Storm Kings Thunder

Supplemental Material

• A Guide to Storm King’s Thunder - I highly recommend you pick up this guide.
• Kraken’s Gamble - This is a must-run one shot side scenario that will tie back in later in the adventure. Can be run anytime during Chapter 3 which is where I spent a LONG time filling until the players reached level 7. Very little prep needed, just make sure you’ve read through the whole thing.
• Fiendly Competition - This is a great little bounty board adventure that I used as additional Chapter 3 filler. It can be dropped into any town your players find themselves. I used it Xanatharl’s keep when my players headed that way in search of the Weevil.
• Herbs of Lurkwood - I used the Fiendly Competition bounty board to send the players into the Lurkwood where I ran a modified version of this.

I also ran a one-shot in the Lurkwoord called “A Death’s Kiss”. I thought I got it from DMs Guild, but I can’t find it there now. If you run across it, it was also good chapter 3 filler, and helped convey that the Lurkwood was a dangerous place.

Harshnag

I highly recommend not just dropping Harshnag on the players in a random combat scenrio. Adding a giant to the party takes a lot of the danger out of encounters and makes your players secondary to the big strong giant. You want your players to be the heroes of the story, not supporting cast. The book has some recommendations around this, saying that Harshnag won’t engage in combat because he doesn’t want to “show up the small folk” as he thinks they have fragile egos. That’s weak; and can lead to players saying “we don’t mind if you help us out”.

I made the following changes:

• Players heard rumors about this giant that was helping the small folk against the other giants
  • Rather than just have players “hear rumors” they can also run across NPCs that were saved by Harshnag
• Players heard of his history with the Grey Hands and that he can often be found in Waterdeep
• Give them an additional reason to head toward Waterdeep (I had them chasing Lady Atillia from Kraken’s Gamble)
• Give the players some things to do/people to save in Waterdeep
• They run into Harshnag in a Waterdeep Tavern, he’s heard of there success around Waterdeep and wants to meet them and express gratitude.

Here Harshnag can tell the party a little about what’s going on with the giants and that he want’s to see the Oracle. However, I once again was faced with the issue of having Harshnag travel with (and possibly upstage) the party. In my case, the party had another side quest they wanted to do before they left town, so they said they’d meet Harshnag back at the Tavern the next day… which was perfect.

When they returned Harshnag had left them a note saying he had something he had to look into, but he would meet them in Mirabar and they could all continue North together. You can find some reason to do the same. There will have to be some travel with Harshnag (some members in my party are looking forward to it) but I am trying to minimize it to keep my party the central focus.