I really enjoyed playing this module. I was finally able to find a good DM online who had time to run this for me with 3 of his friends. We finished it tonight after 3 sessions for a total of about 10 hours. You could probably spend multiple times that amount if you wanted to unearth every secret. And while we didn't experience every aspect of the tomb, it was great exploring and working together with my party which is exactly what I was looking for!

Our DM added his own twists and content to the story, but on its own, it has traps, monsters, treasure, a boss, and some interesting lore about The Tomb of the Serpent Kings itself. Perfect!

I can't speak to the specific mechanics of the game or critique it like some seasoned connoisseur of RPGs; I just know I had fun playing it. Everyone else on my team was really impressed with it too.

I hadn't played D&D since the TSR Hobbies Red Box edition in 1983! For me, it was a nice return to a classic dungeon crawl. Highly recommended.

Just a really bad adventure. I'll go into more detail later, but this is NOT an adventure for beginners, both beginning players and especially beginning DMs. Large parts of it are boring and give no hints or telegraph that there are secrets; the players are just expected to "read the DM's mind" to find the secret. As far as DMing goes, there are several room descriptions and traps that just don't make sense and that the DM will have to fix beforehand. It does an active disservice to the OSR hobby by advertising itself as a teaching dungeon. And there's no illustration or description of what a snake-person looks like! What?? The only nod to that is the lich which has a snake bottom and a human top, which is exactly the opposite of what I was thinking the snake-people looked like. Seriously, this is not a fun adventure and it's not fun to DM. Mine it for the barred-door-and-hammer trap, but it's so sparse, mistake-filled, and full of holes that you should really avoid DMing this one. If this is the fourth time the author has tried to fix this adventure, they need to chuck it.

Great beginners guide to old school adventuring. This one is already a classic.

I'm a DM who's very new to OSR games and this adventure seems so perfect both for me and my players!

Tomb of the Serpent Kings opens with a blurb about the need for a good tutorial for OSR-style play, drawing an allusion to the self-explanatory nature of World 1-1 of Super Mario Bros. As the players begin the dungeon, they are immediately faced with an example of this brand of tutorialization: after a few seemingly uninteresting terra-cotta snakemen, the players come across a clay statue with a silver ring – a ring that can only be pried from the statue's finger by breaking the statue entirely, and, in the process, unleashing a cloud of poison gas and revealing yet more treasure hidden inside the hollow shell. The players prompty revisit the other terra-cotta tombs, this time taking steps to avoid the poison, and being rewarded with additional hidden treasures. And so they learn their first lessons, about hidden treasure, hidden traps, and the patterns that will allow them to discover both.

It's also their last lesson, because everything else in the dungeon is completely obtuse. Most other "lessons" outlined in the book are not telegraphed to the players in any meaningful way, and would-be patterns are applied inconsistently so as to preclude any possibility of the players noticing them. Case in point: the silver ring that the players obtain from that first clay statue gives them a poison-damage attack, which is completely useless against the undead, constructs, and oozes that are the only enemies in the first two floors of the dungeon. By the time the players encounter an enemy that they can actually use this attack against, they may well have forgotten that it even exists.

The clay statues appear again later, but this time they are part of an unrelated "statues are placed over secret doors" pattern, and so they don't feature poison traps or treasure. As a result, this room undermines the sole previously successful lesson, leading the players to actively distrust apparent patterns.

A substantial trove of treasure is hidden at the bottom of an opaque pit full of toxic water – with no indication of anything of value, and no way for the players to later learn that they missed anything. It's fair enough to expect "danger = treasure" if you're a seasoned dungeoneer, but the pattern up to this point is instead "treasure is fairly slim, regardless of the extent of the danger", and so this lesson is completely lost on new players.

An early-on deadly trap (almost certain to kill someone who isn't expecting it – quite harsh for a "tutorial" level) is placed next to a combat encounter in the hopes that the players will use it against those foes, and learn about exploiting the environment. Problem is, the trap operates on a delayed trigger that depends on hefting heavy objects to set and activate – so it's tricky at best to get it to actually fire off in a way that successfully hurts those enemies. Players end up taking the exact opposite lesson: that traps are designed just for them, and that they're not meant to be used against the monsters.

A very detailed encounter with a basilisk features some clever and surprising solutions with fun rewards – but by the time the players encounter it, the only things they'll have seen and fought will have been mindless undead, and so they won't have it in mind to try to deal with the basilisk as a living creature with real needs. Worse still, the actual materials necessary to deal with the basilisk in a creative way aren't provided to the players until much later in the dungeon, so again, they have forgotten about it by then, and don't make the connection. Fine enough for a seasoned group – they should know better. But for a neophyte party? These are precisely the ideas that need to be spelled out, and instead they're actively obfuscated.

These are just a few stand-out examples from my runs with TotSK, but the dungeon is absolutely rife with failed or even counter-productive "lessons". When I've had occasion to debrief with my players, they would often complain about the fact that they actually clued in to many of the "lessons", only for their ideas to fail because the dungeon appears to be specifically designed to frustrated, rather than reinforce, those ideas. I can't imagine a worse condemnation of a tutorial than having a smart player correctly figure out what they're supposed to do, and then have the dungeon tell them they are wrong and should re-think it.

As a standard OSR dungeon for experienced players, I think Tomb of the Serpent Kings is basically a "C+". It's more or less solid, but with a lot of weird and unnecessary flaws: The attempt to act as a tutorial results in the dungeon being a little too straightforward in ways that a more seasoned group may find boring. The descriptions of certain specifics in the dungeon are often inadequate in ways that will force the GM to make up new material to fill in the gaps. Some important details get split off into different portions of the book with no internal cross-referencing, so you may find yourself accidentally skipping info that the players ought to know. The touted compatibility is actually very poor – I had to spend several hours scouring the book in order to convert it to my system of choice – TotSK makes assumptions about all sorts of mechanics that didn't exist in said system, so I had to invent a few workarounds from whole cloth in order to get the encounters to actually manifest properly.

The biggest problem with TotSK, by far, is the fact that if it's measured as an actual tutorial, in the vein of SMB World 1-1, it's an abject failure. It doesn't teach. It expects the players to already know the lessons, instead, which makes the "teaching" totally redundant. Sometimes, the dungeon will punish the players for not knowing a lesson in advance, which allows them to learn it retroactively (although whether or not they get another opportunity to apply each lesson later on is very hit-or-miss), but more often than not it won't even alert them to the fact that they missed something or made a mistake. It's not a guiding hand that introduces, reinforces, and then tests key lessons – it's more like a sheer cliff with no purchase.

The Tomb of the Serpent Kings is my current first choice to recommend for a new Dungeon Master and/or group of new Dungeons & Dragons players. We ran it with Old School Essentials and had a great time. Players will get to experience open-ended dungeon exploration and solving problems with their minds rather than rolling. Its dangers are fair and encourage interaction. When you are confronted with a dangerous environment in a roleplaying game you must put yourself in the scene in order to think your way through it. This makes the scene immersive and gets at the heart of roleplaying. Players will need to make decisions, which is a great first experience for a new player of a roleplaying game.

As other reviews have said, it is also a good introduction to open-ended play for experienced players and referees who might be accustomed to campaigns with less player agency, exploration or problem-solving. It's easy to prepare and run and will probably only take two to three sessions. I would recommended the Tomb of the Serpent Kings to most D&D groups. I'd recommend playing it with Basic D&D or other early editions of D&D or retroclones like Old School Essentials (which is what I would recommend if you haven't played any editions from the 1970s or 1980s before, plus you only need the free basic rules available on Necrotic Gnome's website).

A really nice product for any novice GM that wants to enter the world of dungeon building and OSR games. An experienced GM would find a complete dungeon as a nice addition to their folder of adventures, albeit a somewhat linear experience at first.

Some things that I miss from the adventure and key for any OSR dungeon are a brief description of a base town/city, the surroundings of the dungeon and a table of rumors. The first two are on the hands of the GM, but the third could be easily made with some of the dungeon's "lessons".

This has to be one of the defining OSR adventures, and deservedly so. Simple to grok, and a hell of a lot of fun to play. The fact that it's available for free means no nerd should go into DMing without it in their arsenal.

Another insturction this module gives, is that modules need to bring something unique that can be used in other games. The main attractions at the end demonstrate how tropes can be subverted and used to make a familiar setting seem fantastic.

A cool adventure. Print was well done and no issues. Clear and well made. Can't complain.

I needed a starting adventure after a long hiatus from gaming and I was about to start a new group of players who had never played an RPG. This module fits that bill. So. if you need a "teaching" dungeon, this one does the job.

I'm currently running TotSK using a mashup of OSE/LotFP/LFG and my own hacks and ideas (planning on putting my system out there someday... But thats another post entirely). The reason I picked up TotSK was to have a ready to go dungeon for players new to OSR, so I could focus more on my ideas on mechanics and filling out the setting outside of the dungeon. This module is awesome! I read through it once or twice (only took a few hours) and now only brush up maybe 30 minutes before each session so I know what the players are likely to encounter. Simple and easy to use at the table, this module allows me to focus more on the fiction and what I am trying to achieve mechanics wise. The lessons taught in the adventure are easily learned for both players and GMs as well. So far, we have only had a few character deaths, but none of them felt cheated. I would recommend this adventure to anyone wanting give the OSR a try, or anyone just needing a simple, easy to use adventure to get started.

I am running this as an intro for ttrpg/D&D for two of my sons (and a reresher for me - its been ages since i ran any dungeon-based roleplaying games and it works very well. This is not about the originality of the scenario but the way it is structured and set out. It is supremely easy to use at the table

This bad boy fills a niche. Taking the step from a level 0 human to a level 1 adventurer is a much bigger leap for a new PC. This dungeon is a useful and deadly teaching tool that I'm now using as a kind of intro dungeon experience before running any of the big, deadly dungeons of yon and yore! The lessons that each room teaches is very clear and the map is well laid out and easy to run! Well done and I look forward to more! I ordered the print version too. Remarkably cheap!

Fantastic dungeon for introducing new players to your table. I've had success using it to introduce a few new groups, even modifying it to work with a homebrew system once. And you can't argue with the value of this product with a free pdf.