Gargoyle Guardians, Area 45. Chimeras are also fun, and who doesnt love a gelatinous cube? I have not actually play-tested this numerically, and I probably should, but I would say that providing 30 temporary HP instead of 50 as the Trickster God benefit would make the dangers much more relevant, if you wanted a tougher final battle. On a 17 or better, the slaad would arrive and serve them obediently for 10 minutes, after which they would need to take a short or long rest before attempting to summon it again. Because of this, I adjusted a lot of the rooms in this tomb so that there could be a chance of survival and success. My idea is to adjust the last two to: Precious Air from the Sky, and Falling Sand Remains on Edge. Lovely addition, am I right? Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for D&D: Tomb of Annihilation Map Set - EN at the best online prices at eBay! My VERY brief non-spoiler review so far: I really like it. That having been said, I suppose it is somewhat convenient for Ras Nsi to be in possession of all of the puzzle cubes that the party needs, because at least it gathers them all in one place so they can be reclaimed all at once. So, DMs, lets finish this up, and bring this epic campaign to a close. the bridge. A ten-foot-tall stone statue of an evil-looking monkey balances on its tail atop a stone dais in the middle of . You can get between area 70 and the control room, but you have to get into area 70 and find the secret door first, and that means fighting all of the baddies in the wardrobes in area 60. . Dont do that. Cog of Rot, Area 58. Theres not a lot more to talk about here. Chapter 2 is the biggest of the five chapters, covering the. The silver chest can be survived, and the rusty chest just disintegrates your gear, which is inconvenient but not fatal. You can always make up more or different clues, or even go with what the book does and not provide any, but giving these served two good purposes. Kind of a lot has happened since the party acquired those marbles, and you may actually be in a different game session than when they looted them from the night hags, so drawing a strong connection between the two things is important. Tomb of Annihilation's fifth level, the Gears of Hate, is terrible. Hall of the Golden Mastodon, Area 67. The Maintenance Shop, Areas 26 to 28. Another room that is entirely unfair, and is pretty much guaranteed to either result in a TPK or else permanently remove one PC from the party just as theyre getting to the final challenges and the end of this whole unforgiving campaign. They have conflicting agendas, but both of them have an interest in sending the party into the Tomb of the Nine Gods, so it doesnt really matter whose side the PCs end up on. This post keys off of my last one and also this post by veteran RPG designer John Wick, wherein he rants against the Tomb of Horrors, an old-school D&D module and infamous deathtrap dungeon.. Armillary Sphere, Area 70. I picked up Temple of Annihilation last Saturday and have so far read the first few chapters and skimmed the rest. High-quality Tomb Of Annihilation jigsaw puzzles designed and sold by independent artists. Wongos Tomb, Area 16. I will offer the friendly advice that you shouldnt worry about any temporary connections between area 63 and area 58 while the gears are in the process of turning, because youll just give yourself a massive headache even deciding which gears are turning clockwise or counterclockwise. This is really simple to fix. Mention of searching for (9) Puzzle Cubes, which are needed to open the Tomb of the Nine Gods; Zagmira (leader of these Red Wizards) believes that is where the Soulmonger is. Again, you might call this metagaming, but its also going to make things easier overall. Besides, Acererak runs away from the battle at 30% of his HP or so, which also increases the partys odds for success quite a bit, especially as the PCs will be doing extra psychic damage as another Trickster God benefit. Its a death sentence. Revolving Drum Trap, Area 38. D&D Tomb of Annihilation includes the following: 56 battle maps with pre-placed grids and encounters. The last two waves will be difficult even with a fully rested party; a horned devil is CR11, and the erinyes as already mentioned is a CR12. Even if it was Ras Nsi who released them, or if they escaped on their own, Fenthaza might still be aware that they went into the tomb, and be ready to accost them and perhaps gain the artifact that she believes will summon Dendar the Night Serpent and bring about the end of the world. This is where the party can unintentionally make their way into a demiplane mirror-image of the actual tomb, which they will have no way of knowing isnt the real tomb, but which will put them through the same deadly dangers. The trick is getting a character down to below 100 HP, counting those temporary HP, by the time Acereraks turn comes around but the targeted characters turn has not. Only the exposed one shall seize the circle. Refers to area 68, where gear gets disintegrated until the ivory ring is removed from its place. And when I say once, I mean once ever. Really, really terrible, and some of the same horrible stuff is here in this new tomb as well, and we need to take care of it and make it dangerous but not automatically fatal. I dont see the point of having traps that cant be beaten, enemies that cant be defeated or circumvented, or any sort of challenge that is both unavoidable and impossible to overcome. So the party decided to use the aid the Red Wizards in OMU were offering to infiltrate the Fane. Maze of Death, Area 49. Upload PDF to create a flipbook like Tomb of Annihilation now. The answer, then, was to place puzzle cubes such . Additional Yan-ti Malisons spawn in every area and move 200% faster. Its area 62c thats really notable here, because properly following the instructions for retrieving the Eye of Zaltec using the gargoyle actually results in extreme danger. Maybe theyll try to break the door, and thats a good plan. Check 7 flipbooks from dallas.benning3. Not because it's impossible (which it is), or because it's trivial (which it can be), but because it refuses to explain itself. The onyx chest is quite likely to disintegrate whichever hapless PC is inside when the button is pushed; an average damage of 75 is plenty to reduce most characters at 9th level to zero, at which point they are unrecoverable dust, Death Curse or no Death Curse. I eventually figured it out, though. Make a model of the nursery rhyme book, so the players can actually flip the pages as they read them, forward or backward. Well, the party has finally collected all ten of those crystal eyes that are scattered all over this level of the tomb, and now you can open up the door that lets you into the secret vault with the invisible beholder that kills you. Even if I dont get punched for it, I still dont kill players by fiat, and letting them walk into an unbeatable trap without any warning or chance of escape is tantamount to saying suddenly the passage collapses and you all are crushed by rocks and die, except its dressed up a little more to conceal that the only reason that the PCs died was that you, the DM, decided to kill them and thats that. I just killed them off by daring them to crawl into a hole of instant death, and thats what sucks. The map showing the three gears and the rest of it is on page 171, which also helpfully refers you to Handout 24 so you can figure out how the cogs are supposed to line up based on the control panel in area 61. Choose from 30-piece, 110-piece, 252-piece, 500-piece, and 1000-piece puzzles. Mirror of Life Trapping, Area 50. Description: Tile-based puzzle game with smooth and addictive gameplay, old-school isometric graphics and excellent music. Complete Area 300. Frankly, I think you ought to have that zombie rex attack even if the PCs leave the painters alone, because its an awesome fight. And who actually does the making fun of people? A DMs Guide to Tomb of Annihilation: Chapter 3. Ill discuss this room in more detail below, but suffice it to say that this clue is meant to cause the party to think twice before charging into the room and setting things moving. I run the Discord server and am a mod on the Reddit sub. The main thing I liked was that some of the puzzles in The Tomb of the Nine Gods released huge numbers of deadly foes if . I recommend letting them find the first one, the triangle, very soon after entering the tomb for the first time. Will this be the moment when Ras Nsi realizes that the archlich is playing him for a fool? Shakspere. At least not without chopping off your arm at the elbow. My solution to this problem was to require an Arcana check any time the party wanted to summon the slaad to help them. Problem is, the artifact responsible is located in a lost city. Gorosh scattered everyone from the room and picked up the cube. So thats how I described it, and of course any reasonable player would think that crawling into the mouth is what you were supposed to do, because why would the DM tell you that you would fit if you werent supposed to try it? The others gave chase, had to lift a barrier out of the way, and got to the next hallway just in time to see Chidia fall into a pit. Catch-22, anyone? Well go level by level, right down to the bottom and eventually out, but first there are some general things to be aware of. Tomb of Annihilation is a Dungeons & Dragons adventure that takes place on the peninsula of Chult in the Forgotten Realms. Buy the book from Game Kastle to support the D&D Compendium! The description does say that if you can open up the door that leads into the revolving drum, the trap will stop, which of course doesnt matter because if you can open the door you can just leave. If you want to know what I think you should actually do, the first thing is to just remove all four cells from the tomb entirely. Following the tiled paths on the floor in area 79 is a mixed bag, considering that none of them leads out of the tomb. Because then they will be dead, and they will stay dead, and your campaign will be over. Its just a bit of friendly advice, and giving it freely is going to make everyones life easier, metagaming or not. Quotes /. However, in Configurations 1 and 2, area 63 and area 58 do connect. You need to have the constant possibility that you might get seriously injured or killed if you get stupid or make too many bad rolls, or else theres no sense of risk, and without real risks, there cant be any worthwhile rewards. their tails from its underside. This sounds like a lot of damage, but when you factor in those 50 temporary hit points, theres a definite drop in effectiveness. Im making the tentacle attacks as unrestricted number of reactions, but limited to four of them, one per tentacle. But where were we ah yes, spinning mastodon. But wait, the door is locked, and whats more, the designers made it so that the door locks cant be picked. Normally the party would have no chance at all of defeating Acererak (hes listed as CR23 in his stat block, and these characters are maybe level 10 or 11), but the Trickster Gods throw a wrench into the works, granting any character who is inhabited by a Trickster God 50 temporary HP at the beginning of each of their turns. If you need a reason to give the party another chance at a room or trap that finishes them off, you can use this trick once. D&D Tomb of Annihilation Notes #6 - Camp Righteous / The House of Man and Crocodile. This puzzle needs to be looked at without logic and with assumptions to solve. Shagambis Tomb, Area 48. I think I know how to solve puzzles, but nothing happen when I do as the hints show. Just assume stuff like that happens in every damn room! The door to the puzzle-cube can be forced open by creatures with a combined strength of 25. Any other creature is making assumptions outside the facts given by the words of other creatures. Well go over some of the good, the bad, and the ugly concerning the Tomb, although I dont plan to even attempt a room-by-room analysis. Id be inclined to let the party pay each gargoyle once and call it solved. Okay, this one is actually cool, because theres a tyrannosaurus zombie hiding in here and waiting to attack anyone who messes around with the painters. Essentially, unless the PCs somehow traverse the tunnels without pushing down in the middle of either one (maybe because for some reason theyre flying), someone is going to be trapped permanently in one of the tunnels or other. Vault of the Beholder, Area 44. Its a no-win situation, and the best to really be hoped for here is that the players decide that locking their PCs into mysterious chests isnt worth the risk, which of course it isnt. This is another one where you go in alive but you dont come back out that way. As it turns out, characters who dont have a Trickster God on board have pretty much no chance of surviving the final battle with Acererak, but the players have no reason to suspect any such benefit. Share. In the next chamber Billie got halfway across when a skeletal arm emerged from the opposite wall next to a lever, holding an hourglass. . Not once per campaign, but once per group of players. There are a couple of things worth mentioning, though, as far as getting the party through the skeleton gate. Im putting this room in the guide because it is a possibility that the party will retrieve the slaads control gem from Withers office, and will then have a grey slaad at their beck and call. On a check of 11 or less, the slaad would arrive just as the control gem fractured permanently from incompetent use, leaving the party with a very angry slaad to deal with in addition to whatever enemies they intended it to aid them against. Remember Artus Cimber? After all, the atropal is the real danger here, and the Soulmonger is much more like a lair effect than it is like a normal enemy or magical object. And, fourth and shortest, dont worry too much about encounters with those armored flesh golems or the tomb dwarves. The Wind Tunnel, Area 15. The Batiri are goblins. And, after all, theres a charred skeleton pointing at the place they really need to go to get out. The traitor always lies thrice. Refers to area 62c, where correctly interpreting the gargoyles clues results in getting gassed and run over. It had 3 rotating levels and Old Omuan inscription at its base: "Bound by devotion to . Second, and more importantly, it gave the players some more clues to decipher, because they had really been enjoying figuring out the ones on the previous levels. Jul 19, 2018 @ 12:05pm The red dot is the statue in the corner. So no traditional European fantasy tropes - no elves or halflings or dwarves (at least not traditional ones). You can also have etchings or carvings of the specific types of devils for each wave as part of their section of wall. When your players have to work together to solve a problem, that . Also, the ability to get behind the scenes on the lower levels provides some easy fixes for some of the worst traps; killing the golem that pulls the lever to start the rotating drum is a convenient thing to do, even if it happens by accident. Weve been here before havent we? This is one of those rooms that you enter but never leave. Also, if that wasnt enough, one of the crystal eyes of which you need to collect all ten is located in Tunnel B, which you have to lock someone in Tunnel A to even get access to. I also made up a set of clues for Level Five of the tomb, because there is no plaque or player handout for that level, unlike all of the previous ones. More frequent content is on the way for New World players, when Seasons come to the game on March 28th. Who aligns the orbs shall spin fortunes wheel. Refers to area 70, which involves a d100 table of random results if the PCs align the armillary spheres. Then decide which one of those players youd most prefer to punch you in the stomach when they find out, because youll have deserved it as much as I did all those years ago running Tomb of Horrors. The flesh golem that turns the trap on can see into the revolving drum through a window, but you cant see the window from inside the drum because its invisible from that direction. First, you need to read the part on pages 126 and 127 about the Skeleton Keys, and make sure that the party gets the idea early on that they need to find one of these malformed skeletons on each level of the tomb. #1. And so it goes, right down to the very end, where if you finally dodge all of the traps and fight the lich skull and make it out alive, its possible a demon shows up at the last minute as youre exiting the tomb to kill you if you looted certain items. This isnt as bad as it might be, because at least PCs who are knocked out by poison gas or run over by Napaka the Juggernaut have a reasonable chance to survive. Its rigged up especially so that you cant do much of anything from inside the trap except die there. This is before there was a lot of read-aloud text, so we kind of had to describe things based on the descriptions that were in the module. And, of course, there are generally four or five characters to deal with, and chain lightning and the Disrupt Life legendary action are the only ways to hit more than one of them at a time, at least for significant amounts of damage. The rest of the content in Chapter 4 will give you a pretty decent background for whatever battles and negotiations end up happening, and it also provides a lot of good tone elements for inspiration while roleplaying yuan-ti, who have a weird vibe of evil combined with disgusting that can be hard to pin down. View flipping ebook version of Tomb of Annihilation published by Fijsar the Buccaneer on 2022-04-04. It might be better if it were an ability that recharged on a 5 or 6 (or even just a 6); that would be much more like dragon breath weapons, which do similar damage with a comparable save DC. Learn how your comment data is processed. You might also consider giving them some warning before sending the juggernaut after them if they do the whole gem-crushing exercise, or at least leave off the knockout gas. But, you cant get into area 60 unless someone stays back in the control room to pull the levers to let the rest of the party move around. My suggested fix is to put the crystal eye in the middle of Tunnel A instead of in Tunnel B, which at least gives the opportunity for a character to grab it and back off without triggering the trap. I am pretty sure I have positioned my heroes right, because I can see the hint wall and right floor plates turn green when I position my heroes on it. Think of it as an extra life, but it wont work twice. This is the kind of sadistic garbage design that gets well-meaning DMs punched in the stomach, and I really hope that whoever came up with this mess got plenty of giggles while writing it so as to be essentially impossible to survive. I hate to be as cut-and-dried as this, but if Acererak doesnt manage to kill at least one of the PCs during this battle, its going to seem watered down to your players. I recommend just letting them know that the Trickster Gods arent going to harm them or take them over, and that they may in fact be glad to have one riding along at some point. Ben: We draw our swords! Im a big manticore fan, myself. My suggestion? This is a tricky one, but not necessarily fatal. Tomb of Annihilation, the D&D 5e version of Tomb of Horrors, moves the titular tomb to the jungle regions of the Forgotten Realms and gives the demi-lich Acererak an objective more complex than "lure adventurers to their deaths."He now seeks to use an artifact called the Soulmonger to drain away the souls of anyone ever resurrected with divine magic in order to fuel the birth of a new god. She was an almiraj who was worshiped as one of the Nine Trickster Gods of Omu. Nevermind that an erinyes, at CR12, is probably more than a match for the party all on its own at this level, even if they werent already running low on HP and spell slots from the inundation of devils. So basically, either Ras Nsi or Fenthaza will give them the rest of the puzzle cubes and send them on their way. This is the first area that has traps for which there are no good answers, and which give no warning of their true level of risk, and which cant be circumvented. The easy way to do this is just to make yourself five copies of the map in black and white, and mark the opened and blocked exits on them in the color of your choice; the top-down view of the gears always looks the same in any configuration, and all of the exits are located at vertices of the pentagons for each gear. Instead of an exhaustive treatment, Ill just break down the tomb by level and go over the parts that are likely to cause the most trouble. If you really want to leave the elemental cells in the tomb, it might be a good idea to go into them without a clear idea of what the PCs need to do to defeat each cell, and just see what the players come up with. But, when someone reaches the middle of Tunnel B, the whole thing rotates again, so anyone in Tunnel A is now free to go, but whomever tripped the mechanism in the middle of Tunnel B is now trapped there and waiting to die from suffocation. But, thats the choice for this room: everyone dies, or else the players get to decide whos going to lose their character permanently this close to the end. Theres not really even a way to figure out which is the right one to use; you just sort of get lucky. In order to rule such a motley mob, the goblin queen must defeat any challenges to her throne, and because of this, shes a ruthless and dangerous adversary