^{Originally published on Sidekickcast.com September 23, 2015}

Ah, Tomb of Horrors – one of the few classic D&D adventures that none of my players ever want me to run. Published in 1978 for the first edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons game, this was a tournament module designed to be played at conventions where they could chew up multiple groups and spit them out.

Somewhere along the way, folks decided to play the Tomb at their home games, where there are only a handful of players…and unless they have a perfect combination of callousness, paranoia, and sheer craziness, they’re all going to die.

So let’s hit the spoiler alerts now: here are just a few of the grisly ways that the Tomb of Horrors will totally kill your PCs.

1: The First Room

Yes, the first damned room. Let’s review: Tomb of Horrors is an adventure for PCs of 10^th to 14^th level. This was made in the days when bonus hit points from Constitution were rare and you didn’t get the benefit of maximum hit points at 1^st level. A 10^th level thief, who is likely to take point to check for traps, probably has 35 hit points. If that thief misses the trap in area #1, this happens:

If the roof is prodded with any force, or if the doors are opened, the roof of the tunnel collapses and inflicts 5d10 hit points of damage upon each character inside it, with no saving throw.

So yeah…open the door, and there’s an outside chance your thief just died. Buckle your seat belts, folks.

2: The Green Devil

One of the most infamous traps in the entire tomb is the green devil statue. Exploring the tomb, you run across a red tiled path that leads to a statue with a gaping mouth large enough to fit a person. In a dungeon full of teleportation gateways and secret portals, it isn’t out of the ordinary to think that maybe you can enter the green devil’s mouth – especially since another part of the dungeon establishes that these portals are how fresh air gets into the tomb.

If you do go in, though, you’re dead. There a sphere of annihilation inside the devil’s mouth that instantly kills your character. Worse, it leaves no trace of the body, meaning that your group has no idea that you got disintegrated instead of just being teleported to another area of the dungeon.

To be fair, there is a hint that you should avoid the colors green and red in this dungeon. All you need to do is find and unravel an obscure puzzle at the beginning of the dungeon…in a room where you also have to contend with poison spikes and a deep pit trap.

3: All the Traps that Leave You Naked and Alone

D&D characters rely on their gear. Fighters can’t fight without their swords, wizards can’t cast spells without their components, thieves can’t disarm traps without tools, and clerics can’t turn under without a holy symbol. How helpful, then, that a number of the traps in this dungeon strip you of all your gear and teleport you to a random room where you are cut off from your fellow adventurers.

If you’re lucky, you wind up naked and alone with all of your gear teleported to the tomb’s lower levels. If you’re not lucky, you die instantly and wind up as a naked zombie destined to fight your friends. Poor Wembley the Wizard touched the wrong orb and then had to attack us with nothing but his fists and his shriveled manhood. What an inglorious way to go.

Bonus points to the trap that reverses your alignment, changes your sex, and only allows you to be restored by going through it again. When you steps back through the portal, you go back to normal…except that you’re naked, alone, and separated from the party.

4: Nothing Stops the Juggernaut

One of the corridors in the dungeon releases a sleeping gas trap that has the following description:

The sleep gas is released soundlessly by the opening of the doors. In the first round, it fills the corridor north of the doors; any PC in that area at the end of the round is affected. In the second round, it begins to fill the corridor to the west, filling one 10-foot square per round for the next three rounds. Any PCs who occupy an area affected by the gas collapse in slumber for 2d4 turns.

See the part about how you’re allowed to make a saving throw against this trap? No, you don’t because this is Tomb of Horrors and saving throws are for pussies. Elves and those who randomly hold their breath after somehow detecting this corridor full of colorless, odorless sleeping gas are immune. Unfortunately, all non-elves get crushed by a wooden juggernaut that careens down the corridor, automatically killing any sleeping characters in its path.

5: The Demilich

Tomb of Horrors is the adventure that introduced the demilich to D&D. Throughout the adventure, the PCs believe that they are infiltrating the tomb of Acererak the lich. In reality, Acererak is no longer a lich but instead a demilich, which sounds like something weaker but is in fact more deadly.

A demilich is just a skull and a pile of dust, but when you disturb it the skull rises and sucks out your soul. If you’ve ever played Baldur’s Gate II and run across Kangaxx the demilich, you know the frustration of fighting one of these things – except that the monster had existed for 20+ years by the time that video game came out, so you might at least have some familiarity with it. In Tomb of Horrors, this was brand new. You thought you were done with the dungeon, then a random skull pops up and sucks your soul into its teeth.

These are just a few of the ways that Tomb of Horrors kills characters. There are secret doors that can only be accessed through pit traps, and about a million deadly illusions that can only be seen through if you solve a puzzle early on to gain access to a gem of seeing.

I’ve long wanted to run this module as-written using a conga line of different PCs so that a new one can step up for each one that falls. Unfortunately, my players prefer games where they survive multiple encounters, so I’m left to marvel from afar at the wonderful combination of dickishness and death that is this module.

_{Images: Wizards of the Coast}