The Tomb of Crossed Words

I picked up The Tomb of Crossed Words by Richard Jansen-Parkesup many years ago, and I've run it for several groups. It's a great one for kids and low-level players. It's not terribly combat-heavy, and it's a great puzzle dungeon!

I've got two regular D&D groups: the Riverport Rebels, which consists of my daughter, my nephew, and my husband, and the Class of '81. When I ran it for the Riverport Rebels, we played in person, and I made up actual hands-on puzzles for the kids to solve. They loved the puzzles so much that it has become my regular DMing style. The Class of '81 plays entirely remotely, so I still do hands-on puzzles, but I translate them for Roll20 use. 

SPOILERS! If you are likely to end up as a player in this module, you should probably skip this next part. 

The premise is pretty straightforward: a monk, Brother Connor, is looking for a party of adventurers to investigate a legendary shrine that was dedicated to learning and writing, but lost to time. Local legend says that fifty years ago, a group of adventurers found the tomb, but met a grim fate. Only one of them stumbled back to the village to tell of it before dying of his wounds. 

 The players must answer a riddle given by a skeletal warrior and choose the correct door to access the tomb. Inside, the players find that all the books and scrolls inside are under a curse, their inks turned to smeared and running black oil. 

Encounters include: 

A room that must be passed through by passing by stone soldiers that block the way by advancing on anyone retreating from them. 

A pool of water containing a water weird and spectral beings that can be dispelled using a hint contained in a riddle. 

A room containing a beholder with amnesia. Not kidding. Having been mindwiped, he's more confused than aggressive. I have run this module at least three times, and been a player (I was along to help a new DM run the module) in it once, and never have the players of any group failed to bring the beholder with them out of the dungeon because they felt sorry for it. The Rebels named it Avalon, and the after they followed suite, the Class found out the Rebels had named the thing already and decided to just keep the name. 

A hidden room containing the Big Bad Boss, who turns out to be the undead leader of the doomed party of adventurers that brought the story to the village fifty years prior. He gives the players a choice...answer my question and fight me alone, or fail and fight me and a swarm of animated skulls. The players may ask 20 questions for yes or no answers to figure out the solution.  Every time I run this, the players scoff that the riddle will be impossible to guess. And no group has ever failed to get it right, and often they do it without even hitting their 20 question limit. Which I love, because I kind of feel like that doing a task you thought you weren't up to is a real confidence booster. 

 

In Search of the Unknown

So years ago, the phone rang. It was my sister. Her young son had seen an episode of Freaks and Geeks and decided that he wanted to learn to play Dungeons and Dragons. So she immediately, and correctly, called me. 

I told her "I knew this day would come." 

My sister's family was coming to visit that very weekend, and I had no time to plan. I was not running any games at the time. I had nothing, really, except some old modules (and when I say "old" I'm not kidding. We're talking 30-40 year old stuff in a trunk in the attic, from when I was running Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. System isn't even compatible to 5E) I was actually in the process of learning 5e, because I was playing in Trey's Azurth campaign. 

So I go up the attic and drag out the first module I played in when I learned Advanced D&D, a TSR module called In Search of the Unknown. 

I didn't even own a current Monster Manual. I went online and found the 5e versions of most of the monsters in the module and just went with it. Old modules had to be manually keyed by the dungeon master, so I was using penciled-in keys my high school age self had written decades ago and converting the stuff on the fly with notebook full of notes in my lap. 

Didn't matter. I winged most of it and we had a blast! 

We played the classic way, with paper tokens on a good old fashioned battle mat. The group consisted of my nephew, my daughter (the kids are less than a year in age apart), and my husband. 

In Search of the Unknown was a classic dungeon-crawl type module that was written by Mike Carr in 1979 and published by TSR, Inc. It wasn't a bad module to start some kids on to get them used to combat, ability checks, and map keeping. I definitely wanted to teach them 5e instead of earlier editions, as I thought it important for them to be as updated as possible if they chose to play with their friends later on down the line. But the content was simple and fun, and had some fun stuff in it. It's got one layer of ruins, and a lower level of cavern, and some opportunity for a little role play. 

So maybe not the most compelling module by today's standards, but it definitely was many hours of fun and learning for us!