Lemme start by saying I get that everyone is gonna have feelings about an adventure like this. It’s a legacy IP. It involves colonialism and the depiction of African-like peoples. And the book it pretty packed with information. I get all that.
What I want to do here is give you my first impressions of trying to run it cold-ish for 3 players ranging from age 7 to 45.
The players
So, okay, it was my family. My youngest is 7, my oldest 11, and my wife is 45. My wife played 3.5/Pathfinder for about 5 years. The oldest runs one shot 5e games and mini-campaigns very often and plays in those same sorts of games. And the youngest has DM'd a few free-form games and played in about four or five 5e games prior to this one.
The characters
Lita is a former mercenary ranger who is responding to a contact that reached out to her about a difficult, life-and-death mission. (My wife patterned Lita a bit on Brad Pitt's character, Jack Trainer, in The Lost City.)
Xia is a rogue scholar and personal acquaintance of Syndra Silvane. They are responding to her personal request for assistance.
Twilight is a 7½ ft. tall soldier (fighter) dispatched by his superiors as a favor to Syndra Silvane.
They’re all human and from the greater Sword Coast area. I started them at level 2, which was the consensus of the group, as well.
Music
Several folks have created playlists for Tomb on Spotify. The one I started with was this one:
I kept it pretty quiet, except when in places where there was music being played in-game.
My initial reactions + responses
I should probably open with: spoilers!! Cos I kina presume you’ve read the adventure? If you haven’t, you might want to, or this just isn’t gonna make much sense.
Here we go …
Getting to Chult
It makes zero sense to me that Syndra (Silvane) would summon them to her home on the Sword Coast (or wherever you’ve placed this game), proposition them, then teleport herself and the party to Port Nyanzaru and be like, peace, y’all. Imma fuck off to my merchant prince friend’s villa, and y'all can fend for yourselves.
So I had the story open as they were ending their sea voyage from the Sword Coast to Port Nyanzaru in Chult, having been invited there by Syndra.
I was kind of riffing on that mystery trope of “you’ve been invited to …” I could also see a Nick Fury-esque, assembling-the-team-style sequence working well, too.
Later, I saw some folks online say they used a similar setup to mine but played out the sea voyage. If I had a group of players that I thought would be into that, maybe I would? But honestly I wanted to start in Chult, so that’s what we did.
Setting up the search for the Death Curse
It makes no sense to me that the PCs wouldn’t be bankrolled for this operation. What is Syndra (who I refer to as ‘old rich white lady’) going to do with her fabulous wealth if she dies? And she’s buddies with Prince Wakanga O’Tamu (hereafter referred to as simply Prince … for obvious reasons), who is clearly loaded with gold and magic. There’s also another merchant prince (Jessamine) who is affected by the Death Curse, so it makes sense she could chip in some coin, too. But honestly, I don’t see a need for dinosaur racing and treasure grinding for the purpose of earning money. It makes no sense.
So I just had the rich old white lady bankroll them. Boom. Done.
Now I’ve seen some vids about how folks say to wait on the Death Curse so you can grind for a bit. I mean, if you wanna, you do you. But I have a literal 7 year old attention span to deal with here, so we’re moving on.
Except that it is hard to know how to move on because they don’t tell you—the DM—how to do that. You have to dig around in the book to figure out that the whole deal, which is that they have to get to the Forbidden City of Omu. There’s only, like, one dude in Port Nyanzaru who knows that—Grandfather Zitembe—and his name isn’t even bolded in the text. (His class is, but not his freakin’ name. Wtf.) But check this out: he’s literally across the street from Prince's villa, in the Temple of Savras. This was frustrating to me, too, because I’m like, okay. Rich old white lady has the Death Curse. Who’s she going to talk to? Clerics, right? So wouldn’t she already know this information?
So I had to invent a reason on the fly that she didn’t. I said that she had been consulting with the clerics throughout Faerûn at large and specifically here in Chult but had grown tired of their admonitions that she pray for a miracle, and so had stopped talking with them a couple weeks ago. That made way for Grandfather Zitembe to have had his vision in the last couple of weeks. Why didn’t he run across the street and tell the rich old white lady? Well, the way I described the vision was such that he’d just had it that morning, and he saw a warrior just like Twilight enter the temple and brandish his sword to protect him and the temple … which is what happened—the 7½’ soldier pulled his sword and scared off the Zhents threatening Grandfather Zitembe. So it all just kind of came together for Grandaddy Z in that moment.
YMMV, I know, but that’s what I’m getting at. A lot of the setup doesn’t work fluidly at all. So be prepared to improvise. Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m the same person who wrote a post about running adventures from literal trash. But I strugg sometimes, too, dontchaknow.
Old rich white lady also tells them they need a guide. Again, why she hasn’t already picked one, I dunno. Or at least rounded up the fliers?
So honestly I didn’t think about that? Until, you know, they had already wandered to the harbormaster’s joint, so I just let them look at the message board. I said there were multiple copies of each, written in several languages, so they had to peel through them to find a language they could read.
Side note: I personally feel like languages should matter more in games. I don’t typically allow spells that handwave languages or linguistics. It wasn’t an issue in this one cos none of them had such a spell or spoke Chultan. In a way, though, it kind of didn’t make sense that Xia didn’t know Chultan? Like, why would they have been brought in by Syndra if they didn’t? But, sometimes we just have to accept it's a contrivance of the format and live with it. In any case, it was my fault for not having read the fucker before running it.
Side side note: This is where a lot of contemporary indie and OSR games shine. The layout in those books is so much better and easy to run on the fly. I mean, there are only 24 locations in the Port. But the way it’s integrated with NPC information is poor and confusing. You end up having to skim and page flip a lot. Like, a lot. I know this is a frequent complaint about Wizards 5e books, but I honestly didn’t have such a tough time with Rime of the Frost Maiden. That’s a sandboxier game, so maybe that’s why? I feel like in a setup like this where there is a very pointed ask and a time limit to boot, you should have that outlined pretty clearly. Anyhow. Back to it …
Selecting the guide
My wife literally read every ad aloud. I didn’t ask her to do that; she just did it. The kids weren’t all that into picking a guide. I think they would have been fine if I had just given them one; and, honestly, when I run this again, I may just have Syndra give them one. They can always hire another or fire them if they don’t like them, or whatever. Anyway, Lita settled on the druid and vegepygmy, which kina tracks, right, cos ranger.
The thing was, though, the druid isn’t based out of Port Nyanzaru. He’s over in another location called Fort Beluarian (which I kept accidentally referring to as Fort Belarus).
By the by, Lita is a former mercenary, so she immediately recognized the Flaming Fists and had an intense dislike for them.
Anyhow, they wanted to charter a boat to go around the coastline rather than overland. There is no information on doing this.
So first I had to google medieval African boats. I ended up saying it looks something like a beden, which looks like this according to Wikipedia:
We used the 5e stats for a longboat, which probably isn’t really fitting, but that was the best we had in the moment. It ended up not mattering because there was no wind. (I had the youngest roll the weather check every four hours of travel.) So they moved pretty slowly. The money we handwaved because rich old white lady bankroller.
About halfway there, there was a random encounter with a faerie dragon (rolled by the oldest), but it was invisible, so they could only hear giggling.
Twilight shouted for it to go away, and it did. (He rolled very well, and the faerie dragon rolled very poorly.)
A few hours after that, they find two rich white dudes stranded and signaling for help. So they stopped and picked them up, but this made the boat go even slower. (No good deed goes unpunished!) Eventually they got to Beluarian Landing.
There were two Flaming Fists there who shook them down for a temporary boat slip. Lita used her mercenary background to counter, and they knocked the original price of 150 gp down to 125 gp. Then Xia pulled their sword and said, “We will fight you.” And they backed the price down to 100 gp. Lita sighed and got the rich dudes to pay it, which they did.
The party made their way to Fort Beluarian and soon saw it is a Flaming Fist base flying the banner of Baldur’s Gate, which Lita did not dig.
They didn’t spend too much time in the base. They basically found the guide & his companion—Qawasha & Kupalue—and booked it on out of there, back to Port Nyanzaru.
Tracking food, water, and supplies
I gave them a pass on the first boat ride and the ‘fast travel’ cut back to the Port, but said they’re going to have to track these things for the proper expedition.
YMMV, depending upon how much of an old school hexcrawl you wanna get on. It’s set up to do that very well, and you could spend many sessions dicking around in the jungle, if that’s what you’re after.
Narratively, though (as written, at least), it doesn’t make a lot of sense to do this. They’re on a clock. Old rich white lady and the lady merchant prince—as well as as a couple of the villains—are gonna die soon. So they’ve got to get going.
Aside: It’s like the writers couldn’t decide on one of three adventures. Do we want an old school jungle island adventure? Or do we want a nail-biting, clock-is-ticking thriller? Or wait! Do we want a redux of the Tomb of Horrors? Cos, honestly, none of these really go together very well. Again, I’m sure there’s a way—myriad ways, in fact—to make those things work in a single book if laid out properly. But it isn’t, so it fails in this regard, and you’re left to sort it out yourself.
Other resources for the DM
Compare and contrast this with the 2e book The Jungles of Chult. That one is presented as a straight ahead sourcebook to Chult and has a short adventure in the back. It also has some hexcrawl-like guidance in it. It’s defintely not as detailed as what we think of in the OSR scene now, but you can do it with what’s there.
So there’s another thing: check outThe Jungles of Chult. It’s as much a direct ancestor of Tomb of Annihilation as Tomb of Horrors is—probably more so, in fact, because most of ToA is Chult.
This is somewhat similar to how I felt reading Rime of the Frostmaiden, actually. I remember really needing info from the 3.5e book Frostburn, as well as the D&D Next book The Legacy of the Crystal Shard, and the 2e boxed set The North: Guide to the Savage Frontier; and, ultimately, the 3e Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting book. So far, I don’t think you need that many books for Tomb, but The Jungles of Chult will deffo help. It fills in a lot of the backstory (espesh for Ras Nsi and the undead hordes) and lays the ground work for the Nine Trickster Gods, which as presented in the ToA book is kina wtf.
Okay, that’s all for this week! More next time! May you have awesome adventures in your own secret dungeons!
Xoxo,
T