SPOILERS FOR STORM KING’S THUNDER
I’ve done a couple previous remixes of 5E campaigns. The first was Dragon Heist: The Alexandrian Remix. The second was Remixing Avernus. Those were more or less intentional. This one is a bit more accidental.
Before we dive in, let’s briefly discuss what an adventure remix is and why we’re doing one for Storm King’s Thunder. I discuss this at more length in How to Remix an Adventure, but broadly speaking a remix will seek to either expand the adventure (by adding lots of cool new stuff to it) or restructure the adventure (usually seeking to fix the structure of the adventure so that it will be more robust and/or interesting in play) or both.
This particular remix is, I think, mostly going to be of the latter variety. In my review of the adventure, I delved into a number of the structural defects I think Storm King’s Thunder has, and we’ll breaking those down in more detail and building them back up.
This may prompt the question: Why remix a “broken” adventure instead of just designing something new?
Generally, because the adventure has something really cool about it (or, more likely several things). The many 
strengths of Storm King’s Thunder are ALSO something that I discuss in my review, and our goal in restructuring the adventure is to make it easier to bring all those cool things to your gaming table and to share them confidently with your players.
As I mentioned above, it was not my original intention to do a full remix of Storm King’s Thunder. I started out by writing what I believed would be a short series of articles with a fairly narrow focus on analyzing and then revising the revelation lists which form the core structure of the campaign.
This work remains the core focus of the Remix, and you’ll find it in Part 2 and Part 3. But while working on that material, I had two key insights.
- The Hekaton mystery which comes at the end of Storm King’s Thunder as published is not just inadequately structured and fragile, it’s impossibly broken. In Part 4 of the Remix, therefore, we’ll be redesigning this mystery more-or-less from scratch. (This task also required a deep dive into the Kraken Society, which now forms one of the major expansive portions of the Remix.)
- The published adventure doesn’t have a proper ending. We’ll discuss the specific reasons for this in Part 2, but the short version is that you can either (a) do a quick-and-dirty patch job which, unfortunately, has the side effect of making the entire campaign much less interesting or (b) create a whole new ending to the campaign. For better or worse, the new ending which is both a logical extension of the campaign and also provides an epic conclusion is… non-trivial. We’ll be working on that in Part 5 of the Remix.
And now that we’re fully committed to doing a complete Remix, we’ll round things out by strengthening the opening of the campaign, too.
Part 1: A Strong Beginning
Part 1B: Nightstone Conclusions
Part 2: Revelation Lists
Part 2B: Revising the Revelations
Part 3A: The Three Cities
Part 3B: The Giant Lairs
Part 3C: The Eye of the All-Father
Part 3D: Concept Revelations
Part 3E: Implementing the Revelations
Part 4: Hekaton is Missing!
Part 4B: The Path to Hekaton
Part 4C: Expanding the Path
Part 4D: The Hekaton Revelations
Part 5: The Final Act
Part 5B: Solutions
Part 5C: Running the Final Act
Part 5D: Making Alliances
Part 5E: Waging War
Addendum: Kraken Society
Addendum: Faction Reference
Addendum: Three Cities Proxies
If you’re new here at the Alexandian, you might find it useful to dive into these articles before the remix kicks off, as they include deep discussions of topics we’ll be visiting here:
There are many more articles at Gamemastery 101 that you might also enjoy! Please also consider becoming a patron if you’d like to support this type of work in the future!
Out of all the 5th edition books I’ve read, Storm King’s Thunder is probably the one I most enjoyed reading (same with Tomb of Annhilation). The dungeons, from the beginning Goblin Caves, to the Giant Lairs, to the endgame Boat Casino, are all very evocative and enjoyable. I’m glad this book is getting the Remix treatment.
Thanks for this, look forward to reading the whole series.
I actually went the opposite direction in my remix of STK – I kept Hekaton’s capture but pulled out the Kraken Society. I did it because I used it as part of the Rise of Tiamat, adding Eye of the All Father onward as essentially the last third of ROT.
I replaced Iymrith as the BBEG and instead used Klauth, which gave a higher challenge to my already high level (15) party), and instead of the Kraken Society I had a network of githyanki who worked with Klauth to kidnap Hekaton and hold him incapacitated on a void ship to throw the giants into chaos and make sure they could not get in the way of the Cult and Tiamat.
Grab the popcorn, ladies and gentlemen. There’s a 1-in-6 chance that this Remix winds up 5x larger than anticipated, and a 5-in-6 chance having your mind blown.
Is there a reason why some of the links don’t exist yet? It not clear if you are still working on them or if they just broke (pt 1,3e, 4,5 )
@SR:
Vis-à-vis the non-existent links, those are articles that haven’t been written yet.
Thanks so much for this. I am running SKT right now and have been struggling with some of these issues. I love what you have done so far, and I can’t wait to see part 4 & 5!
Any news when this series continues? Loved all the articles and can’t wait for the last planned ones 🙂
@wurstbrot: Probably shortly after Planegea goes to the printer. Remixing the Hekaton mystery needs a coherent chunk of time for me to get on top of, and Planegea has been sucking up too much of my time.
I cannot thank you enough for your thorough, intricate and emotionally compelling work. I am speechless at your level of output and bountiful creativity. As a long time fan I’m leaving this here to say thank you so much Justin. Thank you.
Really loving reading through this series!!!
I see that the final two sections are currently unavailable, really hoping you can get a chance to finish off this remix so I can use it for my own SKT campaign!
Thank you so much for all your wonderful work, I love learning from you!!
I too was looking for the last two pages of this amazing resource. Even if you throw somes notes up to tie it off that would be great!
Hey there, absolutely loving this remix, your work is phenomenal!!
I know it’s been asked before, but are there any updates as to when this will be completed??
I’m very keen to see how you handle the adventure’s endgame, as it’s the section I’m currently struggling with most in the SKT campaign I’ve recently begun running.
Best wishes for the holiday season, looking forward to seeing more of your wonderful work soon!!
Please please return to this series! I’ve been checking the new blog posts every week for MONTHS waiting for this to finish up!
Have REALLY benefited from your work and implemented Dragon Heist Remixed with a new group that went spectacularly. Thank you!
As for SKT, this would prob. be impossible, but in reading the suggestions at the end about how to integrate players coming off HDQ with bits of ROT, it occurred to me that it could be very cool to make ROT and SKT simultaneous and interrelated events. In my mind, this would mean making the plot to liberate Tiamat the background mechanism for Iymrith’s entire scheme, with all the attendant subplot possibilities. Then with the final rescue of Hekaton, the giants are the ones who show up at the climax of the dragon situation.
My selfish reasons for considering this are (a) not having to choose between two 5+level adventure options and (b) my annoyance with the milestones levelling system. I want my players to work a little harder for those levels!
I see above that Brian W. is doing something along these lines.
Thoughts?
You may be familiar with my thoughts on Remixing Hoard of the Dragon Queen.
On my If I Had Infinite Time list, I think there’s a potentially really awesome Grand 5E Realms Campaign that would merge a bunch of different 5E campaigns into a huge, pointcrawl-based sandbox with node-based layers.
SKT, largely due to its structure, would serve as the backbone. But, exactly so, the Tyranny of Dragons material provides not only great fodder for fleshing out the draconic factions of SKT, but also ongoing Sword Coast politics. Some continuity would need to be changed (e.g., you would need a different explanation for the dissolution of the Ordning).
Similarly, Rime of the Frostmaiden can easily be tweaked to flesh out the Icewind Dale wing of SKT.
Love this idea. Doubt I’ll have time to pull the whole thing off, but I may just crack the Ice-adventures to see.
I looked at your HOD remix a while back but will revisit, thanks.
Re. the Ordning, my thought is to scale down the problem from god-level to the disappearance of Hekaton and the question of his successor, all as a draconian scheme to cause sow dissension among the giants in order to distract them from the Tiamat threat.
I’m about to introduce STK and Rise of Tiamet into my campaign, hopefully you have time to finish up the remix before I get to Hekaton’s mystery because hoo boy is it a miasma of missed opportunity as written!
Wow your work on this series is incredible, I wish I could come up with ideas as good as these!
I think your changes are great and I will try to use as many as I can for my own campaign set in the sword coast. This has inspired me to look at potentially playing storm kings thunder one day in the future, it sounds like a great adventure after your tweaks and fixes.
Do you have any plans to finish your remix? I see there are still two sections you had listed that haven’t been published yet.
Love your work mate! -oscar
Would love to see the last two of Part 4: Hekaton is Missing! and Part 5: The Final Act
Another vote to finish out this series when you have an opportunity! I’m working on my own version of the campaign, but planning to add a larger political element by using MCDM’s intrigue and warfare systems to provide additional pointers towards confronting the Giants in their lairs. Also planning to employ a rival adventuring party employed by the Kraken Society during the search for the Eye of the All Father to keep the pacing up a bit. Hoping that the upcoming book on giants in August isn’t a bust and can provide some fun ideas that would enhance the campaign too. Cheers!
As Bernie said: “once again I am asking you to [finish the Storm King’s Thunder remix]”
Would love to have your take on the final arc(s) of the SKT storyline, as I’m keen to run the adventure for my playing group but not super keen on the as-is final act of the book!!!
This series is fantastic! I recently wrapped up Chapter 1 of SKT (in which I had them arrive at Nightstone *before* the giant attack), and now that I’m reading this, I can’t wait to modify more of the adventure to feel a little more robust. With Glory of the Giants and MCDM’s Flee, Mortals both coming out recently, I’ve been looking at tons of giant-related content. This has been a huge benefit to cinch it all together.
Thank you so much for the inspiration, and please count this as another vote for parts 4 and 5 of this series!
Does anyone know if the Adventurer’s League module Storm King’s Descent fixes the ending issues mentioned here? I’ve been considering running SKT with the remix changes in mind but also want to give my players their first level 20 campaign so I was going to check out Storm King’s Descent. I haven’t purchased it yet as I’m worried that some of the changes the remix makes might break or interfere with the AL module. Any advice would be much appreciated! 🙂
Hey Justin, another vote for the part 4 and 5. Would love to see your ideas.
@ Lou
The AL material doesn’t fix the ending issue as it doesn’t have much of an ending
That said, if you’re running it, the Tier 1 content is a good way of introducing the giant threat through the villain Bad Fruul, whilst the Tier 2 content is also good
I wasn’t too impressed by the Tier 3 or Tier 4 content but there we are
You could potentially make Hartkiller assuming control over the other giants a new Orderning, but the material itself doesn’t really resolve this
You may also consider running Storm King’s Descent from the Dreams of the Red Wizards AL series
It doesn’t provide a more conclusive end either, but it does tie in well with Storm King’s Thunder as a sort-of sequel
Thanks for all the effort! another vote for part 4 & 5.