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Return to the Tomb of Horrors
The nightmare of Acererak's tomb once again hungers for life!
Imagine a place of unspeakable evil. It was built upon hopelessness and filled with unending terror and pain. This loathsome place shattered the life of everyone who ventured near. But through tremendous sacrifice and heroism, over the course of many years, it was finally gutted and its foul creator destroyed.
Now imagine that the horror is beginning all over again.
The sinister wizard Acererak took great pains to safeguard his tomb. It took many years, and many more lives, before his evil was finally laid to rest. But though the demilich is gone, he is not forgotten. Others who would become as he was have traveled to the site of Acererak's tomb seeking the secrets of mastery over death. Slowly these pilgrims gathered, eventually building in the shadow of the tomb itself a community dedicated to the dark arts: Skull City.
But even these twisted necromancers have no inkling of the true evil that swells and crackles beneath their feet.
This boxed adventure contains:
A 160-page adventure book;
A 32-page book of illustrations to be shown to players;
Player handouts, including an adventurer's diary filled with clues;
A 16-page book of maps and monsters;
And a reprinted facsimile of the original Tomb of Horrors adventure module as first published in 1978.
Return to the Tomb of Horrors is an epic adventure for characters of levels 13-16.
Imagine a place of unspeakable evil. It was built upon hopelessness and filled with unending terror and pain. This loathsome place shattered the life of everyone who ventured near. But through tremendous sacrifice and heroism, over the course of many years, it was finally gutted and its foul creator destroyed.
Now imagine that the horror is beginning all over again.
The sinister wizard Acererak took great pains to safeguard his tomb. It took many years, and many more lives, before his evil was finally laid to rest. But though the demilich is gone, he is not forgotten. Others who would become as he was have traveled to the site of Acererak's tomb seeking the secrets of mastery over death. Slowly these pilgrims gathered, eventually building in the shadow of the tomb itself a community dedicated to the dark arts: Skull City.
But even these twisted necromancers have no inkling of the true evil that swells and crackles beneath their feet.
This boxed adventure contains:
A 160-page adventure book;
A 32-page book of illustrations to be shown to players;
Player handouts, including an adventurer's diary filled with clues;
A 16-page book of maps and monsters;
And a reprinted facsimile of the original Tomb of Horrors adventure module as first published in 1978.
Return to the Tomb of Horrors is an epic adventure for characters of levels 13-16.
223 pages, Boxed set
First published July 13, 1998
1 person is currently reading
48 people want to read
About the author
Bruce R. Cordell
166 books124 followersBruce R. Cordell authored books for Dungeons & Dragons over the course of 4 editions (2nd Edition through 5th Edition D&D). These days, he’s a senior designer for Monte Cook Games, LLC designing Numenera , Gods of the Fall, and The Strange. Also a novel author, his credits include several titles set in the Forgotten Realms. Bruce’s tenth novel, Myth of the Maker, is just out from Angry Robot Books:
http://brucecordell.blogspot.com/2017...
http://brucecordell.blogspot.com/2017...
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 14, 2012
Return to the Tomb of Horrors really has no right to be as damned impressive as it is. I mean, we're talking about a sequel/expansion/update to one of the most iconic first-edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons adventures ever printed. "S1: The Tomb of Horrors" has its reputation to consider, you understand. It's the corpse grinder, the sanity smasher, the adventure that invented the concept of the TPK* and gleefully pitted every last trick in the GM's dirty little playbook against the wit, cunning and rules-lawyering of experienced players and their (hopefully just as experienced) characters. Gary Gygax was not messing around when he unleashed this grim, little (twelve pages, not counting the illustration booklet) monstrosity on the world. You either survived it or (much more commonly) you didn't, and that was that. What more, honestly, could revisiting this cruel and inhumane death trap accomplish? Was there really enough there to warrant an entire boxed set? Who the hell did Bruce Cordell think he was, tackling a project like this?
We'll get to the answers to questions one and two in a bit. I can't answer that third question though. All I can say is this is the slickest, sickest, most vicious official campaign I've read in my entire life, and after reading it my opinion was firmly cemented that Cordell is a freakin' demigod of D&D design. I don't even know where to begin here.
Sensible writing teachers always say to start at the beginning, so we'll open with the opening of the adventure, which involves the players getting dumped right into an awful situation as the tavern of the small coastal town they're staying in gets a horrifying visit from some undead creatures. What unfolds from there is a mystery the characters must slowly peel back, layer by layer, as they draw closer and closer to the vile heart of the evil behind everything. I'm trying very, very hard not to spoil anything here--no player deserves to go into this one with advanced warning--but let's be honest: with a product calling itself "Return to the Tomb of Horrors" you know that Acererak, the horrifying demi-lich from the original, is going to be masterminding the whole thing.
In the original adventure (a copy of which comes with the boxed set, and serves as the mid-way point of the campaign), Acererak was a fairly placid opponent: he'd built his dungeon of death traps and was content to sit all by his undead self in the treasure room of his tomb, waiting to see if anybody was strong enough, smart enough, or lucky enough to make it into his presence. Ah, but that was then. Now Acererak's getting more ambitious by the day: he's got a plan that could transform him from an already obscenely-powerful undead wizard into a deity capable of visiting ruin on a cosmic scale. Any volunteers to go obliterate one of the greatest evils known to Greyhawk? Wait, where's everyone going?
Between the unlucky party and the demi-lich, there's not only his tomb. A cult of necromancers has sprouted up around the tomb, studying the kind of Dark Arts that would give Voldemort the willies. There's a couple of survivors from the last group that tried to raid Acererak's tomb years ago, a gorgeously atmospheric journal kept by their party cleric to read, a group of giants that will need dealing with, a trip to a plane that makes Ravenloft look like Candyland, enormous amounts of undead to be pacified, and much, much more. There's call for brute force as well as observation and deduction on the parts of the players and if introduced skillfully it's entirely possible for the players to get swept up into the storyline for several days of playtime before they have any inkling what they're in for.
The artwork in the book is excellent, featuring plenty of beautiful pen-and-ink renderings of a sample party encountering the same things players will (and usually suffering some awful fate as a result). When this nameless group of heroes isn't being portrayed, the artwork reflects the surroundings, notable characters the players may run into, the after-effects of traps, encounters with monsters, or sometimes just vague and menacing bits included solely for atmosphere.
This adventure is not for faint-hearted players: Cordell's update to the already violent original includes themes of slavery, necromancy, murder, torture, vivisection and other acts of unrepentant cruelty. The characters are meant to be beacons of hope for the world, not a bunch of squabbling backstabbers; parties who can't get their acts together and work as a team have no hope of even reaching the titular Tomb, much less finishing the storyline. This is as grim and unforgiving as AD&D ever gets. Mature and serious players (and Game Masters) only, please.
Good D&D adventures are fun to read. Great D&D adventures are fun to run. Amazing D&D adventures are both. Cordell's update to Gary's classic killer dungeon is one of the nastiest supplements ever put on paper, and it will horrify even the most jaded of players. There's little more you could ask of such an undertaking. Well worth the price of admission.
*TPK = Total Party Kill, a situation in which every character in the adventure is killed, driven insane, banished to another dimension or otherwise removed from play.
We'll get to the answers to questions one and two in a bit. I can't answer that third question though. All I can say is this is the slickest, sickest, most vicious official campaign I've read in my entire life, and after reading it my opinion was firmly cemented that Cordell is a freakin' demigod of D&D design. I don't even know where to begin here.
Sensible writing teachers always say to start at the beginning, so we'll open with the opening of the adventure, which involves the players getting dumped right into an awful situation as the tavern of the small coastal town they're staying in gets a horrifying visit from some undead creatures. What unfolds from there is a mystery the characters must slowly peel back, layer by layer, as they draw closer and closer to the vile heart of the evil behind everything. I'm trying very, very hard not to spoil anything here--no player deserves to go into this one with advanced warning--but let's be honest: with a product calling itself "Return to the Tomb of Horrors" you know that Acererak, the horrifying demi-lich from the original, is going to be masterminding the whole thing.
In the original adventure (a copy of which comes with the boxed set, and serves as the mid-way point of the campaign), Acererak was a fairly placid opponent: he'd built his dungeon of death traps and was content to sit all by his undead self in the treasure room of his tomb, waiting to see if anybody was strong enough, smart enough, or lucky enough to make it into his presence. Ah, but that was then. Now Acererak's getting more ambitious by the day: he's got a plan that could transform him from an already obscenely-powerful undead wizard into a deity capable of visiting ruin on a cosmic scale. Any volunteers to go obliterate one of the greatest evils known to Greyhawk? Wait, where's everyone going?
Between the unlucky party and the demi-lich, there's not only his tomb. A cult of necromancers has sprouted up around the tomb, studying the kind of Dark Arts that would give Voldemort the willies. There's a couple of survivors from the last group that tried to raid Acererak's tomb years ago, a gorgeously atmospheric journal kept by their party cleric to read, a group of giants that will need dealing with, a trip to a plane that makes Ravenloft look like Candyland, enormous amounts of undead to be pacified, and much, much more. There's call for brute force as well as observation and deduction on the parts of the players and if introduced skillfully it's entirely possible for the players to get swept up into the storyline for several days of playtime before they have any inkling what they're in for.
The artwork in the book is excellent, featuring plenty of beautiful pen-and-ink renderings of a sample party encountering the same things players will (and usually suffering some awful fate as a result). When this nameless group of heroes isn't being portrayed, the artwork reflects the surroundings, notable characters the players may run into, the after-effects of traps, encounters with monsters, or sometimes just vague and menacing bits included solely for atmosphere.
This adventure is not for faint-hearted players: Cordell's update to the already violent original includes themes of slavery, necromancy, murder, torture, vivisection and other acts of unrepentant cruelty. The characters are meant to be beacons of hope for the world, not a bunch of squabbling backstabbers; parties who can't get their acts together and work as a team have no hope of even reaching the titular Tomb, much less finishing the storyline. This is as grim and unforgiving as AD&D ever gets. Mature and serious players (and Game Masters) only, please.
Good D&D adventures are fun to read. Great D&D adventures are fun to run. Amazing D&D adventures are both. Cordell's update to Gary's classic killer dungeon is one of the nastiest supplements ever put on paper, and it will horrify even the most jaded of players. There's little more you could ask of such an undertaking. Well worth the price of admission.
*TPK = Total Party Kill, a situation in which every character in the adventure is killed, driven insane, banished to another dimension or otherwise removed from play.
August 1, 2021
Return to the Tomb of Horrors is an incredible sequel/expansion on the original Gary Gygax module. Bruce Cordell does an amazing job on keeping the spirit of the deadly and sometime plain ridiculous traps of the original, but also adding new and thrilling characters and scenarios. A fun time through and through (maybe not for the dead/cursed characters, but still).
Read
August 24, 2022Skimmed a lot of the back half of this once the tone became clear. There's certainly plenty of grim inventiveness, but the whole thing is so unrelentingly bleak and horrible; it'd take a very particular set of players to make it through this without getting frustrated or bored, not to mention disheartened at having to roll new characters so frequently, there being new ways to die on basically every page.
I read this because I've liked some of Cordell's other work, but the design principles of the original Tomb and this sequel are at odds with the way that I approach the game.
I read this because I've liked some of Cordell's other work, but the design principles of the original Tomb and this sequel are at odds with the way that I approach the game.
June 19, 2024
One of the best AD & D modules ever. Need to rewrite it into a 5e moduoe.
April 13, 2017
A very interesting campaign take that includes the original tomb of horrors. I found this to be evocative, although it is very grisly and dark.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews