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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charles Rampant" data-source="post: 7837666" data-attributes="member: 32659">So my original post above got posted under another username. Strange. Either way, as I mentioned, the two campaigns combine really well. Tyranny has a near total lack of Giants, beyond one who is helping the dragons for very obscure reasons. This is strange because, as per the MM and other background stuff, the Giants are mortal enemies of the Dragons. Meanwhile, in Storm King’s Thunder, there is a really strange issue with the main storyline - resolving the events in the book doesn’t really solve anything. This is because the central thing the players do (rescue the Storm King) doesn’t seem to relate to the issue set out in the introduction (the gods are mad at the Giants). Combining the two adventures lets you have the Giants vs Dragons theme, and you can remove the gods hate giants bit from SKT and simply have rescuing the Storm King be the required element to get the Giants on side. It also allows you to fix the central issue of SKT, namely the weak connection between the paper-thin plot and the massive sandbox, by making these both parts of the much stronger Tyranny storyline.Furthermore, combining the two also gives you some very useful tools to expand Tyranny. The adventure goes all over the Sword Coast, but gives the DM virtually no setting fluff to actually make that work; SKT has a whole chapter purely on that. Tyranny lacks in repeating adventurer-style NPCs that are interesting, and SKT provides Harshnag, who as a Frost Giant who works for the Waterdeep SWAT equivalent is a really fun NPC to play, and after he dies you get Hekaton who rides around on a massive flying dragon skull throne like an actual boss.So, that’s the ‘why’. How did I actually do it?I just had Harshnag introduced to the players in the first or second Council of Waterdeep. Here it was explained that the Lords’ Alliance had tried to reach out to Hekaton, the Storm King and head of the Giants, for an enemy-of-my-enemy arrangement. However, their calls were not returned, so to speak, and it also appears that the Giants are collectively going bananas. The players are then tasked with going up to the Oracle and finding out what the score with Hekaton is. The players went there, got told to get a giant item, and then got given the option of the different giant strongholds from SKT. I removed the flying castle, since there is already one of those in Tyranny; my players picked the Hill Giants, but in hindsight I kind of wish I’d pre-selected the Fire Giants, as they are the coolest. Anyway, the players also get an airship at this point; I simply had them steal it from some Dragon Cultists, rather than messing around with Klauth giving it to them.The biggest change that I made to Storm King’s Thunder overall was to remove Iymrith and replace her with Klauth. He’s so much cooler than her, for starters, and also Tyranny mysteriously lacks a big fight against a Red Dragon. I also removed the Kraken and replaced it with a Dragon Turtle, also part of the Cult of the Dragon. The players finished out the SKT storyline by fighting Klauth - who is an Ancient Red Dragon who dual-wields wands - and then returned to the main storyline with the giants on hand as allies. Worked really well, like I say.Oh, I also replaced the entire Thay chapter in Tyranny. I liked the idea, but the chapter in the book is total mince, so I just created my own thing on the players going to Thay and being trapped in an illusory world designed to test whether they were good allies.</blockquote>

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