Editing S1: Tomb of Horrors (section)

== How bad is it? ==
It's an [[Old School Roleplaying|old school]] module, so if you're not used to that play style, expect culture shock. The introduction also carries a [[Troll|warning]] that it is a module for thinking people, destined to frustrate [[Rip and Tear|kick-door-fight-orc]] gamers. If you prefer adventures that challenge your problem-solving abilities, then this will be a very difficult test and good fun.

{{Spoilers}}

Just to get INTO the damn thing, you have to probe a marshy hillock with that 10' pole every character buys. When you find the entrance, there's a 2-in-3 chance it's one of the fake entrances, which have either [[Rocks fall, everyone dies|a rigged cave-in for 5d10 damage]] or a 10' thick airtight stone crusher blocking off the exit. If your DM mentions a rumbling sound and starts counting at 1 1/2 second intervals, run out of there as fast as you can.

The real entrance has concealed pit traps with save vs. poison or DIE spikes. If you somehow lost that 10' pole you used to find the entrance and you do your probing for traps with your feet, you have about a 15% chance of getting spiked, not that the pole will be completely useful since there's a decent chance (1 in 3) that you don't trigger a pit while checking for them. A mosaic path will lead you around the pits, and has a poem engraved in it with clues for the tomb's traps you have to be reeeeal close to read, and the path goes over all the pit traps in the hallway... except one pit where the path leads you around it. What a [[Eldrad|dick move]].

There's the glowing archway at the end of that path that you have to touch the archstones in the right order, otherwise it teleports you into an oubliette with a 100' pit trap if you guess incorrectly with the unmarked release levers. The path also leads into an engraved mouth large enough to enter; it's the exit point of a few teleport traps elsewhere in the Tomb. The mouth is actually a [[Sphere of Annihilation|Sphere of Fucking Annihilation]]. Just in case the players think they can climb back in to return to the trap they triggered, the mouth helpfully detects as evil. Lastly, the main exit can be found by breaking away a relief of a door to find... a door.

There's a gargoyle statue with three arms that are carved to hold gems. It's likely that this will be encountered after fighting a four-armed gargoyle wearing a collar studded with ten gems. If you put expensive enough gems in the three hands (like the ones from the collar), they get destroyed, and nothing happens. If you use ten gems in this way, you get a gem of True Seeing, but the gem itself is invisible so you don't know it's there unless you cast a True Sight spell to detect it... or listen to the Magic Mouth that tells you where it is. Since so many illusions in this place are impenetrable without True Sight, you are doomed without this gem.

Many of the doors you see are actually fake, opening on a solid wall, and two of them conjure a spear that jabs the nearest person in the chest. Even if you went straight to the demi-lich's tomb, you'd have to successfully detect 11 secret doors, including one at the bottom of a pit trap (still with the save-or-die spikes) and another is a fake door that has a secret door in it AND a secret trapdoor in the floor on the other side.

Then there's the fake boss-fight room -- which is shown in the illustration on the outside of the module just to fuck with people who saw it in the game store. The description for the fake boss-fight actually instructs you how to be a dick by telling the DM to count to 10 while a [[Rocks fall, everyone dies|Rocks Fall]] illusion is going on, and tells the DM to put the game away, after asking if the module was too hard.

The real end-boss monster is a floating wizard skull that steals someone's soul every time someone touches it -- [[Old School Roleplaying|NO SAVING THROW]] -- turning their body and equipment into dust. Fighters need '''+5''' magic weapons to hit it; thieves can throw gems at it, causing 1 hp of damage for every 10,000gp of value in the gem; clerics can dispel evil for 5 HP of damage; and magic users have to be in the astral plane for any spells to affect it. After stealing eight souls, it teleports everyone else 100-600 miles in a random direction and curses them so that anyone that attacks you never misses (and you lose 2 points of charisma permanently if the curse is removed). '''Fighting him is entirely optional,''' since the skull only reacts if someone's stupid enough to touch it. The awesome treasure on the floor is protected by a phantasm that will threaten players, but can't actually do anything unless the players attack it enough, which gives it the juice to turn it into a ghost. If the players are still in 'touchy-touchy' and 'hack-and-slash' mode by the time they got this far, they get what they deserve.

Don't even think about jumping into the ethereal or astral planes at any time; there's a 1 in 6 chance that you'll run head first into a type I-IV demon every round you remain in them.

There are 20 pregen characters in the back, and it's recommended that players bring two characters each if there are less than six players.

The funny thing is that the module actually isn't ''really'' directly unfair as such; it just challenges the players' assumptions about how the game is played. <s>While there are some obviously dickish parts, the problems you need to solve aren't shockingly abstract, you just need to be really ''really'' careful.</s> Some of the traps and "gotcha" moments found in the dungeon are basically impossible to get around unless you poke around everything, and since poking around everything will inevitably lead to your death, it's essentially trial-and-error gameplay, I Wanna be the Guy style at some points (The fake Acererak being the prime example of a gigantic "Fuck You" where you are unable to figure the trick out unless you have played the module before or are somehow suicidal enough to stay in the dungeon when the tomb starts "collapsing" due to the illusion). Them again, Gygax ''did'' design the module from the ground-up to be a meatgrinder, so the idea of "throwing characters at the dungeon until you poke what works" was done on purpose. [[Skub|Maybe.]] And it's up to the jury whether there's [[skub|entertainment to be found in this kind of gameplay or not]].