Tomb of Annihilation Is Here - What Do You Think?

Today's the day - WotC's latest Dungeons & Dragons adventure, Tomb of Annihilation, is out! Head on down to your friendly (or unfriendly) local (or not so local) gaming (or comic) store and pick up your copy. Alternatively, if you use a virtual table top, it's available for Fantasy Grounds and Roll20.

 

[Jester David]

My wife is snagging a copy for me tonight as a lat birthday present. So I won't get my hands on it for another 11 hours... But then I have an entire weekened to devour it.
Hopefully I can get a review on my site (5mwd.com) by Monday or Tuesday.

 

[ddaley]

Fantasy Grounds works ok. I don't find it to be the most intuitive program and don't always find it easy to find the content that I need. It does work well for displaying maps to users. You can easily reveal only select parts of the map. I use it (at the table) for displaying images and maps to the user. I also use the combat tracker... though we roll dice manually and enter the results into the tracker.

I am hoping that the long talked about Unity release will bring about usability improvements.

The character builder I am sure supports everything that D&D Beyond supports. D&D Beyond is more of a reference site while FG is a virtual table top. So, their intent is different... but there is a lot of overlap.

How well does Fantasy Grounds work? I've seen it, but they do a really poor job on their website of selling it, and the demo is clunky as hell. How detailed can the characters be (i.e. does their character builder cover everything DNDBeyond does)? Do the published adventures use Fog of War, or is it just the whole map plunked down in front of the players?

 

[Robert Dean McAnulty]

Fantasy Grounds

How well does Fantasy Grounds work? I've seen it, but they do a really poor job on their website of selling it, and the demo is clunky as hell. How detailed can the characters be (i.e. does their character builder cover everything DNDBeyond does)? Do the published adventures use Fog of War, or is it just the whole map plunked down in front of the players?

I looked into it, but I do not have a lot of friends who are not local, so I have not gotten a chance to try it... Fog is an option in most systems... I really want to try it and wish they could import the Reflex system so I could do Twilight:2013 on it... I have a few friends far reaching that might play that...

 

[Raunalyn]

How well does Fantasy Grounds work? I've seen it, but they do a really poor job on their website of selling it, and the demo is clunky as hell. How detailed can the characters be (i.e. does their character builder cover everything DNDBeyond does)? Do the published adventures use Fog of War, or is it just the whole map plunked down in front of the players?

I personally really like it. Sure, it has some shortcomings (no map maker, occasional client crashes, etc), but character making is really well done, and there is a large community of people who create modules and stuff for the UA articles and homebrews, so it's well supported. The combat tracker is also really well done; as a DM, it does a great job of helping me keep track of effects and durations.

edit: Yes, it does have a Fog of War for published adventures. You can also import your own maps and such.

 

[GameOgre]

I played both Fantasy Grounds and Roll20 and both were fine to play on and both had a large learning curve for DM's but I went with Roll20 because it was cheaper. Now it's turning out that at least so far Fantasy Grounds is the cheaper one. At least to by WOTC stuff on.

 

[HawaiiSteveO]

Still trying to decide if I want to wait for Amazon to deliver on 19th or buy now . . . pretty much double $ if I'm impatient.

Dragon + had good sneak peak, although revealed a little too much for my taste.

I recall reading somewhere PC's could start at 1,3,5 level or something like that? Any details? I recall CoS really kicked off at 3rd, and STK had 'filler' material for early levels before it really got rolling.

 

[ddaley]

I am in the same boat. I pre-ordered from Amazon, but am tempted to pick it up today from a local store. I'll probably just wait, since my group is in the middle of an adventure already (Legacy of the Crystal Shard... great little adventure).

BTW: CoS also included a mini-adventure to raise characters a few levels.

Still trying to decide if I want to wait for Amazon to deliver on 19th or buy now . . . pretty much double $ if I'm impatient.

Dragon + had good sneak peak, although revealed a little too much for my taste.

I recall reading somewhere PC's could start at 1,3,5 level or something like that? Any details? I recall CoS really kicked off at 3rd, and STK had 'filler' material for early levels before it really got rolling.

 

[Vampyr3]

I'm curious what the disclaimer says; that's always entertaining.

"Disclaimer: this adventure will make your players hate you--the kind of simmering hatred that eats away at their souls until all that remains are little dark spheres of annihilation where their hearts used to be. PS don't forget to tear up their character sheets"

 

[JesterOC]

Got it yesterday. Here are some of my first thoughts

It is a huge adventure. With thoughts on characters with starting levels between 1st and 9th lvl.
It has a list of around 50 named NPCs with short descriptions and pronunciations all in one handy page.
The Death Curse is not messing around
The start feels very sandboxy
The end game looks crazy fun
Feels like the most "living world" official 5e adventure so far (NOTE: I have not read TRoT, PotA nor SKT, so I can't compare to those).
Feels closer to OotA in design, but with seemingly more side quests (just a feeling, could be wrong)
Most compelling story so far. Everyone has a stake in this fight.
Great terrain based random monster tables (feels like AD&D climate based random encounter charts, except only for Jungle)

 

[CapnZapp]

Got it yesterday. Here are some of my first thoughts

It is a huge adventure. With thoughts on characters with starting levels between 1st and 9th lvl.

It looks to me an honest description would be an adventure from level 5-11, based on what the AMA guy is saying.

Do note the adventure assumes actual XP levelling. Assuming they've done their math this time around, that should easily be double the content for a milestone-driven supplement for the same level range, so while I am contesting the level range you imply, I'm not contesting your "huge" characterization