Exploration in Tomb of Annihilation
October 8, 2018
rpg d&dI am currently running Tomb of Annihilation in a home-game of Dungeons & Dragons, 5th edition. After the party finally started their excursion into the jungles of Chult , I read up on the exploration and "hex crawl" rules, and did some Googling. Here's some useful things I found.
In reading up and around the Tomb of Annihilation exploration rules, I found the following links useful:
- Hex-crawl rules by Kyle Maxwell - assembled from his own notes collated from multiple places (the ToA adventure book, as well as the Player’s Handbook and the Dungeon Master’s Guide), this post serves as a decent and comprehensive overall guide to the procedure.
- Travelogue by Kevin Whitaker - a random weather, travel distance, wind direction and encounter generator. Uses the same hex-crawl rules linked above. The random "seed" can be used to regenerate the same ten days worth of information if you navigate away from the site.
- Tomb of Annihilation wiki - a wiki hosted on Obsidian Portal containing some useful reference and imagery for specific locations.
- Guide to the Tomb of Annihilation Hexcrawl - a Reddit post with plenty of tips and a take on why ToA hexcrawl is worth your time.
A nice addition to the Travelogue tool would be to calculate amount of rainfall per rain catcher the party has set up (one inch collected equates to 2 gallons of water, according to the adventure). I used the following table and multiplied up by the number of raincatchers the party had, although it wasn't too long before the cleric in our party was able to create water. Unfortunately we haven't really got to a point where scarcity of water has become important, so YMMV. Tweak the values, if necessary.
| Light (d4) | Heavy (d4) | Storm (d4) | Water collected |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | - | - | 0 |
| 2 | 1 | - | 1" |
| 3 | 2 | 1 | 1" |
| 4 | 3 | 2 | 2" |
| - | 4 | 3 | 2" |
| - | - | 4 | 3" |
Simpler still, skip the table completely and use e.g. a d3 with modifiers (-1 for light rain and +1 for storms). Introducing a chance to lose the raincatchers in a storm instead of harvesting a large quantity of water could be fun too!
In the end I collated all the rules into a handout PDF for the players using the fantastic Homebrewery from Natural Crit. Most of our group use digital apps and play aids, although one did print it out A3 size for his compact yet extremely fat journal.
Another worthy read is a series of articles on Sly Flourish about running Tomb of Annihilation.