May 09, 2020 by [ "James R. Miller" ]
Categories: rpgs Tags: 5e storm-kings-thunder dnd remix stk-remix

Storm King's Thunder Remix 001: Introduction and Goals

I’m currently running a heavily remixed Waterdeep Dragon Heist (“WDH”) game on FoundryVTT with 6 PCs. The PCs have expressed an interest in transitioning into Storm King’s Thunder (“STK”) after WDH is over. I’ve wanted to run STK for a few years now so that sounded great to me.

I haven’t read the book since it came out; and I remember it having some truly brilliant content mixed with some content that either seemed like it would have the players feeling like they lacked a goal.

I’m currently in the process of re-reading the module, so this list of goals might change over time; but, here’s my initial thoughts on what I want to do with STK.

Housekeeping

As the posts accumulate in the future, I don’t intend to write a table of contents page to the various posts in this series; however, you can easily see all of the STK-remix posts by clicking the “stk-remix” tag found here.

Spoilers

If you are going to play STK at some point, or if you are any of the following players you should not be reading these remix posts:

Larrolgan
Hassonzzzup
Norovar
Adrie
Elsys
Lealta

If you’re intrested in the WDH remix, I am running slightly modified version of the wonderful remix content put out by The Alexandrian. Go check it out; it’s a wonderful blog.

Goals

Chapter 1: A Great Upheaval: My party will likely be entering STK at level 5, so we’ll likely be avoiding the Nightstone encounters. Thankfully, this means we don’t have to do anything to reconcile the evil cloud giants that were bombarding the region versus the “eccentric” nicer cloud giant that floats along later. I do want to include Zephyros early on, so we’ll use the Tower of Zephyros in our remix, but likely write a few different encounters in the Tower.
Chapter 2: Rumblings: I think all the material in this chapter is great with the exception of the side quests offered by the various NPCs at the chapter’s conclusion. Since my party will be in Waterdeep, and we have a druid with a good reason to visit Goldenfields, we’ll likely do Goldenfields first. I do want to remix this to include Triboar and Bryn Shander for the party to encounter later on in the adventure, with adding some additional challenges depending on the party’s strength when they make to those respective regions of Faerun. I’m not too keen on the side quests, so we’ll need to do some work on those as well.
Chapter 3: The Savage Frontier: Egads. This is a setting book chapter and content overload. We’ll need some way to transition from Chapter 2, and try to get them to meet Harshnag sooner than later, and for them to learn about the teleportation network. I need to read through this whole chapter and see what is interesting to me, and that I think might be interesting to my PCs.
Chapter 4: The Chosen Path: There is some great material in this chapter. It will probably not need a huge massage; although, I want to find a way to get expose some of the Hekaton and family’s backstory to the PCs here (or perhaps even earlier).
Chapters 5-9: the various Giant strongholds: I don’t want to run just one! I will probably work in one or two of these at my choice, and be ready to run the others if the PCs take an interest in those other giants. This will necessitate some changes to the teleportation items that take them to the maelstrom. This means the PCs might stay stuck on level 8 for quite some time, which is not in and of itself a bad thing. This is because level 8 is still in the “sweet spot” of 5e; the game falls apart at the higher levels in my experience.
Chapters 10-12: I haven’t read these in a long time, so I’ll have to re-read these first before coming up with some goals.