Tomb of Annihilation: Review

This review contains spoilers for the 5e adventure Tomb of Annihilation. If you will play in a
campaign with it, I ask that you don’t read this - for your own sake and that of your GM. 

Tomb of Annihilation came out in September 2017, so this review follows almost two
years after its publication. I realize few people are still deliberating over whether to buy
 this module or not. However, I couldn't bear to review a product I have yet to play. I
guess this makes me late to the party. Although this review is belated, I felt a personal
need to write it and weed through my thoughts on the adventure as an autopsy of our
last campaign.

Full disclosure: Our group did not finish the adventure. I GM’d a campaign using
Tomb of Annihilation from January 2018 to January 2019. We played one four-hour
session about once every two weeks, with intermittent breaks around holidays. Our
group found most of the puzzle cubes in Omu before losing interest. I later ran the
Tomb of the Nine Gods as a one-shot for a solo player. My thoughts in this review
come from these experiences as a GM.

Acererak beckons you from the front cover of Tomb of Annihilation. If you're interested in taking him up on his offer, try looking for the adventure at your friendly local game store.

THE GOOD

First, we will start with the positive things.

Many of the set pieces are interesting. I imagine that, if you’re considering running
Tomb of Annihilation (ToA), the “lost world” vibe interests you. And ToA does well
providing locales and creatures that capitalize on the setting. There’s a crumbling stone
bridge over a river chasm, a pirate cove with sharks in the shallows, and a crumbling
monastery on a cliff face, among others. As far as creatures go, there’s a tyrannosaurus
rex that vomits zombies and a leopard with snakes growing out of its back. How cool is
that? I won’t say that all the set pieces are equally strong (some of the keyed locations in
Chult amount to little more than a few sentences), but ToA has some cool places to
explore and creatures to interact with.

• 

  The zombie T-Rex from Tomb of Annihilation. My players never encountered it... I'm not sure if that's a good or a bad thing.

  The character backgrounds are cool. Tomb of Annihilation provides two new
  backgrounds for players characters: the Anthropologist and Archaeologist. These
  backgrounds fit with the setting, provide interesting abilities for player characters, and
  develop some compelling personalities.
• 
  

  

  Using the archaeologist background, you can actually make Indiana Jones. Let's hope you don't run into any snakes....

  The adventure includes some well-designed puzzles that challenge players. Like the
  set pieces and creatures, they can be hit-or-miss - but the hits are good. The good ones
  invite some real ingenuity on the part of players, particularly the individual shrines of
  the Nine Gods in Omu. The Tomb of the Nine Gods itself seems well-designed,
  expansive, and challenging, though a certain puzzle on the sixth level with rotating floor
  s proved more frustrating than fun. Many reflect an unfortunate compulsion to have
  player characters make skill checks to solve them, though those could be handwaved or
  ignored by the GM in play. 

THE BAD

The “call to action” is contrived. Tomb of Annihilation begins with the premise that a
benefactor hires the PCs to end the Death Curse, which comes from a mysterious artifact
 called the Soulmonger. The Death Curse causes resurrected individuals to waste away
and prevents resurrection because it absorbs souls. You have to wonder why the
benefactor would choose a bunch of low-level adventurers to send on this quest and
why other, more powerful, individuals haven’t already gotten involved. Presumably, if
the Soulmonger absorbs the souls of the dead, it also prevents them from reaching the
afterlife. I don’t know about you, but if I was a god in the campaign setting and the
souls of my followers stopped showing up at my door, I would be pretty miffed and
wonder what’s going on. Personally, I think it would be much better to simply say,
“There’s treasure in the Tomb of Annihilation. Go!” Unfortunately, the premise of the
Soulmonger and its Death Curse is so world-shakingly important (and integral to the
functioning of the eponymous tomb) that it requires some significant revision and
rewriting to make the adventure plausible.

The provided map of Chult is too large with 10 miles per hex. Make it six miles per hex to allow more exploration per day.

The (dis)organization of the book makes the adventure difficult to run. Preparing 
Tomb of Annihilation as a GM was a nightmare. Information about important
components of the adventure, especially NPCs, is scattered throughout the book with
few markers for easy navigation. For example, information on Ras Nsi, a central
 antagonist, is located on pages 4 and 5, page 92, pages 111 and 112, pages 120 and 121,
and pages 229 and 230. There’s not even a keyed index at the back of the book.

Wizards of the Coast should take a lesson from innovations in the OSR scene about adventure
formatting and layout: keyed maps with descriptions of creatures and rooms on the map itself,
 bulleted or nested text for room descriptions - these things make life easier for the GM.
When it comes to layout, organization, and formatting, Wizards of the Coast is behind
the times. Their printed content may look nice, but certainly isn’t user-friendly.

The overland map is prohibitively large. This means the good parts of ToA are
scattered throughout the jungle with vast tracts of empty wilderness between. The text
of the adventure itself even recommends the following: “If there’s a particular site you
want the characters to discover and explore, you can move the site so that it falls along
their path, and give it a new name if necessary.” In other words, the adventure tells you
to “quantum ogre” certain locations, otherwise the player characters aren’t likely to find
them.

My players got tired of the massive, undifferentiated jungle even after finding a
group of aarakocra and borrowing their gift of flight, which quickened their pace
considerably. The adventure could have provided more comprehensive aid for the GM
to make this section fun and engaging. However, all the GM gets is a few paragraphs
supplementing travel rules from the 5e Player’s Handbook and a table of random
encounters that trends heavily towards combat, with only one listed result for each
creature. In sum, a part of the adventure that takes a massive amount of table time
(travelling through the jungle) receives relatively shallow attention, putting more work
on the GM.

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR RUNNING THE GAME

Check out Encounters in the Savage Jungle by Jeff Stevens and the Tomb of
Annihilation Companion by Sean McGovern. They can help you fill in some holes left
by ToA, as written.

Do your homework before starting. At the beginning of your campaign, devote
thought to the Death Curse, the Soulmonger, and your player characters. Consider
rewriting the Death Curse if it doesn’t make sense in your game world (which it
probably doesn’t, because it doesn’t make sense as written). Searching for the Tomb of
the Nine Gods because “gold!” is a simple solution, though you may consider having
the treasures inside not turn to dust when the player characters emerge (despite what
the adventure tells you).

Develop multiple ways for your player characters to learn where Omu is and that the
Soulmonger is there. This is a big one. When it comes to actually learning the
Soulmonger is in the Tomb of the Nine Gods and that the Tomb is in Omu, ToA
provides few leads and little direction for the GM... despite the fact that there’s no way
for the PCs to progress if they don’t know this.

Reduce the scale of the overland map of Chuult from ten miles to six. Furthermore,
talk to your players before starting and see how they’d like to handle travel. Decide
whether you want to run an orthodox hex-crawl or provide a more narrative take.
Slogging through the jungle is a big part of the adventure’s aesthetic, but you can evoke
that experience in multiple ways.

Roll your random encounters ahead of time. Throw out ones you don’t like and add
depth to ones you do. They become monotonous, otherwise.

Only run this if, as a GM, you’re willing to invest a lot of time and energy in prep
work. This isn’t something you can pick up and play; it requires intense study,
preparation, and revision to do well. This makes me wonder if it’s even worth running
this, when instead you could devote that time to writing your own material or prepping
something more user-friendly.

Conclusion

    I’ll admit I’m not a perfect GM. I likely could have done some things to provide a better
experience for our group with Tomb of Annihilation. I should have anticipated that the
overland map of Chult was too large. I should have spent more time at the beginning of the
game developing connections between the characters and motivations for finding the
Soulmonger. I should have read our table better and hit the fast-forward button more often,
speeding up the campaign.

     
However, I think that the fact I’m ruminating this way speaks to a flaw in ToA itself. The fact
that I’m retroactively contemplating skipping parts of the adventure seems antithetical to buying
the adventure, in the first place. Why spend money on content you won’t run (or will have to
modify, if you do)? Upon reflection, Tomb of Annihilation seems like a good sourcebook of
individual locales. The Fane of the Night Serpent, the Tomb of the Nine Gods, and some of the
shrines to the individual gods all provide quality content. However, ToA ultimately fails in
providing a quality campaign. It literally has “weak links.” It fails to connect the pieces or
provide support for the GM to do so in an engaging, meaningful way.

The overall verdict? Three out of five stars. There’s good stuff sprinkled throughout Tomb

of Annihilation, but those moments are diamonds in the rough. Labyrinthine, byzantine
layout and bloat obscure the parts worth playing. I’ll definitely divorce some of its set pieces
from the adventure for other campaigns set in the jungle. But when I first opened the book, I
hoped for better.