Running a Storm King's Thunder Campaign

[donejun master]

Hi all,

I'm trying my hand at DMing my first adventure for my friends. I'll be using the Storm King's Thunder module in Roll20.

My players have been asking about the background for the world, so that their character creation can be inspired by established stereotypes/regionalities/history from the world. The module has some background information on the history of giants and dragon, and has descriptions of a few organizations, but gives no materials to the DM to aid in character creation. The module makes no distinction between knowledge that only the DM should know, and things that all common folk should know.

Am I responsible for making up histories for different races, and for deciding what is common knowledge/what is lost to the ages?

The module does give a few starting reasons for why your party is traveling to the first town, is that the only information that I can give to the players to help them create their characters, their motivations, and why they're traveling together.



I guess my question is do all modules provide so little information on how to aid the players in character creation?


Thoughts on this subject would be greatly appreciated!

[Fishybugs]

Well, all the character creation information is in the Player's Handbook (PHB). The modules only contain the information needed for that particular adventure.

[Sariel Vailo]

Always have the number one rule never EVER TOSS THE DWARF.

[donejun master]

I guess to make my question more specific, there are 6 factions that are listed in the DM journal. All the information on these factions is in the DM section of the notes, suggesting that the players will discover them over time. They say nothing about if the players are suppose to know about them or what to tell them if that's the case, HOWEVER in the first adventure there's an entire different set of possible actions if a PC is affiliated with one of these factions in particular. How could a PC have a connection to a faction that they don't know exists?

Similarly there is a map of the whole adventure's continent which I assumed had spoilers and places that the common folk didn't know existed, YET when a player makes a character they have to come from somewhere and will have varying understandings of local geography.

It's this kind of stuff that I feel is very un-intuitive. What of the adventure material is stuff that I can tell the players about before we make characters/start the game?

[Bubbs]

Storm King's Thunder is written set in the Forgotten Realms setting, so that's where all those places and organizations are being drawn from. There is... a lot of established stuff about the Forgotten Realms setting, which has it's pros and it's cons for running a game set there. If you do want to use that setting and want to provide a map for your players to help them with character creation, I'd look up a map of the "Sword Coast" online. There shouldn't be any shortage of them. (I'd avoid handing out a copy of the one in the Storm King's Thunder book. It's got all the locations relevant to the adventure marked on it, and a good number of those are ones that the players shouldn't just have written on a map for them from the get go. You probably don't want your players to head to insert-villain's-lair-here right off the get go because some arbitrary map maker somehow knew about it.) There's also a pretty handy wiki for the Forgotten Realms online. That should have a bunch of information on those factions.

Of course, if you don't want to use the Forgotten Realms setting, you can adapt what's in the module to fit whatever world you want to make up. You could change as little as maps and names, or you could use only what you want from the module here and there. You'll have more stuff that you need to make up, but it'll also grant a lot more freedom and flexibility. You can make up that stuff as you go.

And you *will* need to make things up and fill in the gaps whether you go with the Forgotten Realms setting or not. Don't be afraid to do things differently than the module lays out where it would make for a better story. The module has a lot of "<NPC> shows up and whisks the party away to the next event" to string things together, because there's only so many assumptions they can make about the party. Get to know your party and what motivates them, and you'll likely be able to come up with a more satisfying way of guiding them to the next plot point.

[Puh Laden]

Background (meaning where a character comes from and not the feature) isn't as important as the character's reason for adventure. I would say determine what the group is and why they're adventuring (if that's not already determined by then module). Then have your players make characters who would go on the adventure. Feel free to fill in the details later. All that's needed in the first session is a background from the PHB. However, it sounds like you might have players who find fun in exploring and being immersed in an "existing" world. If so, they won't want things to feel improvised, even if they are, so keep that in mind. A good test would be to ask them to come up with some details of their past and use that as inspiration. If they still ask for something like a family name for their noble background, make something up but don't let them know you made it up. Then, write it down and use that as inspiration if needed.

(And yes this is based off of reading the Angry GM's article on the varioud kinds of fun.)