The Tomb of Horrors has a reputation either for being one of the greatest dungeons ever written, or an unplayable piece of junk. It's that reputation that's had me fascinated to run the dungeon, and this weekend I got my chance! I got a group of three of my friends together, and we ran through the Tomb of Horrors. And, to my mind, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. The Tomb is not an unplayable piece of trash. But neither is it particularly amazing.
I took all of the 20 pre-generated characters in the back of the module, and converted them into Old-School Essentials characters. I told my friends we'd be playing the Tomb of Horrors, that it was a dungeon notorious for grinding characters into the dust, and that the fun would be watching the stack of 20 characters dwindle and die. My friends came to my house, picked a random character sheet each, and we got started!
I began by narrating the journey to the tomb's location, as well as the several hours the characters spent digging through the vegetation for the tomb's entrance, and told each player they found one of the three entrances.
The adventure started off strong! They defeated both of the false entrances, as well as the pit traps and wall-chest in the main entrance by using a combination of twine, rope, and a 10 foot pole. They found the secret tormentor door behind the plaster all by themselves, lost a hand in the Green Devil Face, and their first character death was when a player stepped through the first misty archway into area 7. The character pulled all of the levers in that room downward, dropping him into a pit where he plummeted to his death. The survivors solved the color puzzle on the misty archway by brute force and decided to walk through it, teleporting into area 11.
At this point, I realized I had two substantial problems. Firstly, I made the pit traps too easy to defeat. Gary says in the module that players have a percentage chance to catch themselves from falling into a pit based off of their dexterity score. In an attempt to make that chance easier to adjudicate, I had players roll under their dexterity with a +4 penalty instead. I was correct that it was easier to adjudicate, but the pre-gens also have really good ability scores. So the players still had more than a 50% chance to catch themselves and save from falling into the pits. That was just a bad call on my part. A plain and simple mistake. And since all of the pits in the dungeon are basically the same, it would be profoundly unsportsmanlike to change the saving throw calculations on the fly. So I was stuck with unintentionally nerfed pit traps. Lesson learned: don't let people save from effects that easily. Honestly, maybe don't let people save against those pits at all.
The second problem: the players avoided the red path on the floor, meaning that they never got Acererak's poem. So we're flying through the rest of the dungeon totally blind! I sure hope that doesn't come back to bite me at all! (Spoiler alert: it did.)
After examining the broken-armed gargoyle in area 11, they moved into area 10 through an illusory sphere wall. They opened the false doors with the spear trap on them, and that did a little damage. And this is where the game slowed down a bit. Despite crawling into this room through an illusory sphere, it took the players about 30 minutes to think about poking at the other spheres painted on the walls. And even then, they poked at the spheres one at a time instead of checking all of them at once. They also fiddled around with the misty archway at area 10A (but never actually entered it). After eventually finding the passageways to areas 13 and 14, the players spent even more time trying to come up with a consensus on which passage to go down.
This would be a recurring problem that dragged the game down for a while. The players were often paralyzed by the decision making process, trying to collectively come up with a decision instead of taking a chance on any one course of action. I would prompt them for a decision when I felt the game was slow, but that just put pressure on the group. Lesson learned: assign a leader at the beginning of play and prompt them for a decision when the game stalls. The leader doesn't necessarily have to call all of the shots all of the time, but I need somebody with the authority to move the group along. This might actually be a good idea for every game I run from now on.
The players ultimately decided to enter room 13 and found the three chests. Here, one of the players (a ranger) cast detect danger. I told them that all of the chests posed potential danger (since opening all of them is a bad idea). In retrospect, that spell would be my undoing. I wasn't keeping very strict time records (Sorry Gary!), and instead was being pretty loose with the time. As a result, the spell lasted much longer than it otherwise should have, and gave the players much more information than it was supposed to. After 20 or 30 more minutes of the players coming up with a plan to open the chests from a distance, my brain was starting to fry, and they eventually opened all of the chests. They fought the skeleton, collected the ring of protection, and ran away from the poisonous asps. In the asps' defense, they got a few bites in on the players, but every PC made their saving throw vs poison. More on that to come. The players returned to the sphere room, and then we took a quick break.
We returned from the break and the players fumbled a little on whether to go through the second hidden passage, or the misty arch. Eventually, they settled on going through the passage to room 15. Detect danger told them that the front pews and altar were immediate danger, and the archway was potential danger. Convinced, they opened the three safe pews, took the money inside, and then rigged up another pulley to open the front pews from a distance.The room filled with poison gas, and everybody saved versus the poison. They touched the altar twice - being hit with a lightning bolt first, and a fireball second. Despite that, they all spaced themselves out across the room and took turns touching the thing. So they all made their saving throws and the damage was mitigated. This is when it really hit me: the pre-gen characters are pretty much all around name level (between 9 and 14), and some have magic items like rings of protection that improve their saves. The PCs in the Chapel of Evil all had somewhere between a 70% and an 85% chance to make their saves versus the traps inside. And they had enough hit points that they could tank the damage and be relatively okay. Lesson learned: The pre-gens have really good saves, and don't have to worry too much about failing saving throws.
The players found the slot in the wall in area 14C. I fleshed this part out a bit by describing the slot as the mural of a monk, with the slot placed at the base of the monk's extended index finger. I also described that the slot was about the width of a coin, but twice as thick. My hope was that they would see this slot at the base of a finger and think "put a ring on it." So, of course, they stacked two coins on top of each other, dropped them into the slot and then went to investigate the orange archway at area 14B when nothing happened. After some alignment and sex reversal, they took a pick-axe to area 14C in order to "break through that vending machine." Yeah...I should have expected that. Okay, hear me out, I didn't want the game to stall completely! And I was starting to panic! The game was crawling at this point and I knew cooler stuff was ahead! So, I marked several hours of game time passed, and then let them break through the wall. I know, I know. It was being too nice to them. Gary would have let them spin their wheels indefinitely. But I want them to see as much of the Tomb as possible. Lesson learned: put even more clues in this room that you need to drop a magic ring in the slot.
The players continued down the hallway in area 15, fell into the first pit trap but didn't die (as we established earlier - I inadvertently nerfed the pits), and avoided the next two pits. Just as Gary expects in the adventure, they went to area 16, busted down the door, and a single player went forward to scout ahead. That character tripped up on the see-saw floor, fell into the fiery pit of doom and died. Yay! This is death #2 I think? I know I'm being pretty nice, but these guys are also doing a really good job of poking around with 10 foot poles and treating everything like an instant death trap. This is...not what I expected! I expected at least 5 deaths by now!
I threw my players another bone by having the next detect danger spell they cast reveal that the third pit was not dangerous, unlike the first two pits which were immediately dangerous. Is this being too kind to them? Yes! It is! But their only alternative was going back to one of the other rooms where, let me remind you, there is no way to progress. They need to find that secret door at the bottom of the pit. So even though I used that spell to suggest there was something special about that pit, they made the choice to climb down and find the door on their own. I didn't tell them to do that. So, I think it worked out well all things considered. I feel like maybe if they had the poem right now, they might have figured this out...I'm really kicking myself for not giving it to them at the start of the game.
A new character joins the group! An elf who, thank god and I'm not making this up, succeeded on their roll to find the secret door at area 17. They got through it pretty easily and lost some time here arguing about whether to go through the secret door or down into area 18. They made the decision to go to area 19.
I feel like players need a reason to check this wall. The elf sort of found it just by being an elf. Maybe just the fact that area 18 is the false ending is enough? Maybe if you move the door 10 feet to the east that would help as well? Since there would be a weird, 10 foot passage that just ends. But you could also stuck another puzzle door type thing there.
Area 19 went pretty well, and was fun. The players found the two halves of the golden key, and were surprised by the ochre jelly in the vat. The ranger had a sword of sharpness, which promptly sliced the ochre jelly in half. Two ochre jellies now! But the elf had Charm Monster memorized and cast it on one of the halves. The jelly failed its saving throw, and came to the elf's defense by wrestling with its other half. I described how the two jellies were throttling about the room - a single mass at war with itself. That got a chuckle from everyone and they continued to area 20.
Area 20 is a big spiked pit! The dwarf in the group climbed down into the pit, walked to the other side, and was skewered by 200 spikes shooting into the ceiling. The actual trap just does some damage, but the player looked at me and said "I'm dead now, right?" Given my lesson learned from the altar I said "yup! You're dead and skewered into the ceiling!" So, he grabbed a new sheet and we continued on. Again, I was too nice here. I let the players go back to room 19 (where the jellies are still wrestling) and let them grab a bunch of trash that they used to repeatedly set off the trap in area 20 until the floor was flooded with spikes. It shouldn't have been that easy; but the idea of infinitely spawning spikes creaking a semi-solid floor was kind of funny to me, so I let it happen. Plus, I'm running out of steam. Lesson learned: Take more breaks! Problem solving and adjudication is absolutely exhausting. This is also a personal weakness of mine. When I feel like games are slowing down, I start panicking and get looser with my rulings to let the players make progress faster so they can "catch up." I need to relax and trust in the game procedures.
The players came to a dead end. They've learned well though. One of the players said "but is it really?" and searched the walls to find the secret door to area 21. This room is a lot of fun actually! The jerking floor mechanic was most excellent. I gave the ranger pre-gen a wolf as an animal companion (again, probably too nice, but I decided that detail weeks before I ran this dungeon), so the wolf went into the room and tore one of the tapestries on the wall. The tapestry promptly turned into green slime, and melted the poor wolf. With that in mind, the players used some magic to minimize the floor jerking, ripped the other curtain off the wall using a grappling hook, surfed over the resulting green slime, and proceeded through the secret door.
The four-way intersection just past area 21 was surprisingly fun! The
players laughed at the pit trap in the center of the intersection
because "of course there's a pit there!" They opened the southern door
and were hit by a spear (again, chip damage at their level, but they
thought that was funny). I cut off the hallway to area 22 and had that
door be another spear trapped false door. The siren in room 22 was a
distraction for me at this point. I was far too brain-drained to play
that encounter effectively. So, I removed it on the fly. I feel a little
guilty about that, but not that guilty. I don't think she adds very
much
Door 24 is where it all goes down hill again. The players correctly guessed that they needed to put three swords in the door to proceed...except they don't have three swords on them! The elf used a disintegrate spell to blast the door down instead. The door is supposed to be totally anti-magic, but honestly, why? The alternative is that the game stalls out again, and I'm tired. I don't want to role-play everyone going back to room 13, grabbing the fallen swords from the skeleton there, and bringing them back to this door.
Room 25, the pillared throne room, is next. And this is where everything fell apart. I had the players roll a 4-in-6 chance to accidentally touch a pillar as they moved through the hallway, and they all passed the check. So no levitation trap. They found the crown and scepter, and proceeded to monkey around with them a little, but ultimately refused to do much with them. When one of the players attempted to..."relieve himself"...on the crown, I knew we had reached the end of our rope and were just getting silly. So, at that point, I closed the adventure and said "Okay, if that's where we are I think we're done now." I need a nap and a hug.
To my surprise, one of the other players said that the dungeon is fun, and wanted to finish it out as a total speed-run; all caution to the wind. Both of the others agreed that going at a slow place wasn't the best idea, and liked the speed run idea. So I said "Okay, all caution to the wind. No saving throws. Any traps from here on out kill you, no save, no damage." The players agreed and we continued.
And you know what? The game got substantially more fun at that point! Without the pressure to survive, the players put on the crown and promptly got themselves disintegrated trying to get it off. But that gave them enough information to find the secret door behind the throne. They collected the key in area 28 (which I let them have without the antipathy effect, because we're trying to finish the dungeon). They stuck the wrong key in the mithril door at first (leading to another character disintegration) but correctly opened the door immediately after using the scepter!
They entered room 30 where I replaced the contents of the treasure chests with glass gems and brass coins (one of my more clever ideas). They released the Efreet, wished for a guide to the real treasure chamber, and used that to find the secret doors into the empty vault in room 33.
Once inside room 33, they put the correct key into the keyhole in the floor on the first try! But that character was squished onto the ceiling by the sudden rise of the treasure vault. And then one last character had their soul sucked out by Acererak. But other than that, they ignored the harmless wraith, stole the rest of the treasure, and escaped! Lesson learned: encourage people to play fast and loose with their lives.
After we finished the dungeon, the general consensus was: The game was fun! At a few points it was kind of absurd in a neat way. At others it was absurd in a dumb way. The mad dash at the end was really fun, as was the intro. It was the slowness in the middle that made things drag on. The pacing ended up like a reverse bell curve, where we started and ended on a high, and the middle was slow. I think a lot of games suffer that curve though, not just this one. It's the kind of pacing that I try to eliminate from my games, but isn't the end of the world.
That said, reverse bell curve pacing is hard for me to handle. Going from a high to a low makes me panic and think about all of the other things my friends could be doing with their limited time on Earth instead of sitting bored at my dining room table. D&D is a big time commitment sometimes, so I'm afraid that if my games aren't maximum fun all of the time, my players will just disengage and leave. That pressure I put on myself makes the game worse though, as my stress infects the players who were having a pretty fun time otherwise! It's okay for the pace to slow down a bit sometimes.
At any rate, once we finished up, I let the players read through the adventure and also sign the book as a testament to their ultimate victory!
I have some more ideas that I'm going to put into a future post about what I will do when I run this adventure again. Because I definitely want to! But for now I'll say this:
If you run the Tomb of Horrors as a one shot, you can make it fun! As written, I think it's good. Not one of the best dungeons ever, though. It requires solid preparation and understanding of all of the components of the dungeon for you to run it efficiently. And I think it benefits from some clarifications in certain parts of the game; places where the dungeon expects you to spin your wheels. We can do better than that and keep the challenge level in the tomb the same.
I recommend this dungeon only to game masters with a few years of experience under their belt. And the willingness to read through the module beforehand, call Gary out on his BS, and adjust the challenges to make the dungeon fair. Not easy - just fair.
Overall rating: 7/10
