Editing Tomb of Annihilation (section)

===Spooky Stuff===
SO. You might be wondering: Gee, handsome and exquisite 1d4chan grognard, what makes this book special? Simple. Aside from the awesome art, the hair-yankingly FUCK dungeon at the end, and the canon reintroduction of everybody's favorite divine abortion, this book introduces two optional rules to the 5e campaign tools: Meatgrinder Mode and Death Curse.

Meatgrinder Mode is explicitly for making character death more likely. In this mode, the players must roll a 15, not a 10, to get one pass on their death saves. That by itself is insane, but there are other things to offset it, like how all characters who survive anything that grants XP or arbitrary money in this mode earn 10% more automatically. Thus, after you hit level 2, you are less likely to take a lethal hit, since you will always be earning new hit point totals faster than the encounter CR can keep up with you (at least in official Wizards of the Coast publications), but if you do go down, you are statistically half again as likely to die.

This couples beautifully with the Death Curse. Under the Death Curse rules, all living things that had died at least once before already begin dying again. This is unblockable and insurmountable. You can still gain XP and more HP from leveling up, but nothing, not magic nor time, can allow you to recover hit points past a formula of [Total HP value - {days since Death Curse began * 1}].  Therefore, when you drop to zero, you stay alive for the usual 1d4+CON hours, then die.  And thanks to the other half of the Death Curse, you are ''fucked.'' Why? Because the Death Curse blocks ALL resurrections. All of them. ''Raise Dead, Resurrection, True Resurrection, Reincarnation,'' even ''Wish'' and the Deck of Many Things are all nonfunctional. The only way to not die is with ''Spare the Dying'' and ''Revivify,'' since the soul doesn't leave the body before the time limits on those spells.

So what's the dealie, yo? Well, remember that atropal? Yeah, Acererak commissioned a soul-injecting necrowomb from some hags, and they thought it was hilarious, so they built it for him. He plugged it into the atropal, and it's eating hundreds of thousands of souls from across the Realmspace Sphere (including the sun and Glyth) as nourishment. Which is [[awesome]], but also [[Grimdark|very bad]]. When it hits critical mass, at which point it will have consumed millions of souls, Acererak hopes it will erupt into a neonate god, one he can control, which will begin ripping the souls from every living thing on Toril and give him a cut. Now, whether that would work or not, nobody knows, least of all Acererak, who can always nip out to his pocket dimension if it doesn't work. He's not from Toril, he doesn't give a fuck. One wonders what Larloch and Szass Tam think of all this, and one would learn that they are ''fucking angry.'' Both have sent their dudes to fuck things up, and you can even take Larloch as a patron of your Warlock if you want to play one of his agents sent to destroy the fucking thing.

So what happens next? Canonically, the party finds the trickster gods (actually just trickster spirits) that Acererak wrecked so he could turn their temple into his new Tomb of Annihilation, gets all kinds of juiced up by them, and blows up the adamantine support struts holding the Soulmonger above the lava pit beneath it, then double-aborts the atropal and kills the current body of the lich. He doesn't like that, but not knowing how they're so powerful since he didn't know the trickster gods were still extant, he just reforms his body elsewhere and plots to murder the party's children. He's eternal, he has time for that.