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To clearly see how the PCs can rescue Hekaton, we need a few key insights.

First, finding Hekaton is not the end of the campaign. For the reasons we’ve previously discussed, and which we’ll take an in-depth look at in Part 5, Hekaton’s disappearance is not the reason the Ordning is broken, nor will returning him to power restore the Ordning. Therefore, saving Hekaton will not end the campaign.

Importantly, this also means that solving Hekaton’s disappearance doesn’t need to be positioned as the end of the campaign: We don’t need to stop the PCs from “prematurely” solving the mystery and ending the campaign early, which will conveniently make it much easier for us to design a robust scenario for solving it.

So if we shouldn’t think of this as the end of the campaign, how should we think about it? Basically, on par with the other giant factions. “Solving the problem of the storm giants” will likely require a different solution than “solving the problem of the hill giants,” but it slots into the same “there’s something wrong with the giants and it needs to be fixed” structure.

Second, the PCs are not assigned to find Hekaton. Or, at least, they don’t need to be. Maybe they journey to Maelstrom, find a way to befriend Serissa, and she asks of them a boon to prove that not all small-folk are treacherous. Or maybe they’ll end up working for a faction and you could have them order the PCs to rescue Hekaton.

It’s more likely, however, that the PCs will simply discover that Hekaton is missing and then decide to deal with that situation themselves. Or they’ll report it to someone and the response is for that person or faction to ask them to look into it further. Either way, the impetus of action is flowing from the players.

Third, it’s the investigation of the Kraken Society that reveals the plot to kidnap Hekaton, rather than an investigation into Hekaton’s disappearance that reveals the Society. This will probably make more sense as we dive into the specific structure of the remixed investigation, but the key insight is that if the storm giants had been able to find any good leads at the crime scene, then they would already be pursuing those leads, not sitting around for months until a random group of small-folk showed up at their doorstep.

Therefore, logically, if you start from, “Hekaton is missing! How do we find him?” there aren’t any good leads.

The reason the PCs can be the ones to solve this is because, structurally, they approach the problem from a completely different direction.

THE BASIC PLAN

The Kraken Society addendum of the Remix provides a full breakdown of the organization. We’re going to break that organization into separate nodes, and then we’re going to classify those nodes as being either Involved (in the Hekaton conspiracy), Uninvolved, or Distant (and, therefore, unlikely to be encountered by the PCs).

INVOLVED

• Waterdeep – Skum Lord
• Neverwinter – Reefkin
• Yartar – Lord Drylund

UNINVOLVED

• Luskan
• Thornhold
• Dessarin Valley – Ghald & Unferth

DISTANT

• Caer Westphal (in the Moonshae Isles)
• Purple Rocks
• Ascarle

For the moment, let’s discard the Distant nodes. The remaining nodes, whether Involved or Uninvolved, can all be encountered by the PCs during the Phase 3 pointcrawl. Any one of these, when encountered, therefore becomes the PCs’ entry point into the Kraken Society investigation.

In each Uninvolved node, include clues pointing to:

• One or more Involved nodes.
• One or more Uninvolved nodes.

In each Involved node, include clues pointing to:

• Optional: One or more Uninvolved nodes.
• The other two Involved nodes.
• The Morkoth and how the PCs can locate it. (See below.)

And we’re done. The PCs can encounter one or more Kraken Society nodes while traveling across the Sword Coast and/or Savage Frontier, then follow the clues they find until they reach Hekaton. (Potentially unraveling krakenar operations as they go.)

THE LUSKAN AGENDA

To include Luskan on the list of Kraken Society nodes above, we’re presuming that there’s some fresh operation afoot there to reestablish the Society’s presence in the City of Sails.

It’s possible that this operation was under the command of Tholtz Daggerdark (SKT, p. 221), who we might characterize as a member of the Arcane Brotherhood. Daggerdark is now the captain of the Morkoth… perhaps the ship was built in the shipyards of Luskan? And the Kraken Society’s current scheme might have something to do with those shipyards, too?

FINDING THE MORKOTH

The basic concept here is that the Morkoth is sailing aimlessly through the Trackless Sea in the vicinity of the Purple Rocks, loaded up with wards that will prevent divination spells from revealing its location or the location of anyone or anything onboard.

This scenario is fundamentally sound, but it obviously means that the PCs need to (a) learn that Hekaton is onboard the Morkoth and (b) figure how to actually locate the Morkoth.

In the book, there’s one method for doing this: Drylund tells the PCs that the Morkoth is in the Trackless Sea and then the PCs just sail around randomly hoping they bump into it.

This option is not particularly compelling, and since it feels pretty hopeless unless you know that The Plot™ is going to deliver you to the ship, you may end up in a situation where the players just won’t go to the Trackless Sea because they’ll be convinced they need more information before they can succeed.

With that being said, keeping “we know the ship is somewhere in the Trackless Sea, so let’s just sail around and see if we can spot it” as a backstop option isn’t a bad idea. Fortunately, there are also some other options we could use:

• The PCs discover navigational charts indicating where the Morkoth will be so that they can intercept it. The most logical reason for these charts existing is that someone in the Kraken Society has a reason for periodically intercepting the Morkoth; e.g., to deliver fresh supplies.
• Alternatively, the PCs discover a beacon designed specifically to pierce the wards around the Morkoth and allow a ship to find it. (Probably for similar reasons to the navigational charts. Or perhaps the ritual which wards the Morkoth even from divine eyes actually requires the creation of the item as a lynchpin for the spell.)
• The PCs access the kraken’s lighthouse. This powerful psionic artifact is attuned to kraken’s compasses, which are carried by ships and undersea agents loyal to Slarkethrel. The system allows for hyper-accurate navigation, but also allows those in control of the lighthouse to keep an eye on everyone using the system. The Morkoth is using a kraken’s compass to avoid other ships in the region, and it’s a key weakness in its wards.
• There’s a permanent teleportation circle onboard the Morkoth. If the PCs can learn the sigil sequence for this circle, they can teleport straight to the ship.

You can pick whichever one of these sounds most compelling to you, and have the clues in the Involved nodes point to it.

Alternatively, they could ALL be true, with each Involved node having one of them as an option. There is a point, though, where a superfluity of options will make the Kraken Society feel childishly incompetent in their efforts to secure the Morkoth, which will also cheapen the players’ sense of accomplishing in conquering it.

So what I would recommend is picking the one you like best, putting it at Purple Rocks (so that the PCs have to go into the heart of the creepy krakenar cult), and then putting clues in all of the Involved nodes pointing to Purple Rocks.

With this done, you’ll have woven all of the Kraken Society nodes together, collectively pointed them through the Three Clue Rule at the Morkoth, and created multiple entry points the PCs can use to enter this knot of nodes and begin exploring them.

You’re good to go.

Go to Part 4C: Expanding the Path

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We’ve now reached the final chunk of Storm King’s Thunder as published, with the PCs investigating Lord Hekaton’s disappearance.

Before we dive in too deep here, though, I think we all need to acknowledge the giant squid monster in the room: This section of the adventure doesn’t make any sense.

• The PCs are given a gambling chip that was found near where Queen Neri’s body was found.
• From this chip, they’re supposed to conclude that the owner of the casino must be directly involved in Neri’s death and Hekaton’s disappearance. (This, of course, is a nonsensical conclusion.)
• Lord Drylund, the owner of the casino, is involved and knows where Hekaton is being held. But… involved how, exactly? Drylund is a krakenar agent operating out of the inland city of Yartar who’s attempting to take over the local government. How does he or his team get involved in murdering Queen Neri in the Sea of Swords?

It’s not just that the evidentiary trail is flimsy and fragile. (Although it is.) The more fundamental problem is that Storm King’s Thunder never actually explains what happened to Queen Neri or Lord Hekaton. We know very broad generalities (Queen Neri was “ambushed” and Lord Hekaton was “tricked” while investigating her death), but no specifics. And even these generalities are actually contradictory. (In one section, Lord Hekaton is said to have been kidnapped while going to a location where he had been falsely told the assassins were. In another, he was attending a meeting with fake representatives of the Lords’ Alliance and believes he was “betrayed” by them.)

This lack of specificity is one of the reasons why this mystery is dysfunctional: It’s all well and good for the detectives to be in the dark about what happened, but if the writer’s understanding of the murder is limited to “somebody killed them in one of the rooms in this mansion with some kind of weapon,” then it’s going to be pretty tough for them to lay down any meaningful clues.

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED

Mirran, Nym, and Serissa are the daughters of King Hekaton and Queen Neri, who rule from the storm court in Maelstrom. King Hekaton was a strict and conservative ruler, seeking always to live within the light of Annam and to adhere to the Ordning. Queen Neri, on the other hand, sought to temper her husband’s wraths and was also something of a reformist; she believed that the giants could not only make peace with the “small folk” — the humans and elves and dwarves and halflings — but that such an alliance could mean prosperity for small- and giant-folk alike.

Five years ago, Serissa ascended above her elder sisters in the Ordning. King Hekaton responded by officially recognizing her as the heir apparent.

Mirran and Nym did not like this, but there was nothing they could do: The Ordning is the Ordning.

Nevertheless, their bitterness and resentment grew, and they began to leave Maelstrom on sojourns together. These journeys eventually took them north to the Spine of the World, where they searched for the lost Eye of the All-Father in the hopes that they would be able to commune with Annam, discover why he had chosen Serissa over them, and perhaps even right the great wrong which had been done to them.

What they found instead was the wyrm Iymrith. Long ago, her daughter Chezzaran (SKT, p. 73) had been scarred by a storm giant raiding party and she had never forgiven the storm giants. She approached Mirran and Nym in disguise as a storm giant, intending to lull them into a sense of false confidence and then murder them. When she learned who they were, however, and heard their tale, she conceived an even greater revenge. She befriended the sisters and used them to infiltrate the Storm King’s court.

And then the Ordning was broken.

Suddenly Mirran and Nym weren’t helpless any more: If the Ordning no longer existed, then their sister no longer had divine favor elevating her above them.

Their father, however, persisted. He wanted to hold faith with Annam, even if Annam had forsaken them. He refused to reverse his decision and Serissa remained heir apparent. At this point, they likely didn’t require Iyrmith’s counsel for their resentment to blossom into rage, but it certainly helped.

Iymrith convinced them that “working with the small folk” was the reason that the Ordning had been broken: If they could break their mother’s friendship with the small folk, they might repair the Ordning… and, if so, they would almost certainly find themselves raised once more above their sister! Then their father would have no choice but to acknowledge them!

NERI’S PEACE

Queen Neri had formed friendships with the Order of the Blue Moon, a Selunite knighthood who operated out of the House of the Moon temple in Waterdeep. Each month, on the night of the full moon, the knights would gather at a secret chapterhouse hidden in the Red Rocks islands known as the Hall of Reflected Moonlight, and there Queen Neri would meet with them. She was particularly close with High Moonknight Xale, an elderly aasimar who was the leader of the order.

With the breaking of the Ordning, Neri was more convinced than ever that an alliance with the small-folk was essential. With Xale acting as a go-between, a meeting was arranged with Laeral Silverhand, another devotee of Selune who had recently become Open Lord of Waterdeep.

Queen Neri even convinced her husband to attend the meeting, bringing with them only a small force of four honor guards in “the spirit of trust and peace.” In the name of security, only their three daughters and Imperator Uthor, King Hekaton’s brother and commander of the king’s garrison, were privy to the details of Neri’s Peace, as it was known.

THE BETRAYAL

Iymrith, of course, learned of the meeting from Mirran and Nym. It was the perfect opportunity.

Iymrith formed an alliance with the Kraken Society because she needed both muscle and agents to carry out her schemes. It was an easy sell to Slarkethrel, as breaking Maelstrom’s power would remove a major impediment to the kraken’s imperial designs beneath the waves of the Sea of Swords.

• The Skum Lord, based out of Skullport beneath Waterdeep, created forged correspondence from High Moonknight Xale to Laeral Silverhand, purportedly delaying the meeting by a fortnight. The Skum Lord’s agents also intercepted Laeral Silverhand’s replies.
• Ascalian merrow warlocks provided a siren’s cage, a powerful artifact which was smuggled into the Hall of Reflected Moonlight and, when activated, dropped all the knights into a deep magical sleep.
• Lord Drylund of Yartar provided a company of mercenaries, who disguised themselves as Knights of the Blue Moon, rode to the coast to meet Lord Hekaton and Queen Neri, and then ambushed them.
• The were-shark Reefkin of Neverwinter simultaneously cut-off the storm giants’ escape to the sea.

The plan worked perfectly: Queen Neri was killed. King Hekaton was captured and loaded onto a specially prepared vessel called the Morkoth (SKT, p. 221).

Design Note: In the published campaign, Queen Neri is killed in one vague encounter and then King Hekaton is kidnapped during an even vaguer encounter. By collapsing both outcomes into a single event, we vastly simplify things for ourselves. (We also sidestep awkward questions like, “If your wife has just been killed, why would you wander off into an ambush all by yourself instead of bringing like a bajillion guards with you?”)

AFTERMATH

The siren’s cage was retrieved and, a few hours later, the Knights of the Blue Moon awoke. The unnatural slumber baffled them and Xale was confused why neither Queen Neri nor Laeral Silverhand had appeared for their meeting. He attempted to contact Neri via a sending spell, but received no response.

When Hekaton and Neri failed to return to Maelstrom, Imperator Uthor journeyed to Red Rocks. There he discovered his sister-in-law’s body, surrounded by ample evidence that she had been murdered by the very small-folk she had sought to make peace with. With his elite guard, Uthor followed the trail back to the Hall of Reflected Moonlight, slew the small garrison there (most of the knights had returned to Waterdeep with the passing of the full moon), and ransacked the place looking for evidence of what they had done with Lord Hekaton. (He found nothing, of course.)

Back in Maelstrom, Mirran and Nym were shocked. This wasn’t what they had wanted… but they also weren’t exactly upset about it, either. Whatever second thoughts they might have had were quickly quashed by a more pressing realization: Their implication in regicide gave Iymrith the ultimate blackmail to use against them.

“Don’t worry, though,” Iymrith told them. “We’ll still make you the Queens of Maelstrom!”

… they just need to deal with their sister first.

Design Note: Why not cast raise dead on Queen Neri? This is a question that D&D adventure writers frequently just ignore. The go-to answer is simply that the soul of the victim isn’t willing to return, and you can just kind of handwave why Queen Neri wouldn’t want to come back.

Option #2: The merrow warlocks crafted some sort of soul-binding poison and her soul is trapped in the Abyss. Or, alternatively, a soul-binding crystal and now her soul is held captive in the sunken city of Ascarle.

Option #3: The breaking of the Ordning and the withdrawal of Annam’s light from the giants also means that giants can’t be raised from the dead at the moment. (Their souls can depart this world, but the road back from Annam’s kingdom is shut.)

Also: Why not just kill King Hekaton, too? That’s because Iymrith has a clever scheme. If Hekaton was dead, Serissa would simply ascend to the throne. With Hekaton alive-but-missing she’s only acting as regent, and the situation in Maelstrom is more unstable. (The Kraken Society thinks this is a crackin’ idea — pun intended — because this sort of destabilize-and-exploit is their modus operandi.)

Go to Part 4B: Seeking Hekaton

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Broadly speaking, there are three different types of factions that the PCs could become allied with: the organizations (which the book refers to as factions), the giants, and/or the dragons.

The core organizations are detailed on p. 12 of Storm King’s Thunder:

• Harpers
• Lords’ Alliance
• Emerald Enclave
• Order of the Gauntlet
• Zhentarim
• Kraken Society

In addition to these factions, it’s not hard to imagine PCs opportunistically forging similar alliances with other groups in the campaign. For example, perhaps they could convince the warriors of Citadel Adbar (SKT, p. 78) to march forth to war once more.

The giants, of course, are the primary antagonists of Storm King’s Thunder:

• Grudd Haug (Hill Giants)
• Deadstone Clef (Stone Giants)
• Svardborg (Frost Giants)
• Ironslag (Fire Giants)
• Lyn Armaal (Cloud Giants)
• Maelstrom (Storm Giants)

Additional giant factions could be added by creating new giant lords, several options for which are also described on page 12 of Storm King’s Thunder. (The PCs might even try to seek out these alternatives to the primarily villainous lords found in the campaign, perhaps as viable alternatives for a Path of Conquest or Draconic Crusade.)

Finally, there are the dragons. These are, of course, the ancient foes of the giants, and at least some of the evil dragons have been conspiring to free Tiamat from her prison and return her to the Material Plane, an act which would end the truce forged at the end of the Thousand Year War.

A number of dragons have already been seeded into Storm King’s Thunder:

• Iymrith (p. 225)
• Claugiyliamatar (p. 95)
• Isendraug & Cryovain (p. 155)
• Klauth (p. 95)
• Arauthator (p. 106) & Areivaturace (p. 92, also Rime of the Frostmaiden, p. 105)
• Red Dragons of Tuern (p. 111)

If you wanted to expand the draconic influence in your campaign, a good resource might be the Wyrms of the North, a column that Ed Greenwood wrote for Dragon Magazine from 1996-99. These columns were collected and updated for D&D 3^rd Edition on Wizards of the Coast’s website from 2001-04, and you can peruse that archive here. This included “By Dragons Ruled and Divided,” an overview of the whole series written by Sean K. Reynolds which originally included this map of dragons’ territories:

Each of these potential types of alliances have important distinctions, and we’ll take a closer look at the details of the specific groups later, but all of these alliances can be handled with some common structures that will make it easier for you to streamline and simplify the juggling of so many complicated, intersecting relationships during your campaign.

RECRUITMENT OPPORTUNITY

Since our goal is for the PCs to be able to join — or, at least, ally with — each of our factions, you’ll want to create a recruitment opportunity for each of them. If it’s helpful, you can also think of this more in terms of an introduction to the faction.

This is the big, upfront prep task you have to tackle if you want all of this to work. I would often recommend adhering to the Three Clue Rule when prepping content like this — i.e., seeding three different hooks for each faction into the campaign — but given the number of factions involved in Storm King’s Thunder and the structural function we want them to perform, you can probably get away with just having one recruitment opportunity per faction.

A few things to keep in mind:

• There are a bunch of recruitment opportunities already built into the campaign. (Consider how Darathra’s quest on SKT, p. 60 hooks the PCs up with the Harpers. Or Naxene’s quest on p. 52 leads to the dragons.)
• If a recruitment opportunity is proactive — i.e., it’s an encounter that the PCs could have anywhere in Faerun; or it’s actually aimed at the PCs — then it becomes a lot easier to make sure it reaches the table.
• Once the PCs have started working with a faction, either formally or informally, you can use the antagonism between factions as the opportunity to introduce them to new factions. For example, if the PCs are working for the Zhentarim, maybe a Harper agent targets them.
• On a similar note, don’t be afraid to improvise additional recruitment opportunities that arise naturally from the events of actual play.

When it comes to the giants, in particular, note that the structure of the campaign and the remix have already taken care of this: The hooks are framed in an antagonistic fashion, but there’s nevertheless plenty of material designed to bring the players up to speed on all six giant factions, their goals, and their circumstances.

If you did want to prep some other introductions that would show the less antagonistic side of the giants, that would not be misguided, but in this regard you might get a lot of mileage by looking for opportunities to reincorporate characters like Harshnag or Zephyros.

RELATIONSHIP

The next thing you want for each faction is a way of tracking the PCs’ relationship with them.

There are three broad approaches for doing this.

First, you can make ad hoc rulings. Basically, play it by ear: If the PCs have done something that would seem to piss a faction off, then the faction is pissed off and will take appropriate actions to target or hinder the PCs. If it seems like a faction would feel that the PCs have proven themselves or if the PCs have ingratiated themselves in some way, then the faction will take positive actions towards them.

Second, use a pair of progress clocks: One clock tracking the faction’s Enmity towards the PCs; the other tracking their Favor. (For more info on progress clocks, check out Failure for the Beginning DM, Blades in the Dark, and/or So You Want To Be a Game Master. Progress clock graphics and fonts can be found here.)

I recommend using clocks with 4 segments. You tick a segment of the Favor clock when the PCs’ actions or accomplishments are appealing to the faction. You tick a segment of the Enmity clock when the PCs’ actions oppose the faction’s goals, hurt its members, or otherwise antagonist them. (Note that the PCs don’t necessarily need to be working directly for a faction in order for their factions to gain them Favor with the faction.)

When an Enmity clock fills up, the faction takes a hostile action aimed directly at the PCs and/or their allies. Each time a Favor clock fills up, it unlocks one benefit in a progression:

• Recruit: The organization offers the PC(s) a formal position in their ranks.
• Resource: The faction will respond positively to PC requests for Resources (see below).
• Major Resource: The PCs can request significant resources from the faction (e.g., a large strike force or magic item).
• Leadership: The PCs are given a significant position of leadership within the faction. This presumably isn’t Leader of the Entire Faction, but it likely involves command over other members of the faction and perhaps a voice in the highest counsels of the faction, with access to and the ability to influence the decision-makers.

In other words, when the Favor track fills up for the first time, the faction offers to recruit the PCs. The second time it fills up, the faction will grant access to Resources, and so on.

It is possible to have slots ticked in both a faction’s Enmity and Favor clocks at the same time. If the PCs trip an Enmity clock after having advanced significantly through a faction’s Favor clocks, the “hostile action” is likely akin to busting them back a rank. Mechanically, you might model this by emptying their Favor clock, or even forcing them to restart the previous Favor clock.

Third, you can use a relationship meter. Actions and accomplishments of the PCs that are appealing to the faction will grant them an increase of +1 to +4 points on the meter. Actions that oppose the goal’s of the faction, hurt its members, or otherwise antagonize them will inflict a -2 to -8 penalty. (The disparity is intentional: When you burn your reputation with someone, it’s harder to dig yourself out of the hole.)

In order to gain a faction’s aid (see Resources, below) when using a relationship meter, PCs will need to succeed on social skill checks. Their relationship meter will act as a modifier on these checks, and when setting the DC you should consider:

• The scale and size of the request. (The bigger the ask, the higher the DC.)
• Whether or not the request is consistent with the faction’s ideals and goal. (If the PCs are trying to do something the faction agrees with and wants to do, it should be easier to convince the faction and the DC should go down.)

This means that PCs can succeed at bigger asks if they either (a) choose the appropriate faction to ask, (b) figure out how to convince a faction that the course of action they’re suggesting is a high priority, and/or (c) spend time building a rep and relationship with the faction.

For every 4 negative points, trigger a hostile action (as per the progress clocks described above). When the PCs reach 4 positive points, you’ll probably want to treat that as a trigger for the faction to offer membership to the PCs (if they haven’t already).

Whichever system you choose to use, the ultimate function of tracking Relationship is to know:

• Which factions will be opposed to the PCs and the PCs’ goals.
• Which factions will be willing to ally with the PCs and grant them Resources.

Either way, obviously all of this should be reflected in the narrative and roleplaying of the game: It shouldn’t just be numbers ticking up on a tracker.

Note: The relationship meter is quite similar to the Renown system from the Dungeon Master’s Guide (p. 22). The Renown system, however, comes with a curious mix of vagueness and specificity that creates a lot of baggage which, in my opinion, makes it a poor fit for Storm King’s Thunder. It also lacks the ability to track negative relationships with a faction. If you’d prefer to use the Renown system, you certainly can. Alternatively, you can just use the relationship meter described above and refer to it as Renown if you find that convenient.

RESOURCES

Remember that the structural goal of forming alliances with various factions in Storm King’s Thunder will generally be to gain the resources necessary to wage war against the giants and/or dragons. (In practice, of course, there’ll be lots of other reasons for doing this, ranging from the personal to the idealistic.)

Broadly speaking, we’re going to think of the resources a faction can provide as being divided between minor resources and major resources. (The latter obviously being more difficult to obtain than the former.) Minor resources give the PCs a benefit from forming alliances early in the campaign, while major resources will generally be the stuff that fuels the endgame of the campaign.

Equipment: Minor equipment likely includes any mundane, personal items. (Within reason, and the PCs may also need to justify their need.) Major equipment could include an expensive vehicle (e.g., a ship) or magic item. The faction is likely to consider such items to be on “loan” to the PCs, and are unlikely to grant more than one such item per PC.

Strike Force: As a major resource, the PCs can obtain a small strike force (perhaps 4-6 level-appropriate NPCs; or, alternatively, a large number of less powerful NPCs). A minor equivalent of this might be a single guide or some minor hirelings to accompany the PCs.

Run a Mission: If the PCs need something done (presumably because they’re busy doing something else), a faction may be able to run that mission for them as a major favor. (This mission might be resolved completely off screen using whatever method seems appropriate to you. Alternatively, you could do a spin-off one-shot where the players take on the roles of the NPCs. Or maybe other players you know could run the mission for them!)

Provide Intel: Factions can often provide vital intel to the PCs. Sometimes these will serve as scenario hooks (in which case, the PCs may not need to actually ask for the favor). In other cases, the PCs may need some vital piece of information — e.g., the floorplans of a location they’re planning to target with a heist. (“Many Bothans died to bring us this information…”)

GOALS

It will probably also be valuable to make a short list of each faction’s goals:

• What is their long-term objective?
• What are the immediate, short-term agendas they are currently pursuing?
• Are there any disagreements within the faction over what goals should be pursued and/or should be prioritized?

This will help you understand how the faction (and its members) might react to the actions of the PCs and/or the evolving situation in the campaign.

MISSIONS

Finally, when the PCs join a faction, you’ll want to prep missions that they can ask the PCs to carry out. (Some of these missions might also be recruitment opportunities; i.e., they would be opportunistically offered to the PCs even if the PCs haven’t formally joined the faction yet.)

I wouldn’t recommend preparing these missions for every single faction ahead of time. (That’s likely a lot of wasted prep for all the factions that the PCs don’t end up engaging with.) But once the PCs are engaged, these missions:

• Give a de facto relationship between the faction and the PCs.
• Help establish what the faction’s agenda is (and how the PCs fit into it).
• Give the PCs an opportunity to build Favor with the faction.

The published campaign already features a number of these missions for some of the factions.

Go to Part 5E: Waging War

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Looking over our options, it’s clear that there are A LOT of different directions the end of our campaign could go. Trying to come to grips with this myriad complexity — particularly if we tried to imagine doing so as a set of linear or branching paths — may feel like a daunting or even impossible task.

But we have a couple of advantages in our favor.

First, we don’t need to fully commit to anything specific until we know a lot more about what the specific group of PCs in our campaign is going to do: Are they going to ally with the Harpers and hunt giants? Ally with the storm giants and squash the many-headed giant rebellions? Lead a draconic crusade? We don’t need to worry about all the details of the stuff they don’t do; we just need to focus on the fallout from the actions they actually take.

Second, we don’t need to prep this stuff as linear plots. In fact, we definitely don’t want to do that. In a campaign as wide-open and far-flung as Storm King’s Thunder, that would lead us down a maddening and almost inconceivable rabbit hole of hopeless contingency-planning. On the other hand, we also don’t want to just leave the entire end of the campaign a blank tabula rasa with the hope that it will all magically work itself out.

Instead, what we want to do is prep the situation, creating a set of toys that will let us flexibly respond to whatever path the PCs choose to take (even if it’s a completely unexpected one that they forge for themselves). To do this, let’s step back and take a broad look at all the options we’ve considered for the final act of the campaign and identify the core mechanisms used in our imagined paths.

DESTROY THE THREAT

• The PCs will wage war against the giants, smashing their strongholds.
• To do this, they will need to form alliances that can help them defeat the giants.

PATH OF CONQUEST

• The PCs will form an alliance with a giant faction.
• The PCs will help them wage war against the other giant clans.

A DRACONIC CRUSADE

• The PCs will form an alliance with a giant faction.
• The PCs will help them wage war on the dragons.

LEAD THE FUTURE

• Likely after beginning to follow one of the paths above, the PCs will gather allies, forming a faction that will eventually rule the new Ordning.

Broken down like this, it’s immediately obvious that there’s a common structure here, and also what that structure needs:

• Details on the various factions in the campaign, along with a structure by which the PCs can forge alliances with the factions.
• A structure for waging war, allowing us to pit these factions against each other.

This is our toolkit, and if we set it up properly then these tools will allow us to easily and actively respond to whatever the PCs do, no matter what path they decide to take.

Go to Part 5D: Making Alliances

Go to Table of Contents

Let’s cut to the chase: How do you solve the giant problem in Storm King’s Thunder?

(Pun intended.)

DESTROY THE THREAT

The most direct approach would be to simply smash the giants so that none of the giant factions pose a threat.

This can be crudely achieved by going from one giant lair to the next and stabbing giants in the face until there are no more giants, but I think there are both aesthetic and practical problems with this. The short version is that it’s difficult to really take the giant threat seriously if it can be trivially solved by five people acting alone.

This is something a lot of narratives — particularly “chosen one” narratives — get wrong. To understand why, consider two examples that get it right: Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings. Luke, Han, Leia, Chewbacca, and the droids can all be absolutely essential to the rebel victory, but if the Death Star was just blown up by the Millennium Falcon flying solo (pun intended), the stakes would immediately collapse. The same would be true if there were no armies in Middle Earth and Frodo and Sam could just walk up to Mt. Doom unaided and defeat Sauron. In both cases, the heroes are larger than life because they are the essential lynchpins in a much larger effort.

So if the PCs want to pull this off, they’ll need to start forming alliance(s) to make it happen.

PATH OF CONQUEST

The giants are the biggest problem (puns all over the place today), but the root of the problem is the Ordning, and clever PCs can flip this problem around and turn the Ordning into the solution by selecting one of the giant factions and helping them come out on top in the Ordning-Yet-to-Come.

Probably the most straightforward path here is “ally with a giant faction, then help them fight all the other giant clans into submission.” Any clan which has the strength to subjugate the other clans will naturally become Annam’s default pick for the new Ordning.

If you want to push this concept into the campaign, you can easily do so by waiting until the PCs have scored one or two big successes — e.g., crushing one of the giant factions — and then have one of the other giant factions approach them with the idea of forming an alliance. Even better, have two different clans approach them simultaneously, giving the players the opportunity to choose which faction they want to align with. (They could easily end up choosing a third, completely different faction. Or, of course, rejecting the concept entirely and choosing a different path.)

Following this path is a big deal: The choice becomes a crucible in which the characters not only express their most heartfelt beliefs, but shape the future of the Forgotten Realms in a truly fundamental way.

A variant of this idea would be to choose a giant not-of-the-clans and champion them as a new King of the Giants. Harshnag, for example, would be an obvious choice (see Part 3C), but one could easily imagine the players embracing another candidate, such as Zephyros (SKT, p. 33).

Along these same lines, the PCs might champion a clan while also deciding that the current leadership of the clan is kind of shit. (Most of the leaders presented in the book, after all, are villainous jerks.) So stage one of this plan might be removing the troublesome leader and replacing them with someone more amenable to the agenda of the PCs and/or their allies (by staging a formal duel, assassination, or some other surreptitious means).

A DRACONIC CRUSADE

Military campaigns of domination and subjugation, however, are not necessarily the only way a giant clan could have skarra shine upon them.

The reason Annam broke the Ordning is because the giants have allowed the dragons — the ancient enemies of giant-kind — to grow strong. Tiamat, the evil dragon goddess, stirs in her prison, and during the events of the A Tyranny of Dragons campaign she almost managed to escape without the giants doing anything to stop it.

So an alternative path to the Ordning-Yet-to-Come would be to ally with one of the giant clans and help them lead a Draconic Crusade. Such a clan would mark themselves as ready to lead the giants into a new era.

The sequence from Storm King’s Thunder in which Iymrith is hunted down in her lair could obviously serve as a seed here, but there are a number of other dragons detailed in the campaign book as well that we can develop.

A super-ambitious approach here would be to also remix A Tyranny of Dragons and run it simultaneously with Storm King’s Thunder: Annam isn’t angry because the giants were lackadaisical about Tiamat’s threatened return; he’s angry because it’s happening right now. Finding ways to seed the activities of the Cult of the Dragon into Storm King’s Thunder is certainly non-trivial, but probably not overwhelmingly so if you’re using node-based campaign design.

Something to note with any of these “ally with the giants” options for the campaign finale is that they will almost certainly represent a seismic thematic shift in giant society: The new Ordning will have been established on a principle of cooperation between the giants and the “little folk.” As a divine mandate from heaven, this will sink deep into the culture and politics of giant-kind, with ramifications that will be felt for years, decades, and even millennia. This might include stuff like:

• Giant pilgrims coming to the communities of humans, elves, dwarves, and others to help and learn the lessons of the little folk.
• A political alliance between giants and the Lords’ Alliance, perhaps representing a joint effort to wipe out the Cult of the Dragon. (Either initiating a Draconic Crusade, if it hasn’t already begun, or continuing it, perhaps even pursuing the Cult into the East.)
• The founding of a New Ostoria ruled jointly by both giants and little folk.

Tip: You might want to use an epilogue structure for your campaign finale, allowing you to emphasize these long-term effects of the PCs’ actions.

LEAD THE FUTURE

Along similar thematic lines, rather than having the PCs choose their horse for the Ordning race, you could instead have one or more of them saddle up as the new King of the Giants.

There are a few ways you could seed this option into the campaign:

• Giants who are defeated (or who see their leader defeated) by the PCs might bend the knee.
• Outriders of a clan whose citadel the PCs have wiped out might seek them out.
• Giant scholars like Zephyros and/or Countess Mulara (SKT, p. 113) might seek out the PCs to chronicle their deeds, creating — perhaps alongside Harshnag — the beginnings of a giant retinue and counsellors.
• Rogues, exiles, and other lone giants who have become separated from giant society — either before or because of the breaking of the Ordning — might seek the PCs out, either to get revenge on their former clans, in an effort to save their people, or for any other reason that makes sense given the PCs’ agendas and actions.

Old school D&D had the concept of high-level characters simply “attracting followers” due to their renown, and this would follow a similar logic (and tie in nicely with the broader concepts of forming alliances): The PCs are building a rep for themselves, and like Robin Hood or Spartacus or Guan Yu, they can gather a retinue of NPCs inspired by their deeds.

This path can then be escalated with divine connotations, for example:

• Giant pilgrims and/or warrior bands seek out the PCs, claiming to have followed “the beacon of Annam” and to see them “illuminated by the light of Annam.”
• The chosen PC(s) begin receiving cryptic visions from Annam.

This is likely all happening while the PCs are simultaneously pursuing a Path of Conquest, a Draconic Crusade, or both.

In any case, all of these threads can ultimately culminate with the PC(s) actually being anointed by Annam as the new leader of the giants during the forging of a new Ordning. This could happen during a communion with the Eye of the All-Father. (In fact, the PCs being responsible for rediscovering the lost oracle of Ostoria could play a significant role in the divine path.) One could imagine a ceremony in which representatives from all of the giant clans come to the Eye — summoned by decree, drawn by Annam’s will, or brought in captivity — and are present for Annam’s manifestation on the mortal plane.

If any of the PCs are a half-giant or goliath (or something of similar flavor), they would be a natural fit for this, but even that isn’t necessary. It wouldn’t be the first time Annam disowned the giants and spurned their failures. His primary goal remains the restoration of Ostoria as a perfect society on the mortal plane, and the destruction of the dragons who have so often sought (or achieved) Ostoria’s destruction. If he comes to believe that scions of the little folk are the most capable of achieving those goals — helping to fuel a rebirth of giant cultures which have become stagnant and moribund — then a radical transformation of giant society isn’t out of the question.

Perhaps such character(s) might become known as Divine Regents, leading the giants until such time as the Promised King comes at last. (A prophecy which may not be fulfilled until centuries from now.) Or perhaps Annam might give them the divine gift of giantdom, creating a new caste of giants.

Go to Part 5C: Running the Final Act