Intro

This is a critical review/guide/opinion piece on the Tomb of the Nine Gods in the 5e Tomb of Annihilation campaign. The format is to go room by room and explain issues that I and other DMs have found while running the content. Some rooms I have a lot to say, others… not so much. The goal is to provide a resource that highlights any issues, particularly modifications or problems, that other DMs have found. This means the tone is critical in places. Don’t take that to mean the content is bad, just that I am writing this to give you the benefit of a year and a half of discussions, experience, and ideas compiled from dozens of DMs across the ToA discord, Reddit, and my experience running the module twice. I hope it will help you avoid mistakes that are easy to make, and give your opportunities to make the game run smoothly when you run it!

Why should you listen to me? Well, you shouldn’t. You should read the book, read what I write here, and then make your own decisions for you and your players! I will say I have run this whole thing twice, so I do have real experience with it. But ultimately you need to decide what is best for you!

Overall Thoughts

I have run the Tomb of the Nine Gods twice, once for a 5e group, once for a PF 2e group. I converted the Tomb to PF 2e myself, using my knowledge of the game systems and some scaling tools in Foundry VTT’s PF 2e mod scene. I have a few thoughts right off the top. All my advice is mostly targeted at the 5e RAW version. This is because in 5e things are not as tight. For my 2e conversion, the whole thing is very deadly, because it is a different system that expects and demands tightly tuned content. The RAW 5e version was a lot less deadly than I anticipated. Let’s get into that.

The difficulty of the Tomb in 5e is going to depend on a few things:

  • Party composition
  • How hard you play the Tomb
  • How your players engage

To unpack those in order:

Party Composition

If your party is well balanced, the Tomb is not as deadly as it seems on paper. If you are following the book the party is going to be between levels 9 and 11 in the Tomb. Consequently they should have a lot of spells, feats, and/or class abilities to bring to each encounter. Most of the enemies are really under leveled from a CR perspective. If your party has a lot of high AC characters, the only real threats will be traps and saves. If you have a balanced comp your players will have lots of tools to increase saving throws, do skill checks, etc. If you have a particularly squishy, tanky, or non-magical party, you may want to have ideas to make combat more or less threatening.

Class and Race specific thoughts:

  • Paladins and Peace Clerics can give a lot of save buffs, and can dish out a lot of damage via smites
  • Gloomstalker Rangers are borderline OP in the Tomb if they play smart
  • Forge Clerics might be nigh-impossible to hit outside critical hits outside a few fights
  • The traps really, really hurt Wizards and other low HP classes hard
  • Echo Knights would likely break the Tomb entirely
  • The final “boss-rush” really requires everyone have some ranged action to contribute, otherwise the player may have a real boring time
  • Flying PCs, via race or class, will trivialize some areas of the Tomb

How Hard You Play It

This is largely for combat and proceeds from the point above. How ruthless you are in combat will make a big difference in making those combats count. If you want a hard tomb, be ruthless, target weak saves, and use special abilities to the utmost. If you want an easier tomb, or you have a really vulnerable party, I would go ahead and reduce monster counts in some rooms and remove the Tomb Guardians and Tomb Dwarves altogether. More on those in a few paragraphs, but both of those monsters are boring to run as is.

How Your Players Engage

If your players are thoughtful and stick together the tomb is pretty manageable. If they split up and/or tend to charge into things, it will be much worse. You may want to talk to your players about this to try and figure out the experience you all want. How your players engaged with the Shrines in Omu will give you a nice test of how the Tomb will go. Learn from Omu and talk/adjust/do nothing as needed.

Specific Topics for Consideration

Spells and How the Tomb Messes With Them

The book gives you a whole list of spells that the Tomb blocks, corrupts, or otherwise screws with. Thematically cool, potentially a source of strife. To be broad, any sort of teleport or divination spell is not going to work right. I warned my players of this. The reason is that as they pick spells, especially for classes that are locked into leveling spell selection, it would be really cruel to penalize a player for taking choices that will come back to hurt or mislead them. I approached this out of character and basically warned players that certain spells might not work the way they expect in the Tomb, and I let players swap out spells if they did not want to take that chance.

A great way to handle this in-character is, upon entering the Tomb, add in a table that has has a stack of waivers for the PCs to review and sign. Include a section that includes a disclaimer about certain spell types. You can also put a blank last will and testament in there too for fun.

Another point to note is that the list of spells is not exhaustive. I recommend comparing your player’s spell lists to the list in the book and decide how you want each spell to work in advance. Remember, it isn’t DM fiat or cheating if you wrote it down before the session started!

NPCs and You

How many NPCs do you want in your party? If you are a “normal” group, you likely have between 1 and 6 NPCs by the time you get to the entrance:

  • Guide
  • Orvex
  • Artus Cimber
  • Xandala
  • Dragon Bait
  • Salida

Let’s assume two is most likely representative, Orvex and a Guide. Once you get inside the tomb, you can pick up a LOT of NPCs:

  • The talking skull
  • Keshma al-Wazir - An earth dao trapped by Acerarak
  • Zaal - Minotaur and friend of Lukanu
  • Tlad Tolbrys - A drow adventurer who found his way into the Tomb
  • Pox / Biff Longsteel - A doppleganger that also found its way into the Tomb
  • Lukanu - Former bodygaurd of Queen Napaka (entombed beyond the Throne Room)

You may also have some Red Wizards, some other NPCs you picked up along the way, either via third party content you may have added or homebrew stuff.

None of this is right or wrong, but every combat or trap gets increasingly less deadly the more NPCs you throw into the mix. In particular Artus, Xandala, Dragonbait, Keshma, Lukanu, and any Red Wizards will really start to tip scales in the favor of the party pretty quickly. So be warned that this can happen, and can make things a lot less challenging than they appear on paper.

How do we deal with this? You can find a way to have entering the Tomb cut out a few NPCs. You can cherry pick only some NPCs that you really want, especially at the mirror of life trapping. You can kill some off, but keep in mind even the best laid plans to kill NPCs can fail spectacularly. Targetting NPCs also makes the combat a weird Dm v DM situation, taking the focus off the players.

Overall, I would make sure you have a plan/plot/good idea for any NPC you let join the party. As per most 5e module characters, they mostly have one or two paragraph backstories. If you can’t figure out how they will interact with the party and why they would go into the Tomb, you might want to just leave them out or find a way to remove them once you get to the Tomb.

Acererak’s Warnings

Make sure you always give these to the players on each floor! They are the only real clues the party gets, so try to make sure they get them. Partly to be fair. Partly to see how hilariously they misinterpret some of the warnings!

Shamelessly stolen from u/The_Doctor_Zoose

First Plaque

  • The enemies oppose, one stands between them - The solution of the puzzle door requires the nine gods be facing their rivals with Unkh in between all pairs.
  • In darkness, it hides - There is a shadow demon lurking in the darkness within the devil face in area 5B
  • Don the mask or be seen - The bronze plate of eyes in area 10 cannot see creatures wearing the paper mache masks
  • Speak no truth to the doomed child - Lie to Nepartak or she’ll burst into a flaming skull (Area 14)
  • The keys turn on the inside only - The solution to the chests in Wongo’s tomb (Area 16)

Second Plaque

  • The ring is a path to another tomb - Describes the portal nature of the ring, and the mirror tomb that lies beyond it.
  • The dead abhor sunlight - If the beam of sunlight is allowed to strike the plaque within the sarcophagus in the False Tomb (Area 20), the wine trap triggers.
  • Only a jewel can tame the frog - The Grey Slaad in Nangnang’s tomb (Area 24) has a control gem hidden away somewhere (The gem lies in Wither’s Office, area 28)
  • Bow as the dead god intoned - Papazotl’s Tomb asks them to “Bow before no one”. ’No-one’ means the faceless statue.
  • Into darkness, descend - The darkness of the devil’s pit in Area 18 can be traversed. This is, I think, to show players that it won’t just annihilate you.

Third Plaque

  • Walk through water with weapon in hand. - The water walls of Area 31 can only be crossed while holding a certain weapon, a trident.
  • Slake your shadow at the font. - Slake means “to satisfy thirst”, and shows the players to get the shadow to drink from the fountain in Area 33
  • The vulture is the first step. - The solution to I’Jin’s tomb (Area 35) begins with the vulture tile, hopefully revealing to them that there is a correct order; and the peep-hole (Area 34) will show them the correct order.
  • Right the gods. In the golem pit (Area 39), the statues of Gods can be rotated to the right to teleport creatures in and out of the pit.
  • The walls of history tell all. Kubazan’s tomb (Area 42) requires a specific ritual be completed, described within the reliefs carved into the walls of his tomb.

Fourth Plaque

  • Death to fire, dine or drown, precious air and falling sand. - The elemental cells (Area 47) have a few solutions. Snuffing out the candle in the fire cell. Drinking the water in the water cell. Breathing air in the air room. Falling beneath (and surviving) the stone rollers with the sand in the Earth room.
  • The army sleeps in silence - The terracotta warriors in Shagambi’s tomb react to sound. Too much, and they’ll wake up and attack whatever disturbed them.
  • The mirror holds twelve. - This just describes that the mirror, mirror, on the wall is actually a mirror of life trapping.
  • Find the iron scepter’s twin. - The iron scepter on the throne in the throne room (Area 52) has a twin in the Crypt of the Sun Queen (Area 53), which can be used to instantly destroy a stone construct named after Napaka in Area 62.
  • The maze holds the key - The sarcophagus in Unkh’s tomb (Area 55) can only be opened with a matching colored key found by navigating the miniature maze atop the far wall in the tomb.

The Sewn Sisters

I think I see more questions about these lovely ladies in the DM discord than just about any other topic. Most of the questions boiuld down to how to foreshadow them before the Tomb, and how to use them in the Tomb. The short answer is to heavily use the night hag signature ability nightmare haunting.

Before the Tomb

There are a few obvious places to inject the Sewn Sisters:

  • Nightmare haunting during long rests
  • Via the expanded backstory of Nanny Pupu in Ruins of Mbala
  • Use Sewing Up a Dream for a dream sequence that introduces each sister in a one shot. I recommend running it in Omu. Disclaimer: I wrote this, but it is pay what you want, so do what you will.
  • Find other ways to foreshadow the sisters that makes sense in your campaign and using your PC backgrounds.

In the Tomb

The usual answer here is to have the hags use nightmare haunting strategically to keep their presence felt, and to keep your players haggard.

Withers

It might just be a case of group think, but over the last year almost every DM I have talked to about this campaign either used, or wishes they had used, a “spectral PA system” to let Withers comment on events in the Tomb and talk to the PCs as they progress. This can be played serious or silly, or a mix of both. The main point is to provide exposition, feedback, and in rare cases offer hints or clues to help the players.

There are a few benefits to this approach. First, you can prperly introduce the Tomb when the players enter via monologue or short conversation. Second, it makes the caretaker of the Tomb more of a character, and lets your players have an NPC they can vent their frustrations and successes at while you all work through the rooms. Third, it lets you set up the meeting, or meetings, with Withers. I got in many fun conversations between Withers and the players as we played. In the final rooms of the Tomb I had two 45 minute RP sessions where Withers showed up and talked to the players. Once between the Sewn Sisters and the Soulmonger fights, and once in the rooms beyond.

Tomb Dwarves and Tomb Guardians

Ok. First big gripe: These creatures both just… suck. They are boring bags of HP that just add combat time. My advice is to go look at the way Golems have worked in other settings (the PF 2e ones are much more mechanically interesting and pose a much more immediate challenge if you port their abilities over), and homebrew your own version of the Tomb Guardians that make the fights more interesting. For the dwarves, I made them passive and creepy denizens that didn’t really do much unless engaged with.

Lack of Game Design Consistency

Many of the traps in this tomb look similar but have wildly different effects. All those green skulls you cannot see into? Some you should absolutely go through. Other are spheres of annihilation that will execute a PC that sticks his or her head in the hole. Know that the tomb will teach your players one solution, then present something similar and the same PC action could be horrible for them. Is this good or bad? That is probably a question for another post just on game design and goals, but be aware.

One way I resolved this was adding saves in a few places to let PCs not get horribly maimed or killed, especially if they were following a previous pattern the tomb had taught. Your mileage may vary.

Replacing Characters

Some ideas to replace characters:

  • Plant a magical statue of a new PC that is brought to life when touched
  • The Mirror of Life Trapping
  • Wandering out of the False Tomb
  • Locked inside a room/trap/sarcophagus and magically preserved until the PCs find them. I put a rogue inside one of the gargoyle pedastals for one group, for example.

Floor 1 - The Rotten Halls

1. Acererak’s Warning

Your first warning! Make sure you make it clear to the players that every line in this plaque, and all the others too, can tell them something useful and relevant relatively soon.

The Stone Obelisk has a nasty demon that lasts for 10 minutes if the stone is knocked over and broken. Not much to say here, it is a straightforward encounter. Kill some players and have fun if they are dumb vandals.

Puffin Forest has a funny video about it.

Not much to say here, the necklace in the “hidden” alcove might be useful if you are not playing with passive perception or have a truly unobservant and uninquisitive party. Although if they need the necklace to find the entrance, this might be a long Tomb…

3. False Entrance

Your first real chance to kill someone… maybe. If your PC are level 8/9 (they should be here), this does about 10 damage per turn for 10 turns, with a save each turn. The first of many situations where you might want to let a clever solution resolve the situations for your players, as opposed to just letting the timer tick down.

4. True Entrance

In case you did not notice, you are making the classical alignment grid here. I don’t care what WotC says, alignment is awesome. Acererak agrees, so I can’t be wrong.

5. Trapped Corridor

After the two entrance doors, the pit trap, and depending on how your party is doing, you may want to remove this. A good number of DMs have replaced the trap in this room with a lighthearted yet sinister scene where Withers gets on a supernatural PA system and introduces himself and the tomb. Some DMs even make release waivers for their party that indicate the usual indemnification against loss of life and limb, and with fine print that explains how magic is altered. Completely up to you.

The Devil Face is a foreshadowing of how these green skulls almost always mean bad news.

6. Crystal Window

This is a window. I got nothing.

7. Grand Staircase

This is a staircase. There are many like it, but this one is Acerarak’s. More seriously, the warning plaques are all here, one per floor. See above, make sure you make the players aware of these.

8. Magical Attraction

A few things to think about here. Where, exactly, are you going to have the magical attraction effect start? Know this so you can deal with PCs moving around. What methods will you allow to disable the trap? Does covering the shield work? Can PCs take the shield? What happens if they do? Does it still work? For how long? If you let them take the shield, it can cause some fun but also a lot of asking what direction it is facing to so you know if your party is going to accidentally destroy all their gear. It may also have impacts on other rooms. I had Withers remotely deactivate it at the party’s first rest after getting it.

9. Magic Fountain

Read the list of effects and adjust as needed for your table. Is gender swapping a thing you do not want to do? Are the potential effects important at all? Do you want something else? And, if someone takes some water in a flask or whatever, write it down.

10. Obo’laka’s Tomb

This tomb’s threat level hinges entirely on if you are running the death curse as written. If so, life drain is a huge penalty and you can really punish the players here. If you are not running the death curse as written, this fight is a pushover. This concept holds true in a lot of places, but the book does not really remind of the fact that losses to HP like life drain are permanent in this campaign.

11. Gas Pocket

Fire makes gas go boom! I like the whole flammable swamp gas vibe here. Also it is almost a flaming fart joke, so I like it.

12. Trapped Chest

Not a whole lot of interest here…. unless your party rips the chest out of the ground and awkwardly drags it somewhere else. Like mine did. Players are unpredictable.

13. Stone Skull

Another skull to look at and get hurt by. Yay! Make sure you really watch every crossing of the threshold and update the players regardin the eye flames.

14. Moa’s Tomb

Warrens

These are annoying in a VTT. If you have no real desire to use them, you could drop them. I also think the spiders are pointless as a fight, but that is up to DM taste.

Nepartak’s Skull

Oh boy. This basically is a high likelihood of the party killing the spirit of a child. It is brutal. If you think forcing the players to take actions that will likely end up with them killing a child spirit is a bad game design choice, change this up. Come up with another resolution mechanic.

15. Wind Tunnel

The biggest challenge here is if the party cannot fly or use rope or something to avoid the floor panels, do they have the one magic item that can stop the fan? I think there is an immovable rod somewhere in the campaign. If your party does not have that, I would let them use a suitably clever idea to bypass this. One of my parties used fabricate to create stuff around the fan before it started moving, and other I think used animated object to make the fan tear itself apart. I liked both.

16. Wongo’s Tomb

Chests

I love these chests. Kill your players, or hurt them real bad. Have fun! If you want a more non-lethal campaign, just tweak down the damage dice to be less that the PC’s HP, solved.

Depth of the Sarcophagus

Can the mummy get out? A mummy has a walking speed of 20 and no climb speed… and the pit is 20 feet deep. So if someone breaks the sarcophagus from above, or they get in a fight and get out, or anything leaves the mummy in the pit… it just stays there. Maybe give is a climb speed of 30 and call it a day.

17. Underground Waterfall

What happens if the party or a single PC fall to floor 5? You need to know how to handle that sequence break, in case it comes up. See my comments on floor 5 and “Leeroy” in particular. If you are feeling nasty, I’d just tear up the character sheet, then bring the (N)PC back as a thrall of the aboleth later. If you want to be nice, I am still unsure how you get a PC back up without a whole lot of sequence breaking action. It might also split the party in a not fun way. Edit: You can climb back up.

I’d recommend jumping down to areas 64 and 65 and reading those, and check out my comments for floor 5 about the aboleth down there.

Floor 2 - Dungeon of Deception

18. Devil Pit

You can jump down into I’jin’s Tomb! Fun, if potentially very fatal. My players found this frustrating as they assumed the floor was deadly, but couldn’t figure anything else out at the time.

19. Gravity Ring

I love the gravity ring as a concept and the staff that turns a player into their favorite fursona is kind of fun but… the Mirror Tomb is a terrible idea. At least for a game. In a book or movie or tv show, having a time consuming false tomb would be great (and would likely have a montage tat reduces the hours or days down to minutes). In a tabletop game where time is our most valuable real world currency, this is disrespectful to the players. I would just completely cut it out and leave the ring a nifty little weird mystery that never gets explained.

The Staff

This is potentially a powerful weapon. A +3 magical weapon that can also do up to 3 doses of +1d6 force damage per day. It is a quarterstaff, meaning it isn’t great compared to a +1 or +2 weapon that has higher base damage, but it ain’t bad. The down side is it turns the attuner into a human with goat feet for hands after three days. I had a discussion abou this recently. I had misread it as basically turning the bearer into a satyr. But, such is the wording. You might want to read through it a few times and decide how you want it to go, especially if you are going to have a post-ToA campaign.

Also various spells cure the effect… but only wish removes the curse. So it would start over if you remain attuned?

20. False Tomb

This encounter is nifty, even if there is not much way to telegraph that there is a massive trap here. The only real head scratcher I ran into was deciding how fast the wine pours out. I made it difficult terrain in addition to the check to get out. I also assumed the wine tunnels were inclined a bit to make sense.

21. Zombie Door

The zombies strain into the stairwell through the holes on the door when they smell dinner. This pulls the door shut. If they walk away, the door opens/can be opened. There is no real solution for this from the stairwell side beyond turn undead, and that might not even work. So I recommend, if your players want to solve it, let any nifty solution work.

22. Papazotl’s Tomb

I love this tomb. You have a timed enemy spawner, weird bolts of force flying around, and a weird puzzle. I let my parties both solve this in a different way than the book present. One group rammed the chariot into the shield, knocking it down so it could not “see” the party.

23. Bottled Genie

So Keshma is really cool and fun to RP, but is also a big old bag of HP and damage per turn. I recommend making her basically a non-entity if she joins the party. Her desire is to let the party solve everything along the way, waiting in the main stairwell and only getting involved as a last resort. I also ruled that basically none of her abilities relating to stone work in the tomb due to the magical walls that are impervious to damage and magic.

24. Nangnang’s Tomb

Lots of people have lots of ideas on how to use the Slaad. I think every DM I have talked to has at least 2 ideas. Does it reveal itself to the party and attack like the book says? Does it go after Withers and the control gem? Does it stalk invisibly, tormenting anyone and anything it finds? All up to you! Just know how you want to use it before you get here and it will work well however you decide to go.

25. Scrying Pool

Very handy way to let your players scout out a bit. Also this is one of the few places I like the wandering tomb guardian attack, as the players can see it come at them!

26. Spiral Staircase

Who likes sequencing breaking games? How about sequence breaking a about a hundred pages of module? This stairwell is a great way to do that. It is also a nice way to bypass encounters or allow for montaged travel around the Tomb. But it also means you need to read everything up to level five before you start level two.

27. Forge of the Tomb Dwarves

This is cool, creepy, and you can run as environmental horror: no one does anything except work on the half complete frankenstein’s monster. I am a huge fan of this approach. Only force the combat if you have to or really want to, as a bunch of undead making an undead Voltron without paying a damn lick of attention to the party is way more foreboding than the combat encounter.

28. Wither’s Office

The real question here is does Withers fight at all? Assuming the party talks to him, he is a great lore/atmosphere dump. As written Withers is supposed to attack after the conversation. This seems like a huge waste of Withers, especially if you go for the PA/Game Show host approach. I would propose you skip a fight, or if it does break out, have Withers leave via his amulet. That allows Withers to keep the Tomb running and perhaps show up in other places, or keeping using the PA to comment on things as the party moves along.

Floor 3 - Vault of Reflection

Things pick up a bit on this floor, with the puzzles and traps being entirely more involved or obscure.

Crystal Eyeballs

First up, the eyeballs. There are ten of these all around the floor. The open the door to the beholder. You may want to reserve the count and mechanics to your knowledge only. I say this because some groups are good at finding these and some are not so good at it.

If your party has a hard time finding them all, you can use NPCs, Withers, or some other creative way to move them or have some already fit into the door. That said, the beholder is entirely optional, unless you put the Skeleton Key for this floor inside the beholder’s room. So you can run this however much or little you want.

29. Jackal Mask

This view through a giant Jackal’s teeth is basically the big reveal that I’jin’s Tomb kills you if you put your foot wrong. By “kills you” I mean it does an average of 44 damage per round for ten rounds in a 15 foot cube centered on the tile. Assuming you survive the first round you can run out, but that will trigger… another cloud of locusts that resets the timer. If you screw up, this is likely to be very fatal.

So this window lets you see what happened to the last party that came through here. Interestingly, there are a number of ways a PC could enter the room through the Jackal Mask, but then they will see the real room, not the arcane playback, and things might get interesting.

30. Iron Barrier

Pretty simple, a spring loaded door that doubles as a guillotine bars this tunnel. As best I can tell the eyes are just a red herring, but let your party have fun trying to figure out how to “solve” this puzzle.

31. Reflected Hall

There are a few separate things going on here: The wall of water and the hidden alcoves.

For the alcoves, there is no real tell except that they are both behind the hawk headed people. I let the party use perception checks to find them. You have to have eyes like a hawk to find the crystal eyes… get it?

For the water wall, this one stumped my groups, they ended up using trial by error. I think the solution is supposed to be the frogs are aquatic, and the tridents are the water weapon. The wall of water is super fun to hit the players with though.

32. Rotating Crawlways

Description is key here. When 50 pounds gets to the middle of the floor, the room is basically a cylinder that rotates 90 degrees and moves far enough vertically to show the second perpendicular hallway. My favorite description is to imagine a hockey puck with two holes drille through the middle, forming a cross. But the holes at at different vertical hieghts. So when you look side on to the puck, you can turn it and see through one hole at a time. There are a lot of creative ways to solve this, and it is not as dire as some discussions make it out to be, in my opinion.

33. Chamber of Opposition

This is a room where you need to be careful with the setup and description. You also want to be very particular about lines of sight and movement for the player and the player shadow. You may want to tell everyone to take turns describing how they engage in here to make sure you react correctly.

When the room starts, the shadow duplicates the first person to enter, and is facing away from that person. This means if other party members come in and the first person turns around and starts walking off, everyone else needs to make the save.

34. and 35. Peephole and I’jin’s Tomb

This one is fun. Lots of things going on. My biggest advice is to read through the window, the dial with glyphs, and the whole room a few times and then game out in your head how this can go. Especially if you have party members that can fly/float/teleport/do various things to break “normal” movement.

For the record, there are two distinct safe paths that branch off the initial path, and each branch allows multiple variants. Draw it out for yourself a few times before hand and you’ll be better prepared.

Questions to consider:

  • Can sovereign glue or other methods seal the mouths of the sphinxes, thereby preventing the locust swarms?
  • How is a PC going to realize they can communicate telepathically from the peephole to the PC(s) in the puzzle room?
  • Does the trap end once the correct sequence is found, or do the players have to retrace their steps, or what? EDIT: It does end per page 150 in the book.
  • What happens if your PCs start destroying the medallion and disc contraption?

36. Chamber of Respite

The party can sleep here… if they all fit.

37. Winds of Pandemonium

There are three possible ways to come upon this room: from the access tunnel to area 38, from the Statue Room (39) or from the Chamber of Respite (34). For the route from area 38 I made it a low DC athletics check to jump between the west balcony and the crawlway, just to make it interesting.

The room itself is pretty straight forward, however given recent changes to how 5e handles madness, you may want to look at what exactly the short term madness table in the DMG can cause to happen. Then you can decide if your group is a good fit for that.

38. Revolving Room Trap

Read this a few times. Draw it out. Make a little papercraft version of it. Search the internet for pictures of the various angles.

Here is my attempt to describe it: The main trap is the cylinder room, which is basically a cylinder lying sideways. In the ceiling is a trapdoor, which is above the top of the north/far end of the cylinder. That trapdoor leads to an access corridor. In that corridor, right by the trapdoor, is a one-way mirror type wall, with a tomb guardian on the far side. The guardian can look through the one way wall and the trapdoor down into the cylinder, and activate the trap, sealing off the cylinder and kicking off the trap.

Like I said, just read and draw it until it makes sense.

If the party does not all somehow get inside, there are multiple ways to solve this trap, via spells, skills or force. Both of my groups handled it with far less difficulty than I had aniticpated.

39. Golem Pit

This is really a keystone cops level of silliness. Your party mucks about until they figure out how to teleport someone into the pit by turning statues and using the teleport pad. Then things get real when the fight starts. I highly recommend you do random rolls to see who gets teleported out if your party starts trying to cycle in the right or wrong PCs to deal. It is wonderful.

My only main advice here is to make the clay golem more interesting. If the right party members go in, the fight is just boring as all hell. If the wrong party members go in, it could be a bloodbath.

40. Curse of the Golden Skulls

Do your players like a deadpan asshole who never shuts up following them around? And that asshole gives disadvantage to All skill checks. Do you want to be that asshole? Your answer to the above indicates if you should run this as is, change it, or just cut if out. And for the record if you want to run Yaka… you might be Acererak.

41. Tomb Guardians

Have I mentioned yet that I think Tomb Guardians are awful? They are boring. Replace them with something more interesting. Give them more interesting strengths and weakness. Give them fun abilities. Golems in 5e are a creatively bankrupt waste of space in the Monster Manual.

42. Kubazan’s Tomb

This is a fun, sneaky little room. My only concern is that you should decide if the whole polymorph effect is something you want to do. It is cool, but it could also mean a player or a few could end up sitting on their hands for a fair amount of time. Up to DM taste.

43. Veils of Fear

Another nifty room. Gore, horror, digging around in a rotting boar’s head, potential for decapitation in a truly gross way, and some allusions to class warfare. Maybe your party can recruit the Tomb Dwarves and Guardians to form the Undead Dungeon Minions Local 666. The proletariat shall rise up and overthrow the unjust rule of Withers and Acererak!

44. Vault of the Beholder

I am not going to write up a long description of how to run a beholder fight. Other have done it better. Instead, I am going to ask you some questions, and let you ponder the answers.

  • Why would a beholder of all creatures just agree to be stuck here baiting the odd adventuring party that has already proven themselves smart enough to survive down to this room and find all the crystal eyes that unlock the door?
  • What if the potion of diminution was a permanent effect that, if imbibed by the beholder, also reduced the effectiveness of the eye rays to make it a blaanced NPC ally?
  • What if the invisibility wears off when the beholder leaves the room after being made small enough to get through the door?
  • What if the party realizes having a beholder help them is freaking awesome?
  • What if the beholder offered the treasure as a reward for helping it get out?
  • How hard would it be to persuade the beholder that it should kill the jailor, not the other inmates?

Floor 4 - Chamber of Horrors

This floor is where tomb fatigue set in for both my parties, and it lead to a very weird problem: They all started running around all willy nilly, pulling the group apart. There are a few rooms in this floor where that borders on suicidal behavior, including the gargoyle room!

Plan ahead to control the movement of your players, somehow. It will save you headaches and retconning and coming up with weird ways to avoid one player activating all four gargoyles while the another in in the maze of death and a few more are dealing with the mirror room.

45. Gargoyle Guardians

I do not know why, but both my groups utterly failed to figure this one out. I guess keep saying copper, gold, silver, platinum over and over as loud as you can and hope for the best.

The real challenge with this room, and this whole floor, is if people start moving around independently. If one or two players just walk through this room alone it will not go well. So, as a general rule, make sure to keep your party together on this floor.

46. Lizard Den

Eh… Want another NPC? Then lean in to this. If not, let the lizard just be a lizard. An unexplained, random little moment in the Tomb.

47. Elemental Cells

And here we are. Odds are you ended up here for advice on how to run these. The super short version is to just run them RAW and make the earth cell broken/non-functional. But I can talk about it more. I will shamelessly steal from my previous post on just this floor:

Problem: This series of rooms is badly designed to kill players even if they are trying to play well. They are also non-sensical. Let’s look:

  • Off the bat, let’s be clear that all the rooms have an anti-magic field in effect. So have fun with your spells, magic items, etc not doing anything.
  • Here is the hint from Ace’s Warning Plaque:

    Death to fire, dine or drown, precious air, and falling sand.

The first two are actually hints, the last two are just descriptions of the room so… good luck? Okay, let’s recap the rooms:

  • The Fire Cell drips lava. It does ~22 damage per turn (average). Also, somehow you can dodge this via a dex save after it starts. This one is okay, the solution is fast and easy, but the trap itself is nonsense. It does not take a genius to imagine the problems of lava filling up a stone room, or the radiant heat alone. Or the plumbing needed to pull this whole thing off.
  • The Water Cell fills with water, and you have to eat a snail or oyster to solve the room. Okay, not so bad.
  • The Air Cell is pitch black, and is ironically airless. You have to pry a bone out of the wall and then open it to breath the air inside. Again, not terrible, but still a bit weird. Who goes around peeling bones off walls? Also, you do this while immediately starting to suffocate.
  • The Earth Cell begins filling with sand. After two rounds the floor splits open and reveals an industrial grinder below. Make a save to not fall in. It does ~132 (24d10) force damage with no save. Well, there is the save to catch the ledge. You have to go through the grinder and hit a button to disable the grinder. If it reduces you to zero hp, you are dead. Ground to pulp. The is a sculpture on the wall that has a secret button that opens the door to the exit, but it only works if you let the trap activate. In other words, you have a very decent chance your non-dex proficient PCs are going to face tank that grinder.

So the first three rooms are okay, I guess. They are nonsensical but not necessarily lethal. The hints from Ace’s plaque are roughly useful. The problem is really the Earth Cell.

If your party is appropriately leveled (between 9 and 11 per the book), there is no way to survive that trap unless you get some really lucky damage rolls. You get teleported in and have 2 rounds to decide what to do. If the party has spell slots and the right spells, they could try to teleport out of the room to the Oubliette… except they can’t because of the anti-magic field. If they somehow block the sand holes before the pit opens, well, the medusa sculpture button only works IF the trap is open.

For the record, based on probability, the grinder does greater than 114 damage 90% of time. For reference, 5e characters at 10th level have somewhere around ~65 hp for a caster, and ~125 hp for a barbarian. This means most characters, most of the time, if they fail that dex save… are just straight up dead. With many of the tools they usually get to use to mitigate it removed via anti-magic field.

There IS one way to avoid almost guaranteed death. IF you do the minotaur maze in Unkh’s Tomb first, AND get the black key, AND that character falls in, they can survive. But there is no guarantee that all of that will happen.

Solutions: So I think there are a few potential rewrites, and you can use these in any cell:

  • Just go with the first sane or cool idea a player has.
  • Turn off the anti-magic field
  • Let the earth cell button work regardless of pit door status.
  • Rework Unkh’s Tomb to require as many keys as you have party members. This way someone should end up with the nine lives charm and basically be a trap scout. If they realize that.
  • Have Withers shut off the roller once it is revealed and make some pithy excuse that the Tomb Dwarfs were told to fix it, but hadn’t gotten around to it. After all, there needs to be a chance for the guests to survive and see more of the tomb. And since their souls feed either the Soulmonger or Ace, stronger (higher level and later in the Tomb) souls are better. Bonus points if Withers has to repeatedly summon in Tomb Dwarves to hit the button, throwing in undead dwarf after undead dwarf until one makes it through to turn off the trap.

48. Shagambi’s Tomb

Problem: So you made it through the Elemental Cells. You arrive in a room with 48 silent statues and littered with broken pottery. If you fail a stealth check twice, the statues all animate and, of course, attack. The sarcophagus in the middle of the room also has a simple trap that plays a music box! Basically, this seems a bit like a gotcha trap. Also the reward is a bard item, which may be completely useless.

Good things:

  • Given how packed the room is, it will be hard for the enemies to actually pile on if you use the normal approach to 5e combat. Only so many creatures can be adjacent!
  • AoE spells and abilities also shine here, a lot!

Solutions:

  • As long as the PCs try to be quiet they succeed.
  • Make the music box trap obvious, no roll needed.
  • If you have no bard, swap the reward to something relevant.
  • Ignore the whole teleport pad damage and polymorph things… they really don’t add a whole lot to this.
  • Make the statues minions a la 4e. One hp per token. This way only so many can attack due to physics, and the party can lawnmow through them.

49. Maze of Death

The Doors

The door images gave all my groups some trouble. They were trying to figure who the hooded figure was, what the stars meant, etc. Interesting, but one group just gave up in frustration. My advice on the doors is to try and find a fail forward approach to the problem, or use skill checks to somehow help the party get in, if they are really keen on it.

The Maze

There are two main challenges here: The Bodaks and the Sphere of Annihilation.

In my playthroughs the sphere was a much larger existential threat. If a player moves into it, they are dead as a doorknob. So I gave players that started mucking about with a Dex save to realize something felt bad. This resulted in my ranger loosing a few fingers, but not loosing an arm, head or the entire character.

The bodaks are either very bad, or not really an issue. It really depends on your party comp. If you have save auras and/or necrotic resistance (my groups had one or both), the bodaks are not that bad at this point in progression. My main advice is to make them creepy, since they won’t last all that long once a fight breaks out unless your party rolls a lot of poor saves. Another good strategy would be to have the bodaks cover lines of sight so each PC is taking the gaze and aura twice a turn. If you can set it up. It is interesting that the layout of the maze actually minimizes how many people can get hit by the bodak abilities while being able to support their allies.

50. Mirror of Life Trapping

This is another case where the encounter as designed is… weird.

The Mirror

Problem: Shagambi’s tomb teleports out PCs to face this mirror, which will cause an immediate save or suck to get trapped. If you don’t have a PC that can cast identify you likely won’t have a way to figure out the magic phrases to engage the mirror. Well I guess there are solutions involving Withers, but again that requires specific scenarios to happen ahead of time. Yet another very sequence dependent solution to an otherwise unknowable problem!

The real issue here is that without the key words, you just basically risk a single save where failure means the PC is effectively dead. And you get this as a reward for successfully getting out of Shagambi’s Tomb alive! It is a gotcha moment, and even better, it affects EVERYONE IN THE PARTY. They all need to teleport out, and all need to make the save.

Solutions:

  • Cover the Mirror
  • Change the teleport location or the mirror to be far enough away to let the PCs decide if they want to approach
  • Come up with foreshadowing like seeing images of the creatures trapped inside from further away than the save range
  • Any modification that doesn’t have a high chance of just removing a PC from play for a long chunk of time or permanently

The Room

Problem: The room the mirror is in is incredibly cramped if the mirror gets broken and releases all the prisoners. The ensuing fight is also not that fun, in that it is a lot of the DM fighting against… the DM.

Solutions: Make the room bigger. Really. Just up the size from 15 feet to 20 or 25 and suddenly you have a lot more space to let the factions align, and get some roleplaying out of it.

The NPCs

There are a lot of NPCs in the mirror. Nine total. Of those many could end up allies of convenience if they survive: A’tan, Zaal, Tlad, Pox (Biff Longsteel), and Lukanu. Lukanu is also a really beefy lass. I think there are two good ways to deal with this clown car of NPCs. First, you could focus the hostile prisoners on them and hope you kill enough to not turn this into Tomb of Friendship. The other is to cut any NPCs you don’t have a lot of desire to run. By this I mean you should have an idea of what each NPC will add to the game. If you can’t come up with something for a given ally NPC to do, just write them out. It will save you a lot of anxiety and’or forgetting they existed.

51. Ghastly Door

A rather straightforward puzzle, judging by my groups. Feed the blood to the serpents and you open the door. It is a nicely grim way to open the path to the…

52. Throne Room

This room is absolutely wonderful. The statues and the painters are all red herrings, and nothing in this room needs to be interacted with at all. It epitomizes Acererak: engaging here can only hurt you. It is also a great place to drop in any monster you want as a fun mid-boss or cool encounter. It could be the Zombie T-Rex. Or it could be a bone dragon inhabited by Acerarak, present only to taunt the party and drive home how much of an asshole Ace is. Or any other monster you always wanted to run but just didn’t quite get to fit into the campaign.

Bonus Points: Have Withers use the PA system to explain this is Ace’s Throne, and chat up the players a bit. Why not have some short spectral Ace monologuing too if you use my bone dragon idea or something similar? Much like the room is a canvas for the painters, this room is canvas for you to turn the volume up a bit, have fun, and make sure your players get to kill something that should end up on the wall of their stronghold if they survive.

53. Crypt of the Sun Queen

This room can really hurt if the party is damaged. It can also kill low HP NPCs very easily. It is also another room where you want to read it through a few times so you really understand how the various traps activate. Things of note:

  • The key is for the secret chamber in area 62b. Stone Juggernaut
  • The necklace of fireballs is hilarious fun or a deathtrap, depending on who picks it up and puts it on
  • The sceptre is useful on the next floor, but you need to hammer home the NAPAKA connection

If you want to remove the threat of AoE death you could alter some things:

  • Change the traps to some sort of magical affect instead of more damage
  • Tweak the room somehow to make the puzzle a bit more engaging and less based on pure triggers. Maybe the spirit can sense the players and talks to them a bit…

54. Rolling Doom / 55. Unkh’s Tomb

Problems: This place has an issue where the sum of the parts room make it way worse than any one piece. A few things are going on.

  • The first is the acid pit/ball trap. I think this is a bit overtuned, in that it has a good chance of being an instant death. Also, players can smartly avoid the obvious ball trap and then fall into the acid pit. I am not a fan of game design where activating the first trap is BETTER than disarming it. Why is it better? Because activating the ball trap will show the acid trap.
  • The second is the invisible key. At this point, who is going to reach into an empty chest in this dungeon?
  • The third is the interaction of the maze, the skeleton minotaurs and the sarcophagus. This one needs some discussion. As written, when someone touches the maze they are teleported in. Then combat starts and the rest of the party has to deal with 10 skeleton minotaurs. The PC in the maze may also run into real minotaurs in the maze. I think the problem here is the splitting of the party may really cause some issues and drag down play. Also if you play the skeleton minotaurs hard, and the acid pit is open, you could be a real evil DM. This may be a bug or a feature!

Solutions: I think some simple tweaks make this more engaging for the whole party.

  • Let multiple peopele enter the maze and do not activate the skeletons until the party comes back out. This fixes the positioning and gives the party a chance to use strategy or tactics.
  • Require a key for each party member. Those keys are awesome for smoothing out later parts of the tomb, and they give cool abilities. Give the chest a number of keyholes equal to PCs and give each PC a key to open their lock.
  • Maybe tone down the acid pit a bit. There is a very good chance it can one-shot players. Especially if they are coming off any of the myriad other ways to lose lots of HP in this place.

I ran this by giving the sarcophagus six keys. Each PC got to enter the maze once and find a key. Once they all got their keys, they could open the sarcophagus, get their boons, and THEN the minotaur skeletons all attacked. It worked fairly well and led to some interesting play with players outside the maze influencing the action in the maze.

My only regret is not reducing the count and buffing the minotaur skeletons. Ten is a lot. It was a long combat that seemed a bit overwrought. One big problem is ten large creatures is actually too crowded for a room where they barely fit. Add in the main offensive gimmick is charging and you don’t even get to use the main monster ability!

56. Grandfather Clock

My main concern here is this is another sequence specific room. If you split sessions between encountering this room and encountering Napaka’s tomb, the PCs may forget the realtionship. Plan ahead with reminders or clues, if your players are the forgetful type.

57. Oubliette

Keep track of which NPCs get sent here. Keshma al-Wazir and the Grey Slaad seem to be very easy to get into this room. If that happens before the players get here, you can choose what the NPCs did in the meantime. The only weird thing I ran into (and have not heard from anyone else) was that my party had a PC pull both levers at the same time. I made them make the save to avoid the sphere of annihilation because why not.

Floor 5 - Gears of Hate

The Cogs

Do the Cogs Seal Off?

This comes up a lot: are the connections between the cog exits and the hallways airtight, possible to get through via magic or other shenangians, or are they open enough to not impede movement? It seems like hallways should have tight seals, but the doors opening to air kind of negate this. So really you as the DM need to decide how you are going to describe and run this.

If you allow more permissive movement, be aware that this will kind of sequence break immediate movement around the floor. However in the long term, I don’t think it matters much. The party will eventually figure out the control room, and some way to get to the palces they need to go. They will also get to the dock down below. The real question is how hard you want to make getting to the open cave.

The one caveat to permissive movement is the gas chamber does need to have an air-tight seal to the Cog of Rot. If it doesn’t, the whole concept falls apart, so keep that in mind. I ran it as “magically fused” to the Cog itself.

Moving Around the Cave

Regardless of how you allow movement it is entirely possible for the PCs to get access to the open cave. This can happen via reconfiguring the Cogs, or by getting to the door in the spiral staircase. When they do gain access to the cave (not if), you will have to decide how the party can move about the big cavern and the exterior of the Cogs. I made climbing/scaling the Gears totally possible, but taking all the concentration of the PC in question. No other actions could be taken while climbing the outside of the Cogs. You should do this however you want, but think about how it will work, mechanically.

Leeroy

Best boy G’lyh’rul. Or as I called him, “Leeroy”. The book says Leeroy is enslaved by Acererak and randomly flips between two personalities. I have no idea how you run that version, because I threw that in the bin immeidately. I had only the inquisitive child like personality. I also decided that Acerarak built his Tomb around the underground lake, and Leeroy has been here since the Dawn War thousands of years ago. Leeroy loves visitors, especially those who take the time to talk, and is more than happy to be helpful, ask for corpses to munch on, and even warn the new friends that its slime is pretty toxic. Also, until the players see Leeroy, Leroy does its level best to stay hidden in the water. Its appearance usually scares visitors, you see.

We had almost two sessions of pure RP with the party talking to Leeroy. It was fantastic.

You can also check out another Puffin Forest video about this.

58. Cog of Rot

This room, if connected to the Gas Filled Room via the Control Room, will spawn three shambling mounds. If your party stays together, I doubt the mounds are much of a challenge. If the party is separated, as one of mine was, this fight could be nasty. Use the engulf feature either way!

59. Cog of Acid

This is a fun atmospheric room. If you have been playing the Tomb straight, they party should assume this room will kill them. But it functional does nothing. The trap is broken, bwahahahaha!

60. Cog of Blood

If your party has not had a hard time with combat so far, I would let them open as many wardrobes as they want at the same time here. Most of the fights are so easy they do not even require resource usage. The one standoup for me was the bone devil. If I ran it again, I would put two of those in there. And use the summon devils ability! More devils really gives you better action economy to make this fight feel nastier.

An interesting note is that the wardrobes themselves can be destroyed, but doing so does not, RAW, seem to count towards opening the prtcullis. They reset every twenty four hours. I would consider either letting wardrobe destruction either count, or cause the destruction to summon the respective monsters to the room.

61. Control Room

What really matters here is that you as the DM understand what the controls do, and how the cogs work (see above). Another read it, read it again, then read it a third time and write down notes that will help you run the room once you hit game time.

If the party activates the slime in this room things could get gnarly pretty quickly. Another situation where you might want to think out ahead of time how lethal you things to get.

Regarding the trickster god actions, every single option is either hilarious or just gowdawful, depending on the temprement of your players. Use accordingly.

62. Stone Juggernaut

The broken statue bit is a bit more of the old “Acererak sends his regards” fun. BOth of my parties ignored the statue and smashed the one fallen arm, which seems a liekly outcome to me. Once they pick up the Eye, this activates Napaka. If your party has the sceptre and puts the clues together, enjoy a clever non-situation. If not, the fight is mostly a quick DPR and “don’t stupidly stand in froont of the steamroller” check.

63. Gas Filled Room

My only comments here are if the party is split up, this encounter can have the potential to be deadly, as the shambling mounds, if they engulf one or two lonesome. may be shockingly nasty. If the party sticks stick together this should not be too hard.

64. Base of the Waterfall

Read this as part of floor one prep. That’s about it.

65. Underground Lake

See my comments on “Leeroy”, the aboleth at the start of floor 5.

66. Door of Devouring

I think the door itself is fine and fairly straight-forward. The more interesting thing is the cage and dock and baots give you a lot of tools to control the meeting with the aboleth. So see my comments on the aboleth. How you run that will likley give you some ideas on how you want to use the diving cage, crabs, boats, etc.

67. Hall of the Golden Mastodon

I love this room. My main advice would be to give yourself total freedom in timing the waves of demons. Again the early waves might get melted, and the difficulty of later waves will depend a lot on your players and how the early waves went. You might want to have some extra tokens or minis on hand to make things harder if the party is steamrolling the early waves and figures out the floor piece quickly.

68. Hall of Decay

Another nifty room, where I don’t have a whole lot to add. I had one group figure this out in seconds, the other group ended up having people strip naked and shove stuff into a sack of holding after the first party member lost their clothes.

69. Mechanus Chain

I want to like this room… but man. Another combat with a whole pile of really low CR monsters, no explanation of what the hell is going on, and oh, if a PC falls they get deleted from this plane of existence. I took the choice of letting this room be a physics and lore puzzle without extra combat. If you do want to run the fight, more power to you but I just did not have any desire to have yet another combat.

70. Armillary Sphere

You get a level appropriate fight, that can insta kill on a crit, and you have the sphere that does roll table stuff! I like this room. I did remove the fight, as at this point my groups had just finished Napaka, the cogs, and the Mastodon, so everyone was hitting serious Tomb fatigue.

Depending on your party size you may want to make the room bigger, since it is a pretty tight space to have a fight in. The other thing I did is let each player take a crack at the sphere, if they wanted to. This did lead to some hilarious rolls on the table, but was also a super fun session of “press your luck”. If you do this it can lead to some potentially game altering results if multiple people get super lucky, but I love that kind of nonsense.

Floor 6 - Cradle of the Dead God

My main issue on this floor is that each of the Trial rooms is cool, but my groups did not find the correct solutions to almost any of them. A case of the module maybe being too clever, or too opaque, for my players. So I took the approach of letting any sufficiently creative solution work in many rooms.

I also have to admit I ran the final few rooms post Acererak as more of a narrative epilogue. This is because both groups have campaigns post ToA. So I took the teeth out. If you are not running post ToA, my advice is of limited value.

71. Lair of the Sewn Sisters

We embark on the end! This room has a lot of options for you in that this is where you can really bring home the Sewn Sisters, or if you forgot all about them, inject them into the game. The main things you have going on here are the three little dolls, the cage with the prisoner, access to the Trials, a chance to add creepy foreshadowing for the fight that is going to happen, and the Skeleton Gate.

The dolls are a nice little RP session. I negelected them a bit, as my players were not super keen on engaging with them. So I used them to lore drop the Sisters again and make sure I had fully warned the PCs that the coven was near.

The prisoner I ran as a catch-up skeleton key. Others have run this in far more macabre, Saw-like scenarios where the PCs had to remove the final key from a living, breathing NPC. I wasn’t really up for that at this point, but you could do some twisted body horror here if you want.

The Skeleton Gate is your chance to make the PCs backtrack for any keys they missed. Depending on your grouop this is a great chance to go back to rooms that have been missed, or just hand wave things away and let them narratively go back to pick up missed keys. I also added a twist where after the trials were completed, a magic barrier blocked the door. This forced a comflict with the sisters. I had them appear after the magic barrier went up. My advice here is to plan out what, if any, deals the players can make to avoid a fight. If you want to force a fight, you might wnat to give a thought about how to force that if your players try to avoid it.

For the trials in general, I tried to hammer home SHAPES. Shapes, shapes, shapes, shapes!

72. Trial of the Triangle

None of my groups figured this out the correct way. They all ended up using spells and abilities to get rope into the cylinder, secure the rope to the lever, and then pull the lever. I think the solution is a bit opaque, so this is another situation where I let clever solutions resolve the room.

73. Trial of the Square

Oh boy. This one was another trial by error until someone finally put together making a box around the lever. They only figured it out after solving multiple other rooms based on SHAPES.

74. Trial of the Pentagon

My main advice here is to give the description of the room multiple times, and eventually emphasize the tapestries in your description. For the food portion, take notes and be ready to pull those notes up. Put a post-it note on your DM screen or your mnonitor.

75. Trial of the Hexagon

I think this was the first room both my parties solved, since the five candles and the HEXagon thing finally clicked. If you run passive perception or your players are good at alwyas rolling for perception or investigation it should all come together. If not, you might need to describe the room a few times again to draw their attention to the location of the sixth candle. Once they find that, it all comes together.

76. Trial of the Octagon

Yet again, my groups did not pick up any of the hints from the description here, and they did not even read the book out loud. They did come up with completely off the wall ways to access the hidden panel, and I ran with it.

77. Death God’s Nursery

Well, we made it to the end. We get two big fights here. First the Soulmonger and the Atropal. Then Acerarak. But first let’s discuss the room itself.

The room’s main feature is the lava pit. It is 30 feet deep. North of the pit is a ten foot ledge. Flanking the south part of the pit are two balconies littered with phylyacteries. To the south of the room is a balcony with a portal. Per the book, any creature falling into the lava from the “floor” level takes 10d10 fire damage from the lava. The book does not include the actual fall damage, which would be 3d6 bludgeoning damage. Lava is hard.

First recommendation: change the fire damage to “OMG this is freaking lava!” damage, a new, heretofore unknown damage type that has no known resistance. This is because lava is so much hotter than fire is most cases that I personally think fire resistance or immunity is stupid. Don’t even get me started on a room with a full lava floor and no venitlation. This whole room is impossible, but verisimilitude has already been shattered, so you might as well make the floor be lava if the floor really is lava. You do you though.

Now let’s talk about the bosses, as we really need those in play to discuss further.

Soulmonger and Atropal

When the fight starts the Soulmonger is connected to the two balconies and the north ledge by three adamantine struts. Three struts in total, that count as large object. The Soulmonger itself is a Huge object for… reasons? It should be large, but whatever. The Soulmonger also has four tentacles, 30 feet long. They are huge animated objects. The Atropal is a huge undead(titan).

A note on starting the fight: The Atropal and Soulmonger do not start this fight. Both hang around sucking up souls until the party takes some sort of aggressive or hostile action. So the party should have time to ask questions, investigate the room, etc.

Once the fight does start, your strategy is actually pretty simple:

  • If anyone scores a melee hit on the Soulmonger or a strut, a tentacle attacks as a reaction. It isn’t even a named action type, but reaction seems appropriate. Use the grappling option, and then subsequently try to drop the offending PC into the lava. The tentacles each get one attack per turn, so melee attacks on the soulmonger should always come with a tentacle counterattack, as there are four tentacles. You could slap the PCs if you want to switch it up, but the lava is far more of danger.
  • One the first turn of each round, use the Wail legendary action. The whole point of this fight is to soften up the PCs for the next fight. Making every round come with potential exhaustion penalties is an amazing debuff.
  • I think Ray of Cold is almost always the best option for the second legendary actions based purely on damage potential.
  • Always move the Atropal out of melee range. It can fly.
  • On the Atropal’s turn you probably want to reach for Life Drain since it heals the Atropal.
  • If a PC is hit on a strut, they need to make a save to not fall into the lava

Some interesting notes here: As far as I can tell, animate object can work on the struts, and maybe even the Soulmonger. If someone animates a strut and rips it free, that sends the Soulmonger into the lava, where it will shortly die. Maybe, if this happens, you could use lava covered tentacles to try and haul the now red-hot Soulmonger out of the lava. Could be fun, and in no way is this based on personal experience.

If your players drop the Soulmonger into the lava, which seems an optimal strategy all things considered, you might notice that the fight with the Atropal and likely Acererak both become entirely ranged affairs. You probabaly want to make sure every player has some ranged action they can take here, or this will be a very boring fight for those players.

Barring tremendous bad luck, eventually the PCs will kill the Atropal, summoning Acererak.

Acererak

Many, many people ahve talked about this, so before I give my take, here are some better blogs:

Almost every one of those assumes you change the spell list, and I am going to assume you do that. I absolutely recommend you take Time Stop, Delayed Fireball, and at least one AoE third level spell and one line third level spell. Fireball and Lightning Bolt seem very good options as you can defualt to these with legendary actions when in doubt.

Before we get into strategy, I’d like to point out that as written, Acererak cannot fly. That seems pants on head stupid given the layout of the room, so I recommend giving him Winged Boots. Ace should never be in easy melee range. If he somehow goes unconscious, you can either drop him in the lava, or have him hang upside down from the boots floating in the air.

The crux of how you run Acererak is: What are you looking to accomplish with this fight? If you are not playing past ToA, do you want this to be a heroic victory for the players? Do you want it to be a doomed fight after they have defeated the Atropal and Soulmonger? If you are playing past ToA, do you or your players want to keep using the same PCs? The answers to these questions really determine how agrresively you run Acererak.

Super Important Note: any PC that has a trickster god gets 50 temporary hp at the start of every turn. After running this, the effect is super powerful, and makes Ace much less lethal. The gods also give a psychic damage bouns. You may want to consider changing this depending on what your goals in the fight are!

Fun lore note: there is a good chance this Acererak may not be the Acererak, but rather a simulacrum that gained freedom and lichdom via foul methods.

Okay. So how do you approach running Ace as a character and as a combatant? Firstly, Acererak is an asshole of the highest order. He built this dungeon to feed his unlife, and then decided to try and birth a death god in a lava pit. The party has ruined at least the second part of that at this point. His toy has been broken, and now he wants to kill those responsible. Another key feature of Acererak is hubris. He does not think the party is a threat, and you can use this to fun effect. You might even go so far as to have Ace comment that the Atropal must have been a poor project, since it was so easily disposed of by mere mortals.

So what does Ace do? Up front he shows up and monologues a bit. The first reason to do this is to show Ace is a tremendously conceited and dismissive jerk. The second reason is to let any one minute long spells burn off. Bye bye hastes, persistent AoEs, etc. Once those spells burn off, you might even let the party take the first shot as Ace cajoles them. Then, when combat starts, on round one or beyond, do not unleash Ace’s highest level fun until the PCs do something that proves they are powerful foes. Once that does happen, I strongly recommend the Time Stop > Delayed Fireball > other useful spells or actions > set off the Delayed Fireball once it has had a few turns to cook for max damage. Then go all out. Target the weak PCs and burn all those high level spell slots!

Some thoughts on tactics and spells:

  • Do not start with Mind Blank active. Ideally use it as one of your actions during Time Stop. Using as part of the Time Stop will negate the trickster god psychic damage, and show Ace is now taking the fight seriously.
  • Wall of Force seems… bad. If you use it and seperate the party, you might as well just use DM fiat to kill everyone in my opinion. Using this spell smartly takes half the party out of the fight while they watch others die. It also means you try to bait out evenough spell slots from any high level caster fo they cannot invalidate the wall. If you do all that and get the wall off, why are you even running a combat?
  • Power Word Kill is another head scratcher. If you can use it given the trickster god HP buff, you are again using DM fiat to kill a player. That seems rough. The exception here is if you are not playing post ToA, then use it at the end and setup this finisher as a late combat action.
  • For your legendary actions, use AoE or line spells that hit the maximum number of targets.
  • The Curse plus Staff combo is powerful, but focuses on targeting a single PC, and takes at least two turns or a turn and a legendary actions to set up. And it forces you to bring Ace into melee range. If you alter the spell list, I think you have better combos.
  • Read the other links above and consider the spells Ace chooses based on your goals in the fight.
  • The sphere of annihilation is actually pretty weak unless you can set it up to hit multiple PCs. Expecially if you change the spell list up.

78. Chapel of Hate

For this room, and the rest, do you want to still try to kill PCs, or do you want to let them out? I ran it as a relatively risk free epilogue. For you, the answer drives how you run the nothics here.

79. Hall of Finality

See above reagrding the traps here. Is this an epilogue, or are you trying to hurt or kill PCs?

80. Red Library

I threw Withers in here, to have a final conversation and to give the players the marbles for the Ebon Pool. This seemed more interesting to me overall.

81. Ebon Pool

The exit. If your PCs made it this far and have the marbles, hooray! If you overlooked or your PCs did not get the marbles from the prior rooms, you couls have a bag of them in the Red Library.

The End

And that’s it! Congratulations! As for what to do next… well that is your job to figure out :).