Go to Table of Contents

The core structure of Phase 1 is fairly straightforward:

• The PCs arrive in Nightstone and discover the town badly damaged by a cloud giant attack, abandoned, and infested with goblins.
• After discovering that the townspeople evacuated to the nearby Dripping Caves, the PCs go to the caves and rescue them from the goblins who have taken them prisoner.
• The PCs receive (in the Remix) adventure hooks pointing them towards Bryn Shander, Goldenfields, and Triboar (see Part 3A).

And that should basically wrap things up.

… except it doesn’t.

After the PCs clear out the goblins in Nightstone, the village is immediately attacked by a completely unrelated group of orcs. And then, after the PCs fight off the orcs, the village is immediately attacked AGAIN by a group of Zhentarim mercenaries.

So, to sum up, in just a couple of days Nightstone has been independently assaulted by cloud giants, goblins, orcs, and Zhents.

That is, to put it mildly, some incredibly bad luck for this town. More importantly, it’s really repetitive gameplay that completely grinds the campaign to a halt at the very moment that it should instead be kicking into high gear.

The reason this happens is that Storm King’s Thunder needs to level the PCs up to 5^th level so that they can face the Tier 2 challenges of Phase 2 (i.e., fighting a bunch of giants). The designers level the group up after clearing the goblins out of Nightstone and rescuing the villagers from the Dripping Caves, but they don’t think they can justify more than that, so they just stuff in a couple more fights so that you can level the PCs up after each of them.

FIXING THE ORCS

They’re dumb.

Cut them.

Note: Greg Benage suggests that the orcs could be a raiding party connected to the Iceshield orcs at the Hill Giant lair of Grudd Haug. He had clues from the raiders lead to Harpsheild Castle, a location which appears in Scourge of the Sword Coast, and from there to Grudd Haug. That’s a good idea, and if the PCs end up extending their stay in Nightstone (see below) having these orc raiders show up later could work well. You could also use this idea if the PCs return to Nightstone at some later date.

FIXING THE ZHENTARIM

The Zhentarim are a bit more complicated. Before the cloud giant attack, a Zhent agent named Kella Darkhope had been sent to Nightstone to investigate the possibility of turning the village into a Zhentarim stronghold. The cloud giant attack has created a perfect opportunity, and so she’s sent a message requesting the dispatch of a Zhentarim strike team.

The presentation of the Zhentarim in Storm King’s Thunder is a little incoherent. The book can’t quite figure out if the Zhentarim should be a faction that the PCs will want to join and work with or if they’re moustache-twirling villains. This is actually a common problem in 5^th Edition books, because roughly half of the writers seem to be aware that the Sword Coast Adventurers Guide had the Zhentarim turn a new page as a kinder, gentler, more nuanced organization… and the other writers are familiar with them twirling their moustaches in the video games and novels of the ‘80s and ’90s.

In any case, the Zhent plan in the book seems to be:

1. Murder people.
2. ???
3. Profit?

This is a silly plan, because Lady Nandar, the ruler of Nightstone, was killed in the cloud giant attack. So the really obvious play for the Zhentarim to make here is, “Oh! Good townspeople! We have come to you in your hour of need!”

Then they help the PCs save everybody, the PCs move on (as PCs are wont to do; or, if not, the Zhents can nudge them aggressively in that direction), and the Zhentarim settle in as the new protectors of the town in this troubled time.

This approach has a few advantages:

• It provides an opportunity for the PCs to ally with the Zhentarim and perhaps even be recruited by them. (If so, you might consider creating a Zhentarim scenario hook pulling the PCs into Phase 2 in addition to the others found here.)
• It plays nicely with the themes of established order being upset and power vacuums being created (and filled) that resonate naturally throughout Storm King’s Thunder.
• It can be neatly incorporated into the broader question of what post-crisis Nightstone looks like.

Which sets us up for…

THE END OF PHASE ONE: NIGHTSTONE’S FATE

As noted, with Lady Nandar dead there’s a power vacuum in Nightstone. The village has also been horrifically damaged, with key infrastructure in the form of food stores and economic pillars (including farms and the Lionshield Coster trading post) being destroyed.

We don’t necessarily want the PCs to get mired in fixing Nightstone, but we do want to provide a satisfying conclusion to Phase 1 by providing closure for this crisis.

First, we’ll let the PCs contribute to rebuilding Nightstone by moving forward with the adventure. This is achieved in Part 3A of the Remix, where two of the scenario hooks leading to Phase 2 of the campaign are rebuilt to feature responses to the crisis.

Second, the key question that will wrap up the adventure is: Who will rule in Nightstone?

Options include:

• The Zhentarim
• Morak Ur’gray, the dwarven proprietor of Nightstone Inn who can act as something of a neutral figure in the community
• A patriarch or matriarch of one of the major families of the village (SKT, p. 31)
• An appointed or democratically elected council
• A PC (guess this will be a different campaign; or maybe the player swaps to a new character)

Simple Conflict. Have the Zhentarim arrive when the PCs have explored about half the town (ideally after they’ve met Kella independently). The Zhentarim won’t immediately make a play for leadership (although Insight checks might suggest that’s their goal); they’re “just here to help.”

In the Dripping Caves, seed rivalry between a couple of family heads. (My eye is drawn to the Delfryndels, who own the village mill, and Taela Summerhawk, the apothecary, but you might just go with whatever NPCs seem to click with the players.) Establish early that they have different opinions about the best way to deal with the goblins and/or escaping the caves. Morak is also there, clearly trying to moderate the conflict.

Once everyone is back in Nightstone, have someone offer themselves to become the new leader. This is probably the Zhentarim if they’re still in the picture. Have others make their claim in response. Morak asks the PCs what they think and enough of the other families follow their advice.

More Dynamic. In this scenario, have just two significant candidates plus Morak. This will likely be the Zhentarim and one of the major families (I’d go with the Delfryndels, although maybe having it be Destiny Agganor, the tiefling who worships Asmodeus, would create more drama).

The key thing here is that the leadership will likely be determined by the other five major families of Nightstone. Use Morak to frame the situation, but, at least initially, avoid having him prefer one option over another. (If he expresses a preference, the players may assume that they’re “supposed” to back Morak’s candidate rather than making the choice for themselves.) Morak is concerned about the economic well-being of Nightstone, and this may also be a good opportunity to drop his scenario hook.

At this point, it’s up to the PCs to talk with each of the major families and try to influence them. Persuasion checks are easy here, but also think about small favors the PCs could do (using other skills) to win favor. If you wanted to flesh this out more, add distinct tensions and relationships between the families for the PCs to discover, exploit, and/or resolve.

Note: If the Zhentarim lose out on having Kella or Xolkin become the new Lord Protector of Nightstone, it’s up to you how they respond. You might have them attempt a last minute assassination and seize power (sparking a fight that presumably the PCs will get involved with). Alternatively, they might just roll with the punches, approach the new leader, and say, “Congratulations! Now, it looks like you’ll be needing some armed men to help keep the town safe. Shall we talk terms?” and establish a local base that way.

THE ISSUE OF ADVANCEMENT

As we discussed earlier, the PCs are supposed to be 5^th level heading into Phase 2 of the campaign. We’ve eliminated some of the milestones in Nightstone, so we’ll need to rearrange things to look like this:

• Advance to 2^nd level after clearing the village of goblins.
• Advance to 3^rd level after rescuing the villagers from the Dripping Caves.
• Advance to 4^th level when a new leader has been chosen for Nightstone.
• Advance to 5^th level after the encounters in the Tower of Zephyros.

If this seems too rushed for you, here are some other options.

Phandelver. Start the campaign by running the PCs through the Lost Mine of Phandelver from the D&D Starter Set. It’s located fairly close to Nightstone and will dump the PCs out at 5^th level, which is more or less perfect. Add a hook from Phandelver to Nightstone, level to 6^th after the Dripping Caves, and skip the level up after the Tower of Zephyros.

Dragon Heist. Waterdeep: Dragon Heist also wraps up with the PCs entering Tier 2. (This is a little less true with the Alexandrian Remix, but still close enough.) What I recommend here is starting the PCs in Nightstone, advancing them to 3^rd level, and then sending them to Waterdeep.

During the events of Dragon Heist you can seed material for Storm King’s Thunder: Harshnag can be their contact with Force Grey, for example. Towards the end of Dragon Heist, Count Nimbolo and Countess Mulara can arrive in Waterdeep in their flying castle (SKT, p. 112-113) so that the PCs can meet them and learn that they’re planning to stay for several months while studying at some private libraries in the city. (As giant stuff starts to happen later on, the PCs might return to Waterdeep to meet with those giants again.)

At the end of Dragon Heist, of course, you’ll need to come up with new hooks to send the PCs to one or more of the Three Cities for Phase 2. But since they’ll have likely aligned with one or more factions during their Waterdhavian adventures, you can ultimately just give them a faction mission to set them on their way.

Just Do It. Alternatively, just start the PCs at 3^rd level. Level them up after rescuing the villagers from the Dripping Caves and again as they get dropped off by the Tower of Zephyros.

Go to Part 2: Revelation Lists

Go to Table of Contents

Storm King’s Thunder is built around two core structures.

The primary structure is node-based. In Phase 1 of the campaign, the adventure begins in Nightstone, where the PCs get a lead to one of three cities (Bryn Shander, Goldenfields, and Triboar).

In Phase 2 of the campaign, whichever city the PCs go to will be attacked by giants, resulting in the PCs getting a wide variety of leads which will point them to various locations across the Savage Frontier, the northern realms of Faerûn.

This launches Phase 3, featuring the second structure of the campaign, which more or less acts like a pointcrawl. Locations throughout the Savage Frontier are keyed with encounters, which the PCs will trigger as they navigate through the region (primarily by road). Many of these encounters, in turn, will point to other nodes/locations.

Thus the node-based structure prompts PCs to move throughout the Savage Frontier, which triggers content in the pointcrawl, which gives the PCs more leads to the node-based content.

The node-based elements of Phase 3 are, at least hypothetically, designed to funnel the PCs to the Eye of the All-Father, an ancient giant oracle. In Phase 4 of the campaign, the Eye requires the PCs to recover artifacts stolen from the giants by the Uthgardt tribes and scattered around the Savage Frontier. For each artifact the PCs recover, the Eye gives them a lead to a citadel of a giant lord:

• Den of the Hill Giants
• Canyon of the Stone Giants
• Berg of the Frost Giants
• Forge of the Fire Giants
• Castle of the Cloud Giants

The PCs can raid one or more of these citadels during Phase 5 of the campaign. Each giant lord possesses a magical conch of teleportation, which is keyed to the court of the Storm Giants. This is another funnel leading to Phase 6, with the PCs using the conch to travel to the Storm Giant court (in an underwater fortress called Maelstrom) and forge an alliance with Serissa. Serissa gives them a wooden coin that was found at the location where her mother’s body was recovered, and she believes it may also be connected to her father’s, Lord Hekaton’s, disappearance:

• The coin leads to a gambling riverboat called the Grand Dame.
• On the Grand Dame, the PCs must question Lord Drylund, who tells them that Lord Hekaton is being held on a ship called the Morkoth.

After being rescued from the Morkoth, Lord Hekaton invites the PCs to join him in assaulting the lair of Iymrith, a blue dragon who had infiltrated his court and was responsible for his kidnapping.

Note: There are two places in the campaign where the PCs are abruptly given access to aerial travel. At the end of Phase 1, a cloud giant offers to give them a lift in his flying fortress. And at the beginning of Phase 4, a dragon randomly decides to send the PCs an airship that they can use for the rest of the campaign.

If you look at the structural analysis of the campaign above, you can see why this happens: Overland travel in Storm King’s Thunder is handled through the Phase 3 pointcrawl. Because the content of this pointcrawl is keyed for Phase 3 (what’s happening in the game world at that time; what clues and leads are relevant to the PCs during that phase), it would cause problems for the PCs to encounter that keyed content before Phase 2 or after Phase 3 is complete. To avoid that, the designers simply arrange for the PCs to literally fly over the pointcrawl unless the PCs are in Phase 3.

For ease of use, let’s title these phases:

• Phase 1: Nightstone
• Phase 2: The Three Cities
• Phase 3: The Savage Frontier
• Phase 4: Eye of the All-Father
• Phase 5: The Giant Lairs
• Phase 6: Finding Hekaton

We’ll be referring to these phases throughout the Remix.

STRONG HOOKS

The campaign as written is underhooked. The PCs are never given a strong reason to actually care about all this giant stuff that’s going on.

The book includes four hooks:

• Get paid to fight goblins in Nightstone. (This is resolved by the end of Phase 1.)
• Get paid to guard nobles in Nightstone. (This goes nowhere.)
• Get paid to negotiate with elves. (This goes nowhere.)
• Contact an agent in Nightstone who can connect you with high-paying jobs. (He apparently can’t do that. But he will give the PCs some letters to deliver.)

As you can see, most of these dead end in Nightstone (and only one of them actually has anything resembling a satisfactory conclusion). This isn’t necessarily a problem, as you can structurally pull the PCs into an introductory scenario like Nightstone and then deliver the big, meaty hook that will pull them into and through the rest of the campaign.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t really happen either. Instead, Morak Ur’gray gives them a mail carrier hook with a generic message in order to procedurally shuffle them along to Phase 2. And even if you flesh those hooks out a bit more (as we’ll do in Part 3A: The Three Cities), the fundamental problem remains that there’s not really anything motivating them to figure out what’s going on with the giants.

This is not to say that they won’t investigate the giant stuff. But it becomes quite likely they’ll end up doing it because it just sort of… seems like the thing they’re supposed to be doing? The unmotivated play will become rote, with the players kind of drifting through the campaign. These are the types of games that often just wither away as the players put less and less priority on playing.

Of course, many players will find ways to motivate themselves or become motivated by the events of actual play. That’s the gold standard, and will almost certainly be the most effective motivation. (Stuff that actually happens at the table is almost always seen and felt to be “more real” than stuff concocted for back story.) But we can certainly prime the pump a bit.

Connections to Nightstone. In the first two phases of the campaign, giants attack four different communities. Simply giving the PCs a strong connection to one or more of these communities can do most of the heavy lifting for getting them invested in the campaign.

In the case of Nightstone, simply look at the list of prominent families and their dead (SKT, p. 31). Having the players related to one of these families not only makes for easy pathos, it can also easily explain why they’re coming home to Nightstone in the first place.

Alternatively, a PC might still live in the Nightstone. Having the cloud giant attack wipe out their home and/or business can easily motivate them. (At the beginning of the campaign, they might have been out of town on an errand. Alternatively, they can just finish digging their way out of the rubble as the other PCs show up.)

One potential problem with Nightstone-related hooks, however, is that, as written, the PCs will never actually track down the giants who attacked the town. Being unable to find that closure (or even make an iota of progress towards finding the cloud giants responsible) will be very frustrating for the player(s). Check out “Creating New Giant Lords” on p. 12 of Storm King’s Thunder and be prepared to flesh out an additional cloud giant faction.

You’ll probably also want to steer clear of having a PC related to Lady Velrosa Nandar, unless you want the campaign to really disappear down a rabbit hole. Nandar’s heir will be the de facto ruler of Nightstone after her death, making it overwhelmingly likely that the campaign will remain rooted in the village as the PCs focus on rebuilding in the wake of the crisis.

Connections to the Three Cities. Connections to the three cities of Phase 2 — Bryn Shander, Goldenfields, or Triboar — can all the follow the same basic pattern as connections to Nightstone. There’s plenty of lore there to flesh out a PC’s background and lots of notable NPCs for them to have a connection to.

This connection can help justify the link from Nightstone to Phase 2. (“You’re from Triboar? Can you take this message there for me?”) If they already have a connection to one of the prominent NPCs, it’ll also add oomph to the scenario hooks delivered after the giant attacks in Phase 2.

It’s also possible to weave these connections together. For example, a PC might be from Bryn Shander and a member of the Southwell family. Coming south to Nightstone to visit their sister Semile, they tragically discover that she’s been killed by the cloud giants. The Delfryndels (see Part 3A) give them a bundle of Semile’s things that they’ve gathered together, and they’ll need to return to Bryn Shander to let their brother Markham know that Semile has died.

A History With Giants. The other option is to simply tie a PC directly to the giants. Was their mentor/mother/first love killed by a giant? Or, flip it around, and their mentor/mother/first love IS a giant.

You may want to be a little wary of characters who “hate all giants,” though. Even though that seems like a really natural character concept for a Fight the Giants! campaign, Storm King’s Thunder requires that the PCs be willing to work with at least some of the giants. The Remix will, in some ways, reduce that strict necessity, but will also hopefully be enriching the options for giant cooperation and it might be a shame to nip those options in the bud.

(On the other hand, a character who has good cause to be prejudiced against all giants who learns that the reality is more complicated than that could be an incredibly powerful roleplaying experience at the table.)

Friendship can actually be just as strong as animosity here: There’s something wrong with the giants. The breaking of the Ordning has shattered their society, and while that’s an opportunity for some, it’s arguably a problem for all of them. If there are giants that the PC(s) care about, they’ll be strongly motivated to solve this problem. (And to do so in a way that either keeps the giant(s) they care about safe, benefits them, or both.)

MAKING THE HOOKS

How do you actually seed these elements into the PCs’ back stories?

It depends on how you actually go about creating characters for the campaign. There are, of course, lots of ways of doing this. I’ve previously written in detail about the method I typically use for campaigns like this in Running the Campaign: Designing Character Backgrounds, the short summary is:

1. Establish the campaign concept.
2. Have the players pitch their character concepts.
3. Collaborate on a public integration, with the GM using their expertise in the setting to take generic archetypes of the character concept (e.g., northern barbarian) and make them specific (e.g., an Uthgardt barbarian).
4. Have the GM do a private integration of the character, tying them into the larger structure of the campaign (e.g., Is there a major villain? Make the long-lost brother of one of the PCs).
5. Bring the party together. At least 95 times out of 100, you’ll want to explain why the PCs are all going to hang out and do things together — specifically, the usually crazy things the campaign concept is predicated on — before you start your first session. 4 times out of the remaining 5, you’ll probably want to have things pre-arranged so that they fall in together within the first few scenes.

Most of the concepts described above are going to fall into the public integration phase. Is there a PC from a small village? Suggest Nightstone and begin feeding them appropriate lore to flesh out their back story there. A major city? Triboar. Are they a druid? Give them connections in Goldenfields.

And so forth.

Note that the PCs don’t all need to have the same hook. And these hooks may or may not be the reason that they’re adventuring together. You might want to check out Random GM Tip: Bringing the PCs Together for additional tips.

If this process has not already explained why the PCs are heading to Nightstone, I recommend working with the players to come up with a better reason for that than just “maybe there’s some money to be earned there.” What you’re looking for is something specific. For example:

• Some highly specific lore about the nightstone itself. (For example, the PCs may have stumbled across information relating to the apocalyptic capacity of the stone during a previous adventure and they’re following up on those leads.)
• Did one of the players decide to create a Zhentarim? Then they’re being sent to meet with Kella Darkhope (replacing the zhent agents who would normally show up).
• They’ve been hired by someone to assassinate Lady Nandar.
• A rich uncle has left the Nespers a tidy sum of money and the PCs have been hired to deliver it.

But try to avoid anything that can’t actually be resolved by the end of Phase 1, unless you do, in fact, want to spend extra time in Nightstone and Ardeep.

Go to Part 1B: Nightstone Conclusions

These detailed notes, written in silver ink on black vellum scrolls, constitute the exploration of an alchemical process referred to as azh-thalar, a dark elven word which can be translated as “boneforging.” And, indeed, the text refers to the work as deriving from the “lore of the dark elves” and, elsewhere, “the teachings of Su-Thanaz.” Several excerpts of the original body of work are directly included, without translation, in the text itself.

Once translated in full, however, the text describes a process by which bone is taken from a dead or undead creature and then molded using alchemical processes into a new form. The items so created can be almost limitless in their variety, and part of the alchemical process specifically tempers the bone to be as hard as steel (allowing effective weapons, armor, and the like to be fashioned).

Particularly intriguing, however, are the advanced methods of undead boneforging, in which the powers of the undead creature can be infused into the bone itself after the shaping is completed.

BONEFORGING

Boneforging requires alchemist’s supplies and a successful Intelligence (alchemist’s supplies) check, the difficulty of which is dependent on the size of the item desired, as shown on the table below.

Obviously, the alchemist must also have the requisite supply of bone. Complex or artistic items may require additional crafting checks at the DM’s discretion.

Boneforging is generally only appropriate for solid, static items (e.g., a chair, knife, bowl), but boneforged components could be combined with other material. Supple material (e.g., a rope) can be forged from cartilage, but this is a more delicate process and the Intelligence (alchemist’s supplies) check to make the item is made at disadvantage.

ADVANCED BONEFORGING

An alchemist creating a boneforged magic item from an undead creature can attempt to replace one spell required by the item creation with the raw necromantic power of the undead from which the item is being crafted. (Note that these items are not made from the remains of the dead; they are forged from undead still possessed of unlife.)

This process can generally be used to replace a spell with a level equal to 1/3^rd of the undead creature’s challenge rating. (So a CR 9 undead could be used to replace a 3^rd level spell.) A skeleton or zombie, however, can only be used to replace a spell with a level equal to 1/6^th their HD. (The simplistic energy which animates such mindless undead is not particularly useful for the complex matricies of the advanced boneforging.)

Advanced boneforging requires an Intelligence (alchemist’s supplies) check (DC 15 + the spell level being replaced). If the check fails, the spell is not replaced and must be provided normally or the item creation process will fail.

Boneforging does not reduce the cost of creating the magic item. (The cost of the alchemical supplies normally required by boneforging is included in this cost, however.)

This material is covered by the Open Game License.

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.

Review: Storm King’s Thunder

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:

• Three Clue Rule
• Node-Based Scenario Design
• Using Revelation Lists

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!

SPOILERS FOR STORM KING’S THUNDER

Personally, I’m a sucker for the core concept of Storm King’s Thunder. A War Against the Giants campaign has been on my bucket list for many a year now, so the premise of giants beating the war drums is basically custom made for me.

The basic premise here is that Annam the All-Father, god of the giants, is upset that the giants did jack-all to stop Tiamat’s machinations during the Tyranny of Dragons campaign. So he dissolves the Ordning — the divinely decreed feudal(?) order which keeps giant society in order. This is a little vague in the book, but here’s how I think of it: Imagine that the divine right of kings was actually real; the legitimacy and authority of political leadership ultimately derives from the fact that a god said, “That guy is in charge.” And then one day the god shows up and says, “Not any more. None of y’all need to pay taxes.”

Pandemonium.

With the storm giants no longer king of the hill (giants), it’s a toss-up who’ll become the new King of the Giants. Ironically, this allows a draconic faction led by the blue wyrm Iymrith to infiltrate and decapitate the storm giant court, further destabilizing the situation. So now every giant is planning how to stomp their competitors, profit from the chaos, and/or prove that they should be the new king, and the conflict is boiling out across the Sword Coast and Savage Frontier.

Enter the PCs.

Storm King’s Thunder can then be broadly broken down into six phases:

Phase 1: The PCs deal with the aftermath of a cloud giant attack in the small village of Nightstone.

Phase 2: They follow a lead from Nightstone to one of three cities (Bryn Shander, Goldenfields, or Triboar), which is then attacked by giants while they’re there.

Phase 3: In the wake of the giant attack, they receive a plethora of plot hooks that will pull them towards various locations across the Sword Coast and Savage Frontier. This section of the campaign basically functions as a pointcrawl, with the PCs navigating the Forgotten Realms and running into additional plot hooks and mini-scenarios (most of which are themed to the giant troubles) as they travel.

(If you’re not familiar with a pointcrawl, the basic structure is a map of points connected by routes and keyed with content. PCs travel along the routes to get where they want to go, passing through points along the way and triggering the content keyed to those points. The pointcrawl in Storm King’s Thunder, although not referred to as such, is a pretty pure example of the form: The points are generally settlements on the map and the routes are literally the roads and trails connecting them.)

Phase 4: The PCs learn of the Eye of the All-Father, a powerful giant oracle. In exchange for recovering artifacts stolen by the Uthgardt barbarians, the oracle will tell the PCs that they need to travel to Maelstrom, the court of the storm giants.

Phase 5: The PCs raid one of five giant strongholds to retrieve a magical artifact they can use to teleport to Maelstrom.

Phase 6: The PCs journey to Maelstrom, forge an alliance with the storm giants, investigate the disappearance of Hekaton, the storm giant king, and (hopefully) rescue him. He then leads them to attack Iymrith’s lair.

The general “only the PCs can discover a hidden evil fomenting a war between giants and small folk” is clearly taking a thematic note from the classic GDQ series, but this is much more a conceptual riff than a Ravenloft-style reboot. It’s an ambitious campaign with epic stakes and a worldwide scope.

FRAGILITY

What my summary of Storm King’s Thunder plot hides, unfortunately, is that the transitions between the different phases of the campaign are incredibly awkward at best.

For example, let’s take a look at Phase 3. The basic idea here, as described briefly above, is that you rescue one of the cities in Phase 2 and receive a bunch of plot hooks that drive you to travel across the map. Here are what the hook lines look like for Bryn Shander (red), Goldenfields (yellow), and Triboar (blue):

Although drawn in straight lines (rather than along likely routes of travel), it should still be clear how following these leads will send the PCs crisscrossing the landscape. And, as they travel, they’ll be having encounters — from either scripted random encounters or keyed locations throughout the North — which will give them more leads to pursue. Pursuing those leads, of course, will lead to more encounters, which will result in more leads, which will… Well, you get the idea.

Eventually, in the course of these adventures, the PCs will discover the existence of the Eye of the All-Father and transition to Phase 4 of the campaign.

Unfortunately, there are some significant problems with this.

First, too many of the scenario hooks that transition the campaign from Phase 2 to Phase 3 are, for lack of a better word, boring. In Goldenfields, for example, they include:

• Deliver a letter for me.
• Come with me to visit my friend.
• Deliver a message for me.
• Deliver a letter for me.

I think of these as mail carrier hooks. There’s nothing inherently wrong with mail carrier hooks, but the structure of a mail carrier hook is so utterly devoid of purpose that it becomes crucial for the message itself to be of great import.

A good example of this in Storm King’s Thunder is the quest Darathra Shendrel gives in Triboar: Giants are invading! The Harpers must be warned!

That’s clearly meaningful. It matters. The PCs will feel important being asked to do that.

Unfortunately, most of the hooks in Storm King’s Thunder look like the one given by Narth Tezrin. “Hello! Heroes who just rescued this entire town! Could you deliver some horse harnesses for me?” This is almost demeaning. It’s clearly meaningless and there’s absolutely no reason why the PCs or the players would care about this.

The lackluster quality of these hooks is then exacerbated by the fact so many of them just… dead end.

For example, Darathra Shandrel tells the PCs to bring urgent word to the Harpers of the threat of the Giants! When the PCs arrive, the Harpers… just don’t seem to care that much. So that which seemed meaningful suddenly isn’t.

Others just trail off without any explanation. In Bryn Shander, Duvessa Shane asks the PCs to carry a message to a ship called the Dancing Wave in Waterdeep. When they arrive, the PCs discover that the ship is missing! Storm King’s Thunder then spends several hundred words detailing how the PCs can hire a ship to go looking for the Dancing Wave and then… that’s it. No explanation of what they might find if they go looking. No explanation of what actually happened to the Dancing Wave.

This actually happens a lot in the book. In Goldenfields, for example, the PCs are sent to look for a missing druid. They’re sent to talk to someone who might have seen him. That person says, “Nope. Haven’t seen him in awhile.”

And, once again, that’s it. No clue what happened to him. No suspicion on the part of the writers that the PCs might want to keep investigating.

The problem perpetuates on a macro-scale at the other end of Phase 3: None of the PCs’ expeditions actually go anywhere.

They go to places in the North and they point to other places. Along the way they run into giants doing various things. And, logically, this should all be taking you some place: Your new faction alliances should give you anti-giant operations to pursue. You should slowly be piecing together clues and your investigation into the giants should ultimately lead you to the Eye of the All-Father and the next phase of the campaign.

But it doesn’t.

What happens instead is that, at some completely arbitrary point unrelated to anything to the PCs are doing, the DM is supposed to trigger an encounter with Harshnag, a friendly giant, who says, “Hello! The DM has sent me with the next phase of the campaign! Would you like to know more?”

We’ve looked at Phase 3 here (coming and going), but unfortunately this type of fragility is endemic to the whole campaign:

• Phase 1 ends with three mail carrier scenario hooks pointing to Bryn Shander, Goldenfields, and Triboar. But rather than giving the PCs the choice of which lead to pursue, the book instructs the GM to instead railroad them.
• The Phase 4 into Phase 5 transition is designed to loop so that the PCs can get multiple leads from the Eye of the All-Father in case something goes wrong and they can’t get the magical artifact they need from the first giant fortress they raid… except the adventure bizarrely slots in a cutscene where the Eye of the All-Father gets blown up so the PCs can’t go back there.
• Even starting the investigation in Phase 6 requires the PCs to get a clue from an NPC who is innately hostile to them. It then requires the PCs to reach several conclusions for which no clues are included at all, while the threadbare breadcrumb trail which does exist is peppered with gaping plot holes.

Perhaps strangest of all, the adventure doesn’t actually have an ending. The central goal of the campaign is “stop the giant attacks.” The rescue of Lord Hekaton and the death of Iymrith is presented — structurally, textually, and diegetically to the characters — as the way to achieve this.

But because Iymrith’s deception and Hekaton’s disappearance are not what broke the Ordning, there’s no logical reason to think that resolving either of those things will result in the Ordning being reformed and the crisis coming to an end. And, in fact, the book more or less concedes this in the “Adventure Conclusion” section on page 230.

CRASHING THE PARTY

Let’s back up and talk about Harshnag for a moment.

When he shows up and says, “Follow me to Phase 4!” this creates a giant-sized problem for Storm King’s Thunder.

Harshnag is a prototypical Realms NPC who is much, much cooler and much, much more powerful than the PCs and shows up to hog the spotlight.

Storm King’s Thunder at least briefly acknowledges the Harshnag Problem and attempts to solve possibly the least important part of it (combat balance) by having Harshnag literally patronize the PCs by pretending he’s not as powerful as he actually is (p. 120):

Harshnag tries not to dominate combat if it means making his smaller compatriots feel inferior. He doesn’t want to be seen as a showoff. He can reduce his combat effectiveness in the following ways:

• He makes one attack on his turn instead of two.

• He uses the Help action to aid a character’s next attack against a foe. […]

• He does nothing on his turn except taunt an enemy who might otherwise attack a character. Assume the effort is successful and the target switches it attention to Harshnag, unless the character insists on being the target of that threat.

I sure hope no one dies while you’re jerking off, Harshnag.

After that half-hearted effort, Storm King’s Thunder gets back down to the work of completely mishandling a powerful NPC ally. We can start with the railroad doors to the Eye of the All-Father that are needlessly designed so that only the NPC can effectively open them and then eventually culminate with an NPC-focused cutscene where the PCs are turned into mute bystanders while Harshnag solos Iymrith.

(The adventure is so insistent on this that it will literally KILL A PC rather than let them try to participate in the cutscene.)

For a detailed explanation of why this sort of thing is a terrible idea, check out How NOT to Frame a Scene. But the key thing is that, while having a much more powerful PC show up is not inherently bad, there are generally two maxims you want to follow:

1. Make sure the game remains focused on the PCs.
2. Use the NPC’s awesomeness as a way of establishing how awesome the PCs are.

Imagine Barack Obama shows up at your birthday party. In Scenario #1 he grabs a fistful of birthday cake, poses with people for selfies, and tells stories about the situation room when Osama Bin Laden was assassinated for the rest of the evening.

In Scenario #2, he comes over to you, throws an arm around your shoulder, and says, “This is a party I could not miss once I heard about <that cool thing you did last week>.”

Which Obama do you want at your birthday party?

Storm King’s Thunder struggles with this because Harshnag’s role in the campaign is not to hype the PCs up.

He’s here to tell them that everything they did in Phase 3 was a pointless dead end.

This is also a problem that the “ending” of the campaign has: After all of their epic adventures, the PCs are reduced to footsoldiers taking orders from an NPC.

DEUS EX AIRSHIP

With all that being said, I want to emphasize that the bones of Storm King’s Thunder are fundamentally really good, and there are quite a few clever things the designers do.

For example, at the end of Phase 1 as the PCs are leaving Nighstone, a cloud giant citadel that’s floating past spots them and flies down. It belongs to Zephyros, a cloud giant who is looking for the PCs because the DM… err, I mean STRANGE PLANAR ENTITIES have told him that he needs to give them a lift to the next part of the adventure.

This is a really cool moment.

Oddly, though, it’s not the only time this happens in the adventure. Later on, a random airship will swoop out of the air and declare that the DM… err, I mean A MYSTERIOUS DRAGON has sent it to give the PCs a lift.

So why does this happen?

The core of the campaign — Phase 3 — is spread across North Faerûn. Locations across this entire region are keyed so that the PCs can travel almost anywhere and (theoretically) encounter campaign relevant stuff. The trick, though, is that all of this material is:

• Keyed to the specific range of levels the PCs will be in Phase 3.
• Designed to funnel the PCs towards the Eye of the All-Father.

If they went overland from Nightstone to Bryn Shander at the end of Phase 1, for example, they’d encounter a bunch of stuff that (a) they’re not ready for and (b) assumes the continuity of the adventure is more advanced than it is.

So to avoid that problem, you have Zephyros show up to literally fly them over these locations. And later, after Phase 3, you give them an airship for the same reason.

If you were prepping a similar adventure for your home campaign, we could imagine keying material appropriate for Phase 2 for their journey and then, later, advancing or updating that key as their journeys continue. If the book had infinite space, we could similarly imagine stocking the entire pointcrawl multiple times with different material for each phase.

But since the book can’t be infinite in its size, this is a very clever structural trick to make it work.

GAZETTEER OF THE SAVAGE FRONTIER

Did you know that Storm King’s Thunder has a significantly more detailed write-up of Bryn Shander — the capital of Icewind Dale — than the one that appears in Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden?

In fact, the hidden treasure of Storm King’s Thunder is that it contains an encyclopedic gazetteer of the Savage Frontier. Although there’s some overlap with the Sword Coast Adventurers Guide, Storm King’s Thunder’s location guide is almost identical in length to Sword Coast Adventurers Guide’s treatment of the Sword Coast. This makes Storm King’s Thunder an invaluable resource for any North-ranging Forgotten Realms campaign, whether you’re interested in an adventure about giants or not.

What’s great about the adventure tie-in, though, is that the gazetteer ends up studded with play-ready material. This is high-value stuff.

You can also flip this around. Because of how it’s structured, a good chunk of Storm King’s Thunder can basically be boiled down to a list of “terrible things that giants are doing.”

So if you’re running any campaign in the Forgotten Realms, you can use Storm King’s Thunder to supply what I refer to as Background Events — a second timeline of future events running in parallel with your PCs’ adventures. These are events that don’t directly affect the PCs, but which are nevertheless taking place and moving the campaign world forward.

In other words, you can take most of Storm King’s Thunder and just have it “running” in the background of your campaign: The world is large and there’s all this giant stuff that’s happening up north or one town over or whatever.

This sort of thing can add incredible depth to your campaign world. And, of course, if the PCs decide to follow up on nay of this… well, hey! You’ve got a whole campaign book you can launch into!

On a related note, Storm King’s Thunder also does something similar in reverse, by dropping in little references to other published D&D campaigns: The crisis is triggered by Tyranny of Dragons. There are elemental lords from Princes of the Apocalypse actively seeking alliances. And so forth.

None of these require your group to have owned, read, or played the other adventures. But if you DO, then these are great little pay-offs and they make the world feel HUGE.

THREE CITIES, THREE FIGHTS

Something else that Storm King’s Thunder does very well are the three big giant fights in Bryn Shander, Goldenfields, and Triboar.

You may have gotten the impression that these fights are generic or interchangeable because of the campaign’s structure, but each location is well-developed and each encounter is crafted with very specific strategic goals and tactics. Each is full of unique interest, framed as large-scale strategic conflicts spread out across an entire community, in which the PCs will need to make tough choices about where and how to engage the enemy.

There is one caveat here, though.

The book doesn’t want the PCs fighting alongside NPC guards. This is most likely a deliberate choice to simplify the DM’s cognitive load and is mostly fine, except they accomplish it primarily by handing out idiot balls.

In Goldenfields, for example, they’re just explicitly incompetent:

There are no guards in the abbey, just a handful of acolytes. One of them, Zi Liang has scolded Father Darovik many times for putting the defense of Goldenfields in the hands of incompetent military leaders, which has made her somewhat unpopular.

With a little extra effort, however, some careful DMing can mostly work around these problems. In Goldenfields, for example, it’s not too difficult to set up the Chekhov’s Gun of The Guards Are Terrible Here.

Similarly, in Bryn Shander, all the guards at whatever location the PCs choose to fight are supposed to immediately run away (while all the other guards in town stay and fight). This is a problem because it flattens the strategic choices available to the players. (Instead of being able to choose how and where to reinforce the NPCs, and then dealing with the consequences of those choices, the PCs have no choice except to go all-in on the completely undefended location.) But about 90% of the solution is to just ignore the direction to have the NPCs run away and instead playing to find out.

CONCLUSION

I like Storm King’s Thunder.

It has weaknesses, but these are well-balanced by its ambition. If you can successfully pull the campaign off, it’s studded with amazing set pieces and gives ample opportunities to become one of the most memorable experiences you’ll have at the gaming table.

But that IF should not be casually ignored.

I’ve spoken to a large number of players and DMs about their experiences with Storm King’s Thunder, and a disconcerting number of them have reported campaigns which floundered, frustrated, meandered their way into boredom, or crashed spectacularly.

And these are problems directly connected to the shortcomings in Storm King’s Thunder’s design.

The one I would consider probably most significant is the campaign’s subtle-but-persistent deprotagonization of the PCs. Whether that’s all-powerful GMPCs, demeaning scenario hooks, or too-frequent “nothing you’re doing actually matters” dead ends, the result is demoralizing to the players and debilitating to the health of any long-term campaign. Why keep doing things if your actions keep getting characterized as meaningless?

The fragility of the adventure shouldn’t be ignored, either. There are far too many places where Storm King’s Thunder is (a) on rails and (b) can easily go hurtling off those rails with catastrophic results.

So, in many ways, Storm King’s Thunder is a needlessly frustrating and complicated campaign for the DM to run. But if you’re willing to tackle the challenge and can successfully thread the needle, I believe you will find it to be a highly rewarding one.

Style: 4
Substance: 3

Authors: Jenna Helland, Adam Lee, Christopher Perkins, Richard Whitters
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Cost: $49.95
Page Count: 256

Buy Now!

FURTHER READING