Revenge is a dish best served cold. Had I a group of 6 hated enemies I would spend years lovingly DMing their party and developing their characters in deeply meaningful ways, until they are truly attached to their characters and then… only then… would pop out Tomb of Horrors and play it straight out of the page, with no hand holding. They would be scarred for life. 

This is actually the second version of Tomb of Horrors, with the first one, from 1975, being used at the Origins convention that year (i’ve reviewed it here before), but this is the first commercial printing of the module by TSR. It’s a clear improvement from the original module, with better descriptions and much better art. It’s still a meat grinder though, and that’s really how it should be.

I would honestly suggest that if your players aren’t your nemeses, and/or you do not wish to lose the few friends you have, you should run this with characters created specifically for this dungeon, it can be a fun run but the permadeath that will invariably be the fate of some of the PCs won’t feel as harsh. Another option would be to tone this down, but that would be defeating the purpose of the dungeon, this is a test, for a test to be effective the real chance of failure with real consequences has to be present, this is also supposed to be horror, the characters should be afraid of dying and that is only enhanced by seeing their friends die before them. A truly evil dungeon, Acererak didn’t want to make his tomb an amusement park, he wanted to fucking kill anyone who came in.