Hi all,
My teen crew just completed ToA with an epic fight against Acererak with a significantly extended ending.
Spoilers for the whole module
We started Tomb of Annihilation in January 2025 and played the last session last weekend: 28 sessions over 22 months, six players, and we finished at level 10. I ran it under the 2024 rules, which took some adjusting, and I have a few thoughts.
I've written the whole campaign up for other DMs. It covers what I added, what I cut, the house rules, and what actually happened at our table, which was not always what I'd planned.
(Part One: The City and the Crocodile)
How I set up my table. Session zero with *Cellar of Death*, a dinosaur race, and a ball I added at Zhanthi's villa, with eight party games, yuan-ti assassins and a letter to steal, and the Camp Righteous dungeon that changed their religion.
(Part Two: The Jungle and the Tomb)
Eighteen months of hexcrawl and six levels of Acererak's dungeon. The nine trickster gods each got a pop-culture impression for the possessed player to perform (the TikToker, the frat bro, the anime protagonist). It ends with a guide to running a 2017 module on the 2024 rules.
(The Ending)
I rebuilt the finale from scratch. As written, Acererak would have wiped my team in under three rounds (Disrupt Life alone would have done about 222 damage a round), so I retuned him and added a few things:
- The souls in the Soulmonger are 200 dice in a jar. Each character gets one scoop during the final battle, as harm or healing, but every soul they spend is one that doesn't go home. At the end, you roll the whole jar and count the sixes.
- A scripted sacrifice in round one (to reduce player DPS on the Atropal). That player carries on as a ghost inside the Soulmonger, attacking it from the inside. Thus, when they destroy the Soulmonger, he can be resurrected!
- A hundred undead with one hit point each, then five personal shadow trials.
- Three guards: while any of them stands, Acererak can't be killed. Plus a sphere of annihilation that always shows where it's going a round ahead.
- Boon cards from Ubtao, an ending for every corner of Chult.
(PDF of my Acererak, the God-King of Death)
Two A4 pages: his stat block retuned for six level 10 characters, spells and legendary actions, the lair actions he never had in the book, and his three guards.
Happy to answer questions about any of it. I'd love to hear how other tables handled the finale, especially at lower levels.
From my table to yours, be well, and have fun.