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I'm thinking of playing the Tomb of Annihilation through with my group. We like to play 4 hour one-shots quite frequently but also run longer term campaigns, of which we are currently in the middle of two (without the time to start another).

How long does it take to play through the ToA, presuming you don't all die rapidly? Or even maybe, is there an average time for everyone to die? I've seen people having competitions, doing speed runs, etc. with this adventure, so I got the impression it was likely shorter than other published adventures.

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    \$\begingroup\$ for reference, there's a chat-room for ToA DMing here; if you do end up running it this may be a useful resource. \$\endgroup\$
    – nitsua60
    Commented Oct 6, 2017 at 12:37

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Starting from level 1 and running the full wilderness survival hex crawl, it's a full length campaign, probably taking anywhere from 6 months to over a year for most groups. You can shorten it by starting at level 9 and going straight to Omu, focusing on the events there and the tomb itself, which could probably be done in a shorter time frame. This part of the adventure is very heavy on puzzles and riddles though (each of the six floors of the final dungeon could easily take up a 4-hour session on its own as the party figures out its particular tricks) so it's hard to really rush it.

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    \$\begingroup\$ Is that six months to a year figure based on a rate of game a week? It would be useful to mention the rate expectations there, so people who play more or less often or shorter sessions can make educated guesses about how it'll affect their rate of play. \$\endgroup\$
    – doppelgreener
    Commented Sep 29, 2017 at 16:03
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ToA tooks us roughly 90-120 hours.

Based on our log, it took our party 28 sessions of 3-4 hours length each.

Our party of just four people started at a mix of 1st and 2nd level. Despite doing almost every significant encounter in the published adventure, and only having four party members, our characters didn’t level high enough to continue the adventure so we also did the Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan which finished in 3 sessions and a Secret Mission Ravenloft adventure DDAL 04-14 The Dark Lord for 1 session.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ I was going to ask how you started with a party of different-level characters, but I suppose the AL part would explain that. \$\endgroup\$
    – V2Blast
    Commented Aug 10, 2018 at 19:59
  • \$\begingroup\$ @V2Blast Yes, we had four people in the party. Three started at 1st level and one was 2nd level. \$\endgroup\$
    – Praxiteles
    Commented Aug 10, 2018 at 22:45
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The game of ToA I've been playing in has been going for seven months (One 5-6 hour session per week) since I joined, and the rest of the party was around level 5 at that point - we are now up to level 10.

So far, we had one full party wipe and one where only two of our 5 survived.

We entered the last dungeon of the campaign about three sessions ago, but our gm told us that we are still less than a third through said dungeon, so probably around another 10 - 13 more hours to go ( based on our current speed).

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