Did anyone actually fall for it?

It's a giant head set in the wall in the Tomb of Horrors. It might seem at first glance to be some sort of tunnel or inscrutable portal, or magical darkness hiding treasure. It actually holds a Sphere of Annihilation that'll flat out erase you.

There are a few stories of parties who don't know any better thinking they found a secret passage, climbing into their immediate and unceremonious destruction before the DM tells them they all just died.

Its actually enough of an icon in itself that it and the Sphere are the namesake for the next big D&D adventure, "Tomb of Annihilation".

Dear lord, that's both terrifying and hilarious
I think I'll run it with my players, this sounds to amazing to pass up

the just rerealesed in the awning portal

It gets worse. There are teleport traps in the tomb that place the player directly outside it, reinforcing the notion that it's some kind of secret passage back into the tomb. The Tomb of Horrors is a wicked, wicked dungeon.

It's worth noting it's the adventure that introduced the demilich.

They must really like ice cream

>It might seem at first glance to be some sort of tunnel or inscrutable portal
It's a creepy a as demon face, at the end of a tunnel full of traps, in a dungeon full of traps, that gets it's on handout image, in a module where every handout image contains clues to traps (in case the DM is bad at telwgraoghing clues).
At first glance it looks like a trap.

At second glance it looks like a trap, too.
Literally any cursory roleplay investigation (the norm, in those days) will demonstrate that it's bad news.

Plenty of people. If you hand congoers a sheet of pregens and say "clear the dungeon in 4 hours", they'll throw caution to the wind.

>the adventure that introduced the demilich.
Just another trap in the dungeon. You can nick all the treasure next to Acerack and leave.
If you don't deal 50 damage to his dust in 3 rounds or touch his skull, be won't do anything.

W-where has this been all my life?

It's actually a pretty shit dungeon. Aside from a shortcut near the start, the whole thing is linear.

>You can nick all the treasure next to Acerack and leave.
That's how Gygax's party beat it IIRC. They had a big party of NPCs with them who blundered through traps, and distracted Acererak while they made off with a few bags full of loot.

I did once. Except it was secretly the answer to the dungeon puzzle, while all the other routes were even more horrifying death traps.

Gygac ran S1 a bunch of times, mostly as a solo adventure.
Outside if convention PUGs, I don't think he managed to kill anyone with it.

On the note of conventions though, the first kill on Acerack used the crown from room 25.

One of my players did it when we run tomb of horrors.

They scored 39 deaths in total before finishing it

It's free ice cream, stick your hand in and it comes back out with a cone of ice cream. Totally recommend it.

yeah it was an introductory module, back in the day, more like a harsh wolcome-to-dnd than anything else, there were a few other adventures like it published and they were less linear

Hell, whenever I have a new group, I eventually run a dungeon in which there is an arm-sized hole in the wall which guillotines inserted limb. They usually put their arms in. Not even checking with a fucking stick, they have this primal urge of sticking arms into arm-sized holes.

You should check out that thing in the Fiendish Codex II
>put arm in arm hole
>lose arm, get new one tht works even better
>put head in head hole
>lose head, die
it's hilarious

Reminds me of the Head of Vecna

...

Stupid greedy murder hobos.

It's probably inspired partly by it

More like a convention module of the "race to the end as fast as possible" variety that got published.

The linearity of the dungeon doesn't really matter when the goal was never lore or exploration, but crawl through as quick as possible, with people in line behind you to do the same.