Anyone else having problems with Tomb of Annihilation??

I'm running Out of the Abyss and I don't roll random encounters. The party wants to go from Neverlight Grove to Blingdenstone because they've heard from their NPC companions that Blingdenstone is the way home. In Tomb there has to be someone to drop place names and rumors of what potentially lies in that place.

It just cannot be, "Today your party moves through hex G-16 and it rains hard and you are attacked by three mantraps. Otherwise it's uninteresting flat jungle like G-01 through G-15 you went through the last three weekends. Now, let's roll for G-17 before we call it quits for this week's adventure."

And in Out of the Abyss, if there are no NPCs in the party that know the way to the chosen or any destination, then and only then, do the players wander "randomly". And still, it's up to me as the DM to place a guide or potential guide or a liar who guides them wrong or into a trap into the game.

There was hallucinatory melding in Neverlight Grove (not a spoiler, I added the whole myconid matrix/augmented reality to the otherwise staid mentions of "melding") and there's rumors of civil war in Blingdenstone, elementals gone rogue. But in between there has to be something, so far there's been two sessions in the Silken Paths, including one in the Lost Tomb which I made connected, and there'll be one or two more before they're on their way, and then I'm thinking "giants", fire giants maybe. All before we get to the outskirts of Blingdenstone where I can finally use the phrase "press gang" from the 1e DMG and get the party into some tunnel wars. No random encounters. They're fighting in the Silken Paths for supply lines and intrinsic points for the upcoming war, a month or more away.

In Tomb you have to make it all connect and mean something. Make up encounters. Use a terrain feature and a random encounter roll and then expand it into something that has to do with something ahead or the theme of the adventure or one of the NPCs goals or a basic D&D meme like a tomb full of puzzles and undead with magic items as a reward.

For example, for the Lost Tomb of Khaem mini-dungeon in Out of the Abyss, I added Fargas Rumbleflake, the lucky old deep gnome and his trinkets that will be transformed into magic items if the PCs can figure out what's missing from the scenes they see in the orbs in the tombs, (it even says in the wiki on Netherese they had a way of turning mundane items into magic items, sheer coincidence) and figure out which trinkets are similar to popular magic items, and a prince turned vampire and his elven wife turned banshee in the next room, cast into the underdark, lost and died 1000 years ago, she the key to forming Dawnbringer if only the PCs can assuage her ancient pain with promises of bringing the light to the Underdark. All that was just extra, random, padding. And instead it's become a huge section of our Out of the Abyss campaign. Now Fargas is going to become Renfield to the Netherese vampire and bring him along on their way to Blingdenstone and we're adding Curse of Strahd and Dracula stuff to OotA, meanwhile I'm watching war movies and reading 3.5 Heroes of Battle for ideas.

/r/DnD Thread