S1: Tomb of Horrors

It's Sphere of Annihilation flavored.

This article or section is about something oldschool - and awesome. Make sure your rose-tinted glasses are on nice and tight, and prepare for a lovely walk down nostalgia lane.

This adventure module for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was a source of considerable Rage. Gary Gygax has author credit, but it's pretty clear it was written by Eldrad because whoever wrote this is a complete dick. It's used as the textbook example of an adventure that's meant to make players cry.

(If you kids had any grey in your neckbeards, you'd know the Tomb is nothing compared to Gygax's Isle of the Ape. Now get off my lawn!)

It was the first module to have an inset booklet with illustrations of key areas in the dungeon, so players could get a feel for what it looked like.

How bad is it?

It's an old school module, so if you're not used to that play style, expect culture shock. The introduction also carries a warning that it is a module for thinking people, destined to frustrate 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.

This article contains spoilers! You have been warned.

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 a rigged cave-in for 5d10 damage or a 10' thick airtight stone crushers blocking off the exit.

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. 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 reeeel 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 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 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.

The 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 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 -- 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 5hp 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, but can't actually do anything unless the players attack it enough to give it enough 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.

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.

Versions

homebrew variation on the original map; fewer dead-ends

• Adventure Module S1, Tomb of Horrors (1978)
• Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Tomes, Return to the Tomb of Horrors (1998)

Actually gave a reason to go there other than graverobbing. Added a village of evil cultists outside the tomb, then you went through the Tomb itself (the original module was included in the box), but in the final room you found instead a portal to the demi-lich's fortress anchored in the motherfuckin' Negative Material Plane, yet another module designed for maximum TPK. Came with an even bigger book of illustrations to show the players.

• novel, The Tomb of Horrors, by Kieth Francis Strohm (2002) holy shit, it is bad.
• 36-page pdf, Tomb of Horrors (Revised) (2005) You can download it for free.

This is a re-edit for D&D 3.5. It was less deadly with "save or die" instead of instant death, made the end-boss a tiefling lich, and added an extra room with a brain-in-a-jar.

• Tomb of Horrors 4e. Mentioned in preview and promo material. Anonymous reports it's actually four tombs, with a "broken, falling down" version of the original Tomb as tomb #2. It's been nerfed to match the 4rry "save or die sucks" attitude. HURP DERP. Also includes an optional (read: unavoidable because the DM hates you) city full of high-level cultists and worshippers of the wizard-skull. By the way, he's NOT in tomb #2.