Anyone have Tomb of Horrors?

[paigeoliver]

Re: Anyone have Tomb of Horrors?

 

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.

[Killer Shrike]

Re: Anyone have Tomb of Horrors?

 

I never met anyone who claimed to have played it.

[Reneshat]

Re: Anyone have Tomb of Horrors?

 

That's it. From now my life's mission, or atleast a short term diversion, is to actually play Dangerous Journeys. I will get good enough to GM it, I will learns the overly complex rules, and I will waste a good portion of my time and my life that I will never get back in the fruitless pursual of mastery of the rules. Thinking about the pathetic state my life has fallen into over the last year and a half or so, I really have nothing better to do.

[Lord Mhoram]

Re: Anyone have Tomb of Horrors?

 

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 did for about 6 months. Then I went insane and killed it's spell system and combat system (I liked the character creation system) and merged them with Spell law and arms law. That lasted about 6 months too, before I can to my senses and went back to HERO.

[Lord Mhoram]

Re: Anyone have Tomb of Horrors?

 

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

The harder stuff to find is the Journeys magazine. It ran 6 or 8 issues I think (I'd have to go dig them up to see how many). There are some nice things there.. a really good skill relation chart.

[paigeoliver]

Re: Anyone have Tomb of Horrors?

 

I did for about 6 months. Then I went insane and killed it's spell system and combat system (I liked the character creation system) and merged them with Spell law and arms law. That lasted about 6 months too' date=' before I can to my senses and went back to HERO.[/quote']

 

Hmm, six months, assuming multiple players, did your characters actually make it through an entire scenario?

[Lord Mhoram]

Re: Anyone have Tomb of Horrors?

 

Hmm' date=' six months, assuming multiple players, did your characters actually make it through an entire scenario?[/quote']

 

Actually I only had one player, my wife (part of the reason we were trying it out, if we had a group we would have been doing HERO). She ran 2 PCs and I ran an NPC. We got through the two intruductory adventures (basic and advanced) one from one of the magazines and about 2/3 through necropolis.

 

I later ran the D20 version and we ended up stalling before it was done, so it is sort of a thing that we plan on going back to it and finishing it, at least once.

[Vondy]

Re: Anyone have Tomb of Horrors?

 

Tomb of Horros was easily defanged with few simple low level spells old-school DnD players never memorized due to their obsession with turning wizards into walking artillery pieces. The only issue left after that was the demi-lich, and he wasn't so bad considering the sheer number of magic items and high-end combat spells your average 14th level DnD character tends to have. I think Tomb of Horrors has potential not as an adventure, but as a scene in an adventure - the players (through another adventure) learn that an ancient artifact they need is buried in the tomb of long-dead sorcerer so-and-so and have to retrieve it to complete their quest. Tomb of Horrors becomes an extended version of the opening scene from Indiana Jones - with a monster in the treasure room.

[Eosin]

Re: Anyone have Tomb of Horrors?

 

I didn't think the original DL could be harmed by magic weapons?

 

IIRC it was Shatter, Eyebite, and maybe 2 other spells that worked on him UNLESS your paladin had a holy weapon - and none were in the module. Even then the Avenger only did 5 points of damage when it hit - and that is the only weapon that could damage a 1st edition DL unless I am misremebering. I will also repeat that Fiend Folio did not come out for another several years by my recollection and that meant that nobody knew didly about the DL. So, you had this freaky creature that was impervious to spells and weapons - killed one person a round without a saving throw and somehow the PCs need to figure out that it is impervious to everything but these 4-5 spells in seven rounds or less (assuming that there are 7 PCs)? Paladin with the avenger is the first to go the way of the dodo.

[paigeoliver]

Re: Anyone have Tomb of Horrors?

 

I just read the appropriate parts of the module and here is the real kicker.

 

The Demi Lichs room is itself a curious sort of trap. It has two dangers.

 

The trap that is in it.

 

The dust, which if continually attacked will turn into a ghost.

 

The Demi Lich himself, who does not actually attack unless you touch his skull.

 

If the characters are wise enough to simply go for the loot, and not bother the skull or the swirly dust, then they can just scoop up the treasure and leave!

[paigeoliver]

Re: Anyone have Tomb of Horrors?

 

Btw, is anyone going to be interested in my hero conversion of this, if so I will make it more than just scribbled notes.

[Vondy]

Re: Anyone have Tomb of Horrors?

 

I didn't think the original DL could be harmed by magic weapons?

 

IIRC it was Shatter, Eyebite, and maybe 2 other spells that worked on him UNLESS your paladin had a holy weapon - and none were in the module. Even then the Avenger only did 5 points of damage when it hit - and that is the only weapon that could damage a 1st edition DL unless I am misremebering. I will also repeat that Fiend Folio did not come out for another several years by my recollection and that meant that nobody knew didly about the DL. So, you had this freaky creature that was impervious to spells and weapons - killed one person a round without a saving throw and somehow the PCs need to figure out that it is impervious to everything but these 4-5 spells in seven rounds or less (assuming that there are 7 PCs)? Paladin with the avenger is the first to go the way of the dodo.

I don't recall. Its been that long. I do recall that a simple detect traps and pits spell, and a simple locate object spell allowed you to avoid and/or prepare for most of the traps. And since he didn't attack you unless you messed with the skull (we didn't)....

[Klytus]

Re: Anyone have Tomb of Horrors?

 

For those who are interested, the demi-lich is an Epic-level monster in D&D 3rd Edition. Good luck having any party facing one of those under the new rules.

[Guest joen00b]

Re: Anyone have Tomb of Horrors?

 

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!

 

Here is the definitive list of Old School D&D Modules. This has synopses of all the modules too!

 

Here are the ones I've played or GMed:

A1 Slave Pits of the Undercity

A2 Secret of the Slavers Stockade

A3 Assault on the Aerie of the Slave Lords

A4 In the Dungeons of the Slave Lords

B2 Keep on the Borderlands

B5 Horror on the Hill

C1 Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan

D1 Descent Into the Depths

D3 Vault of the Drow

DL1 Dragons of Despair

DL2 Dragons of Flame

DL3 Dragons of Hope

DL4 Dragons of Desolation

DL5 Dragons of Mystery

G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief

G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl

G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King (mono)

GDQ1-7 Queen of the Spiders

I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City

I2 Tomb of the Lizard King

I3 Pharaoh

I4 Oasis of the White Palm

I5 Lost Tomb of Martek

I6 Ravenloft

I7 Baltron's Beacon

L1 Secret of Bone Hill

L2 Assassin's Knot

L3 Deep Dwarven Delve

Q1 Queen of the Demonweb Pits

S1 Tomb of Horrors

S2 White Plume Mountain

S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks

S4 Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth

T1 Village of Hommlet

T1-4 Temple of Elemental Evil

X1 Isle of Dread

X4 Master of the Desert Nomads

 

Surprisingly, tehre are many I've never heard of, and even more that brought a smile to my face as I remembered the modules.

 

In the infamous words of Comic Book Guy: Oh, I've wasted my life.

 

It was still fun! Now I gotta go dig all these out, I know I still have quite a few of the ones I listed above in my closet, the GF tried to make me dump a bunch of stuff, but none of it was my old school gaming stuff;)

[Old Man]

Re: Anyone have Tomb of Horrors?

 

 

The way to deal with these killer dungeons IME is to use Summons ruthlessly. Let the orcs and goblins that you summon explore all the rooms, trigger the traps, and take the losses. Rest and recharge your spells often, you want to be near full spells for the big fights.

 

There are some areas where using multiple bodies does not work.

 

I even highly doubt 90% of the wizards in the game had the right spells in their spell books, let alone memorized them.

 

Re: magic weapons, it was pretty lame. The only weapons that could hurt the Demi-Lich were swords (Avenger, +5 Sword of Sharpness) and maybe Mace of Disruption.

[PoorWandering 1]

Re: Anyone have Tomb of Horrors?

 

If the characters are wise enough to simply go for the loot, and not bother the skull or the swirly dust, then they can just scoop up the treasure and leave!

 

That's how our party of 4 6th lvl characters survived. Walked into final room saw "skull with gems for teeth" swiped the sword and some other choice bits o' loot and buggered off. The sword alone established the resurection fund on a sound finincial basis. I suppose the real reason we survived was that we were all Thieves or something-thieves, had the teamwork thing down pat, and were just coming off a long running Paranoia campaign so we had the perfect mind set for this adventure. If you want to survive TOH all you have to do is think like a loot hungry munchkin and do the opposite. To give you an idea of our mindset once we saw the trap heavy entry chamber the Dwarf Fighter-Thief suggested heading back to town getting plenty of food and mining equipment and counter mining the whole place. She figured we would be under the main rooms after no more that a month or two of digging. Then we would collapse the dungeon and pick the loot out of the rubble. Pity we didn't go with that plan.

 

Btw: there are 2 possable fights in the tomb the litch at the end and a 4 armed demon thing in tomb itself. You can avoid the thing if you're sneaky.

[keithcurtis]

Re: Anyone have Tomb of Horrors?

 

Gygax and the whole of early AD&D always seemed to be based on an adversarial approach. All the rules and modules seem to support a GM desparately trying to control rampant munchkins.

 

When I was the first in our group to approach it from a dramatic, genre-influenced philosophy, I rapidly became the most popular GM of our group.

Wow, that sounded really egotisitcal.

 

Anyway,I almost never used a module or gamed in someone else's world. Can someone who went through them tell me what was the big attraction? What made them cool for you?

 

Keith "???" Curtis

[PoorWandering 1]

Re: Anyone have Tomb of Horrors?

 

Gygax and the whole of early AD&D always seemed to be based on an adversarial approach. All the rules and modules seem to support a GM desperately trying to control rampant munchkins.

 

When I was the first in our group to approach it from a dramatic, genre-influenced philosophy, I rapidly became the most popular GM of our group.

Wow, that sounded really egotistical.

 

Anyway,I almost never used a module or gamed in someone else's world. Can someone who went through them tell me what was the big attraction? What made them cool for you?

 

Keith "???" Curtis

 

The challenge. Think of it like a fantasy themed video game or a small unit war-game. Could you out-think the designer and the GM sort of thing. Of course not all the early modules were as adversarial as Tomb or White Plume Mountain. Some were much better balanced and entertainment oriented. The Slaver series and Bone hill for example. Keep in mind that this was back in the days when it took 2 class changes to become a bard. Good storytelling and depth were not the main focus at good ol' TSR. Frankly I see modules like the Giant series, if they are ran as written, as basically an excuse for a bunch of friends to spend a weekend sitting around, drinking soda, eating pizza shooting the breeze and occasionally rolling some dice.

The players and GM were generally aware of the limitations of the material. They tended to either 'out grow' the strict interpretation of the published stuff and move on to home grown or other companies stuff with better storytelling opportunities or they drifted away from gaming. This exodus reached it's peak when computer/console games became complex enough to duplicate this simple style of play. On the other hand there are some published adventures that are quite excellent and runnable basically as written. One of the best that I have seen was 'Dead man's stomp' in the 3rd or 4th ed Call of Cthulhu rule book. Of course this was published at least a decade after the Tomb and the industry had learned a great deal.

[Killer Shrike]

Re: Anyone have Tomb of Horrors?

 

Gygax and the whole of early AD&D always seemed to be based on an adversarial approach. All the rules and modules seem to support a GM desparately trying to control rampant munchkins.

 

When I was the first in our group to approach it from a dramatic, genre-influenced philosophy, I rapidly became the most popular GM of our group.

Wow, that sounded really egotisitcal.

 

Anyway,I almost never used a module or gamed in someone else's world. Can someone who went through them tell me what was the big attraction? What made them cool for you?

 

Keith "???" Curtis

Im with you on this one. I bought many of the modules, mostly because Im a compulsive shopper, but I never actually ran any of them as is other than when first starting red box D&D.

 

All the early AD&D modules can basically be summed up as "adventure hook, go to site, fight to end, kill monster on the cover". Thats a broad generalization of course, but not too off base IMO.

 

The attraction is some people like that sort of gaming. 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. They harken back to the wargame roots of RPGs, where you basically just added continuity to your tactical battles, and certain miniatures that were favored by the dice were assigned some vestiges of personality.

 

It can be a diverting way to spend time, and while Im not fond of it personally, I do know the underlying feeling of it. It's straightforward and has clearly defined means of tracking success -- xp and loot. Personally when I want to blow off steam I load up a FPS on the old PC and blow some stuff up, but some people like to do it with dice instead.

 

For me if Im going to go to all the effort to take part in an imaginary world in real time, I need more than just the pitter patter of dice hitting the table. Thats why Im a ROLE PLAYER; but I still like to win and progress and have measurable success and I also want my characters abilities to exactly match their flavor, and thats why I'm a MECHANIC -- I want a character to be as closely realized as possible in the rules of the game, and I want them to be effective, so that when I portray them I can back it up if resolution is necessary.

 

The AD&D paradigm, particularly the early works, was not conducive to this mindset which is why I eventually found my way to the HERO System.

 

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.

[Cpt.Storm]

Re: Anyone have Tomb of Horrors?

 

Btw' date=' is anyone going to be interested in my hero conversion of this, if so I will make it more than just scribbled notes.[/quote']

I would most definitely be interested. I own both the old and the new Tomb and your conversion would be most helpful!

 

Thanks,

[PoorWandering 1]

Re: Anyone have Tomb of Horrors?

 

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]

Re: Anyone have Tomb of Horrors?

 

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]

Re: Anyone have Tomb of Horrors?

 

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]

Re: Anyone have Tomb of Horrors?

 

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]

Re: Anyone have Tomb of Horrors?

 

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.