Celebrim
Legend
Hmm... I think Tomb of Horrors reputation is undeserved. Played carefully, with well equiped party and an experienced rouge it is very much a survivalable module. The only thing to remember is not to fight the demi-liche at the end, just take some treasure and run. Which, by the time you get to the end, you are more than willing to do.
Blindly stumble around in it, and you'll get more TPK's than you know what to do with.
RttToH is nothing like ToH in design philosophy. RttToH fixes ToH's 'weakness' as a killer module by making it so that a cautious player cannot just walk through it solving puzzles. Instead it surrounds ToH with some of the worst combat situations you could imagine and enough arbitrary ways to die to make the original seem down right humane. The story hour that is going around seems to work on the principal that you can just hop back to reality and resurrect half the party whenever you will, but I got the impression from my reading of it that once you got to the City that Never Wakes that there was no turning back by any means. If that were true, forget it. Noone gets through the City at one go.
ToH is fair. It's younger brother, S2: White Plume Mountain is not. For my money White Plume Mountain is by far the deadlier module. I think it holds the record with something like 12 player deaths.
Just as bad or worse is S4, 'Caverns of _____'. For the recommended level, the fights are just far too rough. It is equivalent to a module where every encounter has a CR 2 or more higher than the party effective level. After the first TPK, we stopped bothering - it was just a dull slugfest anyway.
B2: Keep on the Borderlands is pretty rough. Generally you can expect 50% casualty rates, and that's if you pull your punches and don't have the various factions pull together to fight the PC's. Of course, 1st level modules of any sort if you aren't careful tend to do that, so I don't know if it is B2 specifically or just the type of module. If you have the cultists take charge of the army they are collecting, as is reasonable, I don't think it could be survived unless begun at the high end of the recommended levels.
I6: Ravenloft is the most lethal module ever written if you take into account the ludicrously low level of characters the module is recommended for. Straud has so many powers at his command, and such a well protected fortress (with the best map design in D&D history) that IMO no party can finish the module if the DM doesn't pull his punches. Get this, I typically achieve TPK's on 7th level parties - WITHOUT APPLYING STRAUD'S VAMPIRIC ENERGY DRAIN. If I did apply the energy drain, I don't think that the module could be finished even by those that had read it before hand.
I looked at HoNS, and it seems pretty lethal, but I haven't played it. It looked pretty dull to me, though it had a few interesting and original ideas, most of it was a less flavorful rehash of RttToH and I6.
The ultimate dungeon crawl, and one I've always wanted to get ahold of and run looks to me to be Axe of the Dwarven Lords. It was clearly written by an old 1st edition salt, because I read it and I _knew_ that someone else had done what I had done and read each entry in the monster manual and tried to find 1st/2nd edition critters that could truly hold thier own against a high level party - then just through them all in at once.
Blindly stumble around in it, and you'll get more TPK's than you know what to do with.
RttToH is nothing like ToH in design philosophy. RttToH fixes ToH's 'weakness' as a killer module by making it so that a cautious player cannot just walk through it solving puzzles. Instead it surrounds ToH with some of the worst combat situations you could imagine and enough arbitrary ways to die to make the original seem down right humane. The story hour that is going around seems to work on the principal that you can just hop back to reality and resurrect half the party whenever you will, but I got the impression from my reading of it that once you got to the City that Never Wakes that there was no turning back by any means. If that were true, forget it. Noone gets through the City at one go.
ToH is fair. It's younger brother, S2: White Plume Mountain is not. For my money White Plume Mountain is by far the deadlier module. I think it holds the record with something like 12 player deaths.
Just as bad or worse is S4, 'Caverns of _____'. For the recommended level, the fights are just far too rough. It is equivalent to a module where every encounter has a CR 2 or more higher than the party effective level. After the first TPK, we stopped bothering - it was just a dull slugfest anyway.
B2: Keep on the Borderlands is pretty rough. Generally you can expect 50% casualty rates, and that's if you pull your punches and don't have the various factions pull together to fight the PC's. Of course, 1st level modules of any sort if you aren't careful tend to do that, so I don't know if it is B2 specifically or just the type of module. If you have the cultists take charge of the army they are collecting, as is reasonable, I don't think it could be survived unless begun at the high end of the recommended levels.
I6: Ravenloft is the most lethal module ever written if you take into account the ludicrously low level of characters the module is recommended for. Straud has so many powers at his command, and such a well protected fortress (with the best map design in D&D history) that IMO no party can finish the module if the DM doesn't pull his punches. Get this, I typically achieve TPK's on 7th level parties - WITHOUT APPLYING STRAUD'S VAMPIRIC ENERGY DRAIN. If I did apply the energy drain, I don't think that the module could be finished even by those that had read it before hand.
I looked at HoNS, and it seems pretty lethal, but I haven't played it. It looked pretty dull to me, though it had a few interesting and original ideas, most of it was a less flavorful rehash of RttToH and I6.
The ultimate dungeon crawl, and one I've always wanted to get ahold of and run looks to me to be Axe of the Dwarven Lords. It was clearly written by an old 1st edition salt, because I read it and I _knew_ that someone else had done what I had done and read each entry in the monster manual and tried to find 1st/2nd edition critters that could truly hold thier own against a high level party - then just through them all in at once.
...but Lost Tomb of Kruk-Ma-Kali is a killer too, based on what I hear from those who've run it. Of course, it's still fairly new and news of its deviousness hasn't spread yet.
