ONE WEIRD TRICK TO PRECISELY LEVEL-UP YOUR PCS IN THE TOMB OF ANNIHILATION

Here is a question that gets asked on Reddit all the times: how do I manipulate my campaign of Tomb of Annihilation to make sure my players start and end the final dungeon at the correct level?

My answer: don’t worry about it!

The power level of characters in D&D fifth edition goes up in fits and starts. The Player’s Handbook calls these the tiers of play. Within a tier, characters are roughly equally strong. Sure they’ll have a couple more hitpoints and an extra trick or two up their sleeves, but by and large, they can deal with the same type of challenges.

The Tomb of the Nine Gods is recommended for lvl 9 characters. This puts them on the high end of the second tier: lvl 5 – lvl 10. But does that imply that a lvl 8 party has no chance to survive and should make its time? My experience is that even a lvl 5 party can do pretty well on at least the first floor of the tomb. The difference can fairly easily be made up by being generous with rests, NPC helpers, and the occasional favorable DM-ruling.

However, with a bit of calculation, we can tweak the Tomb of the Nine Gods to lead our characters from wherever they start to lvl 11 just before the final showdown with Acererak!

How much XP is in the tomb?

Here are all the monsters in the tomb that players are expected to fight. I’ve notably left out the four gargoyle statues (worth 20k XP!):

1 Aboleth (CR 10)

48 Animated Armor (CR 1)

1 Beholder (CR 13)

2 Bodak (CR 6)

1 Clay Golem (CR 9)

7 Crawling Claw (CR 0)

1 Erinyes (CR 12)

2 Flameskull (CR 4)

5 Flesh Golem (CR 5)

6 Ghast (CR 2)

1 Invisible Stalker (CR 6)

2 Mezzoloth (CR 5)

10 Minotaur Skeleton (CR 2)

1 Monodrone (CR 1/8)

1 Nycaloth (CR 9)

7 Orc (CR 1/2)

1 Orc War Chief (CR 4)

1 Otyugh (CR 5)

9 Quadrone (CR 1)

1 Shadow Demon (CR 4)

3 Shambling Mound (CR 5)

12 Skeleton (CR 1/4)

4 Spined Devil (CR 2)

1 Stone Juggernaut (CR 12)

6 Swarm of Spiders (CR 1/2)

1 Tyrannosaurus Zombie (CR 8)

3 Water Weird (CR 3)

3 Wereboar (CR 4)

TOTAL XP: 115K

This is enough XP to level four characters from 9 to 10, or potentially 11 if they’re already halfway through 9.

If we want to level any group from any level to 11 we need to give them a bit more XP. The solution: award XP for overcoming obstacles and finding treasure, specifically the nine trickster gods and the four legendary treasures!

The math goes like this: if our players start at lvl 8, they need 85,000 – 34,000 XP to reach lvl 11. If there are five characters in the party, they need five times this amount (255,000). The dungeon provides 115,000. The remaining XP is divided among treasures: 8,250 for a trickster god and 16,500 for a legendary treasure.

In table form (with some arbitary rounding by me):

There ya go. Give the party this much XP whenever they free a trickster god, or double that amount when they find a legendary treasure, and they should end up somewhere around that 11 mark. If they don’t fight and find everything they will most likely end up on lvl 10, but that’s okay with me. Give them the last nudge for defeating the hags if you really want them to hit tier 3 before the final battle!