The DM's Guide to DMing

MilkmanDanimal wrote:

My D&D group is a big West Marches-style group (loads of players, multiple DMs,run one-shots in a common world rather than one long individual story), [...] So, almost undoubtedly, 100+ games in a year. Granted, it's a solid 15-20 avid players with half a dozen regular DMs plus a number of more occasional players, but that is a lot of D&D.

I am very jealous.

Gremlin wrote:
MilkmanDanimal wrote:

My D&D group is a big West Marches-style group (loads of players, multiple DMs,run one-shots in a common world rather than one long individual story), [...] So, almost undoubtedly, 100+ games in a year. Granted, it's a solid 15-20 avid players with half a dozen regular DMs plus a number of more occasional players, but that is a lot of D&D.

I am very jealous.

Agreed. Amazeballs.

-BEP

bepnewt wrote:
Gremlin wrote:
MilkmanDanimal wrote:

My D&D group is a big West Marches-style group (loads of players, multiple DMs,run one-shots in a common world rather than one long individual story), [...] So, almost undoubtedly, 100+ games in a year. Granted, it's a solid 15-20 avid players with half a dozen regular DMs plus a number of more occasional players, but that is a lot of D&D.

I am very jealous.

Agreed. Amazeballs.

-BEP

Understandable. With both 4e and early 5e about five of us tried to get a D&D group together, and we just couldn't make it work, because the most dangerous enemy you face in roleplaying is scheduling, not anything in the Monster Manual. We gave up on RPGs, and instead switched to board game nights, and, sure, those were lots of fun, but I missed D&D. When a friend of mine heard about West Marches games and convinced about ten people to meet at a brewpub one night to talk about the concept. He outlined the basics, and we immediately discussed the basic rules we wanted; no evil characters and play as co-operative heroes, no homebrew of any sort whatsoever and only materials printed in official WOTC books, everybody starts in the Crossed Hammers tavern in the town of Adderholm, and you build the world as you go, and you have one character only. As time went by, those of us who were hardcore started having level 12-13 characters and there were level 2s, so we had a *heavy sigh* Constitutional Convention where we agreed to change things to allow everybody to have one character per tier (1-4, 5-11, 12-16, 17-20) instead. That means even in this one-shot filled kind of game, you wind up playing with the same characters repeatedly, and you get a lot of the same party banter you'd get in a normal D&D group just because your characters play together. My Forest Gnome Wizard and the Deep Gnome Druid argue about flowers and sunshine vs. dirt, because we've played together over and over. My level 20 Bardlock murderhobo has never met the Druid, but has his own relationships with the other big characters.

It has been, to put it simply, @#$!!! FABULOUS as a gaming experience, and we'll go back to face-to-face soon. This works by and large because we're all adult, old-school gamers who have dealt with all sorts of dramatic and terrible players in the past, and we've very carefully curated people who get into the group, and everybody's been good about not inviting people who don't fit, and I think having a formal Constitution (no, really) that states specifically no PvP, stealing from each other, or other traditional dickbag behavior has been really useful. Cannot recommend enough this kind of game; get a few people together to talk it over, have them invite friends, make sure you have a very specific set of rules everyone agrees on, and just go. Been freaking great.

Here's a little HeroForge hint for VTT users. Create your mini in HeroForge, put it in a cool pose, change the camera to top down and take a screen shot. Paste that sshot into your favorite image editor that has background removal and remove the chaff. Save it as PNG with transparency. You can use an editor that doesn't do magic BG removal, but that can take some time. Give Paint3D a shot if you haven't tried it. A friend suggested I try it just for the BG removal and I was pleasantly surprised.

You now have a good top-down token for Roll20 or whatever VTT you use.

To get rid of the electric blue base stuff that HeroForge puts under your mini's image (which makes it more tedious to remove the background chaff), go to the settings (gear at the bottom) and set the graphics to low. you lose lighting, reflections, etc., but for a VTT token you don't need that stuff.

The token on the left is the one we've been using for Duane's character (and his Ferret, Meep). I quickly made the one on the right in HeroForge and will surprise him with it when he gets in his first combat by switching it out with the normal portrait one. It even has his flaming sword!

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/C1bco6v.png)

I made a portrait token from the same mini on HeroForge, but I think he will prefer the one he is using instead of the cartoony one from HF.

-BEP

I'm one session away from completing Storm King's Thunder in Fantasy Grounds for a group of 4. They're level 11 now and I'm looking for another adventure they could jump into from there.

Anyone know any good high level 5e adventures that probably have a Fantasy Grounds module? Their website's search function doesn't filter by level.

mrwynd wrote:

I'm one session away from completing Storm King's Thunder in Fantasy Grounds for a group of 4. They're level 11 now and I'm looking for another adventure they could jump into from there.

Anyone know any good high level 5e adventures that probably have a Fantasy Grounds module? Their website's search function doesn't filter by level.

Well if your party isn't tired of giants the Against the Giants adventure from Tales from the Yawning Portal is recommended for level 11.

You could also maybe tie in the Kraken Society and Slarkrethel into the final adventure in the Saltmarsh book, the Styes. It is also recommended for a level 11 party.

The new Candlekeep book also has some high-level adventures.

I have not played any of these FWIW.

I am also running SKT, and I'd love to hear what you thought of the adventure or any changes you made to it.

EriktheRed wrote:

I am also running SKT, and I'd love to hear what you thought of the adventure or any changes you made to it.

Storm King's Thunder is a very open adventure so I imagine your experience DMing it will have a lot of differences from mine. It takes a good amount of reading your players to determine how fast or often to push them along to a plot point.

We had to restrict playtime to 3 hours every week at first then every two weeks so it was hard to keep the group engaged unless I pushed them to the next plot point. I didn't use a lot of wilderness encounters and as the adventure went on I found more ways to speed up travel and not worry too much about how long it took a gryphon to get them somewhere, etc. Also two of my four players were first timers and needed some extra coaxing to get them out of their shells and think outside of video game mechanics.

I'm going to wall of text this whole thing because I did a lot of specific changes as I went.

Spoiler:

At the resolution of the first section where you've saved the people of Nightstone the Tower of Zephyros appears. I put a lot into making Zephyros a zany and cryptic soothsayer-like character that fit his silly tower. He said vague things like 'you're definitely the ones to fix all of this mess' and other vague suggestions that something big is happening and they're destined to save The North. I had him take them all the way north to Bryn Shander to immediately continue the story with the frost giants attack.

I used Sirac of Suzail's tale of about his father Artus Cimber and the Ring of Winter as a mcguffin to give them more purpose to their travel, Cimber was always two steps ahead of their search and it led them to helping The Harpers and gaining access to Inner Circles for faster travel. Then I introduced Harshnag and he helped guide them to the Oracle after experiencing a few more giant raids on various towns.

At the Oracle they killed the leader of one of the tribes and using the Oracle they were guided to the closest Uthgardt ancestral mound in the ice who's leader they killed. Bringing his head as proof they became the leader of this tribe and hilariously tried to setup a democratic republic for an entire gaming session. This is when the party really started to develop an identity and the new players got into their characters.

When they returned to the Oracle I decided to change how it revealed its path to the Frost Giant Lord to more easily guide them. I decided whomever delivered the item to the Oracle gained a special ability to see the fastest route to the conch in their mind's eye on command. They simply closed their eyes and I described their vision zooming through the easiest path. I did introduce the evil blue dragon and Harshnag sacrificing himself so they could escape. I also had the Oracle suggest the princess Nerissa was being misled by someone close to her.

It's here that I wrote a homebrew section to lead them out from the Oracle using that mind's eye power. They traveled through an ancient hidden tunnel crafted by dwarves who'd mined deep within the mountain near the Oracle and exit through an ancient magic door that no one had seen open before in Mirabar. They had to use this fact along with some of the dwarves who believed they were 'chosen' to convince the Council of Sparkling Stones to fund their expedition to the Frost Giant's keep. Also the tunnel included alcohol brewing myconids and a lonely Barlgura who cracked bad jokes about elves and dwarves.

They quickly traveled to Svardborg by traveling with a dwarven entourage that took them to Fireshear and rode gryphons from there. They were quite successful at being sneaky and picked the correct house for the conch. I had the Frost Giant Lord guy appear just as they were getting to the conch and it turned into a successful chase scene. I played up how impossible it would be to survive if they were caught and it worked to make the getaway intense. I made sure they knew they had to attune to the conch for an hour so they couldn't just blow it and escape.

In Maelstrom they were double crossed by the two older sisters but talked their way out of being killed by the guest giants with details from the Oracle and gifts they'd obtained from the dwarves. This worked really well to make them feel like they'd earned an audience with Nerissa. To keep things going I wanted to make sure Iymrith was revealed somehow during this first encounter.

From the earlier hint about Nerissa being deceived they got the idea to convince Nerissa to dismiss everyone else in the room. While Iymrith was walking out the monk in our group guessed it was her and made a small threat that she'd be revealed - they rolled a nat 20 for intimidation and Iymrith turned, ripped the necklace from Nerissa and teleported away. This was enough to convince Nerissa to trust the group and provide resources to finding what happened to her mother and father. More to come...

...I need to go to bed, I will continue my tale tomorrow!

Continuing on...

Spoiler:

The section on the Golden Goose investigation was vague so I created some backstory for an island where the Storm Giant Queen's body and the coin were found. With a few false leads and some internal island politics they were able to find out the image from the coin matched a river boat a deck hand worked on at a previous job. This led them to Yartar. They used the Harpers circles.

Since they were using the teleportation circles more I created a couple colorful NPCs to manage them, this helped them remember which location was which.

In Yartar they had to acquire fancy clothes and find ways to hide their weapons or leave them behind to get on the gambling boat, this gave them a feeling of vulnerability.

I knew they'd enjoy games in the casino and they had a lot of disposable income at this point so I made it pretty high cost buy in to keep it interesting. I made a simplified version of Craps where bets were just on the Pass (players want 7 or 11 before a 2,3 or 12) and Come (Players want the set number once rolled 4,5,6,8,9, or 10 and lose on a 2 or 7.) They actually came out ahead and eventually spent a lot of their fortune on some magic equipment. They didn't find a whole lot of stuff along the way so we spent a couple sessions on shopping sprees and I made sure lots of cool stuff was available in Waterdeep.

They ended up extracting info from Drylund about the location of the ship holding King Hekaton and like the story says the Kraken telepathically kills Drylund. Pow Ming was happy to take over the ship and help dispose of the body in the river. This part mostly went by the book though they didn't explore much of the ship, just the casino and Drylund's quarters - the party's seductive sorceress was invited there by Drylund.

I also managed to spend some of their fortune on the ship and crew to get them to King Hekaton. I didn't use any wilderness encounters and just did a quick montage-like explanation of the crew. In the ship-on-ship battle my Sorceress and Druid wanted to stay behind on the ship while the Monk and Barbarian went aboard. The enemies in the water were very effective at giving those who stayed behind a reason to move. They quickly freed Hekaton and using Serissa's name and a high persuasion roll from the Sorceress convinced him not to kill them. He helped clear the deck but the wizard (who I think was the ship's captain) teleported away. I haven't brought him back but I'd like to find a place for him later.

They decided to stay and search the ship which gave me the opportunity to have the kraken come and sink the ship just as they escaped with the conch.

After the Storm Giants reunion in Maelstrom they were gifted some items like the Giant Size potion which was super helpful but I had to create custom weapons/effects in Fantasy Grounds for it and they ran straight to the final dragon fight with assistance from the Storm Giants.

I'm in the middle of the final battle now, should finish in our next session. Like the book suggests I gave them each control of a Storm Giant for this battle which helps because the huge number of gargoyles has really slowed down combat.

The two players who I introduced to D&D with this adventure decided they wanted to start new characters to see something new. I'm thinking of running Tomb of Annihilation next. Has anyone ran that and have any recommendations?

I DM'ed session 15 of Tomb last night, probably 1/3 done. Ask me anything

Personal opinion, Tomb is..... okay. It has some great parts - the setting (Chult) has a great "lost continent" feel, and is nicely different from regular forgotten realms. Also my players are enjoying the whole high difficulty/constant threat of death angle. And the campaign has lots of properly old-school D&D puzzles (think "only the penitent shall pass" type of stuff), which my players dig.

But there's some big minuses that I feel like I spend a lot of time working around. The main one is, if you run everything as written then things are very sparse and disconnected. Many of the campaign's major locations and main NPCs have little obvious connection to each other, or to the main story.

And there's a lot of randomness, so the book has way more places and NPCs than the characters will actually visit -- which means that the ones they do visit often only have a paragraph or two of description. So the campaign feels very weak on RP, and on having a cohesive overall story - if your players like talking to NPCs, you'll need to fill in a lot of blanks.

Other big issue is, the BBEG is kind of boring. Acererak (a kind of Ur-lich) is cool from the DM's point of view, but most of his back-story is stuff the players can't conceivably find out, so if you run everything as-written he pretty much just shows up at the end for a fight, and the players will know approximately who he is but not much else.

So we're enjoying it, but my last campaign was Strahd and as a DM there's no comparison.

---

Edit to add: I don't know anything about SKT, but maybe worth mentioning that Artus Cimber is an NPC in Tomb, so could maybe tie into your current story arc? But again his story/motivation is minimal, so you'd need to do all the heavy lifting yourself.

I mean my biggest stumbling block with ToA is probably the whole "lost continent" thing in the first place, since generally it's a story cliche that's VERY heavy on the colonialism. The continent is probably not all that lost for the people and cultures who lived there before the Flaming Fist showed up, for one thing. I'd LIKE to run it at some point but that's something i'm going to have to think carefully as to how best to approach.

Erm, I didn't notice any tropes like that, not sure what you're referring to. The Flaming Fist appear a bit in the first act, but don't play any significant role in the story.

The "lost continent" angle is that the continent's interior is mostly jungle and ancient ruins. It's lost to everyone, not just to non-Chultans.

I'm mostly going by what i've been told by black TTRPG creators, or articles like this one. It doesn't seem unfixable - at least compared to how Chult was PREVIOUSLY portrayed, but there is definitely some stuff ingrained there which I personally wouldn't have picked up on (being literally one the whitest person on the planet).
The art choices though DO stand out to me as being a fair bit cringe. (see examples in above article)

fenomas wrote:

Edit to add: I don't know anything about SKT, but maybe worth mentioning that Artus Cimber is an NPC in Tomb, so could maybe tie into your current story arc? But again his story/motivation is minimal, so you'd need to do all the heavy lifting yourself.

I watched a couple videos of the "Top 10 tips for running Tomb of Annihilation" variety last night. They echoed a lot of what you're saying.

I'm thinking of building these changes in from the beginning:

1. I'm not going to start with the Death Curse and NPC who transports the party to Chult. My players hunted for Artus Cimber through SKT thinking he was an important part when he was really a McGuffin. I thought it would be fun to have frost giants attack and the players observe their former characters fight them off and determine Artus Cimber is in Chult, sending the players there. They find out about the death curse during their sea voyage to Chult and reach level 2 before arriving.

2. I'm going to ignore the 'hex traveling' feature and instead make it more of a dangerous montage of random encounters. We're all parents of small children with limited time, not going to fill it up with lots of random encounters. We also play once every other Saturday so I try to keep to the story as much as I can.

3. I'll use Port Nyanzaru for leveling up more than the wilderness, it seems to be a rich resource for RP.

4. Acererak needs to be more involved, I don't know exactly how, I haven't read most of it yet.

pyxistyx wrote:

I'm mostly going by what i've been told by black TTRPG creators, or articles like this one.

Ah, that makes more sense. That 4E stuff looks pretty yikes I don't follow D&D lore much, so basically everything I know about Chult is from the current 5e module.

That said, it's definitely a story about a big untamed continent with dark-skinned people, there's no getting around that. And if that bit alone turns somebody off, yeah, fair enough. Personally I haven't found the tropey bits any more tropey than everything else in D&D, but this stuff hits everyone different.

As for your comment about how to run it as a DM, to be honest it's not an issue just due to how sparse the campaign is on what we're talking about. Basically, once you leave Port Nyanzaru it's not a campaign about people, but about jungle survival and traps. And while personally I found PN a really cool setting, if you wanted you could funnel your players out of it in session one, and you'd have all the module's tropes behind you and 80% of the campaign in front of you.

mrwynd wrote:

I watched a couple videos of the "Top 10 tips for running Tomb of Annihilation" variety last night. They echoed a lot of what you're saying.

I'm thinking of building these changes in from the beginning:

Agree with everything you wrote. If your players know Artus that's a really good thing to build around. Personally I'm a bit stuck on what to do with him - my players have met him, and various people looking for him, and are expecting him to play a big role from here on, but there's nothing left in the module for me to go on

That said, don't have Artus join the party. It goofs the balance up, and also they'll probably have an NPC guide and maybe Vorn, and it just leads to the players being overshadowed.

For hex travel, personally I keep up the pretext - since it's a sort of iconic part of the module (and my players are "old guys reliving their youth" types, so getting the original experience is part of the appeal). But behind the DM screen of course I ignore all the dice rolls and do pre-planned encounters.

For Port Nyan, in my case we spent three sessions there, mostly RP establishing the city etc. Definitely find a reason to have them encounter one of the merchant princes, as they're all pretty cool. But maybe not more than one, since there's only one map for their house. I used the Grandfather Zitembe NPC as their main breadcrumb out of the city, to get them headed to Orolunga. There's very little combat in the city, I used an undead invasion and a run-in with drunken sailors to spice things up. Also, running into Volo was fun (remember there's a 50% chance he's drunk!).

For Acererak, would love to hear your ideas! One idea I read somewhere was that Acererak has stolen Valindra Shadowmantle's phylactery and hidden it in the tomb of nine gods. I'd also suggest reading up on Valindra and having her play a major role in chapter 2, since she's "a thing" in D&D lore and your players might know her from video games and whatnot.

I ran Tomb of Annihilation, but for characters starting at level five, so I largely skipped over the "sidequest" stuff in the early chapters and pointed them towards the "real" storyline pretty quickly. I can at least speak to the later chapters, and to things I learned in other online groups. Of course, this is all my opinion, your mileage may vary:

On DMsGuild there's an adventure called Cellar of Death. It's widely recommended as a way to bring together a group of disparate 1st level adventurers from outside Chult and give them an investment in ending the Death Curse. It will also teach them what a lich is.

Like most WotC adventures, the early parts are as much sourcebook as adventure path. There's a lot going on, more than you have time to cover, and it's hard to keep focused on the "ticking time bomb" of the death curse while wandering the continent on sidequests. I found handling the early part easiest by making a flowchart of two or three ways the group could learn about where they needed to go and how to get there, and nudged them towards the various paths. Like most WotC adventures, you're well off deciding on what you want to cut and dropping hooks for the parts you think you can run best. (A route via the Heart of Ubtao is recommended due to some excellent foreshadowing... you can find an excuse for almost anybody to suggest the party to check it out.)

The hex crawl as written in the book can get incredibly tedious unless your group is really into random combat. After a very boring session I tossed it completely in favor of narrating travel with a few pre-scripted encounters. The DMsGuild product A Tomb of Annihilation Companion inspired me enormously in this regard (and in other ways).

Use milestone levelling. (Although you have to use some art, since the PCs can do things in different orders.) Otherwise it can be difficult to hit the suggested levels for certain chapters.

The "lost city" chapters are some of the best D&D I've ever run and I have a lot of opinions to share if you get that far. (Hint: preparing them to consider diplomacy instead of killing everyone they see opens up some fun roleplaying.)

The final chapter is wonderfully written to feel way more dangerous than it actually is. (But it is actually dangerous, with one or two traps that are still kind of unfair.) Depending on the playstyle of your group (are they cool with the "meat grinder" or are they attached to their characters?) you might want to tweak it a bit. Either way, it can be stressful and teaches the group to be super paranoid; be sure to lean into every opportunity for comic relief that the chapter offers.

Since my party does enjoy searching/hunting and one of them wants to be a Ranger I think I won't completely toss out the hex crawl but I'll accelerate it. The Companion you linked sounds like a good solution, I may pick that up. Thanks!

The Fantasy Grounds module comes with a pretty useful map I can put shared pins on. I found this helped with SKT since we only could meet every other Saturday. I put links to notes of what happened in each encounter to remind them. It also means each encounter needs to be significant and not 'random encounter 10'.

EDIT: Regarding the beginning I'm going to have their previous characters from SKT show up. One of those characters having the death curse should work as a great motivator.

Since my group knew they didn't want to return to our characters from SKT we spent some time on an 'epilogue' for their group and individual characters. It was fun for everyone to sort of montage their way through what each of their characters would do after saving the land from Iymrith. Their first order of business was to finish quelling the remaining giant attacks before separating to their individual retirements.

We went through creating characters for ToA and role playing them meeting each other on the road to Waterdeep. We ended on them waking up to giants approaching. I'll have their previous group from SKT show up to save them from the giants then commission them to find Artus Cimber in Chult. I'll frame it as part of them solving the remaining giant threat from the Frost Giants.

I want the death curse of ToA to come up later. I plan on that coming from either someone they befriend in Chult or a communication from their former SKT group. I'll play that by ear depending on how their relationships form.

The group is Wood Elf Ranger, Tiefling Rogue, Halfling Cleric and Human Druid. That leaves out any arcane casting. I'm not sure yet if that will be an issue for any plot points.

That sounds cool wynd. If they befriend someone in Chult as a way to rope them into the curse, you might have it be one of the merchant princes. They're all pretty cool and I wish I'd found a way to use them more. The downside is that once the party starts Chapter 2 they'll never meet them again, but then that's basically true of every NPC in chapter 1.

For my crew, they broke into Hrakhamar, then barely survived a big fight with half its inhabitants, and then they casted Leomund's Tiny Hut in the middle of the dungeon to recuperate. So of course the other half of the dungeon's inhabitants immediately discovered this, and the party will now sleep for eight hours while a bunch of angry Firenewts scamper around trying to chisel their way into this big weird opaque dome that's suddenly sitting in their living room.

Absolutely no idea what's going to happen next session when the dome expires.

I wanted to resurrect this thread to give an update on my ToA campaign. We meet every other week and had a few cancellations along the way (Wife and I had our third child too) so we've just now reached Omu. My group really got into discovering and solving random side quests in the jungle and despite repeated NPC's telling them to go to Omu they wanted to look at almost everything else first.

They were in Nyanzaru for only two sessions and refused to hire a guide. They instead spent all their extra money on a trasure map that leads to Needle's Bones lol.

I decided to throw in Artus as a way to keep them from a TPK but I found a way to pull him out again. I used Valindra as the scary villain who gave exposition about the Soulmonger and the Death Curse as well as coming off as incredibly evil and dangerous. After they left Valindra during the next session they found while travelling that Artus was missing. Later they found a note in a backpack saying to deliver the Soulmonger if they ever wanted to see Artus again.

They really liked the medusa queen in Nangalore so it was cool to send them back for the black lotus. It's funny though once they retrieved it (through a trade, my halfling cleric player loves to start conversations by offering mayonnaise from the magic jug) they took it back to Kir Sabal but refused the flight spell when told they couldn't make Vorn fly. So they still have Vorn, the black lotus and decided to walk there. Oh and they finally went to Needle's Bones for a bit of loot they'll maybe, possibly someday sell lol.

My players had some good background I wanted to integrate into the world. One has a father who's a were-tiger I had him introduced as a prisoner in Dungrunglung. The players successfully convinced the Grungs that the goddess was coming to mate with their king. They snuck his father out while the king was gloating and pointing fingers at all the other Grungs who didn't think he could do it. Another player the Tiefling Rogue has a tail that was split in half by a curse that causes pain. She's been looking for a way to restore this as I made it clear a simple remove curse wouldn't do. I've hinted at a solution tied to the statue in Kir Sabal that depicts Ubtao as a Tabaxi. I plan on that being some sort of offering but I'm playing that by ear.

So now my group has just entered Omu as our last session ended. I intend for Valindra to be the main villain but I haven't 100% pieced together how I'm going to do that yet.

Thanks for sharing, mrwynd! Interesting different approaches we're taking: I made Valindra a manipulative charmer, and one of the PCs was quite taken with her.

I think Omu was some of my favorite D&D I've ever played.

Spoiler:

Instead of making them cardboard cutout villains, I gave each of the Red Wizards a distinct personality (including one or two sympathetic ones). With the more straightforward villainous aggression of the Yuan-ti, there was some fantastic roleplay and difficult decisions for them to make, with uneasy shifting alliances. It made for a fabulous mix of combat and roleplay, against the backdrop of all the temple puzzles, so we really hit all the three pillars well.

Also, the way the other factions will solve temples the PCs can't solve is one of the most ingenious design decisions I've seen in a published campaign. Lots of tools are here to tune the difficulty and playstyle focus of the area.

Omu was a lot of fun in my group as well! Here's a bunch of notes from me:

Spoiler:

I started out Omu by getting the party captured by YT after their first long rest, so they could have an audience with Fenthaza/Ras Nsi (my party did both but YMMV). This was easy in our case since they chose Salida the under-cover YT as their guide, so she just set up an ambush (by canceling their Leomund's Tiny Hut).

This way the players got a tour of Chapter 4 (I did the whole thing where they get assigned tasks and have to play along with their handlers), and got some idea of who the hell Ras was and the intrigues in Ch4, THEN they get kicked out to explore Omu and do chapter 3 and all the tombs. Then I funneled things such that Ras Nsi gets a few puzzle cubes so they wind up invading the Fane again. In retrospect this worked well, getting away from the "once you go from place A to place B, place A no longer exists" feeling of ToA generally.

I second the advice about giving the red wizards personalities - in my case I gave Valindra a lieutenant to be the local bad guy, and also the players befriended Orvex the scribe who was happy to turn on his previous employers. Then ultimately the party had a showdown with Ras Nsi in the Fane, followed closely by a showdown with Valindra's lieutenant at the temple of nine gods entrance. On a whim I also had one of the wizard's thugs throw down his weapons when he was the last one alive, and the party wound up hiring him. Then both Orvex and the thug became stalwart companions well into T9G, and there were sad times when they died.

Regret: I never really got Valindra personally involved in things, and once the players enter T9G they're basically cut off forever from anyone who didn't enter with them. Plan way ahead if you want to have Valindra (or Artus, etc..) play any kind of role in the final act.

More on Omu: read through all the Puzzle Cube temples and CUT the ones you're ambivalent about. They can drag, and they're not all winners. As an aside, none of them is hugely tied to its physical location, so feel free to pick which tombs you want the players to do, and just play them in that order regardless of where the players go in the city.

Final big note, the best thing I did in Omu was finagle things such that my players invaded the Fane during a Yuan-Ti ascension ceremony. (In our case Salida was ascending to become a Malison as a reward for betraying the party.) I had someone feed them a hint several days in advance that a ceremony was coming and that the Y-T guard would be down. Anyway the party wound up sneaking through a big temple of snakes who were devouring slaves and bathing in blood and stoned off their tits - it was a good time.

So I'm heading into my last session DMing Tomb of Annihilation next week and I'm dithering how to handle it - basically over whether to have the campaign end with a (probable) TPK, after the players complete the formal goal of the campaign. And I'm wondering if others have ended campaigns that way, and how it went.

Spoiler:

The arc of the campaign is there's a worldwide curse, and the formal goal is to destroy the thing causing it. Once you do that, Acererak (a kind of uber-lich who kills gods and makes new ones to pass the time) shows up with his sphere of annihilation to kill everyone, and the players get special buffs to have a chance. As I follow things, the standard way to run things is to position Acererak like a BBEG, and balance things such that the players can likely win the fight (by driving him off), and then visit the last two rooms of the dungeon (which contain nothing of any great importance).

But to me it feels like it would be more thematic and interesting if the grand finale is that if the players do the thing and lift the curse, thereby "winning" the campaign, and then the uber-god shows up and yells "my baaaaaaby" and goes ballistic in an almost-certainly-unwinnable fight. And then there's an epilogue where the players wake up, and the rich powerful NPC who hired them delivers a speech like "you saved my life and also he world, and the whole continent knows of your heroic deeds, and now let's discuss how much you owe me for the expedition to retrieve and resurrect your bodies", and scene.

Have folks run endings like that? Did it go down, or do you think it would be unsatisfying? There's no question of extended results, as we'll be retiring the characters and doing something else afterwards regardless.

If the game ends in a TPK where the group saves the world but Acererak lives you could explain that the evil plans he set in motion for hundreds of years was thwarted and although he's not defeated it will take him hundreds more to set something like this in motion again. It gives weight to their accomplishments as well as leaves Acererak open to be a BBEG in the future.

Also if there's a TPK after destroying the evil device you could give an epilogue about all the factions and individuals they interacted with through the adventure and how the heroes actions improved (or not) their lives. Kind of like the ending of Fallout New Vegas gives depending on how you resolve things with each story bit.

mrwynd wrote:

If the game ends in a TPK where the group saves the world but Acererak lives you could explain that the evil plans he set in motion for hundreds of years was thwarted and although he's not defeated it will take him hundreds more to set something like this in motion again. It gives weight to their accomplishments as well as leaves Acererak open to be a BBEG in the future.

You pretty much described the campaign! Actually let me go back and spoiler my post, since DMs reading here might still play it sometime.

To clarify though:

Spoiler:

Yes, basically winning the campaign means messing up a plan Acererak has been setting up for a few hundred years. And he lives no matter what; per the campaign he buggers off if brought below a HP threshhold, and even then he's a lich with a phylactery hidden off on its own unknown plane and so on.

I should also add, the schtick of the campaign is that a death curse is preventing resurrection spells and similar magic from working, so having the characters get resurrected after breaking the curse seems thematically justified...

I would not be very amused if I were forced into an unwinnable, cutscene fight. How do you think your players will take it? Also, what happens if they figure out a way to win anyway?

It's not forced or unwinnable or a cutscene, and my earlier post says what happens if they win.

If anyone's played or run ToA would be great to hear your thoughts.

Sorry, I guess I read “and then the uber-god shows up and yells "my baaaaaaby" and goes ballistic in an almost-certainly-unwinnable fight” differently than you intended.

kenada wrote:

I guess I read “and then the uber-god shows up and yells "my baaaaaaby" and goes ballistic in an almost-certainly-unwinnable fight” differently than you intended.

The key words are "almost-certainly unwinnable. A very difficult fight can still be bested, depending on how the dice fall and what schemes the players come up with - and a legendary figure like this should be a nigh impossible encounter to be properly dramatic. The question is how to set it up so that the players don't feel cheated in the way that you're reading.

I have no experience with ToA to help specifically, sorry!