Tomb of Annihilation: Initial Observations

So four sessions in and I decided to do a bit of comparison about how other parties start the campaign vs. how we started out campaign.  It's been a slow slog without much direction for the first four sessions, finally picking up by the end half of session four.  Good thing we're not streamers - we would have lost our entire audience within the first hour of session 2.

One thing that I notice watching YouTube videos of Tomb of Annhilation is that other parties were welcomed at Port Nyanzaru by Wakanga O’Tamu and spent some time speaking with O’Tamu and Syndra Silvane.  In our campaign Sylvane transported the party and the DM played it as if the transport drained her and she needed to immediately retire.  We were literally dumped off without direction nor introduction and expected to hex crawl through the city to discover what was within.  This is almost certainly due to the fact that the group was used to Pathfinder hex crawls. 

Story wise it gave the party the feelings that they were unimportant and disposable.  Other groups play it as if the party are important heroes, the focus of the adventure, but ours felt like we were thrown to the wolves and expected to fail.  And now the DM wonders why we have fatalistic PCs that expect to die…

So yes, that will be a theme in the novelization recaps.  At least one of the five characters is convinced this is a suicide mission.