Tomb of Annihilation (Dungeons & Dragons)

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!

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!

Started running this game a few weeks ago for a group of friends. It's a great base for a jungle adventure and has loads of content, more than you'll use in a single campaign. Your players have the freedom to set out in almost any direction and find engaging encounters. No two playthroughs of this will be the same. My adventuring party is running into dinosaurs, zombies, and the mysteries left behind in the ruins of a lost civilization and loving it. This particularly appeals to fans of hexcrawls and dungeons alike, but there's so many locations and NPCs to encounter, I could see just about any group of players having an awesome time. If there's anything about it that's a drawback, it's that there is so much information the DM will want to read up on ahead of time; expect to read half the book before you run it.

if want to mess with your players and show them that plot armor is fake in your campaigns, this is for you. i highly recommend this story. having it physically is a game changer. this arrived within a day and i started planning for my session immediately after. I'm currently on session four and two of my players have already made new characters, those who survived made backup characters just incase. the no revivify and DC 15 for death saves are my favorite mechanics, players are forced to think critically to stay alive. my players take the campaign serious which allows for emotional moments you just cant have in other campaigns I've DM'd. i will recommend that you play this with milestone and that you read everything first. Also keep at least two places for your players to find themselves at fresh in memory or possibly built in encounter builder, and also think up creative ways for them to get to those places. your players might surprise you with how fast they can navigate an area when they take the game seriously.

I wanted to introduce my close group of friends to D&D finally, and I decided between this and Curse of Strahd. This one stood out to me most though. I love this! This has literally everything I’d ever want and there is so much content. I’ve only dm’ed a few sessions before, and that was a few years ago, but I haven’t found this to be too difficult. I enjoy putting in a lot of work in planning though. Depending on where exactly your party is and how fast they go, really drives your planning, as there is so much they can do, and only so much you as a dm can account for. I wrote my own personal hook too, because that’s the one thing I felt faltered in this campaign. Dmsguild has a lot of nice supplements to this campaign as well, which I love using, like “encounters in port nyanzaru” and “toa companion”. Its also really important to have a good understanding of this campaign, beginning to end; you don’t need to read the whole thing cover to cover, but you need to be able to guide and support the party effectively. Overall, use this as a frame work, use a lot of its content, but don’t feel pressure to use it all, I mean, there’s just too much anyways. Feel free to make your own things up too, remember, it’s your campaign. But yeah, get this, you won’t be disappointed! :D

4 out 5 stars TLDR Suffers from the conflict of the 79-day time clock versus classic hex crawl exploration. I ran this as an Adventure League hardcover using the season 7 rules. Which mean XP for encounters and gold/magic items found. Substitute Pregens were allowed if the pc died. I was also running the Season 7 modules at the same time. I also had my players roll 3 d100 and made up wandering monster encounters before they were rolled. 12 PC deaths with 4 being permeant. 274 monsters killed. 16 sessions of play. And 7 days left on the clock. The setup is the group has 79 days before their patron die due to the death curse. The curse is subtracting 1 HP per day from people who have be brought back to life. So they must find the cause of the death curse and end it. Artwork. Is excellent and range from horror to humor. Maps. The maps are excellent. Even with multiple colors you can still see the grid if necessary, I do suggest you photocopy the pull out map, or find a jpg and print out in full size of better. I printed a no locations marked map in a two by three format. Handouts. Skip Handout 1 in any size format unless your players like drawing where they been. Appendix B is a great hex crawl source Introduction. This explains the death curse, the time clock and gives recommended levels. The weather is not a problem, nor navigation after level five. Chapter 1 gives a good starting city and side quests. Some guides and rumors are included. But the town is just a jump off point for the start of the quest. Chapter 2 give various diverse locations and encounters and should have been bigger. Navigation or Getting Lost on page 38 is a good idea Chapter 3. Gets the players into the secret city. It has some nice encounters and nice rivals. I made handmade puzzle cubes for my group. Chapter 4 best feature is the Roster on page 113. Due to good luck and good play my players blew through the chapter in one session. Chapter 5 is back to a classic dungeon dive. You will need to make some changes as a bad roll can put people out of play for most of a session. I serious mess up the final boss battle and suggest you give the clues to the players and let the ones put into a time out return after a few rounds of combat. Final thoughts. Drop the time clock. Or increase the time clock to 120 days and use Chapter 2 as classic dungeon crawl.

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.

We have several adventures already and I am a novice DM, so the idea of having a physical map that we explore is so much fun! I haven't figured out how to manage the map's sides so that I can see what type of terrain the players are moving into without a lot of folding and flipping and counting, but I couldn't care less. It's such a great idea. I also love the wilderness encounter table with different creatures depending on what type of terrain you are in. I think this is definitely the book for newer DMs. Running the encounters is as much excitement as my old brain can process without also inventing a story about the path the adventurers are taking. We started out as Level 1, which it said we could, but my first group went straight into the jungle and we encountered 4 cannibals right off the bat. (96 hit points each!) So when we started again, we leveled ourselves up to 6 and gave ourselves an "uncommon" magic item. Our group was 8 yesterday, and we had a blast!!!! Highly recommend this one.

Heb het boek sinds ik het heb gekocht meerdere keren gelezen, en er zit zo veel detail in deze prachtige module dat ik er elke keer van geniet. En heb stiekem een paar traps en lore er al uitgehaald en in andere verhalen verwerkt. Great book!

Great book!

Esta campaña de exploración me parece muy divertida y emocionante, además me encanta la ambientación de jungla con algunos dinosaurios, qué más puedes pedir, está edición es en inglés, te recomiendo verificar primero si acaso no le sabes mucho al inglés. Es una aventura muy divertida, emocionante y misteriosa.

If you were to ask me which campaign setting I would love to run as a DM, or go in as a player, Tomb of Annihilation is without a doubt the answer to both. A deep, role-playing filled campaign similar to Critical Role style of play will not be found here; the roleplaying takes the back seat in this adventure. If you have an easy-going group of friends who want to sit around, roll dice, drink, smoke, whatever, and not take themselves too seriously, this is a slice of fried gold. Don't get attached to your characters, don't expect to make it out in one piece, but expect to have an absolute fricken blast playing through this. I loved it, from the top of the island of Schult, to the bottom of the Tomb. 5 Stars, must play adventure.

I've DM'd about 2/3 of this adventure now and wow, my group and I have loved it. It's rich with detail and super fun. We've played it as a "indiana jones" meets "jurassic park" meets "lovecraftian horror" campaign. The sandbox section has been great. There are lots of podcasts to listen to in order to get your mind in the world, which I totally recommend. 5/5 would definitely recommend.