Recaps & Roundups part 17: Tomb of Horrors tournament edition

Cover by Tracy Lesch

The first Origins Game Fair was held from the 25th to the 27th of July 1975, at John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. The fair was to play host to a large D&D tournament, and inspired by Alan Lucien's Tomb of Ra-Hotep, Gary Gygax set about designing a killer dungeon for the event.  The result was the Tomb of Horrors.  Over the course of three days, eight teams of fifteen adventurers went into its depths, and died to its traps. Word spread, and the later groups were better prepared for the dangers of the tomb, but it's deadliness still became legendary. That legend only grew when it became one of the very first official AD&D adventure modules.  Today I'm not looking at the module version, but rather the reprint of the tournament module that came with the Arts & Arcana hardcover.

For the very few (perhaps none) among you who haven't read or played through the Tomb of Horrors, the set-up is this: the lich Acererak has holed up in his trap-filled tomb with all of his treasure, and the PCs want to get in there and take that treasure. There's really not much more to it than that (and what else do you really need?), but the inventiveness and the vindictive nature of some of the traps elevate Tomb of Horrors above other modules of its kind. This one is legendary for a reason, even if you probably never want to run your characters through it.

(As an aside, one of my friends took or group through this module when I was in my early teens, perhaps 12 or 13. We made it through, but upon reading the module later I learned that he had been very lenient with us. We used a wish from a freed efreet to bypass a lot of the tomb, as I recall. I also remember getting blasted by lightning for tap-dancing on an altar, and losing a finger in the devil mouth, but the less said about those events the better.)

I'll try to avoid representing too much of what's in this reprint, but I will post up the map:

The original Tomb of Horrors map

It's a little faded, but for the most part this is a match for the tomb as published. There are some small differences, and at least one room in the published version that's not in the original, but it's very pleasing to note that the two are mostly identical.  I can't vouch for how closely the room descriptions match up, but my read-through of the tournament module all seemed very familiar.  If there are differences, they're in the minor details rather than the major ones.  I might do a close comparison when I get to covering the published module.

After laying out the basic premise, the module goes on to present some possible locations for the module. This is curious, because it can't have been of any relevance to players or DMs at the convention. Regardless of the reason, I appreciate the inclusion. The suggested locations are:

• The highest hill in the Egg of Coot.
• An island lying 100 miles east of Blackmoor.
• In the great desert west of the Wild Coast.
• On the border between the Paynim Kingdom and Perrunland.
• At the eastern edge of the Duchy of Geoff.
• In a swamp somewhere in the Wild Coast.

The published module has a different set of suggestions, and I believe that it eventually gets an official location in the Vast Swamp. I'm open to having the tomb's location move around, magically shifting from place to place.

As for Acererak, he's present in the adventure but I don't believe he is ever named. I'm pretty sure that the term "demi-lich" isn't used either, but he appears here as in the published module, as a floating skull that can drain souls.

Of interest are two phrases that appear during the topic of ways to destroy the lich. It mentions that "the highest Divine destroys it by touch" and that "a Mystic can destroy by mind battle". According to this reprint's introduction, both of these were classes planned for Supplement III: Eldritch Wizardry.  The Mystic was eventually used as fodder for the psionics system, so I'll happily use that title to describe early psionic characters. As for the "Divine", nothing more is said. I'm tempted just to leave it as read, meaning that a divine being can kill the demi-lich with a touch. It's unlikely to come up in play, but you never know.

After the adventure, there's a list of pre-generated PCs for the tournament: two magic-users, two clerics, one paladin, an elven f/m-u, a dwarf fighter, five human fighters, a human thief, a hobbit thief, and a half-elf f/m-u/t.  None of them are named. I'll probably just include them as adventurers who recently entered the tomb and never came back out.

Finally, the adventure includes 24 illustrations to be shown to the players as they explore the tomb. These aren't of the same quality as those in the published module, but by the standards of TSR art in 1975 they're quite good. Here's an example:

A wall carving in the Tomb of Horrors

With two versions of the Tomb now out there, I need to decide which will be included in my campaign. What I'll probably end up doing is using both: initially the tomb will be as described in the tournament module, but eventually it will get upgraded to the published version. It's fine, even Acererak has to do some renovations now and then.