If you run this adventure for your players, and you do not warn them in advance of what you're about to do to them, you are not just an asshole, you are, top to bottom, inside and out, the whole ass. David "Zeb" Cook was being mildly hyperbolic when he named a module Temple of Death back in 1983, but Jason "The Apocalypse Stone" Carl is just being honest.
Only...is he? Because if you run this adventure as written, I can guarantee two things:
- Your players will never finish it, so therefore...
- You will have just wasted whatever money you spent on it.
Understand this: it isn't a "your players won't finish it because the place is too deadly and they're certain to suffer a Total Party Kill" sense I'm referring to here, although I guess such a thing is theoretically possible. No, your players won't finish it because as soon as they realize the place is draining their prime requisite score every hour they spend inside, they'll 'Nope!' right out of both the dungeon and, indeed, your entire campaign. And you will deserve it for being a whole ass.
Look, I've been playing D&D for over thirty years. I've played in and run campaigns in everything from the original B/X set all the way up to 5th Edition. If there's one thing I know how to do, it's read an adventure and adjudicate it without needing to actually experience it for myself with a playtest. There are plenty of meat-grinders out there I am only too happy to run. I've been on both ends of "The Tomb of Horrors", I've played through "A Night Below", I've been the GM for "Tomb of the Lizard King" and "Return to the Tomb of Horrors". I've refereed encounters between PCs and epic-tier monsters like the Tarrasque and Zuggtmoy. And while all of those scenarios contain ways to savage a party, they are all, in theory, possible for well-armed PCs and experienced players to overcome.
Dungeon of Death, simply, isn't.
From the moment any living creatures (including the PCs) enter the titular dungeon, an effect called the Shadow Curse strikes them. This curse drains 1 point from each PC's prime requisite (Strength for warriors, Intelligence for mages, Wisdom for priests, or Dexterity for rogues) for every hour they remain within the dungeon. If any one of any creature's ability scores drops to 0, that creature dies immediately.
That's bad enough, but that's only half the curse. The other half is that the PC's don't recognize the ability score drain until it's culled a full quarter of that attribute. So if your Cleric has a Wisdom score of 16, they don't notice the effect on their Wisdom until it's down to 12.
And herein lies my biggest issue: this adventure requires the DM to deceive his or her players, denying them access to information they really should have about their characters. What's equally insidious is every class gets bonuses based on those attributes, so the DM will constantly be adjusting dice for the Fighter's reduced Strength, or the Thief's decreased Dexterity, but spellcasters get hurt the worst. In Second Edition, the number of spells a character knows, or the number of spells they can cast per day, is entirely dependent on their prime requisite. A decrease in Intelligence means removing a caster's access to one or more of their spells without explanation. The Cleric tries to cast Cure Serious Wounds only to be told by the DM, "Sorry, you don't seem to know that spell." If the caster hasn't lost enough ability points to realize they've lost ability points, there's no way for them to understand what's happening, and that quickly translates to player frustration. Fighters with high Strength will miss rolls their THAC0 stat tells them they should be making, and weapon damage will be equally affected. Thieves will be much less effective at everything.
Carl provides two means of countering the Shadow Curse: both the 'Bless' and 'Protection From Evil' spells completely negate the effect of the curse for their respective durations. That sounds nice, but it's actually no help at all. In 2E, 'Bless' has a duration of 6 rounds, which translates to six minutes of in-game time. 'Protection From Evil' lasts 3 rounds per caster level, making it marginally more effective, but since Dungeon of Death is meant for 7th to 9th level PCs, that means at most a PC can get 27 minutes' worth of protection from the Curse. What's more, 'Bless' and 'Protection From Evil' only provide their protection to a single target, which means you'd need one use for every PC which could be re-upped when the spells expire -- this is utterly beyond the ability of any party at this tier of play. None of the treasure or items found within the adventure are proof against the Shadow Curse, and there is only one small, easy-to-miss area where it is at all safe for delvers to rest without being subjected to its effects: the PCs either steamroll this adventure in one shot despite the hourly ability drain, or they leave the dungeon and never come back.
Fortunately for PCs who notice the ability drain and decide to beat feet out of the dungeon (hopefully they noticed before everybody set up camp for the night!), leaving the place allows ability scores so drained to return to normal over time: they recover at the rate of one point per day. Congratulations: you've pissed off your players, ensured their PCs will never set foot back in the dungeon, and wasted multiple days of in-game time while they recuperate, since no adventurer worth her Armor Class is going back out into the world at less than 100%.
Without the presence of the Shadow Curse, this would be a reasonably difficult adventure: the dungeon is filled with enough traps to make Acererak roll his eyes, and all the demons Tanar'ri infesting this place are more than capable of wrecking a mid-level group of adventurers, especially ones who cannot take the time to rest and recover spells. With it, however, the module becomes all-but-unwinnable, since players with any sense will be unwilling to subject their PCs to this level of abuse.
The Dungeon of Death is aptly named, but not for the reason Jason Carl intended. It's a complete bullshit scenario, fun neither to read nor to play. The only thing this place will kill is your players' desire to keep you as a DM, and in this case, I wouldn't blame them in the slightest.
One out of five enormous middle fingers to any PCs you expose to this nonsense.
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