D&D's Tomb of Annihilation

While I've only been running my own homebrew D&D campaign (with a setting I invented myself) I've been somewhat addicted to buying adventure books on the off chance that I might run them (or even play in them) some day.

The latest to come out and the latest I got is Tomb of Annihilation, and man, I've got to say I'm really enjoying what I'm seeing.

ToA is built around an open-world map that will eventually lead into the eponymous tomb - one of several built by the ancient lich/demilich (he seems to go back and forth) Acererak - who is most famous for creating the legendary kaizo-Mario like Tomb of Horrors (created by Gary Gygax to take high-level players down a peg or two or all of them.) While the Tomb of Horrors was created for top-level players, Tomb of Annihilation is a full adventure/campaign intended for 1st level players that gets them to about level 11 (I know some have complained that the D&D books tend to only have adventures that go up to about level 15, but as a relative neophyte, I'm glad to have tons of stuff designed for players who can't just scry a bad-guy, teleport into their lair, kill them, and take their stuff.)

The structure of the adventure is interesting - players start in the city of Port Nyenzaru, where they can do a few fun city things (including betting on or participating in dinosaur races) before they head into the jungle, where there are a whole bunch of mini-dungeons that look like they can all be done in a single session. There's a high level of humor built into the adventure (Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward was a consultant on this one) which off-sets the fact that this adventure is built to grind through player characters.

The entire focus of the adventure is that resurrection magic isn't working - which is a big problem in a world of fantasy adventurers. That means if a PC dies, they ain't coming back (at least until the player defeat the "final boss.") There's even an optional Meatgrinder mode where death saves have to beat a 15 rather than a 10. They recommend that players doing this adventure be prepared to roll new characters, though thankfully the setting and premise make it relatively easy for new characters to be integrated into the party.

There are some very silly things out there, like a mini-dungeon where players get an advantage for riding on each others' backs or one in which you have to fool a frog-person into falling in love with a painting. I haven't gotten to the eponymous Tomb yet (which looks like it takes up about half the book) but there is a big Indiana Jones vibe to the whole thing (in fact, there's a new character background called "Archaeologist," which has a suggested ideal of "It belongs in a museum!")

I'm really enjoying this so much that I'm tempted to put the main campaign on pause once we get out of our current adventure so that we can run this (I also want to run the catch-up dungeon Death House in Curse of Strahd as a Halloween one-shot.)