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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charles Rampant" data-source="post: 6973891" data-attributes="member: 32659">Spoilers for Storm King's Thunder.TL;DR: I'm thinking about lifting the main plot from SKT wholesale and using it to add Giants to the storyline, as well as beefing up the adventuring in Rise of Tiamat.With my group voting for Tyranny of Dragons as the next campaign, I've begun thinking about how I'll run it. One thing in particular caught my eye with Rise of Tiamat: it feels like there is not enough adventuring to get them up to level 15 smoothly. Another thing that I noticed was the scant space given to talking about the Giants, ancient enemies of the Dragons, as all I can find is a couple short paragraphs mentioning them on page 17. Now, my group voted fairly strongly against playing Storm King's Thunder, and that means that I am unlikely to get to run it for them - considering that there will probably be another 2 APs out by the time that we finish Tyranny. So, let's cannibalise it!Now, my thinking is that if I replace the Kraken Society with the Cult of the Dragon, we'll have a solid start. The bad guys kidnapped Hekaton to keep the Giants off-balance and out of the game; without his leadership, the other Giants are going mental and adding to the chaos of the Cult's war. To make them calm down, and get their aid against Tiamat, the players have to find Hekaton, with Harshnag (who they'll meet in Waterdeep at the First Council) fulfilling his role as normal. I'll remove the Cloud Giant castle - Lyn Armaal - since they will have already done that theme with Blagothkus at the end of Hoard, but instead direct them towards the Hill, Fire or Stone varieties, all within reasonable distance of the Tyranny plotline area. The toughest bit of this incorporation will be to work out what to do with the Kraken Society ship. One idea that appeals is to use a Dragon Turtle instead of the Kraken, but I don't know if they follow Tiamat at all. Perhaps I could fill the boat with Devils, and stipulate that the Cult outsourced this to Tiamat's Devilish allies, meaning that this bit will have a different set of bad guys from the normal Cultists. Another is actually just to keep the Kraken Society, as they were being paid by the Blue Dragon in Storm King's Thunder anyway; but it is a little hard to understand why a Kraken would be happy to help being Tiamat to the Realms, unless it just enjoyed spreading chaos. The benefits of incorporating all this stuff from Storm King's Thunder is that I'll get a storyline extension that should fit pretty well, especially with the Blue Dragon serving as another powerful Draconic personality, get to use the stuff from the AP that I wouldn't otherwise, and bring in the Giants in an interesting way. My big concern is that this will be too big of an extension - that the players will start to wonder whether they're still playing Tyranny - since a rough guess is that the essential plot elements will probably take about two months. If that appears to be happening, I can always have Hekaton being held prisoner in the Dragon's lair, with cultists around him; that'll help return us to a nicely Cult of the Dragon theme. Sent from my iPad using <a href="http://r.tapatalk.com/byo?rid=93205" target="_blank">EN World mobile app</a></blockquote>

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