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This is an ongoing series, detailing the adventures and happenings of five players running through the classic Tomb of Horrors, from the 1st edition of Dungeon and Dragons, converted to 5th edition.



We last left our heroes in a pit. Above them, the floor begins slowly to close. They are about to be trapped in this room! Otto levitates and just makes it out of the pit and into the heaven/hell painted room before the floor clinks shut. The levers snap back into neutral position. Otto presses them down again—the floor opens.

“Very nice,” Geth calls up. “You’ve figured out how to open the door. Maybe now we can figure out a way to get out of here?”



What follows is an episode of MacGyver. Using the two fifty-foot lengths of rope, the group over the course of about an hour devises the most complicated way imaginable to get out of the pit. Nothing is done the easy way. For instance, instead of simply tying the two ropes together to make one 100 ft length rope, they determine that Geth should hold onto both ends of the rope while dangling 50 ft in the air, with one rope tied to the levers above them. Geth will then continue to hold onto these ropes until the other players can climb up him (nevermind that Ikbaldi alone must weigh about 280 lbs). Chad goes so far as to polymorph into a Thrush in order to carry the rope up to the levers before someone finally realizes… Hey, can’t we just teleport out of here?

This starts a ten minute conversation about constructing a permanent teleportation circle (which takes something like a year of daily concentration checks) before someone remembers that Chad has dimensional door and can instantly bring the entire party up to the floor safely.

… except that was an error on Chad’s part. I’ve seen differing rules for it, and best I can figure is that while Dimensional door originally was supposed to be able to support multiple people, in the revised rules it can only take the caster and one other person. So that won’t work. Now they have to figure out if Otto can use magic like levitate to help them.

Long story short, they magic their way up, try the levers in the opposite direction (upwards) and find that a hidden vent in the ceiling opens up, leading to a crawlspace. The crawlspace is cramped, a little like that scene in Aliens where Bishop has to crawl through the maintenance pipe. It turns a corner, but where it turns, Geth notices a plug in the ceiling. The group stops in their tracks, convinced that this is a trap and lava or flesh eating beetles are going to come pouring down on them as they pass underneath it. Ikbaldi volunteers to go in front: “My bulk will block anything from coming past me,” he says. “While I burn alive from lava in my face, you guys can figure out a better plan. But the cleric better resurrect me!”

There is no answer. They totally forgot: Tiniya isn’t with them. She never came through the portal. They briefly wonder what happened to her, but decide that at least they don’t have to listen to her voice.

Tight as the crawlspace is, the heroes can’t maneuver themselves so that Ikabaldi is in front without leaving the area. So they back up into the painted room again. Then they decide they want to take a short rest. I tell them it will give them some healing opportunities and recover their exhaustion, but it won’t restore any spells, not until they take a long rest. They decide it is still worth it, and Chad casts wards on the crawl space so nothing can come disturb them through its ominuously shadowy opening (I think everyone is still thinking Aliens).

At that moment, Ikbaldi sits straight up as a familiar buzzing begins to build in his head. It’s Tiniya using another Sending spell, but something is different about the voice that speaks…

Tiniya: ‘Ello, chap! ‘Ow is it going for everyone there? Would you mind terribly if Oi joined you? The strangest thing has happened…

Tiniya’s Tale

Jump back an hour. Tiniya is spending her time alone in deep meditation, trying to pick out spells that will counter the darkness she feels in every corner of this tomb, when her eyes are forced open as if by the will of another being. She finds she is staring at a glint of silver on the floor, illuminated by her torch light. She walks over to it and sees a ring… with her name engraved in it! A strong aura of good emanates from the loop of silver, and she hears a voice in her head, the voice of her goddess Freyja, saying, “Pick it up. Put it on.”

Tiniya hesitates, but the voice of her goddess is so familiar and comforting in this dark place that she dare not disobey it, lest it leave her alone. She slips the ring on her finger.

A jolt of burning pain is followed by the smell of seared flesh, as the ring suddenly heats to burning temperatures and shrinks around her finger, embedding itself permanently into her flesh.

Me: You take no damage, but there is no way to remove the ring except by cutting off your finger. Tiniya: I raise my fists to the heavens and curse Acerak out loud for his trickery!

*commence shrieking in the character’s voice, until I hold up my hand* Me: You start to do that, but are surprised when the voice that comes out of your mouth is not your usual shriek, but rather a low intellectual voice with a British drawl. Tiniya: … what? Me: You hear a voice inside your head, it is Freyja’s voice. Freyja: My most talented disciple, so that you can better represent me to those who are not aware of my beauty and grace, I have given you a voice better suiting your intellect. This is a legendary ring of intelligence-seeming. Wear it forever in my honor!

Tiniya: I cast the spell of sending and try to connect with Ikbaldi…

And thus ends the tale of Tiniya’s annoying voice. From now on, the player speaks like a gentile British man, which is easier on his voice and easier on our ears, and still really fun for him to play. Chad in particular finds it hilarious.

Tiniya joins the rest of the party by going through the archway and they all take a short rest. Then they recommence their exploration of the crawlspace and discover the plug is not a trap but rather an entrance into a new chamber!

This room is painted to look as realistically as possible like a forest. If not for the echoes of your voices and the feel of hard stone under your feet, you would think you had walked into a forest. Three chests sit on stumps (cleverly carved stone) near the back of the room. As you move around the room, Chad’s dancing lights create the eerie sensation of movement in the trees…

This is another room whose original description is featureless grey stone. I wanted something more interesting, so I added the trees. Ikbaldi’s intelligence is low enough that he wanders over to them and tries to walk through the stone, bashing his nose against the painting in the process.

The chests (one wooden, one silver, one golden) are part of the original dungeon, though. Each is trapped differently, but the traps are nigh-undetectable because they are magical in nature. The group gets as far as realizing that there is dried blood around the edges of each chest, and a magical aura emanating from them, before Ikbaldi decides to open. every. single. one.

At least he does it one at a time.



The Chests!

Ikbaldi opens the wooden chest first. A second later, he feels a sharp pain as two scimitar blades appear out of thin air and embed themselves in his chest. As they withdraw, hands and arms begin to form off their hilts, and eventually a full skeleton is revealed, materializing out of the chest. It is large, huge compared to a normal human skeleton, and it cackles with mad laughter as it swings again and again at the party.

Solution: Kill it dead with Barbarian Rage. And fire.

A level 13 Barbarian is no joke, especially one on the totem path like Ikbaldi, who has resistance to every kind of damage except psychic. The skellie actually has quite high damage, roughly 44 slashing and necrotic damage if it hits with both its blades, but he is no match for a five person thrown-down involving (a) an angry barbarian, (b) a wizard who can cast fire and a cleric who can cast radiance, and © a rogue with a massive sneak attack dice pool. Geth finishes him off with a sneak attack (rogues are so much better in 5th edition, I love it).

The silver chest holds a clever trap. Inside it is another chest, and this is actually the chest that is trapped. Geth falls for this one, grabbing the little chest before checking for traps, and gets hit with some poison darts. He’s quick enough to avoid all but one of the darts, though, and life moves on.

Inside the second chest: Geth finds a ring of protection +1. He immediately marks it as the “loop of magical metal” from the riddle and begins to wonder how he will use it to progress, as the riddle suggests.

The golden chest holds snakes. More specifically, it holds a portal to the ever-loving snake dimension, and this translates as an endless swarm of snakes—they gain more hit points every turn to represent this, unless the chest is forced closed. The swarm immediately covers Ikbaldi and starts biting him. Others head for the next closest person, Tiniya, and swarm her.

Ikbaladi: Should I open the chest? Otto: Open the chest! Open the chest! Ikbaldi: I open the chest! *Snakes pour out* Otto: Close the chest! Close the chest!

Solution: this was my favorite solution. Otto casts force cage on the chest, blocking any further snakes from joining the hoard, though the chest continues to regurgitate them to the point that snakes are being crushed into goo against the walls of the force cage. The snakes that are already covering Tiniya and Ikbaldi are dealt with a little more… bluntly. Tiniya casts sacred flame on herself and Ikbaldi, killing the snakes and giving herself and the barbarian a nice (if painful) tan in the process.

And that’s pretty much it. Geth finds a secret door in one of the tree paintings and they enter another crawlspace, eventually coming out into a new hallway, the “second great hall” mentioned by the riddle. Otto (the player) has to head out to a dinner with his wife, so we call it there for the night.

Some Reflection…

Tomb of Horrors is supposed to make the players nervous, like every square inch of tile may be trapped. That first hallway is so loaded with traps (one of them, the Devil’s face, an instant death trap) that it basically trains the players to watch every step, roll perception on every wall, cast guard spells before each sleep. Seeing this in action was a taste of the old days of DnD, when death awaited past every door!



It was a little like watching someone actually count how many licks it takes to get to the center of a tootsie roll pop.

It’s great to see your players reacting to a dungeon and getting involved enough to proceed with care. But it is a thin line a DM walks between mood setting and repetitive gameplay. Trapping every bare inch of a dungeon might sound like a good way to make a place feel dangerous, but it also functions as a direct message to a player to tell them to game a certain way. You have to think, when you are running a game, in terms of problem and response. The entire game of DnD is that DMs present players with problems, and players respond with answers. The game, for the players, is entirely encapsulated in these answers, so one of the GMs jobs is to give the players reasons to make those responses as varied and interesting as possible.

The answer to “every inch of the dungeon is covered in traps” is “roll a die every five feet to look for and disarm traps.” This isn’t bad for a single hallway themed around that premise, but it gets olds for the players if you carry it on through an entire dungeon. I resolved to circumvent this in the next session and provide some new problems for my players to respond to. See the results in the next post, coming soon, called A Place Where Gods Die.