S1 Tomb of Horrors

At last we come to the very first D&D adventure / module, Tomb of Horrors - at least I think it's the very first module.  Some sources I've read claim the giant series (G1, G2, and G3) came first, but my research shows that this module was first published in June of 1978 while the G series was not published until July.  In any case this module had first been created for an Origins convention a few years earlier, so I'll give it the edge for that if nothing else.  And for those who haven't read my very first post, I'm only counting items published by TSR themselves, so I'm not counting Palace of the Vampire Queen, which was in fact the very first published module for D&D, but published by another company.

In any case, this is one of the most famous and infamous modules of all time.  Designed by Gary Gygax to test the mettle of some of the best players/characters in his group, such as Rob Kuntz's Robilar and his son Ernie's Tenser, it is without a doubt a character killer.  Death awaits characters in so many forms it's simultaneously evil, unfair, and hilarious.  It's best summed up by a note in the module on one of the traps: "Cruel, but most entertaining for the DM".  Let's walk through it together:

• My first thought as I examine the module is surprise that TSR's very first module would be a high level module.  It seemed to me (perhaps unfairly so - we'll see in the future) that in 2nd edition TSR developed an allergy to high level adventures, and it was rare that they printed one for characters above, say, 12th level.  But you'd better bring out the big guns if you want to survive this tomb.  The module includes a list of pre-generated characters for players to use, and all of them are high level, have crazy good stats (like 17, 14, 15, 18, 16, 17), and come with some very nice magical items.
• There is shockingly little combat in the module.  As Gary says at the beginning, "THIS IS A THINKING PERSON'S MODULE" (emphasis his).  It's far more about tricks and traps than tough combat encounters, which I appreciate, although I can only imagine how many fighters were frustrated as they sat around with nothing to do while the mages and clerics cast divination spells.
• This module highlights one of the biggest problems of D&D and the modules written for it - spellcasters have too much agency and so the modules have to cheat in order to keep things interesting.  For instance, spellcasters can travel astrally or ethereally, and this normally would be a great boon to figuring out a labyrinth like this.  But since that would make things too easy, Gary throws in a little note that any characters doing so have a chance each round to attract the attention of a demon.  It's artificial and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.  To this day I still don't really understand the thought process behind spell progression in D&D.  It gives away far too powerful effects at far too low a level, which then creates problems like this.
• A related problem is how this module rewrites rules on the fly, another practice I find incredibly distasteful.  As a player I expect the rules to work just as it says they work in the Player's Handbook.  If my character has a racial power for discovering secret doors, then I expect it to work as written.  Similarly, if a spell says that it detects X, then I expect that it will always detect X every time, unless another rule that I have access to says that in some circumstances it does not.  But this module just makes up its own rules on the fly, changing things up on the player without informing them.  There's a secret door that racial secret detection powers just don't work on.  There's another door that can't be discovered by any kind of magic, because the module just says by fiat that it can't.  There are other encounters where it states that only certain spells can be used to deal with the situation, even though as a player there may be several other spells that would seem to be useful.  To me this is a symptom of the all-or-nothing nature of D&D spells.  Take for instance the Detect Magic spell - it detects all magic all the time without fail, so whenever a situation arises where the DM needs to hide the magical nature of something, they have a problem.  Instead, Detect Magic should be a spell with merely a chance to detect magic - that chance depending on the power of the wizard casting it and the power of the wizard who cast the magic to be detected.  Thus when faced with the magic of a powerful opponent (such as a demi-lich), a character might in fact fail to detect the magic, and there is a plausible explanation as to why, instead of the module simply declaring "Detect Magic doesn't work on this" with no other motivation than the module needs to make things harder for the players.

This module seems to me to be a test of endurance more than anything else - a gauntlet of hideously lethal traps the players must wade through until they get to the final, ultra-hard confrontation with Acererak himself.  It's a far cry from the kinds of adventures we expect today, and is the "Nintendo hard" equivalent for roleplaying games.  It's a tremendous piece of roleplaying history that I'm glad to have finally experienced.