Refreshing to hear strong opinions about an adventure, the wishy washy 'do whatever you want' often hurts newer DMs and your channel is a breath of fresh air, thank you
My modified resting rules was to only regain 1/2 max hp per long rest. It is a very small change, but over the course of the game led to more healing potions, used spell slots and some days where a PC or two had to go with lower HP. It also helps players remember they're only supposed to regain 1/2 maximum hit dice, not all of them which I have never in my years of DMing 5e known a player to remember.
This video is really really great! I'm a newer DM and struggle with this campaign. This gave me a lot of ideas and tips to help me out. Thank you so much :)
Nice tips! I'm running this campaign right now and the characters have collected 4 of the puzzle cubes in Omu. However, the snarky bastards discovered the Fane early and refused to be scared off so I was caught with my pants down when the wizard cast invisibility on the thief (and this guy plays an AWESOME thief) and he did an exploration of 2/3 of the Fane. I really had to scramble here because I had only given the Fane a perfunctory read-through because I wasn't expecting them to make it there for at least 2 more sessions. Woops!
As someone who played through this and now wants to run it. The acerrack fight was honestly one of the most fun fights of the campaign. Honestly, it's the most epic fight our group has had out of a pregen campaign. I'm the sorcerer providing a wall of light to protect us from line of sight spells and counterspelling his top tier spells while the warlock and monk and fighter navigate the room to get into range and nail him for damage. Rolling a nat 20 to counterspell a finger of death had me out of my chair cheering and my character flipping a lich the bird as he fell back behind the wall. And the fighter sacrificing himself to tackle the lich into the sphere of Annihilation to save the sorcerer and warlock and end the battle is still talked about 3 years later. ALL THAT SAID, I think the good advice here is to do more to set him up as the villain. I plan to lean into the trickster gods pretty hard and maybe they let loose that the lich is the one who iced them to get them out of his way. I plan to allow revivify and leverage it as a way to potentially encounter the trickster gods early. Aka something else came back with your soul. Use the story of Ubtao and abandoning the island to set up dendar the night serpent and a legitimate threat from the yuan-ti and explain the lichs presence on the island, growing his own God in the one place the gods can't touch him. Could be a hook for clerics and paladins that their gods need answers
Just finished running this for 2 groups. The only main thing I changed for the hex crawl was allowing them to move two hexes a day in the jungle and three a day in the rivers. Definitely wish I had dropped Acerak, or had him foreshadowed more.
Dropping Acerak is a good idea, actually. I've already been frontloading the hags into the jungle crawl portion, freaking my players out as they appear and draw blood and hair samples to make clones later.
I so disagree. The atropal is just a big bag of hit points and little more. It has a very good con save, which at least can help prevent monk stun-locking, but honestly any strong CC will just shut the thing down entirely. That's why ace is the real boss, and the trickster gods helping defeat their killer is a pretty epic story moment. Tbh ace doesn't even have an optimized spell list, so he's not even that scary of a fight. If you want to drop anyone, I would say the atropal. Maybe make it a prop instead of a boss or just have the soulmonger doing something else.
@@IMadeUpKear The Atropal ended up being a hugely effective boss in our final battle, so much that I wish Ace hadn't shown up to make things even more complicated. **SPOILERS FOR OUR CAMPAIGN** I did make a few important adjustments. Namely the Atropal automatically summoned a Wraith at the start of every round as long as the Soulmonger was still up, and those wraiths did serious work and took much of the PCs' attention. I was also able to throw one PC into the lava with a tentacle attack, and everyone started suffering from multiple exhaustion levels.
@@RogueWatson "summoned a Wraith at the start of every round". This ability has a recharge 6. Did you roll multiple sixes every round or you messed up with the recharge? Summoning more than 1 wraith clearly breaks the fight, even if I rolled sixes, I would have fudged and ignored the ability after the first summon.
@@ROD2o Hell yeah it breaks the fight - most boss fights in DnD need to be overtuned, and this is the final epic battle! I basically turned the wraith summon into a Lair action. Every round the Atropal summoned a wraith (at the start) did his attack on his turn (cold ray or drain hope), then did the Exhaustion wail at the end. When the soulmonger was finally destroyed, the wraiths stopped, but then Ace showed up with a pair of minotaur skeletons. I gave the King of Feathers a similar buff, with satisfying results!
I completly disagree with Acererak bad spell list. His spell list is insane against mid level character If I remember a party fighting Acererak is about level 10 to 11. Which means a Wizard with 20 cons rolling max HP each level will have 121 HP. 143 for d8 classes 165 for d10 classes. And thats max roll 20 cons which NEVER happens. Average is 79 HP with 16 cons (6+4 per level+cons), or 90 with 18 cons... Acererak got TWO power word kill, killing INSTANTLY any d6 character and maybe d8 characters WITH NO SAVES. And before you ask the god gives temporary hit point which does not protect from power word kill. And death ward doesnt work because it dont actually deal damage. Your spellcaster are down, and they also couldnt do anything because Acererak got counterspell AT WILL. Now the funniest thing about Acererak's build : Wall of Force. Because he will one shot your spellcaster (and make your other spellcaster if you have one useless because of counterspell at will, with a +15 to counterspell DC which meabs he will ALWAYS stop any spell you can cast exept if he roll 1) you are stuck with melee classes that cant pass his 10 minutes walls which is 100 round of combat. He just has to separate one martial class and take them one by one. With 4 paralysing touch per turn and 4 DC20 cons sace to make you will be paralyzed and destroyed by him even with the 50 temporary hit point per turn. He also got shield at will so melee classes have to deal with a creature having 26 AC if there arent any spellcaster. Fighter should have +9 to +12 to hit, meaning you need to roll 14 to 17 to touch him... To resume : this encounter start with 2 dead body right of the start, and Acererak stalling being his wall and killing his foes one by one. If you really want to run this encounter change at least power word kill BTW Acererak got 27 in intelligence so he knows who he has to kill first
Thanks for the advice. I will use all tips and steal your idea of Acerak/Thanos 'cut scene'. About to begin the travels to Chult but my players are level 6 so i'll be leveling up the jungle! They love the sandbox so we'll see how the hexcrawl goes. I've even incorporated the original Dwellers of the Forbidden City, Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan, and Isle of Dread but who knows if we actually get there.
Recently finished this module as a player and decided to run it for my own players starting next month. In our case Acererak was presented pretty late in the game and was this god-like figure that was probably pulling the strings of all the tomb. At no point did we expect to have to actually fight him since he sounded out of our reach, you should have seen our reaction after freeing the souls and realizing the campaign wasn't over yet. Now that i have his stats and spells in front i realize our DM nerfed him quite a bit to make the fight possible
Thanks for keeping the list short and to the point! You definitely bring up good ideas how to smooth out some of the more challenging parts of running the campaign. I'm also definitely intrigued by your crafting annihilation series now, as ToA will be the second campaign ever for me to run and seeing how someone else uses the materiel and executes it could definitely help me a lot!
Getting ready to run this adventure, and these tips are really good. The sewn sisters idea for the ending is definitely somethime to consider, but potentially could really pay off
I feel a lot of these tips are subjective to the group you're playing with, but I definitely agree with the point about stopping the crawl early. I see a lot of people on reddit that complain the hex crawl just becomes boring and doesn't provide a challenge... (Edit)... After a certain point.
For sure. Tip #1 in any D&D campaign is to know your group and what you all want out of the campaign in terms of combat, role-playing, story structure, etc. It's entirely possible some groups may want to hex-crawl through the jungle for years....
I think its a DMs job to make any aspect of DND fun. Preventing Slog is a skill many DMs dont know how to prevent. To me Slog is the only skill I hyperfocused on preventing in my games. In this respect I have run both tomb (3 times, in the same world and timeline, 100 years apart, retooled the tomb) and Dungeon of the mad mage. The two books are very similar in the ways it challenges the DM. In both books, the book gives you a map, and leaves it up to you for the most part to create a story in the shadows of the maps. Slog is almost always a DMs problem. If you feel it, 180 and prevent it.
i have been hyping my homebrew campaigns BBEG as a lich so i will be hyping the lich as the conclusion of the campaign. but initially i was considering dropping acerak as well as it seemed out of place.
Great tips. And I totally and absolutely agree with the Fane tip. My group ignored all of my attempts in attempting to coarse them into diplomacy and attempts to capture them were not so successful. I had to cut down Fane a lot to not make it into a murdercrawl.
That's a bummer. I admit I railroaded my party quite a bit to get them inside (using Ishmakahl), but after that tried to give them freedom to explore and get into trouble. They ended up not wanting to take sides, but did talk to both NPCs, and got the cube, and one went through with the yuan-ti ritual.
I only agreed with the first, second, seventh, and ninth points. My players had almost no interest in the city so I would never force them to hang out there. The dinosaur races are a complete waste of time. You suggest that encounters shouldn't be all monster encounters but then recommend taking out all the rolls for non-combat encounters. I don't understand why you would want to change the rules about long rests and not just use levels of exhaustion. You have talked in the past about not liking random encounters, but then recommend using them until Tier 2. I would recommend peppering in side adventures that you have prepared ahead of time and can pop in anywhere to break up the jungle crawl, which you don't even mention. I ran Fane of the Night Serpent as a standard dungeon crawl because my players took it on as such and it was great fun, and I would never recommend replacing Acererak with the Sewn Sisters.
Take what you want and change the rest to your heart's content, I have zero problem with that! Every group is different, and you're going to know what your players enjoy, and where to focus your efforts. That being said, I never want to see the sentence, "The dinosaur races are a complete waste of time.," ever again, haha.
Thanks for putting this tips list out, you make it short and straight to the point! I've decided to take my players out of Tyranny of Dragons to Tomb of Annihilation due to reviews basically saying "ToD is bad, ToA is great". We are a group of young professionals in their late thirties/early forties so we don't have a lot of time to spare for gaming, I want to make sure my friends have a good time. I will do a transition now that they are almost level 4. At which part of ToA would you recommend to have them start since this campaign starts at 1st lv?
Managing threats during travel is something I keep struggling with in Storm King's Thunder, hell making encounters challenging at all is a struggle. When the players arrive at an encounter they've typically long rested so they'll just through all their most powerful abilities at them and by level 7 that makes things quite easy. I've considered adjusting the resting mechanic in future campaigns, started coming to with my own rules from scratch. So I'm curious. Does anyone know how Watson's version of short resting works? Is it still that you only get some of your hit dice back on a long rest? So it really is just like mechanically stretching "a day" over several days?
Hi Rincewind (love the name - big Pratchett fan!) My version of short resting is exactly in the PHB. Roll hit die. Recover short rest stuff (second wind, wild shape, etc). I paced the hex crawl so the PCs typically Long Rested after they cleared an area, such as Yellyark, or Camp Righteous. There were also a few safe areas they could rest, like Camp Vengeance. By the time they reached level 5 and acquired Leomund's Tiny Hut, I mostly handwaved the hex crawl travel altogether. I also struggle with travel and resting mechanics for exactly the reasons you outlined - random encounters don't really work when players are constantly recharging every day. We discussed this problem in my latest DM roundtable - ruclips.net/video/HjjXvoT9X-A/видео.html
Can you share which source you used for random encounters, is it campaign specific, if so are there other random encounter generators online specific to campaigns?
The ToA book has plenty of excellent encounters to draw from. I used this neat website tool to generate about how often I should be running encounters - kevin-whitaker.net/toa-travel/
@@RogueWatson do you know if POTA has that as well, i know it is not as much traveling, if not I can put in encounters in there that fit the theme well?
@@caesarion1399 I would suggest looking at the random encounters in Xanathar's guide. They provide different lists based on environment and player tier.
thank u, very very helpfull, i started to see your ToA campaign and during a video you open an handout with homebrew rules, is it possible for you to share all that text somewhere? the one that contains rules about druid animal shapes, malus after reaching 0 hp like blind etc... p.s. love your dming style and the fact that all the video have auto english sub...without them i cant understand everything
For tip 9, the levels of the dungeon are so good y that I invented a trick in order that they explore everything. They we’re not able to go down (invisible force wall) until they open all the tombs of the fools gods. Currently they’re at level 4
I have only 2 friends to play with :( Is it ok for this campaign ? (Of course I am gonna make encounters little bit easier) any suggestions about this ?
Use the Guides! Have at least 2 of them join the party free of charge, and consider letting your players control them in combat - though be wary that some of them have the potential to massively outperform the PCs if they have full control of their abilities.
My characters entered Port Nyanzaru at 4th level and are anxious to get to the jungle, so we're speeding through it a bit, plus the book says the jungle is designed for characters level 5 & up, would you recommend I let them get through some initial parts of the jungle before leveling them up?
I would argue that the jungle is geared more toward tier 1 than anything else. Once you reach level 5 most of the dangers aren't worth running. By the time my party reached level 5, the bard took Leomund's Tiny Hut, and most of our jungle crawling days were over. If they're already level 4 and chomping at the bit, I'd pick out the few encounters that really speak to you and run with those. Of course, you can always up the challenge level of the jungle by scaling numbers or enemies, or my favorite method - combining multiple encounters into one!
Just finished this as a player. My DM was incredibly lazy with the whole thing. I have to be honest, I hated it. The port had almost no character, the hexcrawl was a slog, but the Tomb was awful. So disappointed
Thanks for the tips. I've already done most of them. I specially liked the #10 tip, since it gives de PCs a bigger change not dying. I thought about the same, taking them to a dark realm where Acerark is with many of the dead souls nearby. Tip #6 made me think if jungle crawl would be tedious, since tracking so many things (drinking water, rolling survival, rations, diseases, etc) can be boring for them and for me if made for a long time. I thought about giving them some better way to move (teleport, ship, kir sabal ritual, etc.).
You made your players play TWENTY SIX SESSIONS just to get from 3-5?! We play 4 hour sessions once a week so that would be 6-ish months for my group. Not criticizing but did you give them magic items and cool stuff to keep them entertained along the way? I think my players would kill me if I did that, lol.
22 sessions, though we do shorter session of about 2.5 hours. But yeah, the campaign ran for 2 years and only ended up at level 11 at the end. Pacing is probably my biggest complaint about this adventure. The hexcrawl can be fun, but it's also too much Tier 1.
I think my dm had us finish the whole thing in like.... 30 or 40 4 hour sessions. And we got mightily lost due to f**king river and flathk getting lost every 5 minutes. I'm still pissed that damn tabaxi has a statue
Can you explain how you did the hex map reveal? I’ve been trying to compare the player map and dm map to make sure they dont accidentally skip over a location.
I believe the paid Roll20 ToA module comes with a player-ready map of Chult, and each hex has a opaque token that can be removed (or hidden) to reveal the hexes as they traveled. Also on the R20 version, every location is hidden on the GM layer, so you can easily move things around before they discover them, if needed (I moved several stuff around in my campaign).
Not teleporting sounds good, but what if your players are already level 5? I’m about to run TOA as part of their main campaign narrative. I’ve already mapped out how they will level up and they will be 14 by the time they leave Chult. I don’t want them going beyond that during this stage as I have more planned for them in the Campaign narrative once they finish TOA.
Thanks, I think I’ve figured it out. I remapped my leveling plan so they can have some fun getting there and I’m gonna utilize the hex to some degree but not fully.
Each of my PCs was traveling to Chult for their own reasons, but along the way one of the NPCs traveling with them (Undril) received the Death Curse-mission from her superior (actually a PC from a previous campaign), and she roped the party in. I think I gave them the map at that point as well. If not they got it in town (we spent several sessions in Port Nyanzaru).
Typically 2-3 hours. ToA we averaged about 2 hrs 45 min and Rime is averaging a little shorter (no break in between). My recent Patron games have been over 3 hours, with a short break in between.
Yeah I wouldn't recommend that, haha. Even with our shorter 3 hour sessions. With our current campaign, Rime of the Frostmaiden, we hit level 5 in Session 24, and that's with even shorter sessions (about 2.5 hours).
Refreshing to hear strong opinions about an adventure, the wishy washy 'do whatever you want' often hurts newer DMs and your channel is a breath of fresh air, thank you
My modified resting rules was to only regain 1/2 max hp per long rest. It is a very small change, but over the course of the game led to more healing potions, used spell slots and some days where a PC or two had to go with lower HP. It also helps players remember they're only supposed to regain 1/2 maximum hit dice, not all of them which I have never in my years of DMing 5e known a player to remember.
That’s also an awesome idea.
I live this book because of the world building, but I was nowhere near prepared to run this, so this video helps a lot
This video is really really great! I'm a newer DM and struggle with this campaign. This gave me a lot of ideas and tips to help me out. Thank you so much :)
Yay, glad they helped!
I've been running this all year, now my party is at the tomb so I'm preparing
Good luck!
Nice tips! I'm running this campaign right now and the characters have collected 4 of the puzzle cubes in Omu. However, the snarky bastards discovered the Fane early and refused to be scared off so I was caught with my pants down when the wizard cast invisibility on the thief (and this guy plays an AWESOME thief) and he did an exploration of 2/3 of the Fane. I really had to scramble here because I had only given the Fane a perfunctory read-through because I wasn't expecting them to make it there for at least 2 more sessions. Woops!
Oh dang, I’d be so nervous trying to organize the Fane without prepping first!
Thank you for the tips from actual play experience
Just bought it yesterday, good timing to find this video.
Same, but a week later. Hope yours goes well overall 🤙
As someone who played through this and now wants to run it. The acerrack fight was honestly one of the most fun fights of the campaign. Honestly, it's the most epic fight our group has had out of a pregen campaign. I'm the sorcerer providing a wall of light to protect us from line of sight spells and counterspelling his top tier spells while the warlock and monk and fighter navigate the room to get into range and nail him for damage. Rolling a nat 20 to counterspell a finger of death had me out of my chair cheering and my character flipping a lich the bird as he fell back behind the wall. And the fighter sacrificing himself to tackle the lich into the sphere of Annihilation to save the sorcerer and warlock and end the battle is still talked about 3 years later.
ALL THAT SAID, I think the good advice here is to do more to set him up as the villain. I plan to lean into the trickster gods pretty hard and maybe they let loose that the lich is the one who iced them to get them out of his way. I plan to allow revivify and leverage it as a way to potentially encounter the trickster gods early. Aka something else came back with your soul. Use the story of Ubtao and abandoning the island to set up dendar the night serpent and a legitimate threat from the yuan-ti and explain the lichs presence on the island, growing his own God in the one place the gods can't touch him. Could be a hook for clerics and paladins that their gods need answers
I really like that part about the trickster gods coming back with your soul, Might have to steal that myself!
About to run this in about three weeks. Very helpful tips I intend to use.
Good luck!
Just finished running this for 2 groups. The only main thing I changed for the hex crawl was allowing them to move two hexes a day in the jungle and three a day in the rivers. Definitely wish I had dropped Acerak, or had him foreshadowed more.
Dropping Acerak is a good idea, actually. I've already been frontloading the hags into the jungle crawl portion, freaking my players out as they appear and draw blood and hair samples to make clones later.
I so disagree. The atropal is just a big bag of hit points and little more. It has a very good con save, which at least can help prevent monk stun-locking, but honestly any strong CC will just shut the thing down entirely. That's why ace is the real boss, and the trickster gods helping defeat their killer is a pretty epic story moment. Tbh ace doesn't even have an optimized spell list, so he's not even that scary of a fight. If you want to drop anyone, I would say the atropal. Maybe make it a prop instead of a boss or just have the soulmonger doing something else.
@@IMadeUpKear The Atropal ended up being a hugely effective boss in our final battle, so much that I wish Ace hadn't shown up to make things even more complicated.
**SPOILERS FOR OUR CAMPAIGN**
I did make a few important adjustments. Namely the Atropal automatically summoned a Wraith at the start of every round as long as the Soulmonger was still up, and those wraiths did serious work and took much of the PCs' attention. I was also able to throw one PC into the lava with a tentacle attack, and everyone started suffering from multiple exhaustion levels.
@@RogueWatson "summoned a Wraith at the start of every round". This ability has a recharge 6. Did you roll multiple sixes every round or you messed up with the recharge? Summoning more than 1 wraith clearly breaks the fight, even if I rolled sixes, I would have fudged and ignored the ability after the first summon.
@@ROD2o Hell yeah it breaks the fight - most boss fights in DnD need to be overtuned, and this is the final epic battle! I basically turned the wraith summon into a Lair action. Every round the Atropal summoned a wraith (at the start) did his attack on his turn (cold ray or drain hope), then did the Exhaustion wail at the end.
When the soulmonger was finally destroyed, the wraiths stopped, but then Ace showed up with a pair of minotaur skeletons.
I gave the King of Feathers a similar buff, with satisfying results!
I completly disagree with Acererak bad spell list. His spell list is insane against mid level character
If I remember a party fighting Acererak is about level 10 to 11.
Which means a Wizard with 20 cons rolling max HP each level will have 121 HP.
143 for d8 classes
165 for d10 classes.
And thats max roll 20 cons which NEVER happens. Average is 79 HP with 16 cons (6+4 per level+cons), or 90 with 18 cons...
Acererak got TWO power word kill, killing INSTANTLY any d6 character and maybe d8 characters WITH NO SAVES.
And before you ask the god gives temporary hit point which does not protect from power word kill. And death ward doesnt work because it dont actually deal damage.
Your spellcaster are down, and they also couldnt do anything because Acererak got counterspell AT WILL.
Now the funniest thing about Acererak's build : Wall of Force.
Because he will one shot your spellcaster (and make your other spellcaster if you have one useless because of counterspell at will, with a +15 to counterspell DC which meabs he will ALWAYS stop any spell you can cast exept if he roll 1) you are stuck with melee classes that cant pass his 10 minutes walls which is 100 round of combat.
He just has to separate one martial class and take them one by one.
With 4 paralysing touch per turn and 4 DC20 cons sace to make you will be paralyzed and destroyed by him even with the 50 temporary hit point per turn.
He also got shield at will so melee classes have to deal with a creature having 26 AC if there arent any spellcaster.
Fighter should have +9 to +12 to hit, meaning you need to roll 14 to 17 to touch him...
To resume : this encounter start with 2 dead body right of the start, and Acererak stalling being his wall and killing his foes one by one.
If you really want to run this encounter change at least power word kill
BTW Acererak got 27 in intelligence so he knows who he has to kill first
Thanks for the advice. I will use all tips and steal your idea of Acerak/Thanos 'cut scene'. About to begin the travels to Chult but my players are level 6 so i'll be leveling up the jungle! They love the sandbox so we'll see how the hexcrawl goes. I've even incorporated the original Dwellers of the Forbidden City, Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan, and Isle of Dread but who knows if we actually get there.
Good luck and have fun!
Can you tell me how did you level up the jungle? Mi players will also be level 6
Recently finished this module as a player and decided to run it for my own players starting next month. In our case Acererak was presented pretty late in the game and was this god-like figure that was probably pulling the strings of all the tomb. At no point did we expect to have to actually fight him since he sounded out of our reach, you should have seen our reaction after freeing the souls and realizing the campaign wasn't over yet. Now that i have his stats and spells in front i realize our DM nerfed him quite a bit to make the fight possible
Thanks for keeping the list short and to the point! You definitely bring up good ideas how to smooth out some of the more challenging parts of running the campaign.
I'm also definitely intrigued by your crafting annihilation series now, as ToA will be the second campaign ever for me to run and seeing how someone else uses the materiel and executes it could definitely help me a lot!
I'm working on weaving this together with the new Vecna adventure. I have a lot of thoughts on it and this helped a lot.😊
Getting ready to run this adventure, and these tips are really good. The sewn sisters idea for the ending is definitely somethime to consider, but potentially could really pay off
Seriously appreciate the feedback for this adventure. Really looking forward to running it, and this video was exactly what I needed. Cheers!
I feel a lot of these tips are subjective to the group you're playing with, but I definitely agree with the point about stopping the crawl early. I see a lot of people on reddit that complain the hex crawl just becomes boring and doesn't provide a challenge... (Edit)... After a certain point.
For sure. Tip #1 in any D&D campaign is to know your group and what you all want out of the campaign in terms of combat, role-playing, story structure, etc. It's entirely possible some groups may want to hex-crawl through the jungle for years....
I think its a DMs job to make any aspect of DND fun. Preventing Slog is a skill many DMs dont know how to prevent. To me Slog is the only skill I hyperfocused on preventing in my games. In this respect I have run both tomb (3 times, in the same world and timeline, 100 years apart, retooled the tomb) and Dungeon of the mad mage. The two books are very similar in the ways it challenges the DM. In both books, the book gives you a map, and leaves it up to you for the most part to create a story in the shadows of the maps. Slog is almost always a DMs problem. If you feel it, 180 and prevent it.
I love these tips, and I'll take all of them into consideration when I start running this campaign for my group. Thanks!
Very good video. You addressed all problems I had with the module while running it.
Yo! WTF, this video is Fantastic. I was -
just looking for nerdy trivia and stumbled upon educational, entertaining content. Thanks so much.
My character got a Jack Sparrow entrance to chult looking for his kidnapped captain
Perfect im starting this today
Thank you for this, I appreciate it. Subscribed
I wanted to run this module thanks for the tips
i have been hyping my homebrew campaigns BBEG as a lich so i will be hyping the lich as the conclusion of the campaign. but initially i was considering dropping acerak as well as it seemed out of place.
Great tips. And I totally and absolutely agree with the Fane tip. My group ignored all of my attempts in attempting to coarse them into diplomacy and attempts to capture them were not so successful. I had to cut down Fane a lot to not make it into a murdercrawl.
That's a bummer. I admit I railroaded my party quite a bit to get them inside (using Ishmakahl), but after that tried to give them freedom to explore and get into trouble. They ended up not wanting to take sides, but did talk to both NPCs, and got the cube, and one went through with the yuan-ti ritual.
I only agreed with the first, second, seventh, and ninth points. My players had almost no interest in the city so I would never force them to hang out there. The dinosaur races are a complete waste of time. You suggest that encounters shouldn't be all monster encounters but then recommend taking out all the rolls for non-combat encounters. I don't understand why you would want to change the rules about long rests and not just use levels of exhaustion. You have talked in the past about not liking random encounters, but then recommend using them until Tier 2. I would recommend peppering in side adventures that you have prepared ahead of time and can pop in anywhere to break up the jungle crawl, which you don't even mention. I ran Fane of the Night Serpent as a standard dungeon crawl because my players took it on as such and it was great fun, and I would never recommend replacing Acererak with the Sewn Sisters.
Take what you want and change the rest to your heart's content, I have zero problem with that! Every group is different, and you're going to know what your players enjoy, and where to focus your efforts.
That being said, I never want to see the sentence, "The dinosaur races are a complete waste of time.," ever again, haha.
My BBEG is going to be called Acerak but he's actually going to be a handsome evil prince, with a side of madness
Thanks for putting this tips list out, you make it short and straight to the point! I've decided to take my players out of Tyranny of Dragons to Tomb of Annihilation due to reviews basically saying "ToD is bad, ToA is great". We are a group of young professionals in their late thirties/early forties so we don't have a lot of time to spare for gaming, I want to make sure my friends have a good time. I will do a transition now that they are almost level 4.
At which part of ToA would you recommend to have them start since this campaign starts at 1st lv?
You can pretty much run as-is. We didn't start the jungle crawl until level 3 (spent a bunch of time at Port N)
Managing threats during travel is something I keep struggling with in Storm King's Thunder, hell making encounters challenging at all is a struggle. When the players arrive at an encounter they've typically long rested so they'll just through all their most powerful abilities at them and by level 7 that makes things quite easy. I've considered adjusting the resting mechanic in future campaigns, started coming to with my own rules from scratch.
So I'm curious. Does anyone know how Watson's version of short resting works? Is it still that you only get some of your hit dice back on a long rest? So it really is just like mechanically stretching "a day" over several days?
Hi Rincewind (love the name - big Pratchett fan!)
My version of short resting is exactly in the PHB. Roll hit die. Recover short rest stuff (second wind, wild shape, etc). I paced the hex crawl so the PCs typically Long Rested after they cleared an area, such as Yellyark, or Camp Righteous. There were also a few safe areas they could rest, like Camp Vengeance.
By the time they reached level 5 and acquired Leomund's Tiny Hut, I mostly handwaved the hex crawl travel altogether.
I also struggle with travel and resting mechanics for exactly the reasons you outlined - random encounters don't really work when players are constantly recharging every day. We discussed this problem in my latest DM roundtable - ruclips.net/video/HjjXvoT9X-A/видео.html
Can you share which source you used for random encounters, is it campaign specific, if so are there other random encounter generators online specific to campaigns?
The ToA book has plenty of excellent encounters to draw from. I used this neat website tool to generate about how often I should be running encounters - kevin-whitaker.net/toa-travel/
@@RogueWatson do you know if POTA has that as well, i know it is not as much traveling, if not I can put in encounters in there that fit the theme well?
@@caesarion1399 I would suggest looking at the random encounters in Xanathar's guide. They provide different lists based on environment and player tier.
thank u, very very helpfull, i started to see your ToA campaign and during a video you open an handout with homebrew rules, is it possible for you to share all that text somewhere? the one that contains rules about druid animal shapes, malus after reaching 0 hp like blind etc... p.s. love your dming style and the fact that all the video have auto english sub...without them i cant understand everything
Thank you! Our house rules are posted here -roguewatson.com/2021/05/01/our-dd-house-rules-icewind-dale-2021-update/
For tip 9, the levels of the dungeon are so good y that I invented a trick in order that they explore everything. They we’re not able to go down (invisible force wall) until they open all the tombs of the fools gods. Currently they’re at level 4
I have only 2 friends to play with :( Is it ok for this campaign ? (Of course I am gonna make encounters little bit easier) any suggestions about this ?
Use the Guides! Have at least 2 of them join the party free of charge, and consider letting your players control them in combat - though be wary that some of them have the potential to massively outperform the PCs if they have full control of their abilities.
Thanks.
My characters entered Port Nyanzaru at 4th level and are anxious to get to the jungle, so we're speeding through it a bit, plus the book says the jungle is designed for characters level 5 & up, would you recommend I let them get through some initial parts of the jungle before leveling them up?
I would argue that the jungle is geared more toward tier 1 than anything else. Once you reach level 5 most of the dangers aren't worth running. By the time my party reached level 5, the bard took Leomund's Tiny Hut, and most of our jungle crawling days were over.
If they're already level 4 and chomping at the bit, I'd pick out the few encounters that really speak to you and run with those. Of course, you can always up the challenge level of the jungle by scaling numbers or enemies, or my favorite method - combining multiple encounters into one!
i dont allow tiny hut in my games. because of reasons you mentioned.
We start it at level 9. Any tips for me, please?
Just finished this as a player. My DM was incredibly lazy with the whole thing. I have to be honest, I hated it. The port had almost no character, the hexcrawl was a slog, but the Tomb was awful. So disappointed
Ugh, I'm sorry to hear that!
Thanks for the tips. I've already done most of them. I specially liked the #10 tip, since it gives de PCs a bigger change not dying. I thought about the same, taking them to a dark realm where Acerark is with many of the dead souls nearby. Tip #6 made me think if jungle crawl would be tedious, since tracking so many things (drinking water, rolling survival, rations, diseases, etc) can be boring for them and for me if made for a long time. I thought about giving them some better way to move (teleport, ship, kir sabal ritual, etc.).
You made your players play TWENTY SIX SESSIONS just to get from 3-5?! We play 4 hour sessions once a week so that would be 6-ish months for my group. Not criticizing but did you give them magic items and cool stuff to keep them entertained along the way? I think my players would kill me if I did that, lol.
22 sessions, though we do shorter session of about 2.5 hours. But yeah, the campaign ran for 2 years and only ended up at level 11 at the end. Pacing is probably my biggest complaint about this adventure. The hexcrawl can be fun, but it's also too much Tier 1.
I think my dm had us finish the whole thing in like.... 30 or 40 4 hour sessions. And we got mightily lost due to f**king river and flathk getting lost every 5 minutes. I'm still pissed that damn tabaxi has a statue
Can you explain how you did the hex map reveal? I’ve been trying to compare the player map and dm map to make sure they dont accidentally skip over a location.
I believe the paid Roll20 ToA module comes with a player-ready map of Chult, and each hex has a opaque token that can be removed (or hidden) to reveal the hexes as they traveled.
Also on the R20 version, every location is hidden on the GM layer, so you can easily move things around before they discover them, if needed (I moved several stuff around in my campaign).
@@RogueWatson ah, alrighty. thank you for letting me know.
Not teleporting sounds good, but what if your players are already level 5? I’m about to run TOA as part of their main campaign narrative. I’ve already mapped out how they will level up and they will be 14 by the time they leave Chult. I don’t want them going beyond that during this stage as I have more planned for them in the Campaign narrative once they finish TOA.
In that case you could easily skip the hex crawl portion, maybe include a few of the more interesting and flavorful jungle encounters.
Thanks, I think I’ve figured it out. I remapped my leveling plan so they can have some fun getting there and I’m gonna utilize the hex to some degree but not fully.
Since you didn't start with Syndra Sylvane, how/when did you give them the map?
Each of my PCs was traveling to Chult for their own reasons, but along the way one of the NPCs traveling with them (Undril) received the Death Curse-mission from her superior (actually a PC from a previous campaign), and she roped the party in. I think I gave them the map at that point as well. If not they got it in town (we spent several sessions in Port Nyanzaru).
How long are your sessions? My sessions tend to be 5-6 hours with 30-40 minute break in the middle
Typically 2-3 hours. ToA we averaged about 2 hrs 45 min and Rime is averaging a little shorter (no break in between). My recent Patron games have been over 3 hours, with a short break in between.
@@RogueWatson thank you. I'll factor that in.
Monkey Island meets Diablo III hard mode.
@RogueWatson Can I join A game with you!?
31 sessions to level 5 Oooof
Yeah I wouldn't recommend that, haha. Even with our shorter 3 hour sessions. With our current campaign, Rime of the Frostmaiden, we hit level 5 in Session 24, and that's with even shorter sessions (about 2.5 hours).
🔒🧬🧪🪜