Tomb of Annihilation, 5e
- https://www.enworld.org/threads/tomb-of-annihilation-likes-and-dislikes.714741/page-3
- They say there is a TRex with feathers. Nope, no thank you, not correct and not cool.
- Sounds like there are a bunch of NPCs I wouldn't need or care about. These newer modules go so overboard with the NPCs.
- So I better avoid it on StartPlaying I guess. A shame. Maybe I could DM it for the kid and retool everything to be less annoying. Or just find more old ones.
Some questionable party portraits. And never liked the bugbear design in 3.x either.
Red Hand of Doom
- 3.5e
- I think I wanna try one day
- Lizardmen
- Dragons
- Although the weird half-dragon everything sounds super duper weird
- half dragon cows that shoot lightning bolts? That sounds goofy as hell.
- maybe if it is a curse, I'd have to reskin all that goofy stuff
- I think a massive orc army incoming to destroy a city or something
- Some epic thing where your party is the assassination team or something to take out the "head" of the bad guys
- Many ppl like it, quote it as
- being super good layout.
- I think it has a ton of "this group of lizardmen do xyz when this happens"
- Apparently VERY hard if just played as is. The 3.5e guy in a comment (yt comment below) said they TPK three separate times during the 3.5e era, and they all were pretty serious players.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AV0jii5JuU&t=1290s
- Comments from ppl (SPOILERS)
- 5e converted: I ran a 5e conversion of this and my party had an absolute blast. The fight to destroy the bridge near the beginning and the final 5 part siege were real standouts! The whole module made my players have to think a little more tactically, especially after the monk jumped into a bunch of undead at the Ghostlord's tower, failed all her saves against their attacks, and ended the fight with 2 max HP because of all of their necrotic max hp drain.
- The triple TPK guy, parabostonian2267:
So you guys asked how people experienced it? It's kind of become a meme for my friends and I, because it started when my friend (who usually played rather than DM'd - I was the usual DM) ran a campaign where he told us (veteran 3.x players) "please don't make super-powerful characters for this campaign." (Living Greyhawk had kind of taught us that the weak perish to looking around the corner and seeing 4 bodaks and the strong pick good prestige classes, lol.)
- So we made mediocre characters that were fun. He ran a couple modules for us prior to RHOD so we could get to level 5ish before we came into the adventure, and then RHOD kicked our asses, lol. After the first TPK (minus the 6th dude that didn't show up the week of the TPK, of course), we brought in 5 new PCs. I died again at some point in a silly way (combat with 3 dragon-cow things, all breathed lightning at my wizard taking partial cover behind stuff, and he died instantly) and we TPK'd again later IIRC, though the 2nd one I can't recall. It seemed very much in my memory like the kind of adventure that punishes you for not having multiclassed or prestige classed into something with evasion, lol. So for us, it became a meme of "when a DM asks people not to optimize, ask them if that's because they want multiple TPKs."
- SERIOUS SPOILERS SECTION
- Seriously though, as a player I remember the first TPK being REALLY rough on us as a group though. It was early on in the adventure, there was a place on the water that was kind of like a lizard man village or something shaped like a circle, with a tower in the center with a bell at the top. The big problem that we immediately saw(besides being on the water, which was a huge problem for a group that had a paladin and a cleric both fond of heavy armor that could easily make them sink and drown) was the huge # of lizard men who were natural swimmers and could, capsize boats and drown us or whatever. So we decided as the group to hang back, come back with the waterbreathing spell on the group the next day, and sneak into the tower to disable the bell so we can pick off lizard men and not have to train the whole zone or whatnot. Of course, this was catastrophically bad, because once we sneak into the tower we basically stumble over a dragon. On one side: we were level 5ish and much preferred fighting the dragon inside where it couldnt fly and kite us, but on the other side, we did manage to kill it but lost 3 PCs in the process. 1 other PC along with mine tried to sneak out after, only to find the lizardmen had heard the fight, and jumped us underwater. Lo, for the legend of my halfling wannabe-arcane-trickster making attacks of opportunity on lizard men trying to grab him under water, stopping maybe a half dozen attempts "like a cat in a corner" only to eventually be disarmed and put in a bag. And then later, tortured to the point of madness and maybe getting eaten by lizard men. =(
- Its funny though how the first TPK is so vivid in my memory, and the death by the weird dragon-cow things, but I don't remember what the TPK was for the far more successful group 2 was. I would love to read it at this point to get more a sense of how to deal with the black dragon / lizardman village area, because it was one of those TPKs where the group felt like it was very unclear what we should have done differently. (Other than maybe to just see the village was bad and just leave? IDK.)
- So in short, my recollection of the adventure was that it was incredibly brutal, if well thought out. I also remember being very frustrated with the other "goodish" people as feeling mostly useless, but like you guys said it was setting up the heroes to be the necessary heroes to make the difference. Its hard to separate what negative bits I remember as being part of the system (3.5 had good and bad parts definitely, like you guys said ESPECIALLY about buffs, but also stuff like relative benefits of multi/pr-classing for saving throws and stuff that made a huge difference in character power), what was the DM not signaling stuff to us, what was us not picking up or maybe playing poorly in ways we didn't recognize, what was us being "non optimized characters" in the first wave at least, what was the DM just being really brutal, and so on. But the adventure definitely knew what it was about, definitely handled stuff like information control thoughtfully, definitely thought out tactics for bad guys, and so on. Clearly the writers had put a lot of thought into it. But again, I just played and died a bunch, I never read it. Anyways despite some amount of mixed feelings from TPKs, we still had a good time, and certain bits are still very memorable decades later.
- Anyways, I hope you all enjoyed the stories of our failures. People always love to hear TPK stories, especially about adventures that they conquered, lol. =p
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