Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="CapnZapp" data-source="post: 7832185" data-attributes="member: 12731">After incorporating the Tomb of Annihilation Companion's added Omu locations I could present a revised city map with over thirty marked buildings (more than A thru Z). Since the number of buildings marked was so great I could hand out that map without the markings feeling "spoilery" since they pretty much covered every interesting-looking building anyway.Since my party kept exploring I don't think I used a single "random wandering monster" (and certainly no low-level speedbumps) - from their view, plenty of encounters felt plenty random as is. They encountered low-level critters both at the cliffside (the about-to-be sacrificed Grung) and in the cellars of the old market (kobolds).When they accidentally made the clock tower crumble I did send out an expedition from Yuan-Ti HQ. As I've recounted somewhere here on the forums, I also elevated Bag of Nails to the greatest hunter in the land (albeit a deluded one). In the end it went fairly well. That is, they sneaked from place to place (partly because they needed to find the nine temples, but partly because they could not resist finding out what was behind all those marked buildings! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> I have a hazy memory of actually posting that map... somewhere... )PS. One rather big thing to keep in mind - in order for the jungle exploration to remain relevant despite having a party overlevelled for the content, I made it impossible for the heroes to rest (regain spells, hit points) unless they camped by a "clean" water source - a river, the coastline, back in town etc. This way, even a monster that can't hope to present a challenging encounter retains some dramatic value, since the adventurers could not expect to move around with all batteries charged.Since Omu has caught up somewhat in the level department I hid a number of Ubtao tablets around Omu. Tracing them gives the character doing so a blessing that lets him or her rest peacefully even if in the midst of the steaming jungle. That way, they had an additional motivation to keep exploring.PPS. Even though the party started out at level 5 instead of 1 they still spent MONTHS in the jungle of Chult. Since they WERE relatively high level I could keep the curse as is (losing 1 hp a day), partly because they would have had enough hit points to still have a fighting chance of seeing the Tomb before the curse takes them, but mostly because the risk of dying (thus triggering the curse) is much smaller in the first place. It happened exactly once (Bag of Nails rolled a twenty and one-shotted the party Rogue from six hundred feet away! Yes, triggering instant death despite the character being at full hp...) but then they were already in Omu. So that character lost maybe a week's worth of hp before the curse was lifted, and 7 hp isn't crippling when you have seventy.Guess my point is: that curse is utterly unplayable as written.</blockquote>

Verification