Episode 62: Abandon Ship

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• Read up on the backstories of the Waffle Crew

We jump into the Tomb of Annihilation adventure this week. It's always interesting to see which parts of an adventure Chris chooses to use.

The Waffle Crew

(Anna) Evelyn - Human Paladin of Lathander
(ProJared) Diath - Human Rogue
(Nathan) Paultin - Human Bard
(Holly) Strix - Tiefling Sorcerer
(Dani Hartel) Captain Xandala - Elf Sorcerer

We left off last time on the air ship. Captain Xandala wants the ring of winter. Artus Cimber has it, and does not want to give it up. The group summoned Shemeshka, who can teleport 8 people to Chult. The problem is that there's more than 8 people on the airship. Also, Klauth, the legendary red dragon, is coming towards the ship right now.

The people on the ship: The heroes, Shemeshka, Xandala, Summerwise, Sir Godfrey, Waffles, Simon, Juniper, Artus Cimber.

The group realizes that if they leave right now, the others might be killed by Klauth.

Diath has yet to commit to the geas spell. Until he does so, Shemeshka won't teleport anyone. Strix gets on her flying broom. Xandala casts fly and invisibility on herself.

Godfrey, the undead knight, says that if he dies he will be reborn in another body, so no big deal. Strix polymorphs Godfrey into an albatross so that he can escape.

Klauth can see invisible, and he chases Xandala. Klauth is wielding two wands. YIKES. Xandala uses mage hand to give him the finger.

Klauth wants to know where his ring is. She tells him it's at Port Nyanzaru. Klauth breathes on Xandala. She rolls a natural 20 on her saving throw... still fails. The DC is 24!

People in the chat were very offended by this. A natural 20 is an auto-success on attack rolls, not saves and skill checks. I understand their reaction - why roll if you can't succeed? I think the DC is very high, higher than the DCs of most of the demon lords in Out of the Abyss!

I actually had the exact reverse happen in 4th edition. A character tried to jump from one airship to another, and rolled a 1 on his skill check. His bonus was so high that he still succeeded. It was very weird and I wasn't sure what to do, so I just let it be. The player and I both felt weird about it.

Anyway, the group teleports to Port Nyanzaru. This is a jungle city where dinosaurs are used as beasts of burden.


Shemeshka is with them. She casts geas on Diath. Diath is now magically compelled to find the spectacles and the spell book, which Chris says is actually X the Mystic's arcane grimoire. That is right out of Tomb of Annihilation. I was wondering if he'd make up another book. Do you think he'll change what is in the book?

Shemeshka leaves.

A citizen of Chult recognizes Strix as a dinosaur racer. The whole group gets excited and wants to race dinosaurs, especially Paultin and Evelyn. Artus Cimber wants to find accommodations.

The citizen/Strix fan hands Strix a trinket - a piece of a mural/mosaic tile. She gives him a half-eaten pastry in return, which grosses him out.

The group decides to stay at Kaya's House of Repose, which is the more fancy place to stay in Port Nyanzaru. People want to buy and eat Waffles the owlbear.

Dani has a great idea.. enter Waffles in the dinosaur race. They should do that!

Paultin has a concert. Evelyn is his brand manager. She wants to set up another show for him. He's on his "Drunk and Dying" tour. Evelyn might have him do a show at the Grand Coliseum or perform private shows for the Merchant Princes (the 7 rulers of Port Nyanzaru). He actually makes 145 gp from this performance.

A strange man approaches the group. He tells them dramatically to seek the guardian at Orolunga. This person is wearing a pendant with the symbol of a lidded eye. Vecna?

The group decides to get the spectacles and the book first, because violating the geas spell will probably kill Diath. Do you think she's used geas spells on Diath's ancestors? Seems likely.


Someone is following them. Avery pale dude with a satchel. The group approaches him. His name is Leric Dashland. He's from House Dashland of Waterdeep, where Evelyn is from. He wants the group to create a map of  some of the mysterious ruins in the jungle - Orolunga and Nangalore. In return he'll give them a ship. Strix is very excited about getting to name the ship.

The group heads to the inn. Time to use the stuff to summon the Sewn Sisters. The ink is meant to be applied to the scroll. Strix makes sure everyone has gone potty before she starts.

The ink slithers out onto the floor and crawls toward the parchment. It leeches into the parchment and purplish writing appears on the scroll until all the ink is gone and has become writing on the scroll. It has become a magic scroll that Strix can cast from.

Strix says, "I'll give it a gander." Evelyn perks up and says, "Did someone say Lathander?" which killed me.

The writing looks like it is in Baba Yaga's handwriting. Wow. OK. o how did Shemeshka get this stuff? Is Baba Yaga keeping tabs on Strix and helping her from afar? Has Shemeshka inserted herself as a go-between? Baba Yaga could show up at any time in her dancing hut.

Maybe she is a rival of the Sewn Sisters, who are powerful hags on their own. As a coven, they're a formidable threat. Perhaps she wants Strix to kill them.

Something hits the window. Evelyn runs to check it out. It's a winged snake. It's gone.

Strix uses the scroll and she's pretty sure that the hags will come to them when they sleep. Everyone is going to sleep in Strix's room.

At one point the group finds Artus downstairs chatting up a half-orc woman who is wearing the symbol of Torm.

At night, everyone but Evelyn feels something climb on top of them. A spectral, ghostly figure of an old crone, thin and spindly. She spits in each of their mouths. Chris makes sure to point out that this is somewhat sexual, and the players are really repulsed. Paultin likes it, though.

The next morning, Artus tells the group that he'd like a priest to come along on the journey. He wants to go to Camp Vengeance, a fort held by the Order of the Gauntlet. Another camp was destroyed by undead. The group will have to pass by it to get to Camp Vengeance.

As the group prepares to shop, Diath notices a winged snake quietly heading off somewhere as Artus leaves the group.

Meanwhile, hundreds of miles away, Xandala falls... burning.. and she sees Klauth fly off to the south, towards Chult. Chris says she's dead. She took 91 points of damage. That's where we stop!

Overall

Decent show. I'm glad to see the heroes in Port Nyanzaru. I was hoping to see a waffle dinosaur race, but it looks like that's not in the cards. Chris basically laid out where the group will be going this season, although that could change at any time.

The camp is such a complex place, IMO, I am interested to see what he does with it. When I read it, I felt like I'd have a hard time handling it. It seems like it could be a drag if you're not careful.
The ruined camp, on the other hand, is awesome.

Orolunga and Nangalore are really cool places, I am very much looking forward to the group going to Orolunga in particular.

Sunday Oct 22nd, Twitchcon will have a live DCA show. That's in one month! Should be awesome! Nate can't make it. Dani said she'd be in the crowd, so that means we might get the return of Dee, which would be awesome.

I'd be fine with Dani playing with them at the live show. In fact, I think she should just stay for good. She adds a lot to the game. She's sharp, funny, and she knows her stuff. I'd love to see what kind of character she would make.

I want to have this thing done by March, which (I assume) is when the next adventure comes out. We tape every other week. So right now, we're looking at 12 sessions (each broken up into two episodes) to finish the whole thing! That's a stretch. I think I am going to see if we can fit in a few mega-sessions in addition to the schedule to make sure we get this done. The tomb is big!

I will be streamlining this adventure as we go. I've picked out the jungle places that I want to use, and I'm clearing out Omu and only keeping the things I like (which is basically, the shrines and the giant dinosaur).

I'm going to pretty much skip the yuan-ti dungeon. It's not bad, but it feels like a slog. Let's just get to the tomb, already!

Obviously plans may change depending on what the group responds to, but that's my general plan.

I am extremely worried about this dungeon. It is really, really deadly. I think I figured out a way to give them a heads up about the most deadly rooms way in advance, but I'm still concerned. I'd hate for my first show to end in a TPK, but I also don't want to nerf the whole dungeon and remove the danger from it.

So basically, you'll see me wincing in terror a lot as we go into it.

The Party

(Ryan) Mistletoe - Human Druid
(Garrett) Ramrod - Goliath Barbarian
(Annalise) Val - Tiefling Sorcerer
(Joe) Zavagor - Half-orc Warlock

We started off in the meeting Kwayothe, one of the rulers of Port Nyanzaru. She handed the group their prizes for winning the dinosaur race:

• A leather thong full of gold
• A piece of the dreamer's amulet
• 4 passes to a bath house. This is to set up the "Spa Day" scenario from Encounters in Port Nyanzaru. I ran that on episode 5, and it was absolutely tremendous.

The group had wanted to go out drinking with the pirates, so I had cooked up a goofy little thing. As they got ready to go, the group asked Zavagor what his story was. He shared that his family is cured to serve Eman, and that she won't say what he needs to do to end the servitude.

Port Nyanzaru

Somehow this morphed into a group hug, which completely took me by surprise. I was just trying to move them along to the next scene, but thankfully I was able to be quiet so they could do their thing.

The heroes and the pirates went to the Thundering Lizard. I had the pirates share their origin stories, which are all pretty goofy.

• Punching Pearl Smitty: She beat up a 14 year old noble in Cheliax and had to flee to avoid jail time.
• Facestabbin Isaiah Hawkins: This dagger-crazed fellow just finds sailing on the open sea to be intoxicating.
• Old Man Gristle: He accidentally chopped his hand off while sawing wood. He had to get a hook and a new job. He realized that since he had a hook hand, he must be a pirate.
• Captain Isabella "Inkskin" Locke: She's a pathfinder NPC that I love. She was raised by sahuagin and doesn't speak common well. She's a sorcerer and was "deprogrammed" by the Pirate Queen Lana Redwater (a character from my 2013 Skull and Shackles campaign).

In return, the heroes shared their stories:

• Mistletoe stumbled into the feywild and drank a fey drink that forever changed him.
• Ramrod's tribe worships a phoenix. The death curse kicked in and the phoenix stopped rising each morning. Ramrod's father went to Chult to investigate and was never heard from again.
• Val: She was once a human. Her village was attacked and she blacked out. When she awoke, she was a tiefling with sorcerous abilities.
• Zavagor: He told his story earlier. He's bound to a demon queen of fire.

I had the Green Vipers (NPC adventurers) sneak in and try to steal the piece of the dreamer's amulet. Ladarius insisted on trying to get the group to set up his catchphrase, but they weren't very accommodating.

The heroes spotted Deidre and Val starting ripping on her. I am usually quick with a comeback, but I had absolutely nothing. So, Deidre was standing there getting roasted. Val finally rolled out an epic play on words and Deidre ran out, crying.

The adventurers headed out to a shrine of Nangnang, where they believed another piece of the dreamer's amulet was. I love this place. It's right out of Over the Edge.

The group found an awesome-looking idol. Here's the art I got of it:

What's weird is the Nangnang in this adventure is absolutely nothing like the Nangnang in Tomb of Annihilation. I like this Nangnang better!

The group fought some skeletons and found the entrance to the underground shrine. The walls were made of skulls with glowing eyes.

There's these four altars that you have to mess with to get to the interior rooms. The heroes figured it out. I was wondering if putting a puzzle scenario on a show was a good idea. Would it be boring to watch? I think it went fine. By the end, the group understood they needed to obtain four skull from four secret rooms to get to the central room in the shrine.

Very good show! Episodes 2 and 3 had better video and audio (I got a headset). On episodes 4 and 5 I leveled out my mic better as I'm a pretty loud dude when I get excited. I am thinking of getting another headset. The one I am using seems a little flimsy.

The next episode is one where the group pretty much completely surprised me. I had to scrap my plans and roll with their fun idea.

You can buy Tomb of Annihilation right here. 

Now that I have read through the entire book and made a massive guide to it, I'm ready to review it. I'm going to go over the good stuff, and then the bad.

Short Version: I think that this is the best 5e adventure by far, though I imagine that some people will prefer Curse of Strahd.

The Good

Improvements

Every time they release a new adventure, they fix some things that I didn't like in the last one. This time around, they actually put some page numbers in the book! They only give page numbers for stuff actually in the tomb book, not the Player's Handbook and etc. Hey, I'll take it.

In Storm King, they had that massive chapter that gave two paragraphs of information on something like 100 locations. I felt that it was too little material on too many places.

This time around, they spent more time detailing less areas, and farmed out the rest to DM Guild creators, which I think is a tremendous idea.

Port Nyanzaru

I love the city of Port Nyanzaru (a city where dinosaurs are used as beasts of burden). I especially love the dinosaur races. Who doesn't? It's a great idea and gets the adventure off on a really high note.

I really like the merchant princes, or at least, the idea of them. Old City is really cool, as is Malar's Throat.

The Jungle

I really love the massive pile of random encounters in the back of the book. Seeing how there is so much travel involved, this is extremely helpful. I wish they had made a really massive, epic jungle set piece involving the zombie-barfing tyrannosaurus rex, but I guess that's something we can do on our own.

Some of the locations in the jungle are stellar. The bridge with the monkeys and the statue springs to mind. I love Princess Mwaxanare and can't wait to use her. Nangalore is a real standout locale - it's a weird, beautiful ruin that really leaps off the page.

There's a ton of good ideas all over the place. A village that can be flung across the jungle! The thorn maze! The crashed airship! The trapped shrine in the ruined camp! So many great ideas.

The Tomb of the Nine Gods

There is a lot to love about the Tomb of the Nine Gods. There are very few "filler" rooms. It feels like they had a whole bunch of people come up with the coolest rooms they could imagine, and then a bunch of other people refined them and put them all together.

One of the things I most appreciate about 5e is how they take classic tropes and make them feel fresh. Someone sat down and went, "what's a good way to present a trap that ages you?" and their answer was: a magic clock. Then they added in other elements and made a neat little room that makes sense in its own weird way.

Another great thing is the skeleton keys. I love them. They're alive! Little skeletons that run around the dungeon. You need all five to get to the final room. Again, they took a cliche but presented it in an unexpected, fun way. That's what I like the best about this adventure. It's all about fun.

I love all the little links to the Tomb of Horrors. There are rooms, statues and traps (the juggernaut) that are variants of stuff from the original tomb. I think anyone who played tomb of horrors will light up when they notice the similarities.

Let's see if I can pick my favorite room from each level:

(pg 136) 12. Trapped Chest: The chest hanging from two chains! This one stuck with me long after I read it. The authors took mundane things - a chest, a pool, and some chains, and they came up with a really deadly trap that makes sense in its own way. This book has a number of things that really shocked me, and this was the first.

(pg 141) 20. False Tomb: A room that fills up with wine! Wine weirds! Just a slight variation on the classic water-fills-the-room trap and a nice twist on the phrase, "Drown your sorrows". That is really clever! The one thing I feel weird (pun not necessarily intended) about in this room is that water breathing magic doesn't work. I can see that causing problems at the table, especially if you haven't set this precedent before.

(pg 156) 44. The Vault of the Beholder: There are a number of traps and hazards involving magnetism in this adventure. It's an under-used gimmick and I really like what they did with it. This room uses it big time as part of a really crazy, dangerous battle with a beholder. Very memorable!

(pg 160) 48. Shagambi's Tomb: Level four has a lot of cool rooms, but this is my favorite. A room full of terracotta warriors that hate noise, teleportation circles, you name it. Chaotic and deadly, but most of all, really fun.

(pg 174) 66. Door of Devouring: I really look forward to doing a goofy voice for this hungry door. I love the shark cages and the powers they grant. I don't like the instant death aspect of this, but that is easily changed. This has a bit of a "Labyrinth" feel to it, which for me is always a good thing.

(pg 184) Area 77: I don't even want to say the name of this place because I really don't want it spoiled. This is the final battle, which is beyond epic! Destroy the soulmonger, defeat one bad guy, and then defeat another bad guy. The tricksters give you absolutely awesome boosts of power above and beyond what they did already. This is a fantastic climax to the adventure!

The NPCs

Some of the villains and potential allies really stick out. Nanny Pu'pu has a very cool scenario, and I love that she killed everyone who lived in the village that is now her home.

The Sewn sisters are tremendous and very freaky. Each of them has a very vivid description. I really wish that there was art of them.

Artus Cimber jumps out at me, just because he looks like Nicholas Cage. I get to do a really bad Nicholas Cage impression?! I've been watching youtube videos of him to prepare. I want to call out "The bees, not the bees!" with laser-sharp accuracy.

The Company of the Yellow Banner. I really enjoyed piecing together the story of this doomed band of adventurers and thinking of ways to use them in my game. They had all sorts of things going on. They had a talking lizard, they were infiltrated by a shapechanger, and they have some fun magic items on top of that.

Trickster Gods

I think these entities are really fun. I love their shrines and I love the powers they grant.

The Art

The art gets better in every book. Up until now, I have maintained that it is all very good, but nothing is spectacular. In this one, a couple of pieces of art crossed the threshold from good to great. Not Elmore-great, but we're getting closer.

The cover is good, but again the colors are muddy and it is too abstract for me. I want a scene! I want to see the stuff you can do in this adventure.

My favorite art:

• The Dinosaur Racers (pg 15). The more dino racing art, the better!
• Aremag and the Sailing Ship (pg 43). This has the trait that I think too much D&D 5e art is lacking - badass-ness. Badass-osity? This is probably my favorite piece of 5e art out of everything so far. Absolutely tremendous.
• Zaroum Al-Saryam (pg 65). This pirate is so unique and cool-looking that I want to expand his role just because of the way he looks.
• Ras Nsi (pg 111) This is another really great piece of D&D art. This one is definitely one of the best pieces of 5e art so far.
• Fenthaza (pg 117) I really don't like yuan-ti, but she is very striking. This one is really sharp. Simple, yet finely detailed.
• The Soulmonger (pg 185). That thing is freaky! A very appropriate choice for a final encounter. When I heard about the Soulmonger, I imagined some kind of altar with howling faces on it. When I saw this crystal tube-thing, I immediately thought of Empire Strikes Back, when Luke healed inside that big tube of water. To me, the soulmonger looks way too sci-fi. That said, I love this piece of art~ It shows me everything I need to see and it's very vivid.
• The Chwingas (pg 216) I love the style of this one. It has a bit of a watercolor feel to it, a little bit of DiTerlizzi. I don't know who the artist is, but I hope they get a lot more work!
• The Kamadan (pg 225). A leopard and some snakes. Normally, that's pretty boring to me. But I have to say that this is an utterly fantastic piece of art. It's really sharp without being photo-real.
• Full Page Spread (pg 242). I really appreciate that they give us full page art, even if it's just one or two pieces per book. I guess most people don't care, but I really like it. The more art, the better. Art helps me imagine scenes and gives me ideas.
• The Handouts (pg 255) There are a few rooms that are very complicated to describe. These handouts made both rooms crystal clear to me! I honestly don't think I'd have been able to run that control room if I didn't have handout 24. I just could not picture it.

The Maps

An entire book of maps by Mike Schley! This thing is a tour de force. To me, he is the best 5e artist and the best map guy, ever. I feel like he need to be properly recognized in some way, but I'm not sure how one goes about doing that.

On pages 98 and 99, he has a massive map of Omu and a map of every single shrine. Nine shrines all neatly collected on one page! All of them right there, so you don't have to flip all over the book.

The Heart of Ubtao is a really tremendous map. It is so good that I want to add stuff to the location just because it looks so cool.

Nangalore also really pops out. I think if you lay down a players version of this map on the table, the players will really get into it. It's just a cool place, a really interesting location that you can imagine your character creeping through.

The Bad
This is just my goofy opinion so please, don't take this too seriously. This is a good adventure! But there's always something to warble about, and I want to point out some things that might be important for those of you trying to decide if you want to buy this book.

Sandbox

Like most of the other 5e adventures, it's up to you to figure out how to get things moving and connect the dots. How exactly do you get your group in a dinosaur race? How does it connect to the quest for the death curse?

I want that dinosaur race to happen. I need that race to happen! But when the death curse is killing people off daily, time is of the essence! Why would the heroes waste time on this? We're on the clock, here, right? Syndra Silvane is going to croak while we're over here betting on Banana Candy.

The jungle is so wide open. It can be scary to let the group chart their course. You have to prepare so much stuff and be ready to run it either today or two months from now.

You can move locations around so that wherever your players go, they go through the stuff you want them to, but that's the kind of thing that will deflate enthusiasm if the group figures out what you are doing (and they usually catch on).

Some of the locations are cooler than others. That brings me to the next thing...

Weird Monsters


I just don't like yuan-ti, aarakocra and especially the grung. When I was first learning about this adventure, I was pretty dismayed when it was revealed that it is full of weird, fiend folio-y monsters like killer koalas and nazi storks.

Dungrunglung is a very cool location, but for me it feels wasted on a redundant race of frog people. There's already bullywugs and kuo-toa. Do we really need these guys?

It just feels way too early in the edition to focus on these fringe, April Fool's issue of Dragon Magazine monsters. We haven't really had adventures that dig into cool creatures like mind flayers, githyanki, demons and devils yet. We get one adventure every 6 months, and the last one was a reprint of old stuff! So this is it for the whole year. Unicorn rabbits.

The Art

Two things stick out to me:

I really hate the way 5e goblins look. I don't even want to use them. Pathfinder goblins are so cool, and now they look 30 times cooler in comparison.

The clothing in 5e art is so drab. You know how in comic books, the characters wear these bright costumes and then in the comic book movie the costumes are really dark and brown, and nobody wears their mask? Some of the art in this book feels like sketches from the set of a Tomb of Annihilation movie. A bit too close to John Leguizamo in Luigi's coveralls for my liking.

Omu

I love the shrines. LOVE them. Love the t. rex. I guess the feathers on the t. rex is a scientific thing. I think it looks stupid, but if it has been proven that they had feathers, then that makes this a fun inclusion.

This place is too busy for me. There's grung, red wizards, yuan-ti, kobolds (don't get me started), and vegepygmies. To me, that feels like a recipe for filler encounters that are going to bog things down, and then if the yuan-ti dungeon comes off bad (which I think it would in my game) you might kill your own campaign before you finally get to the really good stuff.

The Yuan-ti Dungeon

This place just doesn't work for me. We're all ready to get into the super-awesome Tomb of the Nine Gods, but first we have to navigate this rather large yuan-ti place? A location where there's a good chance the group will be captured and will need to negotiate their way out of?

Ras Nsi, the cool-looking bad guy, has a somewhat minor role. There's a fair chance that the group won't even fight him. He was featured in the promotional art! It's shocking to see how little he actually does in this book.

This dungeon feels like a buzzkill. It's like if GG Allin opened for Taylor Swift. The crowd might go home before she even takes the stage.

Death Traps

This is my main concern about the entire book. During the many years I ran D&D at home and in the game store, I ran into a slew of players who absolutely hated death traps. I actually had a group intentionally ruin a session when I tried to run the Lost City of Gaxmoor, just because they didn't want to play in a game lethal enough that they needed a back-up character.

In the game store, it was very much the same. 25% of my players were people who couldn't control their anger when bad things happened, especially when rolling low on a d20. I've written about this before. People throwing dice, punching walls, lashing out at other people at the table. The "it's not fair" mentality.

If that has not changed in the past two years, then a lot of DMs are in for some horrible nights. This dungeon has many "unfair" traps, some of which don't even roll to hit! You just die! And when you die in this dungeon, you're dead for good.

You NEED to know your players before you run this. Tell them up front that they should expect to die, and if that doesn't sound fun for them, then they shouldn't play.

Overall

So, where does Tomb of Annihilation rank among the other 5e adventures? I'd say it is the best out of all of them, and it is not even close. There's a lot of fun packed into this thing, and that's what is most important to me.

I can see some people claiming that Curse of Strahd is better than this adventure. I guess the best way to put it is that Curse of Strahd is Psycho, and Tomb of Annihilation is Jurassic Park. Both will endure, but Tomb will have more appeal because Curse of Strahd is of a genre that some people have to be in the right mood for. Everyone loves dinosaurs.

You can buy Tomb of Annihilation right here.

In this article, I am going to try to help DMs figure out how to take all of the things in Tomb of Annihilation and actually line it up and turn it into a fun campaign.

If You are a New DM

This book might feel a little bewildering when you first look at it. Some sections are a sort of "toolkit" for you to use or not use. You decide what happens when, and there is no "wrong" way to do it. The authors of this book expect you to change things and make it your own.

Please remember that you will make mistakes. We all do! Don't be too hard on yourself if things go wonky, just make little adjustments and roll with whatever is happening. No matter how long you've been running games, you'll make mistakes every single session, so it's no big deal. There's simply too many things you have to do at once to be a "perfect" DM. There is no such thing as a perfect DM! All you can do is perfect your style.

The most important thing is to make it fun. Fun for you, and for the players. You're not the enemy of the players. You're a referee. Don't fall into the trap of getting revenge on the group for ruining or circumventing one of your encounters. 

The bottom line is that you can kill the characters any time you want. You can just say, "You have a heart attack and die." That's not your role, though.

Think of yourself as the director and the audience. The characters are the stars of your movie. You and the players write the script.

The Plot


Here's the basic story:

1. The heroes want to end the death curse.
2. They learn that the source of the curse is in the lost city of Omu.
3. They search the jungle for the lost city.
4. They find the lost city.
5. They go through the Tomb of the Nine Gods. The source of the death curse, the Soulmonger, is at the bottom.

How to Start

One of the trickiest things in the whole book is figuring out how to involve the characters. The default option in the book is to use Syndra Silvane, a friend of the heroes. She's got the death curse and wants the adventurers to find the cure before it is too late.

The problem with this is that the players don't know this NPC at all. It's a little weird to hinge everything on some random person. You could tie her into the group's backstory, but she might not fit what the player had in mind.

Here are some ways to tie in the death curse:

• Relative is Dying: A hero's father/mother has the death curse.
• Kingdom in Peril: The king has the death curse, and the next in line to the throne is a real scoundrel/idiot.
• Hags: A character has a link to one of the sewn sisters (the hags on page 180). Maybe one of the hags has done something terrible and the hero wants revenge.
• The Atropal: You could do something with the atropal, just be careful - you don't want to spoil it! It's such a weird, shocking creature that I think you should keep it mysterious until the heroes get to area 77 in the dungeon. Maybe the character was part of an organization dedicated to keeping the atropal locked away. Then Acererak showed up and freed it/stole it, killing the guardians. The hero survived, and is determined to make things right.
• The Evil Patron: What might be really cool is for a warlock who is unaware that the atropal is their patron! It is calling the warlock to it so that when it rises as a god, the warlock can serve it and explain the mortal world to it.
• Item Quest: A hero might want to go to the tomb just to retrieve an item, either a story item (pg 189) or a magic item (pg 206).
• Other Heroes: Also, you might want to tie a character to the Company of the Yellow Banner. They are heroes who went to Omu a while back and haven't been heard from. They died in the tomb. I wrote up the group in my guide.

What is the deal with Artus Cimber?

You might notice that Artus Cimber and his ring of winter are here, but he has no real relevance to the plot. Artus is in the jungle waiting for the city of Mezro to return from another plane - his girlfriend is there.

You can do whatever you want with Artus, just keep in mind that the ring is really, really powerful (pg 207) and might unbalance things.

Port Nyanzaru


So now, how do you start this thing? The group gets to Port Nyanzaru, and then what?

I would say you'll want to do a couple things, here:

• Adventure: A combat/encounter, to spice up the exposition.
• Dinosaur Race: In my opinion, this is one of the best things in the book.
• NPC: Meeting a guide and preparing for the exposition.

Here's an example of how you could do this.

1. We're on a Boat: Does the group know each other? If not and they're arriving by boat, you could say that they all happen to be on the same boat. You could use the Brazen Pegasus, described in the "harbor ward" section on page 21.

2. Pirates! Their boat is attacked by pirates (pick from the three ships on pg 67). The pirates board and while the other passengers flee, the adventurers can do their thing, beat up the bad guys and show off their abilities.

You can have Aremag the dragon turtle (pg 42) pop up and demolish the pirates. That's his job, to defend Port Nyanzaru from pirates.

3. Arrival: The ship arrives at Port Nyanzaru, and Zindar (pg 238) lands on the ship. He learns of what happened and is impressed with the group. Maybe he gives them a document and tells them to go meet a merchant prince (whichever one you think is cool).

It might be a good idea to use Jessamine (pg 26). She has the death curse and by using her, you will reinforce that this curse is a big deal and that there isn't a lot of time.

4. Merchant Prince: When they meet the merchant prince, the prince rewards them for fending off the pirates and sees potential in them. The prince asks them to ride the prince's dinosaurs in the next dinosaur race. Winning will give them a nice sum of gold to fund their expedition.

5. Meet and Pick a Guide: The group can stay at the Thundering Lizard or Kaya's House of Repose (both described in "red bazaar" on page 23). You could have them be approached by a few of the guides that you think would be fun to use. They can hire whoever they want (or none at all).

6. Dinosaur Race: The next day, they have the race.

After the race, one dinosaur goes on a rampage. The group saves Grandfather Zitembe (pg 21) from the angry beast, and he is very grateful. When he learns of what the heroes want to do, he'll use his magic to tell them the stuff on page 21. That gives them a pretty solid idea of where to go.

7. Equip and Prepare: The group can stock up on equipment ("special items" on pg 31 and 32). The guide can help them, and make sure they get insect repellent and rain catchers.

The Jungle


OK! This is the most wide open part of the adventure. The heroes wander the jungle in search of Omu. The book says you should roll random encounters, but I think you will find that doing so slows the game to a crawl and leads to you running encounters you either don't like or aren't familiar with.

I suggest that you plan out travel days, generic ones that are not tied to a certain location that can be used in any part of the jungle. You should go through these 4 sections and pick out all of the things you want to use:

• Discoveries: pg 205
• Diseases: pg 40
• Encounters: pg 194
• Creatures: pg 209 Don't forget to work in the plants, like the tri-flower frond, the assassin vine, etc.

Planning The Journey

Let's make a bunch of travel days. These can be used when the group travels to a hex that doesn't have anything special on it.

All I'm doing is taking my favorite creatures, encounters and spreading them out. I made up a bunch of details to give it variety. Some groups are fine with having straight combats with monsters every day on an open field, but most people like it when there are all sorts of situations that can lead to cool moments. 

Make sure not to make all of the encounters negative! Have good things happen, too. It's more fun that way, and the group won't feel like everything and everyone is out to get them.

Day 1

The Guide: The guide will tell the group a few things:

• Entering a goblin village is very dangerous, because legend has it that the villages can actually soar through the air like a meteor.
• The dinosaurs aren't good or evil. They are the children of Ubtao and should be respected.
• The guide has heard of ryath roots and can identify them on sight. These roots make you strong! The more you eat, the better! They're quite rare and very useful (the guide is a bit misinformed. See pg 205)

Deez Wukka Nuts: Later in the day, the group comes upon some wukka trees (pg 205). A wukka nut falls from the tree and begins emitting hazy light. The group could climb a tree to get more. A jaculi is lurking up on the branches.

Night: The group sets up camp. Establish that you will assume this is how they set up every night unless you hear differently.

Day 2

Brontosaurii: The heroes come upon a herd of brontosauruses drinking from a lake. They are harmless. A baby brontosaurus plays with the group. The heroes notice that the brontosauruses are devouring wildroot (pg 205) until there's none left.

They group continues on, passing a lot more wildroot. They come upon a huge horde of zombies with blue triangles on their heads blocking their path. The zombies are eating a brontosaurus corpse. If the group thinks of it, they could lure the brontosaurus herd here by enticing them with the wildroot. The brontosauruses would trample all of the zombies.

Camp: Towards the end of the day, the adventurers find a hidden waterfall and lake, a perfect place to camp. There could be a cave behind the waterfall if you want. Colorful, friendly parrots are in the trees and are quite amused by the heroes. The point of this is to show the group that not everything in the jungle is out to kill them, and that Chult is a special place worth saving. 

Day 3

Magic Fruit: While foraging, the group finds some fruit that has juice in it (dancing monkey fruit, pg 205). If you want, after someone begins dancing, a pterafolk or two swoop down and attack.

Empty Camp: The group finds an abandoned camp with supplies (treasure cache, pg 196). Place evidence that they were abducted/slain by pterafolk or goblins, depending how near the group is to Yellyark or Firefinger.

Night: That night, zombies wander into the camp and try to eat sleeping heroes.

Day 4

Food: Foraging isn't going so well. The only edible stuff they can find is bananas that taste like black licorice. They spot a few Al Miraj (pg 211) nearby, who are oblivious to the forager's presence. Will the group kill and eat these defenseless unicorn bunnies?

Ring of Winter: The heroes notice melting icicles on a number of trees, which is obviously very strange. They are attacked by goblins or pterafolk, and Artus Cimber and Dragonbait show up to help the group. Those icicles are from the ring of winter.

Ubtao Ruins: The group comes upon the ruins of a shrine to Ubtao. quite a few Yahcha (harmless beetles, pg 205) are here. Tracing the maze-rune on a wall reveals a secret underground chamber, a wondrous and safe place to rest!

Day 5

Treasure in a Dinosaur: The adventurers spot a few zombies lingering around a dead and decaying t. rex. Through a hole in its stomach, the group can see the inert corpse of an adventurer with gleaming armor and perhaps a magic item (a treasure drop, pg 197). If the group decides to go get the stuff, they'll need to climb into the t.rex to get it. If a hero climbs inside it, the t.rex gets up! It's a tyrannosaurus zombie (pg 241)!

Have an Ice Day: Frost giants are searching for Artus Cimber ("frost giants" pg 200). Their winter wolf sniffs the group out. The giants ask the group if they've seen Artus Cimber. They warn the group that the ring of winter is evil and will corrupt anyone who wears it. The giants say that they want it because they alone can handle it. This is meant to make the heroes wary of Artus. Can he be trusted? Should they take the ring from him?

Day 6

Let's Bee Friends: The heroes come upon a person, who is alive, tied to a post and covered in honey. Goblins did this to him! The group must decide whether or not to free this person. The person can explain that the goblins are having trouble with zombie attacks, and that he thought it was a good time to partake in a little thievery.

In Chult, Village Invade You: Later in the day, what looks to be a huge green meteor appears in the sky. It's heading right for the group! The goblins had to catapult their village and as fate would have it, it's about to land right on top of the group.

Chwinga: Late in the day, the group comes upon a gleaming section of forest with weird shimmering rocks. A chwinga lives in a central rock (pg 216). It will spy on the group and listen to their conversation. That night, a band of zombies are on their way. The chwinga will warn the group. Once the zombie situation is dealt with, the chwinga will reward the bravest of the heroes with a supernatural charm (DMG pg 228). Maybe the charm of animal summoning or the charm of restoration (which would be really handy for a group without a healer-type).

Day 7

The Chase: It's quite rainy and windy. It is loud enough that it is hard to hear at certain times. A band of zombies pop up out of the ground (or whatever) and attack. 1 round later, Artus Cimber and Dragonbait come running. To help? No! They keep running and tell the group to forget the zombies. He's being chased by the tyrannosaurus zombie (if they killed it on day 5, then this could be a living t. rex).

That's Just Grape: It stops raining. Toward the end of the day, the group comes upon a hot spring. Nature's jacuzzi! And look, there;s a plant the is full of wild grapes! It's an assassin vine (pg 213).

Day 8

Dead Guy: The group spots a dead explorer up on a precarious spot, perhaps up in a tree where a zorbo lurks? The explorer has some good loot (pg 197) and a useful journal.

Berry Good For You: The heroes spot some sinda berry bushes (pg 205). A stegosaurus shows up. It likes to eat these. If the group plays it cool, the stegosaurus will share the sinda berries with them.

Night: One of the sewn sisters (pg 180) tries to steal a lock of hair.

Day 9

Tri, Tri Again: The group comes upon a triceratops trying to fend off a bunch of zombies. If the group helps it, it will travel with the group for a day or two, and can be used as a beast of burden.

Water You Waiting For: It is incredibly dry all day. No rain at all! They do come upon clear water at the end of the day (they risk getting throat leeches! pg 40)

Night: Zombies attack. A sewn sister is in the ethereal plane, watching. If blood is spilled, she materializes and carefully collects blood from the ground.

Day 10

It's Your Time to Shrine: The heroes come upon a shrine of Ubtao guarded by a wereboar.

Night: The group is probably really wary of the hags, now. A sewn sister will actually try to attack and subdue (not kill) whoever is on watch, and then steal more hair or blood.

Running the Journey


Now that we have created a bunch of cool things to happen on the journey, we need to figure out how to handle all of the weird little rules on page 38. You have to try and make sure that it doesn't slow the game down and bore everybody to death. To avoid that, you just need to be a little organized.


At the start of each day:

1. Players Pick a Hex: Use the map on page 243.

2. Navigate: One character is the navigator. They must make a survival check. The DC is either a 10 (Coast/Lake) or a 15 (jungle/mountain/river/swamp/wasteland). Fail: The party is lost. They end up in one of the 6 hexes around them.

You might want to roll their navigation checks for them in secret. If a player rolls a 5, they know that they failed. Their character don't know that! By keeping the rolls a secret, you don't have to worry about metagaming.

3. Forage:  As the heroes travel, they can forage for food. They roll a survival check, DC 10 (the jungle is abundant with food). Success: The forager finds d6 + their Wisdom modifier in pounds of food. Repeat the roll for gallons of water.

4. Encounters: Run any encounters that happen throughout the day. If there aren't any, just say to them: "You make your way through the jungle without incident." Give them a chance to do anything they want on that day. Players come up with the weirdest things.

5. Travel Time: Generally, the group will travel 1 hex per day.

• Travel via Canoe: 2 hexes per day.
• Walk at a Regular Pace: 1 hex per day.
• Hustle: Roll a d4. Result of 3 or 4 means they travel 2 hexes per day. -5 to perception checks.

6. Camp: Each night, the group makes camp. They should set up their raincatchers. The first night they make camp, you should have them describe the set-up and if/how they keep watch. Tell them you will assume  that this is how they set up camp every night unless they tell you differently. That way, there won't be any retroactive "I was sleeping in a tree" kind of stuff if the group gets ambushed at night.

7. Water: The water situation is a bit complicated. A waterskin holds 4 pints (aka half a gallon). Each character needs 2 gallons a day! So each character might want 4 waterskins, or maybe barrels full of water (which then requires a beast of burden). They can rely on the raincatchers and drink from them, but if it doesn't rain, they are in trouble.

Stuff to Know:

• Dehydration rules are on page 38.
• River water is not fit for drinking unless boiled.
• If a character doesn't drink 2 gallons of water in a day, they must make a DC 15 con save or suffer 1 lvl of exhaustion (PH pg 291). Those in medium or heavy armor make this check at disadvantage.
• Check out DMG page 111 for food and water rules. Each beast of burden is going to require probably 4 pounds of food and 4 gallons of water!

Using the Locations


The group will probably end up at a number of locations listed in chapter 2 (pg 37). You can have them wander freely or you can direct them to places you want to run.

Bottom line, they can do whatever they want, but if you point them towards the coolest places, that makes your life easier and makes the game more fun because you're not scrambling for material.

I picked the places I liked best and linked them to each other. Here's a way for the group to get from Port Nyanzaru to Omu:

1.The group is in Port Nyzanzaru. An NPC tells them about the home of the "bird people", and how they are friendly and can help the group. They might even be able to fly the group to Omu! The group is given directions to their home of Kir Sabal.

2. If the group decides to try to find Kir Sabal, they travel south, possibly crossing river Tiryki, or canoeing down it.

3. Some pterafolk attack the group. An aarakocra swoops down from the sky to aid the group. He is friendly and his name is Nephyr. He'll chat for a bit then fly off, and (unbeknownst to the heroes) he is captured by the pterafolk.

4. The pterafolk from firefinger attack the group again. Later, the heroes meet a sickly person who claims that he and his friend had been abducted by the pterafolk. He mentions that an aarakocra (Nephyr) flew down to help them, but was subdued by the pterafolk and taken away.

5. The group goes to Firefinger and frees Nephyr. Nephyr can give them exact directions to Kir Sabal.

6. Following his directions, the heroes cross Ataaz Muhahaha.

7. They might spot the wreck of the Narwhal if you want to use that. They might come upon Needle's bones if you want to use that.

8. They arrive at Kir Sabal. They meet Princess Mwaxanare, and learn that the aarakocra can cast a ritual to give the heroes the power to fly! A special component is needed for the flight ritual to work. It is the black orchid (pg 79) found in the ruins of Nangalore.

9. The adventurers go to Nangalore and get the orchid.

10. The group returns to Kir Sabal and are granted the power of flight. They have a fly speed of 30, and the flight power lasts for 3 days. Each hex is 10 miles. If the group travels 30 feet per round (6 seconds) they cover 18,000 feet per hour, or 3.5 miles per hour. So in 10 hours, they can travel 350 miles! That's 35 hexes! The problem is that there's a thick canopy which might make finding Omu difficult.

According to the book (pg 91), "The city is notoriously hard to find" and it "lies in a basin hidden in the depths of the rainforest." The depictions of Omu show clear sky overhead, so I don't think it is that hard to spot from the sky.

10. In Omu, I don't like the yuan-ti dungeon and the grung and etc. I am going to simplify it so that the yuan-ti are in the city, as is the dinosaur and the tabaxi hunters. The hunters could tell the group about the shrines.

11. Then the group must get the 9 puzzle cubes while dealing with yuan-ti ambushes and sudden rampages.

12. Ras Nsi has the last puzzle cube.

13. The group uses the puzzle cubes to enter the Tomb of the Nine Gods, and boom that's the rest of the adventure.

That's it! Not so bad, right? You are a rare breed. Most people don't want to be a DM! A lot of the joy of DMing is in reading an encounter and wondering what the group will do. It's so hard to guess! Frequently, what they do is really clever and hilarious.

I hope your game goes well. Good luck!

Episode 63: Bad Dates

• Follow the show live on twitter here 
• Order Tomb of Annihilation here 
• Season Two Dice, Camera, Action Episode Guide 
• Dice, Camera, Action on Reddit 
• The Reddit Dice, Camera, Action Index 
• The Dice, Camera, Action Youtube Playlist 
• Read up on the backstories of the Waffle Crew

Last week I was a bit confused when the person stumbled up to the group and gave them a mysterious warning. This is actually right out of the book. That was a priest of Savras, unless Chris switches it up for the show.

The Waffle Crew

(Anna) Evelyn - Human Paladin of Lathander
(ProJared) Diath - Human Rogue
(Nathan) Paultin - Human Bard
(Holly) Strix - Tiefling Sorcerer

Last time, the group used a ritual to summon three hags. The hags would show up over the course of three nights. On the first night, a hag rode them, spit in their mouths, and gave them horrible nightmares.

The next  morning, they awake. They are in an inn. Strix wants to use the kitchen to bake some stuff. She is allowed to do so, and she bakes three sinda berry pies. She takes hair from herself, Paultin and Diath, hoping the hags will just take the pies and leave.

The group buys supplies, including wine and insect repellent. Paultin wants a collar that lets him talk to dinosaurs, but he is informed that those do not exist.

In the streets of Port Nyanzaru, Simon is playing with a monkey. It seems to be leading him somewhere.

It leads Paultin and Simon into an alley. Ambush! Someone on the roof aims a crossbow at him. Paultin summons a waffle hut, creating a safe space for himself. Diath runs over the hut, vaults onto the roof and attacks the would-be assassin.

There's 2 assassins, each on a separate building. The female attacker shoots a poisoned bolt into him, but he makes his save vs. poison.

Diath is poisoned a moment later and he gains one level of exhaustion.. then another. That's bad.

Evelyn shows up and declares that there's nothing to see here, like Robocop. She proceeds to roll a 1 on the check to do this convincingly. The street erupts into chaos. A cart of snakes tips over. A guy explodes spontaneously. People panic and flee.

Paultin shuts off the hut and dimension doors to the roof. I tell you what, Nate is in the zone today. He tries to convince an attacker to stand down, but he is ignored.

Diath is now at level 4 exhaustion. Wait.. now it's level 5!! He has disadvantage on everything and his speed is zero! One more fail and he is dead, and I mean DEAD. The death curse prevents him from being raised!

Evelyn sees that Waffles has a basket stuck on her head. More assassins are climbing the walls up to the roof.

Seeing that Diath is in peril, Strix teleports in front of Diath to protect him. She tries to polymorph an assassin but they make their save.

Evelyn flies over and gives him Diath a lay on hands. She describes it like she's using a defibrillator: a "clear!", which is absolutely tremendous and how it should always be described. This cures the poison and gives him 20 hit points. The exhaustion is gone. Whew...


Diath stabs an assassin with Gutter. The assassin is bloodied. She sends a flying snake into the air and then she hits Strix twice, giving her 2 levels of exhaustion.

Diath has a bolt stuck in his back. He flexes and pops it out, which cracks me up.

Strix drops a level 5 fireball. A bunch of assassins are doing fancy scimitar moves and they die. There's 2 assassins left. One on this roof, the other on another roof fighting Strix's broom.

Paultin again tells the female assassin to stand down. He has advantage. 18! He's successful.

Wait.. a giant ice hand strikes her. Artus Cimber!

On the other roof, an assassin has been fighting Strix's broom. The assassin flees and the broom angrily shakes its non-existent fist. You get the feeling that this isn't over, not by a long shot.

The group spots an assassin on the ground holding Simon hostage. He has a hand over Simon's mouth.

This villain is a halfling wearing a black turban and a black veil, and he is riding a blue-painted velociraptor. He has a monkey on his shoulder. It's wearing a fez.


The halfling wants to make an exchange. Simon for the ring of winter. He asks to talk to somebody else and Jared dies laughing. "Are your parents home?"

Diath spots Artus up on a minaret 120 feet away. He signals for Artus to meet him halfway. Artus flies on his ice vulture and meets Diath on a roof.

Artus says they are the Zhentarim.

I had some technical difficulties and missed a bit of this.

The bad guys are gone

Artus says the Zhentarim will be back. He doesn't want to put them in danger. Artus is going to go into hiding, and he will introduce them to a friend of his who can guide them. Dragonbait?

Diath tells the group they did a good job.

That night, they meet a dinosaur man. Dragonbait! He smells like cooked ham. Now he smells like lemon.

That night, the hags return and it's gross. Fiath's hag has a bag on her head. The bag has a little hole in it. A chicken head pokes its head out for a moment and then retreats into the bag. Then a snake does the same.

The hags stuff sacks into the mouths of the heroes. The way Chris describes the bags, they sound like soul bags, which hags use to carry around evil souls.

They have so far ignored the pie.That's where we stop.

Overall

Very, very good show. It was mostly one big combat, but everyone was in such a good mood today that it was a ton of fun to watch. Nate in particular was great in every way. I have no idea what's going on with the hags and the bags. I guess we will find out next week!

The response to this show and my recent tomb articles has been really tremendous. Shawn Merwin actually spent a few minutes talking about my stuff on his podcast right here!

I've gotten a lot of words of encouragement, and I have a hard time responding in a way that doesn't sound trite. I just want you to know that I read every one and it really means a lot to me. Thank you!

Episode 4 is out! It's right here:


Running online games is weird. I get to watch myself DM?! I really cringed at the idea of it, but once I actually saw the results, it wasn't so bad.

I noticed a million little things I needed to fix up, and still am. On this episode, I saw myself repeatedly cutting off the players as they were about to say something. I get so intense about getting stuff done that sometimes I almost don't let them play D&D, which, obviously, is not good.

Solo Scenes: One reason I got antsy is because in my Planescape game, my players are more of the "sit back and enjoy the ride" types. These players aren't like that. They do more interacting and roleplaying.

On top of that, I tried to do a stylistic thing that I use often: I give each of character a lightning-fast solo scene. I wanted to have Zavagor do a thing with Kwayothe, Val have a flashback, and Mistletoe and Ramrod learn things about their stories.

But what happened was that when I rolled out the Zavagor solo thing, the whole group wanted to go and spy on him.

They had obtained the boon of Nangnang, which lets them walk on walls and ceilings, and rightly thought that the boon would help them in this scenario immensely.

What I envisioned as a 3-minute vignette turned into a 25-minute excursion.

Going forward, I have adjusted my planning. Instead of breaking up their stories into separate scenes, I'm going to try to do one scene that develops multiple stories at once.

Forgetting Stuff: Another thing that I'm noticing is that I need to be sharper. In my home games, if I forget something, who cares? But now if I make a mistake, I might confuse the people watching.

I forgot that the group gave Pock-Marked Po the oracle's eye. In this session, I ran it where the group still had it. I can just ret-con it and say that Po gave it back to the group after one of his daughters convinced him to do so, but that makes for a less than ideal show.

I need to make sure that I have the main story points lodged in my head. I'm always going to make mistakes, but I want to try and make sure I get the most important things right.

The Party

(Ryan) Mistletoe - Human Druid
(Garrett) Ramrod - Goliath Barbarian
(Annalise) Val - Tiefling Sorcerer
(Joe) Zavagor - Half-orc Warlock

The group was in the shrine of Nangnang. They figured out the altars and made their way into the central room.

My map guy was on fire for this dungeon.


He is in Puerto Rico and he says it is utter chaos there due to the hurricane. I haven't heard from him in a while and I hope he is OK.

Gem-Encrusted Undead: In the central room, gems animated adventurer corpses and they attacked. Zavagor targeted a gem embedded in the forehead of one of the creatures.

Disarming: Targeting a body part or thing in D&D has always been impossible to run in a consistent manner. In 2e, it was a -8 to hit. In 3e, I think disarming was a feat. In 4e, you pretty much just couldn't do it and if you did, it didn't really matter.

5e has some disarming stuff. I think a character in my Hoard of the Dragon Queen campaign had it and used it often.

It's something to account for when making your encounters. If you have a bad guy using a powerful item, the group will probably try to snatch it away. You don't want to block them on this every time, but you also don't want to let it ruin encounters, so it's a real delicate thing.

Generally I think that if you have a character who disarms, make some encounters where they can disarm like crazy, so that way on the rare times where the disarming will be blocked somehow (examples: item is chained to their wrist, item flies back to their hand, item is evil and damages anyone who touches it, etc) it won't feel so bad.

When the character almost never gets to disarm, and then has a major encounter when their disarm makes a huge difference, it really comes off bad when they can't do it.

If possible, work the disarming into the encounter. As in... this bad guy better be disarmed or the group is screwed. The bad guy is already a threat, but the item makes the encounter impossible!

So in my head, I thought "Well... let's see what he rolls. A critical or a power score means it definitely happens."

What is a Power Score? What's a power score? It's the name of my blog, but it's also a long-running joke in my old campaigns. It was a 2nd edition psionics rule. If you rolled exactly the number you needed, that's a power score, and it has special effects like a critical hit.

So in 4e, whenever somebody rolled exactly what they needed, I'd dramatically announce that they just got a power score, which meant absolutely nothing.

I named this blog "Power Score" as a joke, as in, "This blog is EXACTLY WHAT YOU NEED." Nobody knows that outside of about 12 people on the planet, though, so it's either a supreme in-joke or just a bad idea.

Anyway. Zavagor rolled a power score and BOOM, the gem shattered.

I'm trying to think of an actual effect for a power score in 5e. I'm going to try saying that when a hero rolls a power score, they get to do their "signature move." What is that? Whatever they want, but once they pick it, that's it.

Nangnang: Then I did this thing where the skulls in the walls "read" the souls of each character and transmitted it to Nangnang, whose spirit is trapped in the Tomb of the Nine Gods.

Basically I'm foreshadowing the fact that each hero is tied to a powerful, god-like entity and that those entities might block the trickster gods from inhabiting their bodies.

To tempt them, Nangnang granted them her boon (which is listed on the last page of the ToA book). The characters all gained the power to walk on walls and ceilings! They also felt a bit more selfish than normal. This will wear off in a day or two.

Ramrod loved it and started parkouring through the trees, rolling a natural 20 to do so.

The heroes returned to Port Nyanzaru and met with Pock-marked Po. They learned that he was the "beggar king", basically the head of a thieves guild/hobo support group. Things got a little tense. His daughters drew some poison daggers, but cooler heads prevailed.

Zavagor and Kwayothe

Zavagor's Girlfriend: Then the group went on the excursion to Kwayothe. Val snuck around on the ceiling. Ramrod and Mistletoe harassed a guard outside, and Zavagor met with Kwayothe. The group is now teasing Zavagor, telling him he has a girlfriend.

Kwayothe hates the Omuan royal line. She wants to run Port Nyanzaru and a rebuilt Omu, and because Zavagor is also connected to Eman, she thinks he's the only one she can trust.

Zavagor hates Eman and desperately wants to break the bond to her.

We stopped right when the group was about to go to the bath house, which I LOVE. That happens on episode 5, and it was utterly ridiculous.

One other thing I noticed. We're taking too long to get to the jungle. I want to be in the actual tomb by December. We won't get into the jungle until November, as the next 3 episodes will wrap up Port Nyanzaru (I want to do another dinosaur race).

I think I'm going to try to schedule a few bonus sessions, as I don't want to skip cool material just to make sure we're done by March.

Hopefully we can get that done. I'm cutting Omu down big time, because I don't like much of it, so basically we'll do the jungle and then jump into the tomb, which will be absolutely terrifying!

You can buy Ruins of Mezro right here.

We just finished playing part of Ruins of Mezro, a DMs Guild adventure by Will Doyle. This adventure was released as part of the Guild Adept program, where certain creators were allowed to make books linked to the Tomb of Annihilation.

In the Tomb of Annihilation book, Mezro is mentioned, but not detailed. This book describes Mezro, the creatures that inhabit it, ad the secrets it contains.

The book is broken up into 4 main sections:

1. A description of locations in Mezro.
2. A big list of encounters that could occur in the city.
3. Three adventures, each two pages long.
4. A pile of monster stats, including the living trap, which I love.

Player Stuff: There's a few things for players in here:

• Background: Heretic. There are a bunch of options as to what your heretical belief is. I like the one about the divine sphere of annihilation made by gods to kill mortal wizards. I also like the one about Waukeen and Graz'zt, a callback to For Duty and Deity.
• Cleric Domain: Entropy. You draw power from a divine sphere of annihilation. You gain advantage on death saves, have an aura that disrupts spellcasting and force exhaustion on spellcasters. Seems fun!

The Premise: The ruins of Mezro isn't the "real" Mezro. The real Mezro is safe in a pocket dimension, and it won't come back until Chult is a safe place.

The adventurers can go through these ruins and piece together what happened to Mezro, and they can also get clues that direct them to Omu.

Artus Cimber is looking to find a way to get to the real Mezro or to bring it back, but he hasn't been able to figure out how.His home is detailed in this book.

Factions: There are a bunch of groups exploring or inhabiting the city:

• Flaming Fist: 98 soldiers! They have a base and a tavern and everything.
• Cult of the Crocodile: This cult worships a mudmaw - a crocodile that can see the future.
• Cult of Entropy: Their leader has a sphere of annihilation!

Easy to Read: I usually have a hard time reading and preparing adventures, but I blew through this one in a few hours. It's very breezy and concise.

The Map: This adventure comes with a really awesome map of Mezro. There's a version to give to the players and is a big help.

Layout: This looks very good, very similar to the official books. It even has those weird green text boxes for certain sidebars.

The Monsters: I love the living trap! Love it. It's a really fun idea, and it definitely fits the whole theme of the Tomb of Annihilation.

The City: The locations are all very cool, but too sparse for my liking. You really can't run some of them out of the book. For example, there's a wizard college with shifting corridors, doors that lead to different rooms each time they're opened, and weird gravity that might have you walking on upside down stairs.

That sounds really cool, but there's no map, no room descriptions, nothing. The entropy cult is lurking in the college, in a room where "a large sphere of water hovers over a stony pit." Again, awesome idea, but what does that mean? What do I do with that?

When I buy an adventure, I want those details. For this wizard college, I would have liked a description of 4 rooms and more of an idea of where the cult is and how that encounter might go.

Treasure: One of the main draws of Mezro is supposed to be that there's tons of great treasure, but many times when the group comes to a spot with treasure, you're asked to roll on the DMG or the Tomb treasure charts. Again, I want that done for me. That's why I buy adventures!


Encounters: There are some good encounters on the big list. There are also a number of encounters that I think could have used a bit more pizzazz - some are more or less a list of monsters. The ones I pulled out:

• A hippo is stuck in mud, dinosaurs ambush those who try to help it.
• The living trap.
• The mazewalker looking to get into a holy place so that he can die.
• The triceratops babies.

Traits of Mezro: One of the coolest thing about Mezro is the weird magical effects. I think that if you run this, you might want to sit down and make a cheat sheet to refer to so you don't forget them. You should list:

• The cursed gold effect.
• The insects.
• What happens when you drink water.
• A reminder that the obelisks are outside most buildings (described on pg 26).
• What triggers wild magic.
• Notes on the special district effects (residential maze requires a group check, etc).

My Version: When I ran this, I chucked all of the factions. I love the idea of the city being a wild, overgrown, rarely-explored locale. I made up a demented pterafolk guy who thinks he is the ruler of Mezro and reveres the mudmaw.

One of the main stories here is that there's a statue of a king holding a tablet that contains vital clues on how to get to the real Mezro. This table was broken off and is missing. In the book, one of the cults took the tablet.


For my version, the crazy pterafolk guy did it. He used his sword Shatterspike (from Tales of the Yawning Portal) to slice off the arm holding the tablet. He knew people would want it, so he hid it. If they want to use it, they have to swear fealty to him and do things for him, first.

There's a really awesome location in the city - a ruined marketplace full of hundreds of zombies. My crazy pterafolk guy lodged the tablet into the torso of one of the zombies.

When I ran it, the group had to figure out how to get that tablet out of the marketplace without getting devoured by zombies. It involved a weasel and it was hilarious. You can never guess what player will do!

Overall: I like this book and I think most people will, too. You just have to keep in mind that this book is more of a sourcebook/toolkit. You will have to fill in some of the fine details. It is not hard to do.

So, if you're OK with that, you'll love this. If you're looking to run this right out of the book, definitely check out the preview first and make sure it's got enough for you to go with.

It took me about an hour to create my own version of Mezro, which really isn't long at all. Once I get the completed artwork, I'll post episode one of Ruins of Mezro on Youtube. Was a lot of fun!

We played some more Eberron yesterday. My sorcerer is now 11th level. I have disintegration!

In this one, we threw caution to the wind and drew a bunch of cards from the deck of many things. Then, I came very, very close to dying and we ended up in a really bad spot at the end.

Last time, we were about to be killed when our fighter used one of his deck of many things effects to wish it away.

We woke up.. the elder brain was gone. We survived! We made our way of the place, and appeared back in the far realm-touched house. We got a couple of keys and opened a treasure vault.

My character now has over 20,000 gold! Maybe I should gamble it on something. That would be fun. Is there a casino in Sharn?

The whole point of this was to get a harp for an NPC ally. It turns out that she wanted to use it to kill our party fighter! The first time we drew from the deck, the fighter and I both drew the "rogue" card, which means an NPC out there has magically been compelled to try to destroy us.


So we're in our bar (which hasn't opened yet, but will soon) and she uses the harp to summon the ghost of her dad. The ghost tries to kill the fighter. Our wizard tackled the NPC and beat her with a quarterstaff until she was unconscious. The fighter began battling the ghost-thing.

I grabbed the harp, ran outside and flung into the air. Then I cast fireball on it. This damaged the harp and the ghost. I couldn't believe the harp was still intact!

I looked around. There's this warforged who has a hot dog cart that we've made friends with a while back. I stuck the harp in the boiling hot dog water and yelled for every that it was going to blow. Then I fireballed the cart and boom, the harp was destroyed. The ghost vanished.

From there, we had no idea what to do with this NPC. The magic of the card was continually going to compel her to try to kill the fighter. Only a wish spell or divine intervention could end the effect. We actually still had a wish from our previous draws, but I thought it was a waste of a wish.

We threw around a bunch of ideas and somehow we settled on using the deck of many things to try to get another wish. Our wizard, who is very level-headed, really hated the idea but we out-voted her.

So... I started out with wanting to draw just one card. I declared that I was "due" for a good one. I drew... the Fool. I lost XP and had to draw another card.

Guess what that card was? Rogue! I now had another NPC enemy out there in Eberron. It was hilarious and horrible.

The fighter decided to try. ROGUE! I swear! The deck was shuffled immensely! How is this possible?! Now the fighter has another secret enemy.

I can't remember who drew the next two, as it was utter chaos. But wither the fighter or I drew another card: ROGUE. ANOTHER ROGUE.

I think I drew again, desperate to dig us out of this hole as the wizard pointed out that she thought this was a terrible idea from the start.

I drew.... The Fool. Again! Lost XP, had to draw one more card. I drew: Fates.

The fates allows you to ask a question from an otherworldy entity and get an answer. I asked about removing the effect on our NPC friend and didn't learn too much except that one of my 'rogue' enemies is Corellon, god of the elves! Correllon wants to kill me!

Once we calmed down from all that stuff, we decided to finally bite on an adventure hook that had been dangled in front of us for a year. We had dinner with some government officials. This turned into the sidekick of the evil of Sharn crashing the party and having a meeting with us.

This is apparently one of the leaders of Daask

Here's the deal:

• Our senator friend has contracted a rare illness.
• The bad guys can cure her if we do something for them.
• The back guys want to abduct an alchemist who is hiding out with Daask (I didn't read this link because I don't want spoilers, but I thought you might be interested).
• Our job is to create a distraction so that the bad guys can abduct the alchemist.

We left and told them we'd need a few hours to decide. After much debate, we agreed that this was a set-up but that we should just go and see what happens. We also agreed that we were going to make ridiculous demands for compensation.

We went back. I demanded an airship. I had settle for repairing a crashed one. My character was an airship pilot in the Last War, so my character has a thing for airships. The wizard was granted access to the secret archives of Sharn. I don't remember what the fighter got.

There are a bunch of ways to get to the underground lair of House Daask. We used a door that ended up being guarded by a roper. That roper grabbed me and bit me, dropping me to about half my hit points in a few rounds. We killed it and went inside.

There was 8 teleporting hobgoblin monks in here. We nearly had a TPK. I actually went down and was given a potion of healing, so I currently have 7 hit points. We haven't even gotten to the place we're going yet! I still have spells, but one hit and I'm down! We don't have a healer and potions of healing are illegal in the city.

That's where we stopped! Was awesome. The deck adds so much to D&D, it's really fun. I love random effects. I know it's not for everybody, but if I'm a player, I always want those as a part of the game.

Episode 64: In Guide We Trust

• Follow the show live on twitter here 
• Order Tomb of Annihilation here 
• Season Two Dice, Camera, Action Episode Guide 
• Dice, Camera, Action on Reddit 
• The Reddit Dice, Camera, Action Index 
• The Dice, Camera, Action Youtube Playlist 
• Read up on the backstories of the Waffle Crew

Today we have a special guest. It is Geoff Robinson, Anna's husband. This episode starts slow but gets really fun once they hit the jungle of Chult.

(Anna) Evelyn - Human Paladin of Lathander
(ProJared) Diath - Human Rogue
(Nathan) Paultin - Human Bard
(Holly) Strix - Tiefling Sorcerer
(Geoff) Chumba - Batiri Goblin

Last time, the hags visited the group at night again, pushing black sacks down their throat. We pick up during that creepy visit. Evelyn sees the hags. They think she's an inanimate object. She tells them not to touch the pies. She wakes up the group and the hags disappear.

The next day, Umbril, the half-orc woman they met last time, introduces the heroes to a goblin. That's Geoff's character, Chumba. He is Umbril's steward.

Umbril is a cleric of Torm and a member of the Order of the Gauntlet.

Chumba is afraid of dolls, so Evelyn and Simon freak him out. Simon tries to hug him and he flees. Simon chases him outside. Chumba collides with Dragonbait, the mute dino-man who communicates through odor.

Umbril says the group will be heading toward a river, and she buys some canoes.

During the last long rest, Strix lost a max hit point due to the death curse.

The group goes to Old City (a section of Port Nyanzaru with ziggurats and bamboo huts) and sees some hanging corpses attracting flies.

Evelyn busts out her D&D My Little Pony dice.

The group comes to executioner's run, where criminals are punished. A man is about to be thrown into a 20-foot-wide, 200-foot-long trench with dinosaurs. A man in the crowd cries out that the victim is innocent. In he goes. Raptors close in on him.

Diath throws some rocks at the raptors. He's drunk.

Strix dimension doors into the pit. Evelyn, Strix, Paultin and Chumba end up in the pit as the raptors chase the prisoner.

Strix casts silent image in front of Paultin. The image is of a big, scarier velociraptor. Evelyn uses magic to chat up the dinosaurs. She tries to make friends and distract them.

Suddenly, a horn and gong sounds all throughout the city. People begin to panic and run for the gates. Umbril says that undead must be attacking the other side of the city.

Dragonbait exudes a bunch of odors, and then indicates that the group should run into the jungle.

Paultin shocks the group when he casts fly and soars out of the pit. Nobody had any idea he could do that! This is another one of those shows where Nate is at 105%. He's becoming really fun to watch.

Everyone can fly except Diath. Strix wants to polymorph Diath into a vulture so he can fly, but Diath doesn't want that.

The group heads into the jungle. Things become more dense and Dragonbait has to use his sword to carve a path big enough for the canoes, which are being carried, to fit through.

They come to cliffs overlooking a great misty bay. Diath realizes that they are being followed... they smell death.

Suddenly, gray-skinned ghouls pile out of the forest and come at them in a wave of claws and teeth.
Anna's pony annihilation dice deliver with a natural 20 on initiative.

Chumba attacks and rolls a critical. Evelyn pummels the undead and then Diath draws Gutter and backstabs a ghoul, destroying it.

Paultin draws the sunsword! Nate points out that the chat had absolutely nothing to do with him using it. He destroys a ghoul with it.

A ghoul slashes Diath. Is he paralyzed from the claws? Yes!

Fight over. Diath shakes off the paralyzation and decides he hates Chult.

The ghouls had blue triangles on their foreheads. Strix knows that the triangle is the symbol of Ras Nsi, the evil warlord who waged war on Chult centuries ago. In his day, he used an army of undead to attack the city of Mezro.

It's getting dark out. Paultin summons the waffle hut for the group to cuddle in for the night. When the hut appears, a red silk robe also appears on Paultin.

The group worries that the hags will come back, but have no choice but to go to sleep. Evelyn does not sleep, because since she is a construct, she doesn't need sleep except to recharge spells.

The hags show up in spectral form  and ride the group... guh...Chris goes with a very explicit description. The hags slice open Diath, Paultin and Strix from chest to groin. They pull out the sack sand retrieve a maggot-like worms that are 5 feet long. Soul larvae!?

Soul larvae from the Savage Tide adventure path

The larvae are placed in each hero's chest cavity and sewn back up.

We learn that Diath, Paultin and Strix now each have a second soul - an evil soul locked in their bodies. If they were to die, the Soulmonger could take that soul instead. So... if Evelyn dies...? Makes me nervous.


That's where we stop!

No game next week - they're getting ready for TwitchCon. TwitchCon on Sunday, there will be a live Dice Camera Action game. Geoff will be there playing Chumba, and a second special guest.

Lots of stuff going on in Youtubeland!

You can watch this episode here:


I taped an episode of Ruins of Mezro with a new group of players. They were great! We're taping episode 2 tomorrow. I need to get one or two more pieces of art and then episode one will go up.

I also taped episode one of Return of the Lizard King with another group of new players. They also were tremendous - an entire group of spellcasters! It was terrifying. They were 1st level! Return of the Lizard King is broken up into four parts.

We played through the first one, and it is really, really good.It is formatted more like a Pathfinder adventure, which I love. It has couple of really cool NPCs in it, including the Queen of Creeping Vines.

This episode of Tomb was taped a couple of weeks ago. We're about to tape episodes 6-7 on Saturday, which hopefully will wrap up the Port Nyanzaru stuff and we can get into the Jungle of Chult. I love Port Nyanzaru and I have so many ideas for stuff to do that I hate to throw in the garbage. Plus, who knows when we'll even get to do dinosaur racing again, so I feel like we should do it as much as possible now before moving on.

I was excited about running this one, because I got to use the Bath House from Encounters in Port Nyanzaru. The bath house was my favorite scenario in that book. I changed it quite a bit to suit my goofy story, so it's a bit spoiler-y, but fairly different from what's in the book.

The heroes had won passes to the bath house. They'd have the place all to themselves.

The Party

(Ryan) Mistletoe - Human Druid
(Garrett) Ramrod - Goliath Barbarian
(Annalise) Val - Tiefling Sorcerer
(Joe) Zavagor - Half-orc Warlock

When they got there, they were informed that they'd need to leave their weapons in the locker room. They were issued bathing attire: old-timey bathing suits.

I did the bathing suits that way just to be on the safe side, as some people might not like detailed descriptions of banana hammocks or whatever. I'm trying to take the Larry David approach to these youtube games - tackle adult topics in a polite way. Like the episode of Seinfeld where they had the masturbation contest. The word "masturbation" was never uttered, but they still told the story. It's a fun creative challenge.

There are 4 baths in the bath house. Each grants a special effect, such as 10 temporary hit points and things like that. There's also magic juices that dole out the effect of potions! Potion of haste, potion of giant strength, all sorts of stuff.

There's a water elemental guarding this place. There's no running! If you move more than half your speed in a round, the water elemental comes after you.

My water elemental was a crabby water-dude who was in charge of making the juices. He was extremely intense about the "no running" thing. The group immediately began to troll him, moving 14.9 feet in a round, taking 5 rounds to walk 15 feet, all sorts of stuff. The water elemental was furious but was contractually obligated to do nothing until they broke the rules.

Zavagor drank a juice that gave him a 21 strength for an hour. Boom, he bulked up instantly, look at that striation! Pecs, chest, give it to us!

That's when the bad guys entered. While the adventurers were bathing, the Green Vipers broke in, went into the locker room and stole the group's two pieces of the dreamer's amulet. The vipers had obtained one piece on their own, so now there's only one piece left to be found.

Jim Crank hates Ramrod, so he jumped into Ramrod's pool and started stabbing away with his two poisoned daggers. Ramrod flipped out and started drowning him.

Deidre the Slinker popped out of the shadows. A session or two ago, Val had devastated her in a battle of wits with: "What's the matter? Cat got your tongue?"

Deidre had brought a list of witty rejoinders, so she started rattling them off. Val was in a salt bath. Val... right off the top of her head, responds to a jab with: "Don't be so salty."

The players began waving their arms in the air, which seems to be our group's way to declare verbal devastation.

Ledarius slid into the pool and got angry when the group wouldn't feed into his catchphrase. They are supposed to ask him: "What are you doing here?" so he can answer with a shrug, "Just vipin'".

Nara got in Mistletoe's hot tub and he successfully hit on her. They pretty much came to an agreement that they'd work together on this whole death curse thing.

Nara mentioned that agents of Cheliax are coming. Cheliax is from Pathfinder - it's a kingdom of devil worshipers. I plan on running a 5e version of Hell's Rebels at some point in in the future, so I'm starting to work that stuff in now.

In my campaign, the hell knights of Cheliax will take the place of the Red Wizards in Tomb of Annihilation. I have been working out their leader's voice and quirks. Right now, his name is Heinrich Von Pummel, but that might change.

As Zavagor tried to stop Ramrod from killing Jim Crank, who of course was rolling really low, Ladarius asked Val out on a date and she said yes! I'll have to work that in to one of the next two sessions.

That's where we stopped. The group had more or less trounced the Vipers and had their froghemoth, Hoppy blocking the exit. The group will likely get their pieces of the dreamer's amulet back next time.

Great session!

You can buy Argol's Comprehensive Guide to Infrastructure right here.

Today we'll take a look at a DMs Guild product that focuses on building settlements and fortresses in a D&D campaign.

This is something I've been interested in from my firt campaign. One day, the group sat down and mapped out their sections of the keep they had decided to have built. This became Moonstone Keep, which still stands in my setting today.

In my current Planescape campaign, the heroes own three businesses, a mansion in Sigil and two mansions in the Elemental Plane of Earth. I came up with a vague system to track their income and expenses, but it' pretty shabby.

This book goes into great detail, outlining a very deep system that allows your group to grow a settlement or structure all the way through their adventuring careers. Many times, groups end up with lots of gold and nothing to do with it. This book gives them something very cool to put their wealth into.

The first question I had is: "Who's Argol?" The author told me that Argol is one of his D&D characters. I like when people present their own iconic D&D creations, that's one of the fun things about the DM's Guild.

There's a list of different types of settlements. As an example, a hamlet is 2 farms, 10 homes, 2-4 market stalls, 2 mines, and adequate defenses. This will house 40-80 citizens.

If you want to start building a place, you buy a plot of land. You pay for it using build points", an abstract way to select types of places you want to build.

There are level requirements mixed in. You must be 4th level to own a settlement, 8th level to run a hamlet (which costs 10,000 gp, aka 10 build points), and 18th level to run a large city (which would cost 55,000 gp).

It costs 1,000 gp for a build point. My character, Endarian Nimbus, has over 20,000 gp, so I could buy a big pile of these. He's 11th level, so he could get himself a village, which is 12,500 gp and requires 10th level.

The village has 350-1500 citizens, 85 homes, and each home has an average of 2 adults and 1 child.

You'll need to pick rulers. I imagine the group would have some NPC friends they could put in charge, or they themselves could do it. Your settlement could have barons, mayors, a senate, whatever they want.

Then we enter the construction phase, where you'll determine what you're making and how long it takes to get all of this built.

There's an optional rule for "town satisfaction". If the group hasn't paid for maintenance on the town, there's a chance it' a ghost town or overrun by bandits.

There are tons of details on how to handle merchants, guilds, and farms. It's got lists of types and the benefits of having them.

You can buy an "immense" plot of land. Building a megadungeon costs 450,000 gp! You're probably better off clearing out a dungeon and just taking it for yourself, right? This book seems to define a mega-dungeon as an underground dwarven fortress, not Undermountain.

The construction time on a mega-dungeon is 8 years! Building a mansion takes 1.5 years.

There's a page of things to add to your mansion, like a library, a greenhouse, or a wine cellar.

Hey... what's this?! "Adultery Based Entertainment"?? In my Planescape campaign, the characters own and operate three such establishments. The description goes over the benefits and elements involved with having these sorts of places in your settlement. Unfortunately, there's no amusing list of adult boutiques and services.

Towards the end of the book, there's a chart of influential events. Part of this system involves tracking your group's influence. This can go into the negatives. If the group hits -100 influence, you roll on the "banes" chart.

Banes include the murder of a visiting political figure, an outbreak of disease, a riot, or a natural disaster.

When the group hits +100 influence, they roll on the "boons" chart. Boons include baby boom, peace, gold rush, arcane wellspring (magic becomes abundant!), or you gain a wonder of the world.

It says that you roll on this chart whenever there is some kind of change, like an invasion or a political shift.

Overall

This book is very well-made. It looks very much like the Player's Handbook, right down to the charts and sidebars.

The system is very deep. It's not something you'd do in 5 minutes per session, its a system that is going to be a big part of the campaign. It's definitely not just an expansion of the downtime business rules.

I think this guide should have a one page summary or outline as to how the whole thing works, as I got a little confused about when to do things and how exactly I determine an influence score.

I love the events, they seem like they could drive a whole campaign.

Basically, if your group is into number crunching, they'll like this a lot. It seems like this type of campaign really isn't done nearly as much as it should be, so it's definitely worth checking out!

You can buy this right here.

DrivethruRPG has been slowly rolling out new print versions of old D&D products. I always keep my eyes peeled for Planescape stuff. It's been painfully slow going, so far.

I saw that they actually took one of the old Planescape boxed sets and put it all in one giant book! I was very intrigued. Those old sets come with 5-6 booklets and around 6 poster maps.Would they include the maps? Would the page numbering be all weird?

I ordered it on Thursday, and it got here today (Tuesday). Very fast!

The boxed set is called Planes of Chaos. It details the chaotic-aligned planes like the Abyss, Limbo, Pandemonium, stuff like that. Way back when, I was a kid with very little money. I went to the store one day with enough cash to buy either Planes of Chaos, Planes of Conflict, or Planes of Law. I didn't even blink. I bought Planes of Law. I've always loved the idea of using lawful good entities as the antagonists. Traditional evil villains are boring to me.

I did eventually get Planes of Chaos, and it is very good.

So, how is it in book form? It's awesome. If you have any interest in this at all, buy it! It's $20! The original price of the boxed set was $30, if I remember correctly.

This book is huge! Bigger than the 5e PH!
  
One of my favorite things about these old Planescape books is that they're loaded with art. Tons and tons of DiTerlizzi stuff. It's mind-boggling.

A few months ago, I bought another DriveThruRPG Planescape book - Faces of Sigil. I didn't like the spine on that one. It just didn't look right. The spine on this one looks perfectly fine. It's got the Planescape font and everything.

I love this thing, but there are nits to pick. Again, this is the easiest thumbs up ever, but this book is not perfect. There's a few things to point out.

Border: These are made from scans of books. The original books had no border. For some reason, there's a white margin/border around most of the pages. Why? It looks crappy.

Contrast: The page scans are inconsistent. Some pages have very dark text, while others have very light text. I think this would have had to been fixed in the initial scanning phase. You can fix this in photoshop, but going page by page would be very tedious.

It's very noticeable, though. Some of the art is too faint. You can fix it in about 20 seconds in photoshop, so it's a bit of a bummer. As an example, here's one of the ones that are too dark/black:

Page Spreads: They put the poster maps on two-page spreads, which I found to be a pleasant surprise. But.. Because of the binding, the middle of the map is hard to see without tearing your book in half.

I don't really know what else they could have done, though. It must be expensive to print poster maps..? I would have been happy if they made poster maps of just the useful game stuff and stuck the black and white city art in the book, but I assume printing poster maps would make this much more expensive.

It is weird seeing a booklet back cover in the book.

Those posters maps came folded up in the original boxed set, so a scan will have creases. They did a pretty good job removing the crease lines, but some are still quite visible. This is another thing you can clear up in photoshop with the clone tool in about 5 minutes.

Surprise: For some reason, there's a Mystara hex map in the back of the book.


Mistake? It looks like they had a few pages to fill. Too bad they couldn't have put some cool obscure Planecape thing in there to fill up the space. Concept art, notes from the authors, old Planescape articles from Dragon Magazine, that kind of thing. They could have put that Monte Cook "Infernal Fortresses" article in here, as that directly expands on the Abyss material.

Overall


Aside from some ultimately minor presentation issues, this thing is awesome. The 5e DMG doesn't have a lot of info on the planes! This gives you a TON of material to use, complete with a big pile of adventure scenarios. There's a lot of new monsters, too. Really great book! Definitely check it out.

The new episode is up right here:

We just taped this on Saturday. It was a good session. The next one was great, IMO.

The plan for this episode was to have the group meet Aremag, the dragon turtle in an encounter right out of the Tomb book. Then they were going to go to zombie Island and explore a shrine of Kubazan, one of the nine trickster gods.

I took some rooms from Cellar of Death - traps that I really liked. Then the actual shrine was a way for me to start secretly "helping" the group survive the actual Tomb of the Nine Gods.

Secret Rule: I have a rule of thumb that I applied to this session. "Until it is said out loud at the table, it doesn't exist." So, by the time the group got to the shrine, I was well aware that this was taking too long, so I took the trap rooms out.

I do this all the time. I chuck stuff for a variety of reasons, usually because of time issues, or if it feels like it doesn't fit the moment. I'm pretty sure we've all had that feeling sometimes where you observe the mood of the group, and you can tell that if you use a certain encounter/monster/NPC right now, they'll love it. On other occasions, you look at what's ahead and you realize that the game is dragging a bit so you chuck it.

That's a tough tightrope to walk, because sometimes you're wrong! Once in awhile, I defy those instincts and it turns out the group loves the thing I was about to cut.

I remember running a DCC RPG adventure. There was a part in it where everyone was supposed to wear a paper mask in real life and roleplay some weird situation. I thought it was stupid and might make people feel self-conscious - we were playing in a game store, a public space. I didn't use it. When we got to that part, I mentioned it. The group unanimously groaned and wished I had kept it in!

You won't always make the right call, but in situations like that, you can fix the mistake. You can include it in a subsequent session. So in the end, it's not that a big a deal, and I think you should go with your instincts most of the time.

The Party

(Ryan) Mistletoe - Human Druid
(Garrett) Ramrod - Goliath Barbarian
(Annalise) Val - Tiefling Sorcerer
(Joe) Zavagor - Half-orc Warlock

The group sailed to Zombie Island. Along the way, Aremag demanded the toll.


Last time we had played, a pirate had bet Ramrod that he couldn't beat Aremag in a fight. Ramrod is very impulsive. He charges into everything. Planning this, I knew there was a chance he'd actually attack Aremag, and I planned accordingly. To my surprise, he didn't attack. You never know what a player will do!

The heroes got to Zombie Island. Their pirate friends went one way, and the group went another. The adventurers had heard of a froghemoth shrine that was on this island, and seeing how they travel with an albino froghemoth, their interest was piqued.

Quick Encounters: I had them spot a lone zombie up ahead. I used this a a tool to familiarize them with a thing I do to speed up encounters that are nonessential. I just ask, "What do you do?" They do it. They roll. The end. It's sort of like a cutscene in a telltale game, where you make a choice and then there's a different result if you pass/fail. So if a hero ran up and hacked it and missed, the zombie would attack them. If the hero hit, the zombie would explode or whatever I had in mind.

During the 6 years that I think of as "the grind", when I ran 2-3 sessions of D&D per week, I started to sharpen my sense of what's really important. What is it that makes a session boring? In my opinion, what makes a session boring is wasted time at the table. One such timewaster is non-essential encounters. A random encounter on a road is a waste of time unless it's a very fun and unique situation, or there are interesting stakes involved.

If you're walking on a road and three zombies lurch out of the forest, that's pretty boring. But, if there's a little kid in a tree and the three zombies are underneath the tree reaching for the kid, that's better. If the tree branch is breaking, that's IMO a worthy encounter. That's adventure, to me.

I know everybody has a different style. I know lots of groups who thoroughly enjoy an evening full of combat encounters. There is a lot of fun to be had in taking on a series of combats and trying to gain XP, get loot, and survive!

It is fun when you know you can't get a rest and you only have so many spells and hit points. It gets very thrilling when you're low on everything and one more tough creature comes at the group. That's fun! That's scary!


Long Sessions: In my experience, that kind of session requires a large chunk of time. I am done with 6 hour sessions of D&D. You don't need it! People have a hard time opening up their schedule to fit 6 hours in, and those 6 hour sessions can be a real drag. Boring! Excruciating, even! You look at the clock and you still have 3 more hours? If you're not into the scenario, then D&D stops being fun and starts to feel like a chore.

As a player, I can handle a handle 6 hour session if it's something that I consider relevant. If a DM wants to run Tomb of Horrors for me and a group, hell yes I'll sit there for 6 hours! I know that it's not going to be boring. It's going to be a harrowing, scary, thrilling, hilarious experience! I'll be excited to see what the next room is, and I'll be frantically trying to scope out tricks and traps in advance.

But when it's a session that drags or the DM clearly hasn't prepared enough for... I just want to go home.

To get a lot done in 2 hours, you need to trim all the BS. Everything needs to be streamlined and the group needs to run like a well-oiled machine. The two hours will fly by.

OK. Tangent over!


The Shrine of Kubazan: I stuck 10 zombies in front of the shrine. In my head, I was ready to be open to any clever idea the group had to get the zombies out of the way. I was also aware that Ramrod might charge them.

I had become tuned in to a potential issue in this campaign. Ramrod charges at everything, and it is going to get him killed! This is a conscious choice by the player, so I'm trying to find a balance between not being too harsh while being fair and realistic. If you charge 10 zombies, they're going to swarm you, right?

I honestly feel like if the rest of the group doesn't become prepared for Ramrod's foolhardiness, he's going to die. So I'm starting to place encounters of varying degrees of deadliness and giving them room to adjust.

Ramrod did charge these 10 zombies. The group was able to use gusts of wind to send the zombies tumbling down a hill, basically saving Ramrod from death. That was one test, one "easy mode" test where I gave them a lot of leeway to save him.

Then the group went into the shrine. I deleted the trap rooms and they went right to the shrine of Kubazan.

Preparing for the Tomb: I am really worried about the group going through the Tomb of the Nine Gods. They're going to die! If I was a player, I would die if I went through it. It's really deadly and there are things that do a lot of damage. 

What I'm going to do is sort of "preview" some of the rooms when I can fit it in a way that makes sense. This shrine of Kubazan is an altered version of the actual shrine of Kubazan in the tomb (on page 97, I believe). It involves making offerings and using a frog mask.

In this case, I took the death-trap Kubazan shrine in the tomb, and created a non-deadly version of it. Now the group is familiar with what they'll have to do when they get to page 97 much later on in the campaign, and if they think back to this, they'll have a lot of clues that will help them survive.

I plan on doing this a lot. I think it's a fair way to help them without flat-out cheating or altering the rooms to make them safer.

So the group makes offerings to Kubazan, and a "spirit shard" of Kubazan posses Hoppy, the group's froghemoth. He tells them about the trickster gods, Acererak, the puzzle cubes and the Tomb of the Nine Gods.

He gave them the boon of Kubazan, which will last for a few days. The heroes each have a 23 strength! I like the boons and I just thought it would be fun to sprinkle them through the city and jungle sections of the adventure.


On the way back to the pirate ship, the group heard screams. 30 zombies had surrounded two pirate NPCs, one of which is the group's friend, Punchin' Pearl Smitty. The idea here was to drive home the idea of the death curse. If Pearl dies here, she's dead, period. If the group can't get rid of the death curse, their friend cannot be brought back!

The group was on a cliff 30 feet above the zombie horde. What did Ramrod do? He jumped down into the horde! Now I was thinking.. he might die here for good. What can you do? Let's just play it out and see what happens. One pirate NPC died. Pearl went down and was dying.

Mistletoe climbed down and used gust of wind to make space, pushing zombies back. Val teleported into the horde to try to save Pearl. She was immediately dropped to 0 hit points!

Now I was looking at a potential TPK! Yikes. Hoppy the froghemoth jumped down and squashed 4 zombies.

The Indiana Jones Rule: Zavagor swung down on a rope, letting out a wave of flame as he swung by the horde. For this one, I used another of my little rules. "If it is awesome, it happens." Rolls are merely to determine how awesome it is.

So, in one round, he tied a rope around his waist, the other end around a tree, swung down on the rope and cast a spell. Deciding how far to bend the rules is very tricky, but players love it so much and it tends to electrify the game when done in moderation.

I want my game to be like Indiana Jones movies. If somebody does something Indiana Jones-y, I'm going to bend over backwards for them. Not all the time, but when it feels right.

A zombie clamped down on Mistletoe's ear. Zavagor's momentum swung him back. Mistletoe grabbed on and swung with Zavagor up to the safety of the cliff. The zombie bit off part of Mistletoe's ear. Later, the pirates made him a wooden peg-ear.

I allowed the group to plow through zombie squares. It happens in zombie movies, and the group has a 23 strength, so what the heck. Ramrod picked up Val and Pearl. He ran through the horde, taking quite a few attacks of opportunity. He was able to outrun the horde. Val rolled a natural 20 on her death save! She reached across and stabilized Pearl.

That's when the group realized that Hoppy was alone in the middle of the horde, getting swarmed! That's where we stopped.

Good session! The next one is another dinosaur race, where I tested my new rules. It went great!

You can buy this right here.

I was poking around on the DMs Guild and this one popped out at me. I love the cover! I took a look and saw that it had.. stuff... that I might be able to use in Tomb of Annihilation. It's only $2, so what the heck, right?

Short Version: I'd recommend this to anybody running Tomb of Annihilation or any jungle adventure. I really like it. If you want a massive pile of items, seeds and ideas, you most definitely want to buy this, no question! 

Pricing: This book is 20 pages long. How do you, the reader, feel about the price? Is $2 too low? DCC RPG adventures are about 20 pages long, are in black and white, and sell for $8. I, personally, think that Jungle Goodies could have been priced higher. $4? $5?

I know there's a ton of products out there on the DM Guild site, but generally it feels like people underestimate their own value.

Sideways: I put part of my pdf reader in the title image for a reason. This book is widescreen! It's not 8.5 x 11, it's sized similar to the 4e Dragon and Dungeon online magazines. On the one hand, it feels really wrong to me. I like books that are book-sized. On the other hand, it makes sense. Most of us are going to look at this on a computer, right?

They also included a print version, so you can do your thing.

The book is full of charts and lists. Here's a rundown of each one. I'm trying not to spoil too many, but I am spoiling some so you can get an idea of what's in here.

Animal Bits: There are some cool ideas in this one. Boots made of snakeskin that seems to shift when looked at. A black claw in a small glass dome! Some are a bit too vague for me.

Art Objects: Tremnendously useful! The values seem a bit high, but that's easil fixed. I've always found it very difficult to come up with art objects. LOVE this one: Inside a vase is studs of amber that contain ancient insects. ou could do tons of cool stuff with that one. Are they still alive? Did they suck the blood of some ancient entity (such as Ubtao) that might afford you magical properties? There's too more that I love, but I don't want to spoil too much.

Found in the Tavern: Some fun items in this. A dead, coiled snake that serves as a drink container. A giant flytrap in a bar that eats insects and rodents, keeping the place clean. Love that one!

Gifts from Nature: This one is really tremendous. Preparing the jungle for my campaign, I'm trying to come up with different fruits and foods for the group to find when foraging each day. I am going to use every single one of these!

Primitive Tools: I'm not sure how much I'd use these. I don't plan on using the grung or other more "civilized" places in Chult. I think my favorite tool is the bamboo blowpipe that shoots cactus spines.

Recovered from the Library: This stuff could be placed in a merchant prince library, the ruins of Mezro or Omu. These are a bit too vague for my liking.

Relics of a Lost Civilization: Some of these are good. I would have liked more concrete ties to Omu. I love the clay tablet with the star map, which seems like a great way to direct the heroes to the lost city of Omu. I also like the sarcophagus that might link to some other realm.

Storage Solutions: Man, these are tremendous! This is the kind of stuff I have a hard time coming up with. A hollowed-out iridescent beetle as a trinket box! A chest made from a preserved, hollowed-out mimic?! That's fantastic! I love this list, can't wait to use it. These are actually more closely tied to the actual Tomb of Annihilation book, really good stuff.

Weapons and Armor: Again, fantastic. These little details will set your campaign apart and make it feel special. A spear inlaid with thousands of petrified spiders?! I am surprised they didn't make a dinosaur skull helm. Maybe it was too obvious?

Weird Magic: More treasures! Some are a bit too vague to be useful. My favorite is the small ivory frog with emerald eyes that produce light similar to a torch.

Adventure Hooks: Tomb of Annihilation is so full of hooks and mini-adventures that I won't need this. I think they should have named the NPCs in this one to throw the DM a bone. The elderly wizard seeking the lost mage college can be linked directly to the college in Ruins of Mezro. I love the hook where a woman hires the heroes to go get her severed leg back from the beast that tore it off.

Hazards: Non-monster stuff to encounter in the jungle! Very, very useful. This one is very classic: A swift-moving stream that has stepping stones that you can use to cross. You can do a million fun things with this.

Locations: Woo! Check this out. A shrine made from the remains of a dragon turtle. Those who live in it are trying to animate the corpse! There's more really, really good ones, but I don't want to spoil it.

NPCs: Again, I wish they had named these people. Very good, though. I love the druid with the vine tattoos. I will try to work that in to my campaign.

Strange Creatures: These feel unnecessary. There's a billion monsters to use in tomb, and none of these really jump out at me. I do like the dragon hawk and the water elemental/beholder/thing.

Overall

I think that this is extremely useful and will really enhance your campaign. It's always better for the group to discover a spear with petrified spiders affixed to it rather than "a spear." It goes the extra mile and helps make the world feel fully-fleshed out, and should get the players imaginations revving up.

I would have preferred one more sentence of detail on many of the entries. I think that it is better to have too much information than not enough. I can toss aside the info I don't like but, if there's too little info, I'm stuck doing work that I am hoping this book will do for me.

I personally would have liked it if they directly tied more of the items to the stuff in Tomb of Annihilation. In almost every chart, there's one or two things screaming for it! it's up to the reader to connect the dots, though.

Highly recommended!

Episode 65: Bait and Twitch

• Follow the show live on twitter here 
• Order Tomb of Annihilation here 
• Season Two Dice, Camera, Action Episode Guide 
• Dice, Camera, Action on Reddit 
• The Reddit Dice, Camera, Action Index 
• The Dice, Camera, Action Youtube Playlist 
• Read up on the backstories of the Waffle Crew

This is a live show that was held at TwitchCon 2017. There are two guest stars: Geoff Robinson and Ross, Holly's husband.

Game Grumps is starting an online D&D game, which Jared is DMing and Holly is playing in. Being woefully out of touch, I've never watched Game Grumps before, so I checked it out. They did a playthrough of one of my favorite video games of all time - Shadow of the Colossus.

I watched the final hour of it because I wanted to see their reaction to some things that happen near the end of the game, which legit made me cry in real life.

The one player was suitably weepy, and I was most pleased. Seems like a fun show!

There were major technical difficulties with this stream, so we only really get to see the last half hour. That half hour is very good, so it's worth checking out.

(Anna) Evelyn - Human Paladin of Lathander
(ProJared) Diath - Human Rogue
(Holly) Strix - Tiefling Sorcerer
(Geoff) Chumba - Batiri Goblin
(Ross) Wumba - Batiri Goblin

The group is in the Jungle of Chult. They're trying to end the death curse, which is slowly killing three members of the party. Last time, they were visited by the Sewn Sisters, who gave them a second soul. This should save them if they die - the second soul will be drawn into the Soulmonger.

The group travels for 3 days down a river. Waffles runs on the shore to follow. Evelyn flies next to the boat.

They spot a wukka nut tree. Wukka nuts glow.

We miss a bunch of stuff. We come back to the group having made camp. Wumba is now with them. The goblins have formed a battle stack, which is a thing goblins do in Tomb of Annihilation. They ride on each others shoulders and attack as one entity. In this case, the bottom of the two goblins is invisible.

A zombie t. rex enters their camp and Holly transforms it into an axebeak. Polymorph lasts for 1 hour. I love the zombie t. rex, very cool that Chris decided to use it at this show!

Chumba wants to go swing at the polymorphed dinosaur. The group begs him not to. He doesn't know that hitting it will turn it back into its original form.

Diath tries to stop him, but poor Jared rolls bad. The goblin muscles him out of the way.

Chumba attacks but misses. He action surges! He attacks again. He hits it.. and it turns back into the t. rex.

Wumba takes a selfie with his scrying orb, even though he's invisible. Chumba disengages and flees, abandoning his brother. The t. rex pursues Chumba and hits him doing 24 points of damage. It swallows him! Dragonbait climbs in to a hole inside the t. rex's torso to try to save the goblin.

Strix casts enlarge on Evelyn, so she can have a kaiju battle with the undead dinosaur. Evelyn is now 10 feet tall. The t. rex is 30 feet tall.

Evelyn does a pile of damage. The t. rex is bloodied. Dragonbait climbs inside the t. rex to look for Chumba. Diath goes, "Don't you dare find him!" Jared is very much not a fan of the goblins.

Wumba throws his last will and testament at Diath, does a shadow of the colossus climb and tries to hack into the t. rex. His roll: a 2. Wumba is swallowed!

Chumba makes his first death save. A 2. Strix fireballs the t. rex, assuming the goblins are dead. Dragonbait's in there, too!

Diath attacks the t. rex and does a measly 4 damage. It only had 2 left! It's dead and topples over. Things are moving in there. Evelyn assumes its Dragonbait.

She slices it open with treebane and Dragonbait falls out. He's got Chumba. 5 zombies come crawling out after him.

The heroes start hacking into the zombies. Chumba wakes up1 He's alive.

Holly polymorphs a zombie into an axebeak. The group quickly destroys the zombies.

The heroes retrieve Wumba's body. Wumba makes a death save... natural 20! He's up!

The end.

Overall

Very good from what we got to see!


The zombies and the fireball should have made the goblins dead-dead, but maybe Chris wanted them alive so they could appear on the next episode (which they will be).


Ross seems like a very funny person and he definitely added to the game. I know a lot of us were hoping for Dee, but I guess the Erika Ishii ship has sailed, at least for now. I know she's got some other game going on Game and Sundry, so we could always check her out there.

Click here to check out the Encounter Roleplay Patreon.

I got to do something really fun today. I was a guest on Encounter Roleplay, a streaming D&D show that has partnered up with Wizards of the Coast. They appear on the D&D channel and the guy who runs it, Will, does a million shows. His literal job is to play D&D.

To prepare, I watched some of their show (Tomb of Annihilation). I watched half of the 4th episode, where the group actually met Volo, which was very cool. It looked like they were going to do the whole Executioner's Run thing, where they are tossed into a pit with dinosaurs in it.

They seemed really fun and I liked that the game was a bit laid back. All of them do really good voices. I do bad-good voices, in that they are so bad, they're good (to me, anyway).

I whipped up a cleric named Sid Grundle. Generally, it seems like nobody wants to make a cleric, but I love it. I like being the "glue" that keeps it together and dishes out support when needed.

Sid is an ex-con who has tried to become a good guy in the past few years, but he's not very good at it. The DM had some ideas and we put it all together.

Here is what I was really interested in: What happens before the show starts and after the show ends? What programs do they use to do this? Are there any tricks of the trade?

They use Zoom.us and Roll20 together. Zoom is quite like Skype, and Roll20 is a very popular site that you can use to play D&D online.

This is Will

I have had a few people show me Roll20, and it was cool but seemed very complicated on the DM side of things.

I wanted things to run smoothly. The DM came online with me prior to the game and helped me iron out the one issue - you have to turn the video and audio off in Roll20 in order for Zoom to work right.

Then I added in my character sheet into Roll20, which didn't take long. To roll dice in Roll20, you click on the skill, stat, attack or whatever right on your sheet and the dice roller pop up and does its thing. There's a bit of lag in Roll20 between when you click and when it shows up, and on a live show it is a bit unnerving.

You can also type in a little chat box to roll dice. You just type /roll d100 or whatever. Again, there's a bit of lag that really tears at your soul when you're wobbly at this to begin with.

This was live on Twitch, so there were many people in the chat watching the show live. I couldn't see the chat, as I just used the roll20 and zoom screens. I think I could have seen it, but I'm not sure how that works and it probably would have been one too many things for me to do.

Here's the thing that really popped out at me. Viewers can pay to throw things in the game - curses, boons, all sorts of stuff. You have to roll on a chart, one of which requires a d10,000!

I love this idea, because you can interact with the viewers and you can ham it up with them, trying to get them to give you things, or shaking your fist at them when they saddle you with some awful condition. It was hilarious and it completely changed the game in a good way.

We got a ton of these things in the show, and I got hit with a lot. I loved it and tried to use whatever they gave me in a fun way so they felt like it was worth it.

In this session, we fought some zombies, traveled through the jungle, fought a winter wolf in an icy section of forest and made camp. During the camp we were attacked by 2 bodaks, of all things!

It's so weird to play in an adventure you've read. The DM changed it up quite a bit so that it wasn't predictable. The heroes have Azaka Stormfang as their guide. It seems like a heck of a lot of groups choose Azaka for some reason.

A wild magic viewer thing set it up so that I arrived in a ghost ship and got to make a dramatic entrance. I was hoping to launch myself from a catapult, but alas, it was not to be. I swung in on a rope.

Another viewer thing turned Grob (Will's character) into a swarm of bees. Grob actually has a copy of Volo's Guide to Monsters in the game that was signed by Volo when they met in a previous episode. Grob dropped it when he bee-came bees (boom). I tried to yoink it, but it went poorly.

It's a bit dicey to do any sort of player-vs-player stuff when the other people don't know you, but I had some fun ideas for it and I knew that through the course of the session I would dish out piles of support spells and the players would see that I'm not some turd coming in and intentionally ruining things.

When I tried to snatch that book, I got hammered with curses from the viewers. I got a real kick out of all the stuff that happened to me. Here's some:

• Every time I spoke the letter "s", I got hit by a fire bolt. My name is Sid! How do I introduce myself?!
• The ghost boat.
• I got two natural 20's I could use on roll whenever I liked.
• I got one natural 1 that needed to be used at some point.

There was a lot more spread throughout, but that's the general idea.

Throughout the show, clues were dropped that there was more to my character than what was presented. I was wrapped up like a mummy so that my entire body was obscured. One hero noticed that I didn't actually sleep, I just pretended to.

At the very, very end, there was a little cut scene that showed that Sid was into some bad stuff.

I had to sort of guess how to fit in to the group dynamic. I didn't want to chime in too much, but a lot of times I get excited and start spitting out ideas and it's hard to stop.

I had been given a boon that said the next time I crafted an item, it would explode and do something like 25 points of damage. During the final battle with the bodaks, I made a puzzle out of bark and kept the last piece separate. I figured I could use it to blow up some bad guys if stuff hit the fan. I have 33 hit points, so I'd survive the explosion.

I didn't quite get to pull that off in the bodak battle, as we had to wrap up.

At the end of the show, you do that thing where each player tells the viewer about the projects they have going on and "check out my twitter", etc. Every one of these guys does this with such a smooth delivery. Very professional, no "ums" or "ahs". It seems like they all have their own projects going on.

When it was over, they were nice enough to stay in for a few minutes so I could ask them some questions. Things I learned:

• On 16 occasions, Will played in sessions that went 24 hours, straight through.
• Asking viewers in the chat for boons generally doesn't work well. You usually can't request something and get it.
• These twitch shows with donations make significant money! It really made me think I should probably look into it. I love the curse/boon thing and would love to do something like that. It seems like, with enough of them, the viewers could somewhat dictate what happened in the session, which makes it a surprise for everyone. I love random charts, so this is very appealing to me.

Every one of the players were very nice and fun.

The DM, Greg, is very good. He does fantastic voices and sounds and he has a good sense of which things to downplay in order to keep things moving.

Encounter Roleplay is admirably ambitious. Will's not doing one show, he's doing multiple shows every day! He's building a D&D channel. What I really like is that he has rolled up his sleeves and he is doing it himself. His hard work is clearly paying off for him, and it is nice to see.

I think what he's doing is really smart and, seeing how this online D&D thing seems like it's not going away any time soon (and is, in fact, getting bigger) he's going to end up being a very big deal. From what I understand, he's only 21. He's got it made!

Good show, definitely check it out!

Episode 66: Ghosts and Goblins

• Follow the show live on twitter here 
• Order Tomb of Annihilation here 
• Season Two Dice, Camera, Action Episode Guide 
• Dice, Camera, Action on Reddit 
• The Reddit Dice, Camera, Action Index 
• The Dice, Camera, Action Youtube Playlist 
• Read up on the backstories of the Waffle Crew

Check out the above image. Looks like they got art of each character. Is it by Richard Whitters? Anybody know if there's anywhere we can see the full versions?

Geoff couldn't play today because he has con crud. His character, Chumba is with the group.

(Anna) Evelyn - Human Paladin of Lathander
(ProJared) Diath - Human Rogue
(Holly) Strix - Tiefling Sorcerer
(Nathan) Paultin - Human Bard
(Ross) Wumba - Batiri Goblin Warlock

Last episode, the group met some goblins and fought an undead tyrannosaurus rex.

Evelyn is enjoying being large. Strix enlarged her so she could fight the t. rex. Her enjoyment is bothersome, so Strix cancels it out.

The heroes come upon a large structure. It has giant stone feet on a dais that is covered in vines. Behind it is a passageway going into a hill, into the underground. The heroes spot some ghostly children moving further in.

Strix goes in and immediately falls into a pit trap. She takes 8 points of damage as she falls 20 feet to the bottom of this pit.

The heroes cross the pit in their own wacky way. Evelyn throws Wumba across, who dabs in mid-air. Then she throws Chumba across, who just barely makes it.

Umbril, Dragonbait and Waffles stay outside.

Diath looks for traps and is hit by whirling blades, which Holly finds to be hilarious. The group gets past the scything blades.

They see the ghost kids climbing up a 10 foot tall ledge. Evelyn can't wait to play with the children. Strix quietly judges her. Evelyn somehow senses it.

They come to a room where sunline strems through the ceiling. A cobweb-infested Vault. There's a pillar of stone with a staircase winding up outside of it. They see the girl on the shoulders of the boy going up the stairs.

Diath spots a glyph of warding. Paultin plays the maracccas, and Diath tries to disable the glyph... 22! He does it!

In the room beyond are dinosaur bones. The children scuttle out of view.

They see carvings of a crocodile carrying a man. This refers to an old legend in chult about a crocodile who tricks a man into carrying it around over vast distances.

Evelyn holds hands with Wumba. He's hit by lightning from the pillar. He makes a save... natural 20!  Evelyn helpfully warns the group that there's lightning in here

This is where they are

Mannn... Wumba only has 13 HP. How is he going to survive?

Wumba worships Dendar, the Night Serpent - an evil serpent that wants to eat the sun. He thinks about the legend of the crocodile and figures out how to circumvent the many traps in this place. You have to climb on someone's shoulders

They climb up on each other's shoulders. Diath had been carefully removes glyphs. The group chuckles that he risked himself for no real reason.

The group comes upon a holy container. Evelyn thinks it is linked to Lathander and she does a little dance, squealing about Lathander. In it is a flask of golden light. Anna is cracking me up. Hey! Wumba snatches it.

Wumba is holding it hostage. He wants Evelyn to say that Dendar is great or he'll smash it. She refuses. He spits on it and hands it over. This guy... somebody smite him! I am outraged.

Strix examines it and senses that it has some sort of transformative ability. Strix thinks it is for Evelyn, and that it will turn her back into a human.

Evelyn doesn't think Lathander sent this to her. The group asks Paultin to convince her, but he has nothing.  Ok, people. At this point, I'd say Evelyn should get over Paultin. This was a golden opportunity for something and he just didn't bother. Maybe Lathander is the only one for Evelyn.

Diath steps up and explains how blessed Evelyn is. This dude is the leader!

Evelyn drinks it! Light swells around her... and she's gone! The whole place is collapsing! The group uses magic to escape, leaving the goblins behind. Chumba and Wumba are in trouble.

Wumba jumps down the descending hall from which they came, using his brother to break his fall. Chumba's dead. He wants his brother's whistle... kicks his head off to get it!

Wumba has 1 hit point left and he has to jump that pit trap! He blows the whistle and leaps... rolls a 7. Wait! Something catches him! It's Dragonbait. He heard the whistle. Pretty good!

They escape. The place collapses, Chumba is dead and buried. Paultin saw what Chumba did, as he was a gas cloud. Paultin did the exact same thing, using Chris Trott's wereraven character to break his fall. Paultin seems appalled.


It would be funny if the group gets in a situation where they need to jump off a huge cliff and use a living giant to break their fall or something.

Wumba senses that the NPCs are about to turn on him. He uses expeditious retreat, holding up middle fingers as he vanishes into the jungle.

Meanwhile, Evelyn awakens in a palace of sunlight. Standing nearby is a golden giant with glowing eyes. This is Saint Andral, a servant of Lathander. He gives her a choice. Pick one:

• Regain her human form
• Get an enhanced version of her construct body
• Get Lightfall back.

She takes the enchanced form! She now has a 22 Constitution! This is Lathander's blessing of health, sort of like a trickster god boon with no flaw attached.

Last episode, Chumba had tossed Diath his will. Diath reads it aloud. Long story short, he knew his brother would blow the whistle, and Chumba explains that he farted in it, haha.

That's where we stop!

No game next week... but in next week's time slot, There will be waffle crew sock puppet theater. They are going to recap the events of the show... in sock puppet form!

They talk a bit about the Game Grumps D&D show. It's called Dragons in Places. Jared is the DM! Holly will play, alone with Ross and some other Game Grumpers. It will be on youtube tomorrow.

Overall

I think this was the best session of the entire season so far. Hilarious, fun, and everybody was in the zone. Ross added a lot to the game, he is a very funny guy.

Episode 7 is up! You can check it out right here:

Lots of stuff going on in Power Score Land (Note: I find it very amusing when people refer to me as "Power" on twitter, and am hoping someday, somebody says to me, "Pardon me, Mr. Score....").

I am about to roll out the other shows/campaigns which I've been taping over the last month. This is the group from Ruins of Mezro:


We've taped to episodes and we're taping episode 3 tomorrow. We have been playing through a modified version of the Ruins of Mezro adventure and I think we'll jump into Heart of the Wild next.

I have most of the art for Revenge of the Lizard King. We taped episode 1 of that a few weeks ago and it was tremendous! Different art style for this one. At first, I was a little leery, but I'm climbing on board now that I see them all together:


The art of the 4th character, a triton, is still in revisions.

On top of all that, I got to be a guest on Encounter Roleplay, which was a lot of fun. Hopefully I can beebop around and appear on many a cyberspace D&D game so I can see how other people do it.

The Party

(Ryan) Mistletoe - Human Druid
(Garrett) Ramrod - Goliath Barbarian
(Annalise) Val - Tiefling Sorcerer
(Joe) Zavagor - Half-orc Warlock

For this episode of Tomb of Annihilation, I tested out some material I made. I'm about to put out a book on the DM's Guild called the Tomb of Annihilation Companion. It's going to have 30 days of travel in the jungle all plotted out for you, special "hag visit" encounters, and a new way to run dinosaur races, and other stuff.

I feel like the dinosaur racing rules in the Tomb book are too vague and don't give DMs enough tools to give it the "Return of the Jedi speeder chase" feeling it should have (or the "Phantom Menace Pod Racing" feeling, for you Jar-Jar fans). I tested them out and by gawd, it went great.

We had left off with the group getting mauled by a horde of 30 zombies. As I had feared, Ramrod dove right into them and heroes started dropping like flies. Thanks to some cool ideas, the group had been able to survive a few rounds.

Hoppy the froghemoth was stuck in the horde. He took a pile of hits, but he was able to wade through and escape. Ramrod was carrying Pearl and Val, both of whom were making death saves. He was running from the horde.

Val rolled a 20 on a death save! She woke up and reached over to Pearl to stabilize her. She rolled a POWER SCORE, and we learned that Val's signature move involves hugging.

The heroes fled to the pirate ship and sailed back to Port Nyanzaru.

Hew Hackinstone

They went to the Thundering lizard and met Hew Hackinstone, one of the NPC guides from the Tomb adventure. I gave him my bad Sean Connery voice. Surely the group would choose this guy, right? Surely! At this point, they indicated that they were definitely leaning toward having Hew among their ranks when it came time to go into the jungle.

Then they met with my red wizard replacements - agents of the nation of Cheliax (A Castlevania-style kingdom of devil worshipers from the Pathfinder setting). The Cheliax representative was Heinrich Von Pummel and his two hell hounds. The hounds didn't like Zavagor (they could smell the Abyss on him) and loved Val (they seemed to catch a whiff of brimstone, indicating she could be somehow linked to devils).

I got to do my terrible nazi voice and say one of my favorite NPC names: Paralictor Valeria Asperixus. She's a hell knight from the Skull and Shackles path. She survived that campaign that I ran in 2013, but the heroes did kill Admiral Thrune, who Valeria was obsessed with. She actually knows and hates Captain Isabella "Inkskin" Locke, but the two did not cross paths tonight.

The heroes turned down an offer to team up with Von Pummel's force of soldiers.

Then, the group went to the arena and met with Kwayothe, who let them pick out any type of dinosaur. It went like this:

• Zavagor: Young Tyrannosaurus Rex.
• Val: Her "pretty pink" allosaurus from the last race.
• Ramrod: Triceratops
• Mistletoe: Triceratops

Kwayothe told Zavagor that she had seen to it that he would win the race.

Here's how the race worked:

• I made a racing route on the Port Nyanzaru map, and broke it up into seven "stages".
• Every round, the racers entered the next stage.
• Every stage had a special element/obstacle.
• We used the idea of tracking total "feet" of movement from the book. The winner of the race is whoever had the most "feet" at the end of the last stage.
• The whole thing is a bit abstract. The racers are considered to be in a clump and they can more or less interact freely.

It was tremendous. There were 8 NPC racers, 4 of which were the green vipers. The others were a tortle NPC from the Tortle Package, the son of Ekene-Afa, PARALICTOR VALERIA ASPERIXUS, and a worshiper of Gwynharwyf (which surprised Mistletoe, as he is an agent of Gwynharwyf as well).

There were a lot of highlights. Jim Crank and Ramrod had an epic battle while riding the same dinosaur. The little boy from episode 1 sent his new flying monkey pet after Ramrod. Mistletoe blinded people, Val was way ahead jut like the first race, and Zavagor had two invisible succubi cheating on his behalf.

I couldn't have had a better end to the Port Nyanzaru section of the adventure!

From here, we're going into the jungle. I'll be testing out my jungle encounter days from the Tomb of Annihilation Companion. It seems like a lot of people are glossing over these travel days when they run Tomb, so I wanted to run them to show new DMs how you can do the days without bogging down the game too much. After all of the effort put into the travel section of the book, it feels like a waste to just hand wave the journey.

You can watch this show here.

Since it is Halloween and the group isn't playing this week, Chris Perkins decided to recap the entire show... in sock puppet form. It has a sort of "Unabomber" feeling to it, as if Chris has been locked in that room for way too long. I found it to be utterly hilarious.

I'm not sure how to recap a recap, so I'll just tell you about the things that stuck out. This show is only 30 minutes long, so it's pretty painless to sample if you're not sure about it. take you a lot of time to watch it.

Chris does a great Evelyn voice, very hilarious. Her puppet has this glittery foil as hair, very amusing.

At first it looked like Chris was changing socks really fast, then I realized that this is taped and edited. You can see the top of Chris's head most of the time. Chris did prepare a lot of props for this, intentionally making most of them craptastic, which makes it funnier.

He does a Dee impression, which kills me! You haven't lived until you've seen puppet Evelyn maniacally hug Strix.

Then comes one of the highlights of the show. Remember when Diath got hung?

Good lord.

Puppet Strahd emerges from behind the couch. He has a red cape and sort of sings his own theme song. Then he starts making out with Paultin, and Paultin points out that that never happened. Clearly Strahd couldn't contain himself.

There are a lot of retakes kept into the show. As things progress, it becomes apparent that Chris is running the puppets as if they really are the characters, and that they are acting out the scenes from the show. Evelyn can't remember her lines and curses up a storm.

"We met a bunch of wereravens at a winery." Chris starts waggling around a raven doll and goes "Ca caw, ca caw." I died.

Now Paultin and Evelyn are making out. Chris slips himself a dagger. It's true, the Tome of Strahd was not helpful at all.

The group has never liked Van Richten, but I don't think I've ever heard them call him "Van Rectum" until now.

More Dee! Poor Dee. She says, "Oi! I'm still alive!" We just got ourselves a scoop! Mayhaps we will see Dee again some day.

I think that this show needs some soft, quiet background music. The utter silence in which Chris performs in is a bit unsettling.

The Mordenkainen voice Chris does is fantastic.


Chris declares that "fan-fic Drizz't" showed up and helped the group kill a bunch of werewolves. He points out that there isn't a lot of story going on in this season so far. This guy is killing me.

The giant eagle.. I'm dying

We get tot he part where Harshnag falls to his death. Chris represents this by throwing a sock.

Chris bursts out laughing when he has Strix growl at Evelyn.

Hey... When Paultin saved Evelyn, Chris explicitly says that the Raven Queen gave him the undead hand. We are getting some big nuggets on this show!

Diath wants the sword prop... it looks like a pencil. No.. it's a tiny broom!

Chris spends quite a bit of time roasting his own ideas. He points out the absurdity of how destroying Paultin's shadow sent them back in time somehow.

Sir Godfrey is a skeleton action figure. He can't remember his lines. We get a few bonus clips, one involving Strix Blair Witch-style.

Overall


I thought this was absolutely hilarious. Is it a good recap? I guess so, I'd have to ask someone not familiar with the show. I think that new viewers would at the very least get a feeling for what the characters are like.

They should do this at the end of every season and let fans mail in props. Painted backdrops, puppets, etc. They'd probably end up with way more stuff than they could use.

I love people that don't take themselves too seriously, so I really enjoyed the tone of this. I think a copy of this should be placed in a time capsule so that future humans can try to puzzle it out.

You can buy this right here.

Jungle Treks is a DMs Guild book that contains 6 scenarios that you can plop into your Tomb of Annihilation game to keep the jungle portion spicy. From what I can see, these can be used in any campaign, really, with almost no adjusting at all.

This is written by Teos Abadia and Eric Menge, who have both made a lot of D&D stuff.

The entire book looks a lot like a 2nd edition product, right down to the fonts. I find it very comforting. Check out the logo on the cover:

That's a replica of the old Realms logo, which I always really liked. There are so many weird little things you can do on the DMs Guild. You can put that logo on your product! I can barely wrap my head around it. Great idea!

This book has 6 adventures that you can use to plop into your Tomb of Annihilation game. There are summaries of each in the beginning. As soon as I saw the words "tropical harpies" I got more than a little excited.

All of the adventures are made to be scaled. There's three "tiers" for characters level 1-4, 5-7, and 8-10. In each adventure, you're given stats appropriate for each. For example, the DC of a saving throw could be DC 15/17/19. Use 15 for a group of heroes that are level 1-4 and use 19 if your group is levels 8-10.

They actually make charts to tell you how many monsters to use depending on what level your group is.

Let's go through these scenarios real quick.
 
Tavern Trouble: This is one big encounter in a tavern. There's a bar fight, and there's all these lizards running around. The group needs to identify and nag one particular lizard. Very amusing!

If Looks Could Kill: This is an expedition to take care of a herd of one of those really weird D&D monsters - the catoblepas (the plural form is "catoblepones"). There is a ton of detail on the NPCs that will interact with the group, including a lot of notes about romantic interests. Each of them has a quest involving the Catoblepones.

Wow, check out the catoblepas stats. Their death ray does 36 necrotic damage! Yikes.

Ambush From Above: This is an ambush encounter involving grungs who worship a pig. There's a cyclops in the mix, too. People never use cyclopses in D&D and I don't know why. Too mythological?

Mystic River: This is a good idea - an encounter for groups canoeing in a river. There are a series of cool challenges here that will make this a very memorable, fun encounter. This is easily my favorite so far!

Mudslide: Wow.. I just made a mudslide encounter yesterday! This is very well thought-out and extremely useful. They actually go over the options the group has to avoid the mudslide, including jumping from tree to tree, which sounds really awesome. I love this one.

Beautiful Plumage: Here we go! Tropical harpies. Hey... they have a name for a flock of harpies: A "scream" of harpies. Pretty good!

Here's the description: "...bipedal creatures that combine the worst aspects of a human and a bird with feathers that are as brightly colored as any parrot."

Someone make some art of that! Very cool idea. I like this one a lot!

This is the biggest of all the adventures. It has a complete set of ruins, a maze, a tower, and other entities lurking about.

Overall

This is a really easy thumbs up from me. It takes just a few minutes to read one of these, and then you can roll it out in your game. It is extremely handy for DMs who don't have a lot of time to prepare for their games. Plus, it is very inexpensive. $4! Definitely worth it.

Note: I was sent a free review copy of this book.