Day 190: Today's Pick — Tomb of Annihilation (D&D Module)

There are roughly a hundred published Dungeons & Dragons campaign books, and most of them are fine. Tomb of Annihilation, released in 2017 for the 5th edition rules, is one of the few that I would describe as a working masterpiece — a campaign book that, run well, will give a group of friends a year of the most distinctive D&D they will ever play.

I want to talk about why.

For non-D&D people: a "campaign book" is a several-hundred-page hardcover that contains an entire long-running adventure for the game — maps, plot hooks, statistics for monsters and NPCs, regional lore, treasure tables, a thousand small moving parts. The Dungeon Master (DM) reads the book, runs the campaign, and the players experience it as a long, episodic adventure. A typical campaign book carries a group of four to six players from levels 1 through 11 (or so), over the course of forty to eighty sessions of play, which at one session a week is most of a year.

Tomb of Annihilation is a campaign about a curse called the Death Curse: anyone who has ever been resurrected by magic is dying, slowly, and no resurrection magic is working anywhere on the world. The campaign starts the players in the city of Port Nyanzaru, on the northwest coast of a fictional jungle continent called Chult — an explicit homage, art-direction-wise, to Mesoamerican and West African mythology — and tasks them with finding the source of the curse, which involves traveling deep into the jungle, dealing with corrupt merchants, undead pirates, dinosaurs (yes, real, you fight a triceratops in chapter two), and eventually descending into the titular Tomb, which is a 100-room dungeon designed to murder them.

What makes ToA special, structurally, is the hexcrawl. Most D&D campaigns assume the players go from plot point A to plot point B to plot point C in roughly the order the writer intended. ToA, instead, hands the players a hex-grid map of a jungle the size of Brazil and says: figure it out. The party hires guides. The party charters a riverboat. The party makes navigation rolls and gets lost and runs out of food and meets a tribe nobody told them about. Every hex is a small location, weather event, encounter, or surprise. The campaign world emerges, hex by hex, in a way that no railroad campaign ever can. After eight or ten sessions of jungle exploration, your players will have made up landmarks, named their guides, developed grudges against specific NPCs, and built — collectively — a personal and detailed mental map of the continent.

Then, after roughly a third of the campaign in the jungle, comes the Tomb itself. The Tomb of Annihilation is the Tomb of Horrors of 5th edition — a hundred-room funhouse death trap, full of riddles, deadly puzzles, traps that can permanently delete characters, and the lich Acererak waiting at the bottom. It is unfair. It is intentionally unfair. It will absolutely kill characters. (The campaign provides a small stable of pregenerated replacement characters in the appendix for exactly this purpose.) The first time my group descended into the Tomb, in a campaign I ran in 2022, three of the four players lost their original characters. The campaign continued, a year long, with new characters and old grudges. It is the best D&D I've ever run.

A few practical notes for DMs. ToA requires more prep than the average WotC campaign — the hexcrawl format means you, the DM, need to be ready for the players to go anywhere. Budget ten hours of prep before session zero, then a steady three to five hours per week thereafter. A few unofficial supplements (Chuck Bell's "Companion to ToA," the Yawning Portal podcast's running notes) significantly improve the experience. The 5th edition rules are aging — if your group has moved to the 2024 D&D revision, you'll need to convert some monster stat blocks, but the campaign is otherwise compatible.

A few practical notes for players. Roll a character who can navigate, swim, climb, and survive in a jungle. Druid, ranger, scout-rogue, outlander barbarian — these will outshine your typical urban paladin. Bring a light source. Bring rations. Trust nothing in the Tomb.

Cost: $50 for the hardcover, often $35 on sale, available digitally on D&D Beyond for around $30 with the rules already integrated. The book is beautifully illustrated; Adam Lee's cartography is some of the best in the 5e line.

This has been Day 190. The pick is a book that will eat your Thursday nights for a year. Make new friends, or make the old ones better. Roll dice. Lose characters.

It is what the game is for.