I really wanted to hate Tomb of Annihilation. It’s a Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition campaign book advertised as a module full of super-hard challenges and vicious traps. “You will die,” said the advertising and interviews. I wanted to write a scathing, vicious review deriding the Killer Dungeon and all the malicious, antisocial behavior it fosters among roleplaying game players. Rail against the kind of toxic players who would use this adventure as an excuse to spring uncomfortable, unwanted, confrontational play styles on their erstwhile friends and, worse, random strangers in organized play.

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Unfortunately that review has been put on indefinite hold while I write this review. Because Tomb of Annihilation is good, actually.

Tomb of Annihilation Jungles of Chult Port Nyanzaru Ras Nsi Adventurers at the Tomb Papazotl's Tomb D&D on Twitch Stream of Annihilation Community-generated live-play highlights what’s fantastic about D&D—sitting down together with your friends to tell a grand story! Tomb of Annihilation (FG Rip).pdf.

The Tomb Of Annihilation - Session 33 - 19th November 2019. Undead - Session 34 - 2nd December 2019. Dungeon Of Deception - Session 35 - 16th December 2019. Tomb of Annihilation Board Game is a cooperative adventure design in the same series as Castle Ravenloft that's based on the 'Tomb of Annihilation' storyline for. The Deadly Shift of Tomb of Annihilation. By Mike on 22 January 2019. Warning, this article contains spoilers for Tomb of Annihilation. This article is one in a series of artices I wrote for running the D&D hardcover adventure Tomb of Annihilation. You can find links to all of the articles below: Session Zero of Tomb of Annihilation.

Tomb is an adventure module that blends three kinds of classic D&D gaming into a pretty satisfying whole, despite a few sore spots. It’s metaplot-driven campaign arc set in an exploration sandbox that gives way to a big dungeon crawl for the finale. It’s an improvement on the classic formulas it’s drawing on, that of the classic Tomb of Horrors or Dwellers of the Forbidden City. Instead of a single hell dungeon or sandbox with no greater context, it builds up over time to the climactic delve into the eponymous tomb. Conversely, as a sandbox game it has a real point at the end, a climactic focus and narrative arc that keep it from fizzling out like many exploration-driven campaigns.

In Tomb of Annihilation the heroes are tasked with going deep into the jungles of the Forgotten Realms’ Chult, a pan-African cultural pastiche, in order to stop a necromantic plot to steal all the world’s souls away. Problem is, the artifact responsible is located in a lost city. The adventure is on a timer, too – everyone who has ever been raised from the dead has had their soul reclaimed and is wasting away. Notable people, including the adventurers’ patron, are on a ticking clock to death. Strong locales and stronger characters anchor the setting, letting DMs pick and choose appropriate elements to customize their group’s experience.

That experience will be dangerous, don’t get me wrong. D&D’s design team weren’t lying about the challenge they put into this adventure. The average fight or trap isn’t designed to be tackled head-on, and requires the kind of planning endemic to older D&D modules and old-school playstyles to overcome. The adventure as a whole emphasizes the resource management aspect of Dungeons & Dragons. Fights are to be overcome wisely, spells used sparingly, and traps approached cautiously. If players do die, they’re subject to the same death curse as the NPCs are, losing maximum hit points every day until they hit zero and die for good. The saving grace of this dangerous campaign, what lets me forgive its adversarial nature, is that the book wisely includes measures throughout to tone down or ramp up the punitive nature of the campaign to suit the tastes of the play group. And it suggests you use these scaling options consistently. It reminds DMs that the game is not a competition, but a collaboration of equals. Those looking for a death-filled meat grinder can get just that, while those looking to introduce their group to a more dangerous than average campaign can tweak it for that. It is not something that was an easy design feat. I’ll happily place Tomb of Annihilation in direct competition with Curse of Strahd for the best Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition published adventure module.

The module itself has neat worldbuilding, though it succeeds more in its specifics. Tyrannosaurus zombies that vomit up smaller zombies, or goblins that stack up on each others’ shoulders to battle, are superb touches for a D&D game. There are a variety of strange and interesting characters too, like Chult’s merchant princes and the for-hire guides that litter the port. Port Nyanzaru feels like it’s straight out of a swords & sorcery novel, the kind of place that default adventurers are total fish out of water – but that exoticism sometimes comes off as exploitative or insensitive when you look below the surface. So, as an attempt at a robust pan-African fantasy setting, the new Chult falls pretty short. That’s been covered in greater detail by voices more qualified than my own, but suffice to say that having more African people or experts on the writing may have given better results.

Stronger than the world are the individual places you go to as you traverse it. Set up with clear hooks and obvious terrain funnels, the expanse of Chult’s interior makes a good hex map traversing exploration experience. That said, it’s rather sparsely filled, and there’s not much of a reward for driven players who want to explore off the obvious and beaten paths. Dynamic locations and monster lairs, long a staple of exploration adventures and embraced by the current generation of sandbox adventure designers, have been forgotten as far as ToA is concerned.

There are other odd mechanical or storytelling moments in the module as a whole. Random encounters while exploring are, by default, quite common – a greater than half chance of having one every day. 5th Edition’s lackadaisical approach to magic items is a sticking point for this module, with the adventure as a whole barely distributing anything like what the default treasure tables give. It even goes so far as to insultingly take away a healthy portion of recovered magic items at the end of the tomb itself. Most DMs will need to do some tweaking to give their players a fighting chance. Finally, there’s one odd subplot buried in the adventure that simply doesn’t fit: An elaborate story seemingly adapted from an early 90s Forgotten Realms novel involving Chult which introduces a powerful NPC with a potent magical artifact – precisely the kind of stories and characters that alienate players from the Realms in the first place. It’s the kind of character that could easily become an annoying DMPC, and adds insult to injury by carrying a neat artifact unlike anything the adventure is going to let the players get their hands on.

But like much of the adventure, frankly, it’s something you can ignore if you don’t like it. What you can’t ignore, however, are the final two acts of the adventure: The forbidden city of Omu and the Tomb of the Nine Gods itself. These are more old school, less obviously designed dungeons and environments than much of 5th Edition’s published content. Careful thinking, genuine puzzle-solving skills, and thorough trial-and-error exploration is something players will need to get through it all. The dungeon beneath the city is a living environment with awesome links between areas requiring strategy and tactics from the players to overcome. The Tomb itself is a classic killer dungeon, with whole optional areas designed entirely to get the players killed and expend their resources. That said, it doesn’t have the kind of design pitfalls that many dungeons of this type have, with clearly signposted traps and areas designed to allow players to recover when necessary. It is, however, not going to jive with lots of play styles – it’s more about interesting traps and puzzles than cool combat encounters. Very few of the fights are going to be very memorable, and the high volume of puzzles means indecisive groups are going to take a long time to proceed. It is, overall, very deadly. There are lots of ways to just die. Do not go into this final dungeon expecting to walk out unscathed, or walk out at all – there is a very real possibility that, as written, your campaign will end with the death of every single party member.

But, for once, the whole of the thing is written well enough that I’m comfortable with that.

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by Mike on 22 January 2019

Warning, this article contains spoilers for Tomb of Annihilation.

This article is one in a series of artices I wrote for running the D&D hardcover adventure Tomb of Annihilation. You can find links to all of the articles below:

Tomb of Annihilation is a fantastic D&D adventure. It's an adventure of high fantasy in an interesting environment (the jungles of Chult). It has awesome locations to explore, cool NPCs to meet, a powerhouse villain, and the deadliest dungeon published in the fifth edition hardback D&D adventures to date.

Tomb of Annihilation isn't without its problems. For the most part, these problems are manageable. Let's take a moment to review two of these problems.

First, as written, the death curse (the main driver of the adventure) has too much urgency tied to it. If this urgency isn't tweaked by the DM, the best course of action the characters can take is to run as fast as they can to the Tomb of the Nine Gods to stop the curse from quickly killing off oodles of rich and powerful people all over Faerun (hmmm). Luckily, this problem is easy to deal with. We discussed a few options for managing the death curse in the Urgency of the Death Curse by using it as an urgency dial instead of a fixed countdown timer. Simply forgo the hit point loss-per-day and describe the progression of the curse in a way that better fits the pacing of the game you want at the moment. If you want the characters to feel free to explore Chult, mention that the curse is little more than a concern at the moment. A rash, really. If you want them to laser in on Omu and the tomb beneath, explain how the powerful curse has escalated.

The second problem comes with the many NPCs that can join the characters throughout the adventure. In most cases, these NPCs are just fine but in a few they can either overshadow the characters with their raw power (I'm looking at you Artus Cimber and Dragonbait) or they can end up steering the characters too far away and waste a lot of valuable time on errands that have nothing to do with the plot. We've discussed this problem in the article Handling Tag-Along NPCs. The best solution here is to be careful when introducing these NPCs, ensuring you have an exit plan for them, or skip them all together.

Both of those problems are easily managed. There is a third problem, however, and one not so easily fixed. When the characters actually enter the Tomb of the Nine Gods, the whole atmosphere of the adventure changes. Instead of being a character-driven narrative story of exploration and intrigue, this adventure becomes a puzzle and deathtrap killfest. That's the problem we're going to talk about today.

The Atmospheric Shift of the Tomb of the Nine Gods

It surprises no one that this adventure's dungeon is actually deadly. We all knew it. It says so right in the beginning and if our players are paying attention at all, they'll know it's deadly too. But we say that a lot when it comes to challenges the characters face and most of the time they can pull out of the danger and survive anyway. If you're a soft DM like me, you can probably count on one hand the number of times characters have died in your D&D games. If you're harsher, actually killing characters often, and your players don't mind, maybe this isn't a problem for you.

For some of us though this shift is a big problem. Here at Sly Flourish we take a 'character first' approach to our D&D games. It's the first step in the preparation checklist in Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master. We follow the guidelines of Dungeon World and become fans of the characters. These characters have histories. They have arcs. We love them and we love watching them go on adventures. We don't love it when they get in a black box, a friend hits a button, and they're turned into dust. Literally. Well, I didn't love it.

Death sometimes comes to characters in our character-driven games but often it's part of their character's arc. In this dungeon, though, their arcs can come crashing down with no warning at all. Again, maybe you're cool with this. Maybe so are your players. If that's the case, you need not change a thing.

For many of us, though, it's a big change in the style of the game and one we need to manage.

Telling Them Isn't Enough

We might think that telling the players how deadly the dungeon is will be enough. We think they'll be ready for their characters to die. Sometimes this is the case. Sometimes they're even upset when they don't die. Often, however, the warning isn't enough. Hearing that a dungeon is deadly and actually watching your ninth level character get disintegrated are two very different things. Seeing a character actually die will feel very different to the player. Players might even say how much they love hard D&D adventures and love the threat of death—until it actually happens. At that point none of us know what to do.

When I ran Tomb of Annihilation and my groups got to the Tomb of the Nine Gods, I had everyone roll up secondary characters whose backgrounds had brought them to the tomb over the past century. Making them former members of the Knights of the Yellow Banner gave them a connection to other dead Banner members throughout the adventure.

Still, this wasn't enough. Even having secondary characters doesn't mean that shock and hurt will come when a beloved character gets cut in half by a giant grinning stone skull door.

Many players just aren't prepared for a character's death. I know I'm not.

Solution 1: Send in the B-Team

One way to potentially fix this problem in the adventure is to send in two separate teams of characters. The first characters aren't given the job to stop the death curse, their job is to open the Tomb of the Nine Gods. When the tomb is open, it's up to another group of dungeon delvers to go inside. The nearby wreck of the Star Goddess could be one way that a bunch of dungeon delvers have come to the tomb. The Red Wizards might also have their own group of dungeon delvers ready to go into the tomb. Even Ras Nsi might send his own Yuan-ti Pureblood characters in there as part of a team intending to stop the death curse.

These new dungeon delvers are the expendables. Our players know they might not last and that's ok. They've only had them since the beginning of the Tomb of the Nine Gods. If the die, they die.

Still, it can be hard to put aside characters the players love. Opening the tomb doesn't feel like the end of the adventure. They want to stay with their main character and send them into the tomb. From a story perspective, why should the characters who traveled all this way send some other poor saps into the death trap? If they're heroic at all, sacrifice is part of that heroism. That won't matter to the player when their character is crushed under a big door but it makes sense and it would be disappointing to do it any other way. Thus, switching to new characters at the tomb's door isn't a perfect solution.

Solution 2: Build the B-Team Switch In Early

One way to ensure your players don't get stuck on the decision to send in their main characters or switch to an alt is to wire in that choice from the beginning. Instead of giving the characters the quest to seek the source of the death curse and end it. The quest can be to seek the Tomb of Annihilation and open it. Those who send the characters into the jungle will know that the heroes who find the tomb aren't the same ones who will enter the tomb. Those who enter the tomb are better suited for tomb-delving, not jungle explorations. The main characters can become patrons of these tomb-delvers instead of the tomb delvers themselves.

If this switch is wired in from the beginning, players will feel less like they're abandoning their characters halfway through an adventure and understand that a character switch is built into the story. They'll know their other characters will be stepping out of the spotlight.

This too is not an ideal solution but it might be the best way to make the transition from a deep character-driven exploration adventure to a deathtrap dungeon.

Solution 3: Shaving Off the Sharp Edges

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Here's a solution many DMs will hate: shave off the rough edges. Much of what makes the Tomb of the Nine Gods deadly are the situations where characters who drop to zero hit points are outright killed instead of simply rolling death saves and requiring a heal.

We can likely shave off the rough edges in a few different parts of the tomb to keep the characters alive, at least a little bit more alive, than they might be otherwise. We can still run a dangerous adventure where the players must make hard choices to stay alive without the direct threat of the one-button deaths that can be found in a lot of these chambers. The four elemental chambers are known to be quite deadly but they can be a little less so if we make it easier for players to navigate the puzzels as the characters flounder about.

Some of the more deadly rooms and traps to watch include:

• The onyx chest in Wongo's Tomb (room 16). Consider removing the instant death from the onyx chest.
• The elemental cells before Shagambi's Tomb (rooms 47A-D). Give plenty of clues about how to navigate the cells.
• Belchorzh the beholder (room 44). Play him sub-optimally. He's more interested in tormenting the characters than killing them. Get rid of the instant-deaths on his finger-of-death ray and his disintegrate ray. He wants to have fun, not turn them to ash. Maybe have those spells inflict permanent injuries instead of outright deaths.
• The gargoyle guardians (room 45). Give the characters a chance to flee from the room or lower the gargoyle's hit points. Like the beholder, play them sub-optimally.
• Any of the 'if this damage reduces a character to 0 hit points, they die' effects. Ignore that line or add a permanent injury instead.
• The devil onslaught in the Hall of the Golden Mastodon (room 67). Put in fewer devils, lower their hit points, or play them sub-optimally. Embrace it when the characters cast save-or-suck spells on them. The deal the Erinyes offers doesn't have to kill a character outright. Instead, they could sign a contract for their soul when they die, after the threat of the tomb is defeated.

Tomb Of Annihilation 5e

Frankly, this is my recommended method. People just don't like to see their characters instantly killed in my games. Maybe some do, but I haven't seen them.

Solution 4: Run As Intended and Come What May

Tomb Of Annihilation Player Handouts

Finally, you can ignore all of this and run the adventure as it is. I've seen a lot of discussions from DMs who have run the Tomb of the Nine Gods and described the dramatic shift in lethality. They talked a lot about how it hurt peoples' enjoyment of the game. That was the case in the two groups I ran it for as well.

Tomb Of Annihilation 5e

Tomb of Annihilation is close to the best D&D hardback adventure Wizards has released. This tonal shift from fantasy exploration to deathtrap hurts it. Otherwise, this is a nearly perfect adventure. The exploration is awesome. The setting is fantastic. The story is solid. The tomb, setting aside its lethality, is incredibly well designed. This adventure hits the exact level of focus I love in published adventures. I can deal with the warts regarding the urgency of the death curse and the issues bringing in problematic NPCs but the deadly shift of the adventure can kill a lot of fun after months of play if we're not careful. That's a hard problem to get past. Hopefully this article has given you some ideas how to deal with this shift so you and your players can get the most out of this otherwise fantastic adventure.

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