Tomb of Annihilation Review
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Discover the source of a mysterious death curse in the jungles of Chult. In this Dungeons & Dragons adventure, players can deal with wacky concepts of dinosaurs in D&D and get nostalgic vibes to one of the most famous dungeons ever created for the game. Today we are reviewing Tomb of Annihilation.
The Tomb of Annihilation is another adventure module for Dungeons & dragons 5th Edition. This is for characters level 1-11. Chris Perkins is the lead designer of this adventure. It will go without saying that anything Chris Perkins touches starts to bleed through and become noticeable to me.
The cover shows the famous Demilich Acererak. This is the same character that is on the cover of the Dungeon Masters Guide, as well as the mysterious villain from the Tomb of Horrors. The Tomb of Horrors was also reprinted and modified for 5th edition in the Tales From the Yawning Portal Adventure book.
Throughout the course of this book, the players will be tasked with finding an object that consumes souls. If the item consumes enough souls can become an evil god.
The introduction has a lot of really neat details about characters and the items that will help the Dungeon Master get an idea of all the characters and the items involved in this story.
This version of the game also has a meat grinder like effect where death saving throws require a much higher role to save of 10 or higher making death saving throws 50/50. This is a feature that I can really appreciate and hope that more adventures contain a mode like this as well.
The book also comes with the description of the races in this campaign. The Chultans, who are just humans, the Aarakocra which are an avian race, Batiri which are the goblins on the island, as well as some other races.
The Death curse will cause characters to lose 1 HP per day, so that means that there is a time limit in place to getting to the end game here. I think that if you want to let your players actually enjoy some of the areas in the game, to go ahead and make this more forgiving at the beginning of the game with increasing pace of loss of HP through the course of the adventure as they near the end.
Setting up the Tomb of Annihilation
This is all about arriving at Chult and getting to know the city, perhaps stocking up on items by betting on or racing dinosaurs. I was not the biggest fan of the inclusion to Dinosaurs this campaign and that might be my biggest issue with the entire campaign as a whole.
Once players have taken time to level up in the arrival port of Port Neanzaru. This will be important as the later chapters are not forgiving and if the players are going to venture out into the forests, they can potentially stumbleupon locations far greater than what their levels can handle.
Maps in Tomb of Annihilation
There are plenty of maps in this book that follow the standardized map art of other Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition adventures. All these areas that the book gives makes for many varied scenes that are jungle themed and does not grow stale during the course of the adventure.
One of my favorite locations in the campaign is Omu, this city will be the main area that they will be hanging out in and adventuring while working to obtain the soul monger.
The Trickster gods are able to possess any of the player characters that will give new effects or negatively impact the characters.
The campaign book comes with a really cool double sided map that has one side fully revealed and the other only filled with the known explored areas of Chult. This is a really cool concept that gives the entire jungle a fog of war like element to them.
Extras for Tomb of Annihilation
This was clearly a campaign setting that Wizards of the coast wanted to push. There was many side items that can be purchased from dice, Dungeon master screen and mini’s to even a standalone board game which at the time was only released for selective campaign settings.
If players want to get the miniatures that are really themed to the set can get them by buying the board game. The scale of the miniatures in the board game to fit the standard miniatures released by wizkids.
The set was also released with it’s own set of miniatures that come in blind purchase boxes which can still be found online today. We will provide a link to all these below!
The DM screen is really useful. If there was one campaign setting that I would really recommend getting the Dungeon Master Screen, this would be the one. It contains a lot of information as well as the map of the entire jungle that if the players are playing with the hidden version of the map, will not show everything that the DM needs to see. This simply saves more time with the flipping through the pages of the campaign.
The Final Dungeon
The last chapter is the Tomb of the 9 gods. The 9 gods is referring to the trickster gods in which the players must obtain items to gain access to the dungeon.
Like any Dungeon crawls, this will come down to if the players want to actually dungeon crawl. Since this portion of the book takes the most time, it should be noted that this campaign is a dungeon crawl at heart that simply takes more time to arrive at.
The dungeon is well put together, the puzzles are varied and unique. I would not say that this dungeon is near as sinister as it’s obvious older brother, the Tomb of Horrors.
The final battle in the campaign is neat as well. Based on the mechanics of the trickster gods can really make for a supercharged finale.
Final Thoughts on Tomb of Annihilation
This adventure module is easily the most out there at the time of its release. I would argue that Descent into Avernus might be more out there now. Tomb of Annihilation deviates from the standard sword coast adventures quite a bit though.
Tomb of Annihilation is a mixed bag for me. There are parts that are really cool and enjoyable. But for me, I still just couldn’t really get behind some of the themes that this campaign was offering.
With that being said, this campaign is a fun one to run if your group is looking for something a little different from the standard fantasy setting.
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