It is with a heavy heart that I must inform you of the cancellation of this blog's critical analysis of the Storm King's Thunder campaign. After the first two entries in the series, which I considered quite successful, in early 2023, I turned to the proper beginning of the campaign, where the heroes are deposited in one of three cities, and must aid the city guards in driving off some sort of attack from one or another group of giants. Little did I know that I was embarking on one of the more harrowing episodes of my storied critical career.
At first, everything seemed normal. I was going to compare the three options for the starting cities. First, Bryn Shander, which is famous in the Sword Coast setting, and was featured in the one Forgotten Realms novel I ever read. Next, Goldenfields, a boring place full of boring NPCs where the aggressive Hill Giants are a welcome break from tedium. Finally, Triboar, a medieval version of the American Wild West, with little factions and intrigues, where one day the fire giants show up in force to, as it turns out, dig an artifact out of the ground in the middle of the town. Obviously, the last one is the only cool one, and I was working up a clever way to tell you so.
Unfortunately, that's when I noticed something strange in the Goldenfields section: a particular pattern in the description of the sprawling agribusiness monastery's crop placements. The oat, barley, and wheat placements put me in mind of some of Robert Browning's poems, and in chasing down the references I had to dig a bit in scholarship of the early Renaissance, at which point it became clear that the Bryn Shander section of the adventure was heavily indebted to Marsilio Ficino. And, of course, by now it was autumn, and I had before me a need to make a closer study of scrimshaw as practiced in Icewind Dale, which took me to Nantucket and Cape Cod for a season.
By summer of 2024, I had unified a typological reading of Moby Dick with the later chapters of Storm King's Thunder, particularly in comparing the great kraken with with the famous white whale. But I had to go even further. My manuscript was running at this point to the hundreds of pages, and prose no longer seemed appropriate to the gravity of the subject matter, which had at this point become, frankly, Neoplatonic. I worked into the middle of 2025 rewriting my work into an extended cycle of sonnets, sestinas, and common-meter hymns.
In late June, 2025, I began reaching out to small presses of quality about a print run. Imagine my surprise when my doorbell rang one morning and I found on my front porch a squadron of burly men in brown wool suits and bowler hats. They pressed past me into my house, over my vociferous objections, and ransacked the place until they'd gathered all of my notes and manuscripts. A tall man in a well-cut frock coat then entered my living room. He addressed me in a thick Scottish accent: "D'ye think you're clever, a-delving into such mysteries as these? 'Tis no fit matter for thy wee blog." He then presented me with an elegantly handwritten non-disclosure agreement, on vellum, which bound me to discontinue my research and speak not a word of the raid for a full calendar year. After certain unpleasant alternatives were discussed, I chose to sign. Under his terms, I am to write no more on the Storm King's Thunder campaign.
I shall return, humbled, to the subject of not playing role playing games this month.