I've been DMing 5th Edition DnD for nearly 2 years now. I've DMed a few premades (Lost Mines, Out of the Abyss, Curse of Strahd) as well as ran two of my own home-made campaigns (one is still ongoing). I decided to pick Storm King's up to take a break from having to write for my 2nd campaign and to do something different for my group. I'll do my best to be concise about this premade while still getting my point across and with little to no spoliers. I mostly enjoyed DMing Storm King's (which i just completed this week) but felt that it dropped the ball on a few very important aspects of DnD and where players (mine mostly) derive their fun. And because of that, we went from enjoying it early on to wanting to finish it as quick as possible over the last handful of sessions.
**LIKED**
- OPENING QUEST
-- It felt fairly organic and gave the group a good reason to stick together. It had some fun fights and some hilarious (and disturbing) imagery for storyline progression.
-- Overall, the 1st chapter of the book gives a great introduction to the story and allows the players to get to know each other's characters while getting a feel for their classes with many combat encounters.
- NPCs
-- Many of the NPCs have a ton of flavor to them and feel like real people. The book even gives you stat blocks, and personality/bond/flaw aspects for a few of the really important NPCs. Overall, there were very few NPCs that my players just glanced over with a "meh" attitude. They felt invested in most of them and they were well written and structured
- COMBAT
-- The fights in this premade feel important. None of the encounters felt like filler and even the random encounters could lead to either a side mission or story progression.The boss fights had purpose and some even had some interesting mechanics (like the ability to 1-shot a boss using the environment if your players took the time to investigate the room)
- COMPLEXITY OF WORLD
The 3rd chapter of this book is almost entirely a list of "what's happening elsewhere in this world" and includes an enormous map of the northern regions of Faerun. If the party decided to run off to some random town, the chapter had exactly what was going on in that town, what was important there, and who they could possibly meet. Then you could fill in the rest with your own artistic license. Even locations without any connection to the story at all were covered so that you could potentially flesh out the world as you see fit.
**DISLIKED**:
- PACING
-- This was a big one for me and my players. The pacing of Storm King's is meant to allow the players to take their time (the book tells you that you have a year to resolve the plot before the bad-guys win), but the way that it's set up there isn't really a lot to do aside from the plot. So players will mostly just cruise through it. You have to start making your own side missions/quests in order to distract the players from binge running the main-plot.
-- The way that the game ushers in new things it felt like most of the game was combat oriented and not so much time for RP. Most encounters started with combat or were resolved by combat. You have to take a bit of artistic license to allow for RP for the most part. There is time for RP in towns and on the road, but most creatures that you encounter aren't there to talk, they're there to beat you over the head. To get some RP in, I took some liberties with a few of the bad-guys that allowed for my player's to try and talk them down or come to an agreement even if the book told me "this group fights to the death, no matter what." I didn't like that. My players had very little time to grow their characters organically and develop their personalities because they were going into encounters where the opponents were all issues to be solved with force.
- LEVELING
-- Storm King's does leveling based on milestone leveling (in that there is no experience points, all levels are awarded after predetermined events). I liked the idea but HATED the application. To begin, the players will hit level 5 by the end of the 1st chapter. This is because the start of the 2nd chapter has high CR enemies that could possibly 1 or 2 shot level 5 characters, so anything below level 5 is basically nothing to these creatures. This felt very ham-fisted and heavy handed. My players hit level 4 by the end of the 1st session (about 3-4 hours of play). The players dont have any time to learn their characters, get a feel for their powers, or playout any sort of personality or RP before they are beings beyond normal human comprehension. They go from having trouble fighting a single goblin to being able to level an entire village of people in the span of 1 city and 1 cave. One of my players was playing a plucky wizard who was bullied for sucking at magic when she was in university so she set out to prove herself. And she went from "oh man, how do I cast this cantrip again? uhhh, let me think. Gosh, why am I so bad at this?" to a magical killing machine after about 3 hours of play (and only really killing goblins and a band of disadvantaged orcs). She was unable to get into her character or build on that personality at all.
- PLOT HOOKS/GOAL/PACING
-- The plot to me was really interesting on paper, with all the giants and dragons and their inner turmoils. But my player's characters had a very hard time getting pulled into the story. Their characters didn't really have a stake in the plot. There was nothing to pull them in. The entirety of their anchor to the plot hinges on them caring about helping out the town's innkeeper on an errand and believing the story of a giant that told them that they were the prophesied "saviors" that a planar entity told him about. The ones that could fix the Giant's issue. That's their hook. They don't have family or friends or their hometowns really involved unless you're lucky that a player is from one of the story towns.
-- The only hook they have to go on is that people ask them to do these things if they have the time to do so. I'm fairly certain if I threw in another side-mission, they would have taken that over the main plot. There's no urgency and no real sense of motivation to do it. Now I get it that there should be an unspoken agreement among the players to help push the story along (which they did), but when they're just pushing the story along out of necessity instead of because they want to, then it starts to feel forced. Near the end of this premade, it was getting bad enough that I inserted some NPCs from another campaign I ran that I knew my player's enjoyed so that they could get a better hold on the plot and their purpose. I also allowed them to fight a boss I made up and gain a few interesting magical items that they thought would be fun. By the end of the premade everyone was ready to get back to doing the home-made campaigns so they could feel more connected to their characters again.
- CHARACTER POTENTIAL
-- Like I mentioned before, there's no real way for the players to flesh out their characters. They are more so playing generic RPG character #1 rather than their own personally made character. There wasn't any time given for them to grow their character or allow them to experience interesting encounters that give them tough decisions. They go from level 1 to 5 in almost a single session. Those first 5 levels are usually where a player finds their groove, purpose, and life for their character. But this premade skips over that in order to hit 5 ASAP so that the characters don't die immediately to the encounters in Chap 2. I wish my players could have gotten a little more time to get attached to their characters before they're handed level 5.
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G P.
Why such obvious problems?
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 11, 2019Verified Purchase
Arwyn Preece-Roberts
Poor quality delivery
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 15, 2019Verified Purchase
Poor quality delivery
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 15, 2019
Whilst the content of the product is perfectly fine, and up to Wizards of the Coast's usual standards, the same cannot be said of the quality of the book. Several pages were not correctly cut, and were thus stuck together, and the book has not been bound correctly so one cover is noticeably longer than the other. Furthermore, the packaging for the book was incredibly flimsy so the book has been bent during shipping.Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 15, 2019
I fully intend to return this product, and instead purchase a copy at my local games store where I can ascertain it's quality prior to purchasing it
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