Storm King's Thunder Series: CANCELLED

 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.

Consider the Tiefling: Storm King's Thunder Part II

Previously: Part I

II. Nightstone

The first section of the adventure, which takes place in a village called Nightstone, is meant to be unnecessary to the larger narrative. The authors intend that other books could be "swapped" into the place occupied by this chapter; as long as the protagonists all end up at the fifth level of power, any adventures could work. The usefulness of this section, from the perspective of what comes later, is that the protagonists see that rogue giants are attacking the outposts of civilization, and that they are then steered toward the proper beginning of the narrative. Since the connections to the larger story are so tenuous, your humble critic hopes that he will be forgiven for focusing this section of the essay on a detail that seems, at first, a mere crumb, but that upon close investigation turns out to be a delectable morsel of satire. The detail is as follows:

Destiny Agganor (age 42) is Nightstone's tiefling midwife. [...] Destiny worships Asmodeus but doesn't impose her beliefs on anyone else.

- Storm King's Thunder, p. 31 

A "tiefling" is not a generic fantasy type such as a dwarf or an elf; it originated in the worlds of Dungeons and Dragons. The tiefling is a human with some of the features of a cartoon devil: the horns, the tail, the sharp teeth. It is said that this appearance is due to a pact made between a powerful devil and the ancestors of the tieflings. Although this might appear to be a straightforward allegorical representation of the Christian notion of original sin, the allegory is rather more modern: although the tiefling's outward appearance is redolent of hell, the tiefling has no extraordinary predisposition to sin. If tieflings are overrepresented in the ranks of criminals and assassins, this is due entirely to the warping effects of general social prejudice.

To be greeted with stares and whispers, to suffer violence and insult on the street, to see mistrust and fear in every eye: this is the lot of the tiefling. And to twist the knife, tieflings know that this is because a pact generations ago infused the essence of Asmodeus—overlord of the Nine Hells—into their bloodline. 

- Player's Handbook, p. 42

In short, the tiefling is the designated subaltern in the typical Dungeons and Dragons setting. The tiefling is, in a sense, the way that Dungeons and Dragons examines the effects of the 1980s "Satanic Panic," during which the wider culture suspected that the role-playing game was an occult dissociative initiation ritual. For the players and readers too young to remember Tom Hanks's Mazes and Monsters, the tiefling might be also be thought of as either "goth" or "intersectional."

What is odd about Destiny Agganor, the tiefling midwife of Nightstone, is her tolerant mode of Asmodeus-worship. In this setting, Asmodeus is the overlord of all devils, and a living symbol of aggression and dominion: 

Devils personify tyranny, with a totalitarian society dedicated to the domination of mortal life. [...] Asmodeus, the dark lord of Nessus, strives to subjugate the cosmos to satisfy his thirst for power.

- Monster Manual, p. 66

The Dungeon Master's Guide describes Asmodeus's dominon as "the ultimate plane of law and evil and the epitome of premeditated cruelty." It is self-contradictory to attempt a liberal worship of totalitarianism's essence. It is akin to a being a teetotaling devotee of Dionysus. Real-world historical Satanism is sometimes explained as the only available resistance to hegemonic Christendom; no such explanation is possible here, given the surfeit of deities in this fantasy's cosmology. Nor is ignorance an excuse, in a world where sufficiently motivated adventurers may visit Asmodeus's realm and determine its character for themselves.

Destiny Agganor, therefore, profoundly misunderstands the nature of that which she worships. In a few brief sentences, we find a devastating satire of liberal religion. If one can trace out the throne of European monarchism in the story of the giants and their "ordning," here one finds the altar of pre-modern religion, subtly complicating the apparent "multiculturalism" of the fantasy setting.

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

~~~~~

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.