Retro RPG review 7: The Tomb of Horrors 

A warm memory. Forty years ago when my son was 15 and his friends were 13 or 14 the seven of them played in my husband and my den each Saturday night starting at 7pm over several weeks. I didn't understand much about D&D then but I remember their laughter and being intrigued myself and listening to their jabber. It created a rather interesting several weeks and sticks with all of us even forty years later.

Two major stories from when my DM tried to run this game for us, he expressly stated we could use any feats, spells, and items from any combination of books to make the most broken and overpowered characters possible. As well as make lots of them per player, because we should expect them to die. Given what I've seen after actually reading the book it's clear that our GM seems to have altered a few of the rooms to add more combat encounters. First instance involved our party stepping into the "Rocks fall, everybody dies" room right at the start. My character was a human monk with a feat that lets him start at large size, and a magical item that grants him enlarge person so he can bump up to Huge, and as many things to stack on strength as possible so he could juuuuust barely, at level 10, have the 25 strength and size needed to qualify for the monstrous feat "Awesome Blow" ... Lots of feats into grappling, a tower shield in one hand and his open fist in the other, every magic item I could get that increases his carrying capacity. This was a massive guy named "Ahsome" who picked up sailboats for a living and carried them across a land bridge so they wouldn't need to use a cannal further south, saving time on the trip. Alongside loading and unloading carts. Cue: We first enter the room and rocks fall, exactly one player (wizard) dies to HP loss and we're quick to revive him and get everyone healed up. We clear the rocks out of the room and then toss a stick inside to test if it was safe, once again rocks still fall. Realizing the trap resets, we clear all the boulders away again with magic and have an open room to go through ... Ahsome puts his tower shield over his head and spends a standard action to use it as total cover. A castle wall sized tower shield that barely fit through the halls and covered the room almost completely. Then he walked forward. Rocks fall, they land onto the massive enchanted shield, and with his magic items and insane strength Ahsome was just able to hold the entire mountain above his head and casually let everyone else walk between he feet. Couldn't FOLLOW the group mind, but he could stay there and hold the door open while others passed. Everyone goes into the next room, and what the DM had for us was an empty chamber with some CR 15 pit fiend or something, really high level demon that the players tried to fight and were loosing to, badly, getting a bit of damage done for a few rounds before deciding to just run or risk a total party wipe. Ahsome lets all of his allies run out between his legs as he's holding guard keeping all the piled up rocks on top of his shield. Demon chases after them. "When Rocks Fall and everybody dies, I'LL BE THE GUY THROWING THE ROCKS!" I shouted, and tilted my shield to drop that entire mountain down on top of the demon. Killing it instantly. ... There were other cool moments in the campaign that mostly revolved around broken mechanics and being able to do stuff the module never accounted for, though what actually destroyed our session and made the game unplayable was an NPC class called the peasant, who put all of his money in cows. Just stampeded all the cows to flood every trap and then walked over the corpses, always sending cows in first so we could see what happened to them.

I love our hobby! I started in 79 with a friend in my neighborhood.

Oh my gosh Robilar and Tenser were the players original characters! That's great to learn that kind of history! With Gary Gygax running it that's legendary epic!!

1977: D&D Module, $1 for 36 pages, cheaply stappled 1985: D&D Module, $6 for 56 pages, cheaply stappled 2020: D&D Module, hardcover, hundreds of glossy color pages, basically a campaign ... but @^%*&# it's $50! I guess that's just what happens when the players grow-up to find that (most of them) have less prep-time but more money to spend.

Another great, Affordable way to get the Module is in the "Dungeons of Dread" Book WOTC released. I picked it up on amazon for $25 and includes s1-4. Tomb of horrors, White plume mountain, Barrier Peaks, and Caverns of Tsojcanth. 4 great adventures to run.

They need to take the old modules and make them RPG video games

"i say bring a group of dwarfs and some digging tools". I used a Wizard with multiple summon monster spells, plus Legend Lore and Bind-demon, plus a [x2] potion of gaseous form. Great nullifications.

You put up a picture of Grimtooths Dungeon of doom. Not only have I had a party run through it, but survive both it and the ToH.

So happy that I found this . Thank you

the return box set was great, my players still talk about the vampire scion fight to this day, as well as the journey to the negative plane

This was the first module I played - in 1979 - I died pretty quickly but I found it to be so cool, I got my parents to buy it for me a week later and read it over and over again. In my group everyone had a copy, but no one wanted to play it with their hard developed characters….Still have my pink monochrome, but it is looking well used, held together with yellowed sellotape

I remember the bloodbath very well. Good times.

This was the module that convinced me and my friends to switch to AD&D from BX. There weren't a lot of BX Modules available in our local game store back in the early 80s, but I'd found that just buying the AD&D stuff and adapting the stats worked fine. Mainly by just rewriting the NPCs monsters and treasure it got us through OK. I saw this on the shelf and unfortunately the price sticker was sitting right over the Advised Character Level. So where it said 10-14, all I could see were the 1 and the 4... Since my guys had just started a new party I thought "Cool.. I'll ad lib them to L2 for a couple of sessions, and that will give me a few days to make the modifications I need..." As soon as I got home I pulled the plastic wrapper off and saw the truth... Oops. I read it quite a few times, as it was unlike anything I'd run before. I was about 13 or 14 and most of our games were essentially multi level dungeon crawls with a simple, balanced, "Reward to Risk" ratio. This was not that... I realised that for the most part, level wasn't as important as in most modules, since there aren't a lot of monsters, and most of the traps that couldn't simply be downgraded were pretty much Instant Death Traps anyway. Saving Throws would be an issue, but... I decided against running it until they were a higher level anyway, and when they asked why we weren't going to be doing the new mod that I'd bought I actually showed it to one of the players, and his conclusion was, "Oh, man... we have GOT to start playing Advanced!!!" It was probably well over a year before we got round to running it, as the shift up to AD&D took quite a while. (I remember the first time I opened the DMG, turned to "Combat" and saw that Weapon vs Armour Type table and thought, "Shit... I will NEVER get my head round all this..." But when we DID get round to doing it, they all immediately wished we hadn't. Until it was finally over... when most agreed it was the toughest thing they'd ever played. From a DM's point of view, it needs a lot of re-reads, as it is not as linear as you might think and there are a lot of connections going on that the original version is not as clear about as it could be, and if you don't have your head round that stuff, it could all go horribly wrong, and the whole thing could simply feel like an unwinnable scenario, which it isn't... not quite, anyway.

I just finished DM'ing Tomb of Horrors and this was really well done and insightful. Thanks!

This is just a typical Gary Gygax module. It requires players to use brains before swords. I always liked to use the module to test the party. I used it as a one shot, and usually let the PCs use the pre-generated characters.

Love the NWN sound efx intro!

Don't forget the (old) HackMaster homage/rendition 'Tomb of Unspeakable Horrors' - Made Gary's 'Tomb' look like a training ground.

Do you think you'll ever take a look at or compare the S series compilations? (That is, Realms of Horror, and Dungeons of Dread, both of which compile S1-4)

I gave the players a "Reset Stone" that sits outside the dungeon. It's time travelling powers return them to the start if they don't press the button on it's surface (signalling success) before a set period of time. That way they could decide if any loss was "acceptable" before proceeding.

my 5e players were shocked when there was a player death at the very entrance. they likely never even had characters die on them before. I made sure they played easily replaceable characters

Loved this review and will be watching more

Thank you so much for this review. I was so amazed by it that I got my copy and I'm planning on playing it with my group in the future (they are still beginners). Side note, I was really upset that a certain 2018 movie disregarded its source material and didn't show this module.

Fifth Edition is releasing updated versions of a bunch of classic dungeons, with Tomb of Horrors as it's finale, as "Tales from the Yawning Portal"

I ran this adventure for my group. We changed a few things to make it less deadly but over all it was awesome.

Hoping to run the 5E version of the Tomb of Horrors for my group in the coming months!

Awesome review!!!

Anyone know what a mint monochrome first print would be worth? I have one and wondered what I might get for it.

This was the way I ended all my campaigns. Always a slaughter. I never modified it. I Dm’ed it as written. My players often never made it there. But if they did, they never came out alive. I’m old school and that’s they way we played it. I enjoyed it as a player character and died there. Found it very enjoyable. I don’t play EGG first Edition AD&D modified in any way. I play it as written. Chess ain’t chess without following the rules. Yes there are very few dinosaurs like me around. Yes EGG didn’t play it that way either but that’s okay. My players knew what to expect. The dice rolled what they rolled. I really enjoy your videos. Good stuff.

I love this review, thanks!!

I've run part of the Tomb of horrors, but never completed it.

Our group was around level 16-18 and getting ready for the level 18+ Bloodstone series. We used this as a solo adventure to get everyone up to 18. We were generally up to the task of fighting the demilich, but everything else was a challenge. Great experience.

Great channel. Thanks for the content

Does anyone know where you can find the 3e WOTC free release of Tomb of Horrors, the above link to WOTC no longer works

Ah yes, the Dungeon of many deaths. Well done my liege

One of the most stupid things 4E ever did was have the siren escape all by herself, and the demons replacing her with an undead look alike who attacks the heroes on sight... a straight up no frills combat encounter in the tomb of horrors... WTH?

The kobayashi Maru of Dungeons and Dragons.

Bravo man

"Mwahahahahahahaha!" said the DM.

legend of grimrock

Anyone who says they completed this module (as written) is a liar. A LIAR!

What is intro song name??

I gave this a good reading a while back and it is just plain wrong to say that it only "punishes the foolish". I get that the Tomb is particularly meant to punish CURIOUS behavior - players like Gygax's group that liked to tinker with dungeon apparatus. However, there are plenty of places where serious injury, and life and death, are just random chance.

looks like the link at wizards is down

i say bring a group of dwarfs and some digging tools

The legendary meat grinder...

Ready Player One brought me here! Excellent review by the way!

Great review. I find reviews of this product interesting. The idea of challenging the players as you say, instead of challenging the characters is something that makes me a bit ill to be honest. It seems to be a great collection of just what I don't like in a D&D game. The idea of wizards making super trap dungeons just rarely makes any sense for so many reasons.

om here because im reading ready player one!

I am here cuz ready player one

its fun to dm but its a pretty unfair module to be honest ,just don't take your favourite character thats all ! :]

A classic, but fairly horrible adventure, the number of times you can just die, for the hell of it are countless. Fun with disposable characters, but I'd be seriously pissed if I lost a character I played for years on this one.

About to run this with my group, haha hahaha hahahahahahahahahahaha!

A test. No, this dungeon was meant to kill high-level players. Most of the traps can be failed without an ounce of stupidity, with resulting deaths. So, it's a completely unfair module. Period. An excellent, experienced group of genius and thoughtful role-players still has no chance.

Tomb of Horrors has a tendency to disrupt Murder Hobos hahaha. A thinking person's Game. The HUGE change from Original DnD and 2nd+ editions is the Original strongly depended on the DM to regulate, modify and Guide the game. Where as by the 2and edition modules were Heavily written, giving the DM extensive pathways, scripts et c.. Players had to THINK in the Original games hahahahaha. I'm 51>> Played more DnD than Video games in the 80s! Was no way to just Goggle Up a guide line or whatever. The kid with the books controlled the action. As a DM in today's world, I would save Tomb of Horrorz for a Group that wants to just Kill, Collect and move on. Good luck with that in this module! If you are a Generous DM... One of the NPCs the players have hired has a Wish that Conveniently says> I wish we never came to this Tomb and resets the party AFTER they have all died hehehehehe.. My Personal way to keep my friends Friendly.

We found no reason for our party to enter and left. The weakness of the module is it has no compelling reason to enter. With no striking army housed within the party could demolish the place and avoid the traps with a flood or many disintegration spells or just bury it.

Love you reviews! But your pronunciation of many words needs some work. :D

Only play this with pregenerated throwaway high level characters. Not worth it to play it with characters you put months or years into building--they'll just die, easily, EVEN if you play smart and skilled and cautious.

Look, I know this was made three years ago, and you maybe have bettered this, but keep in mind this is a recording. You can redo a line if you fumble it, it's incredibly distracting, at least for me.

Black screen

Elegant? Bullshit. "Here is another trap you cant detect and cant save, and you die." Gfys

Who else is here because of a shit movie nobody will remember in a year?

Gary Gygax was a crappy DM. If anyone in the audience wants to actually improve at DMing, stop worshiping him and replicating what he did. Or, if your goal is to alienate everyone around you, go ahead and DM like him.