Wizards of the Coast have put out several big campaign adventures for D&D. And many of them left some DMs wondering “How the eff do I run that?”

It’s important to note that this feeling is not confined to their products. It’s true of every adventure publisher, but people are most likely to have seen those big campaign adventures for D&D.

I believe that some of these feelings came from unstated assumptions the designers were making about how the adventure would be run, and the capabilities of the GMs who read it. And yes, some came down to bad design decisions as well.

GMs differ significantly in what they’re good at running. Let me give an example of something that works incredibly well for me:

In Storm King’s Thunder, after the giant attack on the village but before the characters learn where they have to go, they spend time exploring the Savage Frontier and undertaking small quests. While they are questing, they come across giants doing odd things. Some of these are in the random encounter tables, though others are keyed encounters.

And this leads the players to realise that something’s not right with the giants. And so, when Harshnag turns up, the players are primed for the main story to start. It’s awesome design. I love this adventure a lot.

Unfortunately, I’ve seen a many GMs utterly fail to run this well. The most common error is to kill all the special NPCs in the previous chapter, so the players have no quests. Which leaves them feeling aimless. But I’ve also seen them drag it out way too long until the players are bored, and the GM just doesn’t introduce Harshnag to progress the story.

Why does this go so badly? Well, I think it is because the designer doesn’t explain the structure of this part of the adventure and how it works within the context of the adventure’s story.

I have a lot of friends who have an expectation that in a “Save the World” campaign, the threat will be introduced at the start, and the party will go from task to task, working all the time towards the end goal. And Storm King’s Thunder doesn’t do that. (Mind you, it doesn’t help itself with its first chapter, “A Great Upheaval”, which introduces the themes of the adventure far too early. If you play Lost Mine of Phandelver first, the transition feels far more natural).

The campaign structure of “We’re adventurers doing short quests, but gradually shifting to becoming aware of a Big Bad we have to stop” is one that I naturally do in a lot of my campaigns, which is one reason this adventure clicks so well for me.

It’s also why I love short adventures in a standard fantasy setting, which aren’t too weird for me to drop into my campaigns. Let me plug Sly Flourish’s collection of such adventures again – I love these ones!

So, this lack of an explanation of how the adventure should work fatally cripples Storm King’s Thunder for some groups.

And that’s how I feel about the start of Tomb of Annihilation. I look at the opening chapters and wonder “How the eff does this work?”

Now, I know it clicks for some GMs. It doesn’t for me. And that’s because I have an entirely different concept to them for how investigations and hexcrawls should work. For me, an investigation should always discover information. And as you discover more clues, they lead to further places to explore, and you get more and more of the picture until finally you know what to do.

When I read Tomb of Annihilation, it reads like “You explore lots of places that give you no information. And then you find a person who tells you exactly where to go.” Or you can luck out and immediately find that person!

There aren’t that many small discoveries in the text. There are quite a few passages that read “If the PCs ask this NPC how to get to Omu, they tell them the way.” But what it doesn’t have is many ways for the PCs to find out about Omu or learn it’s important. I have a sneaking suspicion that the GMs that run this well take the extensive background on Omu and then weave it more into the plot, with more of the encounters giving the players information that eventually makes them realise “This is important!”

The investigation structure I’d prefer goes like this:

• The PCs learn that a great civilization once ruled Chult, but it fell into darkness. Ruins of its cities are all that remain. (Learn location of two nearby ruined cities).
• In the ruined cities, the PCs learn that a cult of death-worshippers started in the capital city. A while later, it stopped communicating with the other cities, and they began to decline with no-one able to rule the empire.
• The next stage would be travelling to other ruins or inquiring of guides and sages to discover the location of this capital. Death-worshippers sounds a lot like the Death Curse, doesn’t it?
• Finally, the PCs discover the location of the capital, and trek through the jungle to explore it.

If I could do this right, with the players slowly learning this knowledge and finally realising what they have to do, then I think I’ve got a pretty good adventure structure. And having supplemental encounters with Red Wizards and Naga to reinforce this? Great!

Of course, designing this structure isn’t easy. It takes serious effort and playtesting. And even then, it can fail.

There are hints of this structure in the published adventure, but I don’t think it comes together. (It is amazing how few times the words “Omu”, “Death Curse” or “Soulmonger” appear in chapters 1 & 2.)

So, what’s the difference between Storm King’s Thunder and Tomb of Annihilation?

In Storm King’s Thunder, I run the encounters as written, and it forms the story around it. The players have goals, and I realise that the DM has to introduce a new element (Harshnag) to start the main plot.

In Tomb of Annihilation, the players have goals, but, as I understand the adventure, they have to get lucky to find the path.

Better GMs than me will guide the characters to the right conclusions in the adventure. But I don’t think it arises naturally out of the text. This might be a reflection on how I run and interpret adventures, rather than the skills of the designer, but nonetheless, as an adventure designer you have to be careful about the assumptions you make about the abilities of GMs.

I should emphasise that I think that Omu itself is a masterpiece of game design, and easily one of the best adventure environments for any edition of D&D. Tomb of Annihilation often is rated as one of the best adventures produced, so it’s not like it’s awful. There are just elements of how it works that I think could be better!