I also think the death factor of this dungeon is over-rated. With the exception of the green-devil's mouth (stupid = dead), the green slime tapestry (ok, this one is a bit unfair), the lava slide (easily avoidable by all but the least intelligent players), the "remove the crown with the wrong knob" deal (a little unfair as well), and the demi lich (it is the "boss" after all). The rest is more frustrating than deadly. Careful delving will result in few casualties other than the traps I listed. High level players should easily deal with the rest of the monsters easily, and simple spells like feather fall, levitate and fly allow avoidance of most of the other traps. The demii-lich only kills 1 person even if you disturb the skull ( again, the thief must miss his players intelligence test after the ghost dust devil etc. to touch the (oh look, it radiates massive necromantic magic!) skull).

TOH was the first module from any source that taught us to think. It was the first module to illustrate the fact that 12th level PCs may not be played by 12th level players.

In final analysis, I actually think Tomoachan was much more difficult.

 

[froggie]

ps-the "ring" door

Fairly obvious since the chest has a +1 ring of prot in it...and no other treasure has been found yet (except the gargoyle gems, also a key)

 

[froggie]

wands of secret door and trap detection

Whatever, paladin boy.

That's what hirelings, summoned monsters, animated zombies....etc are for!

 

[nato9]

I ran this under 3.5 so the Elf made a lucky Search check.

Ah, I think 3E helps with the many must-find secret doors a bit. Better searching rules, and also the Detect Secret Doors spell. Secret doors bother me so much thats a crafted wand priority for me.

Gygax modules feature so many really important secret doors I think I actually developed a complex about being able to find them. The man has messed with my mind!

Yeah, it was a lucky guess. The veteran players had tried everything and the new player just said it outloud. To be fair, they didn't have enough swords so they opted to leave and go buy some. This is where we left off.

Actually thats really cool: the new guy coming up with something the old guard didn't think of. Certainly would be a cool memorable moment for him, especially if he had been feeling a little lost up to that point.

Its still arbitrary that a party without 3 swords may not pass. Fine from an in-game reality sense where Acererak sure doesn't want to be fair, but poor in a game design sense. The 2 sword party didn't do anything "wrong."

 

[nato9]

Well, not exactly an endless supply of NPC's.

See, we had preperation. At roughly 11th level, we each put on the ring of regeneration, severed our pinky fingers, and gave it to a trusted (but retired) henchman. We also connected our souls to a gem, that would shine if we died, allowing the henchman to raise us from the dead.

Woah, we have found the Yakuza of D&D parties! Brutal. I don't think you had to do that even to literally be a Yakuza in Oriental Adventures.

So the original body was lost and you were reborn from the finger? I hope the henchman was given a good retirement plan to ensure loyalty. I thought the resurrection limit was like inescapable.

I guess cunning, massive, pro-active-player preparation like that makes it a completely different story from a group just following the DM's adventures, or worse, a group playing TOH as a one-off with pregens.

Certainly I think people are talking about different things when they say "beat TOH" if they mean with one mortal party vs effectively multiple successive parties.

Your preparations are really impressive. But its in the preparations that you are being clever and displaying skill, not in actions in the Tomb itself. There you seem to be dying just as much as anyone; its just that because of your cunning preparations death is irrelevant. Under those conditions, who wouldn't win eventually?

Yup. Clone Clone Soul Copy Soul Copy Life Guage Life Guage COntinency Ressurection is always a great code.

You need to take this stuff on the road.

I'm almost positive that there are pits with secret doors in them, but that is a kind of staple in our campaign, and most modules (with a few exceptions, like ToS, EtBP, and a few others) were modified to expand them and adjust them to our campaign style.

Keep on the Borderlands is HUGE! Multiple dungeons, blood cults in the caverns below the keep, the illithid who drove the hermit mad cooking up trouble in the lightless depths of the forest, etc etc etc.
...
Oh man, he wasn't defenseless. As a master of time and space, Acererak was able to draw forth minions from all over the cosmos to protect his physical form.

We once fought a mutant in Inertia Armor, armed with a Mark VII blaster rifle and chemical grenades, that he pulled from the future.

Cool, imaginitive stuff. Much more creative than I ever was with modules. Heavy modifications like that might make comparison difficult though. It sounds like your Tomb was much much tougher than as written, but so was your number of lives and pre-Tomb preparation.

And Mark VII blaster was over the line for your DM. Mark V sure, MAYBE Mark VI, but Mark VII is too much. Besides, if Acererak can pull in stuff, why bother with opponents? I'd warp in acid fog, pieces of the sun, or ye olde 100,000 tons of solid stone on top of you. But that'd be arbitrary, which is no fun.

BUT, we didn't do it in one sitting. We took on ToH repeatedly over the years. It took us FIVE YEARS to finally beat it.

Wow, thats really different. Five years for one module. With that and your other descriptions, you guys played some epic games. On that scale I would expect maybe a little base camp set up outside of the Tomb for your excursions. And, if Acererak was the cool class-act we all want to believe, he would set up little personalized "Welcome Back Yakuza Party" signs in the entry hall and stuff. At least he'd set up the sofa bed for you. Something.

In my head, my TOH solution was always to bring in a good size mining company of dwarves. We'd set up camp outside the Tomb and then just clear away the little hill clean from one side to the other. The party would come check out anything uncovered, but most of it could just be worked around and avoided. Then its mostly a logistics problem of feeding and supplying the workers in a desolate swamp.

Oh no, I wanted to hear your laughter and amazement that people played it through.

Unfortunately its one of the ones I just plain don't know. I know theres a spaceship and thats about it.

That GODDAMN CRAB! In the bubble! I HATE THAT CRAB! I've had to ressurect so many boiled PC's!

I always felt sorry for the crab! He never asked to be put in a bubble. My plan was always to Dismissal him back to the Plane of Water or something.

WPM is a module I love in contrast to TOH. The big reason: the problems are open ended. You can creatively come up with your own solution, based on your own cleverness and the various capabilities of your party.

In TOH, you MUST touch the silver end of the scepter, not the gold, and thats the ONLY way. You MUST have 3 swords or 1 magic ring in the slot, and thats the ONLY way. You MUST turn the second key, not the first, 3 times to the right in succession, and thats the ONLY way. You MUST kill Acerarak with a small, specific list of attacks, and thats the ONLY way. And so on and so on. And most repetively, you MUST find 20 different secret doors to continue, and thats the ONLY way.

In WPM, any way I use my party's abilities to overcome the various obstacles will work. I feel that set up has much more room for creativity and skill than the TOH style. In fact I'm certain of it.

Just think: a WPM discussion would be much more interesting and varied than a TOH discussion because we could all have come up with different, unique, equally valid solutions. Thats creativity and skill!

 

[nato9]

Fairly obvious since the chest has a +1 ring of prot in it...and no other treasure has been found yet (except the gargoyle gems, also a key)

A good point, but its only true IF you went through room 13 and found the ring as treasure. Getting to the Hall of Spheres is the ONLY part in the module with multiple solutions. A party that went through the misty portal or through the secret door complex will have never had opportunity to even see that magic ring, so its no clue to them.

 

[Arcane Runes Press]

I gave it a 2 out of 10, mostly because there are some individually interesting traps, and the demi-lich was a neato villain.

Otherwise, the module's encounters are hung together by the barest pretense of a thread, the individual traps are too often deadly because of game system probabilities rather than actual fiendish cleverness, and the module's nature encourages a save game/grasp as straws/reload after death style/repeat until you stumble on the answer type of play - which has never interested me in my rpg play.

I won't deny it's a classic module, and very formative - but I think it's influence is more in the area of community bonding over shared experience, rather than in actual quality.

Patrick Y.