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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hastur_nz" data-source="post: 7052316" data-attributes="member: 40592">Unfotunately 5e is very heavily skewed towards the 'bottom tier', as far as adventures go, and also the balance of the rules (no edition ever does well at the top-end, as published).  Also, from my one time DMing players to 20th and beyond in 5e, it gets harder and harder to find anything relevant as far as the mechanical nuts and bolts go, you end up having to tweak / invent monsters, encounters, and so on, so what you mostly get form published adventures is 'plot', which means you might as well look at all versions of D&D's published adventures for high level play.So yeah, the idea of leaving the 'epic' plots for the top-half of the levels range (e.g. 11-20) makes a lot of logical sense, but unfortunately in 5e your work as a DM goes exponential as the players go up in levels.  That's why Storm King's Thunder is recommended for PCs up to 10th, maybe 11th level - WoTC have given up trying to design adventures for the upper levels, because that's where things start to get too specific in terms of your group's level of power, the available monsters thin out and are not really scaling in power the same as PC's do, and many groups find the pace of play really grinds down as well - just too many problems, which each group needs to work out themselves (mostly the DM).Personally, I've recently started DMing the Forgotten Realms, and I just figure that 4e/Spellplague then 5e/Sundering hit a big 're-set' button, and there are not many high-level characters around any more, especially in the North.  Elminster isn't sticking his nose into everything here (thank goodness), nor Drizz't etc, and overall I see the rulers of the cities and towns etc are not the 20th level character types of old, they are probably pretty ordinary, many places are re-building from carnage, etc.  All the "Sundering" adventures published during the 5e playtest, were for characters of quite low levels (1-7 IIRC), around Daggerford, Neverwinter, Icewind Dale, etc.  I use them as sources of information, and as a benchmark of sorts.So I don't think it's unreasonable to say that PC's approaching level 10 are, in fact, quite exceptional, and hence having 'epic' adventures, at least in the context of The North.  Storm King's Thunder is set up for a fair bit of "hit and run" action, rather than "kill 'em all", hence the main action is for levels 5-10, but you could easily run it to higher levels and use a bit more of the book.  And it's a local event, not Faerun-wide; if you really wanted to keep going towards level 20, the upper-most levels are probably where you branch off into more "Faerun-wide" and/or "other planes" type of adventures, rather than just be in the North; I suspect you'll need to make something yourself, or find from a previous edition of the game and convert (e.g. I ran "Age of Worms", converting it to 5e; the second half of "Savage Tide" would be a good fit for an 'epic' campaign, I ran that converting it to 4e).Anyway, I think Storm King's Thunder could easily fit your 'guided sandbox' idea, the 'big plot' doesn't have to be there from level 5, you could easily slowly graft it in from around level 7, and run it to say level 12, with non-giant related side-treks here and there; there's heaps of sand-box ideas for you in chapter 3, to help inspire other stuff.  But it's a mess as far as logical 'quests' go, to me it reads like a really bad PC game from the '80's.  So it needs a lot of DM work, to get the most out of it, and help your players feel like they are living in the real world with interesting things to do, rather than wander around getting handed random quests until a plot eventually reveals itself (or not).  The one question is whether your players will get sick of Giants towards the end - I ran "Against the Giants" converted to 3.5, and although I trimmed it a lot there was a certain amount of fatigue on fighting endless giants, especially in the middle sections.</blockquote>

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