The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan

The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan

The cover of The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan, with art by Erol Otus. The artwork depicts a creature battling a group of adventurers.
Code	C1
TSR Product Code	9032
Rules required	AD&D
Character levels	5 - 7
Campaign setting	Greyhawk / Generic AD&D
Authors	Harold Johnson Jeff R. Leason
First published	1980
Linked modules
C1, C2, C3, C4, C5

The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan is an adventure module for the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) fantasy role-playing game, set in the World of Greyhawk campaign setting for use with the 1st edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rules. It is the first in the C-series of modules, a set of unrelated adventures originally designed for competitive play, with the C representing the first letter in the word competition.

Originally printed for the 1979 Origins International Game Expo, the module was made available to the general public in 1980. The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan received generally positive reviews from critics and was ranked the 18th greatest Dungeons & Dragons adventure of all time by Dungeon magazine in 2004.

The player characters explore a stepped pyramid deep in the heart of a tropical jungle—the Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan. The characters must penetrate this Mayan-style temple, which is full of tricks and traps. Some of the traps include cursed items, firebombs, and triggered statues.

The shrine is an ancient Mayan/Aztec pyramid, and the module uses names, monsters, and characters based on that period. It also includes an illustrated booklet with fifteen pictures depicting various parts of the shrine to be shown to the players at the appropriate time. Also included are three pre-made characters for use if the scoring system is used.

This module was originally used for the Official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons tournament at the 1979 Origins International Game Expo (Origins '79). The original printing consisted of forty loose-leaf pages in a zipper storage bag, with a light blue cover; only three hundred copies were printed for sale at Origins '79. In addition to the adventure itself, the module contains a scoring system and pre-rolled characters for adventuring. The original Origins pre-publication version did not have a module code and was titled Lost Tamoachan: The Hidden Shrine of Lubaatum. After Origins '79, unsold copies were put up for sale at the Dungeon Shoppe in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Surviving examples of this version are quite rare and are highly prized by collectors.