D&D 5E Enhancing "Storm King's Thunder"

[Myrdin Potter]

My group rescued the king last session. Complete ninja stealth snatch. Skyship with weather control from the boulder. Ranger with pass without a trace and a fly spell with weather back-up meant they just needed to get someone close enough to contact the king (dispel magic on the stasis effect of the chains) cast an unregistered banishment on him, wait until the boat moved enough and end it, swoop in close and and blow the conch.

Guards did scream and alarm was sounded so so ballista bolt firing and timestop from the arch mage caused a little drama, but teleported away in time. Now need to play out the family drama caused by the king coming home.

 

[Motorskills]

So my group now has a conch (one is enough for the group), and has two obvious options ahead of them.


1. Go to Maelstrom and expose Iymrith. Their plan hasn't really evolved much past that, but they are keen to develop allies that would help them in their diplomacy.

Harshnag will be useful in that regard, but not universally, since I consider him exiled from mainstream giant society, and there will be a blood feud between him and at least the Frost Giant representative at Maelstrom.

The party kinda has the Fire Giants on board, since the Duke's children are being held as hostage for the clan's good behaviour.


Felgolos owes them a favour and could maybe be persuaded to help out, but taking a dragon (another dragon!) to Maelstrom could be problematic.


2. Go to Cloud Giant Castle and avenge the Oracle Ghost, they promised they would. (I simply replaced the Countess with Blagothkus).

They don't quite know why that is a good idea, and frankly I don't either. I would like to flesh it out some, with the outcome being that they have extra ammunition for their audience with the Storm Giant Princess Regent.

They just completed a favour for Felgolos, so if anything he already owes the party. So I'm not convinced about the need to have him tied up and tortured there.

Secondly I never quite understood the Cloud Giant plot - how does the Countess' search for a trove of magic items hurt the smallkin, if at all?


So my thinking is maybe the Countess is at Maelstrom, and if the party can defeat the Count, and prove that he is a wrong 'un that killed their son, that would serve to get another political ally on board.

Or something.


Ideas welcomed.

 

[Ovinomancer]

So my group now has a conch (one is enough for the group), and has two obvious options ahead of them.


1. Go to Maelstrom and expose Iymrith. Their plan hasn't really evolved much past that, but they are keen to develop allies that would help them in their diplomacy.

Harshnag will be useful in that regard, but not universally, since I consider him exiled from mainstream giant society, and there will be a blood feud between him and at least the Frost Giant representative at Maelstrom.

The party kinda has the Fire Giants on board, since the Duke's children are being held as hostage for the clan's good behaviour.


Felgolos owes them a favour and could maybe be persuaded to help out, but taking a dragon (another dragon!) to Maelstrom could be problematic.


2. Go to Cloud Giant Castle and avenge the Oracle Ghost, they promised they would. (I simply replaced the Countess with Blagothkus).

They don't quite know why that is a good idea, and frankly I don't either. I would like to flesh it out some, with the outcome being that they have extra ammunition for their audience with the Storm Giant Princess Regent.

They just completed a favour for Felgolos, so if anything he already owes the party. So I'm not convinced about the need to have him tied up and tortured there.

Secondly I never quite understood the Cloud Giant plot - how does the Countess' search for a trove of magic items hurt the smallkin, if at all?


So my thinking is maybe the Countess is at Maelstrom, and if the party can defeat the Count, and prove that he is a wrong 'un that killed their son, that would serve to get another political ally on board.

Or something.


Ideas welcomed.

The Countess' plans aren't aimed at smallfolk, true, but they also don't care if smallfolk are hurt. A few rumors of obilisks in small towns and she'll just fly over, bombard the town from above, and when they all flee, send down a few giants to rip the Nightsone, uh, mcguffin, out and carry it off. Smallfolk might not like this much.

 

[Motorskills]

It sounds like they have decided to head to Maelstrom first. So I think I will have the Countess there. She has no idea that her husband has gone nutso, killing everything and everyone in his quest to become Grand Champion.

So....Iymrith has convinced the Count to target only good dragons (so back to Felgolos!). Since dragons live in hard to reach places, that's why the smallkin haven't seen much of them.

I like the idea of the castle raid. Iymrith got Blagothkus (and the Zhentarim, somehow) to capture Felgolos, as revenge on the party for killing her two kids.

It's starting to come together in my head.


I really want Maelstrom to be tense, tense, tense.

 

[snaggle2th]

One of the boring-est ideas in Lyn Armaal is that the kitchen staff would be three ogres. There's just no way that cloud giants would be happy with ogres handling their food!

I made the following change. The Countess's chef is now an efreet, held against his will because Sansuri has his Efreeti Bottle up in her tower. He is a true artist, and Sansuri will never willingly let him go. She has forbidden him to leave the kitchen, but he has already teleported a PC to him, and has offered a wish, if she will bring him his bottle. If that happens, he may actually hold up his end of the bargain. If it occurs to the PCs that they could keep the bottle, I will roll on the item's table.

Seems more fun that three stupid ogres who don't even want to fight.

 

[Motorskills]

So I retro-force-fitted what went down. And it worked great (albeit took a long time to play out).

Iymrith knows about the party - she did a Foretell Future thing, and the party knows that she knows. They also know that she doesn't know that they know.....whew.

Anyways, they had agreed to avenge Eigoron (cloud giant ghost in the Oracle, son of Blagothkus, last heard of floating above Parnast).
They had also agreed to rescue Felgolos' whacky baccy from Iymrith's kids.

They also had the option to go straight to Maelstrom.

So they did the second quest first, nominally to get more allies on board before going to Maelstrom. Not quite sure how having a dragon on board would help them with the giants (except maybe for proving that they can shapechange naturally), but anyways...

So they killed the two Blues near Ascore, then hung out just south of the Vordrorn Forest waiting for Felgolos. They wanted to trade up, and hopefully get the required component for Scry, so they a couple of PCs via Windwalk to Citadel Adbar. The Citadel welcomed them as heroes for their trashing of Ironslag, so I gave them a truckload of free stuff and good trades. The Adbar folks detail how the entire region is at war - the Smallkin are fighting Giant incursions on all fronts (Hill, Frost, and Stone. No sign of Cloud or Storm, and the party already stopped the Fire Giants.)


I had decided to have Countess Sansuri in the Castle after all, and have her husband - Count Blagothkus - in Maelstrom. Blag has been tricked by Iymrith to have the Clouds raid metallic dragon lairs in search of some mythical Dragon treasure, and Iymrith provides perfect intelligence on where and how to capture them, the smaller ones at least.

So that fits a nice trifecta, the three main groups that can prevent Tiamat's return - Smallkin, Giants, and Metallics - are all fighting each other.....


So, meanwhile, back at the Vornrord, the wood elf Ranger went poking about, looking for elves and undead. He met the former, and they told him they had seen a cloud giant crew float down to a young Copper dragon, shackle it up and take it away to the floating castle.

While they are figuring that out, they cast Scry on Felgolos. They immediately saw that he was also shackled, with cloud giant 'technology'.

They did some triangulation and headed after the castle, eventually catching up with it over the Nether Mountains, just in time to see the cloud giants shackling a young Silver dragon inside the castle.

They used Windwalk pretty effectively to sneak around the place. They found the three dragons (in Room 8) and unshackled them, and entered the griffon room (Room 7).....but forgot to silence the griffons somehow first.

The alarm is raised.

The party initially decide to dig themselves into Room 7, Wall of Stone on the flyport. They were a little concerned by the drainage grate in the floor, but quickly forgot about it.

Exxxxxxcellent......




The Party Crew:
L12 Bard
L12 Paladin
L12 Sorceror
L12 Druid
L12 Ranger
L12 Barbarian
Harshnag
Felgolos - Adult Bronze, with Ancient HP, down about half at start
Hala - Young Copper, with Adult HP, down about two-thirds at start
Orelia - Young Silver, with Adult HP, down about a third at start


Countess Sansuri and her Castellan organize the defenders. I added a few bodies, and used a bunch of demetrios' Giant Elites.

Countess Sansuri - as Cloud Giant Countess - start in Area 1
Castellan - as Cloud Giant Smiling One - start in Area 1
coordinating the attack


4 regular Cloud Giants in the corridor outside room 4
second wave.


4 Cloud Giant Oathguards in room 3
leading the charge


6 regular Cloud Giants - start on the cloud outside Room 7, the nasty surprise...
they will tunnel into the slush under the grate in Room 7. They will cast Weather Control to generate fog, and then enter the room via Gaseous Form. At least that was the battleplan






To cut a long story short, the party did really well. They changed their plan to dig in, and marched down the corridor towards Room 3, with Felgolos in halfling form (since he wouldn't really fit in the corridor). All hell broke loose. The tunnelling giants were totally crowd-controlled out of the fight with the Wall of Stone being relocated to the Door to the corridor. (I ruled that the Giants could inflict 8 attacks on the Door and Wall every round, but I still needed to do about 700HP before they broke through).

The Oathguards were nastee, but the party - with an injection of Bronze - were nastier.

It was an insane fight, and the Countess and Castellan never really got into it, because of their positioning. Hundreds of points of damage inflicted and received, total victory for the party.

Lots of fun. Clean-up next time.

 

[Greg Benage]

Continued from #356, wherein I describe some of the content (borrowed from Scourge of the Sword Coast) I'm adding to bulk up the 3rd to 5th level content in SKT.

Our heroes return to Zhent-occupied Nightstone from Harpshield Castle to find refugees streaming to the town. The Zhents are requiring payment for admission inside the walls, and a tent city is springing up along the banks of the river. The characters had loaded their carnival wagon with food taken from the plundered stores of the Iceshield orcs (intended for Grudd Haug), but they returned to the castle with two more wagons to retrieve it all. They encountered a wood elf warband led by Rond Arrowhome, a solitary ranger, and a terribly lost hill giant in the wood, but the trek was otherwise uneventful.

When the returned (again) to Nightstone, they talked to many of the refugees and discovered that bugbears (and reportedly at least one giant) were raiding caravans, farmsteads and villages all along the Trade Way between Waterdeep and Daggerford. Xolkin Alessandar hired them to locate these marauders' base of operations and neutralize the threat -- he's trying to get trade flowing again and make Nightstone a hub of commerce. The last thing he needs is a never-ending supply of "filthy refugees."

So the second adventure location I lifted from Scourge of the Sword Coast is Phylund Lodge, which is only about eight miles north of Nightstone. The characters with a nifty Investigation check locate a caravan guide among the refugees who knows the area well, and based on the location of the raids, suggests this is likely the raiders' hideout. There are two secret entrances to the lodge: the first is that northward tunnel leading from the Dripping Caves that's left for the DM to do what he wants with it. The second is north of the lodge -- a cave with a stream leading from it. Our heroes didn't bite on either hint, so they tried to approach the lodge by stealth.

The bugbears had worgs patrolling the grounds, and the PC scouts did a good job of locating them without being discovered. They lured one into an ambush with a silent image and a thrown rock, and the rogue almost took him out. But he survived the ambush and howled, raising the alarm. Now it went bad: the heroes were spread out in a line from the south to the north. The worgs were able to flank them and attack from both sides. After one round of combat, three bugbears emerged from the stables, and after the third round, the hill giant bunking in the stables came out as well. This was Kogg, and we was originally with Lobb and Ogg wandering in the hills when they encountered the bugbears who told them about "the big farm" to the west. Kogg stayed with the bugbears, who made their way through Ardeep and began launching raids from Phylund Lodge.

The fight was deadly, but the heroes managed to defeat the worgs, bugbears and giant with only one death (the rogue, again...rogue #3 coming up!). They retreated to the Dripping Caves, and this time they discovered a broken and discarded morningstar that looked like those crude weapons wielded by the bugbears. This was enough of a hint to persuade them to investigate the northern tunnel out of the caves. It led several miles through twisting tunnels, caverns, and galleries, and eventually emerged in the dungeon level below Phylund Lodge. (Note: Had they explored this tunnel immediately after the Dripping Cave, they'd have gotten to the more difficult Phylund Lodge at 3rd level, before the Harpshield mission. Such is an open sandbox. It's probably fortunate they didn't do that...)

They battled some undead and eventually made their way to the lair of Flubnark and his wolves. Flubnark is a former bugbear chief who's been possessed in SotSC, but I had him set up as a chief who got pushed out and sent to the basement when "new management" took over. There was an opportunity to strike an alliance with the disgruntled deposed chief, but I probably didn't drop enough hints and the PCs attacked him immediately. He got in some good shots but was eventually defeated.

The characters then found the stairs leading up to the lodge. They discover the Phylund Lith, an ancient standing stone carved with glyphs and runes (you can probably guess the origins of it in my SKT-modified version). They go upstairs and find themselves in a long corridor that's basically a second-floor skywalk connecting two of the lodge's separate structures. A lurking bugbear surprises the front rank, and then Thegger Grynn, a wizard, steps out of a study and launches a lightning bolt down that long corridor...

Bugbear reinforcements arrive and the heroes nearly drop Thegger Grynn, but the bad guys seize enough of an advantage with a couple characters down and bleeding out to gain the heroes' surrender. As he's interrogating them, they notice the wizard wears a bosun's whistle on a chain around his neck. I won't say what that means in case some of my players are reading these recaps, but some DMs might be able to guess. Grynn attempts to determine their loyalty, hoping to hire them to kill Xolkin Alessandar and the Zhents in Nightstone (the PCs current employer), but they don't do a good enough job of lying to convince the wizard of their willingness to play ball. He leaves them locked up while he decides what to do with them.

That's where we left off. The rogue (#3) this time is the only one to have escaped capture and is on the loose. No pressure...

At this point, my party is still 4th level. Compared to the adventure as published, they're having to work a lot harder for those 4th and 5th levels, but they're learning a lot about what's going on and picking up some clues that will be paid off later. Time well spent, and low-level D&D is so fun and suspenseful, I feel like it was a good decision to add this content.

Tune in next time to find out if our intrepid heroes escape the oddly nautical-themed wizard and his minions, or whether they meet the executioner's axe.

 

[Daern]

Last night was detective time / keystone kops. What to do with the Golden Goose token found under the Wyrmskull Throne?
Good on me for foreshadowing that EARLY in the campaign. It just so happened the party had partied in Waterdeep on just such a casino boat and were able to track down some decadent acquaintances to direct them to Yartar. A short teleport later the group was posted up in a posh yacht harbor cafe scheming for a way to sneak onto the Grand Dame. Eventually they decided to go with invisibility. This lead to hilarious hijinks -bumping a platter of glazed hogs head into the river -drinking with oarsmen in the galley -but ultimately the group were immediately suspected and questioned by the hawk-eyed Pow Ming. The mage slayer finally got up close and personal with a wizard but succumbed nevertheless to a SUGGESTION to jump off the stern. Soon after, the clerical knight strutting around in full plate was obliged to follow by the purple faced viking guardsmen. This left a dark elf using ALTER SELF to pose as a particular patron, hobnobbing with Lord Drylund in the captains quarters. All the subterfuge had gotten her alone with the guy and one other weakling noble. What would she do?
-"Wait a minute, why are we here? What am I supposed to ask this guy?" oof
It was late so we left it there.
Good times.

 

[robus]

[MENTION=81800]Daern[/MENTION] - WotC definitely made that a tenuous connection. Motivation for Drylund was quite lacking. For me, I had him gaining protection from the dragon cult for assisting in Hekaton’s abduction (in my RoT/SKT mashup), but it was quite a stretch.

 

[Daern]

Yeah, I'm going the dragon cult, RoT route as well. I think I'd better have them find some purple robes and dragon stuff in Drylund's personal effects. And Pow Ming's. I made his body guards "purple vikings" from the Purple Isles. A bit of a hint of location there I guess.