Tomb of Annihilation (Dungeons & Dragons)

Technically speaking, Tomb of Annihilation is a full campaign between two covers, with a focused objective for the players, a major narrative hook driving them forward, and all you need to run that campaign. But for me, it's just a sandbox of possibilities easily plucked out and dropped into my own campaign with next to no adjustment needed. That's the big selling point for me and it's why I like ToA so much more than many other modern modules / campaigns. Officially, this is a campaign spanning roughly levels 1-11, with the players trying to find a lost city and stop a curse that prevents people from being raised from the dead. This takes place in the jungles of Chult, and includes a major "hex crawl" exploration component, a lost city to find and explore, a mega dungeon inspired in part by the classic Tomb of Horrors, and lots of side locations. There is also a ticking clock on the whole adventure. But in practice, it's a sandbox. By that I mean there are loads of nicely fleshed out, unique and interesting locations that can easily serve as standalone adventures. Just pluck them out and drop them into your own world, no converting needed. There are 20+ such locations here, PLUS the lost city, which itself has a whole series of puzzle-focused tombs, PLUS an epic dungeon, as well as an assortment of small settlements, NPCs, monsters, and more. Lots of variety, too, from a kooky goblin village with a defense mechanism you have to see to believe, to a race of bird people living in a strange circular maze, to an imposing tower, to undead-infested camps and more. You don't need to run it as a pre-set campaign if you don't want. There is LOTS of material here to pillage and use as you see fit. That's what I love about it. I've gotten my money's worth and then some, and my group hasn't even played the actual campaign itself. About the only thing preventing it from being a perfect sandbox is that the main city which will serve as the PCs' base of operations is only lightly fleshed out. Otherwise, if you want to run a cool jungle-based, exploration-focused campaign, just toss out the death curse and ticking clock and run this. Or if you just want a bunch of standalone locations you can use with minimal work, this also fits the bill. For those reasons, this is easy to recommend.

I love this adventure. It's based on a hugely favorite D&D module from ages ago, Tomb of Horrors. It steps up the play, though, and hands the players a larger environment filled with danger and discovery. There are two parts to the adventure, the first, and smaller aspect, is one of being in a town where players have to uncover the mystery, find clues and become prepared for the trek into the trackless jungle. There is politics, backstabbing, along with lots of potential palace intrigue, areas to poke around in, a whole culture to explore. Plus, dinosaur races! Not into that? Flip past it and dive into the jungle. Lots of encounters and adventures are outlined to keep your party busy and interested. Explore ruins, encounter never-before seen creatures, find treasure and magic items. Zombies, dinosaurs, and zombie dinosaurs! It's a vast, unexplored jungle filled with things to visit. The final episode, delving into the lost city itself, is filled with puzzles, danger, and very nasty creatures. All the while the danger of the Death Curse hangs over your and everybody in the world's head. Come out victorious and your players could become the heroes of all of Faerûn! This adventure is probably one of the best WoTC has put out in a long while. The book is packed with ideas and fascinating settings. As a DM, this book really gets my imagination going, and really gets me excited about the kind of things my party will encounter. The situations and people in the book feel really well-rounded and full of potential. The mechanics of the travel through the jungle will be fun and add incredible dimension. I would say this is not a good book for a beginning DM. It requires a good understanding about how D&D module books work and how to use them to create a campaign. They aren't scripts, they are outlines that require the ability to fill in the gaps, use your imagination, and be able to react to situations. This book benefits from a good amount of preparation prior to each session, mapping out potential encounters and situations. I extrapolate and invent, expand parts of the book I find interesting and skip over parts I don't. If you really want to run this adventure, but would like help, there are companion pieces available for purchase on the Web (I use the DM's Guild). These will help you understand and greatly expand the potential of the book. Don't think the book is the extent of the module. The adventure is what you make it! I guess my only big complaint would be that the maps are too small, as always. I wish there could be full-page maps for every encounter, but that would be prohibitively expensive. It does come with an immense map of the entire map of the Chult peninsula, that is two-sided, showing both undiscovered and fully-discovered aspects. Have fun!

Pros: -Classic high fantasy world, perfect for any DnD group, especially beginners -Unique jungle setting, gives an atmosphere of danger and exploration -Straighforward story with lots of interesting sidequests and encounters -Information in the book is presented in a very easy-to-read way for the DM -The endgame megadungeon is amazingly designed, and gives the campaign an awesome climax -Zombie Dinosaurs Cons: -The starting hook is a little weak, but any experienced DM could easily tweak it -Lots of jungle exploration and random encounters, requires good pacing and encounter-running on the DM's part for it to stray from being boring -Difficult. If run exactly as the book says, this campaign will absolutely kill the whole party. The monsters are tough, the jungle is unforgiving, and the namesake Tomb of Annihilation is filled with "save-or-die" mechanics. I would recommend reducing the damage/difficulty of many encounters so that your players don't lose their characters every single session. Overall, an amazing adventure. I personally think this is better than Curse of Strahd since it appeals to the broader high fantasy audience rather than fans of a niche genre like gothic horror. Heroic, funny, and dangerous, Tomb of Annihilation is sure to be a great campaign for your group.

Good product

Now that we're winding down this campaign, I decided to give my impressions and some advice. WARNING: DM SPOILERS FOLLOW! So, here's what I did differently. First, exploration of Chult got simplified: rather than using the provided fold-out map with all the blank hexes, I scanned the DM map from the book and photoshopped all of the location names out. This meant no need for a giant bulletin board (which the game store where we play doesn't have) and also no cartography skills needed by the players. Second, I integrated Lost Shrine of Tamoachan and Dead in Thay from Tales from the Yawning Portal into this story. Lost Shrine became a way for them to discover a map to lead them to Omu, and Dead in Thay was made into an epilogue. Third (and this was a really tough decision that the players will never never know about), I decided not to run the city of Omu the way the book says. It was going to be a massive pain, so I just wrote a script for events that would happen each day they were in the city. So, they thought they were moving around on the map, but in fact I had them arbitrarily find what I needed them to find. So, no random encounters, and no measured movement on the map. I picked the five shrines I thought the group would have the most fun with, and guided them to those; all the others they found pillaged. So yeah, maybe that makes me a crap DM, but it's all about having a good time, and that was the best way. Fourth, I had to give a lot - a lot - of ad hoc XP awards to keep the party at a reasonable level. Random encounters just aren't enough if you only use them as often as the book says. So ad hocs for each puzzle/room/trap, and that keeps the party level just about right. Finally, a mistake I should have seen coming and didn't: don't give your players 50 temporary HP each turn during the fight with Acererak. I think 20 or 25 would be better. With 50, you have to do more than 50 damage to any player each turn in order to make a dent in them at all. Seems obvious, but even Acererak had a hard time putting out that much damage. And that's assuming they don't use healing potions or spells! When I manage to kill only one player character in the final showdown, there's a balance problem. Anyway, those are my lessons learned. It's been a great time for everyone, and I'll definitely do this campaign again some day. Cheers, everyone, and carpe DM!

My players and I are 10 sessions into this module so far and having a lot of fun. That being said, the module has some issues that have become typical for a lot of published D&D adventures over the last 4-5 years. Namely, this is less a module and more of a campaign setting. For at least the first 5 levels of play, there is not much of a coherent story. What you get for the first 5 or more levels is a big map with a lot of blank spaces on it and more locations than your players could ever visit before out-leveling the content or running out of time. It also feels like 90% of these jungle locations and encounters have nothing to do with the core story. On top of that, with their central NPC and story hook actively dying and the worldwide threat of the Death Curse looming over them, the players have more incentive to skip things and jump to the end than to actually take their time exploring. This makes some of the side quests particularly baffling. For example, one of the quests titled, "Shilku Reconnaissance", involves sailing around to the opposite side of the map and then spending a week exploring a specific area. In game, this is a quest that would likely require several months of travel time for a reward that is the equivalent of about 50 gold, a hotel room, and a few meals. Why even bother including a quest like that when, in game, the player's primary quest giver and story anchor, is actively dying? In addition, when you look at the location where the quest would take them, there's nothing there but an abandoned village. So, as written, you're spending months of in-game time for absolutely no reason unless you, as a DM, make something up. If I'm doing that, why am I paying up to $50 for a module? As a result, it's difficult to get the players invested early on because they're just wandering around saying to themselves, "This place is cool, but why are we here? Aren't we in a hurry to save the world? This NPC with the magic ring is interesting, but what does he have to do with the Death Curse and the final Tomb?" Unfortunately the answer is usually, "Nothing." This NPC has no purpose other than a reference to a novel that came out 20 years ago and so we can have a protagonist in the board game and video game tie-ins. It is imperative, as a DM, to create characters collaboratively with your players, so that they'll have the right motivation to stick to the campaign. A character focused on the Death Curse and saving the world will be very disappointed for the first 5 or more levels of play otherwise. The writers should not have included a time limit if they wanted the players to explore and experience as much as possible. Syndra is the first NPC the players are likely to interact with at any length, and if they like her, they'll want to get straight to the Soulmonger and save the world and won't care about retrieving wizard amulets, running dinosaur races, liberating dwarven mines, or hunting pirates. If you want those things to have any bearing on the story, you have to make it up yourself. I'm not a writer. I suck at doing that. It's why I purchased a module in the first place. I had a player who was starting to get very upset about the amount of hurdles he needed to jump in order to start exploring and go after the Soulmonger. Between the six day trip to get a charter, the need to interview and settle on a guide (of which the module provides nearly a dozen), the buying and tracking of supplies, and the bevy of potential side quests, he was starting to feel very frustrated. I had to have a talk with him outside of the game to explain things and settle him down so he could have fun again. My other gripe is the inconvenience of the hex crawl. I don't mean the crawl itself, which I think can be very fun, but rather, the lack of tools to make this easier on the DM. Instead of creating an "ugly" hex map that's easy for the DM to follow and makes the type of terrain in each hex easy to see and understand, they took a detailed, hand drawn map, pasted a hex over it and blanked out some of it for the players to explore. Don't get me wrong, the map is gorgeous, but it is so detailed that the handout version is barely legible, and using it as a key while your players jump from hex to hex is very difficult if you're running the hexcrawl as written. I had to spend hours making a simplified version of the hex map just so I wouldn't get lost while I ran it. I envy those who are running it online in a virtual tabletop. There's a lot of potential in this module. I picked it up because I was tired of the standard western-fantasy tropes and this module delivers in that regard. Deadly jungles, exotic creatures (DINOSAURS!), crazy traps, and a real sense of danger all feel very refreshing from I've grown used to, but due to the loose nature of the setting, this module felt like homework rather than a time-saving tool for a busy DM. I had to re-read a lot of areas in order to feel confident about them and then figure out how to fit my players and their story there, as the provided story is kind of weak. Then, after I was finally familiar with all the lore and jungle locations, I came to the realization that my players will not have the time or inclination to visit over half of them. Even the final dungeon is so open and so detailed, that you shouldn't dare let your players enter until you have a firm understanding of every level, clue, puzzle, and encounter, lest your players jump ahead to a part you weren't prepared for out of the 81 rooms. I'm finally feeling confident in my mastery of the module, but it took nearly 3 months of "study" to get there. Maybe I'm getting old, but I miss the more episodic nature of AD&D and 3E adventure paths. This move towards big, open-ended settings rather than "adventures" sounds good on paper for a roleplaying game, but doesn't always translate well at the table due to how much prep is needed at the beginning. Wizards, PLEASE go back to shorter, more manageable modules that I can move around my campaign as needed. These big open settings are turning into a headache.

I played a lot of Dungeon's and Dragon's back in the eighties. After watching Stranger Things with my twelve year old boys they became interested in the game. It has been a fun bonding experience and they really love it. I recently began running ToA for my twins and some of their friends and it has been great! It is hard to find time to world-build and create adventures from scratch. This adventure takes all that pressure off and creates an immersive experience with the main details all in place. A good mixture of puzzle solving, side games, and old fashioned hack-and-slash combat has really kept everyone engaged and excited. You can make this adventure move quickly if you want but if played the way it is laid out, you could make this story last for a year or more! For the same cost as taking my whole family to the movies that is a great value. You will probably need the Monster Manual for encounter stats for creatures and NPCs in the adventure that were not created specifically for this product. However, with some diligence you could likely find most of this on the internet. If you are new to dungeons & dragons, Wizards of the Coast offer a free version of the rules on their website.

Finally what feels like a complete world away from the Forgotten Realms, yet entirely and perfectly incorporated into it as well. This book is superb. The adventures will take a while and there's plenty of ways to die, which makes the game all the better. Additionally, the Death Curse is a GREAT way to make the players consider the dire consequences of screwing up and getting killed... since resurrection magic no longer works. There's a lot of intrigue and the initial starting city of Port Nyanzaru is delightfully rich and full of possibilities. I'm playing it now, starting at first level, which is not really advised... because you kind of have to do a lot of citybound side quests and everyday you delay going to find the Soul Monger, your patron who is supposedly supporting your endeavors gets that much closer to death. Still, I've had such a blast. Great work Wizards. This adventure is so much more rich and full than your initial offerings! Definitely worth it... and c'mon, you can ride dinosaurs! :D