2 out of 5 rating for Storm King's Thunder
If WotC had described this book as a "North Faerun" setting book with associated adventure material, it would probably have rated a 4-star review. The centre-piece of this book is a large chapter giving a very brief but surprisingly good overview of a significant region. Good stuff. Of course, if WotC had described this as a setting book, I also wouldn't have bought it, it being "not for me". As it was, they described it as an adventure... and as an adventure it is poor.
The other problem I have with the description of this adventure is that it is advertised as a storyline for PCs of levels 1-10. However, the real adventure is actually for characters of levels 5-10, with the first full chapter providing some material to advance characters from 1st to 5th. But that section then manages to fall flat - not only does it not contain anywhere near enough adventure to justify all those levels, but it also doesn't give enough space to let that material breathe. Bluntly, WotC should have dropped that first section, started the storyline at 5th level, and used the freed up space to bulk up the rest of the material.
As for the 'real' adventure itself...
I should start by noting some positives: the concept of this adventure is very solid, with lots of characters, factions, and intrigues throughout. And there's a lot of material that's worth salvaging - the three villages, the five quests "against the giants", some of the Storm King's court, and of course the gazeteer in chapter three. Indeed, this book provides a huge array of ingredients that a good DM should be able to assemble into a truly great campaign.
But there are two big problems with that:
- That "good DM" should equally be able to come up with his own 'ingredients' pretty trivially. There's very little here that is particularly new or exciting, or put together in a particularly innovative way.
- Even that "good DM" would probably be better served by starting with a better adventure to disassemble and rebuild.
But probably my biggest disappointment in the campaign is this: throughout, there are large numbers of factions and characters described with their own secrets and agendas. There's plenty of scope for the PCs to work with various NPCs, or reveal various secrets, and thus to talk their way through the campaign rather than just kill everything. Indeed, the whole "King Lear + Giants" premise practically promises that. Except that it never really delivers - with only a few exceptions, there isn't really any way for the PCs to find out those secrets and agendas, and thus reveal the intrigues and betrayals.
Nowhere is this most obvious than in the chapter detailing the Storm King's court, where there's a lot to discover, and where the PCs are ideally placed to find things out - being "puny folk", they could easily go unnoticed and so hear conversations between the various plotters that would allow them to discover the evil plots that are afoot. But, as written, there is no opportunity to do that, because that chapter spends most of its pages on a detailed room-by-room description of the area (which is simultaneously too small to host a real court and also too sparsely populated - where are the servants?), with the various NPCs in fixed locations waiting for the PCs to bring them on-stage. The whole thing really needed more pages, and it also needed to be a much more dynamic environment - describe
scenes rather than
rooms.
I'm also rather dismayed about the end of the adventure, where once again WotC have pitted the PCs against a foe who is way too powerful for their level, meaning they have to be backed up by powerful NPCs who both serve to detract from the PCs' spotlight and also make the final encounter harder to run. If WotC want to use these top-tier BBEGs (and I applaud that) then they should also pitch the adventures to higher levels so the bad guys fit.
(Also, in a campaign strongly themed on giants, shouldn't the climactic encounter have been against a giant or giants?)
Ultimately, I found this book very disappointing. As I said, there's a lot here that's salvagable, and as a setting guide to the region it's pretty decent. But as an adventure, I'm afraid I can't recommend this storyline - it's the weakest of the 5e campaigns except "Tyranny of Dragons" (but without the excuse that that was developed in parallel with 5e itself), and it's weaker than Paizo's comparable "Giantslayer" path. A shame - I had such high hopes.