By Thom Wilson ThrowiGames OSE Levels 3-5
After being spurned by a handsome noble, the warlock Zor Zaynne placed an infertility curse upon a region of the land. Although she accepted numerous payments from noble families to reverse the affliction, she never intended to allow any family to reproduce. After years had passed, rumors of the warlock’s death became popular. Recently, an acolyte of a local order uncovered a potential reversal ritual. All it requires is the warlock’s organs, but they are hidden deep within her treacherous tomb. Nobles have offered the reward of any treasure found in the lair if the organs can be retrieved. Many have already tried, and all have failed.
This 42 page single-column digest adventure explores the question “What if the Tomb of Horrors was for levels 3-5.” There’s nothing evocative here, just room after room of traps and summoned/undead monsters.
Didn’t Grinding Gear, or some other early LotFP adventure do the same thing already, better? Much better? Anyway, this is a tomb of horrors adventure. I hate tomb of horrors adventures. I hate trap dungeons. I think they suck and are not fun. They drain the life out of a game while the players search for how they are going to get screwed eight different ways in THIS room. And to do it in a level 3-5, without the massive resources/divination available? Pffft. Anyway, I have now disclosed my prejudices, so, make what you will of the rest of this review.
So, some wizard curses all the nobles in a region to be infertile. Then, a long time later, maybe dies and is buried by “his loyal followers” in some tomb full of traps and guardians. They send you in to get his internal organs to break the curse. The infertility thing never comes up again, anywhere so it’s pure pretext.
Let’s see here … the first real encounter area, room two, is a sixty foot hallway. Yes. It takes a page and a half to describe. Uh huh. And it has … seven traps in it. There are barely visible glowing runes on the floor and ceiling. And there is a “swing over” pit trap with an ochre jelly in it that is right out of Grimtooth. Seriously. What was it called … the Johnny Weissmuller memorial, or something like that?
Let’s see … save vs poison or die … 50% chance every minute of ceiling collapsing for 4d6 damage, save vs death or die, save vs poison or get a fatal disease. You get the idea. It’s just room after room of screw you traps.
The room descriptions are utilitarian. After all, you’re here to get fucked. “Narrow hallway with four half walls staggered throughout. Wall murals of gory executions of nobles. Portcullis gates opened by control panels in area 21 or 29, or with a successful Strength (Open Doors) check. Air tingles with electricity. Humming noise within each half wall. Floors covered in white powder.” (BTW: Those half walls have instantly resetting blade traps and the rest is mini explosions that do 1 point of damage for each individual footstep you take. ) There’s nothing really to that. The gore thing and humming is getting close, but, also, its all very utilitarian and just not very interesting from a holistic standpoint.
But, ah, the magic items. Book items. +1 shield. +1 dagger. You enjoy that.
So, a lot of save or die, a lot of high damage traps, or continual damage traps. A lack of magic item resources or spells at level 3-5. A designer who says “the adventure continues until all of the characters are dead or the mummy-lich is.” Tomb of Horrors is one of the worst things to ever happen to D&D. And then whatever the fuck started character-driven super-heoric shit.
This is $5 at DriveThru. No preview … SUCKER!
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/462196/You-Should-Never-Have-Come-Here?1892600
Zor Zaynne is a cool magic-user name.
Separately, I would disagree that ToH was “one of the worst things to ever happen to D&D,” though I would 100% agree that novice designers attempting to imitate all the time are “one of the worst things to ever happen to D&D.” Gary said ToH filled a very niche purpose – first, to test the high-level, almost invincible characters of Kuntz/Ernie, and second, for convention tournament play for players who said nothing could beat them. No problem with that here. The problem arises when uninformed and/or novice designers import the same dynamics into low/mid-level modules (where players don’t have the right resources or skill) or modules meant for casual play.
Yeah, ToH was the first of the real “gauntlet” dungeons, meant to instill accomplishment when defeated. Not quite at the “funhouse” level like White Plume; gauntlets are more grounded than that. It provides better motivation for the players, as opposed to the characters. You can wear it as a badge of pride, whereas other dungeons are just kind of “there” for faffing around and then abandoning when boredom sets in or all the loot is gone. There is room for that in D&D.
That being said, they keep getting twisted by authors (like the one for this adventure) into these adversarial things, where the author isn’t so much setting up a difficult-but-passable challenge as they are just pulling a “look at how cool and/or smart my dungeon is, and how efficiently it kills your puny characters”. D&D was never meant to be Players vs. DM, but these guys with their misappropriated gauntlet dungeons are certainly driving play in that direction with this kind of stuff. It’s a shame really, because a good gauntlet dungeon can be very fun when deployed correctly.
100%.
I don’t even particularly like ToH style-play, because I’m more of a funhouse guy, but ToH-style still serves a niche. Too bad it’s mostly misused these days.
This. This. This.
Rereading ToH should be mandatory before attempting an emulation. It is simply NOT what its many and sundry imitators are – or think it is. It is descriptive, evocative and very seldom arbitrary. A tour de force, in fact, of HOW to write up a trapped tomb; the ur-AD&D trapped tomb.
Everyone has already said what I wanted to say. Excellent.
Bryce has not reviewed your high lvl adventure prince!
Will the punk be art no?
Today wintertime
A dusk, high level bryce
in spite of the artpunk
Impatient young foreigner
Rattling his cage bars
Producing much futile noise
English as Second Language
High Time Preference
Haikus are not for your kind
Playtesting & Dungeon Age FTW
Meandering thoughts
suddenly playtesting loops
at the perfect osr
Talk about self-defeating titles!
Agree—the title is hilarious, and enough to keep me from buying if my eyes had randomly passed upon this.
I think the adventure’s premise laid out in the 1st paragraph of the review seems pretty respectable, however.
I like it. Similar to the movie title: GET OUT. A thrown gauntlet or a description of what every adventurer says in every dungeon.
I feel like Tomb of Horrors works if it’s just a site in the sandbox everyone warns the party not to go too and the only reason they go there is of they are greedy.
Nothing forces them to go, and if they do nothing forces them to stay. Just a deadly place on the map filled with loot.
It’s for levels 10-14 and, contrary to “common knowledge,” it’s traps are fair and avoidable. What grills a lot of peoples’ cheese is that it IS fair – for PCs level 10-14- and the real issue becomes whether or not the PLAYERS are competent to be running high-level PCs. That was the whole point of unleashing it at Origins in 1975.
Agreed, but it’s not just if the players are competent, but they should have a choice of if they want to play that style of game, thus a choice in the sandbox not something the DM throws at you.
(Which to be fair they should always get a choice).
EGG was actually chagrinned that whenever he took the ToH to conventions, the players would beat it. It’s not nearly as tough as its reputation. And players were more experienced in that sort of thing.