It does seem a bit rough by the end. Lots of death traps and destroying/removing items. Definitely think the meat grinder playstyle the module recommends in the intro is a good mind set to have, especially for the final dungeon.
@@GreenDM personally I'd massively shorten the tomb. I love everything before the tomb. Great flavor, fun and interesting sandbox, vibrant world. But the endless dungeon crawl ruins the adventure by the end. You'll end up with players asking "how long until we're done and can play something else?". Seriously, use everything EXCEPT the tomb stuff, come up with a new campaign premise and make a small, Tomb-Of-Annihilation-inspired dungeon/forgotten city that houses your endgame.
I have to admit that our current run through of Tomb is really throwing up issues. The difficulty curve is all over the place and we haven't really come across anything that has really been a stand out 'wow' event. The whole experience is traipsing through the jungle getting random combat encounter after random combat encounter. The GM actually faced a player rebellion over the complete lack of magic items as well. I don't know if it's intentional but we hit level 6 with a bag of holding, a cloak of resistance and a +1 shield. I did discuss this with the GM as it felt impossible that we'd missed all of these cool locations loaded with awesome magic items and he pretty much said 'there's nothing to find in the locations you've visited'. When I was sold the campaign it sounded like Jurassic Park and Indiana Jones but it's been so weirdly random. We meet characters and they sound like they might be important to the plot then we never see them again. We go to places that seem like they'll be epic, there's a couple of combat encounters and nothing in the way of reward, just another dozen or so combat encounters to get to the next location. Maybe we've missed stuff (I keep telling myself that every week) and that's why the whole experience just feels a bit disconnected. In some essence the campaign has been reduced to a slog through a jungle as we just hack our way towards the Tomb, hoping to get the experience over as soon as we can do.
It is unfortunate that this book has a lot of combat encounters for the hex crawl and dungeons, and leaves a lot of the social and wonderous exploration for the DM to fill in. Seems like they put a lot of effort into the final dungeon, but did not think of how to make the lead up to it as exciting and interesting as possible. Also that final dungeon wishes for your death so bad lol.
I mean, I kinda love this adventure. For one, it's basically D&D goes Indiana Jones. Lost cities, jungles, racing other factions... it's a very fun thing to pitch to players :) Second, I love how it leans into the inherent silliness that D&D sometimes rails against. Dinosaur races? Hell yeah. Goblin battle stacks? No doubt. All the weird shit in the tomb? Why not, let's go! Been prepping to run this for a group, and it's been a delight to read.
My group just finished ToA tonight, I was a player, not the GM. Our GM really cut things back, as we are more story driven rather than dungeon dwellers. After listening to your recap, I'm very glad with how our GM used this as the backbone for our story but added a bunch of his own ideas as well as things that related to our characters.
Perhaps...random question what is your Intelligence saving throw modifier? Just for academic purposes of course. And do you have enough HP to survive a 10d10 piercing damage attack? Again, purely academic.
5:47 😂 I have never laughed this hard at a well-done echo effect and I'm instantly hooked. Helps that I'm planning a similar adventure and already interested but I sing your praises! 🎉 Well done 👍
Really hope you've got more content on the way, mate, I love this channel! Watching your "So you want to run..." videos on repeat: the editing, the comedy - they're just such good quality 💪
6 sessions in, two of my characters are dead, one to a random encounter and the other to not being able to make 4 strength roles with a 8 in strength, one player got their character aged up to near death, irreversibly and 4 players left and i just quit, very fun campaign…not
Oh lord. Yay tomb of annihilation has a lot of old school traps and design in there that kill characters quick. Definitely need to have in the campaign assumptions this is a high lethality adventure (which it doesnt explain well) or have a DM that changes some of the encounters to be less surprise kill boxes.
Idk maybe I'll play this module some day so I shouldn't watch it because of the spoilers. Watches it anyway. Yeah I don't think watching this video gives you a leg up...
I remember running this game and the players didn't give a flying f*@k about the Death Curse and I had to make up a new plot hook. It devolved into Monster Hunter: Chult Edition. 1 player got a Chocobo for her race animal. (Which costed 2K gold) 1 player got a Yoshi-saurus. (A rare breed that requires combing the jungle) 1 player got a telepathic talking triceratops. (Basically donkey from Shrek). 1 player got Blue from Jerassic World. My players loved the level 1 to 5 short adventure. I decided to retcon the Death Curse from happening. The villain of the game was essentially the Undead IRS whom the Warlocke and Sorcerer made a pact with a Lich whom resided in the jungle. I changed it to Azalin Rex because I couldn't pronounce the module's official Lich character for a few months. So on a side note, the players became wealthy individuals and took their mounts with them back to the Sword Coast. The "Jurassic Battle Swingers" made a name for themselves... or JBS. The players named themselves that because they wanted to avoid a zombie Horde and the Fighter suggested using dangling vines I muttered as filler description. Then had a chance sequence of a giant murder pterodactyl which I ripped off the giant eagle from Curse of Strahd. After that, the table made 'swingers' jokes and I had an NPC joked about their actions. Then I find out a week later the Bard proudly repeat the name in public. "We'll swing there, and everywhere. Got a old lady who needs help, we'll swing over there." - Bard. After killing me with their humor. College life was about to ramp up. So I wrote a final badass race which had 3 players knocked out the race. To which the Bard was the one to win for the team. The players loved it, I got to read the end of the adventure. And we'll return to these characters once most of them graduate. Chult is one hell of an awesome location.
Hi. I recently saw your videos. And I think they are really really good and even getting better over time. I like the newer ones even more. I can understand if you are getting tiered of RU-vid. And that making them takes a lot of your time. But I just want to say, that I, and a lot of other people had a great time watching. And I really hope you continue. I wish you all the best
Yeaaah... this module sucks. It's one thing to make a punishing dungeon full of bad game design (some people want that so chef don't judge) but then it has the GALL to give you 0 loot for your efforts unless the DM goes out of their way to take the "option" the book clearly doesn't want you to take of letting them keep the god items. Which aren't great anyway!
This was the 1st ever game I played in D&D..... & HOO-BOY! what a mistake that was! *11 sessions in, a player playing a Homebrew sorceress w. Main Character Syndrome murders my character (a Monk with a Homebrew class) at Nangnangs temple then tries to pass off to the Yuan-Ti as an ally & get the team to surrender..... which fails spectacularly! Made to sit out the game but now in a 2nd session in a Homebrew campaign
I played in this module as a cleric... and there was not a whole lot of obvious direction to the story that I noticed... or perhaps the DM didn't say much of it? I don't know I got distracted a lot by our guide being an utterly useless pos and never having enough cleric spells to keep people conscious.
The "Let the body hit the floor" jokes crackt me up. I need to watch the videos more than one time because english is not my mothertongue, so I don´t understand everything at the first time in that speed.But I really enjoy it :D I love the small gags (same with "Downtown" in out of the abyss). Cool video and funny explanation!
@@GreenDM it helps, that I learned English at school and consume more and more English videos. But I missed a lot of jokes because of my lack with vocabulary. And what is grammar?! XD But yeah, Enjoy your seria for the campaigns, so thank you for the videos! :)
We got to floor 5 of the dungeon. We booked it and barely detoured and I think the wizard contractor was still very very close to being dead. We did almost nothing in town except rent npcs. That tomb was just too wild.
@GreenDM yeah, we ran through like 8 characters through the campaign. Floor 5 was the final tpk. Back on topic, though, that timer sucks. Even sprinting, we nearly ran out of time.
@@W0lfMan26 It'd be awesome to have like another 40-60 days, so you have a little wiggle room to do side quests for expedition funds and maybe pursue one or two red herrings before finding the right path to Omu.
I bought this to start running as a game in between games. In case someone can't make our typical session so players don't miss out on our current story. I was going to just fill them in on the previous 2 chapters of ToA and start them on chapter 3. They're currently level 5, very close to level 6 PCs. Looking for feedback here. Any thoughts?
I think just starting with the hex crawl part and transitioning into the big dungeon seems like a good idea to me. That is the most interesting part of the adventure to me, unless your players REALLY like dino racing lol. Just make sure the characters have purpose for doing the hex crawl and make sure the players want to do the hex crawl and a really big dangerous dungeon. With that you should be at least good to start!