I don't know if I can copy-paste rules in this subreddit, but basically it adds these;

Cloud Giants: Fling & Wind Aura

Fire Giants: Tackle [& Siege Monster]

Frost Giants: Weighted Nets

Hill Giants: Squash

Stone Giants: Fling & Rolling Rock

Storm Giants: Thunderous Stomp

While I appreciate the effort... as w/o them; Giants kinda feel like oversized Warrior Vets, but with some of their melee B/P/S damaged swapped out for elemental damage--they seem to trade *too much of their damage for the trade-off of forcing a high AF DEX SV. (16-21)*.

Like if a Stone Giant (usually avid throwers) want to grab & fling you; they can't throw you further than 60' (which sure; most people aren't aerodynamic by default) but then you only take a d6 of Bludgeoning damage for every 10' you're thrown--which feels both underwhelming & kinda backwards. Being violently grabbed by a giant doesn't entail any initial damage? They're not throwing eggs FFS. Also, wouldn't you take more damage being thrown hard at a nearby target/spiked on the ground like a football?? (It only *kinda* makes sense for Cloud Giants' throws to speed up over a 60' span, as maybe they're pushing/accelerating you with the wind, upon release???)

Anyways, it feels undercooked & unintuitive in places, so I came up with a pretty try-hard/sweaty update of it for 5.5 that should put fear of Giants back in to the hearts of adventurers, & I'd love some feedback from y'all, as tonight the heroes in my campaign will be traveling south of Helm's Hold on the High Road, & I want their 2nd ever giant encounter to really pop, & set the tone/real danger level for STK.

(Btw has anyone ever ran the Helm's Hold/High Road Frost Giant encounter that has any advice to share? Has anyone ever had a party keep taking Short Rests after each kill, & on an hourly 17+ try to farm d4 Frost Giants at a time, to really winnow down their numbers locally??)

Anyways, I'm also inspired by the Large armored dudes & the cyclops in Nolan's take on 'The Odyssey,' & think bigger enemies throwing party members at each other is not only funny, but a good way to keep everyone involved, & the situation dynamic.

(I also want to test out a new home rule that 'any damage that also knocks someone Prone also gives Disadvantage on any related Concentration checks,' to simultaneously borrow from BG 3, but to also tone it down a bit, as I believe getting knocked Prone auto-breaks Concentration there.🧐)

This is the Frost [& Stone, minus the War Cry] Giants' provisional iteration of Fling, kind of an "improved/updated Fling" along w/ my contextual notes on tactics (as well as me sneaking in the 'Dazed' status effect from BG 3, to represent getting hit by a person thrown really hard @ you);

[Round/Turn 1 of any battle that Frost Giants are shooting arrows/swinging axes; they'll use their Bonus Action to pop 'War Cry' for 2d10+5 Temp. HP + Adv. on attacks until the start of their 2nd turn (so if anyone tries to flee, well still Adv. on their Op. Atk.)  Then @ the start of every turn they'll try to refresh/ recharge it on a 5+!]

If the target is heavily armored/Shielded/doesn't even look Bloodied, the smarter ones will usually try to snatch 'em up, & chuck 'em at someone/something [unless maybe their War Cry recharges]. Basically if a couple-few of their best swings are *not* showing discernible damage/progress... they will potentially pivot.

Frost/Stone Giants Grab & Fling: 1st Atk.: 1H grapple: DEX/STR SV. DC: 17, or take 6 B. dmg. + Grappled [by the head/neck on a Crit 1 SV; doing double B. damage]

->2nd Atk.: thrown 10-60' + 6d8 B. dmg. + Prone, or spiked w/in 5' for 11d8/(50) B. dmg. + Prone + Dazed  

If Grappled target is thrown @ you; DEX SV. DC: 17 to duck, otherwise you're both Prone & split this dmg. + any triggered Concentration checks are made w/ Disadvantage (unless Flying; as then they won't be Proned, only Pushed 10') but maybe give Adv. on this "duck SV." once they've seen it in action. Thrown target lands behind whomever they collided with.

Target w/in: | B. dmg.(avg.)

10': 11d8 + Dazed (DisAdv. on WIS SV. Throws, can't take Reactions, & loses their DEX. bonus to AC)/(50)

15': 10d8 + d4 + Dazed (CON SV. DC: 17)/(47.5)

20': 10d8/(45)

25': 9d8 + d4/(42.5)

30': 9d8/(40.5)

35': 8d8 + d4/(38.5)

40': 8d8/(36)

45': 7d8 + d4/(34)

50': 7d8/(31.5)

55': 6d8 + d4/(29.5)

60': 6d8/(27)

+1d4-1d6 B. dmg. for every 10' slid down on impact

Note; smarter giants could try getting them stuck in tree branches, or within/past Difficult or Deadly terrain [like off a cliff!] unless they're playing 'tag' in a target-rich environment, like if there's a [flying?] caster obviously Concentrating on a bothersome spell.)

Sorry it came out so long, but I'd love some constructive feedback for my session this evening. 2 of 5 members in my party have high AC, & this is my preemptive response to 'keeping things interesting' for them, + the flying Sorc that loves to cast Shield, & their Druid friend that loves Conjure Animals.

FWIW I think shifting some focus away from AC [to having a high/semi-reliable DEX SV.] will put a shine on any Rangers, Rogues, & Barbarians that may feel underpowered in Tiers 2+.

I'm also looking at incorporating other home rules to make Giants more epic, like mundane shields in particular having a reduced effect against their powerful swings, & that "dueling" something so huge/strong/deadly would be an exhausting ordeal to survive...

I’d like to make sure I have all “recommended” books on my wishlist at least. What setting books would you recommend to help run this campaign? I’ve seen the Swords Coast Adventures guide “recommended” in various reviews to flesh out some of the locations in the module, but I’m wondering if there are any more?

My party recently found themselves in possession of the famed "Giant Slayer Greatsword" which is truly awesome... except none of them wanted to use a greatsword (or greataxe for that matter). Our Artificer wanted to see if she could reforge it into a firearm.

I determined that this would require:
1. Finding a smith with the ability to transfer the enchantment.
2. A series of skill checks to determine if the craft were successful.

The party finally found a smith worth of the work (I had hinted that there was definitely one in Citadel Adbar, but gave a chance in every city based on size and identity). When the party was spending some time in Mirabar, I determined that the chance of finding a capable smith was a bit higher, and the fates (d100) determined there was a smith who could handle the work.

Check 1: DC15 Intelligence (Investigation) check to determine the workings of the sword and how the enchantments were applied.
Check 2: DC18 Intelligence (Smith's Tools) check to work the forge and hammer the sword to a workable stock.
Check 3: DC18 Intelligence (Arcana) to ensure the enchantments were not damaged in the reforging.
Check 4: DC20 Intelligence (Tinker's Tools) to complete the construction of the weapon.

All checks were made with Advantage due to the assistance of the master smith. Both tool checks were made with double proficiency due to Tool Expertise. I wanted the challenge to succeed, but needed some stakes for it.

Well, all checks were passed easily, and the final DC20 tool check was a Nat 20!. For the Nat 20, I added the "Rifled" property to the weapon. I valued the weapon at a cool 8000gp, just in case they decide to sell it.

Greetings wise ones.
I’m about to meet my players for session 0 of SKT in a couple of days. Im a new DM having run dragons of stormwreck isle with a few people from the same group and 2 new players. This will be my first session 0 and I’m looking for advice on what to include in the session for this module specifically. I’ve boiled it down to the following:

- character creation and tying the characters reasons for meeting together (we are going to run chapter one as a lvl 1 start seems appropriate having 2 new players in the group)
- giving a bit of background
- probably mentioning the different factions apart from kraken society as I want my players to discover them during the adventure, and having one or more pc’s being affiliated with a faction.
- get a general feel from the group about how we want to play the game

And that’s pretty much it. I feel like it’s not bad but I’m looking further tips on anything that would be helpful to include or pay extra attention to

Any help appreciated!

Hey everyone! I’m Paito from RPG Printables. We’re a small family business making handouts and printable props for D&D campaigns.
If you’re about to run Storm King’s Thunder, imagine this: your players walk into Nightstone right after the giants attacked, and in every empty house they find a letter, a family recipe or a land deed left behind.
That’s basically what we make.
Our Storm King’s Thunder set has handouts for every chapter: the Nightstone residence letters, 18 NPC cards, tavern menus, letters of recommendation for every town, faction notes, spell scrolls, rune item cards for each giant lord, and player maps like Grudd Haug, Deadstone Cleft and the Eye of the All-Father. Everything comes with a printer friendly black and white version too.
My wife designs all of our handouts from scratch. We don’t use AI, because we believe these should be made by D&D players, for D&D players.
This is the same RPG Printables you can find on Etsy. Etsy takes a pretty big cut, so we’re trying to grow our own website.
If you have any questions, ask me here. And if you’ve already used our handouts, a review or an upvote helps us a lot.
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Hello wise folk of Reddit.

I've been running SKT online for the past year, after playing a couple of years in person (I had a baby and moved to the other end of the city, which complicates things).

Nevertheless, we're playing a one-off in-person session in a couple of weeks and I would like to wow them with a set-piece.

Has anyone any useful links for a physical version of the cultists airship from chapter 4? I'd love to run an aerial battle using that as the centrepiece. I'm happy with Etsy products or paper craft; 3d printing might be tricky, but not impossible.

Also, I'm UK based, in regards to any shipping delays

Running it first time ever, am wondering if any of y'all got any advice for a newbie DM for this campaign. Any tweaks to it, any ideas at all I'd love to hear so I can prepare for it :) . Thanks for reading.

Hoping to get some help as what to do with the barbarians at the gate encounter when the party first arrives at he Eye of the All-Father.

As written, there are 6 barbarians, 1 shaman, one white dragon wyrmling and one leader (all CR2 more or less). They will fight to the death and won't negotiate or even talk to the party when they see they have magic users as I understand it.

The problem is that this is a cake-walk. They are cornered in a dead end, so no way to spread our which makes magic even more powerful than usual here, so two fireballs more or less and the fight is over. I could of course make them tougher, but the fight still feels unnecessary and a bit weird. Why would they even attack the four VERY capable looking characters accompanied by Harshnag (who probably looks very menacing) standing in front of them?

Any good ideas how to spice this up or change it into something more reasonable if you can call it that.

Our intrepid heroes are about to rescue Hekaton before working towards the climactic final battle, having killed Zalto and negotiated a transition of power at Lynn Armaal. But they didn't really engage with the Frost, Stone or Hill Giants. Does anyone have smart ideas about how to bring consequences to this choice?

Maybe Iymrith has pieces of Vonindod now the Fire Giants have been scattered? Maybe Hekaton can convene loyal Frost and Stone giants to Maelstrom and they can aid the party in some way? Did anyone else try to tie the story of the campaign into the ending and did it work?

My party is approaching the Eye of the All Father. I'll be skipping the artifacts, so on their way out this time, the encounter with Iymrith will occur.

My group uses a VTT (TabletopSimulator) and nearly always a square grid battlemap. 5e lists gargantuan as at least 20'x20'. I've seen some actual minis available on a 100mm base, which would generally match that size. I've also seen some made at the 150mm base scale, which would equate to a 30'x30' monster.

The Draconomicon has some measurements, but not sure how much those apply to battlemap miniature size. Red/Gold Dragons have a colossal size listed (no longer a 5e thing), so should it be assumed that they can get to the 30'x30' range (Klauth?) and that other ancient dragons should stay at 20'x20' on battlemap?

Should Iymrith be on the smaller end of ancient dragons because she is relatively young compared to others (google tells me her expected age is 900-1200 years, so barely ancient at all).

I plan on running Iymrith as a colossus fight (giving each part of the body an AC, HP, and Initiative). Wondering if anyone else has run her that way and any pointers for it. I understand it's ultimately my choice, just wondering what others have done or recommend.

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My players want to complete the Vonindod and take control of it themselves to attack Iymrith, which is too amazing of an idea for me to say no to.

Does anyone have tips or ideas for how PCs controlling the Vonindod might work? Has anyone done something like this? I want to make sure it can be an epic experience but fair to everyone.

Hey everyone!

I'm DMing Storm King's Thunder right now and my party has just reached the Goldenfields giant attack.

I'm having a bit of a hard time running this part because Goldenfields is huge and there are a bunch of different things happening all over the place at the same time. There are also a lot of NPCs spread around the area, and obviously my players can only be in one place at a time.

The biggest problem I'm having is keeping track of what is happening and when in the places the players aren't currently at.

Like, while they're fighting some giants in one area, what exactly is happening at the other locations? When does each NPC get involved? Who is still alive? What happens if the players arrive somewhere 15 minutes later? etc.

I really don't want to run the entire invasion as one giant combat because that sounds like an absolute nightmare, but at the same time I don't want everything outside the players' immediate area to basically freeze until they get there.

So how did you guys handle this?

Did you make some kind of timeline and just advance it as the players move around? Did you treat each location as a separate encounter? Did you actually keep track of what all the NPCs were doing? Or did you just kinda wing it?

If anyone has some kind of timeline, spreadsheet, flowchart, cheat sheet, or anything else they made for this section, I'd really appreciate it.

I'm mainly looking for a way to make the invasion feel like it's actually happening everywhere at once without having to keep 500 things in my head at the same time lol.

Thanks!

Been running SKT for about 2 years now. I think we have 3 sessions left in the campaign: attack the Morkoth, back to Maelstrom, final battle. In Maelstrom I’m imagining a few things might happen, but one thing I’ll make sure happens is Hekaton gets the fighter’s favourite greatsword back. This was a Cloud Giant letter opener in Lyn Armaal that does Lightning Damage, which the party traded with the cloud giant Lord in Maelstrom in exchange for a cease in hostilities and an introduction with Serissa. When Hekaton gets home and finds this out he will insist it is returned.

I thought Hekaton might upgrade the sword, but then I thought some sort of magical skill challenge might be more fun. Has anyone run anything like that before? Any ideas? Preferably something the whole party (Wiz, Sorc, Cleric, Fighter) can participate in, including the Fighter somehow is essential.

I originally created the Shrine of the Bear Spirit as a system agnostic druidic location, but while finishing it I realised it could fit rather naturally into Chapter 3 of Storm King’s Thunder.

I could see it being used as:

• an abandoned holy site once belonging to the Blue Bear tribe,
• a smaller shrine connected to one of the Uthgardt ancestral mounds,
• a place where a shaman sends the party to recover an offering or commune with a totem spirit,
• a sacred location that has recently been corrupted, occupied or disturbed.

It isn’t intended to replace Beorunna’s Well or any of the official spirit mounds. It's more as a small optional encounter the party discovers while travelling between the larger locations of the Savage Frontier.

I’ve attached usable static versions and animated previews. Where would you place something like this in your SKT campaign?

Cheers!
~dransky

Hi all, i have just started dming storm kings thunder and am womdering if anyone has access to the maps from the book at a 5ft square scale instead of the 10ft scale on the book. Google has given me no luck so please let me know if you can help :)

I'm going to start DM'ing this campaign, and I was wondering what I should tell my players for them to know some of the background. I've already seen a post here asking the same question, but I wanted a more specific answer, can I tell them all that is in the "Introduction" chapter of the campaign up until the end of "Faction of the north"?

For reference in the pic are the contents of the part I'm in doubt of sending them.

Hey Everyone!

I’m currently DMing Storm King’s Thunder for a party of 4, and I’ve been thinking about transitioning into Curse of Strahd later on with the same characters instead of starting a completely new campaign.

Our SKT campaign has become pretty heavily homebrewed over time, with a lot of character-specific storylines added to the main plot. Because of some recent developments, I now have a narrative connection to Barovia/Strahd that could potentially lead the party into Curse of Strahd after (or near the end of) SKT.

The main issue is obviously character level. If we go this route, the party would probably enter Barovia somewhere around level 10–11, with 4 players, which is much higher than the intended starting level for CoS.

So I’m curious if anyone here has actually done something similar:

• Have you transitioned directly from SKT into Curse of Strahd with the same characters?
• What level were they when they entered Barovia and how many players did you have?
• Did you run most of CoS, or cut/restructure the lower-level content?
• How much work was it to upscale the encounters for a level 10+ party?
• How did you handle Strahd himself? Did you significantly buff/redesign him?
• Did higher-level spells and abilities cause problems with the horror/survival aspects of the campaign?
• How did you actually get the party into Barovia narratively without it feeling like you suddenly abandoned the previous campaign?
• Most importantly, did it work? Did CoS still feel threatening and atmospheric with an already experienced, high-level party?

I’m not necessarily trying to preserve CoS exactly as written. I’d be completely fine with treating it as a higher-level Barovia arc, cutting some of the early content and rebalancing the important locations/bosses. I’d just like to keep as much of the actual story, exploration and atmosphere as possible.

I’d especially love to hear from people who have actually tried running CoS for characters around levels 10–12, even if you didn’t specifically come from SKT.

How did you approach it, and is there anything you wish you had done differently?

Thank you in advance!

Edit:

Thank you everyone for sharing your experiences and suggestions! I probably won’t fully jump into CoS after all (at least not with my current group), but I’ll definitely be taking some ideas from you guys. :D

After 5 and a half years, the Dinger Daggers, along with Harshnag and Hekaton, defeated Iymrith and restored the Ordning. We did damn near everything in the book, and tons of quests that weren’t in there. What a ride!

Here are my hand painted minis of Hekaton, Harshnag, and Iymrith that I used for our 2-part in-person finale. What should I run next??

This campaign book launched ten years ago, now. Wow. I haven't been running it that long, but I did keep running it past the end (given the lack of resolution, I felt I had to) and merged in Vecna: Eve of Ruin (a much worse campaign, IMHO). Next week, the level 19 party will meet in pitched battle with Duke Zalto's army of fire, stone and hill giants to rescue their comrade and the key to meeting with Annam to fix the Ordning.

It's wild how much material can be mined from a good D&D campaign, going beyond just what it outlines. SKT is a great book!

So, many session ago, my party obtained a Letter of Recommendation after completing the side quest in Calling Horns. They've already connected with the Harpers, met Dral Thelev at Danivarr's House, and are aware they need to hand the letter to him when they're ready to cash in their favour.

What favours did your parties use the letter to cash in on in your campaigns?

My party recently handed in the letter with the request for magic items that would help slay giants, or at least their locations. What would you rule is the limit of the High Captain's power/reach? Is a weapon of giant slaying too much? Maybe a few potions of giant strength?

He could give them the locations of such weapons but the answer would just lead them to various magic item stores in other cities that the PCs are already aware of. I don't want them to have wasted this letter to get a response they already knew about.

They're are about to head to Grudd Haug to retrieve a conch.

For reference, the body text in Everlund says the following:
"When the characters decide to call in the favor, Dral contacts his employers, and High Captain Horix Zoar does everything in his power to give the characters what they want, provided it’s within his power and isn’t likely to burden him or the Zoar family. Examples of what he might provide include a meeting with one or more members of the Council of Elders, an arranged meeting with a Lords’ Alliance representative from another city, and a spell scroll of raise dead."

I’m running LMOP and I was thinking about running SKT after, so is there a good place in SKT for the map in Wave Echo Cave to show the location of?