The Ghost of Tragedy: Storm King's Thunder Part I

 Storm King's Thunder
by Christopher Perkins, et al.
Wizards of the Coast, 256 pages, $50 (hardcover)

The literary critic of RPG texts must take a primary interest in the narrative forms that are commonly referred to "adventures" and "campaigns," and which were formerly called "modules." The rules for a system are useful for understanding the assumptions of a narrative, but in themselves the rules are a mode of rhetoric, or, arguably, ethics. It is in the adventure book or campaign book that we may study the tantalizing interplay of particularity and indeterminacy.

In the present day, the best-selling adventure and campaign books, far and away, are the official Dungeons and Dragons campaigns published by Wizards of the Coast. Alongside the Dungeons and Dragons rules and setting books, these are the RPG texts that are stocked in ordinary bookstores. Presumably, these books find an audience beyond players. One such adventure text is Storm King's Thunder, published in 2016. It is a book that draws on treasured text of a previous generation,¹ most notably Jennell Jaquays's The Savage Frontier and Gary Gygax's Against the Giants trilogy.

How does it work? What are the mechanics of its narrative?

I: Introductory Material

The book begins with a dramatis personae. Since the list is not grouped by faction or ranked by importance, it is more properly an index of characters. Its placement is the first clue of the Shakespearian ambitions of the text.

Very early on, we are introduced to the notion of the "ordning," a divinely ordained social structure which each one of this fantasy world's giants intuitively understands. There are different types of giants: thunderous "storm giants" rule over all of the other types, while lowly "hill giants" find themselves last in the ranking. At the outset of the adventure, the "ordning" has somehow ceased to function, and the various types of giants have become disruptive and violent in their efforts to seize power. This notion is openly aristocratic, even monarchist: the ordning is directly analogous to the "estates of the realm" in medieval Christendom. It is interesting to see a supposedly "woke" publishing group like Wizards of the Coast attempting to induce in its readers a fondness for the ancien régime.

The change in the ordning is due to a sort of ersatz King Lear situation, featuring an aging king and his three daughters, two of whom are self-interested and amoral. But King Hekaton has much better prospects than Lear: for example, rather than disinheriting his virtuous daughter, he favors her. Nor has he retired form the throne; he has merely been kidnapped, and should he be rescued, all tragedy will likely be averted. This is Lear as comedy. The sensitive reader, however, will intuit that the ghost of tragedy has not been exorcised, and that the story's most fitting ending is not the glorious action-movie finale of the text, but the Bard's original bloodbath of poisoning, execution, and suicide.

The introduction presents the factions at play in the narrative, but, disappointingly, describes them as mostly waiting to be either aid the protagonists, or to be thwarted by them. This leaves the situation much less dynamic than it might have been. For example, the groups of giants are all pursuing unrelated quests, leaving them unlikely to collide with each other. The protagonists are not meant to come upon an earth-shaking battle between fire giants and frost giants, and neither will the thieves' guild, under cover of chaos, act decisively to eliminate its rivals. It was not so in Qelong: there, the rival factions are set to collide in some way no matter what the protagonists do.

The protagonists' view of all this is much more restricted. At the outset, they will only know that the giants have been accelerating their attacks on settlements and travelers. In the course of their journey, they will piece together the larger story with which the reader begins the book. A book like this one must present the solution before the mystery is fully posed: in any actualization of the possible narratives, the clues will come in dribs and drabs, in a way that will become clear when we consider the wilderness-map section. When we enter the sequential part of the narrative, we will know that our protagonists find the path that will eventually lead them to rescue the king; we play the agents of providence as we close off the paths that would fail to converge.

Next: Part II

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¹ It's also a book that I bought years ago. Having twice failed to gather enough friends to use it for a campaign, I am hell-bent on getting some kind of creative use out of it. Hence this series of posts.