Storm King's Thunder *spoilers*

[Varen_Tai]

Note - I will be discussing some details from SKT, and though I will try to keep it general enough that it won't cause issues, I'll just say here that anyone who is intending on playing or is currently playing this campaign probably shouldn't read this thread.

Hey all! Been a while since I've posted. :smallbiggrin:

I am getting ready to run Storm King's Thunder with my family here within a couple of weeks. We've mostly got characters created and hope to start the game on our next session. I have found a number of wonderful resources online to assist, but I have a nagging question I don't quite have resolved yet even with all of the existing resources.

For anyone who has run SKT before, later in the campaign, there's a broad exploration part. While this might be really fun for people with a bunch of those areas laid out in other sourcebooks, this is my only sourcebook. Suggestions on how to help get through those areas without all the sourcebooks? How do I keep the players engaged without losing the thread of the campaign and the upcoming disaster if the issue is not resolved in a timely fashion?

Any DM tips, not just for that questions, but for any other things you've found as you played it? Every campaign has its own quirks and little things and I'd love to hear suggestions as I'm getting ready to run it for the first time.

[Oramac]

For anyone who has run SKT before, later in the campaign, there's a broad exploration part.

I've run SKT cover-to-cover twice, and I don't recall a major exploration thread. Can you be more specific with what you're referring to?

I do know that in the later chapters there were enough major plot points and story hooks that it really wasn't hard at all to keep my groups on task. Now, in the mid-game when they're hunting down the Giant-Lords, that's where I had issues. Not because they had nothing to do, but because they had too much to do. They ended up with analysis paralysis, and I basically pulled in the wacky eccentric cloud giant guy from the beginning of the book to gently nudge them towards two of the Lords (the ones I'd planned out the most, naturally).

[Zhorn]

I've run SKT cover-to-cover twice, and I don't recall a major exploration thread. Can you be more specific with what you're referring to?
Chapter 3: The Savage Frontier

For @Varen_Tai,
The biggest suggestion I would give is have hooks early pointing the party towards The Eye of the All-Father, and lean on those hooks regularly.
It can be very easy for the party to pick up a side quest in the numerous location in Chapter 3 and fixate on following them beyond the details they have in the module. Any time you are in a town, make sure there is regular talk about 'the giant problem' and that 'someone should do something to find out what is wrong and fix it'.

I'm on my 4th STK campaign
I sandbox heavily
My players are still in Chapter 3
They are levels 10-11
Don't do this as a first time thing
By the time the party is level 6, you want them at the The Eye of the All-Father for Chapter 4.

After that the plot is important enough for the party to know what important locations they should head to, but like with Oramac's example; point them to a giant lord YOU feels best suited to run.
If you are doing a loooooong running campaign, doing multiple spirit mounds and giant lords is fine, but first time just go for the one and done.
SKT is great for replay as the campaigns can vary up a huge amount from playthrough to playthrough, and the scope of locations make it very easy to plug in homebrew quests, but same the more interconnected sprawl for your next time.
First time, simple, linear, resolutions.

[Varen_Tai]

Chapter 3: The Savage Frontier

Yup, that's the one.

[Oramac]

Chapter 3: The Savage Frontier

For @Varen_Tai,
The biggest suggestion I would give is have hooks early pointing the party towards The Eye of the All-Father, and lean on those hooks regularly.
It can be very easy for the party to pick up a side quest in the numerous location in Chapter 3 and fixate on following them beyond the details they have in the module. Any time you are in a town, make sure there is regular talk about 'the giant problem' and that 'someone should do something to find out what is wrong and fix it'.

Ahh, ok. I guess I didn't really have a problem with that so much. My party's were both pretty active as far as going and doing was concerned. I also homebrewed a LOT of the campaign. Probably half of the overall campaign was changed in one way or another.


After that the plot is important enough for the party to know what important locations they should head to, but like with Oramac's example; point them to a giant lord YOU feels best suited to run.
If you are doing a loooooong running campaign, doing multiple spirit mounds and giant lords is fine, but first time just go for the one and done.
SKT is great for replay as the campaigns can vary up a huge amount from playthrough to playthrough, and the scope of locations make it very easy to plug in homebrew quests, but same the more interconnected sprawl for your next time.
First time, simple, linear, resolutions.

Agreed. If it's your first SKT (and especially if it's your first campaign) the KISS principle most definitely applies.

Really, the key here is the balance between giving enough information and depth that the players don't feel railroaded while still actually railroading them. It's a tricky balance, to be sure. At the end of the day, if they go off the rails, just roll with it and have fun.

[Varen_Tai]

Ahh, ok. I guess I didn't really have a problem with that so much. My party's were both pretty active as far as going and doing was concerned. I also homebrewed a LOT of the campaign. Probably half of the overall campaign was changed in one way or another.

Agreed. If it's your first SKT (and especially if it's your first campaign) the KISS principle most definitely applies.

Really, the key here is the balance between giving enough information and depth that the players don't feel railroaded while still actually railroading them. It's a tricky balance, to be sure. At the end of the day, if they go off the rails, just roll with it and have fun.

Eh, long time DM, though I haven't run an actual PNP campaign in a couple of decades, so I'm quite rusty. Definitely why I got a campaign book instead of homebrewing a campaign. :smallwink: And the KISS principle absolutely applies here while I get my feet back under me.

Any other suggestions?

[Oramac]

Any other suggestions?

SKT is definitely one of the more sandboxy published campaigns. If the party decides to play in the sand, run with it. Also, some of the social stuff in the Storm Giant base can get pretty crazy, especially if you have a really talkative player with a high insight. Don't be surprised if the party figures it all out a bit sooner than expected.

The final fight against Iymrith is pretty damn boring if you just use a run of the mill blue dragon. This is one place where I'd highly recommend homebrewing the fight, or at least heavily modifying it.

Above all: have fun!!

[Varen_Tai]

Thank you all! Very helpful advice. Looking forward to running it. :smallbiggrin:

[DracoKnight]

As someone who’s run the adventure, the best advice I can give is to run literally any of the other hardcovers. Well, not literally any of the others. Most of them are bad. But Wild Beyond the Witchlight, Curse of Strahd, and Rime of the Frostmaiden are really good!

EDIT: Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel might be the best book they’ve put out for all of 5e.

[Varen_Tai]

As someone who’s run the adventure, the best advice I can give is to run literally any of the other hardcovers. Well, not literally any of the others. Most of them are bad. But Wild Beyond the Witchlight, Curse of Strahd, and Rime of the Frostmaiden are really good!

EDIT: Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel might be the best book they’ve put out for all of 5e.

Journeys looks like it's not a full campaign though, which is what I'm looking for. Strahd is too horror-y for a brand new group including a 12 year old, but the other two... Better than SKT you say? Do you have a preference between Wild and Rime? I might switch last minute...

[Oramac]

As someone who’s run the adventure, the best advice I can give is to run literally any of the other hardcovers.

I'm genuinely curious. What do you find disagreeable about SKT?

[AvatarVecna]

For anyone who has run SKT before, later in the campaign, there's a broad exploration part. While this might be really fun for people with a bunch of those areas laid out in other sourcebooks, this is my only sourcebook. Suggestions on how to help get through those areas without all the sourcebooks? How do I keep the players engaged without losing the thread of the campaign and the upcoming disaster if the issue is not resolved in a timely fashion?

Any DM tips, not just for that questions, but for any other things you've found as you played it? Every campaign has its own quirks and little things and I'd love to hear suggestions as I'm getting ready to run it for the first time.

I'm currently running SKT for the third time, and we just finished with chapter four. What I've found in running it is, the point of this chapter is building the ambiance of the story. Chapter 1 power levels the characters. Chapter 2 is an introduction to the problem (giants are attacking places). Chapter 3 is about building up the scope of that problem. Chapter 4 is about asking around for a solution. Chapter 5+ is about following the path of that solution. With my first game, I played it just as it was straight out of the book, and it kinda just lasted forever. Players wandered all around the north picking random fights and random quests and it kinda just went on until they declared they were bored and I moved us on to chapter 4, per the book's instructions. This is a bad way to do it.

By the time the players have entered chapter 3, they've just helped out during a giant attack on the town. They have an understanding of how outmatched they are by giants in general, let alone how outmatched the average person is. They probably want to help out, but they can't just take the fight to the giants. They're more capable of taking on individual giants (depending on circumstances), so they're the best people to spread news on the road. And they've received a number of quests to follow up on after the town got hit. What you need to do is, whatever path those quests take them on, is chock full of people crossing their paths...and they all have giant stories. The base adventure is already doing this in large part, but ramp it up just a bit. We don't wanna focus on "here's a giant please go slay it", because that's just gonna trigger their adventurer instincts, and the game already has a bunch of those. We need "here's a giant problem adventurers could've solved if they were here, but they weren't".

A ranch south of Triboar had to pack up in a hurry and leave behind all their horses because a hill giant came calling. A merchant caravan passing through Yartar warns you that, if you're heading to Everlund, be wary: they saw a fire giant digging near the road when they were heading here from Everlund. There's an orc resting in Goldenfields who's the only survivor of a town that got stomped by stone giants out to the southeast of the High Forest. An elf princess living in the silver marches has been kidnapped by servants of the fire giants to serve as a hostage to secure her tribe's cooperation. Sailors in Neverwinter tell tales of being chased by an iceberg piloted by titanic vikings. There's a cloud castle hovering over Silverymoon, and any griffon knights that try to approach get shot out of the sky by ballista and boulders. A dwarf knight was ambushed and nearly killed on the road by fire giants; all that was taken was his ancestral adamantine sword. Stone giant attacks in the south have forced a small clan of trolls to move further north, near Citadel Felbarr, and it's causing supply-chain issues.

The players are spreading word of the giant attacks and their motivations...and all the while, they're hearing tragedy after tragedy. Giants wage war against each other and the small folk get caught in the middle. Everywhere they go, they find the helpless masses barely being protected by a few more competent leaders, but that competence is stretched too thin as it is, they can't afford to try and solve the giant problem, not if it means leaving their people at risk for even a short while. The party is not as helpless as the masses, and while the smart thing to do would be to keep your head down and wait for all this giant stuff to blow over, every new person met on the road or in a town is yet another piece of evidence for the theory that the cavalry isn't coming for a long time...not unless the party decides to become the cavalry. Ideally, by the time players have completed the quests they've received, they've traveled through enough areas and gotten side-tracked on enough small quests relating to giants.

The main thing preventing the party from engaging with giant shenanigans is information. The party is outgunned by default, and they don't know what the giants want or how they're going about it, for the most part. At some point during chapter three, they should learn that information for at least a couple giant lords, if they haven't already. Chapter 4 starts with them meeting Harshnag and making a decision to chase down the oracle far to the north. Harshnag is a friendly-ish giant hero who's been wandering the north helping small folk for centuries now; there will be people who know of him, and can mention him to the PCs. Build details on him as the chapter goes on - not every location, but every third or fourth location. Someone mentions seeing a frost giant wearing a dragon skull for a helmet. They're informed by someone in-the-know of his approximate schedule - where they might expect to find him in a few week's time, for example. If you're near Waterdeep, someone can mention there's a giant hero who lives in Waterdeep who might be able to provide guidance; if you go there, you find he's not present currently, but they have an idea of when he'll be back.

Harshnag should not be sold to the party as How You Find Out The Next Plot Point; rather, he is a friendly giant, who might be a more sane and trustworthy source of information than Zephyros was, who might be a strong ally at some point in the war on giants. If you've done your job right, you shouldn't have to push them to seek him out - a handful of hints will be sufficient to get the party seeking him out for his strong arm or his specialized knowledge set, once they've decided they can't wait for someone else to solve this problem.



All of the locations in the North have at least a little bit of info on them; if you're good at improvising, you can get away with just waiting to see where players go and filling in the many blanks on the spot. If you're not good at improvising, I would suggest that at the end of an exploration session, you look at the nearby settlement's basic notes, and figure out what kind of thing you would like to happen there, or how you'd like to flesh out whatever they've indicated should occur. In the same vein, rolling random encounters ahead of time gives you more heads up to plan out any weirdness with them. Make sure to take into account how likely your party is to go cross-country over hills and through forests and bogs.

If you feel an area is a bit too barren, and the random encounter charts feel a bit stale or insufficient, design your own thing to go in the space. A dragon's slumber has been interrupted by fire giants digging for some adamantine in its hoard. This road is too close to the Evermoors, oops looks like you've stumbled on a hag - or even a coven! Some werewolves are stalking a band of frost giants when your paths unfortunately cross. You can spice up existing encounters as well. Have a bandit shakedown get interrupted by some hungry hill giants. Meet some merchants on the road and travel with them for a bit before getting ambushed by stone giants. Have giant encounters that get interrupted by other giant encounters, with the players picking off what kills they can while the two factions quarrel with each other instead of the more fragile smallfolk.

Nightstone gets worse the more you think about it. It's a decent enough introduction to the giant problem, but the section is written in a way that makes it clear the designers 100% expect the players to barely care about the people who's lives have been ruined by pure coincidence. Your players will likely be tempted to stick around to help out, but this is a small-scale story. The innkeeper gives the party a quest to deliver news of death to relatives of the deceased, but this is a minor reason for him to want them out of town.

If you decided to deal with the Zhentarim, the reason he wants them to leave town doing busy-work is because frankly, the town needs financial support more than it needs more muscle, and unless the party is moving in forever, they really need to not rock the boat with the Zhents, and that's exactly what would happen if the PCs stayed around a little while clashing with the agents of the Black Network whenever they try to screw over the townsfolk. It sucks, but this is the best chance these people will have at a future, even if it's not great, and the PC's presence makes that shakier. We appreciate all you've done, but now we need you to let us handle it from here.

Regardless of Zhents or no, there's another reason he wants to send you all over creation: he's a well-conencted innkeeper with a nose for trouble, and this giant attack is a sign of big things to come. Other towns need to be warned about whatever this incoming trouble is, and the party is better able to handle any trouble that finds them on the road...and in fact, they maybe have a bit of destiny/fate feel to them. He gives them a reason to go questing all over the north because that information (and possibly the party's presence) may very well save lives. That's worth a little trouble for he few remaining people of Nightstone.



Figure out how you feel about the Oracle sequence. There's a couple parts that are of questionable value to your game, and it's gonna depend on what your party is up for. Firstly, if you ask the oracle for the location of a giant lord - a location you want to know because the oracle told you that solving all the giant problems requires taking a conch from a giant lord (a thing the giant allfather god actively wants you to do), he gives you some busywork fetch quests to "prove yourself worthy" of being informed how to complete the quest he wants you to complete. Trekking out to the oracle once is an experience; trekking out to it a second or third or fourth or fifth time, because you didn't bring back the right shiny bauble, is a freaking chore. If your party is fine doing a fetch quest to the nearby barbarian village to steal their artifact, it's a relatively small detour that shouldn't take away too much from the majesty of the location. Secondly, there's the Imyrith encounter. I hate it. It's the whole campaign in microcosm: an epic dragon adventurer attacks the small folk, but thankfully they are saved by the epic giant adventurer who happens to be on hand. The PCs being helpless cannon fodder is expected and assumed. In my experience, players feel frustrated, like they're bit characters in a "dragons vs giants" story.

The adventure as a whole wants to help players understand how awful it would be to get constantly attacked by enormous creatures you stand no chance against. The good way to do that is to tell and show them the effects giants are having on every civilian they interact with. the bad way to do this is to just throw over-leveled encounters at the party over and over until they realize they can't just tank a boulder to the face and this isn't a campaign that's gonna be solved with violence. The former allows the party to feel like heroic underdogs when they take the fight to the giants. The latter forces the party to feel like children who've bitten off more than they can chew by daring to try and solve the problem instead of just telling the storm giants how to solve the problem themselves. Walking that line is difficult but rewarding. To that end...



Take advantage of the milestone leveling setup and just...level the party more frequently. Nudge the party into taking big actions that would warrant a level up, or build your own custom ones into the adventure if you feel they've been sparse. My party reached lvl 9 at about the point where they should've reached lvl 7, and you'd be amazed how much difference a couple extra HD makes in their enjoyment even if it doesn't affect their "how screwed are we if we fight these giants head on" chances.

[Varen_Tai]

I'm currently running SKT for the third time, and we just finished with chapter four. What I've found in running it is, the point of this chapter is building the ambiance of the story. ...

... Nudge the party into taking big actions that would warrant a level up, or build your own custom ones into the adventure if you feel they've been sparse. My party reached lvl 9 at about the point where they should've reached lvl 7, and you'd be amazed how much difference a couple extra HD makes in their enjoyment even if it doesn't affect their "how screwed are we if we fight these giants head on" chances.

Wow, this is fabulous! Thank you so much for writing all this up! This is helping to pin down the direction I want to go with everything.

[Rafaelfras]

I will share my experience with you.
It took 2 and half years for me finally finish chapter 3 after that we finally met Harshnag and went for The Eye of the Allfather.


I am the main DM of this table and we finished Princes of the Apocalypse already. Since is the same group I have to calibrate SKT for higher levels.
I did chapter 2 on golden fields (as is appropriate for PoTA ending) and from there went to chapter 3 where we did:
The adventure "Against Giants " where another party member DMed so I could play. And that took almost an year.

Then I took back the DM seat and we did kraken gamble, got the teleportation network and hints about dragons from moonglean tower. My players choose a path that led then to waterdeep where they triggered a sidequest from one of the PCs background: A heavily inspired Star Wars (prequels because it's funny) inspired adventure within a city where Palatine is a evil advisor for a vain King (PC father) with a Darth Vader as brother (Star Wars has lot of medieval stuff and music my players had a blast when Palatine made his cue).

From there we fled to a magic school from my wizard's background, that school is a legacy on my home forgotten realms setting from one of the players from our 3.0 days. I asked that player to broaden the school as it was his idea and legacy.
He made a 16 page adventure that took us last year, with a trial for my wizard, an antimagic organization deep inside the school subterranean and a tournament.
In there I mixed some things from SKT, like one of the dragons we were looking for, the good Cloud Giants and finally after we saved the school the divination professor told us to find Harshnag, we scryed and teleported to him and finally finished chapter 3

What a journey. Looking back I am very happy that I manage to bring everything on track and the whole campaign didn't got lost in all of this.
SKT is really different from other campaigns I've DMed
After finding Harshnag everything went faster. We did 2 giant lords (hill and cloud) and went to the Maelstorm and I just finished chapter 10 ressurrecting queen Neri and outing Imyrith. We are now heding to chapter 11 so we are heading to the end very soon.
Hope my report can help you and good luck on your run