D&D 5E Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan Issues (SPOILERS)

I also included it as an episode in an ongoing campaign. The trick is to use the poison gas to convey a sense of urgancy. That also gives less time for players to question the logic...

TftYP includes several Old School adventures. The other ones to watch out for are White Plume Mountain and Tomb of Horrors. Against the Giants is equally old, but structured more like a modern adventure (but is rather dull IMO).

I wish I had read some of this background before running the module. The big issue is that there's not enough of a foreword explaining the out of game purpose of the dungeon, essentially being that it's meant for competitive play and you get scored for how well you do. I ran my players through it as if it was a standard dungeon, although I did create a boss fight at the end because I had noticed that it's a bit anti-climactic.

I think my biggest issue with it is that so many of the encounters are interesting only if you interact with them. Well, the first couple of hours are interesting but the PCs eventually learn that nothing in the dungeon seems connected to anything else (apart from theme, the dungeon's just a big non-sequitur), so they eventually just looked for the exit. Sure, there's a bit of treasure here and there they were missing out on, but if the standard 9 out of 10 result to interacting with anything was to get punished in some way, the standard PC behavior becomes "don't interact with anything if you can avoid it", which has been well documented with this adventure. Interacting with the adventure just becomes Lucy with the football- "Ha ha, fooled you again".

I think White Plume Mountain was a bit better with making the interactions more interesting and required as opposed to a punishment. It's just as weird, and I'm not a fan of making adventures that focus on the player as opposed to the character (so many riddles and other mental challenges), but I guess you can get around that by telling your players before hand to try to think through mental challenges themselves, and not care about whether their character is smart enough.

Yes, pretty much every encounter in HSoT is designed to distract and slow down the players, so you need to present it as a desperate race to escape rather than a treasure hunt. Case in point - the L-shaped mummy room is specifically that shape so that the mummy has somewhere to run to when turned. It's a shame the didn't include the score sheet in the TftYP version - I used to have it from the original. The other thing about HSoT is it is very well researched with real-world history informing the design - so being "in the know" makes it much more enjoyable.

In my game, the players got their hands on a bag of beans and not knowing what it did, they planted one. Out pops a pyramid.

I wanted to make them tackling this pyramid to be a memorable and epic event. So I turned to Tamochan in the book and started them on it. After one session I knew I had to completely rewrite nearly all the encounters.

Honestly it is so random that it makes almost no sense. I threw out the majority of it and then only just kept the map. Once I did that it worked great.

Mistwell said:

We're playing in it right now as a standard adventure. We fell through into the ruins, are trapped, and trying to find our way out. With no access to long rests, it's an increasingly difficult death trap of an adventure. We're loving it.

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My experience playing it was very similar. I really enjoyed its design as an inversion of a standard dungeon adventure - rather than delving into the dungeon to recover a powerful artifact or kill a big bad at the deepest part, you start out in the deepest part of the dungeon and your goal is to escape before the poison gas kills you. It’s awesome, and I love how the combat encounters are all relatively easy in isolation, but the difficulty still naturally builds as your resources deplete. I think it’s a great dungeon for DMs who struggle with pacing their adventuring days to run, to give them a feel for just how much strict time pressure can improve the game.

On the critical side, the constant series of long, featureless hallways gets very tedious, and as mentioned by others, it very quickly reaches the point where you don’t want to interact with anything because you know it’s just going to be a trap anyway. And an adventure that makes you not want to interact with the environment is not doing it’s job in my opinion. This is a dungeon that can really benefit from good telegraphing and strong adjudication.

Be warned. With the harsh time limits from the original putting pressure on the players to hurry up, coming from the bottom up, the dungeon is possibly more lethal than the famous 'Tomb of Horrors' for the suggested levels of play.

Agreed, If you rule that the poison gas prevents taking a short rest the lower level is deadly, especially the nereid encounter. The "correct" solution to this room in the original tournament was to steal her clothes and blackmail her.

One other thing from the score sheet: the party receive points for not making a map. If the party isn't trying to draw a detailed floor plan then the long corridors are reduced to "we walk down the corridor".

If the party noted the direction of the pyramid when they where above ground it should give them an idea of which way they need to go underground, avoiding backtracking.

It's worth noting (since it isn't mentioned in the text) that at one point baboons can get into the dungeon. This implies that anyone who could wildshape into a baboon (or similar) could get out at this point. The original tournament was with three pregenerated characters - a fighter, a cleric and a Magic User/Thief - no druids!


This adventure needs careful preparation in order to pull off successfully - but then any published adventure does. I have taken to making detailed notes on every encounter when I use a published adventure. I don't know any which you can get the most out playing straight out of the box.