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Storm King’s Thunder begins with the shattering of the Ordning by Annam. The giants, freed from their bonds by the destruction of their society and driven by a desire to claim lordship in the Ordning-yet-to-come, are suddenly more active — and more violent — than they’ve been in generations. Giant attacks run rampant across the Sword Coast and Savage Frontier.

The PCs get sucked into this morass and the question of the hour is: How can we stop it?

Logically, therefore, Storm King’s Thunder should conclude with the PCs resolving the crisis. Their actions should stop the giant attacks and restore the peace.

Oddly, however, as we discussed in Part 2B, this is not how Storm King’s Thunder ends. The book instead wraps up with the PCs rescuing Hekaton (he didn’t disappear until after the Ordning was broken) and then helping him slay the wyrm Iymrith (whose schemes also didn’t begin until after the Ordning was broken).

To complete our remix of Storm King’s Thunder, therefore, we need to conjure forth the missing ending.

THE ORDNING

In the real world, the divine right of kings was the belief that a king’s right to rule was granted by God. In practice, it was fairly circular logic: Everything in the world is the way it is due to God’s plan. Therefore, the fact that I’m in charge means that it’s God’s plan that I should be in charge. And because it’s God’s plan that I should be in charge, no one has a right to question my authority.

I’m in charge because I’m in charge. QED.

(“Hey! What about free will?” “I said no questions!”)

But what if you lived in a world where the gods were real? And you could just call them up and ask, “Who do you think should be in charge?” In fact, maybe your god is more than happy to tell you who’s in charge.

That’s the Ordning.

Annam, the god whom almost all giants worship, has decreed a divine hierarchy for giant society for more than 30,000 years. This hierarchy applied not only between the giant races (so that the cloud giants, for example, had dominion over the hill giants, but were subservient to the storm giants), but also to each individual giant.

The giants sometimes speak of this as skarra, the light of Annam:

• The light of Annam is upon him.
• Her skarra is brighter than mine.
• May the light of Annam shine on you.
• She burns with fiery skarra.

Annam’s light was a guide, a spotlight, a purpose, a blessing, and so much more.

And then the lights went out.

The result was the sort of total societal collapse you often find in failed states. Touchstones from the real world might include the dissolution of the USSR, the rise of ISIS, Rome after the assassination of Caesar, or the Communist Revolution in China.

The giants are a society now riven with strife. Paramilitary organizations struggle for power and/or survival, while the common folk desperately seek protection after aeons of having it assured. In fact, it’s not one conflict, but many different conflicts, all spilling out and affecting the other races and nations of Faerun.

Go to Part 5B: Solutions

A patron asked me to explain what I mean when I say “nonsense railroad.” (Which is something I occasionally do in reviews and online discussions.)

Let’s start by laying some groundwork.

First, in The Railroading Manifesto I defined “railroading” in an RPG as:

Railroads happen when the GM negates a player’s choice in order to enforce a preconceived outcome.

Technically, therefore, railroading can only happen at the actual game table. In practice, though, we’ll talk about “prepping a railroad” or “railroaded adventures,” by which we mean scenarios which require the PCs to make very specific choices, therefore forcing the GM to railroad the players into those choices to avoid having the scenario fall apart.

Tangentially, this is a pretty basic tip: Don’t prep what the PCs will do, because (a) that requires precognition and (b) deciding what the PCs are going to do is the players’ responsibility. Instead, prep interesting and provocative situations that create rich opportunities for the PCs to make decisions and give you, as the GM, the toys you need to actively play the world in response to those decisions.

But I digress.

Second, if you do want to design and run a railroad — (please don’t!) — then the secret to making it work even some of the time, as I describe in How a Railroad Works, is to make sure that every choice is obvious and appealing: You need the players to know what they need to do and you need them to want to do it.

A nonsense railroad is basically what you get when a railroaded adventure doesn’t do that. Instead, the actions mandated by the nonsense railroad are hidden, capricious, unlikely, and/or idiotic.

For example, imagine that the PCs are playing Triads locked in a gang war with another organized crime outfit. Then imagine an adventure in which, unprompted:

• The players have to decide that they should make peace with the rival gang at an arbitrary point in the gang war.
• The players have to propose that peace talks take place at the rival gang lord’s mansion.
• During dinner at their rivals’ mansion, one of the PCs needs to sneak away and break into the rival gang lord’s office.
• Once in the office, they need to take the time to search through all the file cabinets.
• This will not give them any information about the gang lord’s business affairs, but they will find one scrap of paper that says “something weird is happening at one of our warehouses at the docks.”
• They need to immediately leave the dinner and go down to the warehouse in order to interrupt the voodoo ritual being performed there.

And, again: All of this needs to happen unprompted. None of them are given a reason to be done, many of them are completely illogical, and quite a few are actually the opposite of motivated — they’re actively inimical to the PCs’ agenda.

This is not, bizarrely, an exaggerated example. I’ve seen much worse than this on countless occasions, including professionally published adventures. Strangely common varieties include:

• “I’ve mentioned some random object, why aren’t you stealing it?”
• “You’ve got rock solid evidence that So-and-So is guilty of the crime you’re investigating, but please don’t do anything with that evidence because the adventure will immediately break.”
• “I think we can all safely assume that the PCs will leave the pocket-sized object they’ve been sworn to protect unguarded in their hotel room while they go shopping. There’s absolutely no chance that they’ll take it with them or leave one of the PCs behind to keep an eye on it.”

And so forth.

If you’re familiar with the old computer adventure games, then you’ve likely encountered this same type of tortured logic in a different guise.

In short, a nonsense railroad is an adventure where the PCs are required to perform a predetermined sequence of specific actions, which they will certainly NOT take of their own volition because the actions make no sense, and — when they’re clumsily and overtly forced to take those actions — they will feel stupid doing so.

(Because, again, they make no sense.)

Railroads are bad and nonsense railroads are their nadir. They are overtly hostile to the players and, when published, an act of sabotage aimed at the unwitting GM.

On New Year’s Day 2023, many a brave soul embarked on an ambitious enterprise: To design one dungeon room each day, every day, for a full year!

On New Year’s Eve 2023, Dungeon Masterpiece decided to do the whole thing in ONE DAY!

Baron de Ropp invited a bunch of conspirators and collaborators to join him throughout the day, plowing through level after level of the megadungeon.

I was one of these collaborators, and you can see me join up at 4 hours and 47 minutes.

Join me on the RPGBOT.Podcast and Get Ready For Epic Sessions!

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At 2:00pm CT today, I’ll be making an attack with Roll for Combat! as we share tips for becoming the best GM you can be!

We sit down with award-winning author Justin Alexander from The Alexandrian, who just released a must-read book for all TTRPG players, So You Want To Be A Game Master, where he will give you tips and tricks on improving your TTRPG game!

If you can’t join us for the livestream, you can always check out the video later!

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