Storm King's Thunder (Dungeons & Dragons)

The flow chart is very helpful to help keep track of where they players should be but around the middle of the story it leaves the players in a very sandbox style environment the DM will have a lot to manage. Overall it seems like a great story with the ever dreaded escort mission for the players that will open or close opportunities for players leading them to make certain moral decisions that might create lasting effects to the story.

Want an engaging, easily run, lengthy prepackaged adventure? You've found it.

Want more options for your own game? Unlike the other books released for this edition, there's none to be found here. New magic items are sparse and a little lackluster, and there is literally nothing in this book as far as class, race, or background options.

*Some spoilers*
This is an enjoyable campaign module with excellent artwork. However, it is padded with place and NPC descriptions of anywhere a party might go. Many side quests (even some main quests) take up space, but don't further the plot. The plot itself is rather sketchy, and sometimes gets lost in the padding. One entire chapter is devoted to wandering around. There's plenty of that as it is, even if you don't eliminate the cheating airship, moving cloud giant cloud, and teleport circles like I did. My PCs got horses.
The module details all pertinent giant lairs, but a party only need visit one!? I changed that so my group will have to go to each one of them to get ALL the giant relics. Those lairs take a chapter each. I'm not wasting more of my money than I already have. There are some excellent new ideas, but the module is largely a traditional combo of town, wilderness, and dungeon crawl. Do I think it's worth thirty-forty bucks? No, but most new modules are pricey. Would I buy it again? Yes. I went through the whole thing and made notes on what to strip out, and what to add so plot threads come together in a cohesive progression. My group is loving it. They run mid-level PCs, and it was easy to scale.
I am using the 3.5 experience requirements to level because I think 5.0 is imbalanced in that regard. If a party intends to go on after one of these campaign modules, they will have leveled too quickly, becoming superheros (in most classes) with too many powerful abilities.
Overall, a solid traditional campaign module if the DM goes over it carefully and makes adjust for padding, and their group's particular campaign.

Great book. Love the adventure flowchart page, which gives you a fast view and reference for the whole book. I will say some stuff in here is eyerollingly cheesey. The opening adventure is fairly pedestrian. And then..... early first act spoilers.... a giant cloud castle floats in, stairs come down, and a giant meets with the characters as an introduction into what's going on. Yes. That is written as an encounter. I'm trying to think of something more elementary than this, less dramatic or less intriguing or less RIDICULOUS... and I just can't. It's pretty embarrassing. There is a lot of good fun to be had in this adventure - with some great encounters and great material. But it also seems a bit rushed in parts at the same time. It's strength is in the sandbox it builds for you, and assumes you can make it feel more epic and less hokey, I suppose.

Okay so...Overall it is a strong starting point for a campaign. And it very much runs the length of a choose your own adventure novel...

My issues with this book is it is so firmly entrenched in Forgotten Realms that it will pose difficulty in modifying it for other settings to a degree. Ontop of this chapter three in specific isnt really a chapter at all but rather a list of locations and ares of note that says "Well...let them run around awhile...They should be X level when leaving"

I was extremely disappointed with the Rune Magic. I had been expecting a possibly archetype, maybe some new spells...Instead we were granted a rather lackluster table of magic items that can be used to scribe runes onto other mundane gear and make an new attunement item that is weaker than most of those presented in the base book...

Lastly I found myself horrifyingly shocked and disheartened when we got to the giant overlords in the book...Which were in fact basic giants from the monster manual with maybe a bit of armor/weapon changes.

This is to say nothing of the fact that probably 50-70% of the book you wont be using unless you piece it into your story in different areas as you only NEED to deal with one giant lord. So you have to hope that your group either wants to keep going or wants to play it another time to explore the other options they missed out on the first time... PC: Most unique and powerful villain in the book? Your party will never face him, he is just there to terrify them into fleeing more or less.

not nearly as coherent as hodq/rise of tiamat. For the first 6 levels or so very little happens that is giant related and the branching paths confused several players online on roll20 who had seen other branches of the starting areas (there are 3 in the book). They were convinced i wasnt running the offical story when i was just running another starting area lol.

for the level 3-6 arc I ended up detailing three towns and 4-5 subadventures on my own out of whole cloth (Hundlestone, Fireshear and Luskan). This was an immense amount of work that I had to end up doing - and the players seemed to not realize the amount of effort that was required.

Overall i wasnt nearly as impressed with the writing and adventure layout - this plotline was convoluted and didnt make a lot of sense. It is little more than an outline for levels 3-6 so be prepared for a lot of gm work that is required to run it.. If i run it again ill rework the plot entirely next time.

The back story for this campaign is very well thought out and compelling. The story at the beginning had me very excited to run this. But I have to agree with others who have stated it's not very well laid out and too sandbox-y. My group just finished chapter one (which I thought was great!) and I'm doing research into what comes next and the next 50 pages are just walls of text. It's compelling but unless you like spending a hundred hours getting ready for the next sessions, this is all very sandbox. I wish there had been a lot more structure going forward but luckily a lot of reviews tell you how to get this by skipping some things and adding in others. I'll be skipping certain chapters and running them through more of the Giant lairs as others have suggested.

Although i have only read through this book, i can honestly say that the storyline is incredible. The locations and events really make the entirety stand out from most written adventures. The norther region material is great and compliments that which can be found in sword coast adventurers guide. Can't wait to run this adventure. This is a must buy.

Beautiful artwork, compelling story hook.

This book offers the flexibility of melding previous published adventures relatively smoothly or start your players off from scratch.

There is a lot of material but not so much that you feel bullied.

Keep in mind I've not played the module yet, and I'm in my first read-through.

The book was new. However, some pages at the front and back still glued together, resulting in some wrinkled and torn pages. I had to tear off the last page from the back cover to see the last page. Very disappointed.

The description made me foolishly expect to find new spells, class options, or maybe even a whole new character class to give characters rune magic. The closest this book comes to giving your characters runic magic is a handful of magic items. Otherwise there are some interesting creatures including new beasts (so maybe a few new options for druids and rangers), and the majority of the book is an adventure, which I really wasn't looking for. Oh well, at least this wasn't the only treat I got myself for my birthday...