Preparing for the Giant Siege

[KoolKobold]

Hello. My IRL campaign through Discord had to be on pause for 3 weeks due to vacation, but now it’s time for me to get ready for the beginning of Book 4. However I have some concerns on how to prepare and run the siege. I have a map, but considering how huge the battle is idk if it’s possible to utilize that or just do theater of the mind for it. On top of other concerns like what to do if the battle becomes too chaotic or the party splits up and gets into a disadvantage. Any help would be great.

[Bjørn Røyrvik]

I would have a larger map showing the town and general disposition of forces and if necessary use a smaller local map for individual encounters.

Like any big unwieldy issue, chop it up into smaller bits. Make sure you have a rough idea of the tactics and goals of the NPCs and figure out how the battle will proceed without the PCs' involvement. Make a rough time table with events and if necessary make a list or flow chart or something similar. It's been a while since I read the AP but IIRC it should be possible to divide it into a number of smaller encounters which you can run individually.

If the party splits, run one encounter at a time and just say the PCs cannot interact with each other until that encounter is over.

[ckdragons]

If you wanted to Go Big, there are some wonderful full maps of the town that you could use run the entire siege on a single map! I've ran this scenarios a few times, both in person on a battle map and online. Use what you're comfortable with. I personally like the full map so show the full scale of the encounter. But Bjorn has some good advice. The adventure does break down the siege into individual encounters that you can run in sequence. If the party starts dragging their feet, you can always have them spot the incoming
next encounter to help speed them with the current encounter.

[KoolKobold]

I found a Reddit post that shows a whole map of Sandpoint and some locations where the major battle spots happen. I’ll definitely use them for the siege.

Another thing I want to do is add a couple more giants to the siege-specifically cave giants, perhaps with levels in barbarian (there is one NPC I want to make that’s a major miniboss with ranger levels). On top of this, I also want to replace some of the stone giants in Jorgenfist with frost giants, hill giants and even a few ogres. Though idk if that would be overkill.

[ckdragons]

FWIW, I'd skip the frost giants.