[RPG] In Tomb of Annihilation, how can I run the Orolunga ziggurat pyramid challenge with a little more player agency

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I'm running the Tomb of Annihilation adventure, and my players are about to come to Orolunga.

There's a particular "gateway" challenge there:

Access to the shrine at the top of the ziggurat is protected by magic, and there are different things one must do at each level of the ziggurat to get past. These are vaguely reminiscent of Indiana Jones puzzle kind of things, except, as described, each challenge is magically impossible except by doing something that there's no way to really figure out. Instead, we're told that after a few minutes of trying each one, the players notice a chwinga doing whatever is needed to pass, and the answer is "mimic that!". (The module specifically says that every other approach just doesn't work.)

The text says "It might help to think of the whole situation as a fairy tale; it doesn’t need to make sense, because the magic of Orolunga is on a mythic scale that overpowers the ability of any mortal." That's all well and good, but when I played through this section as a player a few months ago in Adventurers League, it didn't feel like a fairy tale. It felt like a boring series of hoops to jump with no ability to use my character's abilities or skills — let alone my own brain.

I'm not looking for random ideas to change this, but rather specific experience from anyone else who has run this bit and done it differently in order to make this more interesting and fun. What did you do, and how well did it work?

Best Answer

So I had much the same reaction to it upon reading. But running an AL table, I didn't really have a lot of leeway to change it and ran it as written. And I've realized two things from that:

  • Even though the players caught on pretty quickly that they just had to mimic chwinga, they still enjoyed it more than I'd have expected. Eight months later they razz the one character who couldn't hold down their snake. (Blech.)
  • This works really well to set up some other chwinga scenes later in the book. The players totally trust them to be helpful little guide-spirits, and that's come in pretty handy.

So I don't have any suggestions for how to change it, but I'll suggest that in my experience you don't need to change it. (Though it's understandable to think to change it.) At worst it's a quick 20-minute skill challenge and you're on to the oracle.

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