Anyone have Tomb of Horrors?

[PoorWandering 1]

The casual style of play that has more in common with 1st person shooters and video games like Gauntlet (and its successor Diablo) than what you would consider a "Role-playing" game. ...

So really, from my point of view, the beauty of the early adventures is that they were just interesting enough to entice me, and bad enough to encourage me to find something better or make it up myself.

Exactly. The early stuff served as a springboard and as a FPS before FPS's existed. These things hit their height in the early to mid 80's afterall. Does any one know when Tomb was first published for example?

[Captain Obvious]

There are quite a few old school adventures from D&D that I loved playing and GMing: White Plume Mountain, the Giant Series going all the way to Queen of The Demonweb Pits, The Temple Of Elemental Evil, Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth... such great times in those!

I really liked the Against the Giants-Queen of the Demonweb Pits series, although a friend of mine got pretty annoyed, because his character really intended on buying a ship, and as soon as one nest of bad guys was rooted out, another one would turn up. He gained at least four or five levels before he got around to buying his ship. Now that I think about it, this was really my last hurrah with with D&D, because other than a session or two immediately after the defeat of Lolth, I haven't played it since.

The series ending with the Lost Tomb of Martek was pretty good, too. I bought the PDF a while ago, just because it was so cool. There are a few parts with some high-fantasy stupidity, like the magical amusement park in the buried city, but overall it was really interesting, and could be worked into almost any world with an Old Araby analogue.

The Assassin's Knot was another classic. The first adventure I ever played where rushing in with naked steel wouldn't bring victory. This one can be had for free on the WOTC website, I believe....

[Markdoc]

I own a fair numbers of old DnD modules which I mostly acquired after the DM had run them and then lost interest, and I actually got a fair amount of use out of them, although I don't think I ever ran one straight (aside from the fact that they were converted to Hero, of course).

One example of the way I did things was the way I introduced a shipload of barbarians to the civilised lands. Having landed, gotten a couple of minor mercenary type jobs, they were down on their luck and short of cash. I took ... ummm (I think it was called) ... the Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh - which is about a fake haunted house and arms-smuggling pirates and ran it pretty much as written, though motivations and origins of the bad guys were altered to fit my own plans.

At the end, the players get a ship and a clue to the next adventure, which IIRC correctly involved lizard men and Kuo-toans, neither of which exist IMG. So I took the basic scenario idea, replaced the nonhumans with human groups, threw in a cameo appearance by an NPC I wanted to use later and ran a heavily modified version of the module, but keeping fair number of the plot ideas. For example at one point the players realise they have the whole plot bass-ackwards, the arms smugglers they have so righteously slaughtered are in fact not bad guys, and they end up having to make a deal with their erstwhile foes - and pay for all the damage they caused. Oh, the tooth-grinding caused by having to pay wereguild and give up most of the loot they have so painfully acquired!

Of course, that gave them the incentive to REALLY get the people responsible - so I flipped to a "temple set in a swamp" module from a completely different series (the name escapes me, but it had a naga as the big bad guy at the end), tossed out most of the monsters and replaced them with cultists and off we went.

That adventure ended up with the players having mad-on for the thieves' guild (and vice versa) of the nearby large city where I wanted them to go, which led to a series of home-made modules dealing with covert trade wars between merchant princes (which in fact masks a larger conspiracy). Unravelling that involved a deal of travelling about and I used the occasional module (Isle of Dread springs to mind as one instance) as locations.

At the end of this series of adventures (about 6 months weekly play), the players finally confront the mastermind behind the whole deal, tackle him and all of his nasties - and screw up! Instead of killing them all I simply diverted from what I had in mind to Escape from the Dungeons of the Slave Lords, which I basically ran more or less as is, just removing things like the Mushroom men and adding in a few items of my own invention to tie it into the existing storyline.

So basically, although I'm running in a relatively low-sorcery world using Hero system and no non-human races, I still got plenty of mileage out of the old DnD modules - and the final fight with the thief-lords on the dock, while the volcano is exploding in the background, from Dungeons of the Slave Lords was regarded as a high point of the game for months afterwards. After 6 months of play and all the bad things that had happened to the players (and their NPC friends and family) along the way, taking revenge on the people responsible was obviously very cathartic for the players.

Basically old modules are a fine source of ideas to mine for games, and what is in them is purely special effects - an adventure that is set in a "dungeon" can easily be converted to a castle or even a series of houses in a city. Some things won't fit in that setting, so just replace them with something that does.

cheers, Mark

[paigeoliver]

I converted an unnamed (because my players haven't seen it yet) D&D module from Fantasy to science fiction with only minimal effort.

[arcady]

Tomb of Horros (which I have) is as bad as it is for the same reason the Spiked Chain is a problem in 3.x DnD:

It is not bad in and of itself, but it triggers all of the 'wrong' aspects of the game system together in one lump.

In 1E AD&D traps were often save or die, and undead drained levels or had save or die powers.

Convert the module over to Hero and chances are a beginning group of 150 point PCs could take it on...

By itself, the concepts, traps, and creatures in it are not overdone - they just exploit all the weakpoints of 1E AD&D.

Much like the spiked chain - a weapon that trips and harms people out to a flexible distance, is not a bad concept, but combined with AoO and the way most reach in DnD 3.x is not flexible (because Monte or somebody never saw anybody use a spear and adjust the grip on the fly - which even I know how to do...) the spiked chain just happens to trigger the system's weak points.

I suspect there is a legal issue in scanning in the map...

But I also know it can be found online if you look in the right ways...
(and not from any place under my control).


Tomb of Horrors was actually my first ever roleplaying experience. Given that I survived as a solo player all the way up the end (where I was merely informed that my character died and I lost, with no option to play out the encounter), it is not a hard module in terms of play skill. All you need to do is not trigger those built in game system weak points. In a convertion to Hero - which lacks those weak points - this would not be hard to do.

[paigeoliver]

I THINK there would only be a legal issue in scanning and DISTRIBUTING the map. I fail to see how scanning it and giving it to a friend would not be fair use.

Anyway, I encourage all interested parties to go ahead and buy the download of "Return to the Tomb of Horrors". It is only $4, and you are gonna need it to play my Hero revision of the thing anyway.

To whoever was asking earlier, Tomb was being used BEFORE AD&D even saw print, and was one of the first printed module, and it came out in the 70s.

[PoorWandering 1]

To whoever was asking earlier, Tomb was being used BEFORE AD&D even saw print, and was one of the first printed module, and it came out in the 70s.

That was me. Thanks.
I hope the hero version works out.

[PhilFleischmann]

We tackled the Tomb of Horrors with about 30 characters (in rotating shifts). After a few died, we'd come out and refill our ranks and go back in. We did manage to kill Acererak. Only two of us were left. Several things worked in our favor:

We figured out how to kill it. We freed the efreet from the urn and one of the wishes we wished for was to know how to kill Acererak.
There is a missing mark on the map where the "wish-granting-gem" is supposed to be. Thanks to this typo, we didn't find it, and it would probably have killed us.
We left the swirling dust alone.
There were a number of deadly areas that we never got around to. We also asked the efreet how to get directly to Acererak's room.
The DM was very lenient. It may have been intended that the efreet shouldn't have known how to kill the demilich, but he told us anyway.

The main question I had afterwards was, "Why the heck would anyone want to become a demilich?" You just sit there for years, decades, or maybe even centuries doing absolutely nothing. No fun, no pleasure, no hobbies, no entertainment. Every once in a great while, you get to eat a soul, but only when someone touches or attacks you. If you want to live forever as an undead, it seems to me that being a vampire is a much better way to go. You've got arms and legs, you can go where you want, have conversations with people, exercise political power, etc.

[Metaphysician]

Demilichs spend almost all their time in astral form wandering the various planes of existence freely.

[Captain Obvious]

But vampires are so angsty and tragically hip.

Anyway, I don't think becoming a demi-lich is really what anyone has in mind. It seems to be more of a not-commonly-known side effect of being a lich for several centuries.

[PhilFleischmann]

Which brings up all the usual questions about the "hard to kill" undead. Does the demilich need to eat souls in order to "live"? If so, how often? Sealing off the tomb would then kill him eventually. And he'd die of starvation if no one survives all his traps for a long enough time. If he doesn't need to eat souls at all, why bother building a tomb? Why not just seal yourself up where no one can find you or get to you and spend all your time roaming the Astral Plane as a free spirit? It's not like there's any pleasure or joy left on the material plane.

Same thing with vampires. Do they eventually starve to death if they don't get to suck any blood?

Don't these contradict the idea that the only way to kill them is stake-thru-heart or list-o-spells?

But now I'm way off the subject. I agree with those above who disliked the adversarial stance in D&D. It was one of the reasons I switched. DM out to get players is the root of all munchinism.

[Susano]

\Same thing with vampires. Do they eventually starve to death if they don't get to suck any blood?

Don't these contradict the idea that the only way to kill them is stake-thru-heart or list-o-spells?

Depends on the sources. As the vampire is already dead, not getting any blood doesn't "kill" it, just tends to weaken it. A lack of blood will usually send a vampire into a comatose state, akin to sleeping. Get any blood on or near it, and the vampire will wake up hungry.

[Edward Kann]

Maybe a Demi-Lich is a Lich that has gone insane?

Maybe it secretly hopes to be destroyed, on some twisted subconscious level it sends out little clues to lead powerful adventurers possibly capable of dispatching it to it's layer.

Once they arrive however the sadistic and incredibly bored aspect of the lunatic Lich come into play and it just can't help itself in trying to make life difficult for our heroes, even kill them if they make an error.

Maybe the whole dungeon environment is the last pathetic entertainment that a Demi-Lich can generate for itself trapped as it is after centuries of slow decay in it's previous Lich form?

Just ideas. Couldn't help myself

Edward

[Metaphysician]

I will repeat:

A demilich is a desirable evolution for a lich, as it leaves them in an essentially free, and almost unkillable, astral form. The skull is just what little connection it still bears with its old self.

[Mentor]

I used to have the Dangerous Journeys rulebook, and have recently decided to go ahead and collect the series, since it is pretty cheap.

But, my question is. Did anyone, ever, at any time play that game outside of Gary Gygax's personal little gaming group. The reason I ask is that the game is a work of art, more so then hero is in a way, but it seemed to be too complex for actual humans to play.

I was actually a playtest local GM for GDW when the system first came out and the company was trying to drum up interest. After the Gygax lawsuit took GDW down (along with Traveller, although The New Era bit) all I have left is the cheesy blue playtest shirt. I still have all the books, which I paid full price for, BTW. Interesting system and really good world concept. Hero is a far superior and more playable system, though. Paige is dead on about the Dangerous Journeys' complexity, even by Hero standards.