Yeah, I even posted on that one a long time ago. If you scroll down on the first page to EvilGM's post where he says, "Worst. Dungeon. Ever." that is his way of saying, "DM-Rocco put us through this, I lost three characters, went insane and began grappling party members through the naked arch."
i wonder how to make characters. i mean, do DMs ask players to make like 3 or 4 pcs, or as they die, they start making another one.
isnt this too time consuming?
if not, how do you make their way till where the pcs are?
Well, there's obviously going to be spoilers all over this thread, FYI, so here goes...
[sblock]Back in college I got together with two friends, Justin and Matt. I was just itching to play through a session of some kind of D&D and Matt was only too happy to provide S1. We only had a couple of hours, but if you know the adventure, you know no one's really going to need more than that.
We took two 1st level 1e adventurers and paddled out to smiling stone isle. Checking it out, it was mostly barren, so we rappelled down the windward face where cliffs had formed and the land had dropped (and was dropping) into the sea.
The tunnel entrance we found nearly killed Justin (we didn't bother naming the PCs). After tripping some sort of trap the whole thing started to collapse from the far end to the exit. He made it out with a cold bath luckily missing the rocks below. I had to pull him out by rappelling down to the sea and soaking myself as well. We paddled back to shore, warmed up and slept before trying again.
The 2nd tunnel entrance we found was the ringer. This one wasn't old and crusty, but was overflowing with description. We poured over the picture we were given looking for any clues on what might kill us next. It was like playing Where's Waldo to stay alive. Matt read this really long description; we had him read it twice. In one of my proudest moments in gaming I told him my PC was examining the path on the floor below. Something in the description had flipped a switch. Matt was stunned and so was I when I learned how important examining the path was. It wasn't like it was that obvious and Matt's the kind of DM who didn't really give more clues than S1 offered (few indeed).
On the floor was a coded message from Acererak the lich himself to all comers to his dungeon. It stretched along the etched path in the floor inward. We only saw half the message because we hadn't yet entered. This time David went first with a climbing rope tied between us in case the place collapsed. Following the path I got about 20 or 30 feet in and read almost the rest of the message as I advanced. Then I fell into a pit trap and died. You see Justin (not my fault of course) wanted plenty of line between us in case he needed to cut the rope quickly. So there was more than enough for me to fall to my doom.
So, the next day Justin and David #2 (that's me) went back to the jewelled hall again. We used a 10-foot pole and found a number of pit traps both on and off the floor's path. I still don't think we found them all so we drew a line on the battlemat to show were we walked (things got a little crowded with all the ink needed for that hallway). Finishing the greeting text, we examined the walls and two exits at the far end of the hall. A painting of a life-sized door seemed like a clue, so we chipped away the plaster and found a real door behind. No sounds were heard so we carefully opened it and a multi-limbed stone monster or maybe an animated stone statue or something was in the room beyond. We slammed the door shut and rappeled back up. Oddly it didn't keep chase. Cautiously peeking back in we noticed the door was still shut. We agreed that that room was a last resort.
Next we examined the gaping mouth of a demon with a black passage beyond. Justin and I had actually heard about this one before, but we tested it anyways. This wasn't actually the brightest idea as we now had a not-quite-10-foot pole. Apparently those are worthless so Justin tossed the rest inside the pole-eating blackness. The colored misty entrance, the other far end "door", did the same thing to a piece of the rope so that looked like a dead end too. Then we started exploring the pits and were lucky to find a secret passage. The two of use crawled down this winding small tunnel only to come to the back of another door locked from the other side. So that didn't work.
Things would have probably ended there, but after some time wasting Matt read us the description of the misty colored portal again. We touched the colored stones and saw them change color. After a bit we got the order right and the mist disappeared. I don't even think we remembered the order, but it really didn't matter. Beyond was another room with a monster statue, but this one didn't move. And I think it had a broken hand as well, but I don't remember exactly. This room had only one exit, another small crawling passage. We exited into the "2nd grand hall". This one had weird animal headed humanoids painted on the wall. It looked like they were playing basketball or something. We had come out of one of the "balls" in the wall as the tunnel exit.
No other exits were in the room and it was getting late for the session, so we just did our best to examine the wall without touching it. I think we were afraid one of them would blow us up if we did. It was another game stall. We did eventually find another "ball" that was a tunnel, but we were almost too scared to go down it. It led to a small room with three treasure chests. We had to end it there unfortunately. It's probably better that we did. Running the adventure myself years latter I learned we weren't likely to make it out of that room alive no matter what we did.[/sblock]
i wonder how to make characters. i mean, do DMs ask players to make like 3 or 4 pcs, or as they die, they start making another one.
isnt this too time consuming?
if not, how do you make their way till where the pcs are?
In my games, I never let on that it is coming, because they generally don't want to play it. In my games, they usually have henchmen and a back up character just in case. When I run the Tomb I have some pre-generated cahracters that come along as NPCs and the Pcs can take over a NPC or make a new one on the fly. In the last running, it was a large group and only one person opted to make a new character on the fly. EvilDM didn't like it when his cleric died and made a quick monk cahracter with a vow of poverty. That is the one that went nuts
One of mine said: "Oh, let's see what in there", then turned to me and said: "I am grabbing some light, and sticking my head in, to see if there is a gem or key or something...."
As I recall it, I spent 7 weeks of a summer-vacation killing my players over and over again (we were playing basically every day).
i wonder how to make characters. i mean, do DMs ask players to make like 3 or 4 pcs, or as they die, they start making another one.
isnt this too time consuming?
if not, how do you make their way till where the pcs are?
Well, there's the "once you're out, you're out" option as well.
IMO, the perceived deadliness of ToH is highly exaggerated. This is an adventure where you're supposed to delve like you were in a giant deathtrap. Think Indiana Jones creeping through the opening scene of Raiders, or the "Cube" movies. The reason this threw people for a loop is because most modules back then were completely linear, and the party could just allow themselves to be herded from one place to the next. ToH, OTOH, is a cattle chute designed to herd the players into a killing floor. It's the dungeon that ingrained in a lot of people that secret doors are worth looking for even when you haven't reached an apparent dead end.
The players who died and died and died just didn't get that they weren't running recklessly through a lair full of gnolls and orcs to chop and blast. Nothing lives in the Tomb of Horrors; it is a tomb, not a lair. Nothing needs to live or go about a daily routine here. Its sole landlord is dead and he designed this place to make sure visitors join him. That was a mental adjustment that players needed to make, and many just didn't. Or, another way to look at it, the DM didn't grasp the notion that not every dungeon is suitable for every group of players.
A good example is early in ToH where there's a "room" that's actually just
a big sphere of annihlation"
. Now, who would just go probing something as ominous as that with something as valuable as one of their limbs or their head? Well, some people's notions of what a hero is entails having more nerve than sense, so they plunge right in. OK, they're dead.
There's only one rule you gotta remember to have a reasonable chance of surviving ToH (as reasonable as the chances of surviving any dungeon, at any rate), and it should be self-evident to any dungeon delver:
[sblock]If the result of an action isn't fairly manifest, then don't do it until you've fully accounted for your options. This means you don't run down blind corridors that lead off in one direction with no terminus in sight. You don't play with altars or magical runes if you don't have to. Treat these things as red herrings that will lure you away from the safe route, because that's what they are.[/sblock]
Me and another character both made it to the end with a couple of 10th-level thieves, a hireling or two, and a lower-level NPC wizard. When we got to the vault and immediately decided that we weren't gonna touch no
demilich skull
, the DM decided that was anticlimactic and arbitrarily had Acererak show up in person and wipe us out summarily. He would later recant the decision and let us have the loot.
Reminiscing about ToH makes me wonder if D&D's heyday is way in the past, at least for me. It's gravitated so far away from puzzle-solving and other forms of strategic thinking, and its current design and development staff feel that the majority of players want an RPG to deliver short-term and fast-paced gameplay that rewards reckless, triggerhappy behavior instead of making it costly. Looking at how people employed at WotC call it a badly-designed or overrated dungeon makes me kind of sad.
No, ToH isn't for everyone. Heck, I sure wouldn't want to run that style of dungeon more than occasionally. But I do regard it as a facet of D&D gameplay that shouldn't be discarded.
Well, there's obviously going to be spoilers all over this thread, FYI, so here goes...
[sblock]Back in college I got together with two friends, Justin and Matt. I was just itching to play through a session of some kind of D&D and Matt was only too happy to provide S1. We only had a couple of hours, but if you know the adventure, you know no one's really going to need more than that.
We took two 1st level 1e adventurers and paddled out to smiling stone isle. Checking it out, it was mostly barren, so we rappelled down the windward face where cliffs had formed and the land had dropped (and was dropping) into the sea.
The tunnel entrance we found nearly killed Justin (we didn't bother naming the PCs). After tripping some sort of trap the whole thing started to collapse from the far end to the exit. He made it out with a cold bath luckily missing the rocks below. I had to pull him out by rappelling down to the sea and soaking myself as well. We paddled back to shore, warmed up and slept before trying again.
The 2nd tunnel entrance we found was the ringer. This one wasn't old and crusty, but was overflowing with description. We poured over the picture we were given looking for any clues on what might kill us next. It was like playing Where's Waldo to stay alive. Matt read this really long description; we had him read it twice. In one of my proudest moments in gaming I told him my PC was examining the path on the floor below. Something in the description had flipped a switch. Matt was stunned and so was I when I learned how important examining the path was. It wasn't like it was that obvious and Matt's the kind of DM who didn't really give more clues than S1 offered (few indeed).
On the floor was a coded message from Acererak the lich himself to all comers to his dungeon. It stretched along the etched path in the floor inward. We only saw half the message because we hadn't yet entered. This time David went first with a climbing rope tied between us in case the place collapsed. Following the path I got about 20 or 30 feet in and read almost the rest of the message as I advanced. Then I fell into a pit trap and died. You see Justin (not my fault of course) wanted plenty of line between us in case he needed to cut the rope quickly. So there was more than enough for me to fall to my doom.
So, the next day Justin and David #2 (that's me) went back to the jewelled hall again. We used a 10-foot pole and found a number of pit traps both on and off the floor's path. I still don't think we found them all so we drew a line on the battlemat to show were we walked (things got a little crowded with all the ink needed for that hallway). Finishing the greeting text, we examined the walls and two exits at the far end of the hall. A painting of a life-sized door seemed like a clue, so we chipped away the plaster and found a real door behind. No sounds were heard so we carefully opened it and a multi-limbed stone monster or maybe an animated stone statue or something was in the room beyond. We slammed the door shut and rappeled back up. Oddly it didn't keep chase. Cautiously peeking back in we noticed the door was still shut. We agreed that that room was a last resort.
Next we examined the gaping mouth of a demon with a black passage beyond. Justin and I had actually heard about this one before, but we tested it anyways. This wasn't actually the brightest idea as we now had a not-quite-10-foot pole. Apparently those are worthless so Justin tossed the rest inside the pole-eating blackness. The colored misty entrance, the other far end "door", did the same thing to a piece of the rope so that looked like a dead end too. Then we started exploring the pits and were lucky to find a secret passage. The two of use crawled down this winding small tunnel only to come to the back of another door locked from the other side. So that didn't work.
Things would have probably ended there, but after some time wasting Matt read us the description of the misty colored portal again. We touched the colored stones and saw them change color. After a bit we got the order right and the mist disappeared. I don't even think we remembered the order, but it really didn't matter. Beyond was another room with a monster statue, but this one didn't move. And I think it had a broken hand as well, but I don't remember exactly. This room had only one exit, another small crawling passage. We exited into the "2nd grand hall". This one had weird animal headed humanoids painted on the wall. It looked like they were playing basketball or something. We had come out of one of the "balls" in the wall as the tunnel exit.
No other exits were in the room and it was getting late for the session, so we just did our best to examine the wall without touching it. I think we were afraid one of them would blow us up if we did. It was another game stall. We did eventually find another "ball" that was a tunnel, but we were almost too scared to go down it. It led to a small room with three treasure chests. We had to end it there unfortunately. It's probably better that we did. Running the adventure myself years latter I learned we weren't likely to make it out of that room alive no matter what we did.[/sblock]
I had one assassin PC who crawled down the tight tunnel and fell in the put of bones. Rather than try to escape, he decided to search for loot in the bones. Of course the trap door above closed in on him and he died a slow death of starvation. Some people are greedy.
