The Gaming Den

Schleiermacher wrote:I converted the module to 3.5 and ran it for a group I GMed way back in college.

But in the process of adapting it to the modern rules paradigm I made it rather less arbitrary and deadly. Which was for the best since not only did I insert it into an ongoing campaign, but (in order for this sort of "static, trap-filled maze-dungeon" to work at all) the group was under significant time pressure to find certain items in the demilich's hoard.

I considered doing the same for a sort of beer and pretzels dungeoncrawl game, but after seeing how many things were "no save you just die" and "this is invisible, and See Invisibility does nothing" and the like, I just decided to make my own.

Past the Pit
...is a long straight corridor which dead ends.

I'm all for re-using a trick that works; if you use colored triangle-puzzles to unlock doors, that's a workable gimmick for a dungeon and consistency is a bonus. But the secret-door trick gets really fucking old in this module. It's not like the dead-ends ever look like cave-ins or unfinished bits or the dwarfs detected damp stone.



The thing is, that at this point in the module you've gone through at least half a dozen secret doors. Anyway, if you go through the secret door (it isn't even an interesting secret door), the room appears to be full of funerary offerings and rotted furniture.

Which does beg the question of what the PCs were supposed to think of the general purpose of the Tomb of Horrors at this point. The Chapel of Evil was obviously not a functional chapel, none of the entrance hallways was properly designed to allow people in, there was a false tomb and a mummification chamber with no mummies...Gygax was obviously familiar with the idea of Egyptian-style tomb complexes, but this also very obviously isn't one. It's a deadly theme park ride designed by Universal Studios loosely based on the tomb complex concept. None of it is functional in any sense, which just makes the kinda-familiar bits a little fucking annoying, because they don't work.

But back to the room: there's six trunks and 24 locked coffers, which contain a combination of deadly asps and low-quality gems (not enough to activate the 3-armed statue). The whole floor is balanced and weighted on mechanism that makes it jump violently after the PCs clamber on it. If you decide to hang onto the tapestries to keep your balance...the tapestries are actually green slimes that will eat you.



If you get covered by a green slime, Gygax declares that's an instant death. If you try to burn the green slime, they turn into brown slimes. If you get sick too often from the shaking room, presumably you'll vomit and one of your mates might end up attack a puddle of sick, mistaking it for a slime.

By itself, the quaking room is an okay concept. One of the things that makes a relatively low-level fight interesting is throwing in an associated environmental obstacle. This room is not a good example of the concept: it relies on the PCs doing something maybe stupid (tearing at the tapestries to keep their feet) for a relatively minor agitation (2 in 6 chance to fall prone and take 1 damage...just crawl through the goddamn room. Or levitate. Spider-climb.) and the monsters are closet-troll level, especially as-written. It's a good concept with a terrible execution.

Behind one of the tapestries is a secret door. Of course. There is also a false door with a spear trap. Which is...okay. It's actually fine to encounter the same trap in multiple different locations throughout a dungeon. Again, it becomes part of the theme: PCs learn what to expect, can plan around it...and the DM can get creative and use that to their advantage. Here, it's just a spear stabs you in the dick if you open a door. Repeatedly.

If you go through the secret door, you curve through a tunnel and emerge at a long corridor, which leads to a 4-way junction (the 4-way junction is a covered pit). This is the "axis" of the tomb, so to speak, where we really start getting close to the end...but we're not there yet.

The PCs arrive from the west. To the south, they can see a door (false; Spear trap). To the north, a dead end (secret door, we'll cover that later). And straight ahead they see another door. Going through it is no problem, and the corridor extends for a ways before the PCs turn a corner and end up in The Cavern of Gold and Silver Mists.

Personally, I like the idea of a combination of natural features and artificial construction. It adds a...nice touch to things. A gentle reminder that there are things you can't achieve with artistry.

The mists are silvery and shot through with delicate streamers of golden color. Vision extends only 6'. There is a dim aura of good if detected for. Those who step into the mist must save versus poison or become idiots until they can breath the clean air above ground under the warm sun. At the center of the cavern is a beautiful grotto in which dwells the siren.

The good-aligned siren is under a spell, which can't be broken unless the PCs ask her to come with them, and she can't give them any hints. She can also cure idiocy by touch. There are also two sacks of treasure; if you touch one, the other disappears (if you try to touch both at the same time, the DM rolls randomly and one disappears).

At this point, we have to stop and ask the question: What is with the Siren?. Her placement in the dungeon is kinda random. We have no idea what she eats or how she got there, except that Ass-rack put her in the grotto as a "private joke." Gygax never details what spell is keeping her there, but he obviously doesn't want to be something you can lift with remove curse. If the PCs ask her to leave with them, she'll do so and be their friend for life, but...isn't she a bit of a liability? She can't heal or remove afflictions, although she might be able to bandage you up. She only has 20 hit points, AC 5, and is never even given a fucking name. Your best bet to keep her alive is just to teleport her out of the dungeon entirely...

Giving the PCs a pet/charge/ward that they have to protect is an interesting added wrinkle to any adventure. In this case, having them come across somebody this deep in the dungeon, where getting back out is almost an adventure itself, makes a certain amount of sense. And the siren is pretty harmless, so it's not like Ass-rack is really taking chances here. But it's also not very...on brand? It's just kind of random. Maybe if it was a Gynosphinx acting as guardian or something, it would make sense. But this is a pretty woman in a dead end filled with idiot-mists. If I was running this, I'd make her look like Julia Roberts.

Anyway, presumably you back-track from the grotto back to the crossroads, try not to fall into the pit again, and head back north to that 'dead end'...

Dead End
So the "dead end" looks like one of the trap doors, but when you open it, expecting maybe a spear through the crotch, it's just...a solid wall. Which of course hides a secret door. Once you go through the not-so-secret door, they're in another hallway. If they follow this down, there's a flight of steps to nowhere, a door that leads to another false/secret door, and finally down another corridor full of sleep gas to a small chamber. If the PCs fall afoul of the sleep gas, a stone juggernaut comes out of the chamber and runs them over.

a stone juggernatu (rather like a steam roller) comes ouf of the 20'x20' room to the north and rolls 1-6 spaces (10'60') south then west as determined by a roll of d6. Everything it rolls over is squashed to a pulp. There is no appeal. (If the party s in this way destroyed, show them GRAPHIC #23)

All of this is more or less dead space. There is a trap and a monster you can't fight. No treasure, nothing plot-relevant, nothing particularly in keeping with the theme of the dungeon (except maybe "fuck you"). The real path forward is behind a secret door right after the first false/secret door. You go through that, down a narrow set of steps, down quite a long tunnel, and emerge at an Adamantine Door.

It has permanent anti-magics on it, and there is no magical or physical way of forcing entry. There are 3 slots in the door at about waist height. If 3 sword blades are shoved simultaneously into the slots, the 1' thick panel will swing open. THIS IS A ONE WAY DOOR WHICH CANNOT BE PREVENTED FROM CLOSING IN 5 ROUNDS!

I feel not a lot of thought has gone into this. It's one of those not-puzzles. You have an arbitrarily indestructible door with an arbitrary means of unlocking it which has not in any way been foreshadowed elsewhere in this tomb. I don't think there are three swords so far - just the two scimitars wielded by the giant skeleton that climbed out of the chest ages ago. It's something that feels like it might be a good idea if you had thought it up and sprinkled some clues elsewhere, but as it is the PCs are expected to read Gary Gygax's mind. Why not just let the gold key open the door? Or that stupid glowing mace? Or the siren's song?

Anyway, past the stupid door is the Pillared Throne Room. If you touch one of the many pillars, you start to levitate until you're touching the ceiling "just as a child's helium balloon." There is a breeze in the room which directs floating adventurers toward one of two Devil Faces.

The Green Devil Face looks like the sphere of annihilation one. If you get sucked in, you get spat out naked near the original Green Devil Face by the entrance. Jumping back into that original one still destroys you.

The Bluish-Green Devil Face is almost identical, but instead spits them out into the Chamber of Hopelessness.

Next to the two devil faces are Small Rooms with Door of Electric Blue. The western room is full of dust, the eastern room contains a low stone table with a sarcophagus, surrounded by canopic jars. Inside the sarcophagus is a mummified corpse, and in its eye socket there is a 5,000 gp amethyst, just poking out of the wrappings. If you pull out the gem, the mummified remains animate as an actual undead Mummy.


At this point, the PCs will be grateful for the XPs.

In the middle of the north wall is the Portal of Scintillating Violet.

If the door is pulled open, the characters will see bare chamber, with a small door before them on the north wall, and pairs of words crossed behind shields hung upon the walls. There are 3 such sets on each of the walls to either hand, and 2 sets on the north wall, 1 flanking each side of the door. if the threshold is crossed by any creature, 1 set will fly off the wall and attack the individual so doing. The 2 swords will both attack at the beginning and the end of each round, striking as if they were wielded by a 1st level fighter, but being +1 on both "to hit" and damage.

There's a lot more complicated nonsense about this particular "trap," which makes you sorry that they didn't have proper animate object traps back in oD&D. If you manage to get through the various flying swords, you can enter the Chamber of Hopelessness. This room has a fountain (with drain holes in the floor), a number of bones, weapons, and coins from previous victims, and a stern glowing message from Ass-Rack that they are doomed, doooomed!

...because anybody that got through all the rest of this crypt and ended up teleported into this specific room - with all their gear - is somehow going to sit here and starve to death, unable to get past the six pairs of flying swords in the outer vestibule. Riiiiight. Maybe if they were stuck in there naked and it was in an antimagic shield and the door only opened from the outside, maybe. This is a shit prison.

In the corner are some charred remains. Stir these about and you find a cursed wish gem. Hold the gem and make a wish, and a perverted version of that wish that brings doom on "that character and all named in the wish." The gem will then violently explode. In one week it will reform. The degree to which this treasure is crap depends entirely on how evil the DM is feeling. I think there's some fun that could be had with this, if the PCs figure out how it works.



In the center of the room is a raised dais with a silver throne. Well, it's described as an obsidian throne inlaid with silver and ivory skulls. On the seat of the throne is a gold crown (which negates the pillars' levitation magic and lets the wearer see normally in the darkness, but which outside the chamber renders the user blind; the crown cannot normally be removed) and an electrum scepter with a silver ball at one end and a gold ball at the other (allows you to remove the crown if you touch it to the top of the crown). However, if the silver end of the scepter is touched to the crown, whoever is wearing the crown immediately turns into a pile of fetid dust, no saving throw. If you take crown and/or scepter out of the tomb, Type I demons are sent to retrieve it.

Careful examination of the thrown shows how the crown and scepter can be inserted into a mechanism to reveal a secret passage. This passage leads to the Wondrous Foyer

If it seems like quite a lot is happening in the Pillared Throne Room...it is. There's no particular reason why, aside from one or two instant-kills it's not particularly deadly as far as the rest of the dungeon goes, just kind of oddball. I kinda wonder how many folks actually made it this far in Gygax's initial run-throughs.

The Wondrous Foyer
After going through most of a dungeon that can best be described as "dank," the PCs emerge into a foyer made of rich materials - exotic woods, gleaming copper walls, a silver ceiling designed to catch and enhance the light, and a series of steps made in richly-hued stone like lapis, serpentine, and black marble.

Before the PCs start deciding on the mechanics of stripping the room bare and hauling the precious materials off to a scrap dealer, there's a bronze key on the fourth step (THE SECOND KEY). The key has a powerful antipathy spell on it, and if you try to touch it or pick it up you have to save (at -2) or never touch the key or allow it within 2' ever again. At the end of the steps are the Valves of Mithril.

The doors are solid mithril, magicked to be absolutely spell-proof (of fucking course), and have a key-hole set in a depression. The hole would appear to fit the Second Key. Actually trying to insert the 2nd Key into the hole causes a burst of electricity (1d10 damage); trying to insert the 1st Key causes 2d10 damage. This is a "trap" that deliberately fucks with people's preconceptions of how dungeons should work. I kindof approve.

The real key is the scepter with the gold and silver balls, which fits into the depression. If you touch the golden sphere, the doors open. If you touch the silver sphere, you get dumped nude back at the entrance.


Honestly, the only insult to add to the injury is if you woke up with a hangover and a new tattoo each time.

The door is, however, not invincible:

if cut by a sharp weapon it will begin to gush forth blood--the blood of all those who have died within the area of the Tomb! The red flow will cascade down the steps and fill the area to the top of the 1st step i 6 rounds, and each round thereafter it will rise higher by 1 step. In 20 rounds it will completely fill the foyer to the ceiling.

There's a list of spell effects if you try different things on the bloody mithril trap, nearly all of which make it worse, my favorite being:

Fire of any sort, magical or otherwise, turns the blood to a poison gas which is absolutely fatal, and all characters in the foyer area are dead, with no saving throw, while any in the 5' passage to the area of the throne will be slain unless they save versus poison at -4.

Anyway, provided you manage to open the doors, you proceed to the False Treasure Room. This room is richly decorated, and in each corner stands a nine-foot iron statue with a raised weapon. The whole chamber is lined with lead and under a weird anti-magic effect that prevents all spells except apparently detect magic and detect evil; the statues alert as both, although that's just Ass-Rack fucking with you.

Inside the room is a granite sarcophagus, labeled ACERERAK which looks like it's already been broken into and looted, complete with a partially-destroyed skeleton with jewelry that's had the gems pried out and a broken staff of the magi.

There's a bronze urn with a thin stream of smoke coming out. It contains an efreet. If the PCs release it with a minimum of jostling, it will perform three services, then fuck off. If they did a lot of banging and clanging, it attacks.

Then there are the iron chests - thick, bolted to the floor, triple-locked with poison needle traps. And if you open them:

The eastern chest holds 10,000 gems which will appear to be of not less than base 50 g.p. value each, no matter how they are tested in the dungeon. Each is actually a 1 g.p. quartz gem. The other contains 10,000 copper pieces magicked to appear as platinum until they are removed to a distance of 13 miles from the Tomb, when their true nature becomes evident.

...which is interesting considering the false treasure chamber is already under anti-magic, but we've clawed far up Gygax's butthole already.

There are no obvious exits from the chamber except the way the PCs came in.If they do a thorough search, there's a ring set in the wall behind one of the statues (moving which, without magic, is a pain in the ass). Pull it and a chute is revealed. Crawl through there and it opens up to a hallway, which curls around and lands at a pair of doors. You go through one or the other, and there's another door. You go through that door, and there's another door. These are, however one-way "phase doors" (because Gygax hadn't worked out a new mechanic in at least a paragraph); if you go through them, they go out-of-phase and you can't go back - if you took the right door, you're in front of the door leading to the grotto (and right over a covered pit trap, as a final fuck-you), if you took the left door, you're behind said door leading to the grotto.

So where the fuck is Acererack's Tomb? Where did all the stuff go that the PCs had every time they were teleported naked back to the entrance? What's up with the keys?

Well, it's undetectable by magic, but back when you moved the statue from the false treasure room, there's a hidden door that can be opened with the First Key. This is the true Crypt of Acererak the Demi-Lich.

The room is 10' x 20', and empty except...

there is a small depression a few inches deep and about 2' square in the center of the floor. Careful inspection will discover a small hole in the middle of this depression--another keyhole!

If you try to put the First Key in, you take 5d6 damage. The second key fits, however, and if it is turned 3 times, the center of the south floor will rise (PCs have until the count of five to move or get squashed into red jelly against the ceiling)...and the southern 15' of the crypt is now filled with a mithril vault. Open the door and you will find all the items lost from teleporting, vast wealth, a handful of mostly-randomly-determined magical items, three cursed weapons, a +4 sword of defending, and one pissed-off demi-lich.

The lich generally can't do much unless directly attacked, or if somebody notices the skull filled with priceless gems lingering in the back of the vault. Touching this is...bad news.



I'd say Acererak is a closet troll, but this is a troll whose closet the PCs have been banging on and demanding entrance for quite a while at this point. The fact that one of his default powers is to kill you instantly and imprison your soul in one of his gemstones is just par for the fucking course at this point. This IS the Big Bad, and Gygax is at pains to point out:

DESTRUCTION OF THE DEMI-LICH EARNS A SUGGESTED 100,000 EXPERIENCE POINTS. THIS CONSIDERS ALL ACTIONS WITHIN THE TOMB OF HORRORS TO GAIN THE CRYPT, TREASURE TAKEN OUT SHOULD ADD AN ADDITIONAL 1 EXPERIENCE POINT FOR EVERY 2 G.P. OF VALUE.

This ends the expedition of The Tomb of Horrors. We hope you and your players will have found it exciting, challenging, and rewarding.

Oh, fuck off.

Let's be clear: the Tomb of Horrors is not a great module. It's a tournament module you're never going to get through during a tournament. It's a meat grinder where the tomb follows no particular logic, except maybe a half-assed attempt to get the PCs to do typical PC things and then punish them for it. Repeatedly. There's a new, novel, never seen-before-or-since mechanic on each page.

This is a dungeon that breaks the rules, but not in a good way. The PCs might, by dint of sheer stubbornness, finish this adventure - but they aren't gaining a lot of satisfaction from playing the Nintendo Hard of old-school D&D modules. There's no mystery here, no great evil to thwart - Acererak is chillin' in his crib, not bothering anybody - and the sheer randomness of the module makes it frustrating. None of it makes any sense. Why didn't Acererak just embed his skull in a mile-thick adamantine sphere and set it adrift far above the world? Why didn't he just put it in a box covered in lead and embed it in the foundations of an important civil works project, like an aqueduct or dam?

This tomb is about being a dick. Full stop. It's not even about bragging rights. There's not even any unique treasure.

After the End
The module comes pre-loaded with 20 pre-generated characters for your conga-line of death. Sortof. They get progressively weaker the farther you go down the list, so that you start with a 14th-level Human Magic-User and end with a Halfling Fighter 4/Thief 5.

And aside from the illustrations...that's it, that's the end.

So what lessons in game design do we take away from this?

1) Have a purpose to your dungeon. It doesn't have to be a great purpose, but something more than a random assemblage of rooms.

2) Dungeons have tropes for a reason. Use them.

3) It's okay to subvert dungeon tropes.

4) Give the PCs a reason to be in the dungeon.

5) Have the PCs play be the same rules as the DM.

That last one is my big take-away. The amount that Gygax felt he needed to cheat with this module is astounding. Forget the bleeding doors and all that stupid crap, it's the arbitrary anti-magic and stuff along that line which galls me. The PCs should hire an army of dwarfs to reduce this crypt to rubble, one shovel-full of dirt at a time.

I'm always a bit mystified when I read an old module and it says "something interesting happens if the PCs throw valuable stuff into this random hole". I mean, that's a surprisingly common thing to have in an old module. Why is that a thing? Is it so that you can easily identify which players have read the module in advance?

This is long before Zork or Rogue, but you can see how those games both borrowed from it - the exploration aspect. Try anything. Part of it is a pulp thing, since pulps can and did do crazy stuff, with lots of hidden mechanisms that don't always make a lot of sense, but I think it has to do with just players trying lots of different things.

It's part of the reason why Gygax throughout the module has spells do things other than just what they are written down to do - there was a sense of complexity about it all which is very weird in the d20 days.

Ancient History wrote:If you go through the glowing, misty archway:

any character passing through the portal will enter a 10' x 10' room where their sex and alignment are reversed by a terrible curse [...] Re-entering the archway will restore original alignment, but 1-6 hit points of damage will be sustained. Going back a 3rd time will reverse sex again, but the individual will be teleported as arch 10 (i.e. naked and back to the entrance.)

The sex change aspect is a hangover from a time when transgender people were discriminated against more openly and gender bending shenanigans were good for a laugh. Today if feels a bit weirder and more unnecessary.

In at least some versions of the module, this archway also causes characters passing through it to fly "into a murderous rage", a charm effect which forces them to attack the nearest creature. It sounds like that wasn't the case in the original version, though - it's possible that change was made with the intention of representing gender dysphoria.

It's a pretty awful representation of dysphoria, though. Additionally if that were the intention, I'd expect trans PCs to be explicitly immune to it, since their typical reaction to that particular "curse" would be to punch the air and exclaim "freakin' finally".