Dungeons & Dragons Storm King's Thunder

I've been running a campaign for some friends for a while, one of them is a Goliath! I've had this book in my sights for what seems like nearly a decade, and while I already have it on dndbeyond, I decided to get a physical copy to help me with session prepping. I don't want to cast doubt on how long dndbeyond will last, but digital goods sometimes concern me and so I've bought several modules that I already own physically to have myself. At some point in the distant future, D&D will have to evolve into the 6th edition. One thing I've learned from my parents and those who've played the earlier versions of the game is that you can reflavor and re-use old adventure content with new systems. That provides a value for me as a DM (Dungeon Master) to be able to have modules like Storm King's Thunder (SKT) on my shelf. --- More about the actual module itself. It's possible to run the adventure from Level 1, since chapter 1 is kind of made for bringing characters into the story and so the back of the book will say "Intended for characters level 1 - 10" or so. If you read the book, it suggests at some points that the characters will actually be level 11 by the end of it. As well, there is a part of the campaign where you choose between the different kinds of giants to go face off, and if you're familiar with Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, you can actually use all of the sections instead. Nothing in a module is "sacred," alter it to your parties needs! It may be worth considering asking the party if they're interested in the long haul, but considering the complaints of D&D being unbalanced or less fun after level 13, this is likely where a lot of players will have the most fun. Go for it! This campaign takes place in North West Faerun, which is where Waterdeep is located. That means Icewind Dale, Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage, and several other adventures take place in the same general area. You can easily connect lower level adventures from this region into Storm King's Thunder by sewing seeds with rumors like... "Farms in the region have been attacked by Hill Giants!" "Did you hear? Apparently an important storm giant was slain on an island." By the time your characters hit level 5, you can start in Chapter 2 of the book (definitely read everything before Chapter 2) and get going. The map quality is good, the descriptions of the NPCs and their backgrounds is phenomenal, and the setting is very exciting. As for the book itself, I received one slightly warped with a tiny bit of a bow curve in it, but it's not really a big deal and can be fixed by leaving weight on it for a while. Otherwise, the print quality, texture, and contents are excellent. Nothing printed upside down, no major deformations or cuts, properly bound, no missing pages, and everything is in order. The product gets 5 stars from me, it's everything I expected and in perfect condition.

I'm completely enthralled by the story of this book. It's well thought out. Although I haven't run this campaign for my players yet I can see where it would be intriguing and captivating for a player to uncover. The thing that I'm most impressed so far is this: the campaign is the most sandbox-y and open world campaign that I will have ever run. I can see where this would be complicated and frustrating as a beginning DM to undertake, but the designers of the book lay things out in a controlled fashion with lots of charts, suggested encounters, and explanations. This makes the campaign much more manageable. Each location marked on the master map of the Northern Sword Coast has an excellent summary of what can be found in the location and examples of what a DM can throw at the players to make a fun and rewarding encounter there. There are also plenty of easy plot hooks available for the DM to get the players back on track (which may be entirely necessary with an open-world game). As with all D&D 5e books that I've purchased I'm incredibly satisfied by the artwork throughout the book. Does it add to the story itself? No it doesn't. But the amount that it adds to the process of reading through the book is definitely to be considered. It also gives a DM that isn't sometimes the best at describing the world some great visuals to show to the players to help them understand the setting. As far as the physical build of this book, unlike several of my other Wizards of the Coast books I've ordered this one arrived in great shape with no damage to the pages or spine.

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.

There is so much here; almost too much. An excellent adventure. But I have some suggestions: - It would have been better if WOTC provided accompanying digital maps (both for players and DMs) to be displayed on monitors while playing. I had to search all over to find the right ones (without the numbers on the buildings) to use for my players. - As a new 5e player, it would have been good to have some examples of how to integrate all of the five political factions (along with Slarkrethel, the Kraken) into the game. Trying to integrate the factions along with the expected encounters can be overwhelming to newer DMs. Maybe a list of 5 ways to integrate into play. - Some of the fetch quests were contrived and not compelling. One involves delivering a cat from the initial encounter, to another city for the next possible encounter. Many people have said the same. I managed to find some more compelling workarounds for the players to go from one place to another without being railroaded. - The game is actually an excellent premade adventure with a TON of content. It's the best (and worst) of both worlds sandbox/railroading. The fetch quests are a bit railroady but the sandbox is HUGE (all of Faerûn) so there are a lot of homebrew things a DM can add. - I HIGHLY suggest researching all the political factions first (think about how they can be integrated into the game, I plugged them into the players' backstories, which made it much easier and believable) as well as researching some of the history of the major cities and all of Faerûn. It took me 2 months to prepare for the game, but I was also learning the 5e system as well. I also suggest finding maps online of each location; I suggest buying maps from Mike Schley (mikeschley. com/projects). They are well worth it.

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. [UPDATE: I wrote this before we played the dragon encounter at the end. It actually WAS really 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.

Reading through this, I like how much flexibility there is. Many pre-canned adventures feel "forced", but I can see an infinite number of ways to improvise off of this campaign with a dynamic group. The story is intriguing and has many spin-off arcs. I can actually see how to create a huge over-arching campaign that incorporates Rise of Tiamat, Storm King's Thunder, Prince's of the Apocalypse, and Curse of Strahd beyond the hints the give you in one of the appendices, as well as incorporating it with my own unique campaign creation of an "interwar" DandD universe that relies heavily on intrigue. There's also a lot of potential for running segments of this as "one-shots" to get newbies started. I like having that kind of flexibility in a springboard product. The artwork is also gorgeous...not quite as incredible as Princes, but still, amazing. My one disappointment with this book is that there aren't as many new, unique monsters as in previous canned adventures. I like to see new additions. Besides that issue, though, this means that there will be more consultation of the Monster Manual than usual in a canned adventure when running SKT. Wish they had "Monster Manual Cards" (like Spell Cards, but with Monster stat blocs). That would cut down on the juggling of all the books.

I have ran The Lost Mine of Phandelver and Princes of the Apocalypse, so I have some basis for comparison when I say that this is a fantastic adventure book. Everything the DM needs to know in advance is laid out in easy-to-digest graphs that help you conceive of the campaign in its grand scope; and the third chapter, The Savage Frontier, is Chris Perkins's rundown of pretty much the whole west of Faerun; in other words, players can travel all over the northern continent without running the game off the rails. In terms of organization, depth, and ingenuity (there are unique city-siege combat encounters that use NPCs in novel ways, to name one example), Storm King's Thunder is a gem.

This is a really fun adventure. There's enough fluff in this book that any one party won't see everything with just a single play through. That being said, there's also enough flexing room for GMs to intergrate their own story ideas into it. Also it is more or less a follow up to the tyranny of dragons campaign with characters, factions, and consequences from that story line reapearing in this one. However you don't need to have run or even read that adventure to understand what is happening in this one. If anything I would say add in your own way to introduce the daughters into the game early that way the party knows who they are later in the story. Great game 10 out of 10. Best adventure on par with strhad, if not better

El libro es una de las pocas campañas que se han editado para dungeon 5.0. La edición al igual que la maquetación y las ilustraciones son muy buenas. Si se te da bien el ingles no lo dudes aunque tambien puedes esperar ya que sera publicado próximamente en español.

Boa aventura pronta para D&D 5e.

This is one of my favourite official 5e campaigns. Will take your group a long time to run from start to finish and it offers up plenty of pathways for you to explore and add on to if that's your bag. The art and maps are excellent. Highly recommend it, I ran it as DM with a group of players that were new to D&D and we carried straight from Lost Mines of Phandelver into this and it was seamless. I think for newer groups you'll really enjoy it and it's not too demanding or convoluted so really works as a natural progression from LMoP for new players, widening the world to them without being overwhelming.

Creo que es la mejor campaña que ha sacado wizzards, hermoso arte y divertidas aventuras

Packaging could have been less tighter since I had a hard time taking the book out, while trying to avoid damaging it. The book's quality is splendid. Speaking for the adventure itself. This is good buy for new DM looking for an adventure book to use after the starter set. It has multiple adventures paths for players to explore. So each group is sure to encounter something different.