Expand Your Dungeons & Dragons Campaign With These Two New Books

However, it is important to note that the jungles and dangers also have a slight feel of “darkest Africa” to them, and the Chultan people are dark-skinned. The narrative beats in Tomb pull heavily from familiar sources like Edgar Rice Burroughs or Jules Verne, and those works have a long racialized history that is not often grappled with. This crops up in places like the design of the Batiri, a culture of goblins who wear massive tribal masks and literally stack on top of each other to make a “totem pole” for warfare. There is also a Lost World-ish thing going on, since Chult has both tame and wild dinosaurs roaming around. While the literary and visual content Tomb borrows from makes for interesting design and visuals, I think Wizards could have done more to interrogate those texts that they borrowed from and how they have a complicated past with general representations of “Africa” writ large.

Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, named after a beholder who just knows a lot of things, forgoes the designed adventure and is instead a huge book of things to add to your game. New character backgrounds, specific transformations for each species of character, and a huge set of new options for how to build your characters are contained within. Guide is a book that is fundamentally about making your D&D game better in as many ways as it can. It is a toolbox that you can use to augment any given part of the design process of your game (for a Dungeon Master) or the actual play experience (for both DMs and players alike).

Dungeons & Dragons is a rules-heavy experience, and that can be a strength or a weakness depending on what the DM and her players want to be doing at any given time. Guide’s power as a toolbox is that it helps you bridge the gap between “crunchy rules” and “narrative freewheeling.” If you need rules for exactly how a Sphere of Crushing Doom (aka Indiana Jones) trap might function, including what the saving throws should be, then this book has you covered. If you need ideas for the “down time” between campaigns when the players are just off doing their own thing, then this book has a wealth of information and tips on how to use that opportunity to make players feel interested and engaged with their world.

These fall offerings from Wizards of the Coast are meant to help Dungeon Masters and their players create interesting and engaging experiences, and both Tomb of Annihilation and Xanathar’s Guide to Everything are excellent at doing what they are intended to do. While the latter is mostly intended to help you grow your game, you could always use Tomb to do something similar. Dungeon Masters should never be afraid to borrow, take influence from, or straight-up rip off things that they like from the published adventures. Does a jungle tomb full of nightmares seem right up your alley? Grab the Tomb book, strip all the important characters out, and send your players through it. I have no doubt that they will have an excellent time. Just make sure they bring a machete.

Cameron Kunzelman tweets at @ckunzelman and writes about games at thiscageisworms.com. His latest game, Epanalepsis, was released last year. It’s available on Steam.