Download Storm King Thunder Dungeons Dragons Wizards RPG Team Books

Product details Series Dungeons & Dragons Hardcover 256 pages Publisher Wizards of the Coast (September 6, 2016) Language English ISBN-10 9780786966004 ISBN-13 978-0786966004 ASIN 0786966009

Storm King Thunder Dungeons Dragons Wizards RPG Team Books Reviews

• I'll make this short and quick.
  
  Better DM material in the front of the book, including a flowchart of events, NPC description, an overview of the forces at play in the adventure. Basically everything that was asked for after Out of the Abyss hit the shelves. I'd rate this section a SOLID 10/10. Hope to see the same sort of thing in future prewritten adventures.
  
  The adventure itself is a 9/10. I absolutely love this thing. It's about the same level as Curse of Strahd, if not better. Very very pleased. Well organized - probably the best organized book dropped for 5e besides Lost Mines. And speaking of Lost Mines, there are adventure ties in one of the appendices that let you go nearly seamlessly from the end of one adventure to the other (does not include Curse of Strahd, as one would expect, but most other official 5e adventures are supported). The best of these in my opinion is the link from Lost Mines. Feels like the two books were literally made for each other.
  
  The expanded setting of north Sword Coast is pretty sick, and offers quite a bit of material that I will use for homebrew after the campaign I'm running comes to an end.
• I am midway thru running this and some pros and cons have become clear. (Spoiler alert, DMs only for what follows.)
  
  The pros are that some of the giant lairs are outstanding -- just super imaginative, with lots of atmospheric detail. For example, the fire giant lair sits below a village of cunning "yakfolk" (half-yak, half human); this must be infiltrated to gain access to an elevator platform that winches down into a subterranean fortress. At the heart of the fortress is the fire giant duke, tossing an iron ball to his hell hounds that contains a roasted dwarf inside; the head of his war hammer is likewise a cage containing a live dwarf begging to be released. There is a slave wheel turned by slaves waiting to be liberated; this wheel drives an enormous loop of buckets on elevated tracks that go round the complex (and provide an interesting means of passage thru the fortress for clever PCs); there is a huge colossus (giant robot thingy) the giants are building to wreak havoc on others, and which the PCs might do well to plunder/destroy. Most of the other giant lairs are also quite good, particularly the stone giant and cloud giant lairs. (Though the cloud giant lair is similar, and probably inferior to, Cloud Giant's Bargain, an excellent side adventure that can be found used and worked into SKT; another good and very short side story that can be found online is Fee, Fly, Foe, Fund, which I used as a prelude to SKT.) Anyway, A+ to Wizards and Chris Perkins on the giant lairs.
  
  But other parts of SKT feel arbitrary and pointless. Three criticisms #1 At three different points in the story, but particularly in the "Savage Frontier" chapter, the PCs are supposed to wander around a vast, vast region, running various errands that are mostly transparent excuses to get them moving around to various towns that require a lot of DM work to populate and roleplay. My players and I got restless and we almost quit the whole thing. If you run SKT, my advice is just pick one additional town for them to visit after the initial giant attack, and then get as quickly as you can to a temple encounter which should lead them quickly to the giant lairs themselves. #2 The PCs are also given a choice about which lair to attack, which is silly because the lairs vary in quality and difficulty, and the PCs have no way to judge which one to attack. This also ends up wasting some pretty good lairs, which go unused; in my game I required the PCs to visit two of them that I selected, plus the storm giant lair, which is where the story climaxes. #3 The storm giant lair, which is crucial to the story and must be visited no matter how you run SKT, is going to need some modification, because there (as written) the characters are basically provoked to undertake an attack that is bound to be disastrous in ways they can't possibly foresee. I am also dubious whether the attack on the dragon at the end of the story is really going to feel that cool.
  
  How does this compare to other 5e adventures? I think Out of the Abyss and Curse of Strahd are clearly better -- more imaginative, more consistent, more immersive and with less of a feel of being just a hack and slay. I like SKT better than Princes of the Apocalypse, which I read and found kind of tedious. But for all these flaws, there's still those giant lairs -- yeah, there's just something classic, so ur-D&D, and so awesome about sneaking into a giant lair, and this is a factor you don't get from COS and OOTA. So I'm glad got SKT, and I'm glad to be playing it. Just wish I'd been more selective in using only the best parts.
• I've been DMing 5th Edition DnD for nearly 2 years now. I've DMed a few premades (Lost Mines, Out of the Abyss, Curse of Strahd) as well as ran two of my own home-made campaigns (one is still ongoing). I decided to pick Storm King's up to take a break from having to write for my 2nd campaign and to do something different for my group. I'll do my best to be concise about this premade while still getting my point across and with little to no spoliers. I mostly enjoyed DMing Storm King's (which i just completed this week) but felt that it dropped the ball on a few very important aspects of DnD and where players (mine mostly) derive their fun. And because of that, we went from enjoying it early on to wanting to finish it as quick as possible over the last handful of sessions.
  
  **LIKED**
  - OPENING QUEST
  -- It felt fairly organic and gave the group a good reason to stick together. It had some fun fights and some hilarious (and disturbing) imagery for storyline progression.
  -- Overall, the 1st chapter of the book gives a great introduction to the story and allows the players to get to know each other's characters while getting a feel for their classes with many combat encounters.
  
  - NPCs
  -- Many of the NPCs have a ton of flavor to them and feel like real people. The book even gives you stat blocks, and personality/bond/flaw aspects for a few of the really important NPCs. Overall, there were very few NPCs that my players just glanced over with a "meh" attitude. They felt invested in most of them and they were well written and structured
  
  - COMBAT
  -- The fights in this premade feel important. None of the encounters felt like filler and even the random encounters could lead to either a side mission or story progression.The boss fights had purpose and some even had some interesting mechanics (like the ability to 1-shot a boss using the environment if your players took the time to investigate the room)
  
  - COMPLEXITY OF WORLD
  The 3rd chapter of this book is almost entirely a list of "what's happening elsewhere in this world" and includes an enormous map of the northern regions of Faerun. If the party decided to run off to some random town, the chapter had exactly what was going on in that town, what was important there, and who they could possibly meet. Then you could fill in the rest with your own artistic license. Even locations without any connection to the story at all were covered so that you could potentially flesh out the world as you see fit.
  
  **DISLIKED**
  - PACING
  -- This was a big one for me and my players. The pacing of Storm King's is meant to allow the players to take their time (the book tells you that you have a year to resolve the plot before the bad-guys win), but the way that it's set up there isn't really a lot to do aside from the plot. So players will mostly just cruise through it. You have to start making your own side missions/quests in order to distract the players from binge running the main-plot.
  -- The way that the game ushers in new things it felt like most of the game was combat oriented and not so much time for RP. Most encounters started with combat or were resolved by combat. You have to take a bit of artistic license to allow for RP for the most part. There is time for RP in towns and on the road, but most creatures that you encounter aren't there to talk, they're there to beat you over the head. To get some RP in, I took some liberties with a few of the bad-guys that allowed for my player's to try and talk them down or come to an agreement even if the book told me "this group fights to the death, no matter what." I didn't like that. My players had very little time to grow their characters organically and develop their personalities because they were going into encounters where the opponents were all issues to be solved with force.
  
  - LEVELING
  -- Storm King's does leveling based on milestone leveling (in that there is no experience points, all levels are awarded after predetermined events). I liked the idea but HATED the application. To begin, the players will hit level 5 by the end of the 1st chapter. This is because the start of the 2nd chapter has high CR enemies that could possibly 1 or 2 shot level 5 characters, so anything below level 5 is basically nothing to these creatures. This felt very ham-fisted and heavy handed. My players hit level 4 by the end of the 1st session (about 3-4 hours of play). The players dont have any time to learn their characters, get a feel for their powers, or playout any sort of personality or RP before they are beings beyond normal human comprehension. They go from having trouble fighting a single goblin to being able to level an entire village of people in the span of 1 city and 1 cave. One of my players was playing a plucky wizard who was bullied for sucking at magic when she was in university so she set out to prove herself. And she went from "oh man, how do I cast this cantrip again? uhhh, let me think. Gosh, why am I so bad at this?" to a magical killing machine after about 3 hours of play (and only really killing goblins and a band of disadvantaged orcs). She was unable to get into her character or build on that personality at all.
  
  - PLOT HOOKS/GOAL/PACING
  -- The plot to me was really interesting on paper, with all the giants and dragons and their inner turmoils. But my player's characters had a very hard time getting pulled into the story. Their characters didn't really have a stake in the plot. There was nothing to pull them in. The entirety of their anchor to the plot hinges on them caring about helping out the town's innkeeper on an errand and believing the story of a giant that told them that they were the prophesied "saviors" that a planar entity told him about. The ones that could fix the Giant's issue. That's their hook. They don't have family or friends or their hometowns really involved unless you're lucky that a player is from one of the story towns.
  -- The only hook they have to go on is that people ask them to do these things if they have the time to do so. I'm fairly certain if I threw in another side-mission, they would have taken that over the main plot. There's no urgency and no real sense of motivation to do it. Now I get it that there should be an unspoken agreement among the players to help push the story along (which they did), but when they're just pushing the story along out of necessity instead of because they want to, then it starts to feel forced. Near the end of this premade, it was getting bad enough that I inserted some NPCs from another campaign I ran that I knew my player's enjoyed so that they could get a better hold on the plot and their purpose. I also allowed them to fight a boss I made up and gain a few interesting magical items that they thought would be fun. By the end of the premade everyone was ready to get back to doing the home-made campaigns so they could feel more connected to their characters again.
  
  - CHARACTER POTENTIAL
  -- Like I mentioned before, there's no real way for the players to flesh out their characters. They are more so playing generic RPG character #1 rather than their own personally made character. There wasn't any time given for them to grow their character or allow them to experience interesting encounters that give them tough decisions. They go from level 1 to 5 in almost a single session. Those first 5 levels are usually where a player finds their groove, purpose, and life for their character. But this premade skips over that in order to hit 5 ASAP so that the characters don't die immediately to the encounters in Chap 2. I wish my players could have gotten a little more time to get attached to their characters before they're handed level 5.