To start off, I'd like to tell my players to stay out of here! You know who you are. *squinty eyes*
Anyway, the GM hat is currently off my head, but I've been planning ahead for when it's on me again, so that I don't have to wing it as much, which I am admittedly not all that great at.
My last campaign left off with my level 14 party fending off a band of stone giants, that had been throwing rocks over the city wall, inflicting considerable damage. After hacking through a couple of giants and dire bears, they came face to face with the stone giant elder and his goons. By the end of the encounter, the elder ran off, swearing vengeance. With a 20-foot stone wall in their way, catching up to him would have been next to impossible. That's where I left off.
Well, at this point, I am kind of at a loss as to how to continue things. Either the PCs will go after him preemptively, or they will end up returning in greater numbers. But that's it - I'd really like to spruce things up a bit, but don't know how. I suppose the biggest hole in the story is the lack of motive on the otherwise peaceful giants' part.
I'd appreciate any advice or ideas anybody has to offer - the greatest minds of our generation(s) lurk around these forums!
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Have a powerful evil spellcaster dominate the giant leader to whip his subjects into an evil frenzy. Have the giant leader become a vampire and charm all his subjects slowly one by one...
The city is built on a sacred giant crypt which is so well hidden, that the founders didn't know it was there when they founded the city, and giants, when they returned to pay homage to their ancestors (something they do not do more ofthen then once a century(being long lived and all) got enraged by the desecration.
Something is driving the giants away from their lands, so they are on the lookout for new land to inhabit, no matter who inhabited it first. After all, whomever drove them away did not care about them, why would they care about anybody else?
The giant kingdom is experiencing massive food shortages on accounts of a bad year. They invade other kingdoms to loot food.
Ther, of the top of my head i got this. Hope it helps.
Rune Giant :)
Try to get a hold on RotR #4: Fortress of the Stone Giants. There you have it all: more giants, their extensive lair (with further adventure hooks) and their evil leader (
Here (takes you to d20pfsrd) are some first impressions on possible monster your group might encounter.
The rune giant as such would also tie in nicely!
Ruyan.
Everything RuyanVe just said, but I flagged him for a spoiler tag.
I honestly cannot believe I missed the Rune Giant's command giant ability. It meshes in with the theme perfectly, and it's just the right CR to be a huge threat to the party. I don't believe they've ever fought a Gargantuan monster before.
I've always been a tad interested in Rise of the Runelords, though I'd much rather participate in it than use it as a campaign resource.
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Stone Giants are more or less supposed to have some spiritual connection with the stone itself. Perhaps the stone in this area is tainted, for some reason, by something that is leaking forth and enraging / corrupting / paining the stone giants in the region.
They may even have been drawn to the area to try and 'fix' whatever was causing harm to the very earth, in this place, only to be frustrated and maddened by the same buried corruption.
A couple option;
1) Is this area the site of a mass grave, and thousands of souls, buried alive, so that the horror of their deaths seeped into and contaminated the soil and stone itself, remain partially trapped here, twisting the dreams of any who remain in the area (even the well-meaning giants, who only knew that 'the stone was suffering' and that they felt compelled to do something about it)? Was their death a natural thing (rockslide burying a mountain monastary or village or fortress), or engineered (herded to their deaths, and then the mountain brought down upon them by powerful magic)? The only 'cure' for what ails the Stone Giants might be to dig down to these long-buried bodies and offer them last rites. But not all of them might be willing to be exorcised, and many might be maddened from centuries of rage...
This will be an undead-heavy encounter, giants may be possessed by ghosts, with varying agendas from 'free our souls' to 'help us attract enough fools here to give us all new bodies, so that we make take revenge on those who slew us.'
2) Was a creature of great evil bound here, a powerful demon, devil, daemon or efreeti of some sort, and it's terrible wrath as it has descended into madness is now seeping forth to infect those who sleep above it's stony prison? Perhaps even a powerful cabal of fiend-blooded (or ifrit-bound) sorcerers and cultists was destroyed here, along with their fiendish patron, in the process of opening a gate to bring that patron forth fully into the world. The gate is buried, but not sealed, and raw infernal taint leaks forth to contaminate the ground, causing evil-aligned earth elementals with the fiendish template to arise and wreak frustrated havoc in the area. The most powerful of them isn't just fiendish, but has the half-fiend template, and is an elder elemental, seeking to unbury the gate to Hell (or the Abyss, or Abaddon), with the Stone Giants opposing them, and fighting them off and undoing their work. The local Stone Giants were misled into thinking that the party of PCs were cultists and servants of the One Who Must Stay Buried, come to stop them from keeping the elementals from unburying the gate!
Fiendish elementals, and, unless some last-minute diplomacy convinces the remaining stone giants that they aren't servants of the Buried Evil, more stone giant fights, will be the fight-fare here, unless some actual surviving cultists of the Buried Evil *do* show up, in the third act, and the party and the remaining stone giants must ally against them (and the evil elementals)!
3) Buried evil artifact. Boring!
Buried *good* artifact, that the Stone Giants are trying to keep sealed away, because the last time it was unearthed, it led to a massive holy jihad of good vs. evil that demolished the peaceful fence-sitting neutral Stone Giants lands. They'd rather that the forces of good not be inspired by a return of this holy relic, and go marching off to cause all sorts of righteous wrath...
Still, even with the surprise twist, it's a McGuffin-hunt, and those are self-defeating, since, either the party gets a McGuffin, and the GM has to deal with that crap, or the party fails to get a McGuffin, and feels screwed out of the big prize at the end of the show.
Everything RuyanVe just said, but I flagged him for a spoiler tag.
Spoiler-ed.
Another idea, playing off whats already been offered is: The Old C3P0 Defense. In other words, some crazy powerful wizard, serpent folk, Doppleganger, Intellect Devourer, Aboleth, etc, etc. Has bombed in and "convinced" the Stone Giants he is their god or their god's avatar. Then he commands them to do all kinds of bad (such as gank a town that offends the god). The key here is Why that town? Is it a strategic spot for conquering the local kingdom/nation/country? Does it have some famous artifact of power or dead hero/villian buried there? Is there a portal to some hell dimension or far realm or heavenly dimension the being wants to get to? Or Even did the evil vampire/Lich/Wizard used to live there and get slighted somehow and lay blame on the village? Also Rune Giants can be controlled and commanded the same as any other, so If said wizard were to have found some ancient rune giant control helm or Dominate Monster on one he found, he could easily go all Master/Blaster and ride in on his Rune Giant and take over a camp of Stone Giants. Actually the concept of a Gnome wizard who got kicked out of town for heineous acts and experiments who harbored a grudge and sought revenge by becoming an expert at dominating artifacts and magics, who then did aformentioned dominating would be awesome.... Especially the scene after he conquered the place and the heroes are recruited by his rival, a Bard Lady with big hair... Now I want that scene.. "Who Runs Magnimar?"
Everything RuyanVe just said, but I flagged him for a spoiler tag.Spoiler-ed.
I'm not seeing a spoiler tag, Ross...