D&D 5E (Spoilers) Running Tomb of Annihilation up to higher levels

[Voi_D_ragon]

So after playing through ToA as a player (with our party suffering 25 deaths throughout the course of our campaign) I am prepping to run it myself for another group.

However.

I like to add modules I DM to my homebrew setting, giving new flavors and explanations for things. And I wanted to add a real emphasys on the exploration part of ToA, since as a player I basically got to see none of all the cool locations I'm reading about now, and I want my players to experience all of those (hopefully). And also add new cool stuff on top of what's already there.

So I was thinking of closing off each level of the Tomb and only make it accessible after recovering a certain object (which can range from a key to the blood of a specific individual, etc). This would make the party experience more of Chult and be better prepared for each successive level. By adding more stuff in the jungles, they will probably be higher level when they go through the tomb (and other jungle locations too)

How would you handle up-leveled characters in the tomb and jungle?

 

[Nebulous]

I'm running this too. Did your DM not take you through the jungle first, or did you start right at Omu and the Tomb entrance? I think the adventure can be tweaked for higher levels without too much trouble. The jungle part is hard to make difficult for D&D characters; the weight of armor, the heat, humidity and awfulness of insects and disease is easily circumvented by magic. And long time habit of those things being meaningless and ignored in regular campaigns.

I made sure to squeeze in nearly every planned encounter in the jungle exploration part of the book. This brought them from 1st to 6th level, right when they reached Omu, and 7th by the time they entered the Tomb. If you want a supplement, there are several great ones on DMs Guild that add extra encounters, including the entire city of Mezro, which in the campaign module is skipped over as "empty".

 

[Voi_D_ragon]

We just did a couple of (near TPK) random encounters in the jungle and the red dragon's lair, which resulted in three more deaths

 

[Nebulous]

Were you lower level when you encountered the dragon? I had to actually make that fight harder with a beefed up dragon and extra kobolds, because Artus Cimber was in the party with the Ring of Winter and firing off cone of cold multiple times. Even then, Artus and another PC were killed. I actually WANTED Artus to die, his being in the party with the Ring was unbalancing. So if you include him, keep in mind that he shouldn't stay with the party the whole time. He might even voluntarily leave. Although I do love the imagery of sweaty, hateful frost giants stomping through the jungle looking for him...

 

[Voi_D_ragon]

Yeah, I do want them to meet him, and then have him leave (and be mostly tied up in combat offscreen during encounters, using the ring to just save from hairy situations)

Our problem was mostly that our cleric went rogue (no pun indtended) and sparked an inter-party battle, so we were already banged up when we met the dragon since we hadn't really given the kobolds much thought.

 

[Nebulous]

I highly recommend the Mezro supplement. At the core, it is all about Artus Cimber's story, and ranges from low to mid to high level. I think it is probably 40+ pages and comes with a fantastic full color map.

 

[Nebulous]

@Plutancatty you can read all my campaign recaps here (well, a good bit of them) on this thread if you want to.

D&D 5E - Tomb of Annihilation campaign recaps

For those that have finished or almost finished ToA, what percentage of the adventure do you think is completed by the time the party reaches the first level of the tomb? I feel like we have done a huge chunk of it, but that damn thing is six levels deep, so it's hard to judge. Due to...

www.enworld.org

 

[Voi_D_ragon]

@Plutancatty you can read all my campaign recaps here (well, a good bit of them) on this thread if you want to.

D&D 5E - Tomb of Annihilation campaign recaps

For those that have finished or almost finished ToA, what percentage of the adventure do you think is completed by the time the party reaches the first level of the tomb? I feel like we have done a huge chunk of it, but that damn thing is six levels deep, so it's hard to judge. Due to...

www.enworld.org

Much obliged, thank you

Anything else other than fleshing out Mezro?

 

[Nebulous]

Much obliged, thank you

Anything else other than fleshing out Mezro?

Any other changes or suggestions? I didn't change much from the core adventure really. Other than Mezro, but that fits pretty seamlessly into the adventure. One thing you're going to have to do so that the PCs are not "pushed" a certain direction: sometimes you're going to need to change locations of set-piece encounters so that the heroes run across them when you want them to, not when the map dictates. So smudge distances. Move villages or ruins. If you want to make sure they hit all the cool encounters (Firefinger, Kir Sabal, Nangalore, Star Goddess, Saja Nbaza, etc..) you'll need to nudge them those directions.

 

[Nebulous]

@Plutancatty I'm curious, how DID your DM start your adventure? Port Nyanzaru was an awesome place, but I was so eager to get the PCs into the jungle I bustled them through it pretty fast. They only returned one other time, at 6th level, and again we were in a rush, so I never did get to fully utilize Nyanzaru. No dino races! Although I did refer to it several times, the players didn't take the bait.