Tomb of Horrors - Reception

Reception

This is a D&D adventure created in 1978 for the purposes of testing the wit and fortitude of adventuring parties at game tournaments. "Testing" is used here in the same sense as the sentence "We'll be testing the dog for rabies." Let's just say the subject is not expected to survive the procedure.

Tomb of Horrors was ranked the 3rd greatest Dungeons & Dragons adventure of all time by Dungeon magazine in 2004. Dungeon Master for Dummies, which lists Tomb of Horrors as one of the ten best classic adventures, posits that many of the adventure's traps would kill a character just for making poor choices. Lawrence Schick, in his 1991 book Heroic Worlds, calls the adventure "A very difficult scenario".

Don Turnbull reviewed Tomb of Horrors in issue No. 13 of the magazine White Dwarf, and gave the module a rating of 10 out of 10. Turnbull commented on the adventure's difficulty, noting that the dungeon is "sprinkled extensively with subtle, insidious and carefully laid traps, and it will be a fortunate adventurer who manages to avoid them". He felt that the illustration booklet would add a great deal to the adventure's atmosphere and felt that the pre-generated character roster was useful. Turnbull noted that the module is "very hard and will be hard for the DM to learn in advance, though this is an essential prerequisite of running it properly for it is much more subtle than the G or D modules", and he said that this module has in common with those modules an "excellent format, for instance, and the comprehensive way in which the scenario is introduced. TSR's high quality has not been in any way compromised, and in S1 it has even been improved upon."

Wayne MacLaurin of SF Site describes the module as "a classic" and a "must have" for gamers, saying that when he played the game in high school, most of his group's characters quickly died. MacLaurin explains that Tomb of Horrors is a classic not because of its difficulty, but because it was the first module that did not involve killing large amounts of monsters; it was a "collection of puzzles and maps." Its focus on traps rather than monsters was a surprise to gamers at the time. One technique some players used to get past the deathtraps was to drive cattle ahead of them, which Lore Sjöberg of Wired described as "a bit less than heroic", noting that in Lord of the Rings Gandalf did not send "50 head of cattle into the Mines of Moria to serve as Balrog bait."

Tomb of Horrors has also influenced later Dungeons & Dragons products. Jason Bulmahn used the module, as well as Indiana Jones, as inspiration for some of the traps in the 2007 D&D supplement Dungeonscape. The computer role-playing game Icewind Dale, developed by Black Isle Studios, was influenced by the module; Black Isle Studios division director Feargus Urquhart said, "We wanted something that reminded everyone of their first foray into dungeons like the Tomb of Horrors, with traps around every corner, and the undead crawling out of the walls."

Tomb of Horrors is mentioned several times in the novel Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, which is set in a virtual reality world created by a man who was a fan of the module.