And that's okay. It's right there in the name of the series. The young adventurer's guide. These books are great gifts for your little brother/sister/gender-neutral sibling who, while old enough to want to know more about your D&D sessions, isn't mature enough that you want to actually let them play. However, I found myself disappointed in Dungeons & Tombs until I read halfway through it, as the first large section, The Most Dangerous Dungeons, mainly gives some broad highlights or previews of Chult (from The Jungles of Chult, Forgotten Realms), Ironslag (from Storm King's Thunder, Forgotten Realms), Ravenloft, The Sea Ghost (from Ghosts of Saltmarsh Adventure), The Temple of Elemental Evil and Undermountain - six supplemental gaming resources of varying sizes, available for purchase separately. In addition to basically serving as very brief intros to these other worlds (in a way that felt much like a catalog without prices, to me), I was disgruntled to not even get a single map of the areas described or any stats of the discussed monsters you could encounter there.
Once I made it to page fifty-four, however, the Dungeon Bestiary section made up for this, a bit, by discussing some of the creatures from those different areas in the beginning of the book. Mind you, there still are no stats to speak of, but there's at least some more detail on the creatures and a "danger level" indicator that gives you a general idea of what sort of parties to throw the creatures at.
Finally, the last section of the book, Building Your Own Dungeon, starting on page eighty-four, is about a fifth of the length of the book and only has three maps in it: one of generic catacombs, one of a temple and one of a pirate boat that looks like it is probably the aforementioned Sea Ghost from Ghosts of Saltmarsh. However, in addition to these maps, Dungeons & Tombs has a two-page key of Map Symbols and some instructions on how to envision areas so that they're more realistic, lived-in environments and how to make your own maps to scale, defining and recording these environments for use in your game sessions.
In my opinion, the materials are presented in "save the best for last" order; the first half of the book shows the flavor of some of the available campaign supplement products out there, but not enough that you can run with it, other than to run out and buy one of them. The bestiary is interesting and inspiring, but you'll still need to pick up rulebooks to be able to use them in a game. The last section on making your own dungeons, however, gives you enough information that you could start doodling maps, without anything more than paper and pencil - or, perhaps, just a little disk space, if you using a drawing program.
So far, Dungeons & Tombs is the weakest book of the series, in my opinion, at least when taken as a standalone book. The most useful part is the last section and, if you already know you want to make dungeon maps, you can quickly find similar resources online to show you how. However, as part of a complete series, it serves its purpose and you can draw on the additional resources from the bestiary resources in Monsters & Creatures. For example, in the section on Ironslag, Duke Zalto, the legendary fire giant, is mentioned, but not in depth. However, you can read more about Duke Zalto and his family in a two-page feature on him in Monsters & Creatures. I do like the fact that none of the material appears to be duplicated between books in the series, but rather, each book presents the appropriate information from each of the mentioned D&D realms relative to its own scope. Personally, I have the most anticipation for Wizards & Spells, the fourth and, apparently, final book in the series, which is slated for release in March of 2020.
