I used to laugh at our 45-year-old veteran player who whenever we were stuck, would go up to random walls and say I disbelieve the wall. I can now see why
I remember those days, where the safest course of action was to simply disbelieve everything on principle. Assuming nothing was real was once the only way to get through many situations.
Fun story about the crown that instantly kills you, one of the first groups to run the Tomb back in 1975 got to the end, slapped the crown on Acerak and used it to destroy him. Gary Gygax himself confirmed that it was a completely legitimate way to beat the dungeon.
Elves had the innate power in 1e and 2e (and maybe others, idk) to detect secret and concealed doors. The door in the first hallway is that, a concealed door. A elf could notice it if they looked for it.
@@TheHEAVYDAN this wasn't a 3e dungeon though. 3e/3.5 made all sorts of changes. When we ran this dungeon as 3.5 characters we had to make quite a few changes to it. I think someone eventually made an unofficial errata that became the popular version of it.
Yup, and if i am not mistaken Dwarfs also had a similar chance to detect pits, deadfall traps etc as well as the ability to know their depth underground and the like. That 1st entrance most high level parties would simply walk in and automatically notice at least half the traps and likely the secret door. Also clerics and wizards have various divination spells that can be used to guide them around or past problematic traps/puzzles if correctly worded, there's also literally a Wish Spell at that high of a level. If a 20th level spell caster is dying they need to learn all their spells and use them much more effectively, even The Wizard knows Fireball isn't the ONLY spell of use 😉
I knew a DM who tried to run this dungeon with some friends, after first session they were done and hated it, and they had barely gotten anywhere. Well, I came in, already knowing the dungeon, and helping him with his hype puzzle thing for the dungeon. I came in as an immortal character who was just there to record the events of what transpired, but I didn't help the players unless the DM told me to give them a hint. Having that character who could add an RP element and work with the DM to help player engagement did help keep them in longer. Although they still said fuck this, and everyone gave up eventually anyways. This is a very niche dungeon for very specific players. Likely COC players will enjoy this more often than DnD players honestly.
@@synthemagician4686 In Call of Cthulu, my analysis of the overall game rules is that if you run your character long enough, they will either be insane or dead. If you're willing to play with that supposition, yes, good point!
Oh yes. Most of my groups come prepared with tools for destroying walls so as to avoid having to deal with doors. I stopped trapping doors years ago but as of yet no one has figured that out.
I second that. Actually I started marking the wall of a house as we headed downstairs of a spiral stairwell. Next thing we know, we effectively had a bloody slip and slide that nearly killed a ranger and myself. We actually nearly drowned on the way down. We hit the dry(soon to be bloody wet floor) with 5 and 4 hp respectively.... I would stab the door.
My DM once trapped us on a small prison inside a ship, it had magic runes all over the place and a complicated puzzle with lights. My Dwarf paladin dropped his beer into the ground and found there were no runes there, we found a magic staff that was part of the puzzle... So I randomly stabbed the floor with it and mashed it with my hammer, making an opening and flooding the ship. We escaped trough the hole swimming, the magic thing did a short circuit and the ship exploded after we left... many innocent people died in the process... fun times
"Who's going to stab the door?" Once had a D&D group find a magic crystal. All it did was glow different colors when you touched it. A giant mood ring without the ring. I think they stayed there for 2 real world hours messing with it in different ways, including but not limited to, stroking it, talking to it, whispering to it, kissing it, licking it, and rubbing anything they could find against it.
@@bakariwolf3835 ...and that is how the whole group caught syphilis, gonorrhea, and a few new diseases that will be named after them. As for who would stab a door, the answer is the fighter who's tired of this shit and decides to just hack the thing down with his axe. It's noteworthy that this is generally effective for most doors in most places, albeit not the most stealthy option.
I can see this dungeon being fun if everyone had randomly generated characters, and every time you died you instantly got another randomly generated character.
I've always wanted to try to solo it with a nexromancer, maybe the necro class that was in White Dwarf, it's bigtime overpowered. I'd hang out in the graveyard for a few weeks before entering the dungeon and have a few 100 zombies with me, then try to brute force through it by sending zombies in.
That's basically how DnD back in the day was played. Characters were seen as more like disposable tools for the players to use to try to "beat" the DM, and not like, actual characters. At the time Tomb of Horrors was originally written, any competent player would always know to bring a stack of pre filled out character sheets to any DnD game, and the idea of attaching complex personalities and motives to the PCs wouldn't have really crossed anyone's mind.
Watching this, I realized: this dungeon is exactly what a sinister super intelligent undead wizard would make to keep everyone away, but that doesn't mean it'd be any good to play.
It is great to play, if one understands the conditions under which it was designed. ToH was for play at conventions in competitions. There was a time limit, and the goal was to see which group's table could get the furthest within that time limit. The goal was never to "beat" it. It was merely to get deeper into ti than the other tables before you failed.
With the amount of instant death/character ruining traps for making a single mistake? Probably not, especially if you go through it often. The bad guy would probably die within days of using it.
@@webeewaboo It's a tomb, it's not something that is traveled through often, by *anyone.* And yes, if I were the bad guy I would very much like to have those instadeath traps.
@@ctrain8900 I was talking on the basis of the bad guy using it as a treasury, not as what is pretty much a shitty joke from both the DM and the bad guy that this dungeon is.
As an owner of both the original ADnD module and its sequel (Return to the Tomb of Horrors), I can tell you that you are half correct. SPOILER BEYOND THIS POINT ---------- The tomb was a means to guard the entrance to Acerak's stronghold while providing him with a steady supply of powerful souls (from dead high-level adventurers).
Note that anytime poison is involved at ANY TIME in this dungeon, remember that in the original Dungeons and Dragons, poison didn't do damage or reduce stats. It was an instant death effect, so everytime there was a poisonous trap in this dungeon, was another layer of death added onto it.
@@travisstroman-spaniel6091 Oh yeah, OSE still has it as a game mechanic, save against poison is basically a second death save, the good thing is that it works both ways, if you manage to poison a barrel of mead, you can clear out an orc lair very easily, high risk high reward kind of thing.
@@havable 'The green slime touches you. You feel a burning sensation. Make a save Vs poison.' 'I fail' 'You're dead and you dissolve into green slime. Roll up a new character.'
Incorrect. Only poison types D and E were all or nothing. ALTHOUGH it DOES say in the DMG that poisons from monsters (as in the MONSTER descriptions) should be treated as an all or nothing affair. I don't think that the original Tomb of Horrors actually specifies the poison types used so it's up to the DM.
I love how the poem is like "everything is fake, youre gonna die, dont mess up or youll die, find the secret door that is a trap but is also a door, try not to die, then go left"
@@ericm1839 tbh that's kinda what I like about this dungeon as a whole, as worldbuilding nerd. Many dungeons in RPGs (both computer and tabletop) feel very _video game-y_ like they're just there for you to go in, fight some baddies, get the treasure, hooray, and rely on a lot of "man, the person who made this sure was dumb". Tomb of Horrors, whilst definitely having its issues, feels less like a video game "go here for le epic loot xD" and more "this is the tomb of a pissed off demilich that just wants to explore the astral plane, pretty much everything in here is designed to deter or kill you, in other words GO AWAY". I can't imagine say the dungeon in White Plume Mountain as a genuine place made to deter adventurers because everything is too "sterile". I could imagine a pissed off wizard in a fantasy setting making the Tomb of Horrors to keep people away.
@@DuskEalain a dungeon someone should turn away from. I could see where that would work with the right group/campaign but it kinda feels like those purposefully troll Mario levels. Definitely niche
@@ericm1839 Oh yeah it's definitely not for everyone and unless your entire campaign is around dungeon crawling I'd recommend it far more to be treated as a rumor or folk legend the party hears in casual RP at a tavern or adventurer's guild, not something for them to actively seek out.
Tomb of Horrors was designed as a Tournament scenario for Origins I (1975). Players were not expected to finish it at all: the idea was to go to the highest numbered room using a team of 12 provided pregens in n hours of playing (4? 6 ? I don't remember). At the end of the time or when the 12 pregens are dead, we look at the highest numberer room visited. Congratulations, that's your team's score. Highest score in the tournament won. Nothing more.
Nah, they didn't miss it but refuse to see it. These cosplayers should just write out their little scripts and act them out rather than play a game with random results.@@looseseal2
@@looseseal2 I don't dislike this channel at all but I will say if you are going to attempt to "demystify" or have a hot take about this module or honestly a hot take on any game at all, saying "the original lauded version of this that everyone likes for historical context is in a system I never engaged with because I don't play first edition" is just not coming at this with good faith. Or hell, even if it was just supposed to be a brutal takedown of a 1E module with zero good faith, you aren't really going to roast the old school grognards by saying "old dnd too hard" or "I misunderstand how dungeons and dragons used to work in the 70s". I love a lot of things 5E does, but there's a reason there's a new golden age of indie ttrpgs and D&D is starting to take a massive hit for being a system that is finally outstaying its welcome after 10 years of setting the standard, while offering not a ton of its own identity. Good luck to anyone staking their rpg career on just dnd in the coming years.
I was hoping someone in the comments would bring this up. Exactly this. Tomb is a death-dealer, for sure...and I love it for that...but it's original intentions were as described.
There are 2 praises I can give this dungeon: 1- it's probably one of the best representations of how a dungeon should be if it was actually planned out and built by an asshole who 100% wants everyone who ever steps foot in it to get fucked in the worst ways possible and die a horrible death. 1- it proves how absolutely easy it it's for a DM to kill a player. "the ground gives in and you all fall for what seems like an eternity, landing on spikes made of magic poisonous adamantine, you all die, but not before you get to see as Tiamat, vecna and Gygax manifest in front of you and give you the middle finger."
@@Muck006 In fairness, Tucker's Kobolds would probably get murked by a high level 5e party. All the Mundane preparation in the world can't protect you against appropriately cheesy applications of magic.
I feel like this is the take people miss on Tomb Of Horrors. Its self-consistent with the early rules and game-world because its not a game, its a real world. And in that world there are asshole wizards and you should not go into their personal shit.
See, I think Acererak would get bored just watching people go into the meat grinder. After a while of getting fucked over, realistically they would just leave. Yes he gets their treasure, but the true pleasure would come from giving them hope and then, when they are feeling clever for overcoming obstacles and making progress, to shut the way behind them and turn up the difficulty. But everything still has to make sense. They need to believe that there is a way out and even though it wears down their patience and sanity, that there is eventually going to be a reprieve. They will find none. They must continue moving forward, cursing their own hubris as they watch their allies fall to traps and monsters one by one. They must come to the realization that the treasure no longer matters, and that all they want is to escape with their lives. They must acknowledge that their lives are the most precious thing to them, and have the hope of survival dangled in front of them. They must be allowed to think that they have finally escaped, only to have that hope taken away. They must always believe that what they desire is just barely outside their grasp, and that if they just continue moving forward, eventually they will grasp it. But like Tantalus, this is but an illusion. This is the suffering Acererak craves.
@cak01vej are the chips in the fresco actually in the module? The problem with ToH is that DMs that actually like their players change it so stuff is more clear or actually a puzzle, so comparing between campaigns is kinda pointless unless both played in a con when ir was released. Like how a lot of players here talk about coming back with more supplies when the dungeon just resets the traps every day more or less
I assumed this was because an earlier door was actually opened by inserting swords into it. Someone might wonder whether it'll work again, and try it out. Or, as suggested earlier, someone might attack the door either as a precaution or out of frustration. (Both of which are very valid reasons at this point in the dungeon.)
my favorite tomb of horrors story was one my dad told me when he played it in college in the 80's, basically the party got to the entrance and asked the dm what the door looked like, the dm described ornatly rich doors made of admantium and mithril, endorned with gold lettering and gemstones, the party conversed for a moment, then went backl to town, hired workers with tales of riches inside the tomb, then promptly took the doors and sold them for tens of thousands of gp each
That actually became a hilariously common ending to Tomb of Horrors. Why bother going through that hellhole when you can just steal the dude's door and be rich anyway?!
I've read that this was actually somewhat common for savvy parties. So much so that some versions of the dungeon don't actually have adamantium in the doors, but "metal enchanted to look and function as adamantium", something like that. Now, why you can't just take that same enchanted metal and sell THAT I am not sure...
How to beat tomb of horrors: Step 1: pick warlock pact of the chain Step 2: pick Voice of the Chain Master invocation Step 3: use your familiar as a test dummy and test on everything in that god forsaken place
Actually, you can STILL beat the whole thing by hiring a team of dwarven miners and masons to dig through the entire thing and then split the loot, much like the original.
@@loosegasket One of Gary Gygax's players successfully defeated the Tomb by using an army of mind-controlled Orc hirelings to run through, tripping off the traps.
Him: “Who’s gonna stab the door?” My level 20 Warlock: Teleported back to the beginning of the dungeon, so he goes all the way through the dungeon without items and then stabs the door in frustration.
No joke, I was playing warlock as well (Lv 15). I was playing him as a goofy Fey trickster so he used Mask of Many Faces to look like he had stumbled across a hidden treasure room and was covered in fine clothes and jewelry. I wasn't really effected by it though because I had Mage Armour and my pact weapon, and we beat Acererak.
I don't know Gary personally, but I can almost 100% tell you how this dungeon was designed. Gary went "Okay, so my level 20 demi-god player characters just completely derailed this big, fun, giant campaign I had planned in a very not fun way... Let's see how cocky they are after I throw this at them."
The sad part is that's not all that far off. Gary Gygax, infuriated at people complaining that the prewritten adventures put out by TSR were "too easy" designed a dungeon specifically to subvert every major trope used by early dungeons with deadly consequences. The only way to beat the Tomb is to be extremely paranoid. Also, XP, I think you're missing the point. The Tomb isn't MEANT to be fun. It's a meat grinder meant to be overcome with multiple backup characters. Dying to the Tomb of Horrors is a baptism by fire for old school gamers. Edit: Best advice I ever heard for dealing with the tomb? The point man is the ten foot pole.
I see it more as that the Tomb of Horrors is a Roleplaying Dungeon, not a Roll-Playing Dungeon. You have to use your wits, not beat DCs, to figure it out. Most of the traps have no save because by the time a trap is triggered, you already were in too deep to have escaped. The tomb is trying to kill people, and Gygax didn't let you hide behind your statistics. No "I take 35 damage and brush it off, maybe guzzle a heal-potion." No "I have a bonus of 15 to my trap-disarming skill, so I fear nothing but a Nat1." It is not fair. It is realistic, and realism should be terrifying in a TTRPG.
1) I LOVE THE TOMB OF HORRORS. 2) Fun fact. Low-level groups have beaten the tomb with few or *no* deaths. You be cautious, you be careful, you *don't* do stupid things, and you can make it through the tomb intact.
@@protonevoker891I'm sorry but it sounds fun to me, I'm just that fucked up, I'm someone who wants to see if it's possible for a player to get through with one character and no pre-known knowledge
Character idea: a survivor who lost everything including their own identity but actually had their alignment turned good in the tomb of horrors and has permanent ptsd but still does the right thing and helps their party as a trap expert
One of my favorite concepts for a character with 'evil powers' is that they ran into an alignment reversal effect. (or a mirror of opposition and the duplicate won.) So now they're both hated/hunted for their old deeds and deeply scared of such effects.
It was a common mechanic in old D&D to bash open locked dungeon doors. A theme in ToH is one of misdirection--that the obvious door is the wrong way to go, but the doors that get you deeper into the tomb complex are all hidden. The scenario is designed that way to teach this to players. There are a bunch of obvious false doors that are trapped to shoot an arrow at PCs who open the door. By the time they get to the super-special, epic, mithril, bleeding door, they should have learned not to mindless bash things.
Isn't that the typical way to get through the dungeon doors when something bad happens to your rogue? Just hack away at it until it breaks. Or stuff that can be even more fun,if the door is from a strong metal just grab a pickaxe and hack away at the stone that keeps the hinges/doorframe
Or... anyone who has the bright idea to bypass figuring out which 'key' unlocks the door by hacking it down. The problem with asking "who's gonna stab the door" is, I think, a too close reading of the text. As a GM I would have interpreted that all day as someone trying to hack the door down with any edged weapon that would cause a 'cut' in the door.
„A very hard dungeon that will give a challange to your invincible characters!” *Makes a steam roller who insta kills anything with no save whatsoever*
@@donb7519 That's kind of just as bad though since that means the death is entirely up to the dice. If you fail the save against the poison gas, you're good, otherwise you're fucked. *This* is the issue with this dungeon, not that it's counterintuitive and confusing (that's just annoying, but ultimately can be fun if you know how to run it right). But there are so many save or die (or just die) scenarios in this dungeon: from the literal "rocks fall, you die" trap in the one fake entrance to the fucking Feeblemind spell in the room with the Siren. Which is why Gygax was a hack: this dungeon wasn't designed to trick you and show that your OP 20th level character isn't invincible with weird traps and a genre savy antagonist, it was made as a way for the DM to legitimise killing parties they didn't like. That's it, that's the intent behind the Tomb of Horrors.
@@PhileasLiebmann you are an idiot on a side note literally everything comes down to dice rolls in DnD hell death itself is a series of rolls to see if you actually fucking die also most of the instant death traps are easy to avoid if you have a IQ above room temperature
Gary Gigax was just really angry at someone in his party so he made something that would deliberately mess with them... and then released it to the public.
the story goes that he made it when his players complained that meatwalls weren't challenging them. However, it first saw the light of day as a tournament module, and was built from the submitted notes of one Alan Lucien, whose original plans were for the Tomb of Ra-Hotep (Acererak's Tomb does have quite a bit in the way of Egyptian visuals). In these plans lie the origin of the Sphere of Annihilation, and Ra-Hotep could control it with his jackal-headed staff
@@MasticinaAkicta Yeah, I'm surprised people forget Gygax just made bullshit modules that most players and DMs just don't bring up that much BECAUSE they were so bullshit hard and meat grindy. Seriously, that's the whole reason these kinds of modules are called Meat Grinders. They just chew through characters. They're not fun to anyone besides ironically the murderhobos and power gamers that Gygax made these modules to punish. Lots of murderhobos don't actually care about their characters and don't get attached, so meat grinder games are what they flock to unsurprisingly. Power gamers like making the most broken builds possible, so a meat grinder meant to make you go through at least a dozen characters is their biggest challenge to get through with just one. It's also why I personally call those games, and any game with next to no RP potential, junk food campaigns. They're just action for the sake of action, and it cuts out like 90% of the roleplaying in a roleplaying game. You don't get any benefit to roleplaying in one of these campaigns, and you can really only roleplay with the other PCs for the most part. They're cheap and easy to run games, where even the DM doesn't really need to do much prep work to get rolling. The book's all a DM really need, since I don't think there's any important NPCs in that game.
it kinda reads as petulant more than comedic, like gygax was so salty about being outsmarted once in a previous session that he had to make this nightmare zone
No, honestly I have to disagree. It's just cruel to your players. I don't think any of my friends would personally enjoy this if I did it to them, and I wouldn't either.
Tomb of Horrors actually makes a lot of sense - frightening lot of sense, when you just realize one simple thing. Acererak is not an NPC. He is a player character. He is a player character, who thinks like a player character and utilizes top/epic level tools the way a player character would. He uses reasoning in a way that makes sense only to him - and even that is optional. Because, let's be honest? Traps, doorways, and dungeons that make no logical sense and are designed so there's only one way forward, it's often counterintuitive and punishes you? This is *exactly* the way PCs would design a dungeon to prevent NPCs from getting inside.
I’m also imagining the dungeon conditioning adventurers (but in reality PLAYERS) to solve impossible puzzles makes the relatively easy puzzle of putting a key together ensures they’ll bring him back to life 😱😱
That's exactly what I was thinking except one obvious flaw... if he has the power to make door ways that take all your stuff and transport you, why not take the PCs stuff immediately upon entering the dungeon and teleport them into the middle of the lava pit. No one will survive to warn anyone else, and no one will have any idea that it's impossible to get through.
I tend to play characters that are immortal by 20, so really the only thing in this dungeon that would become a threat to me is the crown, and that's only because I'm dubious of the wording on "can't be brought back to life no matter what". Other than that tho ... /shrug. But, that's also specifically my thing. I don't powergame for like 1 and 2 shotting gods ... I'd rather just survive it all
Those were all too common in AD&D. But yeah, I truely believe ToH was designed by Gygax to force his long time group to roll up new characters because they were OP
Old school play was often about avoiding triggering the encounter (whether it was a trap or combat) entirely, or at least the "encounter" consisting of roleplaying clever enough searching, survival skills, negotiating, or whatever else that you don't end up having to roll dice for your damage or survival. Combat was unbalanced and varied in deadliness and traps could cause "save or die" because that incentivized trying your hardest to work around these problems.
@@joshuahay2173 but there are things that a player doesn't have access to, that instakill you with no save. Like the room where you spend 10 minutes and die. Like, there's nothing to indicate that anything will happen, you just die.
Regarding that 1st room: When this was written elves still had the ability to detect secret doors. Personally I would have just let them roll a investigate.
@@swirvinbirds1971 I'd probably require them to call for an investigation roll unless theres an elf in the party. I know in 5e they dont get the ability to detect secret doors but since this wasnt originally made for 5e I'd allow it anyway.
Good point. So the guy making this video is complaining about a module that he admitted to not knowing the rules of. I hope you didn't waste 30 minutes, I wasted 3.
I thought of a good context idea for the tomb of horrors that would make it more interesting. Have your players in a sort of Groundhog Day scenario, where every time they die, they wake up at the entrance the same morning they went in. If they find the false boss, let them go free and do whatever, but when they fall asleep that night, they wake up in front of the tomb of horrors again. This way they don't get permanently punished from the death traps and they have more context for the false lich not being real.
It's important to note, that (unlike the misinformation that some people in the comments are spreading), this dungeon was a tournament dungeon at first. The whole reason was to give points to players according to how far they got in a competition. This is also the age of D&D, when having a 3 meter long pole with your character and prodding the floor, walls, and ceiling at every step was the norm. No seeing all traps with one perception check back then, and if your character died to a bullshit trap, well tough luck, roll up a new one. The game's wargaming heritage was much more prevalent than roleplaying, so that's what the dungeon focused on.
This can revive some good aspects of roleplaying a challenging dungeon crawl, where traps and secrets can't simply be roll-checked at a distance. Revival of traps and secrets that need to be found by tactile means is a good starting point. You can't ace-20 Arcana to identify a magical trap, you need Identify. You can't 'see' a camouflaged pit trap, you have to poke it. you don't magically sense a secret door behind a statue with a single Investigation check, you have to do something strange like move a statue out of the way. This is a lot of work for a DM though, who went through a lot of effort to create something that may never be noticed or seen, but I feel that's an aspect of the DM's ego that needs to be checked. Sometimes the cost of being a good DM is being the only one who knows how much extra work you put in that was never found. Tomb of Horrors, done once and properly, is a prime example of work that will never be seen.
yeah i've looked up older versions of D&D and how they were ran. essentially "don't die" and "get the gold" is the main point of playing as in don't need to kill anything if you can get the gold without killing. and i think dungeons tended to be larger than this too, like the entire adventure was in a single expansive dungeon. but yeah lots of meta things that used to be a big portion of the game back then don't really exist now. but i think there's some positives that exists in the older version that would be nice to bring back. for example that you don't exactly need to kill everything "evil", just swipe their treasure in any way you see fit. also non roll checks, like there's no constitution check against a poison sometimes etc, just to make the characters feel a bit more mortally challenged and might make them intensely more cautious.
I think a lot of people don't understand how Old School games were. You weren't epic or traveling heroes, you were a bunch of mercenaries who explored lost ruins and ancient tombs. Magical items were often relics of a lost age, and if you came upon a castle lost to time and plants, exploring it to find out what you could loot was the actual focus. That you could free not-Sleeping Beauty from it was just a bonus. Because it was about exploring newly found cave systems, old castles and mysterious towers. And if you had been getting too cocky, feeling like you could beat anything, your GM might trick you into stumbling into a death trap, reminding you that no matter how strong you were, there was always a reason to be careful. I mean, hell. There was quite a few monsters that existed simply to ambush your party, and mimics were just the ones that remained.
I ran a game that involved the Tomb of Horrors once. The PC’s needed a Sphere of Annihilation to destroy an evil artifact, and they used Divination to find one. They teleported to the ToH, stuck the artifact in the demon’s mouth and called it a day. After that, the ToH became their Bad Thing Disposal Place; they never even went in the door.
Count your group lucky. My players fell for the archway that sent them naked to the beginning of the dungeon. All of the players went through. :-) Instead of re-equipping at the nearby castle, they immediately went back in naked. They found the room with the trapped chests (missed it on the first run in). The paladin, fighter and ranger fought the giant skeleton with rocks, then used its bones as weapons to fight the chest full of snakes. They eventually beat the dungeon, two hours and many improvised snake-skin and giant-bone tools later.
@@CirJohn My genderbent Aasimar went on a testosterone-soaked rampage following the sounds of conflict, then winged it out ass-backwards away from the lava pit.
19:51 I can 100% guarantee that the whole door-stabbing trap only exists because someone in Gary Gygax's playgroup started resorting to attacking every door, and Gygax wanted to punish him, so he added that trap in the middle of the dungeon crawl.
In AD&D I played a Gnome Thief/Magician who was phobic about Mimics. Before he would attempt to open a lock, his first step was to have someone else stab the item he was breaking into.
Busting down doors with a weapon was an extremely common tactic in early editions of D&D, so it makes a lot more sense than modern players might think. Tomb of Horrors is a great dungeon in the right setting, but it doesn't translate well to newer editions of the game.
With how much instant death and teleporting back to the start there is in this dungeon, it feels more like a Fighting Fantasy book than something meant for D&D.
Do the tomb of horrors but have there be traces of previous adventurers, notes carved into the walls, chalk highlighting traps, things like that with them getting sparser the farther in you get
Interestingly from a lore perspective, this is kinda the perfect dungeon. It's designed to just kill anyone dumb enough to walk in. Their soul likely ends up feeding Acererak's unlife, and their stuff goes into his treasure hoard. So while being terrible from a game play stand point, the dungeon is still very much doing what it should do.
But he leaves vague instuctions at the entrance, want people to investigate hes tomb, but punish anyone that investigates hes tomb (there's some mixed messages here). and it doesn't kill anyone that walks in as such as it takes their stuff and leaves them at the door.... And the gassy-room siren.... Acererak doesn't seem evil, just a lonely but powerful guy with questionable hobbies.
@@Shaderox well exactly - Acererak was clearly super powerful and so supremely over confident (perhaps rightly so!), and so he assumes nobody will ever get past all of his traps etc. So with that assumption, he’s fine “baiting” them into his tomb with some cheeky clues before yeeting away their stuff and possibly their souls too. Free magic items and life force for Acererak, zero effort. It’s like an automated mob farm in Minecraft, except the players are the mobs. Not that he can actually use the magic items, or even really needs them. I guess it’s like dragon treasure hordes - it’s just a collection.
@@Shaderox of course he leaves instruction and clues, because he wants to bait adventurers into coming in. He needs the promise of reward to seem greater than the risk to kill would be adventurers.
That's completely in the spirit of the ToH. The whole idea is finding ways to cheat it, because it isn't fair - deathtraps are never fair, and never should be
Someone on a tournament did just dig a hole with shovels to final chamber. GM called Gary Gaygax to ask if that is allowed. Garry said yes. He then revised it to make this impossible for subsequent playthroughs
The easy cop out for a GM running this would be "the walls are magical and don't move", but a high level caster still destroys this dungeon quite easily.
That's a really cool idea for 5 seconds befor you read the spell description and realise you can't escavate stone and get hard countered by a brick wall. Trust me, I also saw that Zee Bashew video but it just isn't as good as he makes it sound. 😕
Gary wrote a lot of 1 shot adventures for disposable characters for tournament play. They tended to be death traps. The goal being to be the last players(teams) playing.
Idea to make this better: make the dungeon even more brutal (TPKs everywhere) BUT the party is stuck in a time loop and the adventure turns into a completely different game
LOL. That was pretty much my first run through back decades ago. “Let the session begin!!!!” 20 minutes later…..”ok, everyone is dead now. Y’all wanna roll to Pizza Hut?”
Gygax was a very, very adversarial DM. I remember some of his advice for GMs in the AD&D DMG, including 'if a player is being a pain, drop a 10d10 lightning bolt on his character' instead of 'talk to the player and ask him why he's being a pain like a mature adult'.
The man hated Tolkien, what can you expect? That's what happens when a child makes a genre-defining game. Childish behaviour is encouraged instead of punished, and the person "in charge" is actually in charge. He basically took CalvinBall and said "YOU'RE PLAYING IT WRONG" when the whole point is that you literally can't play it wrong, except he based his stuff on wargames instead of having fun telling stories. EDIT: I know he was an adult when he made the game, but the terms 'manchild' and 'womanchild' are just redundant. A child is a child is a child. Congratulations, child no longer sounds like a word.
@@CoralCopperHead totally unrelated, but your Calvin and Hobbes reference made me nostalgic for third grade. Which was probably the same maturity level Gary Gygax was at when he made those lightning bolt comments.
I think the tomb of horrors is an idea you could use as an epilogue for a campaign. Like it is something to do after your group has finished their story, introduce it literally as "the tomb that should never be entered" and the gang is all together for one last time.. literally.
It was made for AD&D getting a healing potion in that was insanely good. they cost a ton 400 gold and in AD&D that was an insane! amount of money can turn the item into xp 200 or so xp level one only has 1200xp to get to level 2 that would nornally take a long time.
If I remember correctly Dwarves in AD&D could notice inconsistencies in masonry as a racial characteristic, so the bit where they'd have to peel back the wall was probably initially intended for a dwarf in the party. That's all I've got on this dungeon though, it's not for story or fun, it's for metagaming. That's it.
Also, it makes the presence of a dwarf in the party a nescessity. And plenty of people don't really play dwarf. Everyone has a preference and personally, that's not mine, nor the one of most of the people of my group.
@@tonhaogamergranudo back in the day the true seeing used to reveal any secret doors not just magically hidden ones, so the gem that could show them most of the way through. also it needs a magic ring not a coin which can be acquired from the chests mentioned earlier. the dungeon puts a lot of the things required to solve it's problems, the gems needed to get the gem of seeing from the second gargolye are with the first around it's neck.
Nope. Can't be detected. It specifically notes that you can't detect it by any means (other than peeling it open). Even if it did work, Gygax plays with those as a active abilities - you'd have to ask to use stonesense on each section of wall.
You forgot attempting to teleport or use planar travel spells while in the tomb just... pops you into a dimension of demons who rip you apart (these are the dungeons... trap-resetting staff?)
I once played with someone that played a drunken Dwarf Barbarian that would take his axe to locked doors all the time, so it isn't even an absurd situation.
I think that "peel back the wall" puzzle would have easier to solve back in the 1970s. Wallpaper was more common back then, and some mysteries had hidden doors that had been wallpapered over.
Wallpaper was how my original party thought of it when they found that door. It also helped that any old-school party memorized (prepared) Detect Secret Doors for every adventure. Also, all elves in ADnD had a 1 in 6 chance to spot any secret door within 10 feet without looking for it. It's not happenstance that the hallway was 20 feet wide.
I remember hearing an interesting story about this dungeon. A player placed the crown on the skull of the demilich then struck it with the silver end of the rod. They instantly destroyed Acererak.
you didn't hear that story, you read it in the introduction to the module "return to the tomb of horrors" Gygax himself tells that story as what he thought was the cleverest solution on how to beat Acererak
I remember playing this dungeon, reforming the key that revived the demilich and then proceeded to throw the key into the dark maw of the demon near the archway to destroy it forever, what an odd way to solve it the DM didn't expect.
So hey, Theater Kid note here about the poem: When it says go back through the "Tormentor", the word Tormentor is a very specific word choice. In theatre terms, the Tormentor is what you call the curtains that frame the sides of the stage. (The curtain at the top is called the "teaser"). So in calling it the Tormentor, he actually did tell you exactly what to do when he implied you needed to go through the painted frescoes. Do I think the average person would know this? Hell no. Is it still *technically* correct? Yes Do I still think it's nothing more than stupid wordplay? Absolutely.
Spoiler: If you DM this right, it's not so random. It's a clue, like the kind you find in adventure games like "Zork" or "Myst". It's designed to be a challenge for experienced players, who didn't play with quest beacons or hand-holding, as is common is modern games. Modern computer game designers spend long hours making content, and players spend $40-$60 to experience it, so a lot of modern games try to point the players down a specific path so as not to miss the premium content. No so with the TOH.. The fresco where the secret door is, is a picture of a door with a set of painted iron bars, where a demon is being tortured. So the picture on the wall is also of a tormentor. It stands out from all the other frescoes on the walls. Plus, observant players are told that there are parts of the frescoes that are chipped off, revealing walls beneath. When I first played this, our party knew it was a puzzle dungeon, and liked the challenge. One of the players saw the chipped off frescos, and decided "what the heck". He pulled his hammer and iron spikes from his pack and chiseled off the fresco to reveal...a concealed door! It was a tricky puzzle, but the emotional reward for beating it was totally worth it. There were high-fives all around. Plus, hiding the real door behind a fake door is intentional -- this happens later on in the dungeon multiple times, so we were now on the lookout for more of them. And it alerted us not to underestimate the dungeon. Not random -- but sneaky and subtle.
Gygax doesn't help his case by being, at all times, needlessly obtuse with his vocabulary. Yes, Gary, I'm also a pedantic nerd who loves obscure language. But it's difficult to convey information when some readers (or the poor players this stuff gets narrated to) can't understand what some of the more arcane, esoteric, or outmoded words mean.
You're missing a vital component. Literally vital. The original S1 version from 1975 (I still have mine) came with TWO books. One of them is the DM's book with all the good details. The other one is a book of handouts for the players. Many of the handouts are drawings of the rooms. In the example in this video where the players took an hour and a half to figure out room 1 AND they never even thought of scraping off the facade to find the hidden door, back in 1980 when I ran this for my players, they found that hidden door in less than 10 minutes. Why? It's pretty obvious that there is a door there when you look at the handout. Even the picture provided at 8:20 in this video shows the obvious other door, but there is no instruction to hand that picture to the players. My point of all this is that the verbal descriptions are inadequate because many of those verbal descriptions assume your players are holding a visual aid with clues visually depicted in that visual aid. Without the drawing, many of the clues are missing. The folks that made the version in Tales from the Yawning Portal left out all the visual clues. This applies to many of the rooms. Note: I agree that many of the traps and tricks are, in fact, rather random and frustrating. I'm just saying that some of the worst offenders become far less frustrating and often trivially solvable with the original handouts. TL;dr: The original version in 1975 provided visual clues to accompany the verbal read-aloud text making these puzzles much more solvable.
Huh thats really interesting, I'm glad you posted this I never would have known this if not for the comments. Thanks for the info, still probs never gonna play this though lmao
My understanding was this also came at an early early time in D&D where people would fast roll characters to explore this. Player Death? Expected, you're just going to roll up a replacement character real soon/quick. I could be wrong, but that's what some "old timers" I recall reading were talking about on this topic.
@@icewolf1911 I believe Gygax made it because players would commonly brag about their super powerful characters who could defeat any challenge, any published adventure. There weren't many back then. So Gygax made this and brought it to a convention and slaughtered all those super characters. I think most people that lost a character they had been player for years were not happy to just roll up another. But the module also came with a list of premade characters. Most players who used one of those didn't mind grabbing another one if the first one died.
A little history: the Tomb of Horrors was first introduced to the D&D community at large as a challenge module for a tournament. Players at the convention formed parties and competed to see who could get furthest in this never before seen, super hard dungeon. This is why it's so ruthless: it was created to be a high level obstacle course for a competition. This was also the beginning of its legend, as multiple people fell victim to its traps in public and hilarious fashion at the first Origins game convention ever. These days the legend lives on but the context is lost, which is important because it absolutely was meant to mess with players. I think it stands the test of time as gauge of player mindset, in that it punishes players for following their initial instincts. That could be either hilarious or awful depending on the group. After going through the comments, it's pretty clear D&D was also a very different game back then, when 10 ft poles and pawns to send in and test for traps were more common. Also, apparently, even more stuff in the dungeon was instant death back then. I don't think this dungeon needs fixing. I think it still stands as a challenge, a top of the mountain sort of thing. If you can master the Tomb of Horrors, you can master any challenge. Maybe some clearer wording would help there though.
I was thinking of making the nudity teleporters in to just stealing a random item (that's kept at the end). But I'd still rather make the poem more helpful and the first door make sense. Or make all the progression stuff make more sense, rather. And I really don't know what to do about the insta-kill stuff. Steamroller I could just say they have to run from, that's easy. But like the thing with the crown and the staff and a few other things. Idk.
Back in the 1990’s I really enjoyed DM ing this dungeon. It definitely caused parties I dealt with to leave a cleric outside dungeons with a fingernail or hair. The cleric would cast resurrection on the hairs once a week to see if we were dead.
Wait how does that work? Can you cast resurrection on just a piece of a person and have them come back? If it was cast and nothing happened that meant they were okay? I need answers
@@uhkingdom yes actually you only needed any part of the person, you then had to roll a system shock check (based on your con) to see if your survived the resurrection, you would then lose enough experience to leave you at the beginning of your PREVIOUS level, and permanently lose a point of constitution.
So if you're impaled at the bottom of a spike trap and get resurrected, aren't you still impaled on the spike trap? And wouldn't that just end you again?
this is a classic case of "if this was made by anyone else and didn't have its legendary reputation, everyone would be like wtf kind of 8 year old wrote this shitty homebrew?"
Sure, out of context. In context, it was designed for a tournament. Your group got 12 pre-made characters, a timer started, and you saw how far you can get before time or characters ran out. Person who got to the farthest numbered room wins. Its legendary reputation came from it being fun at a con, then taken back home to humble characters who had slain gods. Or to do a meat grinder, a common type of play since you could whip up a character in minutes if you knew the system. Basically just do the "lets see how far we can get this time" at home. Plus this was a time where you always had plenty of henchpeople or at least animals specifically to test for instant-kill traps, so those weren't as big a deal as expected. For the CURRENT game with our CURRENT playstyle, yeah it's horrendous. But for its original purpose and one of the most common styles of play at the time of creation? It worked great.
I feel like you can do this with any level character. There are so many things here that will kill you regardless of your level and skill. “Yeah this trap kills you. Saving throw? What’s that?”
There was a lot of that in early D&D. Even some lenient things would be like "if you eat this plant you die in 1d4 minutes unless you cast this 7th level spell."
I wouldn’t of that far but if you’ve got a clever group they can make it through with mid-level characters. And a gang of high-level hitwists can get wiped out in 30 minutes.
We turned it into The Grotto of Horrors at Christmas. Every character we had ever played were gathered outside and a wizard said whomever gets to the end wins. If we died, another one of our characters appeared where they fell. Party kept changing and the interactions were hilarious. Still didn't complete it, but it made it fun.
That sounds extremely fun for RP, especially if you lean more into comedy than the dark themes of people being repeatedly and brutally slaughtered in this hellhole of a dungeon
A DM I played under, one who I considered perhaps a bit too merciful but overall a whole lot of fun, was clever when he threw this dungeon in. We'd only periodically visit the place in a dreamscape like setting to break the dungeon down into smaller, more manageable segments. From what I've read, he didn't even skimp the tougher aspects, either (but I shot the siren in the head as I didn't trust her at all). Taking the dungeon in smaller, bite-sized segments did wonders for our navigation instead of forcing ourselves through it. We got through with no casualties and SOMEHOW avoided the BS teleportations. The segmented areas always recharged our abilities, so we'd detect magic with the mage characters and my rogue would fine-tooth every little detail and help us avoid many of the traps, even going so far as to trigger traps upon himself with his astonishing poison resistances. Because of how this dungeon was handled by our DM, I had an absolute blast and looked forward to navigating this labyrinth in our dream sequences. It wasn't until later where I heard of its legendary and infamous reputation. Our DM may have been too merciful at times, but I deeply appreciate that he never made the game anything less than fun.
Sounds like how they did it in an Adventure Zone live-show. It was a training simulation for their team & they had a collective number of lives to lose. [SPOILERS] The simulation got corrupted, turned into Big Bass Fishing so they only do a few rooms.
I remember attempting this back in the early eighties, it was stupidly difficult, our characters died so many times. Whomever survived the longest, had bragging rights and we’d start again, our DM played it as written, but he would let us start over. It reminds me of and was the inspiration for the module I wrote. Death Test One
If you break the urn tho that the efreeti is in he goes ham on you. We spent 2 sessions just fighting him and losing most of our hit points after we used the wish gem to make the mithral door "disappear", but it was cursed and instead made the doors blow up, in turn destroying the efreeti urn.
@@ctrain8900 My players used the cursed gem to resurrect one of dead players (after a long and heated debate on how to used it, btw). I resurrected him as a fully aware Shambling Mound, described it in detail, described how gem started to glow and started counting. Some players were so shocked that they completely missed the count so shambling mount and two players of the party were obliterated, wizard said "fuck it" and teleported away ad only naked paladin ran all the way to fake Acererak, falcon pucned him and "won". This was fun as a GM xD
The long and short of it is, Gary designed dungeons specifically to foil the way HIS regular players approached the game. Those guys came from a VERY different background than a modern player, and brought a completely different set of expectations to the table.
um no. Originally dnd was meant to be VERY realistic. It was meant to be a simulation of a real magical world. Of course now it's about storytelling and "noone can ever face consequences!" but even then.. noone wanted to play a game where you could die randomly.. where the dm .. god.. was actively plotting to kill you
@@charlesreid9337 I started playing OD&D at age 10 in 1979. Different times made for a different kind of culture among gamers back then. My dad was a wargamer, played miniatures battles and games like Outdoor Survival, and encouraged my playing of D&D, though he never played himself--he was from a different era of gaming himself. OD&D grew out of miniatures combat, when Arneson and Gygax wanted a more Arthurian/Tolkien/Vancian flavor of battle, with wizards and dragons and all. The roleplay aspect of it was what they desired, and roleplay is shared storytelling, which grew over time, until Gygax was forced out of TSR, it became more corporate-focused, and WOTC aimed more for what would make them the most money, not what was best for roleplaying in general. The thing is, Gary said that D&D should be whatever a DM and the players want it to be; homebrew rules were there from the beginning. Whatever works for you is fine. Going off on other people for what they like pretty much is the opposite of what Gygax intended from the beginning.
@@charlesreid9337 Nothing says realistic like a 10 foot by 10 foot room occupied by one orc who somehow managed to get past all the traps on his way to work that day.
@@matthewmcgirt1321 Good grief. Normally I'd find that hilarious but the 17 hours...Hopefully that didn't break the campaign and the friend chilled out with the antics.
Dungeon sounds easy as hell for a level 20 wizard who thinks they’re invincible “I send in my simulacrum and take a nap outside” Then just start blowing stuff up and dispelling magic. You can almost always get around doing puzzles by pulling bullshit with spells at higher levels but this doesn’t counter that. Also the 60ft tremorsense from an earth elemental or other summon just removes any trick this dungeon has This is the kinda dungeon where I would eventually go ye nah f*ck these puzzles imma cheese it ,leave, spend two days summoning and planar binding an earth elemental and a glabrezu. Have them at will detect magic and tremorsense/truesight their way through the dungeon for the party.
"they're really not going to think to peel back the wall" Look at me! I'm Jacob! My players actually try to solve puzzles before trying digging through the wall.
@@GonnaDieNever Yup, dismantling a dungeon is pretty common on very veteran players, removing the flooring, dismantling the walls, shredding all tapestries, pulling out the doorways, even yoinking out those teleporting archways, stealing those demon heads, basically, nothing would be left of the dungeon by the time the extreme veteran players reached acerak EDIT: Which is probably why that roller appears after ten minutes in the room - to pummel those dismantling adventurers.
@@GodActio Is not mentioned this video but the book has a passage saying the walls are indestructible, can restore themselves and not even a wish spell can do anything about it. (or something among those lines)
My group loved this module (played in 1985). Our DM warned us to be careful and thorough. It took us seven weeks to play through. We spent hours on a single room tapping every square foot of the floor/walls/ and ceiling with a 10' pole, writing down every possible action in the room and debating what might work. in the end 7 of 9 characters were dead, 19 henchman dead (from a mutiny).
As a side note: Maybe not many people consider that the original version of the Tomb of Horrors brought a lot of drawings intended to be shown to players as they advanced through the dungeon. I think this may have played an important role on playing the adventure for modern players who don't contemplate that fact.
There actually is a reference hint to the coin puzzle: "If shades of red stand for blood, the wise will not need sacrifice aught but a loop of magical metal - you're well along your march." You can put the ring of protection you just got into the slot to open it.
The shades of red are referring to the red mosaic on the floor of the chapel and the fiery red version of the altar (as well as the orange vapors in the archway), and altars are sometimes places where bloody rituals take place. The poem actually makes sense in its entirety.
Actually, putting a magic ring is the only way to activate the stone door. The 5ed text is a bit ambiguous but the original says "It is also just right for insertion of a magic ring, and only such ah item will actually trigger the mechanism which causes the block to sink slowly into the floor so as to allow entry into the passage beyond. The ring (or any other object deposited into the slot) is forever lost..."
One also has to remember that this was designed to be played at a convention as a tournament. A one shot that people would come in and play using pre-generated characters. It was never designed with campaign play in mind. It was not created with the intent to somehow be "fair" or "balanced". In fact, 99% of AD&D players would have never seen this adventure were it not for TSR deciding that these tournament adventures would make them some nice profit and published them as AD&D adventures.
D&D nowadays is about participation trophies, it's exemplified when he talks about how the poem doesn't exactly spell out what it means which makes it a bad hint somehow
it was also an FU to people turning up with so called unbeatable characters wielding thor's hammer, watching them leave was such fun. it's just brilliant but it can be beaten.
@@alancramer1980 I took 2 guys that thought they had invincible characters into this... they both dove into the green mouth. It was a quick night as I ripped up their characters.
Remember, this was old school DnD. Having 7 or 8 npc party members to use as bullet shields was very common. It was not designed to be run as a party of four.
@@AntonioFelluci you know when you're watching a movie (or playing a game) and you see the villain forcing his minions to do something that will obviously activate a trap and kill the minion? That villain is basically an AD&D veteran
Thank you. Not to mention all of 1st ed, advanced and 2nd ed was meant for like 10-15 PLAYERS who could also have henchman/hirelings etc. So in all of the modules Gary and the boys was figuring on like 25 players/henchmen. So all those dying along the way should be making the ones still alive smarter by searching more and all the traps.
@@bfnvalley Well that's the thing, we didn't. I played it in the 80's but you had to kinda be super nerdy to play it. Just like this video most people played with just a handful of people, it was the games and the makers like Gygax that where assuming you had a large party. That is why the old editions are considered hard and unforgiving, most literally played the adventures with a quarter of the recommended characters. I liked the rules, but the modules and premade adventures where skewed. I also as a DM always had at least 1 NPC that was my character that would go with the party to help in certain ways.
So basically the only way to beat this dungeon is to know exactly what you have to do, because none of these puzzles seem like the type of thing you could just stumble across while trying to experiment.
My group worked it out as they went and did manage to finish the dungeon. The trick is to encourage tactile gameplay, you ask people how they're doing things, where are their hands, instead of just "search for traps" with a set DC. it's not true that you have to metagame to win, but what is true is that the ToH is a great example of play conditioning, you can't get in unless you literally dig blindly for the entrance way, and there two (relatively easy) deathtrap false entrances. So that teaches you thorough examination, and to look out for dead ends and traps. The correct route has instant death pit traps, these teach you to test the floors and surfaces before you go anywhere (that one is a bit of a rougher lesson but makes sense in the era it was made in where it was kind of expected that you'd be poking the floor with ten foot poles as you go). The biggest thing to learn though, is that putting everyone in one room is suicidal, my players were kind of in disbelief that any group would get as far as the knockout gas dreadnought room and still be all going into rooms together, there are gas the room traps before that, chambers that fill with snakes and so on, by that point you really should have learned to have one qualified person go in, ideally with a rope around their waist to pull them back out. Solving the puzzles is really less of a matter of finding clues, and more about finding the least lethal way to attempt trial and error. None of this is metagaming, it's just learning what your characters would learn in this situation. It's actually pretty immersive roleplaying in that it forces you to act as cautiously as a real person would if they went to place they know to be filled with deathtraps.
Not at all. A 20th level party is going to have passwall and all sorts of tools to CIRCUMVENT the dungeons defenses. What does a pit trap matter if your party is all floating? What does sleep-no-save gas traps matter if half your party are immune to sleep, and some others don't even breathe? Literally the most stupid thing a party can do is to "walk in the front door expecting every challenge to be solved by a skill roll".
The irony is that the 5E version is way, way kinder than the AD&D version. The number of 'save or die' traps is ridiculous, and the rules system makes it so even high level characters have a very low chance of discovering secret doors (that's why the invisible gem of seeing is there).
AD&D was supremely deadly. A 10th level character was a legend both in-game and out of game. Forget this 20th level Epic adventure stuff. At 10th, a fighter is a lord with his own keep/stronghold, a magic user (wizard) has a tower and apprentices, a thief(rogue) is probably running a thieves guild in a city, etc. etc. A player that played multiple times per week for years probably had 1 epic character, high teens or 20s. These were the true world shakers, peers of Mordenkainen and the Circle of Eight. The DMG encouraged the DM to "divine assention" characters above 18th level, the character completes one last multiverse-shaking quest and is granted demi-godhood or lich status or part of an outer plane to rule and retires from the campaign. Death by too many levels.
@@adz151101 paladins were only paladins then. and only humans could be paladins because a paladin with racial stat buffs is broken. Now humans get +1 to all stats or something? haven't played since 3.5, just dont have the time even if I knew anyone else who played. I play ADoM alot though. first played Ancient Domains of Mystery nearly 20 years ago. Still havent ever beat it.
@@antonymilne1346 takeshi’s challenge not takeshi’s castle. Takeshi’s challenge is a nearly impossible video game that takes an ungodly amount of trial and error to beat
I remember when my friend ran this for us back in high school. The entire group jumped into the yawning portal and died. Well, except for me. I stuck a pole into it, pulled it back and saw that half the pole was gone, and thought "I guess the pole got teleported?" and I jumped in and also died. Good times.
What if I told you a number of the dungeon's traps actually had no saves at all? My favorite has to be the Demi-Lich skull. If you touch the skull in the original, your soul straight up gets consumed by it. No Con save, zip. That's it. Mage Hand is the most overpowered spell for this dungeon.
that's what was on my mind all the time this isn't a dungeon you need rogues, you need a bunch of wizards with mage hand, telekinesis and summons or maybe etherealness. jacob didn't mention any precautions stopping ethereal trespassers. at level 20 they cast on their whole party of three and hold it for 8 hours. the only trouble here would be getting the key together
It was a different kind of game. It wasn't a vehicle to tell a story, it was a game. Just a game. You had players who were on a team, and you had the DM who was the adversary to the players. There was no narrative beyond "you adventurers, you want treasure and this place has some".
It was cool in the original form because it was "Thick" in an era of thin modules. The module came with a separate booklet containing images of specific rooms and traps in the dungeon. For a DM back then THAT was a neat draw. Being able to hand your players a picture representation of the room added a degree of atmosphere that most D&D modules did not provide. And it didn't hurt having GG's name on the thing either.
Remember when those crappy little line drawings would inspire such creative imagination in us? Now the modules are covered in paintings from amazing painters. That's great too. But yeah, those little line drawings were a big deal. Players would fill out the missing details in their heads.
People often forget that the dungeon's original purpose was as a "see how far you can get" style of game for a Convention set in the days where the game was a revamp of a war game, people weren't intended to consistently beat it, and after the convention was over it was simply released to the public and got updated through editions for anyone who wanted to try it out
"This thing just feels like its sole purpose is to just screw over the players" yes that is the dungeon's mission statement. Its one and only goal is to destroy power players and any other poor sap who gets in. It was designed during the player vs dm period of d and d as the dm's ultimate weapon. Its reputation is as the pc killer, as the pinnacle of dm vs player mentality, as the argument to allow metagaming. This dungeon is so infamous that a comic story were some players were being first time DMed by an older addition player came to a screeching halt as they are described a green devil face on the wall and they realized the implications (it turned out ok but that was because the DM didn't keep the tomb as it was supposed to be)
There was never a DM vs Player period of D&D; if such a period exists it would be NOW, since it seems to be a common complaint of late. No, ToH comes from a time when some players had “seen everything” and were hard to challenge. It was the equivalent of a hardcore survival mod for a video game, and you were not meant to play it unless you had experienced all the vanilla game could offer. It requires an experienced DM and players to make it fun though - and most groups that try it are not that. And the reaction of those groups is like the reaction of an inexperienced player to the hardcore survival mode in a video game: “It must be badly designed because I found it stupidly hard. “ No, it’s just not really designed for you.
Original was fucking annoying to run as well. It's definitely not nice to run for the DM either. I remember running it in a con and it IS painful. Also there was never a DM vs Player period, there is a DM vs Players mentality, usually coming from DM's that don't understand the game.
It's not DM vs players; it's players vs another group of players. It was designed to have multiple groups of players going through and seeing who get could the farthest.
When I first started playing *cough* many *cough* years ago, I played with a guy who used to tell stories about going to conventions where Gary Gygax ran modules like this. When I first started playing, AD&D was out (I do know how to calculate thac0 (the last letter is a zero)). A 'standard' kit involved using a 10 foot pole to test the floor for every tile. Being a rogue meant you regularly peeled gold lame off of walls, and prying jewels from walls (a la The Mummy). The story this guy told was the adventure was written more as a way to punish the meta and power gamers who insisted they could one-shot any dungeon they played. I have run this and the Apocalypse Stone. I died a lot. And the world ended.
To be honest, I would attack almost any door on any old dungeon, I mean, halfways the Temple of Fire in Ocarina of Time I was using whatever I had (or the Megaton Hammer once I got it) on all the doors without keyholes before getting anywhere near them. It just becomes a second nature at some point.
The tomb, especially the original one, is for players with a mindset that modern players typically dont have in my experience. You have to go into it understanding that the puzzles will be strange and unintuitive and that instant death will be common. It is a dungeon for people who like Indiana Jones and dont mind being the random guy who gets his eyes melted out so that one of the other players can figure out what the trap is and, eventually, how to solve it. Not that its a bad thing that modern players dont like this kind of adventure. That stems from a love of your character and their story that is more common than when the average character was "Thragg, Barbarian, questing for glory".
It was not about hating players though. This is what they did. Challenged the players by solving dungeons. No joke. Watch DM It All's video. He did it justice. This guy is just a hater who cannot understand the old school and was playing a crap version of the dungeon. Heck, he cheated his players just to end it. Great DMing without hating your players there. He kind of lied and cheated with this whole video I dare say.
@@mitchellslate1249 I dont know what kind of drug did you take to have any justification for this hellhole bedies 'iT wAS maDE tO be UnFAIr", or if you eve watched the video (he said that he just made a mistake while DM-ing and unintentionally made the first part easier), but this kind of dungeon is the reason I would stick with forum rpg-s if I want to have fun roleplaying, rather then good ol' DnD. Absolutely revolting this entire thing is, not even 1/1000 luck of life-gambling interactions, inconsistent, unfun, not even the most despicable Mary Sue character deserves to go through something like this.
the 1st door that you suppose to find behind the trap was simple back in the day you get a rogue to find the traps, but you also have to check the walls, use a 10 ft pole, hit it and find where the wall dont sound the same, meaning there is a space behind it, or the material is not the same, hiding someting ;)
"Who's gonna stab the door?" The angry naked guy who is damn sure not going to try the golden head of the staff given what the silver head just did to him.
@@feritperliare2890 They meant use the silver head on the door. it only kills you if you use it on the Crown, the silver head teleports you naked back to the start if used on the door. Basically they are saying the person is likely to use the silver side on the door get teleported away and come back angry and stab the door 19:34
He also describes that the door "shows red" and bleeds a little if it's scratched. I think the idea is that if the party tries to brute force the door with a ram or something, or try and take it apart in some way, they'll scratch it and learn it bleeds and can be cut.
You want to know why mimics exist? Because Gygax's players would routinely strip every floorboard, every piece of furniture, literally stealing everything that wasnt nailed down, to sell for extra cash, so he decided "what if the furniture was monsters?" They would have absolutely stabbed the door.
@@clockworkmonkey411 Man reminds me of some of my old campaign playthroughs. Trapped doors were not just traps but homebrewed creatures - living traps. Open the door and walk in...oops you jest entered a mouth and were eaten. You bet we hit every door with a spear or a 10' pole, fireballed every room before we entered, had a thief buried under scrolls for when the mage went down, and everything could be a trap and instakill one or all the party members
So, i read a story that said the ToH shouldn't be used as a module to put in an adventure or even an typical oneshot, but used in a large tournament where people made a few characters, joined up with random people, and just tried to get as far as possible. When you died, you compare with other people on how far you got, make new groups, and ran it with one of your other characters. Sounds like a fun idea to me
We just finished this dungeon with my group, level 14. We had intended to just see how far we got before TPKing but ended up completing the whole thing. The MVP was the necromancy wizard with her team of crash test zombies who located most of the traps for us. We managed to guess most of the meanings of the clues right, and you avoid the worst of the bullshit if you strictly follow the "right" path. None of us died. I don't think it's a good dungeon. Too much trial and error, too many red herrings, and Acererak is a pretty mid boss. As someone who runs old school dungeon crawls every week, I am swearing off traps that activate by entering a room from now on, because players being afraid to go in rooms ruins this format of game. I felt like we were not so much trying to explore the dungeon as avoid it. That's not good. You can't punish the main action you need your players to do in order for the game to function. That said, it's far from the worst dungeon in that book. That honor goes to the goddamn Doomvault...
The first time I played ToH (in the mid 80's), we completed the tomb in about 6 hours. The 2nd time I played it (in the late 90's), we failed miserably in about 2 hours. The biggest difference between the 2 runs was the rule sets used. To actually complete the original ToH, you had to know the 1ed rules inside and out. There were so many rules changes from 1ed to 2ed that the dungeon just did not translate very well.
"Gary Gygax wrote this as a middle finger to his players" yeah, he did. Did you read the original introduction to the module? It's literally meant to piss off players, lol.
@@DekuLord He repeated a couple of times that the characters were Lv20 as if it that affected the player's skill to understand/process puzzles... Stuff along the lines "And they couldn't figure it out... and I remind you: these are Lv20 characters!"
@@Kaemonarch I think he was referring to the fact that level 20 characters have access to skills and abilities (read: Options) than lower level characters do.
I've always seen the Tomb of Horrors is just a meat-grinder dungeon. If you go in knowing that and expecting that with a folder of characters ready to go it's a very different experience. Like a "see how many characters it takes to get thought the dungeon" kinda thing.
@@grahamstrouse1165 Yep, and if you did run it as a legit campaign dungeon (say, as a Ravenloft Domain of Dread), you homebrewed the CRAP out of it. That and you frickin' read and memorized it beforehand so you knew what the traps were and how to actually describe the suspicious things to your players or handed out notes that contain what said players would notice the rest of the party wouldn't. I'm a madman who ran a homebrewed-up Tomb of Horrors as part of an Elder Scrolls campaign (as the penultimate section of an arc to foil Vaermina from invading Nirn, heavily lifting from Ravenloft's Dread Domains).
And that's exactly how he wrote it. It was for going to cons and proving there was always a way to handle players who thought they were invincible. It was Dark Souls for 1975. He never thought ALL games should work that way. It was a niche experience.
I think it could be fun if you have a long line of parties waiting to go in, so each follows in the others footsteps, with doors unlocked, traps sprung, etc. so you make it a little farther each time
the problem is, this one is not DIFFICULT, it's random and luck-based, rogue-like style. Intelligence and strategies don't help you much here. Gaming has a special term for that - 'fake difficulty'.
@@Yutah1981 Except its not, I have as of now ran it, not the 5e variant, the actual one, unaltered with my group. Despite them all being new to the adnd system they beat it with only one death. Turns out lateral thinking (which jacobs friends though surely intelligent did not use), lets you deal with most of this.
@@janehrahan5116 we also completed it unaltered, with NO deaths. But it was not interesting or fun at all, and though my over-preparation did help with not dying, the riddles and puzzles there are horrible and random, and have nothing to do with logic. They are typical 'guess what I meant'
@@janehrahan5116his playthrough was clearly of the "let's see how stupid this dungeon is" variety and frankly, he and his players just aren't very bright. Feels like they expect everything to have a solution or a "roll this to solve it" when it's not a dungeon that tests the characters (the fights aren't all that hard, really) it tests the PLAYERS. And if the players/dm are just dopes, well, it's frustrating.
@@janehrahan5116 biggest cope I've heard in a long time, the dungeon has random side-rooms that just kill without warning you for walking into them how can you call that anything but dumb difficulty
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Jacob I hate your content. Unsubbed and disliked.
Elijah Espinosa say some right now
Hey I know this is off topic but I was wondering if a "How to play Barbarian (again) in the works
I’ll be honest runesmiths dungeon seems worse
I used to laugh at our 45-year-old veteran player who whenever we were stuck, would go up to random walls and say I disbelieve the wall. I can now see why
"twas an old hand as well that taught me all chairs should be inspected before use
I remember those days, where the safest course of action was to simply disbelieve everything on principle. Assuming nothing was real was once the only way to get through many situations.
Sounds like the dude had Nam flashbacks but with Dnd
@@MrRyumaru I always randomly stab my furniture with pointy stuff.
@@lordfelidae4505 we found the guy who'd stab the door!
Fun story about the crown that instantly kills you, one of the first groups to run the Tomb back in 1975 got to the end, slapped the crown on Acerak and used it to destroy him. Gary Gygax himself confirmed that it was a completely legitimate way to beat the dungeon.
and then apparently made an errata that the crown couldn't be taken out of the room to prevent said use
that sounds like the biggest fuck you to the dungeon. Something you'd do after you were just done with the dungeon
Party: "Congratulations, you're the king of the losers"
Acererak: *sigh* "Well played"
(acererak ragdolls to the floor, lifeless)
@@ivanivan744 Acererack was a demilich, just the skull. Putting the crown on him and touching it with the sceptre would disintegrate him.
@@ivanivan744 *[source engine ragdoll sound]*
Elves had the innate power in 1e and 2e (and maybe others, idk) to detect secret and concealed doors. The door in the first hallway is that, a concealed door. A elf could notice it if they looked for it.
3.x they got an automatic roll to see if they noticed
Elves were also immune to sleep, so the sleep/steamroller trap was not a guaranteed TPK.
@@TheHEAVYDAN this wasn't a 3e dungeon though. 3e/3.5 made all sorts of changes. When we ran this dungeon as 3.5 characters we had to make quite a few changes to it. I think someone eventually made an unofficial errata that became the popular version of it.
@@alksmdlaks 3.5 dwarves had stonecunning that would detect literally every hidden door here, though.
Yup, and if i am not mistaken Dwarfs also had a similar chance to detect pits, deadfall traps etc as well as the ability to know their depth underground and the like. That 1st entrance most high level parties would simply walk in and automatically notice at least half the traps and likely the secret door. Also clerics and wizards have various divination spells that can be used to guide them around or past problematic traps/puzzles if correctly worded, there's also literally a Wish Spell at that high of a level. If a 20th level spell caster is dying they need to learn all their spells and use them much more effectively, even The Wizard knows Fireball isn't the ONLY spell of use 😉
"Who's gonna stab the door?"
The barbarian who's pissed off that he's been stripped nude 3 times at this point.
And been forcibly gender swapped.
A real barbarian wouldn't be wearing clothes to begin with!
Who's gonna stab the door, he don't know my players.
Fight the gazebo
What if you hit the door with a large hammer or a mace does that count?
"We ran the Tomb of Horrors with my friends" ....and they're still your friends? Now that's going above and beyond the call.
Those are the kinds of friends that'd vivisect themselves and remove their left kidney, liver, and right lung for you. Never let go of 'em.
Some people just wanna run this for the clout and there the only ones who are still friends with u after
I knew a DM who tried to run this dungeon with some friends, after first session they were done and hated it, and they had barely gotten anywhere. Well, I came in, already knowing the dungeon, and helping him with his hype puzzle thing for the dungeon. I came in as an immortal character who was just there to record the events of what transpired, but I didn't help the players unless the DM told me to give them a hint.
Having that character who could add an RP element and work with the DM to help player engagement did help keep them in longer. Although they still said fuck this, and everyone gave up eventually anyways. This is a very niche dungeon for very specific players. Likely COC players will enjoy this more often than DnD players honestly.
@@synthemagician4686 In Call of Cthulu, my analysis of the overall game rules is that if you run your character long enough, they will either be insane or dead. If you're willing to play with that supposition, yes, good point!
He did it four times!
"Who's going to stab a door"?
-My DND group: "allow us to introduce ourselves"
Oh yes. Most of my groups come prepared with tools for destroying walls so as to avoid having to deal with doors. I stopped trapping doors years ago but as of yet no one has figured that out.
I second that. Actually I started marking the wall of a house as we headed downstairs of a spiral stairwell. Next thing we know, we effectively had a bloody slip and slide that nearly killed a ranger and myself. We actually nearly drowned on the way down. We hit the dry(soon to be bloody wet floor) with 5 and 4 hp respectively.... I would stab the door.
My DM once trapped us on a small prison inside a ship, it had magic runes all over the place and a complicated puzzle with lights.
My Dwarf paladin dropped his beer into the ground and found there were no runes there, we found a magic staff that was part of the puzzle... So I randomly stabbed the floor with it and mashed it with my hammer, making an opening and flooding the ship.
We escaped trough the hole swimming, the magic thing did a short circuit and the ship exploded after we left... many innocent people died in the process... fun times
"Who's going to stab the door?"
Once had a D&D group find a magic crystal. All it did was glow different colors when you touched it. A giant mood ring without the ring.
I think they stayed there for 2 real world hours messing with it in different ways, including but not limited to, stroking it, talking to it, whispering to it, kissing it, licking it, and rubbing anything they could find against it.
@@bakariwolf3835 ...and that is how the whole group caught syphilis, gonorrhea, and a few new diseases that will be named after them.
As for who would stab a door, the answer is the fighter who's tired of this shit and decides to just hack the thing down with his axe. It's noteworthy that this is generally effective for most doors in most places, albeit not the most stealthy option.
I can see this dungeon being fun if everyone had randomly generated characters, and every time you died you instantly got another randomly generated character.
That’s actually a good idea.
I've always wanted to try to solo it with a nexromancer, maybe the necro class that was in White Dwarf, it's bigtime overpowered. I'd hang out in the graveyard for a few weeks before entering the dungeon and have a few 100 zombies with me, then try to brute force through it by sending zombies in.
That's basically how DnD back in the day was played. Characters were seen as more like disposable tools for the players to use to try to "beat" the DM, and not like, actual characters. At the time Tomb of Horrors was originally written, any competent player would always know to bring a stack of pre filled out character sheets to any DnD game, and the idea of attaching complex personalities and motives to the PCs wouldn't have really crossed anyone's mind.
So a Rouge like
Similarly as a stage event at a convention or something. Show up, get handed a level 20 character, play until you die.
Watching this, I realized: this dungeon is exactly what a sinister super intelligent undead wizard would make to keep everyone away, but that doesn't mean it'd be any good to play.
Let's face it the way a wizard would actually do is is put a clone body there and go be a dick in another plane
Not enough teleporting naked portals. Every tile should have one. If each of them require a Wish, fuck it, just sleep and Wish and sleep and Wish.
@@feritperliare2890 uh I have some bad news to tell you....
It is great to play, if one understands the conditions under which it was designed.
ToH was for play at conventions in competitions. There was a time limit, and the goal was to see which group's table could get the furthest within that time limit.
The goal was never to "beat" it.
It was merely to get deeper into ti than the other tables before you failed.
OK... To be honest... At least this really seems like a dungeon a bad guy would design to really protect his stuff more or less😅
With the amount of instant death/character ruining traps for making a single mistake? Probably not, especially if you go through it often. The bad guy would probably die within days of using it.
@@webeewaboo It's a tomb, it's not something that is traveled through often, by *anyone.* And yes, if I were the bad guy I would very much like to have those instadeath traps.
@@ctrain8900 I was talking on the basis of the bad guy using it as a treasury, not as what is pretty much a shitty joke from both the DM and the bad guy that this dungeon is.
As an owner of both the original ADnD module and its sequel (Return to the Tomb of Horrors), I can tell you that you are half correct. SPOILER BEYOND THIS POINT ---------- The tomb was a means to guard the entrance to Acerak's stronghold while providing him with a steady supply of powerful souls (from dead high-level adventurers).
Sounds like a creation of the Mad Architect.
Note that anytime poison is involved at ANY TIME in this dungeon, remember that in the original Dungeons and Dragons, poison didn't do damage or reduce stats. It was an instant death effect, so everytime there was a poisonous trap in this dungeon, was another layer of death added onto it.
Wtf
@@travisstroman-spaniel6091 Oh yeah, OSE still has it as a game mechanic, save against poison is basically a second death save, the good thing is that it works both ways, if you manage to poison a barrel of mead, you can clear out an orc lair very easily, high risk high reward kind of thing.
@@travisstroman-spaniel6091 Old school D&D was brutal.
@@havable 'The green slime touches you. You feel a burning sensation. Make a save Vs poison.'
'I fail'
'You're dead and you dissolve into green slime. Roll up a new character.'
Incorrect. Only poison types D and E were all or nothing. ALTHOUGH it DOES say in the DMG that poisons from monsters (as in the MONSTER descriptions) should be treated as an all or nothing affair. I don't think that the original Tomb of Horrors actually specifies the poison types used so it's up to the DM.
I love how the poem is like "everything is fake, youre gonna die, dont mess up or youll die, find the secret door that is a trap but is also a door, try not to die, then go left"
Yea, its basically "go away" in the nicest? possible way
@@kaiseremotion854 "No Solicitors"
@@ericm1839 tbh that's kinda what I like about this dungeon as a whole, as worldbuilding nerd.
Many dungeons in RPGs (both computer and tabletop) feel very _video game-y_ like they're just there for you to go in, fight some baddies, get the treasure, hooray, and rely on a lot of "man, the person who made this sure was dumb".
Tomb of Horrors, whilst definitely having its issues, feels less like a video game "go here for le epic loot xD" and more "this is the tomb of a pissed off demilich that just wants to explore the astral plane, pretty much everything in here is designed to deter or kill you, in other words GO AWAY". I can't imagine say the dungeon in White Plume Mountain as a genuine place made to deter adventurers because everything is too "sterile". I could imagine a pissed off wizard in a fantasy setting making the Tomb of Horrors to keep people away.
@@DuskEalain a dungeon someone should turn away from. I could see where that would work with the right group/campaign but it kinda feels like those purposefully troll Mario levels. Definitely niche
@@ericm1839 Oh yeah it's definitely not for everyone and unless your entire campaign is around dungeon crawling I'd recommend it far more to be treated as a rumor or folk legend the party hears in casual RP at a tavern or adventurer's guild, not something for them to actively seek out.
Tomb of Horrors was designed as a Tournament scenario for Origins I (1975). Players were not expected to finish it at all: the idea was to go to the highest numbered room using a team of 12 provided pregens in n hours of playing (4? 6 ? I don't remember). At the end of the time or when the 12 pregens are dead, we look at the highest numberer room visited. Congratulations, that's your team's score. Highest score in the tournament won. Nothing more.
This comment should be pinned. The video and most of the comments missed the entire point of the existence of the module.
Nah, they didn't miss it but refuse to see it. These cosplayers should just write out their little scripts and act them out rather than play a game with random results.@@looseseal2
@@looseseal2 I don't dislike this channel at all but I will say if you are going to attempt to "demystify" or have a hot take about this module or honestly a hot take on any game at all, saying "the original lauded version of this that everyone likes for historical context is in a system I never engaged with because I don't play first edition" is just not coming at this with good faith. Or hell, even if it was just supposed to be a brutal takedown of a 1E module with zero good faith, you aren't really going to roast the old school grognards by saying "old dnd too hard" or "I misunderstand how dungeons and dragons used to work in the 70s". I love a lot of things 5E does, but there's a reason there's a new golden age of indie ttrpgs and D&D is starting to take a massive hit for being a system that is finally outstaying its welcome after 10 years of setting the standard, while offering not a ton of its own identity. Good luck to anyone staking their rpg career on just dnd in the coming years.
I was hoping someone in the comments would bring this up. Exactly this. Tomb is a death-dealer, for sure...and I love it for that...but it's original intentions were as described.
Exactly
There are 2 praises I can give this dungeon:
1- it's probably one of the best representations of how a dungeon should be if it was actually planned out and built by an asshole who 100% wants everyone who ever steps foot in it to get fucked in the worst ways possible and die a horrible death.
1- it proves how absolutely easy it it's for a DM to kill a player. "the ground gives in and you all fall for what seems like an eternity, landing on spikes made of magic poisonous adamantine, you all die, but not before you get to see as Tiamat, vecna and Gygax manifest in front of you and give you the middle finger."
Why make it complicated? Just use *TUCKER'S KOBOLDS* (and the "module version" in the box set Dragon Mountain gives you an idea how it can work).
@@Muck006 In fairness, Tucker's Kobolds would probably get murked by a high level 5e party. All the Mundane preparation in the world can't protect you against appropriately cheesy applications of magic.
I feel like this is the take people miss on Tomb Of Horrors. Its self-consistent with the early rules and game-world because its not a game, its a real world. And in that world there are asshole wizards and you should not go into their personal shit.
See, I think Acererak would get bored just watching people go into the meat grinder. After a while of getting fucked over, realistically they would just leave. Yes he gets their treasure, but the true pleasure would come from giving them hope and then, when they are feeling clever for overcoming obstacles and making progress, to shut the way behind them and turn up the difficulty. But everything still has to make sense. They need to believe that there is a way out and even though it wears down their patience and sanity, that there is eventually going to be a reprieve.
They will find none.
They must continue moving forward, cursing their own hubris as they watch their allies fall to traps and monsters one by one. They must come to the realization that the treasure no longer matters, and that all they want is to escape with their lives. They must acknowledge that their lives are the most precious thing to them, and have the hope of survival dangled in front of them. They must be allowed to think that they have finally escaped, only to have that hope taken away. They must always believe that what they desire is just barely outside their grasp, and that if they just continue moving forward, eventually they will grasp it. But like Tantalus, this is but an illusion.
This is the suffering Acererak craves.
You said 1 twice
I thought he was going to talk about Logan's shit dungeon. Pleasantly surprised.
JP Gibbons that dungeon is a work of art young man how dare you call that “shit”
TheMilk Man
I mean, who says it can’t be both?
A surprise to be sure but a welcome one
Oh my god that dungeon. I would rather play in the tomb of horrors dungeon than Logan’s
Thought that too
19:50 "Who's gonna stab the door?"
Clearly you've never met my players
"Of course I know him, he's me!"
I've stabbed many a door wall tree you name it
@cak01vej are the chips in the fresco actually in the module? The problem with ToH is that DMs that actually like their players change it so stuff is more clear or actually a puzzle, so comparing between campaigns is kinda pointless unless both played in a con when ir was released. Like how a lot of players here talk about coming back with more supplies when the dungeon just resets the traps every day more or less
I assumed this was because an earlier door was actually opened by inserting swords into it. Someone might wonder whether it'll work again, and try it out. Or, as suggested earlier, someone might attack the door either as a precaution or out of frustration. (Both of which are very valid reasons at this point in the dungeon.)
Years and years ago, our fighter was so pissed he said "I'm sick of these games!" And he smashed his axe into the door. We said screw it!
my favorite tomb of horrors story was one my dad told me when he played it in college in the 80's, basically the party got to the entrance and asked the dm what the door looked like, the dm described ornatly rich doors made of admantium and mithril, endorned with gold lettering and gemstones, the party conversed for a moment, then went backl to town, hired workers with tales of riches inside the tomb, then promptly took the doors and sold them for tens of thousands of gp each
That actually became a hilariously common ending to Tomb of Horrors. Why bother going through that hellhole when you can just steal the dude's door and be rich anyway?!
I've read that this was actually somewhat common for savvy parties. So much so that some versions of the dungeon don't actually have adamantium in the doors, but "metal enchanted to look and function as adamantium", something like that.
Now, why you can't just take that same enchanted metal and sell THAT I am not sure...
How to beat tomb of horrors:
Step 1: pick warlock pact of the chain
Step 2: pick Voice of the Chain Master invocation
Step 3: use your familiar as a test dummy and test on everything in that god forsaken place
Actually, you can STILL beat the whole thing by hiring a team of dwarven miners and masons to dig through the entire thing and then split the loot, much like the original.
Step zero: bring rope, pitons, a 10' pole, a crossbow and several spare quivers of bolts.
@@loosegasket One of Gary Gygax's players successfully defeated the Tomb by using an army of mind-controlled Orc hirelings to run through, tripping off the traps.
Or Be a Barbarian and a leader to a Tribe of Kobolds with a population of 5000+ those little guys can dig and find all the loot and goblins work to
Ghostly sight actually would be far more useful.
Him: “Who’s gonna stab the door?” My level 20 Warlock: Teleported back to the beginning of the dungeon, so he goes all the way through the dungeon without items and then stabs the door in frustration.
What's he gonna stab it with tho?
@@sagecolvard9644 his middle finger probably
With a shadow blade?
@@sagecolvard9644 probably a bladelock that can summon their weapon back
No joke, I was playing warlock as well (Lv 15). I was playing him as a goofy Fey trickster so he used Mask of Many Faces to look like he had stumbled across a hidden treasure room and was covered in fine clothes and jewelry. I wasn't really effected by it though because I had Mage Armour and my pact weapon, and we beat Acererak.
I don't know Gary personally, but I can almost 100% tell you how this dungeon was designed.
Gary went "Okay, so my level 20 demi-god player characters just completely derailed this big, fun, giant campaign I had planned in a very not fun way... Let's see how cocky they are after I throw this at them."
Gary Gygax: Your level 20 PC might be a demi-god (takes a chug of 5.8% ale from a novelty tavern mug) but remember that the DM actually IS a god
The sad part is that's not all that far off. Gary Gygax, infuriated at people complaining that the prewritten adventures put out by TSR were "too easy" designed a dungeon specifically to subvert every major trope used by early dungeons with deadly consequences. The only way to beat the Tomb is to be extremely paranoid.
Also, XP, I think you're missing the point. The Tomb isn't MEANT to be fun. It's a meat grinder meant to be overcome with multiple backup characters. Dying to the Tomb of Horrors is a baptism by fire for old school gamers.
Edit: Best advice I ever heard for dealing with the tomb? The point man is the ten foot pole.
I see it more as that the Tomb of Horrors is a Roleplaying Dungeon, not a Roll-Playing Dungeon. You have to use your wits, not beat DCs, to figure it out. Most of the traps have no save because by the time a trap is triggered, you already were in too deep to have escaped. The tomb is trying to kill people, and Gygax didn't let you hide behind your statistics. No "I take 35 damage and brush it off, maybe guzzle a heal-potion." No "I have a bonus of 15 to my trap-disarming skill, so I fear nothing but a Nat1." It is not fair. It is realistic, and realism should be terrifying in a TTRPG.
1) I LOVE THE TOMB OF HORRORS.
2) Fun fact. Low-level groups have beaten the tomb with few or *no* deaths. You be cautious, you be careful, you *don't* do stupid things, and you can make it through the tomb intact.
@@protonevoker891I'm sorry but it sounds fun to me, I'm just that fucked up, I'm someone who wants to see if it's possible for a player to get through with one character and no pre-known knowledge
Character idea: a survivor who lost everything including their own identity but actually had their alignment turned good in the tomb of horrors and has permanent ptsd but still does the right thing and helps their party as a trap expert
respectfully, i’m stealing this idea
One of my favorite concepts for a character with 'evil powers' is that they ran into an alignment reversal effect. (or a mirror of opposition and the duplicate won.) So now they're both hated/hunted for their old deeds and deeply scared of such effects.
Ironically probably the only good thing to come out of this mess of a dungeon.
So, Actually an NPC present in Return to the Tomb of Horrors
soooo Revan from KotOR, right?
"Who's gonna stab the door?"
Someone who can't contain their anger at this dungeon anymore.
It was a common mechanic in old D&D to bash open locked dungeon doors. A theme in ToH is one of misdirection--that the obvious door is the wrong way to go, but the doors that get you deeper into the tomb complex are all hidden. The scenario is designed that way to teach this to players. There are a bunch of obvious false doors that are trapped to shoot an arrow at PCs who open the door. By the time they get to the super-special, epic, mithril, bleeding door, they should have learned not to mindless bash things.
Isn't that the typical way to get through the dungeon doors when something bad happens to your rogue? Just hack away at it until it breaks. Or stuff that can be even more fun,if the door is from a strong metal just grab a pickaxe and hack away at the stone that keeps the hinges/doorframe
Also, there was that door before it that you had to stick three swords in to open
Or... anyone who has the bright idea to bypass figuring out which 'key' unlocks the door by hacking it down. The problem with asking "who's gonna stab the door" is, I think, a too close reading of the text. As a GM I would have interpreted that all day as someone trying to hack the door down with any edged weapon that would cause a 'cut' in the door.
„A very hard dungeon that will give a challange to your invincible characters!”
*Makes a steam roller who insta kills anything with no save whatsoever*
*"ROAD ROLLER DA!!"*
jacob really did technically mess up that part since its only supposed to kill anyone who passes out and i dont think any of his players had
@@donb7519 Fair enough.
@@donb7519 That's kind of just as bad though since that means the death is entirely up to the dice. If you fail the save against the poison gas, you're good, otherwise you're fucked.
*This* is the issue with this dungeon, not that it's counterintuitive and confusing (that's just annoying, but ultimately can be fun if you know how to run it right).
But there are so many save or die (or just die) scenarios in this dungeon: from the literal "rocks fall, you die" trap in the one fake entrance to the fucking Feeblemind spell in the room with the Siren.
Which is why Gygax was a hack: this dungeon wasn't designed to trick you and show that your OP 20th level character isn't invincible with weird traps and a genre savy antagonist, it was made as a way for the DM to legitimise killing parties they didn't like. That's it, that's the intent behind the Tomb of Horrors.
@@PhileasLiebmann you are an idiot on a side note literally everything comes down to dice rolls in DnD hell death itself is a series of rolls to see if you actually fucking die also most of the instant death traps are easy to avoid if you have a IQ above room temperature
Gary Gigax was just really angry at someone in his party so he made something that would deliberately mess with them... and then released it to the public.
he has made more modules that are really there just to F with the players.
the story goes that he made it when his players complained that meatwalls weren't challenging them. However, it first saw the light of day as a tournament module, and was built from the submitted notes of one Alan Lucien, whose original plans were for the Tomb of Ra-Hotep (Acererak's Tomb does have quite a bit in the way of Egyptian visuals). In these plans lie the origin of the Sphere of Annihilation, and Ra-Hotep could control it with his jackal-headed staff
@@MasticinaAkicta
Isle of the Ape comes to mind
Gygax*
@@MasticinaAkicta Yeah, I'm surprised people forget Gygax just made bullshit modules that most players and DMs just don't bring up that much BECAUSE they were so bullshit hard and meat grindy. Seriously, that's the whole reason these kinds of modules are called Meat Grinders. They just chew through characters. They're not fun to anyone besides ironically the murderhobos and power gamers that Gygax made these modules to punish. Lots of murderhobos don't actually care about their characters and don't get attached, so meat grinder games are what they flock to unsurprisingly. Power gamers like making the most broken builds possible, so a meat grinder meant to make you go through at least a dozen characters is their biggest challenge to get through with just one. It's also why I personally call those games, and any game with next to no RP potential, junk food campaigns. They're just action for the sake of action, and it cuts out like 90% of the roleplaying in a roleplaying game. You don't get any benefit to roleplaying in one of these campaigns, and you can really only roleplay with the other PCs for the most part. They're cheap and easy to run games, where even the DM doesn't really need to do much prep work to get rolling. The book's all a DM really need, since I don't think there's any important NPCs in that game.
Okay but you have to admit, the fake ending that tells the DM to close the book and ask “Was the dungeon hard?” is funny.
"Yes it was. Fuck this sh_t I'm out.". *Middle finger and walks away.*
It is fantastic. My players immediately asked to go back and mine the entire fucking dungeon because they knew something was wrong.
Did they do that at the Origins tournament too? Was the first party to find the fake ending announced as the winner of the tournament??
it kinda reads as petulant more than comedic, like gygax was so salty about being outsmarted once in a previous session that he had to make this nightmare zone
No, honestly I have to disagree. It's just cruel to your players. I don't think any of my friends would personally enjoy this if I did it to them, and I wouldn't either.
Tomb of Horrors actually makes a lot of sense - frightening lot of sense, when you just realize one simple thing.
Acererak is not an NPC. He is a player character. He is a player character, who thinks like a player character and utilizes top/epic level tools the way a player character would. He uses reasoning in a way that makes sense only to him - and even that is optional. Because, let's be honest? Traps, doorways, and dungeons that make no logical sense and are designed so there's only one way forward, it's often counterintuitive and punishes you?
This is *exactly* the way PCs would design a dungeon to prevent NPCs from getting inside.
That's an interesting interpretation.
I’m also imagining the dungeon conditioning adventurers (but in reality PLAYERS) to solve impossible puzzles makes the relatively easy puzzle of putting a key together ensures they’ll bring him back to life 😱😱
That's exactly what I was thinking except one obvious flaw... if he has the power to make door ways that take all your stuff and transport you, why not take the PCs stuff immediately upon entering the dungeon and teleport them into the middle of the lava pit. No one will survive to warn anyone else, and no one will have any idea that it's impossible to get through.
The White Knight bc it’s not about killing them ... it’s about having fun. An in game Dungeon Master 🤘🏾🤘🏾
Yung Namek Well that, plus the whole “powering their phylacteries with soul gems which need to devour souls” thing.
Of course the dungeon can kill "overpowered characters" if it has traps that instantly kill you with no save.
I tend to play characters that are immortal by 20, so really the only thing in this dungeon that would become a threat to me is the crown, and that's only because I'm dubious of the wording on "can't be brought back to life no matter what". Other than that tho ... /shrug. But, that's also specifically my thing. I don't powergame for like 1 and 2 shotting gods ... I'd rather just survive it all
Those were all too common in AD&D. But yeah, I truely believe ToH was designed by Gygax to force his long time group to roll up new characters because they were OP
Old school play was often about avoiding triggering the encounter (whether it was a trap or combat) entirely, or at least the "encounter" consisting of roleplaying clever enough searching, survival skills, negotiating, or whatever else that you don't end up having to roll dice for your damage or survival. Combat was unbalanced and varied in deadliness and traps could cause "save or die" because that incentivized trying your hardest to work around these problems.
@@joshuahay2173 but there are things that a player doesn't have access to, that instakill you with no save.
Like the room where you spend 10 minutes and die. Like, there's nothing to indicate that anything will happen, you just die.
Yeah. A lot of it Shou be large amounts of damage but then if that happened, op characters could survive.
Regarding that 1st room: When this was written elves still had the ability to detect secret doors. Personally I would have just let them roll a investigate.
Yep and this roll should be made by the DM. Asking them to roll gives away something is there.
@@swirvinbirds1971 I'd probably require them to call for an investigation roll unless theres an elf in the party. I know in 5e they dont get the ability to detect secret doors but since this wasnt originally made for 5e I'd allow it anyway.
Good point. So the guy making this video is complaining about a module that he admitted to not knowing the rules of. I hope you didn't waste 30 minutes, I wasted 3.
@@danakennedy3617 its really not his fault that wotc did a terrible job translating from 3.5 to 5e.
Dwarves also have stonesense so they would know the wooden door was only painted to look like stone
I thought of a good context idea for the tomb of horrors that would make it more interesting. Have your players in a sort of Groundhog Day scenario, where every time they die, they wake up at the entrance the same morning they went in. If they find the false boss, let them go free and do whatever, but when they fall asleep that night, they wake up in front of the tomb of horrors again. This way they don't get permanently punished from the death traps and they have more context for the false lich not being real.
This is amazing. I absolutely love this. Make it a mini-campaign, a limited series if you will.
It's important to note, that (unlike the misinformation that some people in the comments are spreading), this dungeon was a tournament dungeon at first. The whole reason was to give points to players according to how far they got in a competition.
This is also the age of D&D, when having a 3 meter long pole with your character and prodding the floor, walls, and ceiling at every step was the norm. No seeing all traps with one perception check back then, and if your character died to a bullshit trap, well tough luck, roll up a new one. The game's wargaming heritage was much more prevalent than roleplaying, so that's what the dungeon focused on.
This can revive some good aspects of roleplaying a challenging dungeon crawl, where traps and secrets can't simply be roll-checked at a distance. Revival of traps and secrets that need to be found by tactile means is a good starting point. You can't ace-20 Arcana to identify a magical trap, you need Identify. You can't 'see' a camouflaged pit trap, you have to poke it. you don't magically sense a secret door behind a statue with a single Investigation check, you have to do something strange like move a statue out of the way.
This is a lot of work for a DM though, who went through a lot of effort to create something that may never be noticed or seen, but I feel that's an aspect of the DM's ego that needs to be checked. Sometimes the cost of being a good DM is being the only one who knows how much extra work you put in that was never found. Tomb of Horrors, done once and properly, is a prime example of work that will never be seen.
yeah i've looked up older versions of D&D and how they were ran.
essentially "don't die" and "get the gold" is the main point of playing as in don't need to kill anything if you can get the gold without killing.
and i think dungeons tended to be larger than this too, like the entire adventure was in a single expansive dungeon.
but yeah lots of meta things that used to be a big portion of the game back then don't really exist now.
but i think there's some positives that exists in the older version that would be nice to bring back.
for example that you don't exactly need to kill everything "evil", just swipe their treasure in any way you see fit.
also non roll checks, like there's no constitution check against a poison sometimes etc, just to make the characters feel a bit more mortally challenged and might make them intensely more cautious.
I don't understand why people overreact to Tomb of Horrors, as you said, the history of the adventure says it all.
I think a lot of people don't understand how Old School games were. You weren't epic or traveling heroes, you were a bunch of mercenaries who explored lost ruins and ancient tombs. Magical items were often relics of a lost age, and if you came upon a castle lost to time and plants, exploring it to find out what you could loot was the actual focus. That you could free not-Sleeping Beauty from it was just a bonus.
Because it was about exploring newly found cave systems, old castles and mysterious towers.
And if you had been getting too cocky, feeling like you could beat anything, your GM might trick you into stumbling into a death trap, reminding you that no matter how strong you were, there was always a reason to be careful.
I mean, hell. There was quite a few monsters that existed simply to ambush your party, and mimics were just the ones that remained.
So, what you're saying is that it is in fact still the worst dungeon ever. Just intentionally so.
"Who would stab a door"
Dude, mimics.
Personally i thought it was more the result of blinding rage, that makes sense, die dungeon die, yay it bleeds so i can kill it.
I laughed. They laughed. The door... Well... Maybe I should have waited for it to laugh, too...
@@grumpyoldgrognard9561 better sooner than never!
Me: Heh! Mimics! Hahahahaha...
You: Hahahahaha....
The Door: Hahahahaha...
Paranoia is what AD&D instilled in us. Stabbing doors was the thing we did after searching for traps around the door. Every chest got stabbed as well.
I ran a game that involved the Tomb of Horrors once.
The PC’s needed a Sphere of Annihilation to destroy an evil artifact, and they used Divination to find one. They teleported to the ToH, stuck the artifact in the demon’s mouth and called it a day. After that, the ToH became their Bad Thing Disposal Place; they never even went in the door.
Thats hilarious lmao
You have 69 likes!
5Head strats
"Who's gonna stab the door?!"
*sigh* My party. We nearly drowned in it. Amazing we got out of that mess at all.
Count your group lucky. My players fell for the archway that sent them naked to the beginning of the dungeon. All of the players went through. :-) Instead of re-equipping at the nearby castle, they immediately went back in naked. They found the room with the trapped chests (missed it on the first run in). The paladin, fighter and ranger fought the giant skeleton with rocks, then used its bones as weapons to fight the chest full of snakes. They eventually beat the dungeon, two hours and many improvised snake-skin and giant-bone tools later.
@@CirJohn My genderbent Aasimar went on a testosterone-soaked rampage following the sounds of conflict, then winged it out ass-backwards away from the lava pit.
Hacking down doors used to be a pretty normal part of dungeon crawling.
@@noahtipton7302 I mean why try to unlock the door when you can bust it the fuck up?
19:51 I can 100% guarantee that the whole door-stabbing trap only exists because someone in Gary Gygax's playgroup started resorting to attacking every door, and Gygax wanted to punish him, so he added that trap in the middle of the dungeon crawl.
In AD&D I played a Gnome Thief/Magician who was phobic about Mimics. Before he would attempt to open a lock, his first step was to have someone else stab the item he was breaking into.
Busting down doors with a weapon was an extremely common tactic in early editions of D&D, so it makes a lot more sense than modern players might think. Tomb of Horrors is a great dungeon in the right setting, but it doesn't translate well to newer editions of the game.
Teacher: The Test isn’t that confusing.
The Test:
With how much instant death and teleporting back to the start there is in this dungeon, it feels more like a Fighting Fantasy book than something meant for D&D.
I was gonna say a Fromsoft game but that works too
Do the tomb of horrors but have there be traces of previous adventurers, notes carved into the walls, chalk highlighting traps, things like that with them getting sparser the farther in you get
Ooh, fun!
Great idea!
Thank you for this brilliant idea!!
And at the end all the treasures a stolen
@@lulu111_the_cool "I compleated the Tomb of Horrors but all I got was this stupid t-shirt."
Interestingly from a lore perspective, this is kinda the perfect dungeon. It's designed to just kill anyone dumb enough to walk in. Their soul likely ends up feeding Acererak's unlife, and their stuff goes into his treasure hoard. So while being terrible from a game play stand point, the dungeon is still very much doing what it should do.
But he leaves vague instuctions at the entrance, want people to investigate hes tomb, but punish anyone that investigates hes tomb (there's some mixed messages here).
and it doesn't kill anyone that walks in as such as it takes their stuff and leaves them at the door....
And the gassy-room siren....
Acererak doesn't seem evil, just a lonely but powerful guy with questionable hobbies.
@@Shaderox well exactly - Acererak was clearly super powerful and so supremely over confident (perhaps rightly so!), and so he assumes nobody will ever get past all of his traps etc. So with that assumption, he’s fine “baiting” them into his tomb with some cheeky clues before yeeting away their stuff and possibly their souls too. Free magic items and life force for Acererak, zero effort. It’s like an automated mob farm in Minecraft, except the players are the mobs. Not that he can actually use the magic items, or even really needs them. I guess it’s like dragon treasure hordes - it’s just a collection.
Still a bad dungeon. Lore is fun when it doesn’t screw your party.
@@Shaderox of course he leaves instruction and clues, because he wants to bait adventurers into coming in.
He needs the promise of reward to seem greater than the risk to kill would be adventurers.
@@ahabthedragon2164 That's literally what OP already said. You're preaching to the choir.
This is not in the spirit of the idea, but... make a wizard that uses mold earth to excavate the entire dungeon and skip to the end
That's completely in the spirit of the ToH. The whole idea is finding ways to cheat it, because it isn't fair - deathtraps are never fair, and never should be
Someone on a tournament did just dig a hole with shovels to final chamber. GM called Gary Gaygax to ask if that is allowed. Garry said yes. He then revised it to make this impossible for subsequent playthroughs
Druid & sorcerer would also work I believe
The easy cop out for a GM running this would be "the walls are magical and don't move", but a high level caster still destroys this dungeon quite easily.
That's a really cool idea for 5 seconds befor you read the spell description and realise you can't escavate stone and get hard countered by a brick wall. Trust me, I also saw that Zee Bashew video but it just isn't as good as he makes it sound. 😕
Gary wrote a lot of 1 shot adventures for disposable characters for tournament play. They tended to be death traps. The goal being to be the last players(teams) playing.
Idea to make this better: make the dungeon even more brutal (TPKs everywhere) BUT the party is stuck in a time loop and the adventure turns into a completely different game
THIS is glorious.
Yeah, a Re:Zero style "Return by Death" time loop would actually make this terrible dungeon interesting.
@@ArmorFrogEntertainment so turning the game into a pseudo rogulite setting
Easy solution: play evil characters. Bring along fodder and prod them on ahead of you. Solves about 90% of the traps.
@@seigeengine a necromancer would be invaluable here so would familiars and summoning spells.
A shortened version of this dungeon is, "Rocks fall; everyone dies."
(Jocrap's voice) *AND THAT'S THE END OF THE SESSION*
"Fun session. What now?"
"Pizza time!"
*The tomb of horrors:* UGH! It’s ONE BIG ROCK that ROLLS onto everyone and they all die it’s DIFFERENT
LOL. That was pretty much my first run through back decades ago. “Let the session begin!!!!” 20 minutes later…..”ok, everyone is dead now. Y’all wanna roll to Pizza Hut?”
That's only in one of the rooms.
There are many other ways to get killed in the other rooms.
Gygax was a very, very adversarial DM. I remember some of his advice for GMs in the AD&D DMG, including 'if a player is being a pain, drop a 10d10 lightning bolt on his character' instead of 'talk to the player and ask him why he's being a pain like a mature adult'.
The man hated Tolkien, what can you expect? That's what happens when a child makes a genre-defining game. Childish behaviour is encouraged instead of punished, and the person "in charge" is actually in charge. He basically took CalvinBall and said "YOU'RE PLAYING IT WRONG" when the whole point is that you literally can't play it wrong, except he based his stuff on wargames instead of having fun telling stories.
EDIT: I know he was an adult when he made the game, but the terms 'manchild' and 'womanchild' are just redundant. A child is a child is a child. Congratulations, child no longer sounds like a word.
@@CoralCopperHead totally unrelated, but your Calvin and Hobbes reference made me nostalgic for third grade.
Which was probably the same maturity level Gary Gygax was at when he made those lightning bolt comments.
@@CoralCopperHead there's a lot to say about Gygax that's less than flattering, as a DM/adventure designer and in general
@@lizzycorvus5109 Isn't there a random jab at feminism in one of the rulebooks? It sounds like Gygax could be a bit of a prick.
That's how it should be!
I think the tomb of horrors is an idea you could use as an epilogue for a campaign. Like it is something to do after your group has finished their story, introduce it literally as "the tomb that should never be entered" and the gang is all together for one last time.. literally.
Imagine beating the tomb only to get 12 potions of healing and spell scrolls for true strike and knock
FuuuuuuuHHHHH!!!
Acererak's last troll
It was made for AD&D getting a healing potion in that was insanely good. they cost a ton 400 gold and in AD&D that was an insane! amount of money can turn the item into xp 200 or so xp level one only has 1200xp to get to level 2 that would nornally take a long time.
If I remember correctly Dwarves in AD&D could notice inconsistencies in masonry as a racial characteristic, so the bit where they'd have to peel back the wall was probably initially intended for a dwarf in the party.
That's all I've got on this dungeon though, it's not for story or fun, it's for metagaming. That's it.
Also, it makes the presence of a dwarf in the party a nescessity. And plenty of people don't really play dwarf. Everyone has a preference and personally, that's not mine, nor the one of most of the people of my group.
There was also a big thing of having followers back then. Either as back up characters or to test traps for you and cary your stuff
@@tonhaogamergranudo back in the day the true seeing used to reveal any secret doors not just magically hidden ones, so the gem that could show them most of the way through.
also it needs a magic ring not a coin which can be acquired from the chests mentioned earlier.
the dungeon puts a lot of the things required to solve it's problems, the gems needed to get the gem of seeing from the second gargolye are with the first around it's neck.
@@tonhaogamergranudo I played a dwarf (this was back in 1984, with the original). I died.
Nope. Can't be detected. It specifically notes that you can't detect it by any means (other than peeling it open). Even if it did work, Gygax plays with those as a active abilities - you'd have to ask to use stonesense on each section of wall.
You forgot attempting to teleport or use planar travel spells while in the tomb just... pops you into a dimension of demons who rip you apart (these are the dungeons... trap-resetting staff?)
Which is ironic given that the dungeon itself teleports you around ...
POV: You opened the staff-only door
22:12 even the loot is a trap, the berserker axe can make you hit your teammates and the avenger sword forces you to attack anything that attacks you
“Who’s going to stab the door?”
My first thought before that question, “what happens if you stab the door?”
I once played with someone that played a drunken Dwarf Barbarian that would take his axe to locked doors all the time, so it isn't even an absurd situation.
@@philosophicaljay3449 I played an orc barbarian that would grab anything shiny, including a gold plated door off of its hinges
AD&D players had very different mindsets than modern players, and that question almost always needed to be answered back then
i feel like a hexblade would stab the door
“Who’s going to stab the door?”
Someone who opened the previous door. 17:36 :)
I think that "peel back the wall" puzzle would have easier to solve back in the 1970s. Wallpaper was more common back then, and some mysteries had hidden doors that had been wallpapered over.
That, and elves could detect hidden doors back in the day.
Wallpaper was how my original party thought of it when they found that door. It also helped that any old-school party memorized (prepared) Detect Secret Doors for every adventure. Also, all elves in ADnD had a 1 in 6 chance to spot any secret door within 10 feet without looking for it. It's not happenstance that the hallway was 20 feet wide.
That’s actually a good point. I don’t know any homes with walls paper nowadays
Also dwarves could detect structural anomalies
@@janehrahan5116 Nice one. I'd forgotten about that.
I remember hearing an interesting story about this dungeon. A player placed the crown on the skull of the demilich then struck it with the silver end of the rod. They instantly destroyed Acererak.
That's hilarious 😆
A taste of his own bullshit
you didn't hear that story, you read it in the introduction to the module "return to the tomb of horrors" Gygax himself tells that story as what he thought was the cleverest solution on how to beat Acererak
@@omino23 Ah maybe that was it.
We put the skull in a bag of holding then destroyed the bag rendering all of the contents into the Astral Plane.
I remember playing this dungeon, reforming the key that revived the demilich and then proceeded to throw the key into the dark maw of the demon near the archway to destroy it forever, what an odd way to solve it the DM didn't expect.
So hey, Theater Kid note here about the poem:
When it says go back through the "Tormentor", the word Tormentor is a very specific word choice. In theatre terms, the Tormentor is what you call the curtains that frame the sides of the stage. (The curtain at the top is called the "teaser"). So in calling it the Tormentor, he actually did tell you exactly what to do when he implied you needed to go through the painted frescoes.
Do I think the average person would know this? Hell no.
Is it still *technically* correct?
Yes
Do I still think it's nothing more than stupid wordplay?
Absolutely.
To be honest I think this emphasizes the point of the Tomb of Horrors being hard and complicated for the sake of being hard and complicated
@@worldatwar956 oh completely. It's not a clever logic puzzle, it's random ass trivia
Spoiler: If you DM this right, it's not so random. It's a clue, like the kind you find in adventure games like "Zork" or "Myst". It's designed to be a challenge for experienced players, who didn't play with quest beacons or hand-holding, as is common is modern games. Modern computer game designers spend long hours making content, and players spend $40-$60 to experience it, so a lot of modern games try to point the players down a specific path so as not to miss the premium content. No so with the TOH..
The fresco where the secret door is, is a picture of a door with a set of painted iron bars, where a demon is being tortured. So the picture on the wall is also of a tormentor. It stands out from all the other frescoes on the walls. Plus, observant players are told that there are parts of the frescoes that are chipped off, revealing walls beneath. When I first played this, our party knew it was a puzzle dungeon, and liked the challenge. One of the players saw the chipped off frescos, and decided "what the heck". He pulled his hammer and iron spikes from his pack and chiseled off the fresco to reveal...a concealed door! It was a tricky puzzle, but the emotional reward for beating it was totally worth it. There were high-fives all around. Plus, hiding the real door behind a fake door is intentional -- this happens later on in the dungeon multiple times, so we were now on the lookout for more of them. And it alerted us not to underestimate the dungeon. Not random -- but sneaky and subtle.
I love it.
Gygax doesn't help his case by being, at all times, needlessly obtuse with his vocabulary. Yes, Gary, I'm also a pedantic nerd who loves obscure language. But it's difficult to convey information when some readers (or the poor players this stuff gets narrated to) can't understand what some of the more arcane, esoteric, or outmoded words mean.
I read the title and thought that this was a sequel to Logan’s worst dungeon video.
I kinda want this same group to run Logan's dungeon! Unlikely to cause as much player death and there's more farting... is that better?
Technically it's a prequel
I'd rather play that dungeon than this one. That one is just funny bad. This one is legitimately bad.
You're missing a vital component. Literally vital. The original S1 version from 1975 (I still have mine) came with TWO books. One of them is the DM's book with all the good details. The other one is a book of handouts for the players. Many of the handouts are drawings of the rooms. In the example in this video where the players took an hour and a half to figure out room 1 AND they never even thought of scraping off the facade to find the hidden door, back in 1980 when I ran this for my players, they found that hidden door in less than 10 minutes. Why? It's pretty obvious that there is a door there when you look at the handout.
Even the picture provided at 8:20 in this video shows the obvious other door, but there is no instruction to hand that picture to the players.
My point of all this is that the verbal descriptions are inadequate because many of those verbal descriptions assume your players are holding a visual aid with clues visually depicted in that visual aid. Without the drawing, many of the clues are missing. The folks that made the version in Tales from the Yawning Portal left out all the visual clues.
This applies to many of the rooms.
Note: I agree that many of the traps and tricks are, in fact, rather random and frustrating. I'm just saying that some of the worst offenders become far less frustrating and often trivially solvable with the original handouts.
TL;dr: The original version in 1975 provided visual clues to accompany the verbal read-aloud text making these puzzles much more solvable.
Huh thats really interesting, I'm glad you posted this I never would have known this if not for the comments. Thanks for the info, still probs never gonna play this though lmao
I remember the hand outs yeah, that was exactly the thing it needed, i guess. Never thought about that.
My understanding was this also came at an early early time in D&D where people would fast roll characters to explore this. Player Death? Expected, you're just going to roll up a replacement character real soon/quick. I could be wrong, but that's what some "old timers" I recall reading were talking about on this topic.
@@icewolf1911 I believe Gygax made it because players would commonly brag about their super powerful characters who could defeat any challenge, any published adventure. There weren't many back then.
So Gygax made this and brought it to a convention and slaughtered all those super characters.
I think most people that lost a character they had been player for years were not happy to just roll up another.
But the module also came with a list of premade characters. Most players who used one of those didn't mind grabbing another one if the first one died.
@@icewolf1911 I am an old timer, and yeah... that is what we did around here in any case. So you might be right on that.
A little history: the Tomb of Horrors was first introduced to the D&D community at large as a challenge module for a tournament. Players at the convention formed parties and competed to see who could get furthest in this never before seen, super hard dungeon.
This is why it's so ruthless: it was created to be a high level obstacle course for a competition. This was also the beginning of its legend, as multiple people fell victim to its traps in public and hilarious fashion at the first Origins game convention ever.
These days the legend lives on but the context is lost, which is important because it absolutely was meant to mess with players. I think it stands the test of time as gauge of player mindset, in that it punishes players for following their initial instincts. That could be either hilarious or awful depending on the group.
After going through the comments, it's pretty clear D&D was also a very different game back then, when 10 ft poles and pawns to send in and test for traps were more common. Also, apparently, even more stuff in the dungeon was instant death back then.
I don't think this dungeon needs fixing. I think it still stands as a challenge, a top of the mountain sort of thing. If you can master the Tomb of Horrors, you can master any challenge. Maybe some clearer wording would help there though.
19:54
"Who's gonna stab the door?"
Well the previous one opened on 3 stabs so...
I wanna run this as a edge of tomorrow style one shot where everytime my players die they all wake up outside the tomb
Well, that... mskes it alot more interesting.
That actually sounds really cool and balancing for the players, since Asscrack is hella OP at the end anyway.
Nothing makes me happier than seeing you write "Edge of Tommorow" instead of "Live. Die. Repeat."
I was thinking of making the nudity teleporters in to just stealing a random item (that's kept at the end).
But I'd still rather make the poem more helpful and the first door make sense. Or make all the progression stuff make more sense, rather. And I really don't know what to do about the insta-kill stuff. Steamroller I could just say they have to run from, that's easy. But like the thing with the crown and the staff and a few other things. Idk.
thats how i ran the 3.0 version back in the day, and it was a blast
Back in the 1990’s I really enjoyed DM ing this dungeon. It definitely caused parties I dealt with to leave a cleric outside dungeons with a fingernail or hair. The cleric would cast resurrection on the hairs once a week to see if we were dead.
Wait how does that work? Can you cast resurrection on just a piece of a person and have them come back? If it was cast and nothing happened that meant they were okay? I need answers
@@uhkingdom yes actually you only needed any part of the person, you then had to roll a system shock check (based on your con) to see if your survived the resurrection, you would then lose enough experience to leave you at the beginning of your PREVIOUS level, and permanently lose a point of constitution.
This is genius!
So...Clerics who are also manicurists/barbers?
So if you're impaled at the bottom of a spike trap and get resurrected, aren't you still impaled on the spike trap? And wouldn't that just end you again?
this is a classic case of "if this was made by anyone else and didn't have its legendary reputation, everyone would be like wtf kind of 8 year old wrote this shitty homebrew?"
Sure, out of context. In context, it was designed for a tournament. Your group got 12 pre-made characters, a timer started, and you saw how far you can get before time or characters ran out. Person who got to the farthest numbered room wins. Its legendary reputation came from it being fun at a con, then taken back home to humble characters who had slain gods. Or to do a meat grinder, a common type of play since you could whip up a character in minutes if you knew the system. Basically just do the "lets see how far we can get this time" at home. Plus this was a time where you always had plenty of henchpeople or at least animals specifically to test for instant-kill traps, so those weren't as big a deal as expected.
For the CURRENT game with our CURRENT playstyle, yeah it's horrendous. But for its original purpose and one of the most common styles of play at the time of creation? It worked great.
@@maromania7If that's the case, it should only be used for tournaments.
I feel like you can do this with any level character. There are so many things here that will kill you regardless of your level and skill. “Yeah this trap kills you. Saving throw? What’s that?”
You do have to fight a demi-lich if you make it to the end...
There was a lot of that in early D&D.
Even some lenient things would be like "if you eat this plant you die in 1d4 minutes unless you cast this 7th level spell."
You're kinda not supposed to fight him. You only fight if you're dumb enough to touch the skull
I wouldn’t of that far but if you’ve got a clever group they can make it through with mid-level characters. And a gang of high-level hitwists can get wiped out in 30 minutes.
We turned it into The Grotto of Horrors at Christmas. Every character we had ever played were gathered outside and a wizard said whomever gets to the end wins. If we died, another one of our characters appeared where they fell. Party kept changing and the interactions were hilarious.
Still didn't complete it, but it made it fun.
That sounds extremely fun for RP, especially if you lean more into comedy than the dark themes of people being repeatedly and brutally slaughtered in this hellhole of a dungeon
A slapstick meat grinder sounds like the best way to make this dungeon not suck
A DM I played under, one who I considered perhaps a bit too merciful but overall a whole lot of fun, was clever when he threw this dungeon in. We'd only periodically visit the place in a dreamscape like setting to break the dungeon down into smaller, more manageable segments. From what I've read, he didn't even skimp the tougher aspects, either (but I shot the siren in the head as I didn't trust her at all).
Taking the dungeon in smaller, bite-sized segments did wonders for our navigation instead of forcing ourselves through it. We got through with no casualties and SOMEHOW avoided the BS teleportations. The segmented areas always recharged our abilities, so we'd detect magic with the mage characters and my rogue would fine-tooth every little detail and help us avoid many of the traps, even going so far as to trigger traps upon himself with his astonishing poison resistances.
Because of how this dungeon was handled by our DM, I had an absolute blast and looked forward to navigating this labyrinth in our dream sequences. It wasn't until later where I heard of its legendary and infamous reputation. Our DM may have been too merciful at times, but I deeply appreciate that he never made the game anything less than fun.
You have 69 likes!
@@kedabro1957 - I ruined it. I have no regrets
Sounds like how they did it in an Adventure Zone live-show. It was a training simulation for their team & they had a collective number of lives to lose.
[SPOILERS]
The simulation got corrupted, turned into Big Bass Fishing so they only do a few rooms.
@@Ajehy😫
I remember attempting this back in the early eighties, it was stupidly difficult, our characters died so many times. Whomever survived the longest, had bragging rights and we’d start again, our DM played it as written, but he would let us start over. It reminds me of and was the inspiration for the module I wrote. Death Test One
The fake treasure room giving you 3 wishes is still worth it tbh
If you break the urn tho that the efreeti is in he goes ham on you. We spent 2 sessions just fighting him and losing most of our hit points after we used the wish gem to make the mithral door "disappear", but it was cursed and instead made the doors blow up, in turn destroying the efreeti urn.
@@ctrain8900 My players used the cursed gem to resurrect one of dead players (after a long and heated debate on how to used it, btw). I resurrected him as a fully aware Shambling Mound, described it in detail, described how gem started to glow and started counting. Some players were so shocked that they completely missed the count so shambling mount and two players of the party were obliterated, wizard said "fuck it" and teleported away ad only naked paladin ran all the way to fake Acererak, falcon pucned him and "won". This was fun as a GM xD
The long and short of it is, Gary designed dungeons specifically to foil the way HIS regular players approached the game. Those guys came from a VERY different background than a modern player, and brought a completely different set of expectations to the table.
This +1000. Times change.
um no.
Originally dnd was meant to be VERY realistic. It was meant to be a simulation of a real magical world. Of course now it's about storytelling and "noone can ever face consequences!" but even then.. noone wanted to play a game where you could die randomly.. where the dm .. god.. was actively plotting to kill you
@@charlesreid9337 I started playing OD&D at age 10 in 1979. Different times made for a different kind of culture among gamers back then. My dad was a wargamer, played miniatures battles and games like Outdoor Survival, and encouraged my playing of D&D, though he never played himself--he was from a different era of gaming himself.
OD&D grew out of miniatures combat, when Arneson and Gygax wanted a more Arthurian/Tolkien/Vancian flavor of battle, with wizards and dragons and all. The roleplay aspect of it was what they desired, and roleplay is shared storytelling, which grew over time, until Gygax was forced out of TSR, it became more corporate-focused, and WOTC aimed more for what would make them the most money, not what was best for roleplaying in general.
The thing is, Gary said that D&D should be whatever a DM and the players want it to be; homebrew rules were there from the beginning. Whatever works for you is fine. Going off on other people for what they like pretty much is the opposite of what Gygax intended from the beginning.
@@charlesreid9337 Nothing says realistic like a 10 foot by 10 foot room occupied by one orc who somehow managed to get past all the traps on his way to work that day.
@@charlesreid9337 Actually EGG's players expected just that. Read some of the early articles from Dragon to see what it was like.
Party: *stands in a room for exactly 10 minutes*
Gary Gygax: ROADO ROLLA DA!
This is actually the best way to explain the Juggernaut 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Gary Gigax: *"MUDAMUDAMUDAMUDAMUDAMUDAMUDA!!!"*
Terraria ptsd
*one of the party members actually are role playing as jotaro and was given the abilities of jotaro because he bugged the dm for 17 hours straight*
@@matthewmcgirt1321 Good grief. Normally I'd find that hilarious but the 17 hours...Hopefully that didn't break the campaign and the friend chilled out with the antics.
Dungeon sounds easy as hell for a level 20 wizard who thinks they’re invincible
“I send in my simulacrum and take a nap outside”
Then just start blowing stuff up and dispelling magic.
You can almost always get around doing puzzles by pulling bullshit with spells at higher levels but this doesn’t counter that.
Also the 60ft tremorsense from an earth elemental or other summon just removes any trick this dungeon has
This is the kinda dungeon where I would eventually go ye nah f*ck these puzzles imma cheese it ,leave, spend two days summoning and planar binding an earth elemental and a glabrezu. Have them at will detect magic and tremorsense/truesight their way through the dungeon for the party.
"they're really not going to think to peel back the wall" Look at me! I'm Jacob! My players actually try to solve puzzles before trying digging through the wall.
Losers, don't they know that dungeon makers always spend way more time on the doors than the walls?
Everybody knows it's easier to dig through walls
@@GonnaDieNever Yup, dismantling a dungeon is pretty common on very veteran players, removing the flooring, dismantling the walls, shredding all tapestries, pulling out the doorways, even yoinking out those teleporting archways, stealing those demon heads, basically, nothing would be left of the dungeon by the time the extreme veteran players reached acerak
EDIT: Which is probably why that roller appears after ten minutes in the room - to pummel those dismantling adventurers.
@@GodActio Is not mentioned this video but the book has a passage saying the walls are indestructible, can restore themselves and not even a wish spell can do anything about it. (or something among those lines)
First things my players said was: there's a door painted here? Yea there's a door behind the plaster.
“You go in it your alignment and sex reverses”
I accuse Gary of Fetish.
What would happen to a True Neutral Warforge
@@singularity1130 The dungeon explodes
@@ArmoredChocoboLPs that's a high hope
@@singularity1130 that's an interesting concept.
@@singularity1130 Or a changeling. Wouldnt they just change shape back?
My group loved this module (played in 1985). Our DM warned us to be careful and thorough. It took us seven weeks to play through. We spent hours on a single room tapping every square foot of the floor/walls/ and ceiling with a 10' pole, writing down every possible action in the room and debating what might work. in the end 7 of 9 characters were dead, 19 henchman dead (from a mutiny).
No offense, you do you, but that sounds freaking awful.
We used an 11' pole for things you didn't want to touch with a ten foot one. Lol
Good times
As a side note: Maybe not many people consider that the original version of the Tomb of Horrors brought a lot of drawings intended to be shown to players as they advanced through the dungeon. I think this may have played an important role on playing the adventure for modern players who don't contemplate that fact.
There actually is a reference hint to the coin puzzle:
"If shades of red stand for blood, the wise will not need sacrifice aught but a loop of magical metal - you're well along your march."
You can put the ring of protection you just got into the slot to open it.
That's pretty clever.
The shades of red are referring to the red mosaic on the floor of the chapel and the fiery red version of the altar (as well as the orange vapors in the archway), and altars are sometimes places where bloody rituals take place. The poem actually makes sense in its entirety.
Actually, putting a magic ring is the only way to activate the stone door. The 5ed text is a bit ambiguous but the original says "It is also just right for insertion of a magic ring, and only such ah item will actually trigger the mechanism which causes the block to sink slowly into the floor so as to allow entry into the passage beyond. The ring (or any other object deposited into the slot) is forever lost..."
One also has to remember that this was designed to be played at a convention as a tournament. A one shot that people would come in and play using pre-generated characters. It was never designed with campaign play in mind. It was not created with the intent to somehow be "fair" or "balanced". In fact, 99% of AD&D players would have never seen this adventure were it not for TSR deciding that these tournament adventures would make them some nice profit and published them as AD&D adventures.
D&D nowadays is about participation trophies, it's exemplified when he talks about how the poem doesn't exactly spell out what it means which makes it a bad hint somehow
it was also an FU to people turning up with so called unbeatable characters wielding thor's hammer, watching them leave was such fun. it's just brilliant but it can be beaten.
@@alancramer1980 I took 2 guys that thought they had invincible characters into this... they both dove into the green mouth. It was a quick night as I ripped up their characters.
@@basedbear1605 LOL
@@kkirT I think he meant that the adventure hardly gives any information even to the DM.
Remember, this was old school DnD. Having 7 or 8 npc party members to use as bullet shields was very common. It was not designed to be run as a party of four.
Have your npc followers as minesweepers for traps since a lot of the traps were instant death no saving throw deals
@@AntonioFelluci you know when you're watching a movie (or playing a game) and you see the villain forcing his minions to do something that will obviously activate a trap and kill the minion? That villain is basically an AD&D veteran
Thank you. Not to mention all of 1st ed, advanced and 2nd ed was meant for like 10-15 PLAYERS who could also have henchman/hirelings etc. So in all of the modules Gary and the boys was figuring on like 25 players/henchmen. So all those dying along the way should be making the ones still alive smarter by searching more and all the traps.
@@TennEaglesNest I just thought to myself “how would you ever get that many people together for DnD?” Then I remembered it was the 70s.
@@bfnvalley Well that's the thing, we didn't. I played it in the 80's but you had to kinda be super nerdy to play it. Just like this video most people played with just a handful of people, it was the games and the makers like Gygax that where assuming you had a large party. That is why the old editions are considered hard and unforgiving, most literally played the adventures with a quarter of the recommended characters. I liked the rules, but the modules and premade adventures where skewed. I also as a DM always had at least 1 NPC that was my character that would go with the party to help in certain ways.
So basically the only way to beat this dungeon is to know exactly what you have to do, because none of these puzzles seem like the type of thing you could just stumble across while trying to experiment.
You HAVE to metagame to solve the dungeon
My group worked it out as they went and did manage to finish the dungeon. The trick is to encourage tactile gameplay, you ask people how they're doing things, where are their hands, instead of just "search for traps" with a set DC. it's not true that you have to metagame to win, but what is true is that the ToH is a great example of play conditioning, you can't get in unless you literally dig blindly for the entrance way, and there two (relatively easy) deathtrap false entrances. So that teaches you thorough examination, and to look out for dead ends and traps. The correct route has instant death pit traps, these teach you to test the floors and surfaces before you go anywhere (that one is a bit of a rougher lesson but makes sense in the era it was made in where it was kind of expected that you'd be poking the floor with ten foot poles as you go). The biggest thing to learn though, is that putting everyone in one room is suicidal, my players were kind of in disbelief that any group would get as far as the knockout gas dreadnought room and still be all going into rooms together, there are gas the room traps before that, chambers that fill with snakes and so on, by that point you really should have learned to have one qualified person go in, ideally with a rope around their waist to pull them back out. Solving the puzzles is really less of a matter of finding clues, and more about finding the least lethal way to attempt trial and error. None of this is metagaming, it's just learning what your characters would learn in this situation. It's actually pretty immersive roleplaying in that it forces you to act as cautiously as a real person would if they went to place they know to be filled with deathtraps.
Not at all. A 20th level party is going to have passwall and all sorts of tools to CIRCUMVENT the dungeons defenses. What does a pit trap matter if your party is all floating? What does sleep-no-save gas traps matter if half your party are immune to sleep, and some others don't even breathe?
Literally the most stupid thing a party can do is to "walk in the front door expecting every challenge to be solved by a skill roll".
The irony is that the 5E version is way, way kinder than the AD&D version. The number of 'save or die' traps is ridiculous, and the rules system makes it so even high level characters have a very low chance of discovering secret doors (that's why the invisible gem of seeing is there).
Don't forget that Acererak's treasure is cursed. It keeps the theme of telling the players "FUCK YOU" to the very end.
AD&D was supremely deadly. A 10th level character was a legend both in-game and out of game. Forget this 20th level Epic adventure stuff. At 10th, a fighter is a lord with his own keep/stronghold, a magic user (wizard) has a tower and apprentices, a thief(rogue) is probably running a thieves guild in a city, etc. etc. A player that played multiple times per week for years probably had 1 epic character, high teens or 20s. These were the true world shakers, peers of Mordenkainen and the Circle of Eight. The DMG encouraged the DM to "divine assention" characters above 18th level, the character completes one last multiverse-shaking quest and is granted demi-godhood or lich status or part of an outer plane to rule and retires from the campaign. Death by too many levels.
Thank you for pointing this out, I feel that this is important for people to know. (Why? i dunno, ask my subconscious or something.)
what you do for 2e is you take a paladin inquisitor, who has a 91% resistance to illusions, and you SEE ALL.
@@adz151101 paladins were only paladins then. and only humans could be paladins because a paladin with racial stat buffs is broken. Now humans get +1 to all stats or something? haven't played since 3.5, just dont have the time even if I knew anyone else who played. I play ADoM alot though. first played Ancient Domains of Mystery nearly 20 years ago. Still havent ever beat it.
"Now you have a gist of its history...."
My brain: "...gistory"
stealing that word you just made
Ah, the Tomb of Horrors. Aka, the Takeshi’s Challenge of D&D. May Pelor have mercy upon our souls.
Nah nah nah. Takeshi's Castle was damn near impossible but it was at least fair!
@@antonymilne1346 takeshi’s challenge not takeshi’s castle. Takeshi’s challenge is a nearly impossible video game that takes an ungodly amount of trial and error to beat
I remember when my friend ran this for us back in high school. The entire group jumped into the yawning portal and died. Well, except for me. I stuck a pole into it, pulled it back and saw that half the pole was gone, and thought "I guess the pole got teleported?" and I jumped in and also died. Good times.
What if I told you a number of the dungeon's traps actually had no saves at all?
My favorite has to be the Demi-Lich skull. If you touch the skull in the original, your soul straight up gets consumed by it. No Con save, zip. That's it.
Mage Hand is the most overpowered spell for this dungeon.
No no no, it's not "overpowered". It's necessary
Mage Hand and the 10' Pole
that's what was on my mind all the time
this isn't a dungeon you need rogues, you need a bunch of wizards with mage hand, telekinesis and summons
or maybe etherealness. jacob didn't mention any precautions stopping ethereal trespassers. at level 20 they cast on their whole party of three and hold it for 8 hours. the only trouble here would be getting the key together
@@hugofontes5708 it's not even made for mages. It's made for players who think about every move, characters aren't part of this
@@hugofontes5708 I think it's missing in the new print but the original punishes anyone going ethereal with demons appearing
He didn't say it in the rulebooks, but in interviews Gygax said he viewed D&D as "players vs DM", and TPKs were wins for the DM.
He did say it in the original DM's guide though. He also said DMs should never trust their players. Dude had some issues.
@@mattpace1026it might have been a product of their time.
@@lobsterwithhisshouldersbac8368 How so?
It was a different kind of game. It wasn't a vehicle to tell a story, it was a game. Just a game. You had players who were on a team, and you had the DM who was the adversary to the players.
There was no narrative beyond "you adventurers, you want treasure and this place has some".
@@frostmagemarii Oh, I know that, but you didn't really explain what the time period had to do with any of it.
It was cool in the original form because it was "Thick" in an era of thin modules. The module came with a separate booklet containing images of specific rooms and traps in the dungeon. For a DM back then THAT was a neat draw. Being able to hand your players a picture representation of the room added a degree of atmosphere that most D&D modules did not provide. And it didn't hurt having GG's name on the thing either.
Remember when those crappy little line drawings would inspire such creative imagination in us? Now the modules are covered in paintings from amazing painters. That's great too. But yeah, those little line drawings were a big deal. Players would fill out the missing details in their heads.
People often forget that the dungeon's original purpose was as a "see how far you can get" style of game for a Convention set in the days where the game was a revamp of a war game, people weren't intended to consistently beat it, and after the convention was over it was simply released to the public and got updated through editions for anyone who wanted to try it out
"This thing just feels like its sole purpose is to just screw over the players" yes that is the dungeon's mission statement. Its one and only goal is to destroy power players and any other poor sap who gets in. It was designed during the player vs dm period of d and d as the dm's ultimate weapon. Its reputation is as the pc killer, as the pinnacle of dm vs player mentality, as the argument to allow metagaming. This dungeon is so infamous that a comic story were some players were being first time DMed by an older addition player came to a screeching halt as they are described a green devil face on the wall and they realized the implications (it turned out ok but that was because the DM didn't keep the tomb as it was supposed to be)
There was never a DM vs Player period of D&D; if such a period exists it would be NOW, since it seems to be a common complaint of late. No, ToH comes from a time when some players had “seen everything” and were hard to challenge. It was the equivalent of a hardcore survival mod for a video game, and you were not meant to play it unless you had experienced all the vanilla game could offer. It requires an experienced DM and players to make it fun though - and most groups that try it are not that. And the reaction of those groups is like the reaction of an inexperienced player to the hardcore survival mode in a video game: “It must be badly designed because I found it stupidly hard. “
No, it’s just not really designed for you.
I wouldn't say it came from the Player vs DM era of DnD. It kind of *started* that mentality.
Original was fucking annoying to run as well. It's definitely not nice to run for the DM either. I remember running it in a con and it IS painful.
Also there was never a DM vs Player period, there is a DM vs Players mentality, usually coming from DM's that don't understand the game.
Death monks at lv20 get 20 anti this hell dungeon
It's not DM vs players; it's players vs another group of players. It was designed to have multiple groups of players going through and seeing who get could the farthest.
When I first started playing *cough* many *cough* years ago, I played with a guy who used to tell stories about going to conventions where Gary Gygax ran modules like this. When I first started playing, AD&D was out (I do know how to calculate thac0 (the last letter is a zero)). A 'standard' kit involved using a 10 foot pole to test the floor for every tile. Being a rogue meant you regularly peeled gold lame off of walls, and prying jewels from walls (a la The Mummy). The story this guy told was the adventure was written more as a way to punish the meta and power gamers who insisted they could one-shot any dungeon they played. I have run this and the Apocalypse Stone. I died a lot. And the world ended.
"Whos gonna stab the door!?!" Well my bard tried to cast vicious mockery on a door once so stabbing it is not out of the question
To be honest, I would attack almost any door on any old dungeon, I mean, halfways the Temple of Fire in Ocarina of Time I was using whatever I had (or the Megaton Hammer once I got it) on all the doors without keyholes before getting anywhere near them. It just becomes a second nature at some point.
The tomb, especially the original one, is for players with a mindset that modern players typically dont have in my experience. You have to go into it understanding that the puzzles will be strange and unintuitive and that instant death will be common. It is a dungeon for people who like Indiana Jones and dont mind being the random guy who gets his eyes melted out so that one of the other players can figure out what the trap is and, eventually, how to solve it.
Not that its a bad thing that modern players dont like this kind of adventure. That stems from a love of your character and their story that is more common than when the average character was "Thragg, Barbarian, questing for glory".
Gary Gygax: "It all clicked after I realized I hated my players"
It was not about hating players though. This is what they did. Challenged the players by solving dungeons. No joke. Watch DM It All's video. He did it justice. This guy is just a hater who cannot understand the old school and was playing a crap version of the dungeon. Heck, he cheated his players just to end it. Great DMing without hating your players there. He kind of lied and cheated with this whole video I dare say.
@@mitchellslate1249 What did he cheat the players out of, exactly? They weren't enjoying it anyway.
@@mitchellslate1249 I dont know what kind of drug did you take to have any justification for this hellhole bedies 'iT wAS maDE tO be UnFAIr", or if you eve watched the video (he said that he just made a mistake while DM-ing and unintentionally made the first part easier), but this kind of dungeon is the reason I would stick with forum rpg-s if I want to have fun roleplaying, rather then good ol' DnD. Absolutely revolting this entire thing is, not even 1/1000 luck of life-gambling interactions, inconsistent, unfun, not even the most despicable Mary Sue character deserves to go through something like this.
@@mitchellslate1249 Yeah, that's not fun, people don't like playing escape room constantly
@@psychologicalsuccess3476 . You speaking for everyone or just yourself? Guess there was a different breed of player years ago.
Big talk coming from the guy who made “the door puzzle”
At least the door puzzle didn't kill you for guessing
XP to Level 3 Haha ok you got me there
@@XPtoLevel3 but wouldn't it be kind of epic if it did?
@@TheMariosack No, no it wouldn't
@@XPtoLevel3 didn't it do like 1 damage? So theoretically it could kill you for guessing...
I'd love this style of breakdown of other adventures and dungeons
Same. I'd love to see Jacob's take on, say, Keep on the Borderlands or the original I6 Ravenloft.
But who's gonna stab the door?
* the last door they had to get past needed to be stabbed 3 times *
I'd love to see him do Death House, even more in depth than in his Curse of Strahd video
the 1st door that you suppose to find behind the trap was simple back in the day
you get a rogue to find the traps, but you also have to check the walls, use a 10 ft pole, hit it and find where the wall dont sound the same, meaning there is a space behind it, or the material is not the same, hiding someting ;)
"Who's gonna stab the door?!"
Jacob, you've played D&D, right? Everyone. Every D&D player will stab the door.
My party rubs my character's face on every door. Against his will.
"Who's gonna stab the door?"
The angry naked guy who is damn sure not going to try the golden head of the staff given what the silver head just did to him.
My players don't stab doors, they seduce them.
@@Jermbot15 you mean to his friend cause you know the guy that used the silver end is absolutely dead forever
@@feritperliare2890 They meant use the silver head on the door. it only kills you if you use it on the Crown, the silver head teleports you naked back to the start if used on the door. Basically they are saying the person is likely to use the silver side on the door get teleported away and come back angry and stab the door 19:34
“Who’s gonna stab the door?”
Well, apparently somebody did so back when Gygax ran the dungeon, thus he adjudicated it as such.
He also describes that the door "shows red" and bleeds a little if it's scratched. I think the idea is that if the party tries to brute force the door with a ram or something, or try and take it apart in some way, they'll scratch it and learn it bleeds and can be cut.
You want to know why mimics exist? Because Gygax's players would routinely strip every floorboard, every piece of furniture, literally stealing everything that wasnt nailed down, to sell for extra cash, so he decided "what if the furniture was monsters?"
They would have absolutely stabbed the door.
@@clockworkmonkey411 Man reminds me of some of my old campaign playthroughs. Trapped doors were not just traps but homebrewed creatures - living traps. Open the door and walk in...oops you jest entered a mouth and were eaten. You bet we hit every door with a spear or a 10' pole, fireballed every room before we entered, had a thief buried under scrolls for when the mage went down, and everything could be a trap and instakill one or all the party members
So, i read a story that said the ToH shouldn't be used as a module to put in an adventure or even an typical oneshot, but used in a large tournament where people made a few characters, joined up with random people, and just tried to get as far as possible. When you died, you compare with other people on how far you got, make new groups, and ran it with one of your other characters. Sounds like a fun idea to me
That was exactly how it was run originally, also with a scoring system in place to grade how well you did.
@@Snoil cool
We just finished this dungeon with my group, level 14. We had intended to just see how far we got before TPKing but ended up completing the whole thing. The MVP was the necromancy wizard with her team of crash test zombies who located most of the traps for us. We managed to guess most of the meanings of the clues right, and you avoid the worst of the bullshit if you strictly follow the "right" path. None of us died.
I don't think it's a good dungeon. Too much trial and error, too many red herrings, and Acererak is a pretty mid boss. As someone who runs old school dungeon crawls every week, I am swearing off traps that activate by entering a room from now on, because players being afraid to go in rooms ruins this format of game. I felt like we were not so much trying to explore the dungeon as avoid it. That's not good. You can't punish the main action you need your players to do in order for the game to function.
That said, it's far from the worst dungeon in that book. That honor goes to the goddamn Doomvault...
The first time I played ToH (in the mid 80's), we completed the tomb in about 6 hours. The 2nd time I played it (in the late 90's), we failed miserably in about 2 hours. The biggest difference between the 2 runs was the rule sets used. To actually complete the original ToH, you had to know the 1ed rules inside and out. There were so many rules changes from 1ed to 2ed that the dungeon just did not translate very well.
"Gary Gygax wrote this as a middle finger to his players" yeah, he did. Did you read the original introduction to the module? It's literally meant to piss off players, lol.
You expect him to understand that when he completely fails to understand the difference between character power and player skill?
@@DekuLord oh stfu
@@DekuLord He repeated a couple of times that the characters were Lv20 as if it that affected the player's skill to understand/process puzzles... Stuff along the lines "And they couldn't figure it out... and I remind you: these are Lv20 characters!"
No it was "to punish players that thought they were invincible" so I assume that means this was made to bitch slap that guys with
@@Kaemonarch I think he was referring to the fact that level 20 characters have access to skills and abilities (read: Options) than lower level characters do.
I've always seen the Tomb of Horrors is just a meat-grinder dungeon. If you go in knowing that and expecting that with a folder of characters ready to go it's a very different experience. Like a "see how many characters it takes to get thought the dungeon" kinda thing.
Someone gets it! That’s exactly how it was. It wasn’t something you just introduced to your characters in the middle of a normal campaign.
@@grahamstrouse1165 Yep, and if you did run it as a legit campaign dungeon (say, as a Ravenloft Domain of Dread), you homebrewed the CRAP out of it.
That and you frickin' read and memorized it beforehand so you knew what the traps were and how to actually describe the suspicious things to your players or handed out notes that contain what said players would notice the rest of the party wouldn't.
I'm a madman who ran a homebrewed-up Tomb of Horrors as part of an Elder Scrolls campaign (as the penultimate section of an arc to foil Vaermina from invading Nirn, heavily lifting from Ravenloft's Dread Domains).
And that's exactly how he wrote it. It was for going to cons and proving there was always a way to handle players who thought they were invincible. It was Dark Souls for 1975. He never thought ALL games should work that way. It was a niche experience.
@@Bobby3OOO Dark Souls is relentlessly brutal... but utterly fair. This dungeon is, by no means, and in no way, remotely fair.
I think it could be fun if you have a long line of parties waiting to go in, so each follows in the others footsteps, with doors unlocked, traps sprung, etc. so you make it a little farther each time
I always heard that this was designed because people told Gygax that his dungeons were too easy. So he pretty much had a “hold my beer” moment.
the problem is, this one is not DIFFICULT, it's random and luck-based, rogue-like style. Intelligence and strategies don't help you much here. Gaming has a special term for that - 'fake difficulty'.
@@Yutah1981 Except its not, I have as of now ran it, not the 5e variant, the actual one, unaltered with my group. Despite them all being new to the adnd system they beat it with only one death. Turns out lateral thinking (which jacobs friends though surely intelligent did not use), lets you deal with most of this.
@@janehrahan5116 we also completed it unaltered, with NO deaths. But it was not interesting or fun at all, and though my over-preparation did help with not dying, the riddles and puzzles there are horrible and random, and have nothing to do with logic. They are typical 'guess what I meant'
@@janehrahan5116his playthrough was clearly of the "let's see how stupid this dungeon is" variety and frankly, he and his players just aren't very bright. Feels like they expect everything to have a solution or a "roll this to solve it" when it's not a dungeon that tests the characters (the fights aren't all that hard, really) it tests the PLAYERS.
And if the players/dm are just dopes, well, it's frustrating.
@@janehrahan5116 biggest cope I've heard in a long time, the dungeon has random side-rooms that just kill without warning you for walking into them how can you call that anything but dumb difficulty