…Yeah, okay, that title doesn’t make much sense. >.> But we’ll roll with it!

My Storm King’s Thunder campaign is rolling along nicely, going on something like two years now. SKT was hailed in reviews as being a terrific sandboxey adventure, which it kinda-sorta is, and kinda-sorta isn’t [1], but we are now in the “post Eye-Of-the-All-Father” stage of the campaign, which very much isn’t a sandbox, as written. I want to avoid spoilers, but I will say that if you’re familiar with SKT, you will probably know what I mean when I say that from Chapter Five forward, it’s pretty much a railroady race to the end, with scripted cutscenes for NPCs to have big moments baked in and everything.

Which, y’know, makes a certain amount of sense. You can’t really write “a campaign in a book” like this and have the ending make any kind of sense, if you don’t collapse all the probability waveforms down into a single cohesive storyline. But running a railroad game is fundamentally opposed to my Gamemastering credo, specifically items #7 and #9. So how to resolve this?

Actually, the answer is also in the Credo, specifically item #11. I’m tossing in a bunch of potential side-quests of my own design, most if not all of which are optional. The most recent sessions involved the characters happening upon a derelict cloud giant skycastle that by the machinations of fate was tied in to one of the PCs’ backstories– none of which is in the adventure-as-written. This particular side-quest kinda floated in the liminal space between sandbox and railroad, in that I was pretty confident that when confronted with an unexpected floating island, the PCs would want to check it out… but they also had the option, and the story would not have been broken, if they just shrugged and said, “Meh, the Oracle told us to go to Ironslag, let’s keep going to Ironslag.”

The scenario ended with them in something of a quandary about what to do next: they’ve still got the task at Ironslag waiting for them, but I can see at least three other directions they might want to go from here, and none of them would be “wrong answers.” One of those is even still on the Storm King’s Thunder script! Another one involves stopping at a town where they’ve never been and– guess what– that town is also a mini-quest-hub that has at least three side-quests going on as well.

I don’t expect the players to do all these side-quests, and honestly I wouldn’t want them to– it would probably feel tediously grindy to go on every monster-hunt they happened across, and you could play an MMO for that. But having the quests there gives the players “breathing space” around the main plot, in order to pursue their own agendas, which is what sandbox play is really all about at the heart of it.

It’s entirely possible that the players will look at the side-quests, say “Screw that noise!” and carry on racing towards the end of Storm King’s Thunder instead. That’s fine, too! It’s entirely consistent with my GM credo to let the players buy their tickets and get on the plot railroad, if that’s what they have chosen to do.

[1] Actually, very few D&D games are actually “sandboxes.” What they may be is “open world,” but that’s another discussion all together. My experience is that most of the time, when people describe a D&D adventure as a sandbox, what they mean is “not a railroad.” ;P

Fire giants. They’re just bad.

It’s been a year and a half since the campaign started at the Keep on the Borderlands; the characters have reached 7th level and finally, after much meandering, gotten to the Eye of the All-Father in Storm King’s Thunder. If we assume that KotB was the prologue, and snuffing out (so to speak) the fire giants’ hopes of reviving the Vonindod was Act One, we are now at the beginning of Act Two.

Storm King’s Thunder is written in the weird meandery style for the first part, but then once you hit the Eye of the All-Father, it pretty much becomes a straightforward run to the end. There are some branching points, but they all lead to the same destination, somewhere around 10th or 11th level. So it’s still a bit away, but we are now at the point where I can see the end of Storm King’s Thunder looming on the horizon, and have been thinking about what the campaign would do next.

I had the idea of ending the campaign when we reached the end of SKT to start something new; I was particularly looking at doing a Spelljammer(-ish) campaign that brought in a lot of the flavor of the MCU cosmic stuff, inspired by Thor: Ragnarok. And I still like that idea, but as I was thinking about it, I had a very sudden and definite message from the subconscious:

…Well okay then. O.o

There’s lots of reasons for this, not the least of which being we’ve never reached that kind of a level in any of our campaigns, and so it would be something completely new for us. Also, I just like this group of characters, and I’m not ready for their story to be over– and I suspect the players probably feel the same way. Finally, by all accounts (and our own experience so far), 5E is the system that, if you’re going to go to 20, you want to do it in.

(In Pathfinder we’d already be hearing creaks around the edges of the system by now. In 5E, at 7th level, the combats are taking a little longer than they did back in the KotB days just by virtue of having more complex characters and tougher opponents, but the action is still fast and furious. Out last session had a chase/combat against a behir in a cave maze (CR 11!) that was done 75% as “theater of the mind” and basically went like this:

For all the chasing around and getting in potshots at the monster (or FROM the monster) it all ran very smooth and quickly and led to a fingernail-biting climax where the barbarian NPC was one round away from being digested in the creature’s belly and saved by the players pulling out all the stops to save her. I can’t think of another system we’ve used that would have handled the situation half so well.

But having decided that I want the campaign to reach level 20, that leads to the question of what to do for the second half. There are some tweaks written into Storm King’s Thunder itself that provide ways it can be expanded on, and I’ll happily add those in, but even that isn’t likely to take the party past 12th or 13th.

So what I’ve decided to do was to pull out some of my still-unplayed higher level 3.x edition adventures, particularly from Goodman Games’ Dungeon Crawl Classics line, and tie them together into an “adventure path.” Some of them involve giants and make for obvious “sequel” material, particularly if [SPOILER REDACTED] manage to escape rather than suffer Death By PC when their nefarious scheme to [SPOILER ALSO REDACTED] comes to light. I also found another one that could provide a kind of cool “Return to the Keep on the Borderlands” side-trek as a change of pace from fighting giants all the dang time and that could possibly act as setup for Spelljammer later.

The ones I’ve found so far could take the game as far as 16th or 17th. Beyond that… I have no idea. That’s probably at least another year and a half away itself anyway, so I have time to work on it, and by then hopefully WotC will have gotten around to some of that “supporting higher-level play” they’ve been talking about. But it seems to me that once you get into that realm, where even the wizard has 80+ hit points, the barbarian becomes as strong as a giant and can rage indefinitely, and the cleric can literally resurrect people at will, the stories are going to have to look very different.

You don’t “dungeon crawl” at that kind of level. I don’t know what you do do… but you don’t dungeon crawl. Really that, more than anything, is going to be the challenge at that point.

-The Gneech

Brother Drang summons lightning against the cave leaper. It’s SUPER EFFECTIVE.

An epic moment from last night’s D&D session. Wandering around the underdark because reasons, the party was attacked on a long and narrow span by “cave leapers” (a kind of bat-winged flying dire toad thing) and purple worm larvae, in an encounter literally named “The Gorge of Horrible Things.”

Hantamouse’s storm cleric (“Brother Drang”) was swallowed whole by a leaper, which then tried to fly off. The barbarian lassoed it, and SirFox’s rogue (an anthropomorphic flying squirrel) jumped on it, stabbing the thing with his rapier to make a handle. At this point Hanta, who had already cast summon lightning at the beginning of the fight, decided he had no fucks to give and blasted the thing from the inside out, failing the saving roll against his own spell and taking the full brunt of it as well.

Me: “The good news is, you killed the cave leaper! The bad news is, you’re now 20 feet in the air trapped inside a dead leaper. You take five more points of damage from the fall.”

Hanta: “No I don’t! I’m at zero already.”

They won, in the end. 😉

-The Gneech