Largely, this is self-inflicted in my case, because I've been presenting those kinds of worlds for awhile now. I layer on meaning over multiple arcs so that when a reveal happens, it's always been there, just not obvious. I also layer in lots of different things so I can adapt and make even sudden changes appear as if the rational has always been there. This comes from building a deep world with almost every NPC or major player not having a pre-written plot, but instead having a motivation and a set of goals. That way, no matter what happens, they react in a consistent fashion. Finding those motivations and goals is a big part of predicting what the bad guys are doing/going to do and stopping them. But, and, again, I'm dealing with SKT only here as the first module I've run in a decade, I find that this module just has things happen to the players that are out of the blue and has them react to it. I find, more than halfway through, that the core concept and many of the set pieces are good, but that I'd completely restructure the entire thing if I were to attempt it again because it has some glaring holes (the hill giants, btw, are nettlesome, not glaring). For one, the actual bad guys don't make an appearance until most of the way through the game. Boo. There should have been some color encounter early on where the players run into them, and learn to hate them, so that the emotional payoff in a later scene isn't 'weird cultists are the bad guys? Fine, whatever, let's kill them" it's "I KNEW it was those bastards, I have a bone to pick with them!"
SKT, instead, seems to just hide information until they give it to the players to start the next bit. Except for the Shrine of the All Father Oracle, though, there the players have to have been paying some decent attention and then guess which questions will result in the information they need to continue. Blargh. Works if they do, doesn't if they don't. My players, who usually close attention, fumbled here because of the lack of sufficient foreshadowing. They kept asking questions about things that had happened in the modules that didn't go with the main plot because they assumed that since it was impactful to them, it was important. But that's how my games run, and I failed to account for the change at the one point in the module where it doesn't just hand out the next job to do and the needed information to do it.
I picked up SKT because my group had an out-of-game major change and we switched to Roll20 instead of face to face for awhile. SKT had pretty maps and all of the fixings supposedly done and we were all learning the new interface so it seemed a good bet, especially since I had a change in duties at work and had less time for prep during the transition. But it's, so far, turned out to be more work as I get deeper into the game to change it into something that isn't just a string of connected combat encounters. The maps are pretty, though.
