So yeah, Tomb of Horrors...

I've got more free time, but not the right kind of free time... so while getting back to a monthly game session is happening, I didn't end up having time to prep more dungeon.  So I hauled out some classics with bad reputations:

a. The Tomb of Horrors!  Reading through it, it seemed "tough but fair", all the traps are telegraphed because everything is a trap.  The pits in the first hall in particular advertise the trappiness.  Biff's player is usually pretty reckless, and even he adjusted quickly, grabbing the levers for dear life in anticipation of the floor dropping was showing the requisite level of paranoia.

b. In the Dungeons of the Slave Lords!  It's bullshit to strip players of all their stuff unwillingly, so I figured I'd see if they wanted to volunteer to go in naked.  They can't abide the idea of the BEC taxing them - I thought that a tax abatement would be the perfect bait.  My players weren't having it, slaughtering the BEC instead was more appealing, and they LOVE their equipment, despite rarely using it (mostly due to poor inventory control, the longer-standing characters have 10 pages of notes attached to them at this point).

Kudos to Gutboy for his obvious, ham-handed attempt at framing Ashkasar (a villain encountered in Guy Fullerton's "Many Gates of the Gann") for the BEC murders - it will totally work, because it's fun letting these things succeed and having ALL the unintended hilarious consequences possible happen.

It's funny seeing how different players reacted to the Tomb - Biff and Pai Mei's players could care less about character death, it's just a re-roll with a new character class, whereas Gutboy's player views survival as a victory condition.  He's even talking resurrecting or re-creating Rufus the talking dog, trying to get back to that "win" state.  We'll see how that plan works out, he hasn't given me any specifics.  He had Gutboy retreat, and played the pair of healers instead.

Speaking of which, for henchmen, I extracted all the "new class" articles from my Dragon Magazine Archive and printed & bound them, and I've got a table of them I use when I need to produce new henchmen.  There were the usual weird misfits (entertainers? geisha? Neanderthals?), but the Healer class is insanely OP.  I stated they were all fifth level, and then checked the capabilities - fifth level "Raise Dead Fully" (as opposed to partially?) spells available to them.  I'm not one to back down on giving excessive powers to players, it's fun to see them be misused (or, more rarely, correctly used), so they've got that going for them.  It might be enough to lure the party back into the Tomb.

Or maybe they'll go dungeoneering in the Anomalous Subsurface Environment instead - I need to do some writing.