And "I beat a module" isn't exactly an 'extraordinary claim'"...
As many many many many people have pointed out, all you need is tons of hirelings, chickens and other canaries to beat this dungeon. That was a much more common style of play back then.
Was not.
None of the players in our group brought hirelings, chickens, or canaries... or anything else even remotely like that. Just to try it, some folks used pregens, I rolled up brand new 10th level fighter. After that character died, on a direct challenge of the GM, I brought one of my best characters, a 17th Level Wizard, that had never died in any other adventure that I had playing for over two years years previously. We did bring 6 ' and 10' poles, rope, spikes, hammers, picks, shovels, and other common dungeon sundries.
This was 1980. We played the mono 78' red cover version, because it had just arrived at our Friendly Local Gaming Store (FLGS). 90% of everything we ever learned about RPGs came from the FLGS. We mail ordered our wargames, and the wargame companies like
Avalon Hill and
SPI published their catalog, and direct mailed us new catalogs with the latest releases at least once a year, AH and SPI were famous for mailing quarterly updates as well. That's once every three months, and they were the big boys in the game Industry. RPG were still very new, and the other gaming companies we would get catalogs from would maybe mail out a catalog maybe once a year. TSR would add an advertising page, so you could learn about new modules by reading the last page of a game or module. One of the inside cover, or maybe it was the back of the Tomb of Horrors listed the other modules that were released at the time, and often we would go down to the game shop after we had played a new module or game, and special order new games or modules we learned about in this manner.
I might have attended one or two
Ghenghis Con game conventions in Denver by that time. There were no groups that would teach RPG or wargame walk-thru's at the convention at that time, because organized play groups did not even exist then. We would just go to shows to try new games, and half the new games at a show were run by local GMs and Refs from coffee stained crib notes, rules mashups, or some new cobbled experimental rules set laboriously typed up on some old typewriter. If you were really newfangled and had a nice chunk of change to burn, you could buy an electric IBM Selectric typewriter which included a whiteout typeover ribbon so you could quickly correct your writing mistakes on the fly.
State of the Art computers of the time included TRS-80's, The Amiga, and a few folks had Apple IIe's. Any gaming material that came from these computers were printed on cheap mechanical tractor dot matrix printers, which featured perforated continuous sheets of paper tens or hundreds of feet long that included holes so it could be fed through the printer. We bought this paper in boxes. One sheet of this printer paper was like a hundred or five hundred continuous pages long, and we would print just what we would need, maybe ten sheets, then tear off this whole lot, then separate the papers laboriously by hand. The Ink quality varied widely, and often, after just a year, anything tractor printed would be so faded it was illegible.
Full color printing was extremely rare, and most games or RPGs were black and white, or featured one tone monochrome color printing. To be considered truly professional, you had to at least spring for a full color cover, but the vast majority of games were released as Black & White, or featured a monocolor print job with black and one other color. TSR printed their modules in monotone blue color because photocopiers at the time could not see light blue, it shows up as white for black and white copiers, and red shows up as solid black. It was a copy protection scheme to up their sales of modules. You had to either buy the module, or copy the maps and game notes by hand to duplicate them, because most copiers didn't "see" blue and would not reproduce the blue maps or notes on copies.
Us real GM's had a name for that style of play, where players got chickens, or cattle, or hirelings and ran them though the dungeon ahead of the players. We called it
Monty Haul GMing, after that television game show
"Let's Make A Deal". Basically with Monty Haul GMing, the GMs would award the players with a bounty or plentitude of monies, or treasure, and/or magic. And then let the players run through a dungeon or challenge. Our gaming group looked down on this style of play with considerable disdain. We actually didn't see this style of play often, but we heard about it.
The other term used at this time was
Iron Man, and with the
Iron Man style of play, the player would carefully actually work up a character from first level. and almost everyone at this time had a few long-term characters that had survived multiple campaigns of often unexpected complexity. Naturally we took great pride in the few high level characters we had, that had survived fiendishly devised dungeons, and adventures. If the high level character dies, player would roll up a new character at the 1st level, and start again.
Iron Man. You had what equipment was listed on the character sheet when you started, and nothing else could be added, unless the game started in like some big city or something similar.
