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Lost Tomb of the Mummy Lich 1E: The Worst Piece of AI Garbage I Have Seen Ever In My Entire Life

I hate this module. It is an insult to me, you, two hundred and sixty-seven kickstarter backers, the classics the module means to pay homage to, and the author's cat.

Lost Tomb of the Mummy Lich 1E alleges both that it is made for levels 8-12 in the OSRIC system, and that it is written by Mark Taormino of Dark Wizard Games. It was funded via Kickstarter alongside Fantastic Quest of the Whimsical One, and together they drew in a budget of 14,158 USD.

I do not think any of the backers have actually read the module, since nobody has cursed out the author in the comments, but they may very well have flipped through it - the book looks nice in terms of layout, and it is full of nostalgic black-and-white art, which the author has commissioned or requested permission to use.

The credits list artists Felipe Faria, LC Frietas, Carlos Castilho, Jacob Blackmon, Francesco Accordi, Phil Stone, and Dean Spencer, and additionally someone called Justin Davis, who does not appear to have a significant online presence.

At least one among them appears to be an AI artist. They have provided this image of a fletched sword hilt (top left) and a four foot tall elf with spider pedipalps for a chin (top right).

There are a few other pictures that are also clearly AI-made, but none of them are signed. One wonders if Mark Taormino is aware that he has been given AI art, or if he is himself being cheated in turn, in a great circle of AI grifting.

The module opens with several pages of padded backstory. I believe it may be partially handwritten, because it is pretty goofy, or at least the earlier parts may have felt an editor's touch after the AI spat it out.

A long time ago there was a pharaoh with three sons. Then his wife cheated on him and had a bastard son, Ankhen-Hotep, with an evil warrior in the pharaoh's service.

"Ankhen-Hotep, my son, why are you so fine and muscular and very handsome with an unusual hint of underlying evil, and not at all disgusting, lazy and ugly like your brothers and I?"

Ankhen-Hotep kills his entire family and becomes a cruel pharaoh, somehow worse than the dynasty of indolent scumbags that apparently preceded him. Then he becomes a lich and builds a big evil tomb. Unfortunately, due to some undefined dark pact shenanigans, he can't leave the tomb until someone releases him with the power of love (?). You'd think the evil gods who make people into liches would want them running around and doing evil, but that is not so.

A thousand years later, an earthquake reveals part of the tomb, and sorceress-queen Neferkhet, who happens to be the biggest forgotten evil kings fan the lineage has ever known, comes to investigate. This is where the text very clearly breaks down.

Queen Neferkhet goes to the ruins, digs out the ruins, seals the ruins away, kills everyone involved, seemingly forgets the ruins existed, rediscovers the ruins (now half-buried again) and is completely awestruck. She claims she knew whose tomb it was at once, but I guess she went home after figuring it out to bring her friends and make a big show of pretending to recognize it.

Neferkhet looks at the murals in the tomb and learns the story of Ankhen-Hotep (I guess she didn't pay much attention in her studies), and she sympathizes so much with his tragic past that she falls in love and decides to revive him. The murals that tell this story are not actually shown anywhere in the adventure, so she might have made them up.

I suppose these must be the seals she set up herself, the first time she found the tomb? Or is Ankhen-Hotep just not interested in being woken up?

Regardless, she casts a spell that shatters Ankhen-Hotep's sarcophagus (which is still intact later), and they fall in love, and they build a big undead army, and together they ravage the countryside to gather souls which they intend to use to make Ankhen-Hotep young and sexy again. Oh no! Someone better stop them!

This is where the PCs come in. Despite the backstory making it sound like the villain duo is pretty active in the surrounding lands, there are no encounters outside the dungeon. Let's step inside.

The first room is a false entrance, which can be found by examining the base of a jackal-headed sphinx, located some distance away from the pyramid that holds the true tomb.

This is also where Mark Taormino has given up even pretending that the text isn't written by AI.

If you don't want to read it, I don't blame you.

The text believes the room is inside of the pyramid, it can't decide whether the trap in the room is that the floor opens into a pit of spikes or that the walls close in to crush the party, it suggests breaking the floor into the pit of spikes as a means of escape, it throws out incorrect trap mechanics (OSRIC thieves have 21%+4% per level in find traps) that don't need to be mentioned in the first place, mixes in some 5e terminology, proposes a "2-in-6 chance on a Wisdom check", whatever that means, details how the trap activates no less than three times (though the details are different each time), and mysteriously suggests that the GM "may allow a history check if relevant". Who even knows!

I don't think a single person in the world has actually read this text before you and I did. Every single room description in the book is the same style of self-contradictory word salad.

You may be wondering how that undead army Neferkhet and Ankhen-Hotep are making is coming along. There are five undead encounters in the module:

1d4 wandering skeletons

1d6 wandering zombies

1 large size mummy, though actually, the room it is in is called "false mummy and treasure room" and the mummy attacks with "stone fists", so I suppose this is not a mummy at all, but a bandaged golem of some kind

Ankhen-Hotep

20 toothless mummies, which the text calls skeletons until it posts their statblock, stuck in a pit:

Suffice to say, it's not looking good. They're not even evil. No wonder the villains tried to hide them away in a pit.

There are still a few signs of human activity in the text in the book, such as in the randomly scattered glaring typos: "Jackle", "Anubus", "Ressurection", "Wonderous". Whether these were intentionally planted in some eight-year-old's attempt to disguise the use of AI, or are leftovers from the author's typo'd prompts, I cannot say.

I also sense the presence of the author in the gleeful addition of acid traps melting your players' dicks off, since this is typically something an AI is forbidden from even thinking:

This idea appears to have excited him so much he also added it to the mechanical gears trap:

Otherwise, Mark has a particular hangup with the idea of "GM's discretion." He has pasted this into the text in about a dozen different locations, and treats it as the ultimate editorial spice and duct tape which can answer any question and improve any text. Eventually, he begins invoking it like some sort of mystic, sentence-final mantra.

Meow!

Did that last one catch your interest? This amusing kitty is actually Mark's own cat, Merlin, that sadly passed away during the Roman occupation of Egypt.

I would say I can't imagine what kind of person would think to dedicate a kickstarter scam to a once-beloved pet, but I suppose the guy who makes dick-melting acid traps would be the one.

I'm sure I will enjoy "reading and playing" the module exactly as much as Mark enjoyed "writing" it.

Final Score: AI Level: Disgusting Table Usability: Zero Layout: OK

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Lost Tomb of the Mummy Lich