Celebrim said:
As written, the Tomb is basically unwinnable for a party, if by 'winnable' you mean defeat Ascerak knowing nothing about the contents of the adventure. The adventure is an 'easy' thing to take on only if you have read the 1st edition entry on demi-lichs and have made extraordinary preparation based on that. For the parties of sample characters in the back of the book, the Tomb is an absolutely certain death trap.
I've run the Tomb as a one-shot on many occasions. Parties have had various degrees of success. Only one party successfully won the adventure, IMO:
After collecting the keys, the party became stymied when they reached area 23: They opened the door, triggered the trap, and saw that it was yet another frickin' false door.
This, coincidentally, is a very common experience. No party I have ever run the adventure for has ever bothered to search the wall behind the door to discover the secret passage. As a result, experiences in the Tomb generally fall into one of two categories: Careless or unlucky parties who die very quickly and more careful and meticulous groups who avoid obvious dangers or even questionable situations. The latter usually make it to area 23, become stymied because they don't know where to go next, and end up backtracking and doing all the risky things they had wisely bypassed before... and this eventually ends up killing them.
In the case of this party, the first risky thing they tried was going through the magic archway at 10A. They didn't do this in the best possible way, but they did manage to mitigate the damage so that only
some them were naked when it was all said and done.
And then they got clever: They guessed that their items might not have been destroyed, so they cast
locate object and got a direction-finding on where their missing items were. And then they went to work with
stone shape spells. (Note that this does not trigger the demons: Only ethereal or astral travel triggers the demon visitations.) They eventually hit the mithril vault and weren't able to get inside.
(This was actually me screwing them to some degree: (a) It would have been reasonable to assume that the north end of the vault would be open so you could tunnel right into it. (b) The module makes no mention of the mithril being warded, so there would have been many ways for them to punch right through the mithril. I generally play perfectly fair with this module, since anything else defeats the purpose and the fun of it. But, in this case, I decided that this was simply a situation that had never been considered and concluded that these were not unreasonable defenses given the general architecture and nature of the Tomb.)
Stymied by the mithril vault they tunnelled around for a bit and eventually broke into area 32. They did some more tunneling and got into areas 28, 29, and 30. This gave them access to all three keyholes, which allowed them to eventually work out which keys went to which locks.
This allowed them to lower the vault. (IIRC, they actually suspected a trap with the last keyhole and TKed the key in order to avoid any risk of being crushed.) They grabbed their gear and held back on hitting the ghost to see what it would do (and, thus, discovered that it apparently wouldn't or couldn't harm them).
Then they got stupid and greedy: One of them touched the skull. It soul-sucked two of them, then a spellcaster threw up a
wall of stone that blocked the demi-lich into the far-side of the vault. They shovelled the rest of the treasure into their
bags of holding and skedaddled.
They did not destroy Acererak, but they did defeat him. And they escaped with the treasure.
