Return to The Uncalled Four D&D Sessions
Essentially, the party was in the Averoigne adventure from X2 Castle Amber, but several people had to cancel at the last minute. I didn't have anything prepared, and knowing that S1 Tomb of Horrors can be fairly deadly, we pulled out the AD&D rulebooks and played with pencil and paper. It went fairly well for not being prepared.
The next day, I sent an overview to the whole party, along with images, in case they were curious what had happened. I find it kind of funny that 15 months later when we played with the whole party, some of these details were forgotten (or may never have been read in the first place). However, specifically with Steve, he remembered some details but chose to roll dice to determine actions in Aug 2025, since it was a different character. This, of course, resulted in his character's death.
So below is the summary I sent to the whole group in June of 2024:
To be clear, we did not use your existing characters from Castle Amber. The module comes with pre-generated characters. Steve played 2 characters: Magic Mike, a 14th level Magic User, and Peter the Paladin (12th level fighter). Alisha also played 2 characters: Bob the Cleric (14th level), and Dex the Dwarf who is a multi-class 7th level Fighter and 8th level Thief.
The group started at the hill of the tomb, which has stones on the top arranged in such a way that it looks like eyes, nose and mouth of a skull (Gary Gygax's art is actually really poor for this one).
They located a ledge of rock on one side with plants overgrown underneath the ledge. Starting in the middle and poking through the plants with a spear helped them locate a blocked entrance.
They cleared enough rock to crawl in. They saw a hallway with a stone floor, with some stones a dark red creating a winding pathway. The walls and ceiling are covered with plaster with frescoes painted on them.
Using a 10 foot pool, they moved carefully down the hallway, tapping the floor ahead to look for pit traps. They found and avoided 6 of them overall through the whole session, some on the path and others off to the side.
Their first stop was at a painting of 2 jackals holding a box between them. The box was real, Dex found a poison needle trap and disarmed it. Inside the box was a lever. Touching the lever opened up one of the pit traps, no one fell in. It was deep with spikes at the bottom.
Next, the painting of a door with a monster reaching through bars in a barred window ended up as actually hiding a real door. They broke the plaster all apart, unlocked the door, and entered a room with a 4-armed Gargoyle. They defeated the Gargoyle, but not before Mike lost half his hit points.
They then explored a series of 10 ft x 10 ft rooms, which just led to a false door dead end. They searched and didn't find any secret doors. They found another dead end 10 ft x 10 ft room that they searched for secret doors, but any time someone touched a wall, a crossbow trap sent bolts flying and injuring people. They didn't stay in the room to search more.
They decided to go down the original hallway further, reaching the end, where the red stone path split between an archway filled with mists and a large demon head with mouth open wide.
They experimented with the demon head. Peter the Paladin put a 10 foot pole into the demon mouth and didn't find any resistance. The demon mouth was pitch black, and he couldn't see the pole once it passed the mouth. He stopped short of putting the whole pole (or his hand or arm) in. When he pulled the pole back out, only the part that hadn't been pushed in remained, appearing to have been chopped off, teleported somewhere, or disintegrated.
They experimented with the archway, touching different colored stones in different sequences, until they found one that changed the archway. The mists disappeared and they could see the pathway continuing on the other side. When Magic Mike (I think) stepped through, he disappeared. The rest of the party followed, rather than split the party.
They found themselves teleported into a 10 ft x 10 ft room with no apparent exits. There were 3 levers on the wall, each lever could be moved up, down, left, or right. After playing with them a little bit, they moved all three upwards at the same time, which opened a trap door in the ceiling. Dex climbed up and found a narrow passage that could only be crawled through. The others followed. Dex came to a turn in the passage and saw a passage that went vertical above him for 10 ft. He climbed it, and discovered a secret door at the top. Everyone followed into a new room with no exits.
This room had 3 chests in it, one made of gold, one of silver, and one of wood. They decided on opening the wood chest. They discovered it was unlocked and not trapped. They opened it and an animated giant's skeleton with 2 scimitars jumped out.
...and that's when we ran out of time. Maybe Bob, Dex, Mike, and Peter will return another day.
I'll send drawings and a map. Steve and Alisha haven't seen all of these yet.
