In a few weeks I am going to start running my group through Tomb of Annihilation. I absolutely love the setting so far. It's thematic, exotic, and has a definite prehistoric/mythic feel that I haven't encountered in a lot of the more traditional fantasy material. In fact, I'm tempted to run the adventure in a sort of mythic or bronze age setting, removing a lot of the more medieval and colonial elements. Any thoughts on how one might set the timeline back a couple thousand years? Adjustments I would want to make? Anything stand out as problematic mechanically or storywise?
I also don't really like the idea of rushing my players through to the Tomb itself. I want them to spend much more time exploring Chult, and I feel like Port Nyanzaru especially has huge potential that is kind of wasted by treating it as a one or two session starting point. So I'm looking at ways to slow down the players' exit from Port Nyanzaru. I don't want to force them to stay in the city if they absolutely don't want to, but I want to give them incentives to stay. I've thought of a few off-hand:
1) Reliable guides may only be hired by those who hold a Charter of Exploration, from one of the Merchant Princes or from the Flaming Fist, but neither are keen to give charters to newcomers and outsiders. The players can try to go it alone, or hire a guide from the local bar, but they are taking a big risk. So in order to be safe(ish) they have to meet with one of the Merchant Princes, get a charter, and hire a guide that way. However, no one just gets a meeting with the Merchant Princes. In order to meet with them, they have to either do a service, or get noticed some other way (dino-racing, gladiatorial combat, etc).
2) Their contact in the city, the one their patron sent them to find, is murdered just before they arrive (I'm having them arrive by boat, and slowing down the Death Curse, or maybe even delaying its beginning). In order to find out the information their contact had promised, they need to find his...something. His journal? A map? Or maybe he had the locations of pieces of an artifact that, when assembled and used in a certain ruin in Chult, show the way to Omu (hehehe, I did not steal this from Indiana Jones. Not at all).
3) The city is under almost daily attack from the Undead. Hardly any ships are sailing out due to pirate activity. No guides are willing to leave while these two conditions are still ongoing. In order to hire a guide, the players have to find a way to deal with the Pirate problem (leading of course to intrigue in the city, as the players have to find out who is in league with the pirates) or deal with the Undead (maybe there is something calling them to Nyanzaru, a yuan-ti cult or other servants of Acererak conducting a ritual, etc).
What do you guys thinks about these? Any advice is appreciated!
Also, I've never really run an urban campaign before, and I'm coming up with lists of random city encounters/short plot hooks. The list from the book is helpful, but anything you guys can come up with would be great too!
Thanks!
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"If you don't hear anything on the other side of the door, it's probably a trap."
One thing you can do is not kick on the Death Curse until they have been in the Port for awhile. One problem I have with many book campains is that too much pressure on the player's to rush. If people are dying daily to this curse, the players may feel honor bound to resolve the problem quickly, causing them to ignore side quests.
One urban urban event I enjoy running is a festival. It gives the party reason to explore and role play. Perhaps the first instances of the curse emerge as the night moves on. Maybe the type of festival you create foreshadows events in the upcoming weeks.
I am running a pretty heavily modified version of ToA. In my version, there's a lot of corruption and evil (think like, Red Mages/Zhentarim control many thing secretly) that the players have been uncovering. They just, on their fifth or so session, reached a large milestone in that they discovered the evil mage leader is missing. I've been dropping subtle hints, but I plan to reveal the beginning of the Death Curse at the start of the Dinosaur Races (which is a week long celebration in my game). But even then they won't have much information, and will have to learn all that they can, both inside and outside the city. Intrigue is a ton of fun, especially in a city as colourful as Port Nyanzaru
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I know what you're thinking: "In that flurry of blows, did he use all his ki points, or save one?" Well, are ya feeling lucky, punk?
It's really cool to see how differently everyone is approaching this adventure. I'm running ToA as my first campaign and I'm having a lot of fun weaving elements together in the way that I want to build my world.
I like your concept of Option 1 the best - but the fun thing in my world, I'm playing it as the Flaming Fist are not recognised by the natives, I've made a flyer to give my players when they arrive in Port to not be swindled for a charter of exploration (intentionally to see what happens when they do come across the Flaming Fist). I'm also tempting them with really pissing off the Merchant Princes first up by throwing the Save an Innocent Man side quest at them and to see how they'll try to intervene (or even if they will). The flyer specifically references law and order of the island (we're running it as an island to fit in with our homebrew world) which may seem strange to outsiders but don't interfere, so that'll add an interesting dynamic- but I've got absolutely zero idea how they're going to actually do it. Throw in some dino racing (which is also fraught with irking people/factions depending on how they go about getting involved) and a catch up with the "Queen of the Harpers" (alluding to the classic Simpsons quote which I know my players are gonna love), my guys should be out of Port for the first time in about 3 days - or on January 3rd as I'm utilising the calendar to track when different people die from the death curse etc.
IMO if your aim is to explore all of chult, it might be better to change the driving force so that there isn't a counting clock. Ultimately, if you follow the death curse route, you're starting a timer and will instigate a rush.
It's easy enough to imagine a slightly different storyline that causes the players to enter Chult in order to find/kill/stop Ras Nsi and the Yuan-Ti rather than stopping the death curse. The soulmongerer awakening could then be the threat, gathered from Red Wizards/Yuan-ti in Omu.
IMO if your aim is to explore all of chult, it might be better to change the driving force so that there isn't a counting clock. Ultimately, if you follow the death curse route, you're starting a timer and will instigate a rush.
It's easy enough to imagine a slightly different storyline that causes the players to enter Chult in order to find/kill/stop Ras Nsi and the Yuan-Ti rather than stopping the death curse. The soulmongerer awakening could then be the threat, gathered from Red Wizards/Yuan-ti in Omu.
This was my plan on what turned out to be an abandoned play of ToA. I know how my player would handle countdown theme game so I made it more of an exploration of the region and slowly feeding them about the SoulMongerer and the Red Wizards goal to unleash it onto the world.
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Hello all!
In a few weeks I am going to start running my group through Tomb of Annihilation. I absolutely love the setting so far. It's thematic, exotic, and has a definite prehistoric/mythic feel that I haven't encountered in a lot of the more traditional fantasy material. In fact, I'm tempted to run the adventure in a sort of mythic or bronze age setting, removing a lot of the more medieval and colonial elements. Any thoughts on how one might set the timeline back a couple thousand years? Adjustments I would want to make? Anything stand out as problematic mechanically or storywise?
I also don't really like the idea of rushing my players through to the Tomb itself. I want them to spend much more time exploring Chult, and I feel like Port Nyanzaru especially has huge potential that is kind of wasted by treating it as a one or two session starting point. So I'm looking at ways to slow down the players' exit from Port Nyanzaru. I don't want to force them to stay in the city if they absolutely don't want to, but I want to give them incentives to stay. I've thought of a few off-hand:
1) Reliable guides may only be hired by those who hold a Charter of Exploration, from one of the Merchant Princes or from the Flaming Fist, but neither are keen to give charters to newcomers and outsiders. The players can try to go it alone, or hire a guide from the local bar, but they are taking a big risk. So in order to be safe(ish) they have to meet with one of the Merchant Princes, get a charter, and hire a guide that way. However, no one just gets a meeting with the Merchant Princes. In order to meet with them, they have to either do a service, or get noticed some other way (dino-racing, gladiatorial combat, etc).
2) Their contact in the city, the one their patron sent them to find, is murdered just before they arrive (I'm having them arrive by boat, and slowing down the Death Curse, or maybe even delaying its beginning). In order to find out the information their contact had promised, they need to find his...something. His journal? A map? Or maybe he had the locations of pieces of an artifact that, when assembled and used in a certain ruin in Chult, show the way to Omu (hehehe, I did not steal this from Indiana Jones. Not at all).
3) The city is under almost daily attack from the Undead. Hardly any ships are sailing out due to pirate activity. No guides are willing to leave while these two conditions are still ongoing. In order to hire a guide, the players have to find a way to deal with the Pirate problem (leading of course to intrigue in the city, as the players have to find out who is in league with the pirates) or deal with the Undead (maybe there is something calling them to Nyanzaru, a yuan-ti cult or other servants of Acererak conducting a ritual, etc).
What do you guys thinks about these? Any advice is appreciated!
Also, I've never really run an urban campaign before, and I'm coming up with lists of random city encounters/short plot hooks. The list from the book is helpful, but anything you guys can come up with would be great too!
Thanks!
"If you don't hear anything on the other side of the door, it's probably a trap."
One thing you can do is not kick on the Death Curse until they have been in the Port for awhile. One problem I have with many book campains is that too much pressure on the player's to rush. If people are dying daily to this curse, the players may feel honor bound to resolve the problem quickly, causing them to ignore side quests.
One urban urban event I enjoy running is a festival. It gives the party reason to explore and role play. Perhaps the first instances of the curse emerge as the night moves on. Maybe the type of festival you create foreshadows events in the upcoming weeks.
I am running a pretty heavily modified version of ToA. In my version, there's a lot of corruption and evil (think like, Red Mages/Zhentarim control many thing secretly) that the players have been uncovering. They just, on their fifth or so session, reached a large milestone in that they discovered the evil mage leader is missing. I've been dropping subtle hints, but I plan to reveal the beginning of the Death Curse at the start of the Dinosaur Races (which is a week long celebration in my game). But even then they won't have much information, and will have to learn all that they can, both inside and outside the city. Intrigue is a ton of fun, especially in a city as colourful as Port Nyanzaru
I know what you're thinking: "In that flurry of blows, did he use all his ki points, or save one?" Well, are ya feeling lucky, punk?
It's really cool to see how differently everyone is approaching this adventure. I'm running ToA as my first campaign and I'm having a lot of fun weaving elements together in the way that I want to build my world.
I like your concept of Option 1 the best - but the fun thing in my world, I'm playing it as the Flaming Fist are not recognised by the natives, I've made a flyer to give my players when they arrive in Port to not be swindled for a charter of exploration (intentionally to see what happens when they do come across the Flaming Fist). I'm also tempting them with really pissing off the Merchant Princes first up by throwing the Save an Innocent Man side quest at them and to see how they'll try to intervene (or even if they will). The flyer specifically references law and order of the island (we're running it as an island to fit in with our homebrew world) which may seem strange to outsiders but don't interfere, so that'll add an interesting dynamic- but I've got absolutely zero idea how they're going to actually do it. Throw in some dino racing (which is also fraught with irking people/factions depending on how they go about getting involved) and a catch up with the "Queen of the Harpers" (alluding to the classic Simpsons quote which I know my players are gonna love), my guys should be out of Port for the first time in about 3 days - or on January 3rd as I'm utilising the calendar to track when different people die from the death curse etc.
Any advice or resources you’d recommend for running a festival in Nyanzaru?
IMO if your aim is to explore all of chult, it might be better to change the driving force so that there isn't a counting clock. Ultimately, if you follow the death curse route, you're starting a timer and will instigate a rush.
It's easy enough to imagine a slightly different storyline that causes the players to enter Chult in order to find/kill/stop Ras Nsi and the Yuan-Ti rather than stopping the death curse. The soulmongerer awakening could then be the threat, gathered from Red Wizards/Yuan-ti in Omu.
This was my plan on what turned out to be an abandoned play of ToA. I know how my player would handle countdown theme game so I made it more of an exploration of the region and slowly feeding them about the SoulMongerer and the Red Wizards goal to unleash it onto the world.