Be warned: !!SPOILERS!! for Tomb of Annihilation!

I am running Tomb of Annihilation. We just got to the fourth level of the final location, the Chamber of Horrors in the Tomb of the Nine Gods. And I have some thoughts. The Tomb of the Nine, from here on out, simply the Tomb, is a pretty nifty bit of design. The first three levels have been written decently enough. Well, not the Mirror Tomb. But the rest of it is pretty good, and has been quite engaging for my players and for me. Level Four, the Chamber of Horrors… is a bit less well written. Or maybe less well designed. To be blunt, it is designed to mercilessly kill characters. And often there is no good way to forewarn the grizzly deaths that await the players.

Worth noting: My team is actually the same starting set of PCs, so at this point they have managed to get most of the way through the campaign, approximately 50 sessions or about 150 hours of communal play time. It seems a shame to have punitively designed traps just wipe players after hundreds of hours. Especially since the way the Tomb is written, and the way the rest of the campaign is written… don’t really jive. If you ran a meat grinder campaign the whole way, by all means ignore this whole post. If you are finding the Tomb to be a bit of a serious tonal shift, I have some recommendations.

So let’s re-write some stuff!

I’ll go through the locations in the Chamber of Horrors that I think are particularly egregious, explain the problem as I see it, then give some solutions. My solutions are a mix of ideas I have seen on the internet, and my own additions. There are links at the bottom of the post to other articles like this one. I am assuming you have the book if you are reading this, so I won’t go into excruciating detail on how things work unless I need to call out specific things.

47. Elemental Cells

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.
  • 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 industiral 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 trap. 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 open the door to the exit, but it only works if you let the trap activate. In other words, a 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 they have the 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 scultpure 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 between ~65 hp for a caster, and ~125 hp for a barbarian. The odds of surviving are low, assuming full HP.

There IS one way to avoid almost gauranteed 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 gaurentee 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 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 Tombe) 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.

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 al la 4e. One hp per token. This way only so many can attack due to physics, and the party can lawnmow through them.

50. Mirror of Life Stealing

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.

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

53. Crypt of the Sun Queen

Problem: This one isn’t so bad. It is really the piles of damage the Sun Orb can cause through repeated triggers of the various abilities. I think it is only a problem in the context of the rest of the floor. If you are cruising through this floor, HP will be at a premium, so you may be at a situation where the Sun triggering will wipe a few people. That feels bad. Especially if they activated the T-Rex in the prior room…

Solutions:

  • Change the trap 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…

56. 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 sekelton minotaurs and the sarcophagus. This one needs some discussion.

As written, when someone touches the maze and gets 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 and buffing the minotaur skeletons. Ten is a lot. It was a long combat that seemed a bit overwrought.

So there you go. Some advice on floor four.

Some other longer, more complete takes on the Tomb are below. I have repeated some of Chaotic Neutral DM’s advice here, as it is really good and bears inclusion.

Chaotic Neutral DM: Guide to the Tomb of Annihilation

Power Score RPG: Guide to Tomb of Annihilation