1. Tomb Of Annihilation Levels
2. Tomb Of Annihilation Anyflip

Tomb of Annihilation is a 5th-edition Dungeons & Dragons adventure set in the Chult region of the Forgotten Realms. 1 Index 1.1 Characters 1.2 Creatures 1.3 Locations 1.4 Organizations 1.5 Magic 1.6 Miscellaneous 2 Trivia 3 Appendix 3.1 Further Reading 3.2 External Links 3.3 Connections Click. Tomb of Annihilation Jungles of Chult Port Nyanzaru Ras Nsi Adventurers at the Tomb Papazotl's Tomb D&D on Twitch Stream of Annihilation Community-generated live-play highlights what’s fantastic about D&D—sitting down together with your friends to tell a grand story!

Tomb of Annihilation gives us one of the most powerful and iconic villains in the history of Dungeons & Dragons: the archlich Acererak. This centuries-old, planeswalking master wizard was once a cambion (half-fiend) from the world of Greyhawk (Oerth), the son of an Orcus-worshipping balor and for a time the apprentice of the infamous Vecna (before the latter ascended to godhood). Acererak’s real claim to fame, however, is his penchant for constructing elaborate death traps to harvest the souls of powerful adventurers. It is this legacy that endures in the eponymous dungeon of Tomb of Annihilation.

This article is part 1 of the Tomb of Annihilation series. You can read part 2 here.

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Since his first appearance in the original Tomb of Horrors (1978), Acererak (ah-SAIR-ak) has taken many forms, including that of a lich, demilich, and a vestige (a kind of super-ghost invented to give a purpose to the Binder class in Third Edition). In the Fifth Edition Monster Manual, Acererak was mentioned in the context of the demilich entry, possibly indicating that he was originally intended to take that form again. However, demiliches are no longer the advanced form of a lich as they were in the past, and so Chris Perkins et. al. at Wizards of the Coast opted to restore him to full lichdom in Tomb of Annihilation. Not only that, they gave him an advanced stat line that put him on the same level as some demon lords. Seriously, he’s nuts.

Most remarkable about Acererak’s Fifth Edition stats are his spellcasting abilities, which are well beyond even the mightiest mortal archmage. Able to cast 1st- through 3rd-level spells at will—including outside his turn as legendary actions!—as well as having more spell slots of higher levels (two 9th-level spell slots!), he is in a completely different league than any PC could become. Reading through his abilities, it is impossible to not have visions of arcing bolts of lightning and roaring eruptions of flame. Dropping three fireballs just as legendary actions?

Except… no, that can’t be right. He doesn’t even have fireball prepared? What?

Closely perusing Acererak’s spell list has led many people to scratch their head in wonder at the way his stat block was designed. How does he expect to prevail against interloping adventurers without fireball? How can he have not availed himself of the opportunity to throw one of the best spells in the game around four times in a single round? He’s got 27 Intelligence, this is a no-brainer!

Worst spell list ever.

Now, many have argued that Acererak isn’t expecting to have to rush to the tomb that day in order to smite some upstart adventurers, and therefore that he’s not necessarily going to be packing enough magic to annihilate a small army. And those people would be right… if his current loadout didn’t include high-level damage spells like disintegrate and circle of death. He frequently travels the planes exploring dangerous locales, has enemies across the multiverse, and regularly deals with dangerous situations. He is always going to be ready for a fight.

In actuality, there is a more (and also less) logical reason for him to eschew the most damaging spells that he can spam: so that he doesn’t wipe the entire party within a few rounds. Adding three fireballs to the average damage of each turn raises Acererak’s per-round average damage considerably. We say that this is more and also less logical because there is already zero chance that the PCs should be able to defeat him; they should have depleted most of their resources crawling through six levels of Faerûn’s deadliest dungeon and then fighting a coven of night hags as well as an aborted godling. By this point, Acererak could show up with nothing more than a pointed stick and be able to destroy the 10th-level (max!) party.

In other words, sparing the players fireballs as Acererak’s legendary actions in hopes that it makes the encounter at all survivable is an exercise in futility. No 2nd-tier party should prevail against Acererak the Devourer. In fact, we would go so far as to say that you’re doing your players a disservice if you don’t wipe the floor with them in this fight. You wouldn’t make Demogorgon a pushover, would you? A 10th-level party that fights Orcus or Dispater is going to be soundly trounced, and that’s precisely what the party should be expecting from this fight.

Of course, those who argue that Acererak, while he should be ready for deadly situations, shouldn’t be outfitted ready to singlehandedly wipe out a small army have a very good point. But it is a point that raises issue with his basic spell list, too. For someone supposedly not prepared for war, there is a notable lack of utility in Acererak’s spell list. It’s as though he was halfway through swapping out his spells from a day he expected combat to a day he thought he’d just bum around opening magically locked doors and then just… got bored and stopped. It really doesn’t make sense.

So what should he have prepared? To figure that out, let’s look into a day in the (un)life of one of the most powerful wizards in the multiverse.

Acererak’s Day

What does a mighty archwizard who has need of neither air nor food nor sleep do in a typical day? Aside from overseeing the construction of deadly tombs on far-flung worlds, Acererak primarily “wanders the cosmos in search of souls to harvest” (TOA 94). In his odyssey across the planes, he comes into conflict with powerful spirits (such as the Nine Trickster Gods of Omu) and rivals in his search to plumb the secrets of creation. His adventures, then, are fraught with peril, and even though he will always reform when destroyed (so long as his phylactery survives), he is sure to resent delays in his adventuring and so would ensure that he possesses the means to defeat his foes.

What about Acererak’s style? As a necromancer, he probably doesn’t put too much stock in the illusion school, so while phantasmal killer would certainly be fitting for an evil wizard who enjoys terrorizing his foes (or underlings), it probably doesn’t belong on Acererak’s list. Likewise, he is too economical to run a high-level spell like maze, which does what a low-level spell (banishment) does better. A creature that Acererak doesn’t have time to deal with but also doesn’t want to destroy (perhaps because he wants to interrogate it later) is better banished indefinitely for later recovery using the demiplane spell. The only illusion spell he’d take would probably by greater invisibility, as it allows him to cast spells without fear of being counterspelled (since he cannot be seen and therefore cannot be targeted).

When you take into account Acererak’s particular brand of villainy and consider his daily activities, you can draw a few conclusions. He would have to have spells that can move him from place to place, damaging spells that can deal with various types of foes, spells to protect himself against those damage types to which he is not already immune, and spells to help him to defeat ancient magical protections. Let’s take a look at what this would look like:

Now this is a spell list you could expect from someone who means business. He has a spammable spell that grants disadvantage to someone trying to attack him (ray of sickness). He also has spells which deal lightning, cold, and fire damage, a well-rounded arsenal able to overcome most any foe. He can fly wherever he wants at will, allowing him superior manoeuvrability, and if he really needs an escape he can teleport 30 feet away as a bonus action with misty step. He can singlehandedly wipe all but high-level parties with a single use of chain lightning followed with some legendary action fireballs, but if he really gets angry he can cast time stop followed by delayed blast fireball, dealing 13d6 damage to any creatures caught inside the conflagration. He can also dispel a pesky persistent effect like Bigby’s hand if he missed negating it with counterspell. And don’t forget that greater invisibility allows Acererak to cast spells without fear of being countered by someone who doesn’t have truesight, as counterspell requires that you are able to see the target. Pair that with shield and you have a lich who a fighter with Strength 20 and a +1 weapon can only hit one third of the time on average.

Yet, as equipped as he is for battle, Acererak also has the right utility spells for adventuring. .Comprehend languages, detect magic, knock, speak with dead, and telekinesis are all the kind of spells that an adventuring wizard would rely on to explore long-lost locales or ancient libraries, and some spells like disintegrate have out-of-combat applications if Acererak runs out of less drastic options. He also packs utility cantrips (of which this list gives him the full five that a 20th-level wizard is entitled to), including light if he needs to look at something in colour (darkvision is greyscale) and mending. If you really want to load Acererak up with more battle spells, comprehend languages and detect magic are both rituals and could be swapped out for something that hits harder; we felt it was appropriate that he would spare the extra 10-minute casting time and use one of his unlimited 1st-level spell slots to cast them as needed.

Finally, he also has the most important spell in a wizard’s arsenal: wish. Because if anyone in the multiverse should have this prepared, it’s Acererak.

Remaining Spell Slots

Now that we’ve figured out what spells Acererak should have prepared, we should guess at how many spell slots he has remaining when he arrives. Let’s assume that he casts mind blank on himself every day, so that takes him down to a single open 8th-level slot. Now, let’s assume that he’s been exploring some ancient ruin on another plane—maybe the ruins of Bakluni on Oerth (Greyhawk) or the Mournland on Eberron. We can expect he generally relies on his at-will utilities like dispel magic and mage hand to do most tasks, but perhaps he had to use telekinesis or a 5th-level banishment at one point. Then he had to plane shift to Toril in order to confront the upstarts wrecking his experiment.

Let’s consider what his spell slots would look like, then:

Cantrips: at will
1st level: at will
2nd level: at will
3rd level: at will
4th level:3 slots
5th level: 2 slots
6th level: 3 slots
7th level: 2 slots
8th level: 1 slot
9th level: 2 slots

New Challenge Rating

Of course, changing out Acererak’s spells also changes his damage potential, which has an impact on his challenge rating. Note that DMs playing Adventurers League can ignore this section; Acererak’s challenge rating will remain unchanged even if you decide he has no spells prepared.

The process of calculating a monster’s challenge rating is laid out in chapter 9, “Dungeon Master’s Workshop”, in the Dungeon Master’s Guide. It involves a long series of calculations based on AC, hit points, damage, and attack bonuses or save DCs (whichever the monster uses more). To spare you the boring steps, here’s how we re-calculate Acererak’s challenge rating:

Defensive CR: 25
Offensive CR: 28
Final CR: 26 (90,000 XP)

Optional Bonus Features

Now, changing out the spells is well and good, but it may not be enough to make sure that Big A gets to shine. You see, he has several significant weaknesses which might still make him too easy for a party that can focus its efforts, especially if many of them possess magic weapons or can counterspell. The following optional features offer a way to ensure that Big A doesn’t fall victim to the action economy if facing a larger party.

New Action:Empowered Spell (Recharge 4—6). Acererak casts a spell from his list of prepared spells, choosing one of the following additional effects:

• • Acererak gains 5 temporary hit points per level of the spell.
  • Any attempt to negate the spell using counterspell or similar magic requires a successful spellcasting ability check, regardless of the spell slot used negate the spell.
  • If the spell deals damage, Acererak can deal an additional 20 necrotic damage to one target affected by the spell.

This is the simplest method to cover Acererak’s biggest weaknesses as a single spellcaster. Fifty percent of the time, Acererak can use his action on his turn to supercharge a spell, either gaining temporary hit points, dealing extra damage, or making it extremely difficult to counter. Note that this is a specific action, so it doesn’t work when Acererak uses his At-Will Spell legendary action. To inflict maximum terror on the party, use the third option when casting finger of death on a cursed target to deal an average of 163 damage, which might actually be enough to trigger the instant death rules and successfully transform the character into a zombie under Acererak’s control.

Insuperable Magic.Spellcasting ability checks made as part of attempts to negate Acererak’s magic (as with counterspell) are resolved against Acererak’s spell save DC.

This is a huge change. Acererak can spam 1st- through 3rd-level spells, which have a DC of 11 to 13 to negate with counterspell. Therefore, a spellcaster with a spellcasting ability score of 18 (+4) will negate his spells at least 55% of the time. By changing this to a flat DC 23, you remove the biggest obstacle to Acererak actually being able to use his abilities. You should really only use this one if your players are so optimized that Big A can’t afford even one round of losing his spells to counterspell, by which point your party should have burned through any remaining spell slots they had of 3rd level or higher.

Potent Magic.Any spell slot Acererak expends to cast a wizard spell counts as a spell slot of one level higher.

This option comes with an important reminder that Acererak doesn’t have spell slots of 3rd level or lower; those spells are at will for him, and therefore wouldn’t benefit from this effect. All of his spells of 4th-level or higher, however, would deal more damage and be harder to counter.

Regeneration.Acererak regains 10 hit points at the start of his turn if he has at least 1 hit point.

If your party is on the heavy side of damage dealing (say, able to maintain an average damage output of at least 60), this will probably extend the fight by another round or so.

Superior Health. Acererak has the maximum number of hit points for his Hit Dice.

Much more potent than Regeneration, this change will be something to consider if your party is disproportionately heavy in straight damage dealers who either deal magic damage or have magic weapons that bypass Acererak’s damage immunity. Warlocks, barbarians, fighters, and the like can all sustain a pretty significant damage output that can burn through Acererak’s hit points like a hot blade through goblin. Along with the changes to his spell list, this is another option available to Adventurers League Dungeon Masters, whose parties are more likely to be at the adventure’s intended level cap (level 11). Just remember that if your party doesn’t have magic weapons, their physical attacks aren’t just resisted, they’re ignored.

Reaction: Spell Reflection. If Acererak makes a successful saving throw against a spell, or a spell attack misses, he can choose another creature (including the spellcaster) he can see within 30 feet of him. The spell targets the chosen creature instead of Acererak. If the spell forced a saving throw, the chosen creature makes its own save. If the spell was an attack, the attack is rerolled against the chosen creature.

What could make an archmage capable of blasting a cavalry charge to bits even more deadly? Turning their enemies’ own spells against them. Remember the short range (30 feet) of this feature. In all probability, it will be against a melee-oriented character who has got all up in Acererak’s face instead of the original spellcaster.

Putting It All Together

Acererak is a legendary archmage who has lived for centuries and defeated all manner of terrifying enemies, including would-be gods. A DM who pulls their punches with him is doing his players a disservice by cheating them out of the experience. Your players knew going in to Tomb of Annihilation that their characters would probably not make it out alive, and that’s exactly what should happen here.

While he isn’t likely to have prepared spells for the day expecting to destroy adventurers, Acererak frequently journeys through the most dangerous locales of the multiverse in search of powerful souls to harvest and therefore would have a suite of damaging spells prepared as part of his regular repertoire. Unfortunately, the prepared spells suggested by the adventure do not reflect his experience in leveraging his magical abilities. Thus, a revision is absolutely necessary to truly deliver the real “Acererak experience”. The improvements presented here will ensure that this battle is one of the most memorable of your players’ gaming careers.

Don’t forget to check out part 2 of this series, Tomb of Annihilation: Playing Acererak.

If you enjoyed this article, we highly recommend that you check out Sly Flourish’s take on Acererak’s spells.

When our group first started playing Tomb of Annihilation, the prospect of emphasizing the dangers of the jungle was very exciting. While in a typical region (like the Sword Coast of Faerûn), characters can generally expect to find a small town (and maybe an inn) within a day of travel in pretty much any direction and therefore will rarely face a situation where they have to forage for food and water, Chult is a deadly landscape populated only with dinosaurs, sentient poisonous plants, vicious cannibals, xenophobic albino dwarves, fire newts, and other creatures that make for poor hosts. The characters are on their own here, and if they’re not careful they’ll starve to death before they make it to their destination!

Or will they?

The longer the campaign went on, the more acutely we became aware that keeping track of food and water consumption was becoming a tedious distraction from the rest of the game. At first it was fun, but there is a reason you rarely see people in fantasy stories having to scavenge for food. It’s the same reason you don’t see them cooking dinner or relieving themselves: it’s unnecessary. It adds nothing to the narrative. While travelling through the jungle, one expects the characters to be thirsty, just as they’re expected to be sweaty and scratched up from thick bushes and whatnot. Books and movies may include it in a travel montage, but unless it’s the players against the jungle (instead of the jungle just being in the way), we found it to ultimately become an unwelcome obstacle to the real fun.

And so, being nerds, we looked at the math behind what was being rolled for.

The Issue of Water

The primary danger in the jungle is the increased amount of water characters need. Normally, it’s 1 gallon of water per day for a Medium creature. In Chult, that becomes 2 gallons because you’re sweating so much.

Of course, Chult also has water in abundance. According to the descriptions of the peninsula, rain is almost a daily occurrence. And not just normal rain, heavy rains. The streets of Port Nyanzaru are built with wide gutters to quickly clear water out so as to prevent flooding in the city. It rains a lot.

To reflect the increased precipitation Chult receives, we used the following table in place of the one found in chapter 5, “Adventure Environments”, in the Dungeon Master’s Guide.

Light.Light rain continues for 1d6 – 1 hours (minimum 1 hour). A region experiencing light rainfall is lightly obscured beyond 1 mile. A rain catcher deployed during a light rain can catch ¹/₄ gallon of water per hour.
Medium.Medium rain continues for 1d6 + 1 hours. A region experiencing medium rainfall is lightly obscured beyond 500 ft. A rain catcher deployed during a medium rain can catch ¹/₂ gallon of water per hour.
Heavy.Heavy rain continues for 2d6 – 1 hours and comes with an additional 1d4 hours of light rain. Lightning is not uncommon during such storms. A region experiencing heavy rainfall is lightly obscured beyond 150 ft. A rain catcher deployed during a heavy rain can catch 1 gallon of water per hour.
Tropical Storm. A tropical storm is typically a violent weather phenomenon that comes along with fierce winds. It lasts 2d6 hours. A region experiencing a tropical storm is lightly obscured beyond 60 ft. and creatures have disadvantage on Wisdom (Survival) checks made to navigate in unfamiliar terrain as long as the storm persists. Rain catchers cannot be properly deployed in a tropical storm.

With these parameters set out, the following table shows how much water a rain catcher can typically collect during a day based on the intensity of that day’s precipitation.

Rain Collected Per Rain Catcher

Foraging: Taking the Average

According to page 111 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide, “if multiple characters forage, each character makes a separate check”. Given that the DC for a Wisdom (Survival) check to find food in the jungle should (using the table on the same page) be an easy 10, chances are that even someone untrained in Survival will be successful about half the time (or more than half the time, if they have a higher Wisdom score). Assuming that nobody in the party has Survival and Wisdom scores are all average across the board, in a typical day of travel the party should have the following results:

Average Wisdom Party

This means that there is a water debt of 12.5% in any given party of average-Wisdom characters, hence the need for rain catchers (or for boiling water if you are near a river). The only time you risk dehydration is if you are not travelling along a river or stream and it hasn’t rained, two uncommon occurrences in a tropical rainforest.

But what if you have someone in the party with some foraging skill? Assuming that the foragers have a Wisdom of just 13 (+1), the average foraging results become the following:

Tomb Of Annihilation Levels

Note that, rather immediately, the issue of getting enough water vanishes. While some days the party might not get quite enough water, their average consumption is less than their average collection. If the party packs extra water skins, they should be able to stock up and maintain supplies, eliminating the need to keep rolling every day.

Magic

If the party includes a cleric or a druid, 10 gallons of water can be produced at the low cost of a single 1st-level spell slot using create or destroy water. Add in all the other crazy ways that magic can be used to gain an advantage in the search for water (a wizard sending their flying familiar up to do scouting, a druid using speak with plants to learn where the nearest stream can be found, etc.) and it becomes clear that the characters should rapidly move past the need to worry about whether they can find enough food and water.

Conclusion

If your party’s average foraging results over the course of a week would indicate that they are self-sufficient, the task of tracking their supplies is going to become a chore with no real benefit. It’s fun at first to call for foraging checks to reinforce the danger of traversing the jungle, but if it becomes clear that the party would have to have spectacularly bad luck to suffer, the trials of the jungle should be left to narrative style. Our players much preferred to have the weariness of a day of trailblazing and the cloying sensation of constant sweat narrated to them in passing than they did rolling dice to tell them much the same thing, only with some extra bookkeeping.

Save the rolls for particularly difficult situations, such as having to find shelter from a tropical storm, or if a character ingests some of the more interesting specimens of Chult’s flora. The game will run a lot more smoothly.

Tomb Of Annihilation Anyflip