This is not that kind of adventure and is not intended for that kind of play. Players and DMs expecting a deep and story-driven adventure with interesting decisions and a variety of NPCs to interact with in the pursuit of some grand goal will be sorely disappointed.
What matters is not what the characters do, but how clever the players are and how quickly they achieve their goal: Reaching the end of Tamoachan with as many hit points left on their characters as possible. This is designed to challenge the players and not the characters. 54 rooms of mechanisms stand between the players putting characters in at room 1 and taking them out at room 54. Instead, Tamoachan is one giant, trap with multiple moving parts. And this is precisely what Tamoachan is not.
There is a series of underground chambers, traps, combat encounters, treasure to acquire, and a goal for characters to achieve. On its face, The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan presents itself as a straightforward dungeon crawl with a sort of Azteca, Mayan, Toltec, and more theme mashed together with all the usual features. The ‘C’ stood for Competition module, a series of modules with a similar lineage or intent as Tamoachan, each intended to be played competitively at a tournament. Starting in 1980, it kicked off the C-line of adventures. Keep that in mind.Įventually, Tamoachan left the tournament scene and became a regular product in the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons line. It was player performance that mattered and not the characters. The idea of Tamoachan was not to test the characters, but the players themselves. Generally speaking, a selection of pre-generated PCs were used in order to keep all the player teams on the same footing. Parties were scored on the basis of what actions they took inside the dungeon, how long it took to complete the dungeon (or how far the party got), character deaths (including how early a character died), and the team of players overall performance. In Tamoachan’s case, the original time slot at Origins ’79 was two hours. Note that this is a real-time limit, suited to the usual length of a convention time slot. The chart adds or subtracts points to a party’s score based on their actions inside the dungeon as they race to finish it in the prescribed time limit. The competition comes in through a scoring chart, filled in by the DM, and a strict time limit. Many newer gamers may not be familiar with the concept of a competitive dungeon, but understanding the concept may go a long way towards explaining the adventure’s popularity and the way it is meant to work.Ī competitive dungeon, and the reason Tamoachan first appeared at Origins, is meant to be played by multiple players under multiple DMs over the course of a convention or other gathering as a tournament-style event. As given in the book and other online resources, what is now The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan was first played at Origins ’79 as a competitive dungeon. Tamoachan is so different, and from such a different era of gaming, that this review will be an overview of the adventure as a whole with discussion of its place in D&D, and its best use at the modern gaming table.įirst, some brief history, expanding somewhat on Yawning Portal’s treatment. The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan is the third adventure in Tales From the Yawning Portal for Dungeons and Dragons from Wizards of the Coast. What sorts of adventures did old gamers have back then and were they any good? Is Tamoachan a gem from D&D’s past? What does it have to say about the way D&D and other RPGs were played back then? At last the moment has come to step back in time and experience some of the early years of D&D.