Module Review: Storm King's Thunder

Disclaimer: I only review modules that I have played (either as DM or a player) and I have been waiting for my group to finish Storm King's Thunder so I could write up my module review. Thanks to last week's session, I am ready to go. Also, as always, I want to point out that my players and I had a wonderful time playing through this campaign and my criticisms below are not meant to take away from that. I do highly recommend this campaign.

Module Review: Storm King's Thunder

If you think about it, the beautiful cover art actually gives away the plot of 2 of King Hekaton's daughters being evil; I mean, look at those faces. What I find ironic is that it looks like the Storm King is the bad guy, but the group ends up on a mission to rescue him. I do appreciate that the adventure path includes twists and turns with the giants seeming to be the villain in the beginning and the group finding out someone else is behind it (reminiscent of the old GDQ series Against the Giants when the Spider Queen ended up being the enemy). What's great is that there are multiple twists this time around, especially if the DM takes the other enemy groups seriously.

I was surprised to see the first 2-page table of contents in a 5E campaign book:

It's weird though that all of that material from Chapter 3 is in the book; I suspect that it was supposed to be in the previously released Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide and it didn't meet the deadline or something so they reworked it to fit into this module. Honestly, it makes this book a follow up to the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide and continues the 5E trend of the campaign books also being part of a Forgotten Realms setting update (which I am fine with, since I own all of them).

I feel like I should once again accuse the module authors of essentially lying about the levels for this campaign since the book claims it's for levels 1-10, but it really isn't; I recommend using it for just 7-10. As a DM I continue to refuse to use the "milestone" leveling system and rely on actual XP to level the players in my game. That means I notice how lacking the book is in giving what is needed to get the characters from one level to another. Luckily I was expecting this and had my players already at a higher level to start events in the campaign.

There's a nice campaign flowchart (with appropriate levels for locations) provided and I hope Wizards of the Coast and other companies continue to consider including these, even though it reveals some strange things about the adventure:

In the chart, you see a basic admission that adventuring parties should really start at level 5, not level 1. The beginning 2 options lead to 1 place, which provides 3 options, which all lead to 1 place and another, which then provides 5 options that could all lead to the final parts of the campaign. But it's strange because each of the 5 main options is a huge chapter with lots of combat; this setup provides the group with the ability to choose which giant lord's base to invade to get an item needed to get to the lair of the storm giants. I suppose you could argue that this system provides for re-playability options, but it was a lot of DM prep work to end up having a group pick just 1 of the 5 (and that's all they needed to pick). I considered having NPCs try to convince the group that they needed to kill all of the giant leaders in order to make sure they established peace, but it really wasn't necessary. That means a lot of the material is either wasted or will need to be somehow used later for something else.

They continue to print strange sayings on the backs on the 5E campaign books; for the record, my players were not giants, but they did fight giants:

We almost had a TPK at the end because the final battle is against an ancient dragon with plenty of minions around (so my group had to teleport out and come back later to finish the combat with more allies - and almost had a TPK again); it's really not an appropriate CR setup for a group of level 10 adventurers. My players actually asked, "What level did they expect us to be for this?" The writers of the campaign tried to cheat the situation by offering a bunch of powerful NPCs and magic items for the finale, but I'm tired of that happening at the ends of these campaigns. I would like a challenge that the group could take on by themselves.

Overall, I still give this campaign a rating of 7 out of 10 because it was lots of fun and the flaws are easy for experienced DMs to work around; I just feel bad for new DMs who are starting with this one because it could be a mess and lead to multiple party wipes.