Introducing Tomb of Annihilation
Session 0 and House Rules
THIS ARTICLE HAS 3 SECTIONS:
Preface: On Bad Ideas
Session 0
Micah’s House Rules
PREFACE: ON BAD IDEAS
If you’re online, you’re going to find a lot of people asking about some pretty bad ideas. I’ll phrase these as questions, as they’d be posed in forums. I’ll respond with my opinions to each pitfall.
“My players just finished another campaign and are high level now. How should I introduce those characters to Tomb of Annihilation?”
Don’t. ToA is designed to take characters from level 1 on up to about level 11. The exception to this would be if you wanted to start them off right at the entrance of the Tomb itself. If that’s the case, they should be pre-leveled up to level 9.
“Does someone know a good one-shot set in Chult to start off the campaign with so the characters will get to know each other before the story begins?”
There are already too many places to go in the adventure, no need to add more. The characters will get to know each other on the road. Or…probably not. They might just keep dying.
“My player wants to run a Tabaxi (or some other Chultan). How do I introduce them into the adventure in such a way that they’ll know the region already?”
The whole point of running ToA is to introduce players to environments, creatures, and lore that they DON’T already know. Do not allow players—at least at the beginning of the campaign—to play characters from the Chultan peninsula. Have them pick someone from the Sword Coast.
SESSION 0
Disclosure: I don’t usually do a Session 0 for my campaigns. My group is my family, so I already know their boundaries well so it’s unnecessary. Usually.
Tomb of Annihilation is a different sort of game, though, so a Session 0 makes sense.
I’m not going to go over all the elements of a good Session 0, how/why to run one, etc. There are very good resources for that elsewhere. I’ll put out, though, that if you are playing with new people, you should probably do a Session 0 so you can establish what sorts of content is off the table.
Your Session 0 will probably need to cover other issues besides those covered here: triggering content, player desires for the campaign, rule interpretation clean-up, game scheduling norms, etc. I’m just here to talk about what ToA uniquely needs.
Tomb has a few elements in it that are best dealt with in a Session 0 in order of relevance
Tomb of Annihilation is part of a D&D context that may be meaningful
The game is deadly.
The game has racist and othering tropes in it
The game assumes players know some Forgotten Realms lore
ToA’s Context—this is all stuff you can tell your players, IMO
Tomb of Annihilation is a 5e reboot of an iconic adventure called Tomb of Horror by Gary Gygax. That adventure was written as a way to kill of characters that were too “stacked” by obnoxious (and often, dishonest) players. “You got a guy who says his 20th level fighter is invincible? Send him over the the Tomb of Horror table!” they’d say!
It was an overtly unfair module to be run through. The puzzles were not self-consistent; the challenges were absurdly deadly (a lot of “if the players enter the room, roll a save-vs-death because: evil magic” sort of stuff).
The villain of that story is a demilich named Acererak the Eternal. He’s the most famous lich in all of D&D, except for perhaps Vecna. He has even appeared as a villain in such mainstream content as the book and film, Ready Player One.
Acererak is a maniac whose favorite pastime is building nutty dungeons full of traps and monsters, then watching adventurers get chopped up on them in new and interesting ways.
Knowing this about the game’s origins and the nature of Acererak MAY influence what your players say about how modded they’d like the campaign’s deadliness to be. Keeping the nature and identity of Acererak a secret to be revealed seems goofy to me. He’s on the cover. He’s famous. Players should know who he is, at least a little.
The Game is Deadly
As I said elsewhere, I offered my players three choices during our Session 0:
Bloodbath (Rules as Written): fully deadly and many of the deadly elements are unfair. This requires players to actively avoid scenarios in order to survive at all. This is how organized play will run it and also the way to play it if players want full bragging rights about finishing the adventure. This can be played in “Meatgrinder Mode” or not; both ways are deadly (notes on Meatgrinder and the Death Curse below).
Deadly: the DM will run the game deadly, but will modify the scenarios to be fair. Players would retain most bragging rights if they made it through this.
Just Fun: the DM will nerf the game generally, keeping the 5E feel in which most players, with a little caution, should expect their characters to survive to the end. Players are on easy mode. No bragging allowed, but maybe more fun, depending on personalities.
My players chose 2, so I’ll be including all my mods for the game in this blog as they come. I’ll also include any observations or thoughts I have about the other modes too.
If the players choose either bloodbath or deadly modes, I would make a house rule that they MUST have a back-up character ready at every single session.
a backup makes it easier for them to swallow being killed
a backup makes it easier for the DM to swallow killing them
a backup makes it possible to drop the player back into the game quickly
You should emphasize to your players that ToA is survivable IF players focus on caution. They won’t do it. They’ll always fall for any bait in any scenario.
But telling them this in Session 0 gives you the ability to tell them you told them so when they went back to pluck the emerald eyes from the statue that killed them.
Racism and Othering in the Game
Most of the adventure takes place in a pseudo-African jungle setting. The native people of the region are all black humans. This alone is sort of weird to say out loud once the players arrive at Port Nyanzaru as a reveal:
Your eyes blink open from the teleportation spell and are blinded by the array of colors in Port Nyanzaru! Giant hydraulic systems move ships and cargo around the bay before you! Coral and turquoise drapery adorns bleached stone walls of strange Arabesque architecture! Giant lizards (what WE would call “dinosaurs!”) tow the ships into port! And everywhere you look, every NPC is a straight-up BLACK PERSON! Exotic, right??
Try it out. Weird, right?
I found that the easiest way to introduce these problematic elements is to tell the players about them upfront, before the game begins:
Look, gang. This adventure is set in a parody of Africa, Latin America, and Asia combined. Let’s use that genre to illuminate bigotry, not reinforce it.
Your group can then lean into this as hard as you like. Pendleton Ward, who wrote Adventure Time, worked on this—so the comedic potential of the parody is intentional.
I, personally, emphasize this stuff a lot in my game. I draw not only on jungle adventures like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Tarzan, The Emperor’s New Groove, and Romancing the Stone—but also on indictments of racism and colonialism like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Ferngully, Apocalypse Now!, Black Panther, Cameron’s Avatar, and Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.
My Chultans are conscious of the colonialist efforts of the Sword Coast. They either resent their exploitation—or assist it opportunistically. Other racist topics that I inform my game with include black-face, minstrelsy, cultural appropriation, the Noble Savage, and the Magical Negro.
Player Background Knowledge of Forgotten Realms
Tomb of Annihilation is explicitly a Forgotten Realms adventure set in Faerun1. The adventure begins in Baldur’s Gate, which the characters are meant to count as “home.” Or at least, “like home.”
The assumption is that the characters grew up in the European fantasy setting—with leather-capped goblins, paladins in shining armor, and gray-bearded wizards wearing violet star-crusted cloaks. This makes the arrival at Chult jarring and alien.
If the characters are FROM Chult, it would mess up the whole set-up. If the characters know a lot about Chult, then it messes it up too. Don’t allow this.
Moreover, the adventure assumes that players are familiar with some of the Sword Coast factions—particularly, the Flaming Fist mercenary group, the knights of The Order of the Gauntlet, and—to a lesser degree—the Harpers. I would give a handout to the players with rough descriptions of these three groups that say something like:
FLAMING FIST: these mercenaries serve as the local police in most cities, including Baldur’s Gate.
ORDER OF THE GAUNTLET: a holy order of knights, dedicated to protecting the world against evil.
HARPERS: a secret society, collecting information and intelligence.
Other non-Chultan factions like the Emerald Enclave, the Lord’s Alliance, the Zhentarim, and the Red Wizards of the Thay have their parts in the adventure, but it doesn’t assume that the players are familiar with them. You can introduce these as you like.
Micah’s House Rules
This will not be encyclopedic; like most gaming tables, we have a whole mess of house rules that we have adopted over time.
This will, instead, be a list of the house rules that I recommend especially for Tomb of Annihilation.
Players must have at least one back-up character on-hand for every session.
Use a tougher death system than 5e’s. You can use the “Meatgrinder Mode” that’s provided in the game, but I think it’s still pretty weak. We use a tougher single-death-save check based on Professor Dungeon Master’s rules.
Use a milestone leveling system, not XP. Replacement characters should be introduced at the same level as the group (benchmarks for the milestones are on p.7 of the ToA book…or see below.
Without XP as a motivator, I like to reward good character play (interest in lore, problem solving, etc.) with handing out magic items and weapons. These can be looted by replacement characters and serve as a motivator in a milestone system. They can also be taken away or broken when you want. I’d mostly stick with simple magic items like +1 swords and the like.
Here are the suggested milestones as indicated in the adventure book. NOTE: most groups find that they are able to mop the floor with the big bads pretty easily if they are over 10th level at the end.
This can be mitigated by using enemies who want to win and a properly sized group (2-5)…or by letting the players get to locations at lower levels than indicated in the guide below.
SUGGESTED CHARACTER LEVELS (per p.7 of ToA)
Port Nyanzaru: 1st Level
Land of Chult: 1st-6th Levels
Dwellers of the Forbidden City: 5th-8th Levels
Fane of the Night Serpent: 7th-9th
Tomb of the Nine Gods: 9th and higher
Beyond these, you may also consider using a different D20 game system entirely for running this adventure. 5e Hardcore Mode, for example, or another OSR-style game would likely offer a more punchy RPG system for a game like this. I’ll be assuming 5e throughout the blogs I write, unless I state otherwise for some reason.
Next Up: Session 1 - Baldur’s Gate
Micah Faulkner - @AnnotatedToA
Dungeon Master
It’s conceivable that you could run Tomb in a different setting—Greyhawk or Krynn, for example, but really it’s a FR-lore-centric adventure. It would take a whole lot of work, without much seeming payoff, to retrofit it for a different campaign setting.