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 any 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

Go to Part 1

I believe that the Kraken Society first appears in The Savage Frontier (1988) by Jennell Jaquays, where they are described as the Thieves’ Guild of the North and connected to the Kraken of the Purple Rocks. They came to a particular prominence with their appearances in two SSI AD&D computer games — Gateway to the Savage Frontier and Treasures of the Savage Frontier (which I haven’t played).

Much of the material from The Savage Frontier was incorporated and expanded into The North, a 1996 boxed set. This more or less forms the foundation of the Kraken Society, but it received its most expansive treatment in Cloak & Dagger (2000), one of the very last AD&D books ever written. (This book appears to draw on continuity developed by Elaine Cunningham in several tie-in novels, but I haven’t read those, either.)

The 3^rd Edition supplement Lords of Darkness (2001) also had a full write-up of the Kraken Society, but it was basically just an abbreviation of the material from Cloak & Dagger.

The Kraken Society didn’t appear in 4^th Edition, as far as I can tell.

Purple Rocks, but not the Kraken Society, next appear in the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide (2015).

Finally, I’ve drawn material from both Princes of the Apocalypse (2015) and Storm King’s Thunder (2016) to flesh out into the Society’s current activities in Yartar. Background details unrelated to the Kraken Society were drawn from Shawn Merwin’s “Backdrop: Moonshae Isles” article in Dungeon #196 (which, as far as I know, remains the only definitive treatment of Moonshae in the 15^th century).

My goal with this project was to advance the Kraken Society into the 15^th century and provide a definitive reference for it. This meant:

• Advancing the Society’s timeline. I didn’t want the organization to have simply been stuck in a form of stasis between the 1380’s and the 1490’s.
• Resolving the various continuity discrepancies between the official sources. Some of this could simply be swept under the rug (it happened a hundred years ago, so there’s no reason to worry about the details). The rest was primarily a matter of creating Slarkethrel’s myriad mystery cults and then diegetically seeding the contradictory continuity into the game world. There are many “truths” of Slarkethrel… and that’s just the way it likes it.
• Expanding and detailing the Society.

The final point took many forms. Too many to catalogue, frankly. (If you’re curious, however, you can compare the material here to that found in Cloak & Dagger and the 5E adventure books to easily identify it.) But, for example:

• Ascarlian satrapies did not previously exist.
• The Assassins of the Purple Veil are new.
• Society operations in Neverwinter, Thornhold, Caer Westphal, and Luskan had not been previously detailed.
• Concepts like low tide, high tide, and bucklings — along with other cultural aspects and slang of the tentacles of the deep — are original creations.

And so forth.

I’ve done textual histories of the Forgotten Realms in the past (Zariel, Elturel, Trade Way, Arveiturace) which only seek to provide a gestalt summary of existing Realms lore. But the primary goal of this piece was to creatively expand the Kraken Society (and Slarkethrel’s domain in general).

Go to Storm King’s Remix

Go to Part 1

The agents of the so-called Thieves’ Guild of the North, known as krakenar, identify themselves through the secret mark of a purple squid with an incredible number of tentacles. (The number and styling of the tentacles, perhaps encouraged by the decentralized structure of the Society, has actually shifted over time and in different places. This is not an intentional variation, but those who are deeply familiar with the krakenar may be able to identify the origin of a particular instance of their sign.) It would be a mistake, however, to think of the Kraken Society as purely a bunch of thieves. They are skilled spies and information brokers, with their services often being sought even by legitimate powers. The krakenar thus include highwaymen, merchants, adventurers, and more. Anyone with the right skills or in the right place may be welcomed in the tentacles’ embrace.

In fact, the Kraken Society can often abide in these legitimate, mutually beneficial relationships for years. The krakenar refer to this as the “low tide,” getting their foot in the door by selling valuable information, using their newly privileged position to gain access to more information, rinse, wash, repeat.

What the krakenar are looking for is the “crack in the seawall” (which they may refer to in slang simply as a “crack” or “buckling”); a weakness in the existing systems of power which can be exploited. When they find it, the tide comes in.

Operating at “high tide,” a krakenar cell will use all of its illicit knowledge, covert skills, and criminal resources to disrupt the targeted government or organization. They may attempt to destroy the entire institution, but it’s more common for them to target specific individuals. When the leadership has been crippled or wiped out, the krakenar agents who silently infiltrated the organization during low tide simply slip into the power vacuum. It’s not unusual for krakenar agents to enter power promising to end a threat that was created by the Society in the first place, ensuring acclaim as they rapidly “solve” the problem.

ORGANIZATION

The Kraken Society is cell-based. Each city or region is controlled by a Lieutenant, and although the various regional cells cooperate with each other when it’s beneficial, each is operated as an independent organization and has deliberately limited contact. The local structures of the cells are not proscribed, and can vary greatly (although they tend to value secrecy and usually reflect the Society’s general cell-based methodology).

The inner circle of the Society, which consists of the Lieutenants and a handful of other senior members (called Followers), refers to itself as the coterie. The coterie is privy to the inner mysteries of the cult, which feature a highly mythologized “truth” about the Kraken of the Purple Rocks: They believe themselves to be the servitors of the King of the Trackless Depths (Slarkethrel), who is destined to regain the lost hegemony of the kraken empire which once ruled the seas of Toril. Those who advance further into the mystery perform rites which forge a communion (or supposedly do) with the kraken psychopomps who escaped their empire’s destruction within the sanctuaries of the abyssal rifts.

Those becoming Lieutenants travel to the Purple Rocks, where the Heralds of the Deep indoctrinate them through a series of strange rites. Lieutenants who earn great honor may even be invited to Ascarle.

Most krakenar agents, however, are not part of the coterie and just think of themselves as being part of a criminal organization. Even further out on the periphery is the vast web of front organizations which serve the Society’s will without most of their members or employees ever knowing they are part of it.

CURRENT CELLS

Waterdeep/Skullport: The Skum Lord is an aboleth which lairs beneath Skullport. It has quietly spent centuries inexorably expanding its influence within the Port of Shadows, creating a network of telepathically linked agents strategically placed in the nexus of the underworld. Information flows through Skullport, and the Skum Lord skims his take.

Those long-enthralled to the Skum Lord can be noted by their pale, translucent skin. Known by some as the “pale servitors,” they can be seen moving throughout Skullport and, increasingly, the city above. (The Skum Lord used to have a surface counterpart who served as the lieutenant of Waterdeep, but this hasn’t been true in decades. Slarkethrel’s resurgence in recent years has prompted the Skum Lord to become more active in expanding the Society’s presence in Waterdeep. His agents had some success doing business with Lord Neverember’s administration, but have been disappointed by Laeral Silverhand. It’s uncertain whether the Skum Lord wants to expand his base of power, or if he would be happier finding a new Waterdhavian lieutenant.)

In Skullport, the Skum Lord is also rumored to own forty percent or more of the city’s buildings. Each month the pale servitors come to collect their rent: Sometimes they ask for money. Sometimes they ask questions.

Yartar: Yartar was once the primary center of power for the Kraken Society, but in the late 14^th century the Harpers and the Waterbaron systematically broke their power and drove them out of the city. The Society has only returned to Yartar within the last few years.

• Ghald (sahuagin) and Unferth (male Tethyrian human priest) are partners jointly in charge of Society business in the Dessarin Valley. Their approach has been to recruit powerful, ambitious individuals who already have existing power bases and simultaneously turn them towards myriad schemes. Their theory is that they can easily jettison the failures and consolidate the victors into a larger organization. The actual organization that Ghald and Unferth have reporting directly to them now can actually be described only generously as skeletal, but they’ve managed to project to most of the people they’re working with the illusion that the Society is a monolithic force. (Princes of the Apocalypse, p. 210)
• Lord Khaspere Drylund, one of Yartar’s nobles, is a member of the society and spearheading an effort to replace Ruthiol as the city’s Waterbaron. Drylund notably owns and operates the Grand Dame, a riverboat gambling casino. (Storm King’s Thunder, p. 216)

The Hand of Yartar is an all-female thieves’ guild in Yartar which was actually founded as a front organization for the Kraken Society. In the 14^th century it was led by Semmonemily, a doppelganger who assumed the identity of the Hand’s guildmistress, Emily Iramalac. When the Society was purged from Yartar, however, Semmonemily was killed. The remaining members of the Hand had no idea they’d been operating as part of the Kraken Society and no living connection to the organization. They’ve continued operating independently over the last century, and ironically are now one of the strongest opponents to the Kraken Society as the Society attempts to reassert its control of the underworld in Yartar.

Neverwinter: The Reefkin are a group of merfolk who have set up a commune under Neverwinter Harbor. The upper ranks of the Reefkin deliberately infect themselves with lycanthropy, allowing them to transform into wolves when they wish to pursue shoreside agendas.

The Reefkin have a familiar modus operandi among Slarkethrel’s cults: They rescue drowning sailors and, sometimes after showing them some underwater wonder or vision, deliver them to shore. They claim a life-debt from these sailors, however, and subtly coerce them into the Society.

(Do the Reefkin create their own supply of sailors-to-be-saved by covertly sinking ships with damage disguised to look as if they ran aground on the reefs? Of course they do.)

What happens next depends on circumstances: Some can be immediately forced to do terrible things. Others will be manipulated into countless small acts of treachery, each binding them closer to the Reefkin. The end goal is either recruitment, blackmail, or both.

The Reefkin are also known to have formed alliances with fey powers within Evernight, the dark reflection of Neverwinter which lies within the Shadowfell.

Thornhold: North of Waterdeep along the Sword Coast, Thornhold is an ancient fortress which was unwittingly built by the Margaster noble family directly below the caverns of Clan Stoneshaft in the Underdark below. Control of Thornhold has passed through numerous hands and its connections to the Stoneshaft dwarves have grown stronger (primarily due to a period in which Zhentarim slavers were oppressing and exploiting the dwarves).

Most recently, the Margasters have once again taken possession of Thornhold and forged a tentative alliance with the Stoneshaft dwarves: The Margasters protect the Stoneshaft interests, provide defense against surface threats, and facilitate trade relationships with the merchants of Waterdeep. The Stoneshaft dwarves benefit from having economic access to the wealth of the North; the Margasters reap a healthy profit from their role as middlemen.

There are those among the Stoneshaft dwarves, however, who resent the Margasters: They remember the past betrayals of other surface “allies” and they question what the humans are doing to justify “stealing” their wealth. That’s the sort of buckling that the Kraken Society looks for. A krakenar dwarf named Urnom Telrokak has been organizing disaffected Stoneshaft dwarves. What would be ideal is if the Kraken Society could place an agent within the Margasters, who could then be used to exacerbate the tensions between the two factions.

Caer Westphal: Caer Westphal is the capital of Snowdon, a small isle in the southeastern corner of the Moonshaes which was recently annexed by Amnian nobles. The Society has implanted itself among the native Ffolk of the island, characterizing themselves as a popular uprising.

They have an uneasy alliance with the Brothers of the Beast, another resistance group run by a druid named Heinrich Mucklepratt who can summon strange allies from the island’s moonwells. Their mutual efforts have forced Lady Erliza to openly reveal more and more of her dark powers, increasing tensions on the island.

Luskan: The City of Sails is worth mentioning here because, like Yartar, it was once a major center of power for the Kraken Society. The regional lieutenant here was actually a member of the High Captains who ruled the city, often turning Luskan’s extensive resources to the Society’s purposes. As in Yartar, however, the Society was purged in the late 14^th century. Recent efforts have attempted to find a toehold here, but so far Jarlaxle Baenre and the Bregan D’aerthe have been successful in stamping them out.

Addendum: A Brief Word on My Sources