Storm King’s Thunder: Episode 12
DMing is a learning experience. Sometimes you learn lessons from earlier in the campaign, and if you’re lucky, you get to apply those lessons within that same adventure. After not being open enough to new ideas from my players in Episode 4, I was gifted a great opportunity to redeem myself — and I took it.
The Party:
(Adam) Auberon — Elf Druid
(Terry) Cygnus — Half-elf Warlock
(Matt) Xavian — Human Rogue
(Stacy) Zedrick — Human Cleric
The Path:
The Spine of the World, the Coldwood.
Be he alive, or be he dead, I’ll have his bones to grind my bread.
The party returned to the Eye of the All-Father, where Harshnag awaited them. They had five relics, and placed them in the mithral circle for the Oracle. Each time they placed one, a stone bas-relief of a giant lord turned from the wall to face the party.
They offered a spear tip, a nose ring, a magma ring, a porcelain mask, and a gold-plated tooth. Some of these relics were connected to the same giant lord, so only Countess Sansuri of the Cloud Giants, Chief Guh of the Hill Giants, and Duke Zalto of the Fire Giants had their bas-reliefs turned. This left Jarl Storvald, of the Frost Giants, and Thane Kayalithica of the Stone Giants as mysteries. They now had to declare which giant lord to pursue to steal their conch.
I really didn’t want the players to go to Chief Guh. I had read a bit of her dungeon, and it seemed very basic. The players could potentially run in and grab the conch very quickly, or alternatively have every hill giant converge on the party in a massacre.
Countess Sansuri seemed very interesting. She had captured Felgolos, and there was a legitimate chance that the players could lose her conch forever, and be forced to find another dungeon (which wouldn’t be the worst, since the rest of the dungeons looked like a lot of fun too).
The party had to talk it over. Storm King’s Thunder set up a really interesting choice for the players. Who should they go for? What makes the most sense?
Xavian spoke up and said that they should go for Chief Guh, since hill giants are dumb and they are lowest in the giant caste, so that should be the easiest. I didn’t want to completely dissuade this line of reasoning. But I reminded Xavian’s player, Matt, that Duke Zalto was technically the person who imprisoned Xavian and his family in their mountain forge, Ironslag. It took a second, but suddenly Xavian was all in. “I’m all about revenge,” he said. “Let’s go get Zalto!”
The Oracle told them where to find the Fire Giants.
They still had six questions available to ask the Oracle before they left. They huddled together to figure out the right questions to get some informative answers. They eventually asked “what was the best way to actually find Hekaton?”
And “what happened to Hekaton?”
Now they knew they needed to find King Hekaton’s daughter Serissa who would help them, and that his other daughters, Mirran and Nym had betrayed him. Then they asked “can anyone help us in our pursuit of Duke Zalto?”
This reminded me of when they tried to get help in Bryn Shander, and I didn’t want to say no to this opportunity. I had the Oracle tell them a band of elves lived near the fire giant forge and had insight into the yakfolk.
With that, I could re-purpose one of the side-quests in Ironslag into a pre-dungeon excursion. In the adventure book, you can stumble upon some moon elves being held prisoner by the yakfolk, and return them to their tribe for some magic items. Instead, I would have them find the tribe first, and they would offer the magic items as an incentive to get the party to help them. It didn’t hurt that I had mentioned the moon elf princess in Xavian’s backstory video. Also, Xavian had said in his past that he had a mentor who was very important to him, and I thought now would be a good way to introduce him to the story.
Before they could do that though they had to leave the Eye of the All-Father. As they stepped out with Harshnag, they came face-to-face with the ancient blue dragon, Iymrith.
Iymrith is incredibly powerful. She started tearing the place up, and Harshnag could hardly contain her. After a couple rounds it became clear they were going to die, so Harshnag decided to cause a collapse, and demanded the players escape. The party ran out while Iymrith fixed her attention on Harshnag and the imploding building. The party made it out alive, but the temple was no more.
Men who pay in promises should have at least the sense to promise more.
The airship took them to the Coldwood, where the tribe of moon elves awaited them. Auberon led the way. I wasn’t liking the idea of random encounters at this point, since I didn’t want to stop the momentum, so instead I started imposing a level of exhaustion on them for failed Survival checks. Also, for the next combat we were going to be trying the new variant rules of Greyhawk Initiative, and I wanted to try it out on a fight that mattered.
After getting one point of exhaustion, they found the tribe of elves. They were very accommodating, and told their story — their princess Halani was captured by the yakfolk. They were afraid to approach since in the past if they spotted intruders, they would ring a loud gong, letting all the yakfolk know to instantly kill all of their prisoners.
They had one human adventuring friend who had helped them in the past, and had said that if he got one more “piece to the puzzle” he could certainly rescue their princess. The human stopped by a while later, and Xavian saw that it was his mentor, Garrin. He was ecstatic and acted like he was meeting his hero. Xavian was eating up every word of Garrin’s. Garrin wanted the party to come with him to a deep part of the Coldwood forest, where a “powerful weapon” was guarded by fierce monsters. With the party’s help, they could get it, and that would enable them to rescue Halani.
Without much convincing required, they followed Garrin to this magically guarded place within the Coldwood, requiring some more Survival checks and exhaustion. A puzzle prevented them from entering further. I had seen this interesting puzzle on r/dndnext and decided to try it out here.
The suggested solution was pretty strict, and involved a convoluted rhyming instruction where they had to figure out to connect top colours to bottom colours while avoiding/including an arbitrary amount of whites and blacks. I thought I would just make it easy, and let the players discover what they had to do as they did it. Depending on how quickly they solved things, I could make the puzzle harder or easier on the fly.
Playing on Roll20 was helpful here. They would draw lines, and start criss-crossing them and test out different methods. Eventually they determined if they only crossed paths on a certain amount of whites, they could connect all the colours. They’d used some significant brainpower to come up with this, so I said “correct!” and the puzzle was solved.
They walked further into the forest. My plan was for them to face off against a medusa (I had seen Matt Colville’s video about medusas being a fun enemy, and was inspired). Best tip I picked up on medusas — you never tell the party “a medusa lives here” or anything that clear. Instead you just pepper the area with details like “you see many life-like stone statues” and describe the many poses and expressions you could imagine adventurers would be caught in.
So they were walking by all of these statues, slowly getting a hint of what was going on. Finally they made it to a ruined tower, and out came a group of yuan-ti and a medusa. I can attest that this was actually a very fun combat, made more interesting from the Greyhawk Initiative. Every round was a new initiative, so what happened the moment before would affect what your character would do next.
The yuan-ti were constantly using their Suggestion spells to get players to look at the medusa. Auberon caught its gaze and slowly began to turn to stone, so the players had to adjust their tactics to try and save him, which Zedrick did. Garrin cowered from the medusa, and wasn’t much help, while Cygnus Polymorphed into a tyrannosaurus rex and took out a few yuan-ti on his own.
With the battle over, Garrin ran into the ruined tower and admitted what was going on. This whole encounter had nothing to do with helping the moon elves, he just saw that the party looked tough and he was hoping to steal some magic items from the medusa for himself.
The party was pissed, Cygnus especially. I was wondering what Xavian’s reaction would be. His rose-coloured glasses did not come off at all. He said “great, let me know the next time I can help you,” and just beamed proudly. I thought this was great. Now Garrin could potentially be used again (I had a feeling the group may kill him). He did eventually cough up some “lesser” magic items for the party, so he wasn’t all bad.
Still, the party returned to the moon elves ready to save their princess. The moon elves offered some magic items as well, and offered their finest warriors to accompany the group.
This whole deviation happened because the players imaginatively asked if someone could help them on their quest. And while the answer wasn’t in the book, I gave them a “yes” and made amends for my “no” many episodes back.
