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It may not be terribly helpful - I planned on running this but gave up midway through prepping/placing in Golarion.
By way of warning. Though: have you looked over the maps? Particularly some of the later ones were pretty much unusable to me. It was a real shame as I was really excited by the concept and the choice of adventures. There were maps where I couldn't find the room numbers. :(
I'm still in prep mode. I plan on dropping Tamoachan or heavily modifying it since I don't really want to bring in an aztec feel to the campaign. It just feels off as far as flavor goes. Mostly, I'm thinking of renaming it Castle *mumble since I forget the name and I don't have it in front of me at the moment* that is on the picture of white plume mountain and I'll repopulate it with monsters and keep the map as is.
I've started to run "The Sunless Citadel" for my wife and kids, but it's going to be quite a while before we get to "Tomb of Horrors," so I don't have much to say on that one specifically.
By way of warning. Though: have you looked over the maps? Particularly some of the later ones were pretty much unusable to me. It was a real shame as I was really excited by the concept and the choice of adventures. There were maps where I couldn't find the room numbers. :(
My main beef with the book (as a whole) was that too many of the maps were reproduced at a size that seems guaranteed to induce eye strain in the poor GMs squinting at the tiny details while flipping back and forth between maps and main text. I ended up copying the maps by hand into a gridded composition book so that I would have more readable copies to refer to during play. (Doing that also forced me to simplify the maps to something that I could draw on the battle grid in a reasonable amount of time, which has been a big help, too.)
I don't recall any missing room numbers offhand, though some of the maps are definitely too small and/or busy to be user-friendly. (The overall map for "Dead in Thay" is guilty of both.) What maps did you have the most problems with, Steve?
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Getting prepped to run this and I was wondering if anyone else has yet and what their experiences were so I know what to look out for and expect. What level was the party? Were there many deaths? Any oddball encounters that went unexpectedly? That kind of stuff....
I agree about the map comments. I'm half way through running The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan. With 5th Ed making it so difficult to kill PCs it feels much less of a meat grinder than it did when I ran this adventure shortly after it came out in the 80's with 1st Ed AD&D rules. It does help to have my original module on hand because many of re pictures were not reproduced.
In short, I'm happy with it so far. It does represent an old style of play that I've moved on from so I'm not certain how soon I'll run any of the other adventures in the book. But it's fun to revisit.
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It may not be terribly helpful - I planned on running this but gave up midway through prepping/placing in Golarion.
By way of warning. Though: have you looked over the maps? Particularly some of the later ones were pretty much unusable to me. It was a real shame as I was really excited by the concept and the choice of adventures. There were maps where I couldn't find the room numbers. :(
I agree. I'm lucky in that I still have the original maps from the original adventures. If you don't then google image search will turn most of them up.
I don't recall any missing room numbers offhand, though some of the maps are definitely too small and/or busy to be user-friendly. (The overall map for "Dead in Thay" is guilty of both.) What maps did you have the most problems with, Steve?
The Giant series was the one that made me put the book away and go somewhere else. Particularly the ones with darker background floors (a couple of the fire giant dungeons, from memory), but even the ones with a grey background were difficult enough for me to give up on them.
To be clear - I doubt there's any missing numbers. I just have poor eyesight (exacerbated by middle age) and I couldn't find them.
The roll20 version of Yawning Portal has all the maps set up in battle map form with tokens and such that are at large size, so they are way easier to navigate. I agree that the maps in the book are way too small in most cases.
I've been running Tomb of Horrors on roll20, and I decided to have them use 9th level characters because there was nothing about it that really seemed like it required really high level characters, even though the DM advice suggests otherwise and they put it at the end. We've played three sessions. The group has been cautious and fairly smart about their exploration, and so far I have not yet killed a character- so I think that one is over-hyped in terms of difficulty, particularly in the 5e adaptation.
It may not be terribly helpful - I planned on running this but gave up midway through prepping/placing in Golarion.
By way of warning. Though: have you looked over the maps? Particularly some of the later ones were pretty much unusable to me. It was a real shame as I was really excited by the concept and the choice of adventures. There were maps where I couldn't find the room numbers. :(
Sorry - I only just read the title properly. My comments weren't about the Tomb of Horrors adventure. (The ToH map isn't hard to use at all).
I don't know how I missed that bit of the thread title. :o
The encounter with the stone juggernaut in 23a doesn't work for me. Its supposed to fill the entire hall and crush everything it rolls over, but if it filled the hall, how could it possible make a 90 degree turn round a corner, which it supposed to do. I'll change that part if my characters get there.
One thing to note is that unless a few key secret doors are found, the characters can really progress in the adventure- areas 15 and 17, as well as the door in the bottom of the pit trap that connects links the hall by area 15-16 to the halls where areas 17-18 are.
I think it is important to keep in mind that this was originally intended as a tournament adventure. It was assumed that most party's would become stuck and not make it through the entire dungeon. Only the groups that really take their time to inspect things super carefully (e.g searching for secret doors at the bottom of pit traps) are going to be able to navigate the dungeon to its conclusion. It think it's an easy dungeon for players to get frustrated with if the DM isn't careful about how they run it. I suggest giving them a wand of secrets to help out.
I think it is important to keep in mind that this was originally intended as a tournament adventure. It was assumed that most party's would become stuck and not make it through the entire dungeon.
This is a very important point to keep in mind. Often the winner was the party that made it the furthest before they died. TPKs for many of Gygax's early stuff was normal. His idea of success in an adventure and mine didn't always align. LOL