Tomb of Horrors, My Beloved

22 May, 2026

It's one of my favourite dungeons, and not for the reason you think

Tomb of Horrors is a classic dungeon from the DM vs Player era of TTRPGs. It's a meatgrinder designed by a twisted lich who just wants to see people suffer in the pursuit of treasure. This kind of ruthless, adversarial gameplay is what the dungeon is known for, and people either love it or hate it.

I love this dungeon, but not for that reason. I love it because it encourages problem solving, not puzzle solving. This also means I think it's an excellent dungeon for beginners, contrary to what you'd expect, and I've mocked up a version of the dungeon that makes it even better for that purpose.

But before we get to that, let's talk some more about puzzles and problems.

Puzzles & Problems

What's the difference? Puzzles have one solution and one method of arriving at it. Problems have multiple solutions, and often multiple ways of achieving them.

Riddles are examples of puzzles. "What has three hands and a face but no brain?" is a riddle. It has one solution (a clock) and there is a central a-ha to solving it. If my player character was asked to solve this riddle, either I'd solve it as a player or I'd make an INT check for my character solve it. It is an atomic problem with no other means of arriving at a solution.

For contrast, let's see an example of a problem. Someone invisible is hiding in a room, and I want to reveal them. I might:

• Use my Scroll of Reveal Invisible Creatures (if I have one)
• Throw a bag of flour into the room (but what if there are open flames?)
• Empty a bucket of water so I can see the invisible figure's footprints (if they're standing on the floor)
• Swing a long, heavy object around on a rope (risking damaging the room's contents)

See how a simple problem leads to multiple solutions, each of which has its own unique pros and cons? This is excellent because TTRPGs uniquely enable freeform problem solving, unlike videogames or boardgames which suffer from needing all their solutions hardcoded in.

Tomb of Horrors: Problems, not Puzzles

So many of the encounters in Tomb of Horrors beg of you to think that they're puzzles when they are actually, secretly, problems. Combine this with how much the dungeon punishes mistakes, and you have an excellent recipe for teaching players to think critically about the world around them (instead of just thinking about a puzzle on the terms you give it to them).

Even just at the entrances to the Tomb we see multiple excellent examples of this.

First of all, there are multiple fake entrances. Both of them feature a purely mechanical trap which can be detected by multiple means. You can avoid both traps and identify that the doors at the end of the corridors don't lead anywhere through a variety of means, and if you fail to do so you get an immediate introduction to the consequences of failing to think critically.

Then you find the real entrance, and you're immediately presented with a new problem. Snaking through the mosaic covering the floor is a path of red tiles. It's so salient it screams "I am a trap!", but what is the trap? Do you need to follow the path to avoid the traps, or avoid it?

The answer is neither, there are traps on and off the path. Illusory tiles throughout the hallway lead to spiked pits which deal heavy damage if you fall in. So how do you avoid them?

Any way you want!

• Use magic to dispel the illusions or see through them or see through walls
• Spill anything from water to ball bearings across the floor and see where they fall through the tiles
• Sweep the floor in front of you with a 10ft pole or a length of rope
• Get a familiar to probe your path before you walk it
• Proceed slowly on all fours
• Ignore the trap completely by finding a means of flight

The challenge is using the tools at your disposal to complete an open-ended challenge, not to guess at whatever solution the author of the dungeon thought made the most sense. Any idea you think up is valid, the total freedom afforded by TTRPGs is on full display!

A Brief Treatise Against Puzzles in TTRPGs

I think it's a huge shame that GMs often resort to chucking in a filler puzzle in their dungeon instead of a problem. It seems to stem from a misunderstanding of what players want in terms of "intellectual engagement" from their games, and a lack of role models for what good TTRPG problem design looks like.

Knights & Knaves, riddles, zebra puzzles, this kind of puzzle-slop tends to get tossed into a session despite totally breaking the flow of the game. We had to sit down as a party and seriously consider the implications of trusting the princess, what to do with our knowledge that the duke is a werewolf, and how to infiltrate a heavily guarded bandit hideout.

But now we stop thinking about the world as if it were real and immersive and eat chips while one player solves a sudoku?¹

I can find endless riddles and puzzles online², why stuff them into a medium they weren't designed for³?

The Brand New Dungeon

With those lessons in mind, here's my version of the dungeon designed to work with the system Macchiato Monsters, which I find more accessible to beginner roleplayers. The goal of my redesign was to teach players a lesson they can bring into all future campaigns⁴: TTRPGs do not have puzzles, every puzzle is a problem in disguise.

To that end, my version of the Tomb of Horrors does the following:

• Problems which present as puzzles are now more numerous, and provide fair ways of discovering their nature before instantly dying to them
• Puzzles which (as far as I could tell) had no solution and gave you a 50/50 chance of character death or losing all your items can be solved using Acererak's Riddle⁵
• Acererak's Riddle now has a coherent meaning to it, and is prominently displayed near the start of the dungeon

XP to Level 3 doesn't seem to appreciate what I do about this dungeon, but a bunch of his fixes to the dungeon are excellent so I incorporated them into mine.

#Game Design #Musings