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In addition to the Three Cities attacks in Phase 2 of Storm King’s Thunder, the pointcrawl in Phase 3 of the campaign is filled with a plethora of giant attacks, raids, and other activity. The map above shows the locations of these encounters, color coded by the giant faction involved.

• Cloud Giants: Yellow
• Fire Giants: Red
• Frost Giants: Blue
• Hill Giants: Orange
• Stone Giants: Green

Unlike the other giant factions, the Storm Giants of Maelstrom do not have keyed encounters and, therefore, do not appear on this map. (However, see Part 4C of the remix for suggestions of how such raids and other activity could be added to the campaign.)

The map below uses the locations of the giant encounters to roughly map out spheres of influence for the various giant factions:

The areas indicated are, of course, just rough approximations, but they should prove useful when generating random giant encounters and the like. The intersection between the hill giants, fire giants, and cloud giants in the Evermoors and Dessarin Valley also immediately leaps out as potentially significant, suggesting a dynamic and unstable situation which could easily evolve over time in your campaign. (Or, perhaps, be taken advantage of by your PCs.)

A few more quick notes:

Shining White. The storm giants encountered here (SKT, p. 107) are not explicitly associated with Deadstone Cleft. I’ve included the encounter here for completeness, but (a) given how far Shining White is from any another stone giant activity and (b) the fact that there’s no coherent reason for Deadstone Cleft giants to be here, it’s probably safe to assume that these are unrelated stone giants.

You might actually consider swapping these stone giants out with cloud giants from Lyn Armaal (seeking the cache of dragon  magic) or fire giants from Ironslag (who might believe a fragment of the Vonindrod is located here).

Fire Giants. Duke Zalto has sent out a number of farflung expeditions for various purposes, most notably seeking the pieces of the Vonindrod. For the purposes of mapping out their area of influence, I’ve chosen to not include their drow agents in Gauntlgrym, but you could just as easily conclude that the fire giants encountered in Triboar, Stone Bridge, and even those passing through Mornbryn’s Shield on the western side of the Evermoors are similarly small expeditions and not indicative of wider activity.

However, it’s probably more interesting for Duke Zalto to actually be pushing an expansion in this direction. (Particularly because, as noted, it brings him into conflict with Lyn Armaal and Grudd Haug.)

Cloud Giants. There are a large number of cloud giant encounters in Storm King’s Thunder which are NOT associated with Lyn Armaal. This includes the cloud giants who attack Nightstone at the beginning of the campaign (p. 20), as well as Zephyros (p. 32), Count Nimbolo’s cartographers in Waterdeep (p. 113), and the cloud giant youths in Secomber (p. 107). These encounters are not shown on the map.

In fact, unlike the other giant factions, there are no encounters associated with the cloud giants of Lyn Armaal or Sansuri’s schemes. Since Sansuri is not actively preying on the countryside, this might potentially make her a more natural ally for the endgame of the campaign (see Part 5 of the remix)… except for the whole “torturing good dragons” thing.

Remember that Lyn Armaal’s location above the Evermoors, although it’s “default” position (SKT, p. 187), can easily change. It is, after all, a flying fortress.

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Additional versions and high-resolution copies of these maps, as well as a layered Photoshop file you can use to customize your own, are available to Patrons of the Alexandrian.

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The War of the Giants has begun!

Whether that’s a war against the giants, the war the giants are fighting against each other, or some form of draconic crusade will depend on how your campaign goes. But the core concept is that the campaign has escalated beyond dungeons crawls and simple raids: The PCs are no longer a simple fellowship, but are part of an alliance — likely an alliance they have helped forged themselves! — capable of resolving an international conflict.

There are several ways you can handle this, possibly all at the same time.

TRUE WAR

Armies have been gathered and mass combat is the order of the day!

A full-scale military operation is a thrilling option to consider, but vastly exceeds the resources available to us in Storm King’s Thunder. Not only are the giants and other faction threats scaled to tactical combat with a group of five PCs (not armies marching across the Sword Coast), but we also don’t have the mechanical support or scenario structures for running a war campaign in D&D 5^th Edition.

If you want to go big, therefore, you’re going to have to start basically from scratch and it’ll take a lot of work to pull it off. I can suggest a couple of options you might want to consider, however.

Option #1: Handle the macro-strategic elements of the war — the size of the armies, their movements, etc. — in a more or less ad hoc fashion. For the individual battles, adapt the fray system from Shadow of the Dragon Queen to put the PCs on the battlefield and in the thick of things.

The major shortcoming of the fray system is that the PCs’ actions don’t truly have an impact on the outcome of the battle. The old D&D 3^rd Edition module Red Hand of Doom used a similar system, but also had the PCs’ actions matter more in the grand course of things. You may find it useful to draw some inspiration from that.

Option #2: Implement a full-fledged system for war. MCDM’s Kingdoms & Warfare might be a good place to start, although its primary focus may not make it a perfect fit for what your Storm King’s Thunder campaign needs. Another project with Matt Colville as one of the lead developers you may find useful here is Fields of Blood: The Book of War, another 3^rd Edition-era supplement.

ALLIED ASSAULTS

Instead of full-scale war, we can evoke a similar thematic scope of allies gathering to fight titanic struggles while still keeping within a typical D&D-style tactical scale (i.e., individual combatants on a manageable tabletop battlefield). They key escalator here — what will make these fights feel larger-than-life and bigger than a typical D&D combat encounter — is simply the allies themselves: It won’t just be the PCs vs. the bad guys; it will be the PCs + their allies vs. a much larger and/or more  dangerous force of bad guys.

Storm King’s Thunder already includes an example of what these allied assaults might look like: In Chapter 12, a combined strike force of PCs and storm giants head to Iymrith’s lair for a gigantic showdown with the blue wyrm!

Whether these allied assaults are targeting giant strongholds or draconic lairs (or both) in your campaign’s final act, they’ll follow a similar structure:

1. The PCs will hit up their allies.
2. Their allies will provide a strike force.
3. The players will run both their PCs and their other members of their strike force.

Giving each player one additional character to play during the assault is probably ideal, and in practice I’d suggest that two additional characters per player is probably the maximum you’d want them to be juggling simultaneously. Fortunately, this is more than enough for the scale of the confrontation to feel epic in scope.

On the other side of the battlefield, if the PCs line up a bunch of allied support and then siege the giant strongholds, the problem you’ll immediately run into is that these strongholds were balanced on the assumption that the PCs — and only the PCs! — would be attacking them. If the PCs attack with a much larger and more powerful force, they’ll likely just roll over the opposition.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing for the first allied assault: It will be like a reward for the hard work the PCs have put into bringing that allied force together. But if the end of the campaign turns into a series of trivial mop-up actions, that likely won’t feel very satisfying.

Fortunately, there are a few options you can use here.

Reinforcements: Simply add more giants to the strongholds. Whether they’re mustering for their own military actions or bolstering their defenses in response to the PCs’ assaults, the giant lords are simply calling more giants home to defend their strongholds.

Allies vs. Allies: Along similar lines, if the PCs are forging alliances to take down the giants, it will likely force the giants into new alliances with each other. For example, the fire giants of Ironslag and the cloud giants of Lyn Armaal might join forces in a defensive pact. (This will also reduce the number of stronghold assaults you need to play out, which may be useful if your group is finding “fight yet another giant stronghold monotonous”.)

Alternatively, you can use the concept of enemy alliances to evoke “offscreen” giant factions — e.g., the cloud giants of Lyn Armaal ally with the cloud giant wizard who stole the Nightstone. This allows you to simply increase the number of giants (or their small-folk allies) present, in a fashion similar to reinforcements, while simultaneously raising the stakes and making the scale of the giant crisis seem vast.

Split the Assault. If the players adopt — or can be encouraged to adopt — a battle plan in which the strike teams split up and each assault a stronghold from a different direction, you may not need to rebalance the encounters at all. The encounters will be split across multiple groups, but since each group will have roughly the same strength as the PCs, each encounter will remain a balanced and challenging fight.

These split assault plans may also make it easier for the players to juggle multiple characters, since the strike teams can be arranged in such a way that each player has one character in each team.

In terms of actually running these encounters, I recommend checking out Spectacular Sidekicks for techniques to use while running multiple characters simultaneously. Remember that the Three Cities Proxies will have also given your group some basic training in running these types of encounters.

On your side of the screen, these assaults will run best if you can run them dynamically, having the defenders actively respond and adapt to the actions of the PCs and their allies. Don’t be afraid of letting this collapse towards a dramatic final stand in which the various assault teams join up for one final, epic assault on the final defenders. (See “Dynamic Encounter Design” in So You Want To Be a Game Master, p. 186.)

Tip: On a wider scale, you might also want to consider how, why, and when the PCs enemies — whether giants, dragons, or other factions — might choose to counterattack, forcing the PCs into a defensive scenario for a change of pace.

SPECIAL OPS

Along similar lines, you can evoke a larger battle or military campaign, but rather than focusing the gameplay on that military campaign, you can instead put the focus on the PCs performing essential special ops missions:

• Disabling supply lines.
• Assassinating a giant leader.
• Sneaking into a besieged fortress to lower the gate.
• Breaking through enemy lines to deliver a vital message or object.

And so forth. Instead of Aragorn leading the Army of the Dead at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, the PCs are taking the role of Frodo and Sam sneaking into Mordor with the Ring.

The exact nature of these special ops will depend a lot on exactly how your campaign’s endgame is playing out, but I would certainly look for opportunities that leverage the existing resources in Storm King’s Thunder — e.g., the giant stronghold maps and keys. You’ll likely also discover that it’s easiest to frame and hook these special ops missions if the PCs are taking orders from someone else (who can give the a mission brief). That may be less desirable, of course, then having the players feel like they’re in the driver’s seat.

MIXED METHODS

In practice, none of these techniques need to be all-or-nothing. PCs who have conceived, coordinated, and executed an allied assault may report back and get assigned to a special ops, only to receive a promotion and lead the troops during a full-fledged wargame finale.

Or, alternatively, the players might be running a full-scale war, only to conclude — like Aragorn parting ways with King Theoden to recruit the Army of the Dead — that there’s a special op that requires their attention.

Or perhaps while some are holding back the armies of the fire giants, the PCs will need to lead allied assaults on dragon lairs in order to complete a draconic crusade and seal the deal for a new Ordning.

CONCLUSION

The common theme here, of course, is that the true conclusion of Storm King’s Thunder is uncharted territory: Neither I nor you nor your players will truly know the fate of Faerun until that fate is forged at your table.

With the right tools and techniques in your pocket, though, you should be able to confidently follow your players’ lead, actively play the huge cast of characters and factions at your disposal, and discover that thrilling tale together.

ADDENDUMS
Addendum: Kraken Society
Addendum: Faction Reference
Addendum: Three Cities Proxies

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 37A: Dominic Departs

They had an almost impossible number of possible courses to pursue. First, there were the Banewarrens. They had been hired by Jevicca to seal them and by Rehobath to retrieve the Sword of Crissa.

Agnarr raised the possibility of following up on Demassac Tovarian, assuming that Jevicca hadn’t already done so. They knew he was experimenting with chaositech.

“He might even be the one who supplied the items that let the bone rings into the Banewarrens,” Ranthir said.

Ah! Demassac Tovarian!

He’s one of those roads untraveled that almost always crop up here and there in any campaigns that aren’t purely episodic.

(Spoilers: The PCs never actually pursue the Demassac Tovarian lead. Well, I guess at least not yet. We’re still playing the campaign, so I guess it could happen. But it seems extremely unlikely at this point.)

Tovarian was one of the scenario nodes forming Act I of the campaign. The PCs first encountered a reference to him while investigating the Cran crime family in Session 8, but despite frequently mentioning the lead, they never actually pursued it. I actually primed the pump a bit by having a patron (Jevicca) offer to hire them to check out Tovarian’s operation, but in Session 15 they turned down the job because they were too busy with other stuff.

At that point, I figured the Tovarian scenario was dead, and so I was actually a little surprised when it came up during this Second Meeting of All Things – what the players’ called their mega-planning sessions. That’s also something that’s fairly common in campaigns like this: The players will reach back and pull on the most unexpected threads.

In this case, of course, the tugging still didn’t go anywhere.

There were other clues that would have also pointed to Tovarian, but the PCs either missed those clues (because they got captured by Malkeen Balacazar and never explored the smuggler caves thoroughly) or actually missed the entire adventure those clues were placed in. (I don’t think the Ennin Slavers have even been so much as mentioned; the PCs missed them entirely.)

In fact, there were a BUNCH of Act I scenarios that the PCs skipped past. (And which the players remain unaware of to this day.) Tovarian and the Ennin Slavers collectively had a bunch of clues pointing to things like the Swords of Ptolus, Jirraith, and the Pale Dogs. Because the PCs missed both Tovarian and the Ennin, that whole wing of the campaign kinda just fell away.

And that’s just fine.

I’ve previously mentioned that one of the GM’s biggest friends is a simple question asked at the end of every session: “What are you planning to do next time?”

It’s not foolproof, but it will save you from a lot of wasted prep. In this case, I knew how Tovarian and the Ennin and Jirraith and the Pale Dogs and the Swords of Ptolus all connected to each other because I’d prepped a revelation list. But because the PCs never got anywhere near most of those nodes, I never actually prepped the scenarios. So the only thing I “lost” were a few scribbled concept notes.

(Some of which I would eventually circle back to: The Ennin Slavers had connections to the Vladaams, and so they eventually got hooked in from the opposite direction.)

Of these scenarios, the one I spent the most time on was Demassac Tovarian, because there were a few points where I thought the PCs were going to be heading in that direction.

This work included a map of the alley where the House of Demassac Tovarian was located:

I also mapped the house itself (A1), but as you can see, I never actually finished keying it:

I never got as far as mapping the Undercity located beneath the alley, nor the Tomb of St. Thessina. In the case of the latter, I’m not even sure what my intentions were: The only thing preserved in my notes is the name.

I did have a general vibe in mind for Demassac’s demesne, which was largely inspired by the slightly surreal fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith. He possessed a dream sifter – a piece of powerful chaositech that he used to steal dreams from people. I had several strong images which were the touchstone and inspiration for the adventure, and a handful of these I’d worked up into preliminary room keys, like the Room of Endless Night:

A perpetual gloom shrouds the room. Thick shutters and inky drapes cover the walls and window. The light seems to twist and turn beyond the threshold of the room, casting only a strange phosphorescence that barely illuminates the contents of the room: In one corner of the room stands a heavy basalt statue of a squat, reptilian beast with a grotesque, horned head, stunted bat-like wings, and crooked claws. In another corner there is a sphere of black glass standing on a pedestal of black stone. In the center of the room, a large stone pool or basin is filled with water. Stretched across the top of the pool is a stone slab. The slab has been fitted with manacles.

And the Corridor of Lost Dreams:

This corridor, with a hall at one end of it, is shrouded in a perpetual gloom. Dozens of small glass spheres are suspended on nearly invisible wires here and there from the ceiling. Ghostly sounds of laughter and merrymaking float through the air. Sparks of multicolored light seem to dance through air, leaping sedately from one glass sphere to another.

There’s just enough of Demassac that came into existence that I do sometimes think of him and wonder what might have been, and perhaps some day I will return to this strange alley of madmen, dark technomancy, and strange visions. But for the moment, much like the fleeting dreams Demassac fights so hard to preserve, he has tripped along merrily into a lost realm of imagination.

Campaign Journal: Session 37B – Running the Campaign: No, But…
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

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Just like the other sections of the campaign described in Part 2 and Part 3, the Hekaton investigation is ultimately organized around a revelation list, although it may be useful to think of it in separate parts.

SETTING THE STAGE

Even before the PCs get directly involved with the Kraken Society, you’ll almost certainly want to set the stage with some key revelations:

• Storm Court is no longer in charge of the other giants
• King Hekaton is Missing / Queen Neri is Missing
• Serissa is acting as Regent of the Storm Court
• Optional: Storm Giant Raids (if these are happening)
• Optional: Mirran and Nym are opposed to Serissa’s regency

Basically, you want the PCs to know that the storm giants are in a state of crisis and confusion — and, importantly, who King Hekaton and Queen Neri are — so that when the PCs start encountering Hekaton-related revelations while investigating the Kraken Society they’ll immediately recognize the significance of what they’ve found.

Several of the clues we set up in Part 3D can serve double duty here, but you’ll want to make sure these revelation lists are fully stocked. It probably wouldn’t hurt for some/all of these to be seeded fairly early in the campaign.

STRUCTURAL REVELATIONS: THE KRAKEN SOCIETY

The core structural revelations are the ones we’ve already discussed — e.g., point-crawl accessible nodes → Involved nodes → Purple Rocks → the Morkoth. These are the leads that will take the PCs through the various Kraken Society nodes. The exact breakdown of this revelation list will depend on the options you’ve chosen.

In addition to the standard revelation list (i.e., the leads pointing to a node from other nodes), I would also make a list of pointcrawl-acccessible nodes for easy reference. “Encountered on Pointcrawl” is, of course, a legitimate vector pointing to a node and can also be included on the node’s revelation list, satisfying one of the three clues for the Three Clue Rule.

You’ll also want to include any leads from the Three City hooks or faction missions pointing to Kraken Society nodes. It can be useful to sketch these out ahead of time, but keep in mind that you don’t need to fully flesh out the faction missions until you know which (if any) of the factions your group is getting involved with. If you want to do this systematically, include a Kraken Society lead in each of the Three Cities and for each of the factions.

Friendly factions can, of course, give the PCs direct leads to Kraken Society nodes as missions, but missions can also point to the Kraken Society indirectly — i.e., the PCs are given a mission to do X, which is unrelated to the Kraken Society, but doing so will tangentially bring them into contact with the Society. (An easy example of this is, “go do X, which is coincidentally in the same location as a pointcrawl-accessible Society node, thus triggering the Kraken Society encounter.”)

Along similar lines, even enemy factions can deliver Kraken Society leads: The PCs target the faction, and discover that faction’s Kraken Society-related intelligence (e.g., “Why are the Zhentarim so interested in the activities of Lord Drylund of Yartar?”).

CORE CONCEPT REVELATIONS: WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING?

In addition to just moving from one Kraken Society node to another, there are several key concepts that the PCs should be learning so that they can figure out what’s really going on:

• The Kraken Society kidnapped Hekaton.
• Hekaton is on the Morkoth.
• How to locate the Morkoth.

You’ll likely want to make sure that the clues for “the Kraken Society kidnapped Hekaton” are seeded into the entry point nodes for the Kraken Society: Learning this will give the PCs a very specific goal for continuing their investigation of the Society. Without establishing a goal like this, the only thing motivating the PCs to continue investigating the Society will be simple curiosity. This can work, but it tends to be less reliable and less compelling. (Of course, it’s also quite possible that the PCs — or perhaps their factions — will end up providing their own anti-Kraken Society motivators.)

THE IYMRITH CONSPIRACY

Strictly speaking, the PCs can probably end up rescuing King Hekaton from the Kraken Society without ever figuring out the deeper conspiracy involving Iymrith, Mirran, and Nym. But ideally they’ll figure out this deeper truth, so we should set up a revelation list:

• The Kraken Society is collaborating with someone in the Storm Court.
• The Kraken Society’s collaborator is Iymrith.
• Mirran & Nym are conspiring with Iymrith.
• Iymrith is actually a blue dragon.
• Optional: The location of Iymrith’s lair.

It’s likely a lot of clues on this list will be pulling double duty (i.e., a clue that indicates that Iymrith is conspiring with the Kraken Society AND that the Kraken Society know she’s really dragon). The clues in Part 3D, once again, include several more clues that are pulling double duty for these revelations. Also remember that clues pointing to these revelations can also be seeded into the Storm Court itself.

One structural note here is that any clue pointing to “the Kraken Society’s collaborator is Iymrith” will almost certainly also reveal that “that Kraken Society is collaborating with someone in the Storm Court,” but the latter is listed as a separate revelation because — while it’s not strictly necessary — it’s probably more effective to establish the mystery of “Who is the collaborator?!” before providing the clues that resolve the mystery.

In other words, you want three distinct clues for “Kraken Society is collaborating with someone in the Storm Court” that don’t overlap with “their collaborator is Iymrith,” and you’ll want to seed those clues into “earlier” nodes. (For example, maybe “there’s a collaborator” clues can be found in the pointcrawl-accessible nodes, but “it’s Iymrith” clues can only be found in nodes that can only be reached by investigating the pointcrawl-accessible nodes.)

Since node-based scenarios are, obviously, nonlinear, it’s still quite possible that the PCs will learn Iymrith is the collaborator at the same time they learn there IS a collaborator. They might also learn, from other vectors, that Mirran, Nym, and Iymrith are all collaborating together before they learn that they’re working for the Kraken Society and/or are involved in Hekaton’s disappearance! That’s just fine. Our goal isn’t to lock things down. We’re just seeding our clues in the most effective way possible.

The final thing to consider here is designing a proactive node for Iymrith and/or the sisters. In other words, if/when Iymrith learns of the PCs’ efforts, what action might she take to oppose them? Some or all of them might choose intervene directly. Or, alternatively, send agents who can be tracked back to them. In addition to being a fun encounter, this is obviously also a perfect opportunity to include some Iymrith Conspiracy clues.

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