When we left our brave adventurers, they were in the middle of the Valley of Dread and needed to make their way to Port Nyanzaru, many hundreds of miles to the north.
Welcome to the part of Tomb of Annihilation that I like the least, and had hoped to avoid completely by running Return of the Lizard King. Guess not, huh?
For those unaware of what a hexcrawl is, it’s the term given to an adventure where the players start with a map filled with blank hexes and then must explore, discovering what lies in the blank hexes as they go. The archetypal example of this is Isle of Dread, which I’ve run on a few occasions. I feel that they’re tremendously hard to DM well. It’s very easy for the players to get very frustrated with wandering around, marking the terrain of each hex, and failing to find anything of interest.
At least Tomb of Annihilation does one thing right: It makes the process for getting lost a lot easier to adjudicate. In the old days, if you got lost, the DM would randomly determine what direction you were travelling and not tell you. After several hexes of marking the map incorrectly, the adventurers would stay lost until they returned to a feature they recognised. This led to many very frustrated players. In Tomb of Annihilation, if you’re lost you wander around randomly, but you learn which hex you’re in when you regain your bearings. Travel can then return to normal, which is much less frustrating.
It was fascinating to see how often Josh’s druid failed his Wisdom (Survival) check, condemning the party to wander the wrong way again!
The best option is for the party to have a guide. But where would the party find a guide in the middle of the Valley of Dread?
The answer came from the random encounters. Through pure happenstance, one of the first encounters they had was with Artus Cimber, a major NPC in the tale, and the guardian of the Ring of Winter. Not that the players knew that yet! Instead, he was just a ranger who encounter the party when they were lost and in need. Once the adventurers explained the situation: that they were seeking to free the land from the Death Curse, he nobly agreed to accompany them on their quest. Although somewhat reluctantly – he knew people were looking for him.
The dice were kind again, and the next two encounters were with bands of Zhentarim looking for Artus. I ran them slightly differently. In the first encounter, they just confronted the party, called for Artus to surrender, then attacked when the adventurers refused to hand him over. The second encounter was a more significant ambush, with a hidden assassin. To survive this one, Artus was forced to use the Ring of Winter, revealing its power to the adventurers. Thankfully, they’re not a bunch of evil characters, and they agreed to keep Artus’s secret. And so Artus guided them north towards the Port.
This demonstrates the best of random encounters; where events surprise you and lead to great gameplay. It still requires some judgment from the Dungeon Master to integrate it all together, but the results can be stunning.
Unfortunately, many random encounters are boring. You meet some triceratops, and you avoid them. This may add a splash of colour, but little real interest. When I was younger, having unplanned encounters kept my interest, but it doesn’t anymore. I’ll use them for a couple of hours of entertainment before I abandon the dice and just start choosing ones that will be significant.
My whimsical side does get the better of me at times, though. Jesse’s bard used Leomund’s Tiny Hut to negate most of the encounters that might happen at night. Which is intelligent play? Of course, the party were woken up in the middle of the night by a band of triceratops charging and bouncing off the hut at full speed. And I had one belligerent one continue to headbutt the hut for hours until it got bored. Another night, Jesse’s bard failed to notice an Assassin Vine in the area, only to wake up when the vine started strangling him during the night. As Jesse’s character has a phobia of vines from his encounter with the Fey Queen from the first session, that just made it hilarious to everyone else in the group!
Terrain can add interest to the hexcrawl, although there’s an awful lot of jungle in Tomb of Annihilation. The adventurers experienced a different terrain when they reached the Valley of Embers. The crossing gave the adventurers one or two bad moments, especially when I turned a random encounter with skeletons into a more horrifying experience with skeletons pulling themselves out of the lava!
What you need in hexcrawls are places of interest. If you’re running Tomb of Annihilation from the book, there are entirely too few of them to discover. Those that do exist are good, but there’s a lot of ruins and mines with no encounters. Artus guided my group to one of the interesting ones, the ruined city of Nangalore.
Nangalore is brilliant. The plant life is deadly, and there are hints that the place was once more than it was. The adventurers were very respectful when they met the Queen of Nangalore. She was heavily veiled, and no-one was unwise enough to ask her to unveil. Her conversation with the adventurers was unsettling. It was obvious that her grip on reality wasn’t strong, and the adventurers can feel fortunate they didn’t anger her. After leaving her, they quickly left the city, especially after encountering some entirely too lifelike statues of horrified poses!
As we approached Port Nyanzaru, the use of random encounters tailed off. I very much wanted the adventure to proceed to the next section. We’d done the travelling through the wilderness bit – let’s now get back to the plot!
If I had a group of role-players, we could have spent many sessions in Port Nyanzaru. This isn’t the group I’m running, and so they were happy to restock. They bought potions of healing and better armour, then set out to find the druid who Sylia had asked them to find. It didn’t prove difficult.
Once the adventurers gave Qawasha Sylia’s holy symbol and explained her passing, the druid explained that he was a member of the Emerald Enclave. He had discovered the location of the Soulmonger, the cause of the Death Curse, and was happy to guide the adventurers to it, in the ruined city of Omu. Now the adventurers had a destination; they could move onto the meat of the adventure.
The group were now level 5. We spent three two-hour sessions in the hexcrawl and exploration of Nangalore and Port Nyanzaru. Qawasha and Artus both accompanied the party to Omu, and that was handled very swiftly. Hours of rolling up random encounters? No thank you. Been there, done that. Time to investigate the Hidden City!
This gets me thinking along pretty meta lines: what about different *types* of hexcrawls?
Tomb of Annihilation is meant to be a mostly plot-centric campaign where hexcrawling happens to be a mode to get from one event to the next. Some of the locations and obviously many of the encounter tables are truly only there as “speedbumps”: places to grind some XP or do some world-building, but they aren’t seen by the designers as important enough to hang anything more on, and are a chance for DMs to ad-lib a bunch.
But then there’s the OSR/early-D&D version (“ideal”??) that works where the random tables are the entirety of the prepared game, and everything is ad-libbed. So those random encounter tables and barely-described regions on the map are all you have; no plot, no events, no plot-important locations.
I think a major problem is that, as you mentioned, ToA (and even 5E’s DMG) doesn’t necessarily spell this stuff out, and doesn’t include enough stuff in ToA for such large hexes (overall), so you are left with a lot of minimalist-ly designed tables of stuff without a lot of context, yet there’s not enough stuff on those tables to make enough of the rolls feel like they churn up fun, interesting, and campaign-specific encounters. It seems like you’d have to default to the billion tables in the 5E DMG to add color and context to the encounters, but without knowing that or be pointed to specific tables that might be especially useful, it’s up to the DM to cross-reference what tables work with what encounters and locations to add that context and make use of all of those tools.
TL;DR – I think the random encounter tables and hexcrawling in ToA needs to rely on the flavorful tables in the 5E DMG, but without any clear indication as to which ones are best, it’s kind of like you’ve been handed an advanced box of high-tech tools but no instruction manuals for any of it.
ToA feels like a hybrid to me. The first five levels is sandboxy wandering around the jungle – probably with a guide and some subquests (if you’re lucky), but all of that is just a prelude to the Lost City and the Tomb, which is a far more structured adventure.
When Eric Menge and I wrote Jungle Treks, we created each encounter as a robust experience for the exact reason you mentioned – wandering around is dull. Players and DM alike prefer, generally, an interesting stimulating experience over just random fights (or nothing at all). DMs run out of ways to describe the jungle (though a thesaurus or online tool can really help) and you need interesting bits to make hexcrawling fun and worthwhile.
In my own game, I make up encounters similar to Jungle Treks and space them out. This gives us periodic meaty experiences to keep interest high. I also do two other things:
First, I use the plot hooks in ToA sparingly up front. All those plot hooks in Port Nyanzaru? I use one or two. The rest I keep in reserve for future visits, and have the plot hooks be new, unfolding via NPCs they befriend. That keeps the Port relevant and vibrant and makes NPCs relevant. I also doll out the plot hooks/quests via random encounters. Take that quest from an NPC and instead have it be written in a water-stained leather journal found in a random encounter. It’s especially useful if you use plot hooks/quests that are near where the party is located and which you don’t want them to miss, or if they missed where they should go and need redirecting.
Second, I use random encounters to advance the personal plot of PCs, or the plot aspects that seem to resonate with PCs. For example, if they really like hunting dangerous creatures, an encounter can provide leads to the stomping grounds (literally) of a major dinosaur or monster. Maybe they run into an expedition being eaten by monsters, and the whole purpose of the expedition was to hunt the creature. They give up, but share what they know with the PCs. Or maybe the party loves pirates. They can run into humanoids who when on the brink of defeat offer up information on a pirate cove. Furthering plot with “random” encounters gives them significance.
For personal tie-ins, look to PC backstory and interest areas and find ways to further them. If a PC is all about dwarves, “random” encounters can feature the species that took out the dwarven mines/forge, or those that know of it.
For me, weaving these kinds of experiences gives a lot of depth to ToA and makes it a real pleasure to run as a hexcrawl.