D&D 5E What is Iymrith's full plan? (spoilers for Storm King's Thunder)

[tardigrade]

WARNING: Spoilers for Storm King's Thunder below (I'm afraid I haven't worked out yet how to format spoilers on this forum; advice on this appreciated).

Iymrith's plan in SKT, as presented, is to trigger a war between the giants and the 'small folk', particularly the Lord's Alliance, thereby weakening both and removing two threats to herself and by extension chromatic dragonkind. Stage 1 (before the campaign begins) has been to remove King Hekaton and frame the humans (although the 'framing' part seems a little light).

It's not clear what stage 2 is - Iymrith is hanging around in Maelstrom to try to steer things a bit, but this seems like a ridiculously risky strategy given that the giants and the dragons are ancient nemeses (nemesises?), and at least one of the giant lords' strategies - Duke Zalto - is to rebuild a titanic construct with the express function of killing dragons. I think it was clarified at some point that this plan is doomed to fail, but if the fire giants don't know that (being experts in the area) I suspect Iymrith doesn't either. So even if Iymrith succeeds in starting a war, as far as she can know a secondary outcome will leave North/Sword Coast significantly riskier for dragons in general, and potentially her in particular, in the future.

Also, given that we're talking about FR, it seems that there would be a real risk of a god turning up and explaining what actually happened to Hekaton, even assuming that Slarkrethel doesn't double-cross Iymrith, and in either case Iymrith would be utterly stuffed. It sounds like Stage 1 has only worked so far because Annam thinks the giants need to sort this one out by themselves; I can only assume that if things start going terribly for the giants he might rethink this.

Does she not care - is this some sort of suicidal act of revenge over something - or is there some part of this plan that I've missed that leaves the dragons better off rather than just letting the world burn, dragons and all?

(edit) It sounds like most people have taken it this way anyway, but as well as the canon explanation I'm interested to hear your own workarounds/improvements.

 

[Prakriti]

Her plans are never fully explained. All the book says is that she wants to foment strife between the giants and small folk.

When you get down to it, none of SKT makes very much sense.

That said, I think it was Chris Perkins who said that none of the giant lords actually have any chance of succeeding in their plans, including Duke Zalto. His dream of recreating the Vonindod is just a pipe dream. So Iymrith doesn't likely see him as a threat.

 

[pukunui]

The gods aren't able to just turn up and explain things anymore. Ao stopped all that with the Sundering. (Hence why Tiamat needed the Cult of the Dragon and the Red Wizards to summon her. She could no longer manifest on her own.)

 

[Daern]

In my campaign Imryth is sowing chaos to cover for the Cult's Tiamat summoning activities. The Draakorn of RoT will sound around the time the PCs get out of Maelstrom.

 

[discosoc]

So much of SKT is left unexplained. Kind of felt like they designed it primarily for Adventure League games. Anyway, Iymrith just wants to get the giants to fight the small folk and to take the Wyrmskull Throne for her trophy horde. The method for doing that was by breaking down the storm giant power structure enough that they couldn't easily reign in the rest of the giants looking to take advantage of the broken ordining.

Basically, the ordining breaks and you'd normally have all the giants fighting to get to the top. Except that storm giants are already up there and -- ordining or no -- definitely have the overall strength to keep the others from YOLOing themselve's into a FR version of a land war with asia. In that scenario, the ordining might be remade with adjustments to giant rankings a bit, but giant society would largely (heh) still exist.

Iymrith, being the ancient blue dragon that she is, saw the ordining as a chance to prevent the storm giants from keeping the others in relative check while the dust settles. Without strong leadership from the storm giants, the other tribes were free to wage their stupid and no-chance-to-succeed wars against the small folk. End result is giants are either driven back into a totally weakened state, or hunted to near-extinction. Either way, it just became much easier for Iymrith to take possession of the Wyrmskull Throne.


Unfortunately for my campaign world, the heroes decided use the conch of teleportation with very little planning, so they got killed as soon as it became apparent that the giant's weren't going to simply take their word at face value when accusing a storm giant of actually being a dragon. Not sure if they just figured it was going to be a dungeon crawl or what, but Imyrith definitely got her throne in my world.

 

[discosoc]

I think it was clarified at some point that this plan is doomed to fail, but if the fire giants don't know that (being experts in the area) I suspect Iymrith doesn't either.

Remember that she has been consulting with Yuan-ti mystics who are "translating" to her knowledge of how to defeat her foes from their god. Depending on how the final chapter plays out, there could be a rather funny scene where she demands to know if she can defeat the adventurers that have invaded (or something to that effect) and they basically lie and tell her yes out of fear of suffering her wrath if they passed on what their god really said.

I'd be surprised if that was the first time the mystics fudged on the translations, so who knows how much questionable Snake-God advice Imyrith's been operating on over the years. As a result, it's easy to explain whatever irrational behavior or decisions she's made.

 

[robus]

It makes a lot more sense if you combine it with Tyranny of Dragons. Iymrith is distracting the giants so they don't help the small people against their mortal enemy the dragons. I can't imagine my players doing a 180 after ToD and suddenly trusting a dragon cult for access to an airship?!

 

[discosoc]

It makes a lot more sense if you combine it with Tyranny of Dragons. Iymrith is distracting the giants so they don't help the small people against their mortal enemy the dragons. I can't imagine my players doing a 180 after ToD and suddenly trusting a dragon cult for access to an airship?!

That did seem weird. I just replaced the dragon cult with some crazy gnomes and suddenly it worked fine. I also considered having the "dragon cult" really be deep-cover harpers, but ultimately decided I had too many factions in play as it was.

 

[robus]

That did seem weird. I just replaced the dragon cult with some crazy gnomes and suddenly it worked fine. I also considered having the "dragon cult" really be deep-cover harpers, but ultimately decided I had too many factions in play as it was.

I'm trying to combine as many FR adventures in one campaign as possible so I can call it done and move on. LMoP -> ToD (+ SKT) -> OotA (as a high level adventure ) and never to return! (Famous last words....)

 

[Jester David]

The whole story/ plot of SKT is pretty terrible at the end. I think they had the main story (ordning, the giant's subplans, etc) and just stumbled when thinking of ideas for the larger plot.
The ordning doesn't get restored, the evil princesses don't do anything (and nothing in the scheme leads in any way to what they want), there's no reason Hekaton is kept alive, and Iymrith's plans are vague.

I think it's a lot of nebulous ideas that DMs can use to build their own stories. A good DM can run with and tell cool stories for their players, reacting and responding to their actions and the situation.
But if the DM is not in the zone, that's when they need a strong adventure th most.