--- title: "Running Tomb of Annihilation" subtitle: "How my players found a plot" author: Seth publish_date: 2025-02-16 08:00 date: 2025-02-16 08:00 hero_classes: text-light title-h1h2 overlay-dark-gradient hero-large parallax hero_image: dungeon-1600x800.webp show_sidebar: true show_breadcrumbs: true show_pagination: true taxonomy: category: gaming tag: [gaming, dungeon, tip, modules, gm, rpg, 5e, pathfinder ] --- I've been running a **Tomb of Annihilation** campaign for about a year now, and I can't honestly say it's been quite as nice as running a good module like [Expedition to Castle Ravenloft](https://mixedsignals.ml/games/blog/blog_expedition-to-castle-ravenloft-1) or [Rise of the Runelords](https://mixedsignals.ml/games/blog/blog_runelords-burnt-offerings). It's my fault, because **Tomb of Annihilation** is actually a sandbox. I understand the concept of a sandbox, but I freely admit it's not my style of play. Over the past year, I've come to accept that **Tomb of Annihilation** is not an adventure but a setting source book for Chult, and I've been adapting the module to make it work for me and my gaming group. It's gone well enough, and we're all enjoying wandering through the jungles of Chult. Here's what I've done. This post has lots of spoilers in it. ## The adventure is a lie First of all, rename **Tomb of Annihilation** to just **The jungles and cities of Chult**. There's no adventure in the book, there are only locations with a paragraph or two of text about each one. There are 2 dungeons in chapters 4 and 5, but don't imagine that chapters 1, 2, and 3 lead to those dungeons. They don't. The first 3 chapters are settings, and they contain lots of great locations for players to find themselves in during an adventure of your devising. The way the book was published confuses the matter. Its title makes you think it's a module about a specific tomb. It is not. There is no literally "tomb of annihilation", that's just a descriptor. I'm being serious. The dungeons in the book are _Fane of the Night Serpent_ and _Temple of the Nine Gods_. The first couple of pages in the book make it worse by suggesting that there's an adventure in this book. There is not. There is a prompt, and then there is a sandbox. There are very few planned encounters, there's no path from the beginning to the end of a story, because there's no story. _This is a settings book._ ## Drop the death curse The death curse is frankly just an annoyance. It makes no sense in the context of a sandbox. Players are told that a death curse is eating souls. It's super urgent that they go and remove the curse before all the heroes of the land perma-die. Then they're told to go wander around a jungle with literally nothing to do but find a solution for the curse. Because it's boring to just have players wandering around a hex map for the hundreds of days that it would take for them to stumble upon the correct dungeon that can trigger a solution, you're meant to provide little adventures along the way. The book doesn't provide them. Most significantly, there's _every reason_ for player characters to **actively** avoid side quests. There's a curse on the entire planet! Why would they let anything distract them from this urgent and most noble task? The death curse is also too vague as a goal for an adventure. If the book had mapped out a series of clues taking the players from location to location in their search, then it would work. That's how Paizo would have handled it, and it would have been fun. But as written, the book gives you nothing to work with, and in fact muddles things by including inconsequential subplots. Months after playing, you'll know where to find the Ring of Winter but you still won't know who or what a soulmonger is. It's actually demotivating. Players aren't given enough information on where to go next, so they end up going nowhere. They just accept that either the death curse is the new normal, or that some other group of adventurers will take care of it. Having no idea how to stop a disease might be realistic, but it does not make for an entertaining game. ## Give players purpose with the cube quest I'd already signed on for the "adventure" by the time I identified what wasn't working for me and my group, so we were stuck with the basic premise of a death curse and a soulmonger. To stall for time, and to provide some much needed structure, I threw the [Tomb of Horror](https://mixedsignals.ml/games/blog/game_tomb-of-horrors) into Mezro. My players discovered it, and took the bait. The obvious problem with this delay tactic is that at the end of **Tomb of Horrors**, the players are likely to kill Acererak. So instead of encountering Acererak, the big reward in the tomb was a stone cube bearing images of 6 of the 9 gods of Omu. I'd already established that the 9 gods were significant, so the players took the cube with them, even though they didn't know what it was for. The stone cube, of course, is a component of a puzzle that gets player characters into the book's second dungeon, Tomb of the Nine Gods. The players didn't know that yet, but immediately after they found the cube, they encountered a minor villain who kept demanding that they surrender the cube to her. And of course, when the players eventually met the Yuan-ti (which I changed to Serpentfolk because I'm running Pathfinder 2), there was even more fervor over the cubes. One of my players calculated that with 6 gods on each cube and 9 gods total, there are likely 9! ÷ ( 6! × (9-6)! ) cubes (that's 84, assuming unique combinations with no repetition). Well, I know that the player characters only need 9 cubes to solve the puzzle, but with everybody in Chult now talking about these strange stone cubes and the 9 gods, it suddenly felt like the players had finally found the plot that the book authors forgot to write. The players jumped on the idea with no further prompting from me: They had to find the stone cubes. With only 83 to go, it seemed attainable (assuming that some stones would be found together). From that point on, any time the players meandered from one inconsequential location to another, I grabbed a Kobold Press or Frog God adventure and dropped it into Chult. Every point of interest that the book fails to incorporate into a meaningful story, I just made into the start of a quest to find stone cubes. It was easy. ## Sandboxes and parks I realise that a talented sandbox Game Master can recognise that all my players and I have done is exactly one of the things that a sandbox adventure is designed to do. A "sandbox" makes room for adventure by not providing an adventure. However, unlike an experienced sandbox gaming group, none of our adventures developed from player actions. The sandbox of Chult has served like a park map instead of an open world for us. You can take any path you like to any number of locations. Who knows what'll happen along the way but once you arrive, there's a ride there. The ride has a start and a finish, and it has a story with a clear goal. After you've finished the ride, you're back out in the park, ready to explore further. I think **Tomb of Annihilation** is a great settings book, and it's got 2 really neat dungeons, too. The book, however, is poorly positioned. It's a setting book with an adventure's title. It's 20 pages of a fiction novel and 200 pages of a nature documentary. After this campaign experience, I think I'd be comfortable running **Tomb of Annihilation** again in the future but I'm more likely to just run one of the dungeons. I like the Chult setting, and I love that the book provides so many interesting locations to explore, but I also feel that there are other jungle settings with even more thematic flavour. If you like the idea of a jungle setting, I recommend something with many more stories available for it: Frog God's [Tehuatl](https://www.froggodgames.com/products/351898). It's got the same great atmosphere and none of the excess baggage. It separates its adventures from its setting, so you can enjoy Tehuatl as a fun setting for a game or campaign, and you can either run your own adventure or run a published Tehuatl adventure.