Tomb of Horrors

[aphoticConniver]

Any tips for a DM's first time running the 3.5 Tomb of Horrors? Adjustments that should be made, etc.

[Chronos]

Make sure your players know what you're doing, and make sure they're not using any characters that they're particularly attached to.

[OldTrees1]

Since the The tomb of horrors(ToH) is mostly "puzzles", it will be longer than estimated.

The lethality gradually scales if the players are cautious. (reckless characters die)

Print off the poem/message. They will want to refer to it often.

[Crake]

Print off the poem/message. They will want to refer to it often.

If the players think it's relevant, let them write it down, otherwise you're making it too obvious

[Amphetryon]

Hand everyone a few extra Character sheets just before the first session. Don't explain why. :smallamused:

[Grod_The_Giant]

Since the The tomb of horrors(ToH) is mostly "puzzles", it will be longer than estimated.
Oh dear god, this.

3.5 Tomb is this weird mix of mind-numbingly long puzzles and stupidly lethal traps. It's not a good combination-- puzzles are already slow, and when you add into the need to poke and prod every object in the tomb for twenty minutes to check for traps...

[Irk]

Unseen servants with ten foot poles.

[Fenryr]

Be prepared for possible TPK. At least one of the party must have trapfinding. Or use bags of tricks.

[pbdr]

Any tips for a DM's first time running the 3.5 Tomb of Horrors? Adjustments that should be made, etc.

Adjust to a different adventure. Sorry, it's classic I know, but you need a special group and only run it as a one off....

[Manly Man]

...make sure they're not using any characters that they're particularly attached to.

This. Thisthisthisthisthisthis. I cannot emphasize this any more than I already am. If I'm feeling nice, what I do is if there's a TPK, the party just ends up waking up from a bad dream instead of actually being dead, and the Tomb, as far as they know, never existed, and they keep none of what they 'looted'.

Then again, I usually play it with the First Edition content, but 3.5 rules, so it's a lot more lethal than what they've made it now.

[rockdeworld]

I ran it with my players and let them restart from the beginning with essentially a clone each time they died, just so they'd finish it. I figured we'd have a laugh at the body count when they were done. 10 PCs down and they didn't pass the second room. They didn't want to pick it up again next week.

Lessons: 1. Can't have too many PCs. 2. Make sure they understand that it can be very difficult mentally. 3. Make sure they understand that unlike in videogames, walls/floors/ceilings/statues/etc can be messed with.

[Chronos]

3. Make sure they understand that unlike in videogames, walls/floors/ceilings/statues/etc can be messed with.
Where "messed with" means, for instance, that you can stick your arm in the statue's mouth? Yeah, maybe it's better if they don't realize they can do that.

And didn't the original have some sort of powerful evil spirits trapped within the walls, so that the party would get ganked if they tried to stoneshape/disintegrate/adamantium pickaxe new doorways?

[Darrin]

There are a couple "choke points" in the adventure that you want to be careful of:


Room #17 "Magical Secret Door". If your players aren't searching every single 10' wall section, they are likely to miss this door, and miss out on a very significant portion of the module. Decide beforehand if you're OK with the party missing this door entirely, and how hard you want to "sell" room #18, the False Crypt. The party could think this is the end of the tomb, Acererak was just an overhyped mummy, no big deal, and they might leave the tomb, thinking they've completely defeated it.

If you decide you want the PCs to notice this door, then you can drop hints or remind them to use the gem of seeing (if they found it), and ignore the DC 20 Search check to find the door with true seeing (WTF would you need to do a search check with true seeing?). If there are any elves in the party, make sure you make a secret check for secret doors when they walk past it (or make this check beforehand, just in case). If any PCs cast detect magic in the false crypt, they may see the secret door's abjuration aura.

Room #29 "Mithral Valves". I am still not entirely sure what Gygax meant by "valves" here, and the artwork is no help at all. I thought he meant something like metal tubes with a spigot-type wheel valve or butterfly valve, but I think these were just supposed to be double doors, and Gygax went a bit overboard with his thesaurus. In the original version, these mithral doors were one of the most unforgiving traps in the entire dungeon: if they take any damage at all, a Flood of Blood trap fills the room, and if any fire at all touches the blood, it turns into an instantly lethal poison, no save, everybody dies. There were a bunch of spell effects that did really weird things with the blood, but I'm still wondering if anyone survived long enough to actually try any of them. (This is probably the source of a lot of the "The air itself is a trap. You turn into a fish. Then you explode." jokes.)

In the 3.5 update, the mithral doors have inexplicably replaced with doors that only appear to be mithral, because apparently Acererak got tired of replacing them after they kept getting stolen... SERIOUSLY? I'd like to see the party that managed to get a pair of 14' x 28' x 3' mithral doors out of this dungeon, particularly when they gush forth a torrent of blood (fast enough to fill the entire room in 20 rounds) if they take any damage. In the 3.5 update, the Flood of Blood is even faster: it fills the room in 4 rounds (off the top of my head, that kind of pressure sounds like it would strip flesh from bones). Fortunately, the Flood of Blood has been considerably toned down: it no longer turns into an instantly-lethal poison, and the random spell effects have been removed.

You may need to ignore or modify the text in this room to get the effect you want without completely frustrating the players: trap triggers, room fills with blood (which may be more gross/annoying than actually lethal), PCs may have to wait 24 hours for it to drain away.

[aphoticConniver]

Adjust to a different adventure. Sorry, it's classic I know, but you need a special group and only run it as a one off....

I've been adventuring with this group for at least 3 years, and I'm running it as a one-off with entirely new characters at level 9. Granted, I made them base the characters on themselves, but that's going to be fun when they hit the gender/alignment switch arch.


I ran it with my players and let them restart from the beginning with essentially a clone each time they died, just so they'd finish it. I figured we'd have a laugh at the body count when they were done. 10 PCs down and they didn't pass the second room. They didn't want to pick it up again next week.

Lessons: 1. Can't have too many PCs. 2. Make sure they understand that it can be very difficult mentally. 3. Make sure they understand that unlike in videogames, walls/floors/ceilings/statues/etc can be messed with.

I have 5 PCs who have heard tales of the Tomb. They're on the Hall of Spheres and haven't died yet, sadly.


Where "messed with" means, for instance, that you can stick your arm in the statue's mouth? Yeah, maybe it's better if they don't realize they can do that.

And didn't the original have some sort of powerful evil spirits trapped within the walls, so that the party would get ganked if they tried to stoneshape/disintegrate/adamantium pickaxe new doorways?

It still does, except now they trigger on moving to the astral plane as well.

[Chronos]

To the incredulous part of Darrin's spoiler, that's what the Shrink Item spell is for. And if you put something that friggin' valuable in front of the PCs, of course they're going to steal it. That's their job.

[rockdeworld]

And didn't the original have some sort of powerful evil spirits trapped within the walls, so that the party would get ganked if they tried to stoneshape/disintegrate/adamantium pickaxe new doorways?
It's been awhile since I read it (and it was only the 3.5 version), but I think the demons just repaired the walls overnight if you went through them, not attacked.

[SoraWolf7]

I can tell you this right now, the only way I've survived the Tomb of Horrors was by being the cleric who did only one thing with his spells, Point the Way. I never had to heal anyone because the most damage a character took without it being an insta-kill or an alternate dimensional trap was 3 HP. Then a combination of other character skills and wackiness provided the rest of the dungeon-crawling, IE a dwarf-powered stone drilling machine, a fishing rod with a glowing severed arm attached to the hook as a room-tester, and the most non-confrontational ending I've ever seen for a dungeon since starting D&D.

We started with 5 members and we ended with three. I call that a success.

[Alleran]

To the incredulous part of Darrin's spoiler, that's what the Shrink Item spell is for. And if you put something that friggin' valuable in front of the PCs, of course they're going to steal it. That's their job.
Isn't the way to "beat" the Tomb of Horrors to just take the adamantite doors at the entrance and sell them for money?

[Manly Man]

Isn't the way to "beat" the Tomb of Horrors to just take the adamantite doors at the entrance and sell them for money?

In 3.5, they changed it so the adamantine doors are treated like the mithral ones inside, i.e. they turn to regular steel when they're removed.