My game of Storm King’s Thunder has just begun Chapter 4. Most of the session was the adventurers meeting Harshnag and travelling to the Oracle, with just the opening part of the exploration.
This was a three-hour session. With breaks, we probably got in about 150 minutes of play. In that time, we had the following encounters:
- Meet Harshnag and aid him against 6 Hill Giants.
- Ambushed by 12 Orcs and an Orc Warchief in the mountains
- Fight two Young Remorhaz’s in the mountains
- Encounter harsh weather on the journey
- Fight four stone giants
- Initial exploration of the Oracle (and discovery of traps)
- Fight eight barbarians, a shaman and a wyrmling
That’s five combats plus some role-playing and exploration. And the combats were tough – in many of them, PCs were knocked unconscious.
Because I was keeping to a plan of “1 combat per day”, I felt happy to run encounters that otherwise would have been too deadly in a more regular adventuring day of 4-8 encounters. This way, the PCs got to use their best spells and attacks each encounter, and the XP came rolling in. Each player was awarded 5,000 XP at the end of the session based purely on combat XP! (The six PCs were mainly 6th level).
I increased the speed of the combats by using Theatre of the Mind, mostly using a system described here: “A Quick Word on Theatre of the Mind“. I wasn’t using a lot of narrative description of actions, but I was having the monsters speaking and reacting to the player’s actions. When Brian’s druid cast call lightning, the standard response of all combatants is not to realise he’s responsible, but to look accusingly at the skies above. This session, the giants started cursing the “Storm King”, which will have more resonance later in the adventure. The orcs kept crying out to “kill the squishies!” and taking attacks of opportunity to move away from the fighters and get to the spell-casters in the group – something terrifying and which was possible due to the wilderness setting of the combat.
All of this moved the adventure’s story forward significantly. The group, having discovered the stone giants demolishing an abandoned wizard’s tower, remarked upon how all the stone giants they’d met had been demolishing buildings and how the fire giants had been looking for adamantine. All these wilderness “random” encounters had alerted the players to what the giant factions were doing. With Harshnag arriving, more of the explanations came: The Storm King had vanished, and with the Ordning shattered, no-one was overseeing the lesser giant races. Thus, chaos!
We’ve finished nine three-hour sessions of Storm King’s Thunder now, and the PCs are 7th level and in the Oracle. I expect they’ll spend a couple more sessions there, and then move onto the Giant strongholds.
This is Storm King’s Thunder played with a strong eye towards the plot and seeing the narrative reinforce itself. I’m fascinated to see what the players do once they gain aid from the Oracle!